"Difficult Passages: Grace vs. Works"

So maybe that is what Paul is getting at – when you were dead, you couldn’t do anything for yourself… so God had to save you!

Ephesians 2:1-10 vs. James 2:14-17

August 31, 2025

Dr. Todd R. Wright

“You were dead!” That’s how the writer of Ephesians begins this section of his letter.

It would have caught the attention of those listening as the letter was read.

Just as it caught your attention.

What does he mean when he describes their pre-Christian life that way?

It’s confusing. They didn’t feel dead.

One scholar imagines a listener protesting that they used to be known as the “life of the party!” In fact, many of them remembered their former lives as full of bright lights and good times. Ephesus was a thriving hub of commerce and religion, home to 250,00 people,[1] the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire! It was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which brought a constant steam of worshippers and pilgrims! It was also a major port city which meant there was always some new spice or idea to spark conversation.

How could Paul say to the Ephesians, “You were dead!”

---

Thomas Lynch has an explanation, according to Scott Hoezee:

“Lynch is not only an award-winning author, but also the undertaker in the small town of Milford, Michigan. He knows a thing or two about dead people but most of what he knows comes down to one very simple fact: the dead can’t do much for themselves. He says, ‘If you want a corpse to move from one room to another, you’ll have to do it yourself. [Giving orders] to the dead body is consistently ineffective. The dead don’t listen worth a toot. You really just have to do everything for them.’”[2]

So maybe that is what Paul is getting at – when you were dead, you couldn’t do anything for yourself… so God had to save you!

Now most people, (including the Ephesians, I assume), don’t like to hear that. We’d rather believe that we are strong, capable, intelligent; that we chart the direction of our lives, that we lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps, that we earn everything good that happens to us in this world.

Paul nods his head knowingly. He believed the same, once upon a time.

He once boasted to the Philippian church, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.”[3]

But then Paul discovered God’s grace on the road to Damascus, and it changed his life!

So he wants the folks in Ephesus to know that while they were once dead in their sins, now they have been offered life by God’s grace!

---

Frederick Buechner muses, “After centuries of handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody's much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, [it] still [has] some of the bloom left.”[4]

“Grace,” he continues, “is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it, or deserve it, or bring it about, any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries, or earn good looks, or bring about your own birth.”

In her novel, The Prayer Box, Lisa Wingate has one of her characters talk about grace after a hurricane has washed through buildings and wrestled boats loose from their mooring lines:

“Yet amid all this, there is the water of grace. It flows in all directions, seeping into hidden crevices, the darkest spaces. It comes with the stranger who rows by in a kayak when the water is [still] high. ‘Just checking. Do you need anything?’ he asks. The grace water moves in meals, in blankets, in trucks filled with supplies, in young men wearing uniforms, in old men carrying chain saws, in lamp oil and candles. Light passed from hand to hand.”[5]

She continues,

“The water of grace. A sponge to thirsty lips. A trickle and then a flood … The river moves a mountain stone by stone, slowly widening its path, flowing over each of us, cutting into each of us, washing through the places that are hard, that would separate us from one another, from [God] among us and within us. [Because] after the storm, all are equal. All wanting. All needing. All in need of the water of grace from one another and from [God].”

Paul couldn’t have said it better! That’s what grace looks like with its work gloves on!

---

So when the group was coming up with difficult passages, they mentioned this one, not because they had a problem with Paul saying we are “saved by grace through faith, not as the result of works so no one may boast,” but because it seemed at odds with the words in the book of James: “So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

So which is it? Are we saved by grace alone. Or do we have to work for it?

On the surface Paul and James seem to disagree.

But I don’t think they do.

Let me explain.

Like Paul, James doesn’t pull punches. His phrasing shocks: faith without works is dead!

I am told that when Lyndon Baines Johnson was pressing someone to agree with him, he would step into their personal space and lean in and speak to them from his great height. He wanted them to feel uncomfortable, off balance, pressured, so that giving in was their only escape.

James is doing something like that when he asks what good is it if you see someone without food or clothing and your ignore their need while cheerfully chirping, Go in peace! Stay warm! Eat your fill! Your words might as well be dust for all the good they do.

They are dead and they cannot bring life … or hope or healing.

---

Interesting that James chooses to use the same word as Paul – dead!

Doug Bratt reminds us that the word in Greek, nekra, means dead, lifeless, even mortal.[6] So if faith is nekra, it implies something with limited power to make a difference in either the lives of Christians or their neighbors who are vulnerable.

Dead faith knows the words of Amazing Grace by heart, without letting them move their heart.

Dead faith has perfect Sunday school attendance and thinks that will impress God.  

Dead faith carries a Bible but doesn’t act with the compassion of the Living Word, Jesus Christ.

Dead faith goes through the motions without any hint of the winsome ways of the true believer.

James is pressing the congregation: why bother with a dead faith?

The world needs a church that is more than an empty shell or a name on a sign.

It needs Christians who are fully alive, made alive and lively by the grace of God.

---

And that brings us full circle to Paul’s words to the church in Ephesus:

Christians who were once as dead in their sins, as the stoney statue of Artemis,

but who have been saved by grace, not their works.

Saved from something, to be sure; but also saved for something: to be a lighthouse of God’s love and the hands and feet that actively make that love a tangible reality for others.

Both Paul and James long that we may be such a people! Alive, not dead! Amen

[1] For comparison, that’s about the size of Winston-Salem, NC, or Toledo, OH, or Richmond, VA

[2] From his reflections on the text for cepreaching.org, 3/11/18

[3] See Philippians 3:4-6

[4] Here and following, from Wishful Thinking: a theological ABC, page33

[5] Here and following, from pages 261-62

[6] From his reflections on the text for sepreaching.org, 9/8/24