There is no way to update a user’s status to “Active”. They have to login for that to change.
To fulfill your requirement, you could try the following approaches:
- Ask all of your users to log in once to enable the password expiration email.
- Send out an invite email for each inactive user to remind them to login.
- Generate a search report for all inactive users and send them an email that their password will expire unless they login. It wouldn’t be the same as the email template, but it would be a notification. This could be accomplished using Workflows.