Our Blessings in Christ
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Good morning, church. Good morning. Good to see all of you here this morning. It’s, uh, Back to Church Sunday. We, we, we celebrate this day every year because it seems like when kids go back to school, we start getting back into the groove, and then we take one quick break for Labor Day, and then this tends to be the Sunday people go, I got to get back to church.
And so we’re celebrating the day, National Back to Church Sunday. Glad you’re here today. And it’s also the day that we’re kicking off a new sermon series entitled Life in Christ. We’re going verse by verse through the book of Ephesians, and we’ll be spending the next 6 weeks going for the— through the first 3 chapters, and then we’ll take a break for the holidays, and then we’ll pick up the next 3 chapters, chapters 4 through 6, in 2017. And the Apostle Paul has, has given us some clear natural breaks in it so that it works out well.
The first 3 chapters talk about who we are in Christ, life in Christ, our position in Christ, and And so that’s what we’ll be talking about in this portion of the series is who we are in Christ and our possessions and position in Christ. And then the last 4 through 6, last 3 chapters, he’s really talking about living it out, our practices in Christ, how does it look to live for Christ? And so that’s kinda how he breaks it out. The key phrase in the book of Ephesians is in Christ. That little phrase, in Christ or in Him, repeats 36 times in this little book.
And indeed, it’s 11 times in our reading today in just chapter 1, in Him, in Christ, in the Beloved. He repeats it over and over again, and it’s because he makes a big deal, he makes much of the reality that we are in Christ, that what God has done for us, church, is that He has placed us in Christ and Christ in us, that this is the hope of glory, as he wrote to the Colossians. And he wants the Ephesian believers that he’s writing to, he wants them to know who they are in Christ. He wants them to know what they’ve been blessed with in Christ. And so that’s a question today, isn’t it, that everyone strives to answer, especially when we’re younger, is who am I?
You know, we want to know, who am I really? The late Tim Keller said there’s really kind of 3 categories about how people work this out, and he called one the traditional identity or the historical approach, and that’s the idea that you determine who you are by those around you, by who your family tells you are, who you are, who your village tells you, who your neighbors, who you grow up with, and so if your father is a plumber, then you’re supposed to be a plumber. If your, if your mother, you know, does this, you’re supposed— and so you grow up based on who people tell you you are. That’s the traditional approach. And, uh, and so if people put you down when you’re growing up, then you get a low self-esteem.
If they build you up, etc. So, so people often follow that approach to identity. Others tell us who we are. Then there’s the modern approach. The modern approach is that you look within.
You look in the mirror, you look within, you go, how do I feel? Well, I feel like this, that must be who I am. And so often that person is rejecting what others have said about them, probably because they’ve been hurt. And so they turn inward and they look for some truth there. But neither of these approaches would be the biblical approach or the gospel approach.
And that’s the approach that Paul wants to teach the church at Ephesus, and that’s the approach that this pastor wants to teach this church And that’s the gospel approach, that instead of asking, what do others say about me? Or looking in the mirror and going, how do I feel about me? What does God say about me? Who does He say that I am? And that’s what the Apostle Paul will do in his opening remarks here to this church of Ephesus.
What does God say about me? And let that be the determination about my identity. Who am I? What does God say about me? In the book of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul writes this letter and he opens up this letter with a burst of praise, blessing God the Father for every spiritual blessing that is ours in Christ Jesus.
And I believe today that we can bless the Father, we can bless the Lord, we can praise the Lord for all the spiritual blessings that we have by being in Christ. And as we look at the text, I think we’ll see from the Apostle Paul’s letter here, 3 ways that we can praise God the Father for all the blessings that we have, spiritual blessings that we have in Christ. So let’s dig in, chapter 1, verses 1 through 14. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.
In love, He predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of His will according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory. In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory. This is God’s Word, amen.
We’re looking for 3 ways we can praise God for our spiritual blessings in Christ. Here’s the first way, by blessing the Father for choosing us, by blessing the Father for choosing us. Notice how Paul has a burst of praise here that starts in verse 3. He says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, He begins with what the Hebrews would have called a baruch. He begins with a blessing of God.
Why? Because the God, the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, our Father, has blessed us. Bless God because He’s blessed us. Praise God because He’s blessed us in Christ. So all of the blessings of God are found in the person of Jesus Christ.
And so that if you’re in Christ, you have how many spiritual blessings from heaven? Look at the text. How many? All. Does it say most of?
No. Does it say some of? No. It says every, every spiritual blessing, everything that Christ has, every blessing. How many?
Every, all are yours in Christ, in Him. 11 times, in Christ, in the Beloved, in Him. If you’re in Christ, God is not withholding one single blessing of heaven from you. Oh my goodness, let’s praise the Father. Let’s praise the Father, amen?
Because we have every spiritual blessing in the Son, in Him, and the Father has chosen us. Now that’s a term that we pick up very early here. It says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who had blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him. Who’s Him? Christ.
He chose us in Christ. When did He do that? When did He do that? Before the foundation of the world. So in time past, in eternity past, before He said, let there be light, Before He flung the stars and the planets into space, before He made us, in His heart, in His will, that word will repeats 4 times, in God’s heart, in His will, He’d already decided what this was going to look like.
And He’d already chosen that the Jew and the Gentile would be one, where? In Christ. That He’d already chosen how He was going to bring humanity back because He knew what was going to happen. Now, this is beyond my understanding. It’s beyond your understanding.
It’s a mystery concealed.
The word mystery, we’ll see it down there, I think in verse 10. And Paul’s going to talk about this some more as he continues. It’s a big word in the book of Ephesians. In the Greek, musterion. It doesn’t mean like a mystery like you watch an Agatha Christie movie and try to solve whodunit.
It’s not that kind of mystery. It’s not a puzzle for you to solve. It’s a secret that God kept in His heart from eternity past. He didn’t even tell the Old Testament prophets about it. It’s revealed now in Jesus.
That, what was that secret that He kept? The church. And you’re the secret that He’s revealed if you’re in Christ. That He would cause all things to come together in heaven and on earth Where? In Him, in Him.
Oh, this is a cosmic chapter. This is an unbelievable chapter. We now look in history past, before history, if you will, and we realize that Paul begins the story of salvation not with a choice we make, but a choice that the Father made in time memorial, before time. He made a choice according to His will, it says, The purpose of His will in verse 5 and verse 6, it says, to the praise of His glorious grace.
This is what he’s talking about. Now we have some preliminary work to do before we begin a book like this. We’re going to be going verse by verse. We have verses 1 and 2 that we need to cover before we dig in further to this reality that we can praise the Father because He chose us to be part of His church. We’re going to work that out, but before we do, let’s work out who’s writing and to whom he’s writing.
This is Paul, an apostle of Christ, Jesus, he tells us. Paul, who began his life born in Tarsus, born to a Roman citizen, so at birth he was a Roman citizen. He was given the name Saul. He was from the tribe of Benjamin, and so he was named after King Saul. That’s a powerful name.
And really, he grew up, he went to Jewish Harvard. He studied under Gamaliel in Jerusalem. His father must have been wealthy to send him off to Jerusalem to study. He was a Hebrew among Hebrews. He was a Benjamite.
He was a Jew among Jews and according to the law a Pharisee, but yet he says, I’m an apostle here, and in another place in his letter to the Corinthians he says, an apostle untimely born, because he saw Jesus revealed to him on the road to Damascus after Jesus had already been ascended to the Father. This is who we’re talking about, this is Paul. He’s writing from a Roman prison in his first imprisonment, He wrote several letters, he was very prolific in Rome. He wrote this letter to the church at Ephesus, he wrote letters to Timothy, his son in the Lord, and other letters he wrote in that first imprisonment. He’s writing to Ephesus, it was a church he planted along about 51, 52 AD.
He stayed there longer probably than he did any other location of any other church he planted. If we read in Acts chapter 19 and 20, we find out that he stayed there about 3 years, which for Paul was a long time. I’ve been here almost 35 years now as your pastor, and so Paul calls it a long time if he’s somewhere 3 years, ’cause he was a church planter extraordinaire. He was always on the move planting churches, so he was— he planted that church about 52 AD, stayed there through about 55 or so AD, and so he planted this church to who? To the saints To the set-apart holy ones, the believers.
Now he knows these people in Ephesus, he knows them, and he says, and you’re faithful. He knows they’re faithful ’cause he’s put his son in the Lord Timothy in charge as their pastor. And so he’s keeping up with them. And he says, grace to you. And that word grace is important for Paul.
Grace is God’s redemption at Christ’s expense, amen? That’s a good acronym to remember, that it’s God’s unmerited favor. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ. And then he’s gonna give us a Trinitarian doxology starting in verse 3. Why you say Trinitarian?
‘Cause he’s going to bless the Father, he’s going to glorify the Son, and he’s going to say we can get our joy from the Spirit before he’s finished in these verses here as we continue. The will of God is an important theme that we’ll see here as well. Now, what is this place Ephesus? You know, one of the things I’m always talking to you about is the Bible Talks about real people that lived in real places in history, and the Bible is not a gathering of myths, but it’s a true story. Now, I’ve been to Ephesus, or at least I should say I’ve been to the ruins of Ephesus, and it seems appropriate at this point I should show you a map, right?
And so let’s look at a map. Ephesus is on the west coast of what would be modern-day Turkey. Today. It was on the west coast, it was a seaport city on the west coast of Asia Minor. It was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire.
Some estimate that maybe 200,000 to 250,000 people lived here. It was the seat of the Roman proconsul for all of Asia Minor. Paul planted that church there in his 3rd missionary journey. Paul here, he grew up in Tarsus and then He knew this area fairly well, and Ephesus became a point of spreading the gospel throughout the area to Colossae, to Laodicea, to Smyrna, all up and down here, Pergamum. A lot of that radiated out of Ephesus.
I told you I’ve been there before. Here are a couple of images from a trip that my wife and I made to Ephesus some years ago. You can see here as we’re going down the colonnade road here towards the Library of Celsus, You can see in the distance a valley out here and mountains in the far background. During Paul’s time, there would’ve been a seaport right here as it was one of the largest seaports in Asia Minor where they would bring in much of the commerce for all of Asia Minor from the Mediterranean Sea. But because the river carried silt down the river over the centuries and there was an earthquake in the land, it moved the coast out And Ephesus little by little became a place of ruins.
The people moved away because it was no longer prosperous or profitable to be there. Go to the next slide. You can see the amazing engineering of the Romans and this Roman road that still today you can walk on, the Street of the Colonnades. There may have been marketplace people in some of these spaces that they rented to sell their wares. And so you can walk down that street today.
Next slide. They even had indoor plumbing, by the way. And so that’s how advanced this time was. I don’t know what you think about 1st century Ephesus, but this is who Paul’s writing to. They didn’t have a lot of care about privacy, apparently.
And this little— there would’ve been water running in this little gutter, and they had water running underneath. And apparently they had servants here that would hand you stick with a sponge and you can figure out the rest. Go to the next slide. Just to prove that we were there, there Robin and I stand in front of the, uh, Library of Celsus. And it’s really amazing.
Now I’ve got other pictures, but if you stand down there, you can see that person. This thing is huge. Uh, just an amazing city. The ruins are amazing. Go to the next slide.
Uh, uh, 2 servants of Caesar were set free by him and became wealthy men, and they built this triple arch in the city to commemorate their thanks to Caesar. And if you could read this, I could read it to you later, but it shows their commemoration of Caesar. Go to the next slide. Here is the 25,000-seat stadium or theater that’s in Ephesus where a riot took place that you can read about in Acts 19:20, where Demetrius, a silversmith, caused a riot saying, we’re losing business because this Paul has come here and got all these Christians growing. And now nobody’s buying our little images, our little silver images of the goddess Artemis.
If you’ll go to the next slide, you can see that the stadium was built into the side of a mountain and it’s missing now because an earthquake destroyed it. But the Temple of Artemis, the Temple of Diana was one of the 7 Wonders of the World. And so the sailors would come there and they would buy these little silver statuettes of Artemis and they would take them out and carry them around the world. And Demetrius was mad because Christianity was ruining their idolatry business. And a riot broke out and Paul and some of them almost got beat up here in this place.
Now this little road goes all the way out to what used to be the port. May I say to you, Ephesus is a real place, I’ve been there. The Apostle Paul is a real person, these letters that we read about really happened. This is what we’re reading today. Paul says to them, those in Ephesus, grace and peace to you from our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.
And then he begins from verse 3 through verse 14, in the original Greek, a sentence without any punctuation. It has to be the longest run-on sentence anywhere in the Bible, 202 Greek words without punctuation that some, like N.T. Wright in his commentary, calls it a shout of praise. Others call it a burst of praise. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And it’s as if Paul, couldn’t even punctuate his own language. I don’t know if he was able to say this in one breath. If so, he had a great powerful set of lungs and a diaphragm to suck in his breath and to just say this shout of praise all in one breath because that’s apparently— and he decides not only to do that, but he decides to use every Christian terminology found almost anywhere in the New Testament and say them all at once in these verses.
Which this week for our study time, my son Jonathan and I were overwhelmed. We always do word studies before we dig in very far, and, and we’re like on page 7 now writing down definitions, and we’re like, how are we going to preach this? We, we need to do like 10 sermons just on these 14 verses. Well, we can’t do it justice, not, not the way we’re proceeding. And so what I’m going to do is I’m going to fly over at 35,000 and just dip down occasionally, okay?
But this, I want you to get it the way Paul wrote it, and it’s a burst, it’s like he sent off fireworks across the heavens, this is a cosmic view of who we are in Christ. I don’t know if you’re excited yet, I’m excited to talk about this. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Bless Him because He’s blessed us with how many blessings? All of ’em.
And then Paul begins to list them. He begins with, He’s chosen us before the foundation of the world. That word chosen is where we get the doctrine of election from. It’s the eklegomai is the verb in Greek. Eklegomo, ek means out of, lego has the idea of to choose, out of choice or out of the will like that, out of the Word like that.
And so it’s where we get the doctrine of election. He also says He’s chosen us, but He hasn’t just chosen us, it says when He chose us, He chose us before all creation. What did He choose us for? You see, this is very— what did He predestine us for? In other words, He decided beforehand, what did He do it for?
For us to be holy and blameless, it says in verse 4. He chose us to be, His holy and blameless ones in Christ, that we would be set apart, holy, that we would be blameless, without sin, in Christ. What else did He choose us for? Verse 5, for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. Now why sons?
Why not sons and daughters? It’s because during Paul’s time, sons received the full inheritance. So sons and daughters are included, but to be particular, it was to make sure that even men and women knew they had equal footing in inheritance here, that you get the inheritance of a son. You can go back and read in the book of Exodus and read in the first 5 books of the Bible and see that there were some daughters that didn’t have a father or a brother that went to Moses and said, can we get a possession in the land? And he had to go before God to get an answer to that.
And so I think that’s a good setup right there to remind us that God hasn’t left, he hasn’t left the women out here in this verbiage right here. No, it’s to say that you get the full right as sons. And so he’s not trying to say something other than that. And so you’ve been adopted. And then he’s not finished, he goes on to say, to the praise of his glorious grace in verse 6.
And so what have you been chosen for? You’ve been chosen so that He might bless you with every blessing He has. You’ve been chosen so that you might be adopted into His family. You’ve been chosen so that you might praise Him to the glory of everyone so that you’d be a representation in this world of His wonderful grace. You’ve been chosen to be holy and blameless.
Now look, When you look inside, you might not feel holy and blameless. Have you heard this phrase, there’s something called experiential truth and there’s something called positional truth? Have you heard this? The Scripture talks about your position in Christ, but your experience in this world, and by the way, Paul teaches us, the Bible teaches us that we walk by faith and not by sight. Sight.
And so we walk by what God’s Word says about us, not what we experience. We walk according to our position as the Bible describes it, not according to how we feel. We walk by faith, not feelings. We walk by faith, not sight. You still here?
What’s our position? In Christ. Now that’s the repetitive phrase 11 times. In Christ. Now, in Gary, I’m not holy and blameless.
In Gary, in the flesh, I’m not holy and blameless. In Christ, I’m holy and blameless. In Christ, I’m a child of God. In Christ, I exist for the praise of His glory. In Gary, not, not, not.
And so I got up very early this morning with full awareness of who Gary is, but full, fully understanding who God is. In Christ, in Christ I can step up here. In Christ I can talk to you. In Gary, I don’t wanna be anywhere near this pulpit. Please God, anoint my words so that the sermon they hear is not the sermon I preach, but the one the Holy Spirit preaches to them.
So that between whatever I’m doing and whatever He’s doing, that that’s what you hear.
My position, when God looks at me, He looks at me through the lens of me being in Christ. So when He sees me, I’m already holy and blameless, I’m already adopted, I already exist for His glory. That’s my positional truth, in Him. And that’s yours too if you’re in Christ, if you’re in Christ. The idea of being chosen and predestined is another way of saying it.
Dr. Tony Merida says, unfortunately, this passage has generated a lot of debate because it mentions the concepts of election and predestination. While this discussion in itself is not a bad thing, I think we can miss the spirit of this text. The spirit is one of worship. Paul’s not attempting to explain these things. He’s attempting to tell us, hey, you’ve been chosen by God, so you should bless Him, you should praise Him, ’cause you were chosen.
That’s what he’s saying. The idea of God choosing a people to display His glory is not new. He chose Abram, Genesis chapter 12. The Lord said to Abram, go from your country to the land I will show you, and I will make of you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
So He blessed Abram to bless us through the seed of Abram, which is Jesus. And so we can’t help but see that Paul’s working out the whole Old Testament here. He’s not only giving us every Christian doctrine that’s invented, I mean, every single doctrine is listed here, but he’s also, he’s doing it in the order of the Old Testament of how God chose, da da da, you know, He’s working it out. In fact, Jesus told His disciples this in John 15:16, He says, you didn’t choose Me, I chose you.
Now, we have several families in our church that have adopted children. I think it’s a beautiful thing for Christians to do that. I think Christians should be into adoption because God’s into adoption. And it costs a lot to adopt a child, but these parents, they’ve paid the price to adopt. And that child didn’t choose them, they chose that child.
Now, the child comes to a point in its life where it chooses to call them father and mother. Just as surely as they were their biological parents. Now, by the way, I feel like I chose my wife. I think I did. I think I chose Robin before Robin chose me.
There was an order to the choosing. There was an order to it. When I first asked her out, she said no, which made her much more interesting to me, ladies.
Just the way men, at least this man, is shaped. I asked her out again. Guess what she did? She told me no again. Now she had to be mine after this.
She said it was because I waited till the last minute. She said it’s probably because she was farther down the list than somebody else to turn me down. That’s why I asked her at the last minute. She didn’t realize I was just kind of a last-minute guy at that point in my life. So the third time I said, are you going to this concert this come Thursday night?
She said, well, yeah, we have to go because we’re both music majors at Radford University. We had to go to this particular orchestral concert. And I said, well, good, we’ll sit together. I didn’t even ask her. I was tired of asking her.
So we sat together, and so the journey began. I feel like I chose her. But there came a day, June 2nd, 1979, where she said I do back to me. She chose me back. Now what’s the mystery there?
Well, the mystery is who chose who? Did she have her eyes on me before? Found out later she was kind of looking at me. I had my eyes on her before. Who chose who?
Well, it’s a mystery. If we get really caught up in this mystery of election, and it’s a mystery, that’s one of Paul’s favorite words in this book. If we get caught up in trying to figure out where to move the scale of God’s sovereignty and man’s human responsibility, who chose who, we will get in a divided place, believers. And so I somewhat resist categories here. It’s created so many denominational differences.
Let’s rally around Christ and let’s give praise to the Father that I believe He— the Bible is teaching us He chose us first. But he doesn’t finish, Paul doesn’t finish this little section before he tells us we got to choose Him back. Get down there to verse 13, in Him you also, when you heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. So He chose me first, but I chose Him back. Now some of you are here and Robin told me no the first 2 times and I kept chasing her.
And God’s been, He’s been asking you, He’s been knocking at your heart’s door and you’ve been turning Him down, you’ve been making excuses. He’s been pursuing you, He knows you. Stop saying no, stop saying wait, stop saying later, today’s the day of salvation. Say yes, say yes to Jesus. Stop grounding your identity in what others think of you or of what you think of yourself.
If you are in Christ, The Father has set His gracious love upon you before He even made the earth. He has chosen you in Christ to be holy and blameless, to be His adopted child. And let us admit that the doctrine of election is a great mystery, and it’s like many other mysteries. I don’t fully understand the Trinity. I don’t fully understand that Jesus is 100% God and 100% man, but I believe I believe it because the Bible teaches it.
He chose me first, but I must choose Him in return to believe and follow. This leads us to the second way that we can praise God for all the spiritual blessings we have in Jesus, and it’s by glorifying the Son for redeeming us, by glorifying the Son for redeeming us. Paul moves from the Father’s eternal purpose to the Son’s historical accomplishment. He moves from eternity past to the first century, and Paul has just in a few verses, in one breath, moved to what Jesus has done for us. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our transgressions.
In who? In Christ. We have redemption. Redemption, that’s a big old Christian word. That means to be released from slavery by payment, to be liberated from slavery because someone bought you out of slavery.
Redemption, to be redeemed, bought out of. And so this is the word that Paul used here. You’ve been redeemed. Church at Ephesus, you’ve been redeemed. Church in Wilson, you’ve been redeemed.
If you believe in Jesus, if you’re in Him, you’ve been bought out of what? Slavery to sin.
Slavery to sin so that you could be holy and blameless before God in position. You’ve been forgiven. All your debts have been canceled. Are you walking in guilt today, believer? Are you a believer, you’ve got Jesus in you, you’re in Christ, but yet there’s still reminders of your former life?
People still remember what you did. Some of you have moved to Wilson to get away from that. You move from another place because they were— they knew who you were there. May I say to you once again that your truest identity, your real identity, is not what others say about you. It’s not even what you say when you look in the mirror.
It’s not what you say about yourself. It’s what the Father says about you. He chose you and he redeemed you in Jesus’ name. So glorify Jesus, not yourself. You didn’t get yourself saved.
You couldn’t save yourself. You couldn’t get yourself out of slavery to sin. You couldn’t stop Some people say, I’ll come to Christ once I clean this up. I need to get this straight before I become part of the church, and I gotta fix this. You’ll never get there.
You’ll never fix it. You’ll never clean it up. The Scripture, it’s not a self-help manual. It’s a die-to-self manual. Die to self.
Just as we saw in the baptism this morning, the old life is dead and the new life is risen in Christ. So glorify Jesus because He’s redeemed us. He’s forgiven us. And from what account did He pay this tremendous price? He paid it from the riches of His glorious grace.
He paid it from the eternal heavenly bank account of His righteousness, which is infinite. He paid for your sin. According to the riches of His grace. And did He just sprinkle just enough to get us over the line? No, it says in verse 8, which He lavished upon us, which He poured out on us to the extent that it overflows in us and through us and over us and spills out on others, this grace.
He lavished it because the Father’s love is a lavishing love. He pours it out.
This is who He is. And so He pours it out and He lavishes. And then we see in verse 9, He talks about that mystery I was mentioning before.
He’s making known to us the mystery of His will. There’s that word will again. It’s in there 4 times, I think, in this reading today. And it’s this secret that God had kept from time past in his heart before he said, let there be light, that only the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit knew about it. And they were like, let’s— let us make man in our own image, in the image of him.
He made them male and female. He made them— let’s do this. And they did it. The Holy Spirit was there. The Son was there.
John tells us the Son was present at creation. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made by Him, without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life and that life was the light of all men. This is the Son.
All 3 were present at creation. But God has this mystery, this secret that He’s kept. But now, Paul says, now He’s made this mystery known. He’s revealed it. Where?
In Him, in Jesus, in Jesus, He made it known. And what is this mystery? According to His purpose, which He had from before the beginning, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time. There’s 2 Greek words for time. One is chronos, which is tick, tick, tick, tick, tick time, and the other is kairos, which is seasonal or opportune time.
Like when we say, well, when the doctor says the lady’s gonna, the pregnant lady’s gonna give birth on such and such date, it’s rare that he gets that right because it’s kairos time, it’s not chronos time, it’s when the baby comes, the baby comes time. And that’s the kind of verbiage that Paul’s using here, that Jesus has come in the fullness of time and He is coming again. In the fullness of time. And what’s God’s ultimate purpose? To unite, look at verse 10, in the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, who’s Him?
Jesus Christ. He’s gonna unite Jew and Gentile into one church in Him, but he’s not finished. All things on earth, yeah. All things in heaven, yeah. So the abode of God and the abode of man is one.
In Christ. That’s His cosmic plan, Paul says, and it’s been revealed in the King of God’s kingdom, King Jesus. Paul wrote this to the Colossians, he said, speaking of Jesus, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. Some believers punish themselves and they need to stop. They need to find their position in Jesus.
You’re made holy and blameless. You’ve been forgiven, you’ve been redeemed. Walk in the position that you’ve been blessed with and give glory to Jesus. Give glory to Jesus that He set you free.
And that leads us to the 3rd way that we can praise the Lord, we can praise God, for this, the, the every minute, every blessing he’s given us. And it’s by rejoicing in the Spirit for sealing us, by rejoicing in the Spirit for sealing. Uh, sealing is a, um, it’s a metaphor, right? The idea, uh, in ancient times was if you sent a letter, you sent a scroll or a letter, that you would put a, uh, drip some wax on it and then take your signet ring and put your seal in it, and that’s your signature, your signet ring, and it would leave the mark, and it was not to be opened by anyone except for the recipient. And so that letter is now sealed.
We know that the Jews asked Pilate to seal the tomb of Jesus so that it had a Roman seal on it. That didn’t stop him, did it? But that was the point, was that, okay, it’s sealed. And so the idea of being sealed is the idea of assurance that when you’ve received Jesus as your Lord and Savior, that the Holy Spirit comes to live in you and seals you unto the day of going home with Him, unto the day of redemption, so that you get the new body and you get the time with the Lord in heaven for eternity. But in the meantime, you have as a down payment, what does the Scripture say?
It says as a guarantee. Let’s look at it. It. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth— what’s the word of truth? It’s the gospel of your salvation.
Paul doesn’t leave us out on a limb. He tells us. What’s the word of truth? The gospel of your salvation. What’s the gospel?
Jesus died for your sins. He was buried. He was raised on the 3rd day according to the Scriptures. Now he’s risen and ascended to the Father and returning again someday. Do you believe that?
Do you believe the gospel? Do you believe that Jesus is the Lord of Lords, King of Kings coming again? Died for your That’s the gospel, that’s the truth. You heard it and you believed it. That was that mysterious part I was telling you about.
That’s the human responsibility part. Paul tells us in another place in Ephesians, he tells us, for by grace you’ve been saved through faith. So even that faith you can’t boast about ’cause he gave you the ability to do that too. It’s a mystery. You were sealed with the Holy Spirit, the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee Of our inheritance.
What’s our inheritance? Well, it’s everything God’s got. Everything that belongs to Jesus is yours because you’re a co-inheritor with Christ. Every spiritual blessing.
What’s a guarantee? Well, did you ever buy a house? You buy a house, you make an offer. It’s a written offer, it’s a contract, and you have to put some money on it. You say, 30 days from now, I’m gonna close on this deal.
And here’s X amount of earnest money, guarantee money, deposit money that if I don’t close on that date, I lose my guarantee, I lose my deposit, I lose my earnest money. So it’s attaching. Now on the day of closing, I have to show up with all the money, or at least the bank does. And then I got to pay that for the rest of my life. But anyway, you got to come up with a deposit and you lose that if you don’t close.
Are y’all with me? That’s the language that Paul is using describing the Holy Spirit. He’s your guarantor, that he’s given you the Holy Spirit as his guarantee that all the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ are yours. And the Holy Spirit is the assurance of that. So the word sealing is a metaphor for the assurance of the Spirit living in you so that you know that you know that you know that you belong to Him.
Paul writes about this to the Romans in Romans chapter 8. He says, the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Our assurance does not rest on how we feel ’cause our feelings If you ate pepperoni pizza last night, you might feel a certain way the next morning. Our feelings are fickle, but God’s Word and what He says about us is on the rock of Jesus. In Him, in Him, we have the Holy Spirit as a guarantor, as a guarantee that all that He’s promised us is ours, that we will acquire possession of it all to the praise of His glory.
So that we give glory to Jesus, we give blessing to the Father, and we take and rejoice in the Spirit. And so this is what Paul has called us to in these verses, this burst of praise, this doxology of what we have in Christ. In Him, we have been chosen by the Father, redeemed by the Son, and sealed by the Spirit. So my friend, who are you? Who are you?
Are you what other people say about you? Are you what you see in the mirror? Or are you what God says about you in His Word? Who are you? The Father says, I chose you.
The Son says, I redeemed you. The Spirit says, I sealed you. Who are you? None of this begins with you. We’ve learned today it begins with God.
But Jesus says, behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens the door, I will come in. Stop saying no. Stop saying wait. Stop saying later.
Say yes to Jesus today. He came for us. He lived the life we couldn’t live, died the, the death that we should have died. On the cross, raised on the 3rd day, ascended to the Father, returning again. This is the gospel.
Until that day, He’s given us the Holy Spirit as a guarantee that everything He has promised will surely be ours. So Christian, bless the Father, glorify the Son, rejoice in the Spirit until He comes again. And if you’ve never trusted in Christ, notice what Paul says, you just heard the truth. The gospel of salvation. Believe, believe.
Turn your life away from your sin and place your faith in the Lord Jesus who was crucified for you and died for you and was risen for you and is returning again for you. In Him, we have how many spiritual blessings?
All, every. Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you. Lord, thank you. We give you glory. We give you praise. Hallelujah.
Praise you, Lord. I pray for the one that’s here today, you’ve never given your life to Jesus. You can do business right now with the Lord. You can say right now, I believe. I’ve heard the good news, I’ve heard the truth, I believe.
I want Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I pray right now, Lord, forgive me of my sins, I repent of my sins, I turn from my former way of living, I give my life to you, I surrender, I believe you died on the cross for me, that you were raised from the grave, that you live today, come and live in me by your Spirit, adopt me into your family. I wanna follow you as my Lord and Savior all the days of my life. If you’re praying that prayer of faith believing He’ll save you, He knew you, He pursued you before you ever made this decision today. Others are here today and you’re a Christ follower but you’re beating yourself up with shame and regret and grief and would you recognize who you really are in Jesus today?
Would you say, Lord, thank You for Your Word, Help me to walk in my true identity in Christ and put to death the former ways and to fully walk in you, to be assured of my salvation and to know that I know that I know you’re mine and that I’m yours. In him, in you, Lord Jesus, we pray, amen.
Read transcript
All right, good morning, church. Good to see all of you this morning. Very thankful you’re here today. We are starting a brand new series this morning called Life in Christ, and I do pray that it would bless you today. It is intended— this message was written to be a blessing to you.
And so as we start the book of Ephesians, we’re going to be in Ephesians for the next several weeks together, going through the first few chapters. We won’t finish Ephesians this year. We’ll come back to it again next year, but we’re going to get it started. And you’re going to see a phrase appear a whole lot in our text today and certainly over the next few weeks. It’s this phrasing that’ll be in Christ or in Him or in God.
You’re going to see that appear a whole lot. In fact, 36 times in this letter, he writes some version of that, in Christ, and 11 of those today. And so, the idea of what Paul is writing here is this idea of knowing who you are. Not what the world says you are, not even what you feel, knowing who you are in Christ Jesus. And so I hope that this encourages you.
Certainly the opening of his letter is meant to be a blessing. So I hope you walk out today going, yes! Hallelujah! I want that for you today. So if I do a good job, you’re going to walk out feeling encouraged.
If I don’t, tell me later, you know, maybe tomorrow. Let me at least have the day thinking I did a good job, right? But anyway, this is a wonderful passage. The Ephesians are so much, are in so many ways dealing with something culturally that we are dealing with now in the 21st century, and so this letter is timeless because Paul is arguing for something that is still true. He knew Ephesus really well.
This is a really big city in the ancient world, and he spent most— the place he spent the most time at anywhere else was the city of Ephesus, the church of Ephesus. He spent nearly 3 years there, and then some years later, he writes this letter to them. He writes this letter to them from a prison cell. This is one of his many prison— we call them prison epistles or letters. He writes these from a prison in Rome, and it’s a beautiful letter where he’s clearly trying to help them work through something.
Ephesus is the kind of city where they were very confused about who they were. In fact, one of the main places to go and worship in Ephesus was this temple up on the hill, which was one of the 7 Wonders of the World at the time, the temple to Diana. And that was a place where the way in which you worship there is a strange way to worship. In fact, you would often go up there and hire a temple prostitute to worship the goddess Diana. Not a normal way that we would consider to worship anything, but let’s be honest, their crazy world, ours is pretty crazy too.
And so, a lot of times we say up is down and left is right, and so they’re dealing with a culture very similar to us, one that has a very confused identity. And so, this is the question kind of posed for the Ephesian church, I think, as Paul begins. He’s like, hey, look, brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, You’re different. You’re included. You’ve been redeemed.
He’s going to have all these wonderful words for them so that they might not look at the world around them and go, I don’t— I’m lost. I don’t know what to do. He’s trying to help them with that. And so now it’s a question we can ask, one of the most basic questions I think we deal with, we still wrestle with to this day, and that is, who am I really? Who am I?
There’s a couple of different secular views on this. There’s what you might call the traditional view of identity. For many centuries, the idea is that other people tell you who you are, and so, like, probably initially your parents. So growing up, your parents might say, hey, you’re really smart, hey, you’re really athletic, hey, you’re really going to be good at this, and then over time you start believing them, and unfortunately, if they say a lot of negative, you start believing that too. I’m just not sure you’re all that smart.
You might want to, you know, school might not be your long-term move, you know, or you’re not that athletic. Pick something else. Some of you have gotten a mixture, I bet, growing up of positives and negatives. Some of you more of one than the other, but you begin to believe those things. And so you start to identify with those things.
And so some of us find ourselves in careers and in places where we go, how did I get here? Well, it’s probably a long list of people saying you were good at something. And all of a sudden, boom, here you are working a job you didn’t expect. That’s sometimes what happens to us in this traditional identity. Now, there’s a modern way of identifying that maybe was true for Ephesus, but at least in modern times, it has not been a popular view until recently, and that is this idea of, I am whoever I say I am, or however I feel today.
That’s more of a modern interpretation of How to identify. So here’s the thing, both of these are wrong. I’m not here to pick sides on that today. The Bible actually gives us a better perspective than either one of those. It’s less about what people say you are and less about what you think you are and more about what God says you are.
There’s a better identity that Paul is going to talk about today, that in his letter to the Ephesians, this is really the beginning of his primary purposes, I want you to know who you are in Christ. The whole series, Life in Christ. What does it look like to identify with Him? What does that change? Because there’s something better going on there.
That’s exactly what Paul’s up to. So, we’re going to be in the book of Ephesians today, chapter 1, 1 through 14. Here we’re going to see Paul really opening up his letter with an amazing blessing, a big praise of all the spiritual blessings in Christ, and we can praise God in this same way. So, let’s dig in. We’re in Ephesians 1:1-14.
Listen to this. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. I hope you believe that today. What a word!
God has given us every spiritual blessing. Verse 4, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ. According to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of His will according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ.
As a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be the praise of His glory. In Him, You also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of His glory. This is God’s Word, amen? This is meant to bless and encourage you today.
I pray it does so. We can respond to this with praise ourselves. This is meant to draw us to worship. So how do we do it? How can we praise God for these every spiritual blessing He promises.
First is this: by blessing the Father for choosing us. That seems to be where Paul begins. This is a Trinitarian kind of praise. You’ll see it if you look it back over. You’ve got the Father’s work, you’ve got the Son’s work, and then you’ve got the Spirit’s work, all in these short verses, that God in His Trinitarian Godhead has helped us and restored us and blessed us in some incredible ways.
Ways. It begins first with the Father choosing. Now, I want to say something about this passage that you might not notice when reading it in the English, but it is a long run-on sentence in the Greek. You might have even felt it as I was reading 3 through 10, but really 3 through 14 in the Greek is one long sentence. Paul is essentially saying, I’m not even going to take a breath here, I’ve just got to give you all these blessings.
If y’all just knew how blessed you were, And he’s just feverishly writing this to— first to them and now to us. It would have been— actually, I’ve looked at this in the ancient Greek. It’s pretty hard to translate, in fact, because they didn’t do spacing like we do. The letters are just back to back to back to back. So you’ve got like 4 lines of just— and Paul here listening to the Holy Spirit going, I just can’t wait to tell you all these blessings.
Blessings in Christ Jesus. That first begin with this choice. I want to dig into that, but before we dig into that, I want to set the stage just a little bit. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time telling you about Ephesus and stuff. Some of you are really interested in that.
I would encourage you to look into this more, but let me give you a snapshot. We’ve got Paul here, the Apostle of Christ Jesus. He claims himself to be, and he’s right. He has come to faith in a very astounding way. He, unlike the other disciples, comes to faith in more of a miraculous kind of way.
He was the main persecutor of the church in the first century until God met with him on the road to Damascus and basically said, hey, why are you persecuting me? Radically saving Paul, and he goes on to become what you might say is the ideal church planter. He just says— he puts everything else aside in order to endure in the mission of Jesus, and he writes half of the New Testament for us. His powerful testimony. Now he’s writing to the saints in Ephesus.
He says, let me give you just a few things of Ephesus. Here’s a map for you if you’re wondering where this is. It’s in modern-day Turkey. Uh, it’s, it’s a, a seacoast city. It no longer exists today.
The Mediterranean has moved over the last 2,000 years. And so the result of this river bringing in what’s called— I think it’s silt or something that it’s bringing in— has slowly caused the Mediterranean Sea to move away from the city, so it’s just ancient ruins now. But in this time, it would have been a major port city, one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire, somewhere around 250,000 people, they think, or more. So a large port city in which, if you go there today, if you ever get the chance to do the footsteps of Paul, it’s probably the most amazing city to go and see. More has been uncovered there than any of the other churches that we see in the New Testament.
And so, there’s some of the beautiful images of that place. We know that in the 1st century, Aquila, Priscilla, Timothy, all of those characters you see in the New Testament, they find their home in Ephesus. In fact, tradition tells us that late in his life, the Apostle John, John the Beloved, spends his time in Ephesus in late years. And so, this is a powerful place and really a center of spreading Christianity in the world in the first century. So that’s the people he’s writing to.
It’s also a people who are in deep darkness. There is a great idolatry in this place, as I mentioned, with this temple to Diana. In fact, it causes a great riot. If you go read late in the book of Acts, Acts 19 and 20, you’ll see riots occurring because a lot of people come to faith, and then riots occur as a result because guess what? They stop worshiping the idols and they stop buying the products, and it makes a whole bunch of people mad.
In fact, they go out and burn all of their, their false writings, and it makes a big uproar in Ephesus. So they’re dealing with this cultural problem, and Paul’s writing to them saying, don’t worry, you are blessed in Christ Jesus. And here’s the first way in which you’re blessed, verse 3 and 4: Every spiritual blessing’s given Verse 4, chosen before the foundation of the world. Now, this goes on to be a hotly debated conversation among Christianity, not one that I’m going to in any way be able to help you with in the next few minutes with you. This has been a hot-button topic for 2,000 years in Christianity, but I will say one thing that I know to be true of this text.
Is that Paul intends for us to have a heart of worship when we read it, that it isn’t meant for us to look at it and go, okay, well, if I’m chosen, are other people not chosen? And begin to have that debate, and that’s something that’s worthy of discussion, but it’s not the discussion he’s having here. He’s saying to these primarily Gentile believers, look, you’ve been chosen too. I want you to hear this. Here’s what Paul’s thinking here.
He’s thinking of the old Hebraic terminology. In fact, This is something you may not need to know, but I’m going to tell you anyway. The Old Testament, when it was translated into Greek, is called the Septuagint, and Paul was very well learned in that, and he’s quoting, in fact, some places in Scripture where the Septuagint uses this idea of chosen. The people of God throughout human history have been chosen by God. In fact, this would have been almost something the Israelites would have bragged about among other people.
Hey, we are God’s chosen people. And it’s something they were proud of, and God in some sense has really— has been blessing them and protecting them. They have been chosen in one sense. The reason they’ve been chosen is all based around the promise that God first gave to Abraham. Now, I want you to hear something today.
What’s great about this promise to the Ephesians and now to us is that it’s becoming— it’s coming into full fruition now among all peoples. So here’s the promise He made to Abraham: You will be a blessing to all nations. Your seed will be a blessing to all peoples, not just the Jewish people, all nations. And that seed is the promised Jesus Christ, the Messiah. So now He’s using that terminology to us today, not so that we’ll sit there and go, am I chosen or not?
It’s more to say, hey, look, I have great news to you. I have great news. I have grafted in the Gentiles now. Now, I’m personally really thankful for that because I don’t know of any Jewishness in me. If there is any, I’m unaware of it.
So I’m thankful that now I get to be a part of the chosen people because of the sacrifice of Christ. That seems to be the main blessing that Paul’s talking about to these people who are questioning, okay, I’ve come to Christianity, but I’m not quite like those who are going into the synagogues. I don’t know what to do. Like, everybody’s trying to pull me to go worship over here in the temple of Diana, and I’m pretty sure that’s not right. So where do I belong?
Paul says to them, you are in Christ Jesus, chosen before the foundation of the earth. You’ve been redeemed. He has paid much for you, and He has predestined you not just for— he tells us the purpose. You’ve been predestined for holiness, blamelessness, into adoption as sons. Now, women, don’t get hung up on that.
The idea there is that you’ve been given every right of a firstborn son. I’m a secondborn son, so this is great news to me too, that I have the rich inheritance of the firstborn son, and so do all of you in Christ Jesus. In fact, I like what one commentator writes on this. He says, this passage has generated a lot of debate because it mentions the concepts of election and predestination. Now, while this discussion is in itself not a bad thing, I think we would miss the spirit of the text if we don’t see the spirit as worship.
Worship. He’s predestined us for praise, for adoption, for a holy and blameless life. I really think adoption is what God has done. It’s probably one of the best words that He gives us. It is a very biblical word.
I mentioned this earlier, this idea of adoption has been for all of God’s creation for a long time, and in Christ Jesus, it’s coming into full reality. Here’s what I mentioned earlier, the promise to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. It says, the Lord said to Abram, go from your country to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.
And in all— in you, all the families of the earth shall be blessed. So because of the way in which I’m blessing you, you will be a blessing, and then all of the nations, all of the families will be blessed. Jesus has chosen. He also chooses His own disciples. John 15, it says, you did not choose Me, but I chose you.
This is the nature of which we have all come to Christ Jesus. This is the really sweetness about the gospel, is that there was never a day where I just woke up and said, I know how to be made right with God. It never happened for me that way. My guess is it never happened that way for any of you. Instead, God did something miraculous in your life.
Perhaps He’s doing it today. I pray He might. This amazing thing is all inside of this term to which the Bible calls adoption. Now, we’re very familiar with this term. The reason, you might ask yourself, why is it we’re so familiar with it?
Because we are a pretty uniquely Christian nation and adoption is a uniquely Christian idea. And so you will find in a lot of churches you go to that there’s a heavy push towards adoption. I think this is right because it shows who we are in Christ and that we are a blessing to others. This is a powerful thing that God has done for us. Here’s what I love about this picture.
Because there’s nothing that a child can do to choose his parents, whether organically or in adoption, but certainly in adoption, there’s never a moment where he can say, those are the ones I want, this is how I want it to go. No, it’s the other way, that the parents make a decision to set their love upon that child, and they make the decision that that child gets to have their name, their home, their their inheritance so that the security for that child doesn’t rest on his choice, but on the choice of the mom or the dad, both, hopefully. So this is this beautiful picture that God has for us. We did not choose him. We couldn’t, but he chose us.
He said, I’m going to adopt you into my family. I’m going to make you sons and daughters. I’m going to restore you. This says something about who we are then, right? We’re not what other people necessarily say we are, although there’s some good people in your life, there’s some godly people in your life that will speak truth in your life.
They will tell you exactly what’s right, but many won’t. Many will tell you what you want to hear, and that isn’t it. And often what you tell yourself is a bogus lie. I will probably wake up tomorrow morning on a Monday morning and feel a little bit like, I don’t know how I did yesterday. I might wake up feeling a bit tired.
I’m going to wake up feeling all kinds of ways, and you might as well, and you might lie to yourself in that moment and say, I need to hang this up. I’m not sure God’s asking me to do this. Be very careful of hearing that because we are not what others think. We are also not what we think. We are in Christ.
His gracious love’s upon us. Paul writes in verse 9, this is a real mystery. It’s a great mystery.
We begin here in this text with this idea of God chooses us, but what’s interesting is this text also ends with us believing in Him. So for those of you in the room that know a bit about this discussion, about this debate between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, I want you to see in this text that Paul has taught both. So there’s a bit of a paradox here that is meant to be a mystery to you, that maybe for— in some ways you might step back and go, okay, there’s some ways in which God operates that are very, very much beyond my understanding. This is one of many. I’m not going to get up here and say, hey, we can figure out every little— we can analyze every detail and understand God perfectly.
That would be false. I don’t understand how God is both fully man and fully God, that Christ is both 100% man and 100% divine in the same incarnation, but that seems to be what the Bible teaches. At the same time, it seems to me the Bible is teaching that God has 100% chosen us, and I have 100% also believed in him. There’s something wild going on there. Paul says it’s a mystery, and he goes on to say, and in that mystery, we ought to praise him.
So I hope today you might walk out saying, hey, I don’t know how all these details work, but I know this: I have been adopted by Christ Jesus, and I should worship. That’s the first. The second is maybe the sweet middle of this text, and that is we can praise Him by glorifying the Son for redeeming us. This is the method. This is how God did it.
He chose us and Christ with His plan A. It’s not— I’ve said this recently— it’s not like God all of a sudden when He created and man messed up and walked away and abandoned Him, it’s not like God said, oh my goodness, I didn’t see that coming. That’s not what happened, friends. Before the foundation of the earth, God had intended to not only create but also redeem. He has always been a loving God, a creative God, and also a redemptive God.
It’s who He is, it’s who He’s always been, it’s who He will always be. And so, here in this text, we see in Him, in Christ, in Him, verse 7, we have redemption. Redemption through His blood. Redemption through His blood. I said this the first service, I’ll say it the second.
We had back-to-back songs about thanking God for the blood and pleading the blood, and for some of you in the room, you might be thinking, that’s really strange. What are we doing? What is all this blood singing stuff about? And it would sound really weird everywhere else but here, because here, here’s what we understand, that it was the only payment that could set us free. It is only by the blood of Jesus that we are redeemed and forgiven.
So it sounds strange to sing about, but it is true, and it is worthy of our praise. These 2 words, redemption and forgiveness, are amazing in this text. The idea of redemption here is the idea of being released from bondage, that your debt has been paid. Forgiveness carries that same weight, that you have been imprisoned Your forgiveness is like someone has given you a pardon. So the text here is telling us we were once slaves of sin.
We were once stuck, imprisoned. I felt that, friends. Even as a believer, there are times where I have to come back to the Lord and say, hey, help me here. I’m getting re-stuck. And in this text, we find out that the reason we give Him glory is because He paid the ultimate price so that we could be forgiven.
It says in verses 7 and 8, in fact, He lavished us with the riches of His grace. He poured it out. So yeah, we’re thankful.
Verses 10 and on begin to unpack this, that in the fullness of time, Christ did this. This is the idea that there was a specific moment that God had in mind for the the sending of the Messiah. For 2,000 years, this was building. God was teaching the people through His Word, through the Old Testament, what we call it now, teaching and blessing and showing and preparing so that when Christ would come, people might be ready to receive it. Some were, some weren’t.
But in the fullness of time, He’s unpacking that. And then there’s another fullness of time on the other side of us where Christ will return, and it will be exactly at the right time.
He says, in Him then we have this inheritance. He’s redeemed us by this. I love what he says to the Colossian church in a very similar light. The Apostle Paul writes, He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. I want you to hear that this morning.
It might be the case that you’ve heard this terminology enough to where it’s lost a bit of its sweetness. Here’s what I’ve observed, at least in my own life: when I hit a real valley again, that’s when the gospel becomes super sweet to me again. Now, I’m ashamed to say there are times where it just kind of seems like it’s in the back of my mind and not in the forefront, but many times where I’m feeling a disaster or I’m going through something or Maybe I’ve messed up again. It is in those moments when the precious blood of Jesus is very, very sweet to me again. And I think that’s the picture Paul’s trying to paint to the church of Ephesus.
He’s saying to them, hey, I know you guys are struggling. I know there’s some crazy stuff going on in town. I know every time that there’s a revival, immediately there’s a riot. I actually heard recently a preacher say, if you did this, if you did a work on the book of Acts or another of these early church books, you will find every time revival ends in riot, and then there’s another revival that ends in riot. What that means is there’s always going to be an adversary to the move of God.
But now one day He’s going to end all that and He wins. Great news, church, Jesus wins. But until then, there’s this constant back and forth, and in this place, Paul’s telling the Ephesian church, I know every time that God does a move in our lives in this church, I know terrible things are going down, but I want you to hear something. In Christ, you have been redeemed. Believer, this morning, if you’re experiencing a guilt and a shame that makes you go, man, I can’t come back to Jesus with this, I’ve come to Him too many times, I want you to hear He has thrown that as far as the east is from the west.
Somehow in His infinite mercy, He has fully forgiven you. Somehow in His grace, He looks at you and does not see your brokenness. He sees Jesus. That’s mind-blowing to me. It’s mind-blowing to me because I’m broken.
I have a hard time looking past your sin. It’s harder for me. He is somehow able to see Christ when He sees us. He gives us a lot of images like this. I’m going to admit something to you, church, that this story that came to my mind as I was wrestling with this text is an obscure one.
And I hope that it’s meaningful to you. It really meant a lot to me as I unpacked it this week. There’s a prophet in the Old Testament that’s one of the weirdest stories, and there’s some really— a lot of them are really strange, but there’s one named Hosea. If you’ve never read Hosea, it is a strange book, a very worthy book to study and read, but it is a strange book. The reason it is strange is because God basically tells this poor prophet, He says, I want your life to model how I feel about Israel.
I want your choices to be an example for how I feel about Israel, and here’s what that means. He has instructed Hosea to stay married to a woman who continually dabbles in infidelity and adultery. In fact, she gets herself in such a terrible situation that Hosea has to come and buy her out of out of a debt. She seems to be in some form of bondage in Hosea chapter 3. Now I’m going to admit to you, y’all, there are times where I think being a pastor is hard until I read Hosea and go, there’s times in the Old Testament where God says, hey prophet, I want you to go and marry an adulterous woman so that way it would be an example to the nation of how I feel about them.
Like, I’m glad I didn’t get that call. That’s tough. I mean, he tells the prophet Jeremiah, he says, hey, I’m going to give you great news and the people will not listen. Yes, it’s like, imagine Jeremiah, sign me up. And they’re going to throw you in a cistern later and leave you for dead.
There, that’s how much they’re going to love you. They’re just going to leave you behind to die. Okay, being a pastor is actually really easy, uh, compared to that. Way easier than what Hosea gets. This— why is this prophet in your Old Testament?
Here’s why. God is trying to model something that’s true not only about Israel but true about us. And I don’t want you to count yourself out here. I don’t mean this to make you feel ashamed or guilty because I’m right here with you. Hosea has to stay with this poor woman, this adulterous woman who has a terrible name.
Does anyone know her name? Gomer, which does not make you think of a woman, you know it doesn’t. It makes you think of Gomer Pyle. Don’t picture that, put that out of your mind, but this woman is a mess. And gets herself in such trouble, and God keeps telling Hosea, go back to her, do not abandon her, buy her out of bondage.
Why? Because that’s who God is to us. That’s a strange text, but it has a powerful meaning. I want you to hear something, believers today. You might feel like you’ve messed up a lot.
You might feel like there’s no way God wants to talk to me about this again. You’re Gomer, so am I, but he’s Hosea. And he will never stop buying you back out of bondage. He will never stop loving you. He will never stop seeking you and finding you.
So whatever that guilt is you’re feeling, I want you to hear this: it’s not from God. It ain’t from him. Now, where it’s coming from, that’s up for you to determine, but it ain’t from the Lord. What he wants is communion with you. He wants fellowship.
So don’t come to this text going, oh, I’m okay. I’m doing well. Nothing’s wrong with me. No, we’re all Gomer— adulterous, abandoning God at every turn. We all are.
We want our way. We constantly do.
And we abandon God countless times. And yet this text reminds us of this amazing truth. That by the redemption of His blood, we have been bought back. We are no longer slaves. We are free.
So believers in the room, don’t punish yourselves anymore for sins that Christ has already forgiven. Move forward. And for those in the room that are feeling real proud of yourselves, like you’ve done enough religiously, I want you to hear that ain’t it either. There was nothing you could do to earn His love. He has poured it out by His good grace.
Paul says, in Him we have redemption. It is ours. So confess your sin, receive His forgiveness, and glorify the Son. That’s the second. So the Father has chosen us.
The Son has redeemed us. Hallelujah! Lastly, the Spirit has sealed us. So this is the final form of praise, that we would rejoice in the Spirit who has sealed us. Now I know that’s a weird term, but that’s the term Paul uses, so I’m sticking with it.
He says, lastly, you’ve been sealed. This is the idea that you’ve been locked up, you know, you’ve been wrapped up in the arms of Jesus. The idea of this seal is like an ancient letter being sent with a wax seal that King Jesus has now stamped, and when that letter goes out, you know it’s good. That’s the idea of this seal here. He says in verses 13 and 14, this powerful move has happened.
God chose you, yes, it’s amazing. God redeemed you through the blood of Jesus, awesome. But you heard and you believed. So something incredible is happening inside of this mystery. Yeah, God has done the work, but we responded.
In fact, Paul writes in another place, he says, how can you believe unless you have first heard? And how can you hear unless someone teaches or preaches it to you? And how can they do that unless they are sent? So there’s a balance here, church, to what God has done and how we respond to it. It says in verses 13 and 14, you’ve believed in Him and therefore you’ve been given an incredible, incredible inheritance.
There’s a guarantee on this. I think my favorite word here at the end of this text here in verse 14 is this word guarantee. This is the idea of a pledge. A down payment has been made. Essentially, God is saying to you, when you come to Christ Jesus, I’m putting a little bit of a down payment in right away.
Believer in the room, great news. We don’t have to wait for the Holy Spirit. It has been given.
It’s already happened in Christ Jesus. You might be thinking, well, how do I know that? How do I know that’s happened? And I will say to you, it’s— there’s not like a, a real specific set, but I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple of ideas that the Bible gives and ideas that I’ve experienced. The Bible says that the Holy Spirit will convict, that the Holy Spirit will teach us to pray, that the Holy Spirit will move in certain ways in relationships.
I’ll say this to you. The way I am, the way I am apart from Christ, is not the kind of person that quickly forgives. You might be surprised to hear that. You might be looking at me and thinking, man, this guy’s got it all together. Boy, wish that were true.
I’m not naturally quick to forgive. I’m not even naturally really wanting to be with people at all. Kind of my natural bent is— yesterday, I’ll tell y’all a story. Yesterday, my whole family was gone for about 4 or 5 hours. And I sat upstairs and said, man, this is the best.
This is the best. That’s who I am, very introverted. It was so quiet in my house. I had time. I tidied my room, which is weird to some of you, but it’s who I am.
I tidied up and I sat there and went, man, now I know when they get home they’re gonna ruin all this, but boy. So that’s who I am naturally, but who I am in Christ is very different. The Holy Spirit in me is doing a work. Those moments where I say something or think something or do something and then quickly I feel something in me say, that wasn’t it, buddy. You need to reconcile.
You need to ask for forgiveness in that. That’s not the way to think about that. That’s not the way to do that. I want you to hear something, church. That’s the Holy Spirit.
Because Jonathan is totally fine goofing around, messing up. My sinful nature does not care. The Spirit in me is moving. The Spirit in me causes me to reconcile with people when I would love to hold a grudge. I would so love to hold it.
I told first service this too, like, it blows me up that I just— there are times where I’m just confident that my wife is wrong, and she may very well be, but I cannot let it set for more than 24 hours before I just— I’ve got to make this right. I’ve got to fix that. And it’s not my personality. My personality is I want to be right 100% of the time. I want to always be right, but the Spirit in me says there’s something more important than being right.
Way more important.
Being at peace, having mercy and grace and love— way more important than being right.
So if you’re wondering, man, I don’t know about this promised Holy Spirit, this guarantee, do I have it? Do you feel God’s conviction of sin? Do you feel at times the Lord moving you to talk to people? You’re like, well, I don’t want to talk to them. That ain’t you, buddy.
That’s the Holy Spirit. When you notice people, you feel something moving you. There’s a whole lot of lists. I could list and list and list. The Spirit of God has been given as a guarantee and it is active and moving.
This promised Holy Spirit is moving in your life, doing things that perhaps at times you aren’t even aware of. And God says it’s a guarantee, it’s a down payment, so when you have it, you can know, it can give you a sense of assurance knowing that, all right, the Lord is with me and there is eternity in store for me. The Spirit is this assurance, this guarantee that we are fellow heirs with Christ. Paul wrote to the Romans in chapter 8, he said, the Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. It’s like He has given us a down payment, earnest money on a house that, that, yeah, the house has not fully been purchased yet, but earnest money’s been put down.
And there’s a day coming when He either returns or takes us home when the house will be bought. But even in this moment, we know a down payment has been made. So friends, if you’ve heard the gospel, you’ve believed in Christ Jesus, The Holy Spirit is with you.
If you don’t have a sense of that, if you’re struggling in that, the Bible actually promises that He will step in and pray, that there are times when we don’t even know what words to pray. I’ve been there. There are times as of lately I pray really simple prayers. I wonder, church, if the longer you walk with Jesus, if your prayers don’t get more complex, they actually get simpler. I’ve been wondering that myself because there’s things lately I just simply say, Lord, I just want to hear your voice on this page.
I want to see you move in my life. I want to know why you just woke me up. Those early mornings, I was talking to someone between services, why do I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and I’m not sick, nothing’s wrong, I just woke up? Those are moments I used to just roll over and say, back to sleep now. Now I’m going, hey Lord, is that you?
Like the prophet Samuel. The prophet Samuel as a little boy is like, I feel like somebody in the house is calling my name. He kept running into Eli, his adopted dad, and saying, hey, you call me? Finally, Eli’s like, hey buddy, I’m a little older. I know what’s going on here.
God’s trying to talk to you. Next time say, here I am, Lord, speak. Now when I pop up at 4 AM and go, I’m exhausted, what in the world am I fully awake for right now? Here I am, Lord, speak. My prayers are getting simpler because I think trying to get down to something more foundational in my walk with Jesus.
Maybe you are too. Spirit is our seal moving in us. Our feelings, they’ll fluctuate. Our circumstances, they’re going to always be uncertain. I want you to understand that the Holy Spirit of God is your guarantee.
So as I close right now, I want you to ask this question of yourself: Who are you? Are you in Christ, or are you a long list of what other people have told you you are? Are you what you’ve been telling yourself you are for many, many years? Maybe the job you do, maybe the things you do, that’s what you identify with. I am a carpenter who’s a dad who has a, has a wife, and, and that’s how, how you identify yourself.
And that makes sense, because if anybody asks, you know, what do you do? Who are you? You might say those things, and that makes sense. But who are you really?
Who are you? Because in Christ Jesus, those things aren’t what defines you. And you’re also not defined by your failures or your successes, your past or your possessions. You’re not defined by your feelings right now.
What defines you is what Christ says. As you leave today, I want you to hear these sweet, sweet words. God says, I’ve chosen you.
I’ve redeemed you. I love you. I’ve forgiven you.
You’re mine. I’ve adopted you into my family. I’ve given you the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a seal. Do you hear the words of Jesus today to you? God loves you.
Boy, wow. If that’s who I really am, I feel like I can move mountains now, right? I’m chosen and redeemed, sealed. If you’ve not yet trusted in Christ, today’s an invitation. It’s not meant to guilt you.
None of this was meant to guilt you, but rather to hopefully invite you, encourage you, That you might see these truths and go, this is not what I’m experiencing. I’m not experiencing a life of redemption and a life where there’s a God who loves me. I’m not experiencing that. Today’s the day. Paul says in his letter here, you’ve heard the word of truth.
Now believe in him. The invitation to you stands. And the great news is this, friends, we’re all in the same boat. None of us have been able to earn these blessings. We merely receive them by faith.
We don’t earn them. Now, we live them out once we’ve received them, but we don’t earn them. Today, friend, if that’s you, would you receive? Place your faith in the one who was crucified for you and rose from the grave so that all of us might experience every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Let’s pray now together.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for your good mercy to us. What a letter. What a wonderful word to us today. Lord, I don’t know how else to say it. I’m grateful.
Thank you for your love. Thank you for choosing me, for adopting me into your family. I didn’t deserve that. Thank you. Thank you for redeeming me.
I’m a mess. I’m thankful for redemption. I’m thankful for forgiveness that’s both past and present and ongoing. Thank you, Lord Jesus. I didn’t deserve that.
Thank you for the Holy Spirit within me. I’m thankful that you’re making me a better person than I could have ever imagined I’d be. In my broken heart, I make a big mess of relationships. I don’t even want the right things most of the time, Lord, but your Spirit is moving in me, and as a down payment on my eternal salvation, thank you, Lord. Thank you.
God, help me to live in that blessing. Help your church today. There are many believers in the room right now, Lord. I pray today they would feel encouraged that, God, you have done a wonderful work in their life and they can live that way. They don’t have to live broken.
They don’t have to live guilty, ashamed. Those sins are paid for, and their future sins, God, you’re gonna work on and convict and restore because you love us. God, I pray that they would live into that right now, that they would live with a sense of joy that’s incomparable. Lord, for that person here today, they might not have been really sure why they came. Maybe someone really begged them to be here.
Lord, I ask today that this message would feel like an invitation to them, that God, today you would move them towards yourself, and only you can do that.
Friend, if that’s you, you’re hearing this good news— chosen and redeemed. You want to believe, as verse 13 told us. You want to hear it and believe it. What a great day. You’ve got an appointment with God today.
You can respond to this with a prayer, a prayer of confession. The same writer of Ephesians wrote to the Roman church, and he said, If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Friend, would you pray a simple prayer confession with me?
Jesus, I believe today. I believe you died on the cross for me, for my sin, my mistakes, my brokenness. You paid. I believe that. And God, I believe you.
You raised Christ Jesus from the dead. This gives me really strong hope that not only have you paid for my sin, but you’ve also guaranteed, promised eternal life in the resurrection. Thank you for these things, Lord. I’m asking now, would you help me to understand these things? Would you begin to guide me?
You say in your word, as we read today, that you would give your promised Holy Spirit. Lord, would you help me to be aware of that? Let the Holy Spirit move in my life, convicting me of areas I need to change, leading me towards you at every turn. Lord, thank you for these things, I pray.
Dear friend, if you prayed that prayer with me, you are now adopted into the family of God. I appreciate and I’m encouraged by your move. I would ask you, friend, if you would let someone know today, a friend who brought you, maybe someone else here that you know, that they might be able to pray for you. And we’re all praying along with you right now. Lord Jesus, help us to praise you at every turn for the blessing of being chosen, to glorify you that we’re redeemed, that our lives would model that, and to have assurance in the fact that you’ve sealed us with the Spirit.
Would you give those in the room who are having strong doubts— would you give them assurance today? Would you give those in the rooms who are struggling with guilt of sin— would you let them know they are forgiven? God, would you move us in a powerful way to live for you at every turn? In Jesus’ name, amen.
Every one of us has to answer one of the most basic questions of life: “Who am I?” And how we answer that question shapes almost everything else about us.
Again and again in these opening verses we encounter the words: “in Christ.” Paul wants believers to understand that our deepest identity is not something we achieve through our performance, inherit from our family, or discover by searching our feelings. Our identity is something we receive by grace because of our union with Jesus Christ.
In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he opens up his letter by praising God that He has given every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places to believers in Christ. We can praise God for the spiritual blessings He has given us in Christ.
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