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The sermon teaches that all people outside Christ are spiritually dead, whether their lives appear respectable, morally corrupted, or openly degraded. Moral virtue cannot produce true spiritual life; Christ alone quickens the dead through the effective work of divine grace. Conversion may occur gently or dramatically, but genuine believers then require nourishment, restoration, and continuing vigilance. The sermon combines severe warning of final judgment with a strong invitation to hope, insisting that Christ can save even the worst sinner.
Theological center: Regeneration is the sovereign and effectual work of Jesus, through the Spirit, by which sinners dead in sin are made alive and brought to faith.
Applications: Believe in Christ for life · Seek instruction after conversion · Guard the heart · Recognize spiritual death
Primary texts: Ephesians 2:1 · Mark 9:27 · Luke 7:14
“And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” Ephesians 2:1 IT might naturally be expected that I should have selected the topic of the resurrection on what is usually called the Easter Sabbath. I shall not do so—for although I have read portions which refer to that glorious subject, I have had pressed on my mind a subject which is not the resurrection of Christ, but which is in some measure connected with it—the resurrection of lost and ruined man by the Spirit of God in this life. The apostle is here speaking, you will observe, of the church at Ephesus, and indeed, of all those who were chosen in Christ Jesus, accepted in Him and redeemed with His blood. And he says of them, “You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” What a solemn sight is presented to us by a dead body! When last evening, trying to realize the thought, it utterly overcame me. The thought is overwhelming, that soon this body of mine must be a carnival for worms. That in and out of these places, where my eyes are glistening, foul things, the offspring of loathsomeness, shall crawl. That this body must be stretched in still, cold, abject, passive death—must then become a noxious, nauseous thing, cast out even by those who loved me, who will say, “Bury my dead out of my sight.” Perhaps you can scarcely, in the moment I can afford you, appropriate the idea to yourselves. Does it not seem a strange thing that you, who have walked to this place this morning, shall be carried to your graves. That the eyes with which you now behold me shall soon be glazed in everlasting darkness. That the tongues, which just now moved in song, shall soon be silent lumps of clay. And that your strong and stalwart frame, now standing in this place, will soon be unable to move a muscle and become a loathsome thing—the brother of the worm and the sister of corruption. You can scarcely get hold of the idea. Death does such awful work with us—it is such a Vandal with this mortal fabric—it so rends to pieces this fair thing that God has builded up that we can scarcely bear to contemplate His works of ruin. Now, endeavor, as well as you can, to get the idea of a dead corpse—and when you have done so, please to understand, that that is the metaphor employed in my text—to set forth the condition of your soul by nature. Just as the body is dead, incapable, unable, unfeeling, and soon about to become corrupt and putrid, so are we if we are unquickened by divine grace. Dead in trespasses and sins, having within us death, which is capable of developing itself in worse and worse stag…