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We are hopeless in the path we’ve chosen to follow. Like a crowd moving in step, we fall in line with those around us who themselves are following the ways of the world. Together we drift in a current further from the life God intended.

It comes naturally. We are predisposed to sinful desires. To go with the flow is easy. The pull of pride is magnetic.

So how can a hopeless people change course? How do we turn and walk against the crowd? How can something spiritually dead be brought back to life?

Only by being raised with Jesus. Only by being made alive again. The payment we could never make to satisfy God’s wrath has been paid. There is nothing we could do to earn it, that is what makes us hopeless. Not weak. Not lacking effort. But utterly unable to reconcile ourselves to God by our own strength.

Yet God, rich in mercy and overflowing with love, gave freely what we could never deserve.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins ² in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— ³ among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. ⁴ But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, ⁵ even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— ⁶ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, ⁷ (Ephesians 2:1–7, ESV)