In his sermon, Ben Merkle emphasizes the inadequacy of human confession and the sufficiency of Christ’s perfect work on our behalf. He explains that our confessions of sin are inevitably flawed—we forget sins, lack full sincerity, and may even repeat the sins we confess. However, salvation does not depend on our imperfect efforts but on Christ, who bore our sins and perfectly confessed them for us (as seen in His baptism of repentance and Psalm 40). Merkle then shifts from his exhortation to Ephesians 1:7-10, highlighting redemption through Christ’s blood as the forgiveness of sins, grounded in God’s grace rather than human merit. He warns against seeking assurance of salvation in subjective experiences (e.g., emotional conversions or personal sincerity) and instead directs believers to rest in the objective truth of Christ’s finished work—His death, resurrection, and sovereign plan to unite all things in Himself. The gospel, he stresses, is a revealed mystery, not deduced by human wisdom but proclaimed so that faith may rest in Christ alone. The sermon closes with an encouragement to find confidence not in introspection but in the unchanging work of Jesus.

(Exhortation) This is the time when we begin preparing our hearts to confess our sin, and that’s what this exhortation, this portion of the liturgy is intended to do, to help you prepare your hearts to confess your sins. But I’m afraid that I need to give you some bad news about the confession that you’re about to make. In one sense, your confession won’t work. I promise you that in addition to all the things that you screwed up in the past week, you’re going to screw this up also.

First, you’ve already forgotten the bulk of the sins that you’ve committed this past week. And even though you might have been trying very hard to confess each sin as it happened, I’m afraid that you missed the majority of them. And those few that you have remembered that you are about to confess now, you’ll probably screw that up also.

You won’t have 100% sincerity. You’re going to fail in your honesty. And I think it’s entirely possible that even as you confess those sins now, you might even slip back into that same very sin that you’re confessing. For instance, it’s actually quite easy to slip back into anger right when you’re in the middle of confessing it.

You pray to God, please forgive me for being angry about this. And just as you’re saying that, it reminds you of how you were wronged and you get all angry all over again. And you fall into that exact same sin in the very midst of confessing it. In short, this confession is going to be tainted by sin. It’s going to be imperfect. But the good news is that it was never your confession of sin that saved you.

When Jesus came forward for baptism and John said clearly he was the one who needed to be baptized by Jesus, not the other way around. But Jesus insisted on receiving a baptism of repentance. Jesus, though without sin himself, went through repentance and he did so on our behalf. Or look at Psalm 40. The author of Hebrews tells us that this Psalm, Psalm 40, is actually Jesus speaking.

But many theologians have struggled with that because in verse 12, the psalmist confesses his sin. He talks about the sin that he’s wrestling with. How can the psalm be about Jesus if the author is confessing sin? How can Jesus be acknowledging his own sin? Augustine explained it like this. Jesus is the head of the church and he often speaks on our behalf as our head. And when the psalmist confessed his sins, it was Jesus confessing sin on our behalf. As the scripture says,

He made him who knew no sin to be sin. He made him who knew no sin to be sin. He carried that sin and he confessed our sins for us. So when you kneel here, you’re not confessing your sins as a way of paying them off. You’re not trying to tick each off, each sin off individually to get them all paid off. If you were trying to do that, you would fail because your confession is going to be imperfect.

Your confession of sins this morning is your acknowledgement of your need of a Savior, a Savior who fulfilled God’s law perfectly, a Savior who even confessed your sins for you perfectly. Let us meditate then on these things and prepare our hearts as we sing, As the heart about to falter, Psalm 42. So our text this morning is Ephesians chapter 1, verses 7 through 10.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace, which he made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, in him. Let’s pray.

Our Heavenly Father, we come to your word now and come to the words of eternal life. Father, we know that if our hearts are hard, that our minds will be closed and your word will be a meaningless yammering. And so, Father, we ask that you would pour out your spirit upon us that we might have soft hearts, open ears, and obedient feet to walk in the path that is lit before us. Bless us with the faith in your word that unlocks this power. We pray these things in Jesus’ name, and amen. Please be seated.

(Sermon) So we’re continuing on in the first chapter of the book of Ephesians. Last week, you remember, we considered verses three through six, which we said we noticed was grammatically one long sentence that was all based on the one phrase that we should bless God. OK, so we should bless God. And then the rest of the.

Okay, that was the first, the three verses that we considered, or four verses that we considered last week. This week, it’s actually kind of similar because we’re going to consider another four verses, verses seven through 10. And once again, if you look closely at this text, you will see that this is all one long sentence.

And it kind of depends on how your translators have rendered it because I believe some of them actually have it continuing on. So this is only the first part of the sentence. But in New King James, which is what I’m working from, this is one long sentence. And once again, the main clause is right there at the very beginning of the sentence. It’s right at the beginning of verse 7. And the clause is this, we have redemption. We have redemption. In him, we have redemption.

Just as our election was in Jesus and our adoption was in Jesus and our being accepted was something that happened in Jesus, so also we have redemption in him. So in him we have redemption. And the rest of these next several verses are unpacking the nature of this redemption that we have.

Now, let’s define that. To redeem something, we want to be specific, because to redeem something is to pay a debt that was owed. And it’s different than just paying a price for something. You can go to a store and you can buy something at the price that is set for it. That’s not the same thing as redeeming it.

Redeeming, it looks similar in some cases, but it’s a little bit different. Redeeming something is when you pay something that has been owed. You pay off a debt of some sort. For instance, if someone has a house that they want to sell and I have enough money to go pay for it, I can do that. That’s buying it. That’s just buying it. But to redeem something presupposes that someone has incurred a debt, a debt that they are no longer capable of carrying.

For instance, if someone took out a loan to buy a house but could no longer pay the debt that they owed, the lender can demand that the house be returned. The lender has a right to demand that that be given back to him. But if I come in and I pay the debt that the homeowner could no longer pay, if I fulfilled his obligation for him, that is redemption. That’s what redemption looks like. To redeem is to recover ownership of something that had been lost.

This is the beauty of the story of Boaz in Ruth, in the book of Ruth. Boaz is a redeemer. He’s described as the kinsman redeemer. He comes and there’s a debt that Ruth and Naomi cannot pay. Their land is gone. It should be theirs, but it’s gone because they’ve lost it and they can’t recover it. But Boaz comes in as a redeemer. He pays a debt that they could not pay in order to recover something that they should have. Paul defines then

The redemption that Paul explains to us then that Jesus coming for us was him coming as a redeemer. Listen to verse 7 again. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace.

We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace. Our redemption then, our redemption is the forgiveness of our sins. That’s the debt that we owed but could not satisfy. There was a debt that we had that we could not fulfill. And our redeemer is Jesus Christ who comes and he pays that debt and the cost he pays to pay off that debt is

Welcome to my lecture, Welcome to my lecture, Welcome to my lecture,

He came and he paid this price with his own blood. Now, if you can combine my words so far this morning with also my emphasis last week, one of the things that you’ll notice that I keep doing is I keep jumping up and down on every piece of text that describes salvation in terms of what God has done for us instead of in terms of what we have done. It’s an emphasis that I’ve been

Trying to, deliberately trying to make both last week and this week and even in our, the call to worship and everything this morning, I keep emphasizing what God has done rather than what we do in our salvation. Okay, and I do, there’s a few reasons that I’m doing that. One, I do this because it seems to me that that’s just what the verse says. Like these verses are written in such a way to emphasize exactly that. So I’m just being biblical, I think, when I do that.

But two, this emphasis on the sovereignty of God in our salvation is a distinctive of Reformed Christianity. This emphasis in God’s sovereignty then, this emphasis, I want to make sure that we’re clear about the theological convictions of this church and the church leadership here so that you know what you’re getting into when you worship here.

We’re going to clearly and consistently proclaim that God is sovereign in our salvation, just to be as transparent as possible.

But third, I also think that there is something that is so beautifully practical about coming to understand this. And I want to spend the bulk of the sermon here unpacking this beautiful practicality of the gospel and the doctrine of God’s sovereignty in our salvation.

What I mean by this, when I say that there’s a usefulness to this doctrine, is in the gospel of Jesus Christ, obviously there are very large things that are at stake. Very large things are at stake. We’re talking about the eternal state of your soul, which is a fairly big deal. You really can’t come to a larger question than that, the eternal state of your soul.

Heaven and hell are before you. And so this is a, when it comes to questions about the gospel, you want to get this right and you want to have confidence in your answer. You want to be able to rest confidently in your answer. So what makes you saved? What makes you saved? What makes you right with God? Whatever the answers to those questions are, you want to be able to have deep confidence in the fulfillment of the answer to that question.

You want to be able to answer the question and be able to rest at night and sleep with peace. Now, what I want to note is that there is a common temptation, I think in evangelical Christianity, there’s a common temptation

There’s a common temptation to answer this question by pointing to something inside of yourself, all right? To be able to say, I know that I’m saved because I, because this is something that I have done. I know that I’m saved because I prayed the sinner’s prayer.

I know that I’m saved because I had this one conversion moment that was so profound that I know I’ve passed from darkness to life. So I know that and this is, I’m a completely different person. So I know that I’m saved. I know I’m saved because I feel inside of me a deep love for God. There’s an emotional response that I have. And so I put confidence that that’s the sign that I’m truly saved.

But what happens though is, and you can have those and they can give you a little bit of confidence, but when we come to moments of doubt or start to have misgivings about our faith, we tend to look back at, we tend to start looking for moments of sincerity in our life to somehow prove

Throughout Paul’s teaching, Jesus owns the verbs. It’s Jesus who does the action, and it’s Jesus that Paul wants to talk about. And so when it comes to thinking about our salvation, your own personal salvation, I want to urge you to think about it in a way that your eyes are lifted up from introspection and up towards Jesus Christ himself. That’s where you want to look to find confidence in your salvation.

Now, I said that there’s something beautifully practical about this truth, and here’s what I mean. When you’re thinking about your salvation, if your focus is on your own personal experience of the gospel, you will find yourself building your confidence on something that is flawed and fleeting.

I’m not denying your own personal experience. It’s a real thing. But looking at it as the foundation for your confidence in your salvation is putting your confidence on something that’s always going to shift and it’s going to fade and it’s not going to be dependable.

These kinds of questions put all kinds of doubt in your heart. You search, we tend to search and we tend to prioritize the moment of profound conversion experience. And the reason why we want that is because

And look for the sincerity in our own heart. When we examine the salvation that Paul describes, we’re not searching the dark corners of our own hearts. We’re looking up at the brilliant light of the Son of God in heaven. And when you’re looking at him, you don’t doubt the quality of his work. When you’re looking at Christ, you don’t doubt the quality of his work. You know that it’s perfect. You know that it’s complete. And you know that you can actually just rest in that.

Now again, I’m not denying the importance of individually experiencing Christ or the necessity of individual personal faith. I’m not denying that. I would insist on all of those things. You must have an individual and personal experience of Christ and you must exercise personal faith.

He should have that pointed out, okay? So I’m not trying to skip over that kind of thing. What I’m talking about here is what you ought to look at for your confidence. Where do you go to find confidence in your salvation, in your faith? If you are a saint, particularly if you are a saint who is prone to the temptation of introspection and doubt, all right? If you’re somebody who is constantly examining the quality and sincerity of your faith

You’re going to be looking at the wrong thing to find confidence if you’re examining the quality of your

I always have this image in my head. If you can remember, I can remember going to the barbershop as a young boy. Don’t do it so often anymore. But you go to the barbershop and there is always the mirror in front and the mirror behind. For some reason, this only happened when you’re in the barber, where you’ve got the mirrors aligned perfectly. And if you’ve got your head in just the right spot, this infinite tunnel of reflection would suddenly appear that you were just like falling into.

And I can always remember like when you’re getting your haircut, trying to move your head to get yourself into that tunnel. The barber’s telling you, quit moving your head. But I was so fascinated by that. But just the sensation of suddenly out of nowhere, this infinite hole that you could just fall into. And that’s like what you find in your heart when you start trying to find your confidence.

If you dive into your own heart looking for something there to guarantee your salvation, you’ll find yourself falling into that mirror tunnel. Paul describes to us a salvation that is larger than ourselves, so large that we can climb inside of it. This is why I was trying to emphasize last week the importance of understanding us in Christ rather than thinking just in terms of Jesus in your heart.

And it’s funny because that’s actually just a very slightly, I’m just slightly tweaking that phrase only a little bit. But do I love God puts all the emphasis on me. It makes the question all about me. But if I say, is the love of God real? I’m looking up. It’s still personal. It’s still individual because it’s me that’s thinking this. But I’m looking at the objective truth of the gospel.

Instead of asking yourself, do I really believe in the gospel? Ask yourself, did Jesus Christ really die, rise again, and ascend into heaven? That’s why we audibly confess this every week. We are saying what we believe. We’re saying the confession that we believe. It’s an objective truth that Jesus Christ died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and we’re confessing that. Instead of asking yourself, have I been converted? Ask yourself, has Jesus been resurrected?

Did he rise again from the dead? Do I believe that? Yes, he rose again from the dead. And the emphasis is on what he did and not so much on myself. In each of these questions, instead of looking at yourself, look to Christ. Look at Christ and look at what he did. And I keep mentioning the evangelical world

It was sort of disparagement, but I’ll just point out we are a part of the community of reformed evangelical churches. So I’m not trying to be outside of evangelicalism. I consider myself an evangelical. It somehow holds to the orthodox preaching of the gospel. But I do think in our modern contemporary church, there are certain trends that have crept in that we need to be

There are many profound testimonies that God has given to the church in lives that he has rescued from just out of complete and total darkness, transformed them and brought them into the church. And you hear those stories and it gives you a deep confidence in the power of the gospel. Somebody was running with the hell’s angels and a crazy life of sin and crime and all that. And out of nowhere, God just strikes them down, converts their heart of stone to a heart of flesh. And you can just see the reality of Jesus Christ in their transformed life.

It’s actually a bit of an uncommon experience, but because it’s so visually powerful, the testimony is so clear, and it gives such a clear answer to a question that many of us wrestle with, how do you know if you’re really saved? Because of that, we all wish that we had that kind of story. And I can remember as a kid growing up with what I could call now like intense testimony envy. Because we’d go to church camp every summer, and they would always have a speaker who had,

But that’s not how the gospel works for most of us. If you grew up as a Christian, you are likely never able to remember what it was like to not know God. You might remember periods of being away from God. You might remember periods of darkness or periods of rebellion. But even then you have to say,

But I did know God. I knew that I was turning my face from him. I knew I was walking away. It was all clear to me what was happening. And most of us, that’s the case. We know God from as early as we can remember. And I think because this, many Christians can really struggle with knowing for sure whether or not they are Christians because they can’t point to that moment of radical conversion. As I said, I had, as a young man, significant testimony envy.

And I wonder, like, how do you parent through this? As a parent, how do you walk your kids through something like this? Do you try to chase them out of the church so they can get into deep sin, so they can have a radical conversion, and have now what is, I think, okay, now that’s a testimony that I believe, right? Now that they’ve had all of these problems and all of these felonies, now I believe your testimony. That’s not a good parenting strategy, okay?

You probably heard the recent Barna report. It’s been really striking how we’re seeing this for the first time in most of our lives, this report of an increase in faith in the younger generations, an actual increase across America of a turn of faith.

And so he was interpreting this whole resurgence of faith as a problem because you can’t call that real Christianity. They all have to go, they have to get their felonies, they have to get all that life and rebellion, and then it would be real faith. I think that is a twisted logic. That is a very twisted logic. If you insist on a stark before and after picture of your heart,

In order to have confidence that you are saved, that is where you’re going to end up. If you insist that everybody has to have this before and after in order to say that the change has happened, you are going to end up in that kind of space where you’re trying to push people away to get them into darkness so that you can bring them back.

But the thing is, you don’t have to have seen the sunrise in order to know that it is up. You don’t have to have seen the sunrise in order to know that the sun is up. If I ask you now, is it daytime? Can you sensibly answer that question? Is it daytime right now? Can you sensibly answer that question?

Do you need to have been up at whatever sunrise was this morning? Do you need to have been up for that and actually sat and watched the before and after of the sun below the horizon, the sun coming up? Do you need to have done that in order to reliably answer the question that I am asking? If I say, is it daytime right now? And you all say yes. And then one of you says, how can you know?

Who here saw the actual sunrise this morning? How can you know? That’s ridiculous. You don’t need to have seen the sunrise in order to answer the simple question, is the sun up? Is the sun up right now? Is the sun up? That’s what you need to know to answer that question.

And Paul promises us in Romans, this is Romans 10 verse 9, if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. You can hear that promise and you could dive into your own heart

Asking whether or not you really believe what you are saying, okay? You could make that promise all about yourself, dive in your own heart, ask whether you really believe what you’re saying, or you can look up at Jesus and say, there he is, he’s the Lord of my life, he’s the one who rose from the dead, the sun is up, I’m a Christian, this is true. And that’s all you need. And when you go about it that way, what you do is you find that, you know, I’m pitting this sort of personal,

And you go down into your heart trying to find a place where you’ve got enough of a sincerity and all that in your heart, you’re going to lose this. You’ll lose this. So if you want the personal, you need to focus on this. That’s where it will come from. Okay. Now, if you’ve not been at a CREC church service before, you might be struck by the more formal,

A part of a glorious tradition that goes back thousands of years and we are worshiping in that tradition and we’re claiming that tradition. This is how the saints have worshiped for two millennia. We are corporately gathering together to proclaim the objective truth of what Jesus Christ did. And that truth is bigger than any of us and that’s why we do this in a more formal way, in a corporate body. What I mean by that is

We’re not trying with this worship service to help you descend down inside of your own heart searching for sincerity. Okay, and I do think that that is the way a lot of contemporary worship services are crafted because they believe that your assurance is going to come from that moment of sincerity that you can find deep in your heart. And so the service is crafted to take you to that moment. The music

As you’re working through your worship in this way, we’re not trying to descend into your hearts to search for sincerity. Our music is not about creating an emotional moment in your heart to try to give you a private sensation of worship. Our worship and our music is about proclaiming an objective truth that is larger than each of us. We sing from the Psalms as well as other hymns, but these are the songs that God gave us to sing as we worship.

And we sing straight through. We don’t sit on one word dwelling on it again and again trying to make it feel true. We’re just going to declare his word. And you’re going to find when you’re singing psalms, you’ll sing things that you would never see sing in an evangelical chorus. When you start to sing through the whole word of God, you start to see there’s a much larger range of experience that he intends for us to have in worship. So we’re not trying to descend down

I just want to make one other point from this text here. I want to note how in verse 9, Paul describes Jesus’ work of salvation as a mystery. Listen to verses 9 and 10. “…having made known to us the mystery of his will, according to the good pleasure which he purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, in him.”

God had this eternal plan which he had determined inside of himself. And that plan was the method of our salvation. Namely, that he would send his eternal son as a man, incarnate as Jesus Christ, as our Redeemer, to come and die for our sins on the cross and to be raised again on the third day. This was how he had determined that he’s going to deliver us from our sins. And in this, he’s going to bring glory to himself. He had this determination eternally.

Get ready for him. That’s Moses, and we go well over a thousand years before we come to Christ, and the mystery actually is unfolded. Job foresaw the resurrected Jesus. He says in Job 19, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he shall stand at last on the earth, and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God. He saw Jesus, he saw the resurrected Jesus, and he saw himself resurrected in Jesus, and he knew these things were true looking forward.

In… In…

When Peter preached his first sermon to the Jews in Acts 2, he quotes from David’s Psalms, and he says at that time, David looked forward in time and had seen Jesus. They all could see it, but they all could see it through shadows and types. They didn’t really see it’s Jesus Christ, the Son of God, come in the flesh, dying on a cross, resurrected on the third day. In one sense, the coming of Jesus was prophesied, and yet Paul says,

Here describes Christ on the cross as still, despite all these prophecies, a mystery. Now the Greek word for mystery, mysterion, not too different, mysterion, it describes a secret that you can’t know without someone coming and explaining it to you.

It’s a secret that you cannot know unless somebody comes and gives you the answer. That’s what a mystery is. And that’s different. You should notice that because that’s different from how we might think of a mystery. For instance, if you read a good murder mystery book or watch a murder mystery movie, the whole point is that

You can get to all those things from natural revelation, but what you cannot get to is the name Jesus Christ and the Son of God who becomes man, dies on a cross, and defeats death, conquers death, being raised again on the third day. You can’t get to that without somebody coming and proclaiming that word to you. That is the gospel. That is the good news that we proclaim.

So the gospel of Jesus Christ could not be puzzled out beforehand. It could not be understood until God revealed it in the fullness of time. Peter describes this in his first epistle. He says, this is 1 Peter 1. The prophets said,

They’re looking forward, they’re searching, they’re looking. Who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when he testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. He gave them hints, but they were enough that they could search, but not enough that they could find. The prophets are looking forward. To them it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to us, they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you

I love that last line, that angels themselves, the prophets are craning their necks, looking forward, trying to figure out how this works, and even the angels in heaven are doing the same thing. Looking, searching, how is this going to unfold? How is this going to actually work? You can see all the tension building, but you don’t know how God is going to resolve it until the coming of Jesus Christ.

And that is the mystery that is suddenly unpacked and declared and unfolded in front of all of us. So the gospel is not something that is logically deduced out through natural revelation. It’s a message that is declared. It is announced and is received by a believing heart. This is what Paul means then when he describes it as a mystery.

And that’s why then we as Christians prioritize the preaching, the declaration, the declaration of this mystery that nobody can puzzle out on their own. That’s why we prioritize the preaching of Christ on the cross and Christ rising from the dead. Without this proclamation, salvation is an inscrutable mystery. Let’s pray.