Dead Man Walking

Dead Man Walking

“How are you?” is a question most of us ask or answer several times a day. A former boss of mine used to reply to the query with a blustery “Perfect and improving!” (He was either terribly optimistic, bluffing, or both.) When someone asks me, I typically answer, “Fine, thanks” without thinking. My hair could be on fire, and I wouldn’t change my story as it blazed.

Even though our culture is obsessively self-focused, we are seldom fully self-aware. We’re not really cognizant of how we are. We tend to answer “How are you?” as if we’d been asked “How do you feel?”—imagining that our feelings are a true barometer of our spiritual reality. They are not.

The apostle Paul offers any believer a marvelous answer to this question, tucked into his letter to the church at Ephesus: we were once dead in our transgressions, and now we have been made alive in Christ. How am I? I am alive in Christ. I am loved by a God who is rich in mercy. I used to be dead in my sin, but now I am made alive together with God’s Son, raised up and—in an already-but-not-yet kind of way—seated in the heavenly places. But to fully embrace this magnificent state of being, I must first embrace the stark fact that without Christ, I was dead. Not just unconscious or unmoving or resistant to his love . . . but lifeless. Flatlined. Unable to respond.

It’s hard to think that we were once dead men and women walking, isn’t it? Some of us considered ourselves pretty vibrant before we were brought to life in Christ. We may have appeared confident, successful, or favored, but looks can deceive. Dead is dead. And that’s what you and I were before grace quickened our hearts. We believed that we were independent, autonomous agents of self-rule and that what turns out to be bondage was life. But it wasn’t life at all.

You were dead in your trespasses and sins. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.

Ephesians 2:1, 4-5, NASB