Ephesians 2:1
Ephesians 2:11And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
The Watchtower typically treats "dead in your trespasses and sins" as figurative language for the moral state of a person before coming to knowledge of the organisation — dead to God's purpose, not dead in capacity. The remedy is accordingly framed as reform and progressive improvement through Bible study, publisher activity, and eventual baptism. The verse is sometimes cited to establish the contrast between life "in the world" and life inside the earthly organisation, but the idea that a person is literally unable to come to God without being made alive by God is softened into the tamer claim that they were simply heading in the wrong direction.
Paul says "you were dead in your trespasses and sins" — not sick, not weak, not confused. Dead. Keep reading to verse 5: "even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ." The grammar of the whole passage is one-way rescue: God acts on corpses. This is the pastoral move at the door — "A dead man does not read his way to life. He needs to be made alive. That is what Jesus called being born again in , and what Peter calls the imperishable seed in — the word God uses to raise dead hearts." is the negative side of what states positively: the natural man cannot discern spiritual things because he is dead. The JW "study and decide" framework is pastorally humane but describes a shallower problem than Paul does.