Two Journeys

Well, I've been looking forward to preaching this sermon for a long time. I'm preaching effectively on one verse, Ephesians 2:7. And it's not the kind of verse that maybe many people would focus on, but for a long time I have been meditating on what will be our occupation in Heaven, what will we spend eternity in Heaven doing? Randy Alcorn recently wrote a book called "Heaven." It's an interesting book, almost 500 pages long on that one topic, and I think it's a great book. He does a lot of Heavenly speculation. I think John Calvin would have been struggling with all that speculation, but I actually enjoyed it. I think we came to the conclusion that if Randy Alcorn likes something on Earth, it's going to be in Heaven. Just go to him and find out what we're going to be doing in Heaven and he will know, but one thing he's writing against, and that is the idea of a static, boring Heaven, the kind of thing that you could kind of shrink back from. You think about floating on fluffy clouds and strumming a harp and you're like, “who wants to do that?: I don't know anyone that would be excited about looking forward to doing that. And so he just unfolds how ridiculous that is, if you understand the creativity and the power and the glory of God, it is unthinkable that we would be for even a moment, bored in Heaven. And so, for me, the idea of what will we be doing and what will be our occupation, how will we spend eternity? Like it says in Amazing Grace, “When we've been there 10,000 years…” It's hard to even imagine that span of time, “bright shining as the sun, we've no less days to sing God's praise, than when we’d first begun,” but then we start thinking, “Okay, 10,000 years, what will we do?” I don't think there's anything that I do on earth now that I'd want to do every day for 10,000 years. I don't think there's any food that I like here on Earth, that I'd want to eat every day for 10,000 years, even pepperoni pizza, which I love, and you never got fat and nothing bad ever happened, I still wouldn't want to do it for 10,000 years, and so we might struggle with it.

But the more you meditate on the immense creativity of God displayed in this present created order. Just go to an aquarium and look at all the different species of tropical fish. You look at all the different colors, their shapes, their sizes, what they do, how they behave. Or you look at just the different types of birds there are, some different ones that fly and soar in thermals like birds of prey, like eagles and falcons and hawks. And the peregrine Falcon, that in a hunting dive can get to 250 miles an hour, all the way down to more simple sparrows that are two sparrows sold for a penny, and they're not incredibly consequential, but part of the world that God made, same thing with all the things that grow on the earth, the different range of plants and vegetation and bushes and trees and flowers. Our God is an amazingly creative God, isn't He? It's just incredible how He has woven all of this in.

And so what I'm going to say to you today is that Heaven is going to be a very exciting, thrilling place and I believe based on Ephesians 2:7, we're going to spend at least part of eternity celebrating the grace of God that He's already shown us in Christ, and that He has yet more to show to us of His grace for all eternity. Look at verses 6 and 7, it says that God, “raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the Heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages, He might show or display or demonstrate the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” In other words, He has more to show us in the future and the coming ages about what He has already been doing in the church in Christ Jesus.

Understanding God’s Power at Work in Our Lives

Now, last week, we had a chance to hear from Walter Lee some of what God had done in his life. I shared some of the things that happened in my life. I think we are going to have unfolded before us, church history as we have never seen it or heard it before. We're going to find out, from brothers and sisters in Christ, in every era of history, all the ages of church history just what God did to save them. And I don't mean just bring them to initial saving faith, I mean to guard them and protect them from the world, the flesh, and the devil and how God used each individual brother and sister in Christ, and how He wove together their lives and their works and all that in this magnificent Tapestry of Grace. And we're going to see it and we won't for a moment be selfish or bored, but we will be delighted in everything that God has done.

God’s Character in Our Salvation

So, we stand here in the middle of one of the great sections of Scripture that you heard Joel read, Ephesians 2:1-10, and it comes after another incredible portion of Scripture in Ephesians 1, and so we have a chance to see the grace of God. And so what I want to do is just kind of stand here in the middle of verses 6 and 7 and say, "We're going to look back what God has already done by grace in our lives, and then look ahead for the rest of our lives here on Earth, how God has yet more grace to show us, and how we should rely on that future grace that is still going to come to us more and more, and He's going to show us how gracious He will be from now until the day we leave this Earth. But then unfolded into the eternity future, the ages yet to come, and how God is going to put His grace on display." 

Kyle was talking about trophies of grace. And so we're going to see them all and we're going to celebrate them all, and we're going to do it in such a selfless way. All we'll want to see is how each individual saved person glorified God, and we'll be eager for that story. So let's look at it, and let's begin looking at the past. What has God already done? How has He shown grace in us already? And this is just by way of review, Paul's goal here is that the Ephesian Christians will know God better, that God would give them, “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.” And not only that, he says, but that, “the eyes of their heart would be enlightened.” And so as I was explaining that, that's your faith. By faith, based on the word of God, you would have revelation or illumination, of the grace of God shown us in Christ, so the “eyes of your heart would be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints.”

Now, the "in the Saints" phrase is very interesting, but the idea here, at least in part, with some of the themes I'm bringing up, is that we would celebrate what God did in the saints and the other believers in Christ and we would see the greatness and the riches that are going to be in Heaven of all that God's done with our brothers and sisters, and we're going to realize that the grace He showed us is just a small portion of all the grace He showed to the family of God and we're going to realize it's every bit as much worthy of our celebration of someone else's grace as ours. It's the same God that gives all. So He wants the “eyes of our heart enlightened, so we would know the hope of our calling the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power.” Power at work in us who believe. God has grabbed hold of us by His sovereign power, by His sovereign grace, by omnipotence, and He will never let us go, until His purposes of grace are finished. And so Paul picks up on the third of those three and goes off and talks about that power, that power is like the working of His mighty strength which “He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead, physically, and seated Him at His right hand in the Heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that could be given, not only in the present age, but what? In the age to come.” “And God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.” So in other words, just keeping it simple.

Our Origins: Spiritually Dead

God wants us to know that the same power of Almighty God, God the Father, that raised Jesus up from the dead, physically has already been at work in us spiritually, if we're Christians. Why is that? Chapter 2, because we were dead spiritually, like Jesus was dead, physically. That's the analogy that he is making. “You were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live, when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit that is now at work in those who are disobedient, all of us also lived among them at one time. Gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.”

Like Kyle was saying, we already have a sense from Ephesians 2:1-3 of what we were apart from Christ. Actually, we have an inadequate sense of how bad it was. We underestimate how bad it was, and I said, at that time, a couple of weeks ago, your joy and celebration, and sense of gratitude toward God in the good news will be in direct proportion to your sense of the bad news. The more you just know how bad it was apart from Christ, the more joyful you're going to be in your Christian life. And so Ephesians 2:1-3 paradoxically, though very dark and sad verses, actually is a launching pad for great joy in Christ because we were dead. And there was nothing we could have done to save ourselves. Nothing at all. “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, God made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions - It is by grace you have been saved,” just can't, can't go even a moment without saying “Grace! Grace! Grace!” Next week, we're going to talk about Ephesians 2:8-9, “It is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the Heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.”

Miracles Already Worked in God’s People

Now all of this, God has done in the past, it's already happened. If you're a Christian, this has already happened to you. God's already displayed incredible power in your life, if you only know what to look for. That you love Jesus right now, it's supernatural power put on display. You were dead. How did you come to love Jesus? How did you come to follow Him and believe in Him against all odds, against the world, the flesh and the devil? How came you out of that dark, cold grip of Satan, and of your sin and your rebellion? It's by the sovereign grace of God, by His power. So, we're looking back, this is something that's already happened to you, celebrate it. Be amazed at it, Never lose your sense of wonder that you're a Christian. It doesn't matter if you were raised in a good Christian home. That's fantastic, that's wonderful. God used that to protect you from corruption and wickedness. It's a good thing to grow up in a Christian home. It doesn't matter that you don't have a dramatic conversion story like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. It doesn't make a difference. You're a miracle of God's grace, if today you love Jesus and you're following Him. But if on the other hand, you do have an amazing story like in the song, All I Have is Christ, “I was wandering in darkness and rebellion and sin, and did so many evil things, but God reached down and He drew me out of those deep waters,” celebrate God's grace. It doesn't make a difference. What matters is if you're a Christian, you're already a trophy of grace, God's already shown His power at work in your life, and He's doing it still, and He does all of this to put His own glory on display. He's putting Himself on display, He wants us to see His greatness. And so we've seen this again and again in Ephesians chapter 1. Look at verses 4-6, there, “in love He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace.” In other words, He did this, He predestined us, elected us and predestined us so that we might be for the praise of His glorious grace. That's why he did it. Again, verse 12, "In order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of His glory". In other words, that we might exist to put God on display to glorify God, that's why He did it.

And then again in verses 13-14, "Having believed you, you Ephesians, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit who is a deposit, guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of His glory.” By the way, in Verse 14, until the redemption of those who are God's possession, God has a whole bunch of elect people that haven't been converted yet, and so, this history is just unfolding, history of evangelism and missions and the growth of the church is unfolding. There are more glorious stories yet to be told. They're going on right now today. Today is somebody's glorious day of conversion. That's awesome, isn't it? But until all that's done, you who have already been saved in Christ, you have been “marked with a seal,” and you're held with the sovereign power of God, He is holding on to you, and He'll never lose you. So that you might be for, “the praise of His glory.”

It is Right for God to Show Off

Now, all of this is the idea of a public display. God's putting this thing on display. He wants to show Himself. He wants to display Himself. And so, that's why Ephesians 2:7, I'm zeroing in on this, this word “show” or “display,” that God has a “show” or “display” to put on in the coming ages, we'll get to that in a minute, but the idea of display that God's putting Himself on display. Well, does God do that kind of thing? Is God a showoff? Oh yes. He's a bigger showoff than we can possibly imagine, but not in any bad way. God wants us to see His greatness. He wants to give us gifts, and the greatest gift He can give us is Himself and the emanations of His creativity and power and who He is and so, oh yes, God shows off. He's done it in physical creation, hasn't He? Don't we see the glory of God in the world around us? Psalm 19:1-2, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech, and night after night, they display knowledge.” I went out last night, I was putting the cars back, they were out in the street and I had to put them away. I don't know why I was going out, it wasn't for taking out the garbage, anyway, so I was going out just looking up at the night sky. There weren't many stars out last night, I don't know what was going on, but I just looked at the silhouettes of the black trees, felt the breeze on my face, just looked around, just... I'm glad no one saw me. It would've been weird. But anyway just looking at what God's made and there wasn't much light, but it's still amazing to me. There's trees and the breeze and everything. God does that, He puts himself on display, the power and the existence of God is on display, all the time. 

More Glory Displayed in the Gospel

But then even more in the Gospel, Amen. Even more has God shown Himself in Christ in the Gospel. He put Jesus up on a cross in order, Romans chapter 3, that He might display His justice, “because in His forbearance, He left the sins committed beforehand unpunished.” David was never punished for what he did with Bathsheba, and with Uriah the Hittite. He wasn't put to death. Why not? Because God looked ahead to Christ. But He had to display His justice in saving us, to show that He was vindicating His law, and vindicating His justice. He showed His justice in the cross. Not just justice, He showed His love at the cross, didn't He? In Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” He's putting His love on display. This is the kind of thing that God does, He displayed His power, didn't He, in Pharaoh? Didn't He say, "I raised you up?," this is Romans 9, "I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show My power in you," what's the word "show" mean? "That I might put My power on display, that all the nations would see how powerful I am, and what I can do, And that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth as a powerful, mighty, delivering God."

And so we have that great Exodus story. The Ten Plagues, the Red Sea crossing, the water walling up on the right and the left, that's an awesomely powerful display of salvation, isn't it, but God raised Pharaoh up to display His power. God does this. And He does it in conversions, He puts himself on display in converting people. Paul is a great example of this, doesn't God show His nature in converting someone like Saul of Tarsus? He wakes up that morning, breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples, hating the church, hating Jesus, hating everything he stood for, went to bed a Christian. How in the world do you explain that? "Oh, the psychological pressure was on Paul." No, listen. Sovereign grace! He plucked him out of Satan's dark kingdom and He transferred him into the kingdom of light, and Paul says that's what happened in 1 Timothy 1:16, he says, "But I received mercy for this reason, that in me as the foremost of all sinners, Jesus Christ might... " What's the next word? "Display." “Display, show His perfect patience, as an example to those who are to believe in Him for eternal life.” God puts up with rebellious wicked, elect people for a long time and then converts them. And He just puts on display His patience. Paul's humble apparently weak preaching of the Gospel, he said, was a demonstration or display of the Spirit's power. I mean, God's doing this all the time, but He has yet more to show you. You don't even know the millionth part of what God has done to save the elect, the church, in every era of churches. He has more to show you. He's just doing this all the time, He's putting Himself on display.

God Displaying Himself in Our Lives

And He's doing it in your life. He says, "You are the light of the world." Jesus said that in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:14-16, "You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden, neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl, instead they put it on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father who is in Heaven." Right, but who lit you up? Who lit you like a lamp? Did you light yourself? No. God lit you and God puts you up on a lampstand and makes you give light to everyone in the house. Well, that's going on right now, but it's going to go on for eternity in Heaven, He's going to put you up on a stand and say, Look what I did in this person's life. This is My son, this is My daughter. What's the point in telling a great story if it never gets told? If God's going to craft an incredible story that goes on for decades in someone's life, hey let's tell the story, I want to hear it, don't you?

It's like, “Well,” You will then, okay? God is going to transform you and you'll be so ready to hear your brothers and sisters' stories, so He doesn't light a lamp and hide it, instead He puts it out so everyone will see the work of God going on in their lives. And this is an immeasurable display. It talks about the incomparable riches of His grace, this is lavish language of how incredibly rich has been God's grace to us in Christ. He wants us to know how much He spent on us.

The Cost of Gospel Glory

Have you ever spent a lot of time like scraping a price tag off a gift? I don't know what it is with these price tag manufacturers, they need to study their adhesive better. They are just amazingly strong, and the paper amazingly weak. Have you ever been like, How do I get this gummy stuff off without ruining the paint? You probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but you're just scraping it off. Why? You don't want the person to know how much you spent because you don't want it to be a guilt thing, or whatever, and this goes on. God's the other way, He wants you to know exactly how much He spent on you, He wants you to know how costly it all was, He wants you to know that He gave what was most precious to Him in the entire universe, His only begotten Son, dead on the cross for you. And that, “if He's going to give you that, how much more would He also along with Him, graciously give you all things.” That means Jesus, what He's already given you, is more valuable than the entire universe to God the Father, and He wants you to know that. He wants you to know how much He spent on you and is spending and will spend. It's immeasurable. To some degree, He wants us measuring the immeasurable.

The immeasurable riches of His grace, just how much He has spent. He wants you to take your little three yard long piece of string and go to the base of Mount Everest and start going around the circumference of it and start measuring it, get a sense of it, of the “immeasurable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” Just measure it, we got eternity friends, let's see how much He loved us in Christ and notice what it says, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ. Oh, that word has worked in my heart this week. Kindness! God has shown us kindness in Christ, immeasurable riches of His grace expressed in kindness. You could imagine a stingy person wanting you to know how much he spent on you. Somebody who's doing the guilt manipulation thing. “I hope you realize how much that cost, I mean you know that, don't you? And that's just not just any such and such. That's the best, you do know that, don't you?” “Alright, alright how much did you spend? I mean since you want to tell me, tell me.” It says in Proverbs 23:6-8, I love this, “Do not eat the food of a stingy man. Do not crave his delicacies, for he's the kind of man who's always thinking about the cost. ‘Eat and drink,’ he says, but his heart's not with you. You will vomit up the little you have eaten and will have wasted your compliments.” Don't you love the Book of Proverbs? Just says it straight. But God isn't like that, God isn't stingy, He's kind. He loves saving us. I mean He really enjoys giving us a kingdom. “Fear not little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” that's Luke 12. Fear not, He enjoys lavishly blessing you with grace, He just enjoys that. You think about the father of the prodigal son, he says, "Quick, bring a ring for his finger and a robe and sandals and let's kill the fattened calf and let's celebrate!" He's just so filled with joy at saving sinners. He loves doing this. There's kindness here.

God’s Kindness Toward Us in Salvation

And one verse, it's been much in my heart this week, and over the last few weeks, as I'm doing some Scripture memory in the minor prophets, Micah 7:18. Listen to this verse Micah 7:18, "Who is a God like You who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance. You do not stay angry forever, but delight to show mercy." I mean, just, wow. God delights in showing mercy, that's His kindness. He will greet you kindly, when at last you see Him, don't fear Him, He will greet you kindly. He is the father of the prodigal son, He will welcome you to Heaven, so we're so afraid of that, but He delights in showing kindness. He's so kind to us in His Son, He says, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls," that's the kindness of God speaking through His Son. He's so kind in saving us, "For my yoke is easy and my burden is light," And so this is an immeasurable display of kindness. And it's going to go on for eternity. So that, “in the coming ages, He might show.” “In the coming ages,” so God was looking ahead to the coming ages.

Faith in Future Grace

Now, I want to take that and expand it from this moment now to the end of your life, and talk about that briefly, and then I'm going to go from the end of your life on Earth on into the coming ages of eternity and say that God has something to show you in both of those ages, the age of your life here on earth this present age and then the rest of all eternity, in the future, age in Heaven. He wants to show you something in both. So let's talk first about the rest of your life. God has more grace to show you from now until the day you die. He's going to continue lavishing grace on you, He's going to continue showing you kindness. You're not done being saved, and neither am I. So we've got more grace to receive from God, yet more grace is going to come our way. James 4:6 says, "but He gives us more grace."

So just think about that one expression more, grace. Do you need more grace?  Yes, you do, you need a lot more grace, and it needs to just keep coming and coming. But God, having already begun this good work of grace, He will not stop showing you grace until at last you are done being saved. And so, you can count as you look to the future and you look ahead and you say, "You know, this is an uncertain future. I don't know where I'm going to be, I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know what's going to happen to me. I don't know what combination of temptations and assaults, and trials and afflictions Satan's going to bring my way, I don't know. And I could be afraid of that. How am I going to make it? How am I going to run this race with endurance, right to the end? It's a long way to go."

God Stays with Us Throughout the Race

I'm really impressed with those people that have the 26.2 (which is the amount of miles in a marathon race) things on the back of their cars, or the 13.1. I saw one this week, 0.0. I don't know what that's about. Have you seen that before? 0.0. Boasting about not running a marathon, but anyway. But you know, I used to be a distance runner. And there comes a point in a long race, where you wonder if you're going to make it. It's like that's right around the time they say, of hitting the wall. You got another seven, eight miles to go and you're like, "I'm done, I don't have any more to give". And it's a moment of desperation. How do you know you're going to make it, brother, sister? How do you know you're going to finish this race with endurance? So you have to lay aside every weight and run with endurance. Well, you know how you know? Faith in future grace. Confidence that God has more grace to show you and what you need you will get. That's your confidence, that's how you know you're going to make it. He who began a good work in you, He will most certainly continue to pour out grace in you and work in you until you're done being saved. You can count on that. And so you're going to have constant attacks from the world, the flesh and the devil, it's going to keep coming, that you can bank on. “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart, I will show you all the grace you need to get you through this world, you're going to run your race, you're going to finish it. I'm never going to let you go, I will never leave you, I will never forsake you.”

You know how Ananias was sent to baptize Saul of Tarsus after his conversion. “No, no, it's real. It really is real. Go baptize him.” Now, “I've heard reports about this man and all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.” “Go! for this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel,” and what's he say? "I will show him how much he must suffer for my name."

Yeah, but that's not all He was going to show Paul, “I will show him how much grace I have for him, how ‘my strength is made perfect in weakness,’ and how my grace is sufficient for you, Paul, I'm going to show you that too.” And so He's got something. I will show you how much grace I will give you, so that you will finish this race. That's going to happen. So there's your assurance, there's your security, that's how you know you're going to make it. If somebody ever asks, "How do you know you're going to finish your life still believing in Jesus?" Answer, "God's going to show me future grace, He's going to show me grace every day, the rest of my life".

Gifts of Grace in Heaven

Thirdly, Grace displayed for eternity in Heaven. So we've got ages to come, we're in a present age now, and then we've got an age to come. Now, I don't know for sure that that's what Paul meant when he says, "In order that in the coming ages, He might show," but maybe this age, and the age to come, or ages of church history could be. And then the age to come. But I think it must include Heaven. So God is going to give us a perpetual heavenly education. Now, for the longest time, I thought that you know how it says, "When we see Him, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is, in a flash in the twinkling of an eye we'll be transformed and we'll be changed." And so I thought at that moment, we would get a kind of an instant upload of a bunch of information and we'd be done learning, right? But then that would make us omniscient, and friends, we will never be omniscient. We'll never be God. So actually the more I started thinking about it I was like, “No, it's not that, is that we'll lose our sin nature that's what's going to happen, we'll be glorified and done sinning, and I think we'll be done forgetting too,” amen. No more forgetting.

So ever expanding learning, there's always more to learn. What will we learn? Well, we learn the greatness of God in Christ in saving us at least, I think we'll also have a New Heaven, New Earth, and New Jerusalem to explore, we'll learn what He's made there. That'll be awesome. But just focusing on the grace He's shown us and kindness in Christ Jesus, that will be a study for us and so we will be forever growing, forever learning, Heaven will be a very dynamic place. You're going to study church history in Heaven. Amen, Hallelujah. You're going to study church history in Heaven, you're going to be excited about it, you really will, you'll like it, I promise. You will enjoy it.

An Ever-Increasing Kingdom

I remember some time ago, I was meditating on those verses, a very famous verse, Isaiah 9:6 and 7, that we focus on at Christmas time, "For to us a child is born, to us a Son is given, and the government will be on His shoulders, and He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Isaiah 9:7, "Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end." Take it literally. An eternal increase. Well, how can that be, if there's no procreation? “Neither marrying or giving in marriage like the angels in Heaven.” We're done with babies being born all that, set number of people. How will His kingdom eternally increase? We'll just keep learning. We'll just keep on magnifying the Lord, more and more than ever before, we're going to just say, "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, let us exalt His name together. Let's find out some more things about what God has done in redemptive history and in the New Heaven and New Earth," that's what we're going to do. We're just going to keep learning and learning. Like God said to Satan. "Have you considered my servant Job?" Not sufficiently. Hey, let's meet Job. Let's get to know him, you know a lot about him. Let's find out more. I want to know about that widow that put in those two copper coins. Remember her? I want to know all about her. Jesus exalted her to just about the highest place of Christian giving, she gave more than anyone else. I want to meet her, I want to know her. How did she get to that point where she was willing to give all she had to live on? Don't you want to know her? I want to know her. Have you considered my servant Job?

You know how it says at the end of John's Gospel, in John 21:25, "Jesus did many other things as well, which are not recorded in this book. I suppose if every one of them were written down, even the whole world would not have room enough to contain the books that would be written." Alright, well, how about Heaven? Is Heaven a big enough container? I want all those books, well, forget the books. That's seeing through a glass darkly. I want to hear the story, I want to see it happen. I feel like we're going to be living it again. Like in a hologram or something. No, not like that, but we're going to just be there and live through it, and see it, and God will display it and we'll learn what He did in the Middle Ages, or what He did to spread the Gospel in this place or how He reached this valley of people in here. Some elect people, and some missionaries went and they suffered in some of those people came to Christ and what they did to the glory of God. I want to know, “have you considered my servant Job?” I want to find out who all his servants are and consider them all, and celebrate God's grace in all of their lives. I just want to do that.

The Glory of God in Believers’ Lives

I love going over the stories of people's conversions. Don't you love reading? How was Augustine converted? I love that story. How Augustine was burning with lust, and he couldn't shake his sexual immorality. But he knew the Gospel, and his mother was praying for him to become a Christian, but he's just stubbornly holding on to his sins, and he was there in a garden one day and he heard children playing, singing in Latin "Take up and read, take up and read", this little thing and it's like a little children's diddy and there happened to be a scroll of Romans or something like that, there in the garden, opened up to Romans 13, and he happened to read. You ever do that? It's like, "Alright Lord, lead me, bring me to a good verse that will help me". It's not a good way to Bible study, but that seemed appropriate then. It just happened to be open at Romans 13. And then he realized there was a command against the very sins that he was committing. I know that I know, but something happened, and he realized that the very thing God commanded He would give grace to obey. And so he said in his confessions, give what you command, and command what you will, Lord, and at once, he understood the Gospel, that's the very thing, God will give you perfection as a gift, if you just trust in Jesus, and he was saved. I love those stories, I want to know more about it. I want to know how the Gospel was spread.

I want to know about how Celtic missionaries went under the tutelage of Columba, and they went across Northern Europe to all these barbarian tribes and set up these enclaves and then courageously went out and shared the Gospel and how they were persecuted and how they were successful. I want those stories, I love the story of Boniface. I was just there in the Northern part of Germany just a little while ago and where he was chopping down the Thor tree, you know, these pagans, and chopping it down. What a bold guy! Give me an axe, I'm going to chop down that sacred oak. And then suddenly a wind comes and finishes the job. People are amazed. He gets up on the stump and preaches the Gospel. Uses the wood to build a chapel for Jesus, Amen. I love a guy like that, I want to meet him. Tell me your story, I've heard that story. Are there any other good ones? I want to know more of the stories. Let's hear them all. I want to know what Thomas did apparently went to India, what Thomas did in the first century to establish the Gospel in India. I want to know the story of that. I want to know who the historians were and how they brought the Gospel early on into China and what happened there. I want to know some things that history hasn't even recorded. People getting on boats and going to South Pacific islands, and bringing the Gospel to some people who have long since died and gone to Heaven. And there's no record of it, but I want to know those stories, don't you? I want to see what God's done. I want to know the things He's doing right now, in the Muslim world. I have all these accounts in here. I don't have time to read them, they're all awesome.

God Glorified Through Abouna’s Ministry

Let me just tell this one, there's good stories, a wind in the house of Islam, stories of how God is working to bring Muslims to faith in Christ and there's this one guy named Abouna Zakaria Botros, he's a 79-year-old exiled Egyptian Coptic priest who infuriates Muslim fundamentalists by telling the truth about Islam. And this man courageously preaching the truth about Islam and about Christianity, is amazingly effective. Sixty million people listening to his internet webcast every day, in the Muslim world, and many, many people being converted. He said, "I don't hate Muslims, I love them, I hate Islam", and he's telling the truth. Apparently there's a $60 million price on his head. What's it like to live like that? Someone actually was joking, an Egyptian Christian was joking saying, "I think the $60 million is offered to any Muslim who can answer what he says." "If somebody could just refute him, we'd be happy with that." But he's winning people to Christ, and one of the men he led in Christ is a 64-year-old Arab man named Nassir. He'd been wooed by the Gospel all his life, finally came to Christ when he pondered this guy's attacks, gave his life to Christ, soon after that met an American missionary named Tim who was in the city who had been praying, zero fruit for two or three years, finally met Nassir, began to disciple this guy, Nassir, Nassir starts leading dozens and dozens of to other Muslims to Christ. I love those stories, don't you? I want to know him, the trophies of God's grace. One of them, one of the men he led to Christ, was another man named Sabri, he was 50 years old, influential in his village. He first led his own wife and children to Christ by showing them the falseness of Islam and the truth of Christ, and he eventually worked his way through the town and is now responsible for leading 400 to faith in Christ. Divides them into small groups to escape the attention of the police.

So many stories. How many will there be? Well, listen to this, Revelation 7, "After this, I looked in there before me was a multitude greater than anyone could count." Take one of those from every tribe, language, people and nation standing around the throne, dressed in white robes, holding palm branches in their hands, and saying, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb". Each one of that countless multitude has a countless number of stories to tell. It's true. Of all that God did in decades of their lives to bring them to faith in Christ. And then to use them afterwards. Alright, and as a matter of fact, in the text, it asks the question, maybe you didn't notice this before. I never had. Listen to this. It continues. "Then one of the elders asked me, these in white robes, Who are they and where did they come from?" That's my whole point.

Who are they? All of these people? And where did they come from? We've got stories to tell, amen. “In order that in the coming ages, He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, express in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” So, He's going to show it, and all of us, it's going to be put on display. And why is that? So that all of us may boast in the Lord as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord."

So, what applications can we take from this? Well, begin by meditating again on the richness of God's grace to you expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus, meditate on each word, “the immeasurable riches.” Say, "I am immeasurably rich." Just say that. "I, as a Christian, I'm immeasurably rich." In what? In grace, and mercy, and kindness from God. Ponder the word kindness that God has shown kindness to you. Let it melt your heart, let it just work on you and then say "Oh God, make me merciful and gracious and kind to others". It has that impact on you. It's like, as you've been kind to me, I want to be kind to others. And look forward to the displays. There are many verses that say, This is going to happen, says "Those who live in darkness, do not come into the light" John 3, "for fear that their deeds will be exposed, but everyone who lives by the truth comes into the light," why? “So that it may be seen plainly, that what He has done has been done through God.” What does that mean? We're going to come in and put on display what God did in and through us. That's what's going to happen. And we're going to celebrate. So look forward to that. And so let's do it now, what do you say? Let's talk. Say, how is God at work in your life? How can I celebrate God's grace in your life? Tell me your story, tell me your testimony, and learn to celebrate God's grace in other people's lives, you're going to spend eternity doing it. Let's do it now, it'll bind us together, it'll make us less self-focused. So, celebrate that. CJ Mahaney in his book "Humility" said, one of the best things you can do to somebody, it’s humble too. You say, I see God at work in your life, brother, sister. I see God working in you. That's very encouraging, isn't it? Meditate on salvation by grace through faith apart from works. We're going to talk more about that, God willing, next week, but just celebrate that.

And finally, if I can just address you if you're here as a lost person, you came in here in darkness on the outside, I would love for your story to be consummated by faith in Christ. I would love you to come out of darkness right now into the light. You've heard the Gospel several times already today. How God sent His Son, for sinners like you and me, and all you need to do is trust in Him by faith, by grace through faith apart from works, trust in Jesus for the salvation of your souls. Close with me in prayer, please.

Lord, thank you for the time we've had to celebrate your grace. I can't wait, Lord, to get to Heaven and to meet all of my brothers and sisters. “A multitude greater than anyone could count, from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation,” who have been saved by your sovereign grace, each of them individually and in special and separate in different ways. And Lord, I want to know these dressed in white. “Who are they? And where did they come from?” And I want to know how they came out of the tribulation and their robes were washed in the blood of the Lamb and how the Shepherd will forever protect them and bless them, I want to meet them, oh Lord. Help us to love the brothers and sisters now and help us to be energetically active in evangelism and missions leading other people to Christ. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Well, that was a very moving story from Walter and it's amazing how God works in grace, and I have my own story to tell, this morning, not exactly like his, but a year before I came to Christ, I almost drowned in Lake Winnipesaukee. I went with my fraternity, it was up in New Hampshire, I went with my fraternity from MIT, and we went every early September to a camp there, and we would work on the camp, and then we would play in the afternoon and have a good time, and I took this small sunfish out sailing in Lake Winnipesaukee and that was a pretty bold thing for me to do. Some would say pretty stupid because I've never been sailing before, but I thought I could handle the sunfish, evidently not. It was a very, very windy day, there was a lot of chop on the lake and I was flying along in this sail boat when suddenly I hit a significant wave, and got thrown from the boat. And I immediately swam back, like you're supposed to do to the capsized boat. But then I noticed that the center board a little piece of wood from the center had floated away and I was afraid that I, you know, I was going to lose it, so I made an almost fatal decision, at that moment. I left the boat with no life preserver and swam out to get the center board. And I grabbed it and then turned around and the boat was now twice as far away from me as when I'd first swam away because the wind was blowing it away from me. So I began swimming with one arm around this board and the other just plowing through the water and I wasn't even keeping up with the boat. So then I let the center board go and just started swimming and started to feel inside my heart a rising panic and I swam for a little while and I said, "I am not going to look at the boat," because I was getting discouraged. And I just swam and swam and swam and swam and swam for a long time, and then I looked up and the boat, I had only made up half the distance to the boat, and I was getting very tired at this point. Then something strange happened to me at that moment, I went under the surface of the water because it was very choppy, and windy, and I was starting to panic and I just wanted to get my wits. So I just kind of went under the water and at that moment, this strange thought came to me. I started to decide if I wanted to live or not. It wasn't a suicidal thought. I was just tired and I just wanted to decide if I would make the effort to live and I decided that I did. I was going to give everything that I had to stay alive. Again, I was not a Christian at the time.

Little did I know that at that particular moment, spiritually my soul was hanging in the balance between Heaven and Hell. So I was not a believer, I was close to death and I was not ready to die. And so I just swam and swam until I really felt that I couldn't swim anymore, and there was the boat and I reached up for the boat, but it was hard to hold on to it. It was very slick and wet and I couldn't grab hold of it. At that moment, some arms reached down and pulled me dead weight outta the lake, it was a guy on a motor boat, he had seen my plight and he pulled me out. I don't know his name, I never saw him again. He might end up having been an angel, I'm not sure, because I didn't see the boat much after he brought me to shore towing the sailfish behind. I don't know anything else about the guy, but I know that I was almost dead and almost condemned as a sinner. But God stepped in and intervened. Just like he did with Walter, so he did with me and he would not let me die at that moment. It would be another year before I came to Christ. A year of rebellion, a year of fighting the Gospel, a year of saying no, but God would not let me die. And I stand before you today a trophy of God's sovereign grace.

“But God…”

And my point, the point of my sermon as was last week, so also this week is to say to all of you who are Christians so are each of you. Trophies of God's sovereign grace. God intervened. And so we come in Ephesians 2:4 to, I think in some ways the two most important words in the Bible, if you understand them properly, "But God.” “But God." Now, I'm aware the NIV starts with, "But because." Whoever decided to be the only English translation to go with, "But because" instead of, "But God", they'll have to live with themselves. But the Greek says, "But God", and every English translation  brings it over it's "But God", and it's so powerful because the word, "But", just grammaticality means we were going in one direction and now we're going in a different direction. It captures the sense of a God-centered Gospel, a sovereign grace of His activity in my life and in the lives of every Christian of intervening, interfering, whatever you want to say, of stepping into space and time and saying, "No, it's not going to go like that, it's going to go differently for you." It's a contrast, we're talking about a dynamic God intervening and working in a mighty way, God is the greatest force in the universe, He created the universe, Heaven and earth, and so these words "But God", capture His dynamic activity in the world. And you see them again and again in Scripture, if you know what to look for, they're there again and again. For example, Genesis 7 and 8, the flood of Noah, the text reads this way: Genesis 7:24, and then 8:1. "The waters flooded the earth for 150 days. But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and all the livestock that were with him in the ark and He sent a wind over the earth and the waters receded." Or again in Genesis 41:15-16, Pharaoh took Joseph out of prison and wanted him to tell him the meaning of a dream that he had had. "I had a dream, and no one can interpret it, but I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream, you can interpret it. I cannot do it," Joseph said, "But God will give to Pharaoh the answer he desires." Or again, later in the story, of Joseph, we have this amazing account, Joseph, now, that Jacob was dead, his terrified brothers were afraid that Joseph was going to punish them for their wicked actions against him and selling him into slavery, that he wanted to kill him. All of that, they were terrified. And Joseph said in Genesis 50:20, "You meant it for evil but God meant it for good, to save lives as He is doing now.” “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good." Or the wise woman of Tekoa to King David. 2nd Samuel 14:14, "Like water spilled on the ground," she said to him, "which cannot be recovered, so we must die, but God does not take away life. Instead, He devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from Him, but may be reconciled." Psalm 73:26, "My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." And then I like this one, Peter and John preaching to the citizens of Jerusalem, "You killed the author of life, but God raised Him from the dead. And we are all witnesses of this." There are probably others. Have a fun time going and finding them.

But God intervenes. He steps in and he makes all the difference in the world. He's the center of the universe, everything comes from God, and He alone can make the real changes in your life that must be made if you are to spend an eternity in joy and peace instead of in the torment that we all deserve for our sins.

The Uniqueness of the Christian Message

So, we come to the uniqueness of the Christian message. The only hope for sinners like you and me, the only hope there is, is Jesus Christ. Acts 4:12, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men, by which we must be saved." There's no other answer than Jesus. And so the Christian message begins with total human desperation. I think about Walter in that room. I think about me in the lake, nothing left, I had no strength left. I could not save myself from drowning but actually spiritually, the text says where it's even worse, talking about human depravity, complete inability weakness, even spiritual death. Spiritual death. The Christian message doesn't end there, however, the words “but God” means that God stepped into our spiritual death into our hopelessness and helplessness. So therefore, salvation comes from outside of us in. It's starts out there with God, and steps into us, that's the Christian message, that's the Gospel. It's God's doing, it's God's work from beginning to end. This is so hard for us, prideful sinners to accept. We as Americans, we're so used to the American dream, the idea where you can be anything you want to be. And so we have this message of, "Believe in yourself, do everything that you can. You can earn it, you can do it, you can make yourself whatever you want to be." Yes, but you can't make yourself a Christian, that you cannot do, you don't have the power to make yourself a Christian any more, than you will have the power at your own funeral to make yourself rise from the dead. You can't do that.

And so this morning, our task is to understand more completely our spiritual resurrection from the dead in Christ, that we'll understand that, and that God will get the glory, more glory than ever before from you, and from me, for our salvation. And we're going to do it based on these amazing two words as a gateway to these three verses of Ephesians 2:4-6. The Apostle Paul clearly asserts that every Christian is an astonishing miracle of spiritual resurrection through faith in Christ. This is true Christianity, this is it. Do you see Christianity, that way? Do you understand yourself that way? And the point of all of this, in the end, is to God alone be the glory for human salvation, to God alone be the glory. As it is written, "Let him who boast, boast in the Lord." 1 Corinthians 1:31 and as it says three times, in Ephesians Chapter 1, "To the praise of His glory." So we're going to begin where we started last week. Ephesians 2: 1-3 with our condition apart from Christ, we were spiritually dead.

Understanding God’s Grace: The Beginning

Look at the verses, again, verse 1-3, just by way of review. "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient, all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, and following its desires and thoughts, like the rest we were by nature objects of wrath." So that's what we looked at last week. This is the starting point of understanding God's grace. We vastly underestimate our natural wickedness and sinfulness our condition, and we vastly underestimate God's glory and grace and power and mercy in saving us. And so the idea of this preaching, the idea of study is so that we won't vastly underestimate them as much anymore, and that our hearts will be moved and we will be empowered to worship God and serve Him with grace.

Thorough Probing of these Verses

So last week we did a thorough probing of these dire verses. We started with the phrase, "You were dead in your transgressions and sins." Last week, I likened that to, spiritually, your pupils fixed and dilated, so if the EMT shone the light into your eyes, you wouldn't respond to the light. It's unresponsive to spiritual truth. Spiritual death means you're not responsive, that's the nature of that deadness. We were spiritually dead, but we were physically alive. And so the essence of the spiritual death was in our minds and hearts. In our minds the way we thought, in our hearts, what we loved and what we hated. Romans chapter 8 captures the nature of this deadness in our minds, "Those who live according to the flesh have their mind set on what the flesh desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their mind set on what the Spirit desires. The mind of the flesh is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace.” We had dead minds spiritually. And then it goes over into the heart, The heart is that part of you that loves and hates. You were attracted to what was evil, and you despised what was good and delightful. It says of Jesus, He has “loved righteousness, and hated wickedness." We were the opposite, we loved wickedness and hated righteousness, so that's the nature of our spiritual deadness, and we were not responsive. Somebody could come and share the Gospel, we didn't care, somebody would read some scripture, it didn't hit us, we were not interested, we had no desire to be in church on Sunday, certainly no desire to read the Bible or pray. We were dead, spiritually dead, even while we lived. And we followed the ways of this world, we were surrounded by dead people, and so, we comforted ourselves in thinking we were fine because everybody else was doing the same things, but we were just following the ways of this world, and we were in bondage to Satan, the ruler of this world spiritually. He is “the god of this age” and he had blinded our minds so we couldn't see the light of the Gospel of the glory of God in Christ, he had blinded us. And he was acting as an angel of light alluring us toward wickedness and sin, could be false religions, false philosophical systems, could be just the allure of materialism, but he had enslaved us.

And we had invisible chains around us, and we couldn't break free. And we were following “the ruler of the kingdom of the air. The spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” And all of us, this was universal, it wasn't just some people, this is everybody. Now, you may say, "What about my sweet little children? What about my little babes? Were they enslaved in following the ways of this world?" And all that. Well, here's what the scripture teaches. All of us died in Adam, positionally. Every human being is seen to be positionally a sinner in Adam, but it doesn't take hold in the individual heart until that person recognizes moral law and especially as coming from God. And that's written in our hearts in our consciences so that as soon as that little child, boy or girl starts to violate their conscience they die spiritually.

So Paul says in Romans 7, "Once I was alive, apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died", and that death takes more and more root the more and more bad decisions that child makes, they become more and more corrupted, it becomes deeper and deeper. So early on it's very, very weak. The hold of sin on them, but it becomes progressively more and more powerful and they corrupt themselves by violating their conscience. That's what's going on in your household right now. You who have little toddlers, you who have little ones growing up they are cute, but you know exactly what I'm talking about, don't you?  It's going on right before your eyes. And so in the end, give it enough time, all of us also lived among them at one time. And no exceptions.

God Raised Us in Christ Spiritually

Well, that was our situation. Now, we need to meditate on this, don't we? I mean I preached a whole sermon on it. I'm going to move on now to verse 4, but we need to know this, we need to understand the nature of our spiritual deadness. We didn't feel it, we didn't know we were dead. But we were. And now, it's amazing, you can even be a Christian and not know just how bad it was. Paul's writing this to Ephesian Christians, they'd already become Christians. And he says, "I want to tell you what you were, you probably don't really know how bad it was." And I tell you, the more you meditate on how bad it was, the sweeter the Gospel gets. Actually paradoxically the happier you get, the more you meditate on these dark things, because we have been rescued from all of that. But God stepped in and would not give us over to Satan into the flesh into the world, and He has rescued us. So we get to verse 4, "But God raised us from the dead. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive with Christ. By Grace you have been saved.” Or simpler, if I could just boil it down. But God raised us from the dead, raised you from the dead. That's what he's saying here.

So this is a radical transformation that happens, and I just love 2nd Corinthians 5:17, it says, "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old is gone, behold everything has become new," that's what happens when you become a Christian, a radical transformation comes over. You're a new creation. Like when God said, "Let there be light," and there's light. When God said, "Let there be a Heaven," and there's Heaven. "Let there be earth," and there's earth. God created you, in Christ. You're a new creation. And we became instantly spiritually responsive. Then, if the EMT shown the light of the Gospel in our eyes, we would see it. And we saw the beauty and the attractiveness of Christ and of the Gospel and of the cross and we were allured to it and attracted to it. We were spiritually responsive, that's what God did and we understood the significance of Christ and His beauty. He became beautiful to us. And we saw the beauty of His tenderness and compassion in dealing with sinners and in His power in showing and displayed in all of His miracles, the incredible things He did, walking on water and feeding 5000 people with five dinner rolls, and raising Lazarus from the dead, after four days and just the things He could do, and then we were amazed by it. And every time we're reading the Gospels there's a new discovery of the greatness of Christ and ultimately His love and laying down His life for sinners like you and me, and the power displayed in His resurrection. We were attracted to these things and our spiritual eyes were opened. That's faith. The eyes of our hearts were enlightened, and we saw it, and we were alive, and we could see how glorious God is in Christ, and we were attracted.

Unification and Freedom with Christ

So, the key concept in all of this, in these verses is a mystical, spiritual union that happens between the sinner and Christ by faith. You became united with Christ. So look at the text again, "But God made us alive together with Christ." See that? In verse 6, "And God raised us up with him," see that? "and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus." Now, that's four times in these three verses that this idea of our union with Christ is taught. This is central, and again, it's not something we feel, you know, like feel united with Christ. Well, you didn't feel dead either, but this is something that's true. If you're a Christian, you have become spiritually united to Jesus. You're one with Him. You're one with Him. And so, His resurrection has become your resurrection, His life is your life, His death was your death. You died in Christ, to the Law. How powerful is that? And I mean, specifically, the Law's ability to condemn you to Hell. You're dead to that, it cannot condemn you to Hell. You died to the law in that power and you died to Satan's power as well.

You don't have to do anything the devil tells you the rest of your life. Amen! Isn't that awesome? You can tell him "no," “you can resist the devil and he will flee from you.” You're not one of his subjects anymore. You're not in his kingdom anymore. Those invisible chains that were around you, they have been broken by Jesus. And so, you are alive, you're not dead in Satan's kingdom of death anymore, but you are alive now, in Jesus. And you are mystically or spiritually members of His body, just like every other Christian in the world. We're members of one another and of His body. You have become engrafted into an olive tree, and now you're receiving nourishing sap from it, all these images of union with Christ. So Christ's death once for all, has become your death, and His resurrection has become yours, and His life is now flowing through you, through the Holy Spirit. You're alive. That's what happened to you and me, and that's awesome.

Salvation Glorifies God

Now, what moved God to do all this? Well, the text covers that too, it tells us what motivated God to do it. And we have these attributes, mercy and love and grace. Salvation glorifies God. To the praise of His glory, you know, “praise of His glorious grace.” What does that mean? Well, salvation puts God on display. So because He saves sinners like you and me, God is on display. He's putting Himself on display for everyone to see. So what's on display? Well, nothing in all of the universe and anything that God's ever done so clearly displays His attributes, His nature, as human salvation does. It's the most glorious thing God does is save sinners. It puts Him on display. Now, we've already seen in chapter 1 one of those attributes very, very clearly, and that is God's power. God's power is on display in our salvation. So you remember back in Ephesians 1 he's praying that the Ephesian Christians, "The eyes of their heart would be enlightened, that they would know God better," he prays, "And that they would know the hope of their calling, the riches of glorious inheritance in the saints." And then the third thing is, his incomparably great power at work in us who believe, and then he just takes off on power, he says that power, that “power is like the working of His mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all ruling authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come.” "God exalted Christ from the grave to the right hand of power, and gave Him the name that is above every name," it says in Philippians. So there, that's the power of God. Now, that same power is at work in us. That's the transition from Ephesians 1-2. Just like Jesus was physically, so you were spiritually. “You were dead in your transgressions and sins, but God has made you alive.” He's already displayed His power in you. Look at verse 5, "It is by grace you have been saved," do you see that past tense? It's happened now, it's perfected action. It is by grace you have been saved. I'm not denying there's yet more salvation to come, there is, but here he's focusing on your justification, the beginning of your salvation. “It is by grace you have been saved.” He's talking about the power He's already displayed in you by raising you from the dead. “By grace you have been saved.” And so, this power's on display.

Power, the First Attribute

Now, power we use the word in two different senses, maybe many others, as well, but when it comes to a person and their power, think about authority, the right to command, the right to do something. Did God have the right to do this? We were sinners, we'd violated His law. Did He have the right to declare us not guilty in Jesus? Yes, He did. He is the King of Kings, He is the Lord of Lords, and He deals with His justice at the cross, He deals with that, but He has the right to do this, He has the power to do this. There's a second sense of power. Can He do this, does He have the capability to do this? Oh yes, He does. He can raise dead sinners to life spiritually, He has that kind of power. We've already seen the power, but now we're going to see these others, and that is mercy first, and then love and grace.

“Being Rich in Mercy”

So first, mercy, “God being rich in mercy.” So you already heard from Daniel earlier about the mercy of God, and that was a great statement. God's mercy, I think there's different ways. It's hard to distinguish between mercy and grace. I think it's actually in some cases impossible, but one way to look at mercy is that it has to do with human misery and suffering and God has moved out toward the sufferer, toward the one who's miserable and wants to rescue them out of that misery, and take that misery away. So you see, again and again, sick people or tormented people crying out for Jesus, the Son of David to what? Have mercy on us, Son of David. We're blind, we want to have our sight. My daughter is demon possessed, she's suffering greatly, and Jesus has mercy. So, it's a sense of God seeing us like in Exodus chapter 2, where God speaks to Moses and says, "I have indeed seen the affliction of my people, and their bondage by reason of their taskmasters in Egypt, and I'm compassionate on them and merciful on them, and I want you to rescue them out of it." So that's God delivering miserable suffering people from their misery and their suffering. And it says in the text that God is, “rich in mercy.” I mean, He flows in mercy. Just by way of application, can I just say, shouldn't that make us want to be rich in mercy too? Just to look around and see suffering and want to move to it, and alleviate it? I mean, shouldn't you want to find some suffering person today or this week, and go alleviate their suffering some way? That has to do with benevolence ministry, or evangelism or whatever, or even ministry of counseling in the church, but we should want to move toward misery and suffering and be rich in mercy, like God is. But that's what God did with us, we were in Satan's dungeon. We were tormented, harassed and helpless and God “rich in mercy” stepped in.

Another sense of His mercy, and Daniel picked up on this, has to do with forgiveness, where God just doesn't give us what we deserve. We deserved punishment, and we knew it. But God had mercy on us, and did not condemn us, and that you get in the Parable of the 10,000 talents, where the King talks to this man who had owed him 10,000 talents of immeasurable debt. But he wouldn't forgive one of his fellow servants. He hauled him back in, and he said, "Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow servant, just as I had on you?" So it's a sense of forgiveness of sins. Now, this is something that God gives at His sovereign grace, He doesn't have to do it. Romans chapter 9 says, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." You can't demand mercy. No one can ever say, "God you owed me mercy." Didn't matter how many people God shows mercy to, it's always sovereign grace, and so God shows mercy or he doesn't, he doesn't have to show it. But what's incredible is, He will show mercy to everyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus for salvation, and He is rich in mercy.

“Because of the Great Love with Which He Loved Us”

Secondly, because of, “the great love with which He loved us,” the love of God. Isn't it a stunning marvel to you that God could love someone like you? I mean, it should amaze you. It's like, "No, actually pastor, you don't know me, I'm something actually." Yeah, you're something. You don't probably see yourself the way the Scripture sees you, the way the Law sees you, the way God saw you apart from Christ, but here's the thing, “God set His love on us while we were still sinners.” Well, maybe it's a different kind of thing than the way we use the word love. I actually don't think it is. Now we use this word, ”love,” a lot, don't we? You know, husband loves his wife, parents love their children. You know, a child loves ice cream. I do too, actually. A photographer loves a great action shot. A sightseer loves spectacular scenery or a sunset. A fan loves it when his team wins the championship. All of us love to be praised and encouraged. Alright, well you're saying, "What do all those uses of the word love have to do with it?" It's the same thing, only just infinitely greater. Love has to do with a heart attraction that results in cheerful sacrificial action. That's what love is. God is attracted toward us, even in our sins, and then is cheerfully sacrificing and giving for us. That's what love is. And that's what God did, he moved out toward us. He is passionately attracted to us as a husband is his wife and jealous over us. He is lovingly doting over us, the way a father is over his children. Protectively nurturing, the way a mother is with a nursing infant, all of those things are in the heart of God. And He “set them on us before we were even born, before God created the world,” because of His great love for us in Christ. And it moved Him to be generous and give us Jesus on the cross for our sins and then to give us a kingdom which we can't even imagine how beautiful and awesome it's going to be. To give us all of that, cheerful generosity, sacrificial action, that's love.

“It is By Grace You Have Been Saved”

And then finally, grace, and I'm not going to spend hardly any time on it today, because we'll get a second chance at it. Paul actually just kind of interrupts himself, he says, "It's by grace you've been saved, you know that, right?" He's going to come back and develop it more fully in Ephesians 2:8 and 9, "For by grace are you saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it's a gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast," so we'll get to grace. But it's just infinitely more than just simply unmerited favor. It's infinite, blessing given to those who deserve infinite curse, that's the grace of God. Those are the things that God put on display. That's what motivated God. And what did God do to us?

Well, “He seated us in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Look what it says in verse 6, "He raised us up with Him," spiritually raised up, "And seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Again, note the verb tense. This is a done deal. If you are a Christian, you are spiritually seated with Christ at the right hand of Almighty God. That just blows my mind. You think about that, it's like, "Wow, we are at the right hand of God through our union with Christ." What does that mean? Well, it means a number of things. It means absolute security. You know how secure you are at the right hand of God? Satan's arm is too short to reach up there. He can't get you down from there, no one can snatch you out of the Father's hand, or out of Jesus' hand. You're at the right hand of God, you are safe, spiritually. How secure are you at the right hand of God? Well, what else does it mean?

We Have Access at God’s Right Hand

Well, it means access, you have access to God. You get to call Him “Abba, Father,” and bring all of your mess, and all of your problems and all of your issues to Him any time you want, and He will welcome all of your prayers anytime, you have access to God through Jesus Christ, through a new and living way, open through the body of Christ, you have access now that you're at the right hand of God, in Christ. And you have honor, it's a place of honor, you're honored to be there. Jesus said in Revelation 3:21, "To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on His throne." So Jesus went out and won the victory of the battle and He gives you the honor, "Come and sit with me at the right hand of God." How awesome is that? A position of honor. What else do you get? Well, you get wisdom. Think about the Queen of Sheba, remember how she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom? She was blown away. It says in the Hebrew that, "The breath was taken out of her," she couldn't even breathe because of how awesome Solomon was.

And she said, "How happy must be all of your servants who just get to stand around and listen to your wisdom." Jesus said very quietly, later on, "Someone greater than Solomon is here." We get to be at the right hand of God, and listen to His wisdom, the rest of our lives. How do you do that? Read the Bible. Through the Holy Spirit, He will speak wisdom into your hearts, you get to listen to Him be wise in your life, the rest of your life. It's a position of wisdom. It's a position of joy, you get to be joyful there. Psalm 16:11 says, "You will fill me with joy in your presence with eternal pleasures at your right hand," it's a pleasureful place to be at the right hand of God. God's a happy being. Everything's under control up there. Feels like it's not under control down here, but even that's under control. God is sovereign, He is happy, He is delighted. And, “at the right hand of God, is eternal pleasures forever more.”

Fellowship at God’s Right Hand

And finally, it's a position of fellowship. You get to just have a relationship at the right hand of God. You get to have a relationship with God, a friendship with God. Remember how God called Abraham His friend. Well, you're His friend, you're His son, you're His daughter. You get to have fellowship with Him. I think about John 17:24, Jesus said, "Father, I want those whom you have given me to be with me where I am and to see my glory." Well, see my glory is awesome, but just a step before that, “I want them to be with me.” I want them to have fellowship with me, I want to have a relationship with them. Father wants that too. And so, the right hand of God is a place of fellowship, as well.

Marvel at God’s Goodness

Alright, applications really quickly. First, will you just marvel with me at all of this? Just marvel at God's goodness. Rejoice in this, celebrate, worship God for these things. Understand how spiritually, frankly, you were just like I was in Lake Winnipesaukee, you were drowning, you were dead, you were gone, and God reached down and pulled you out of the deep and gave you life. He saved you. So just marvel at that.

See Believers as Miracles of Grace

And secondly, just understand that you are a miracle of God's grace already. God's already displayed His power. Understand how much power God has shown in your life that you're a Christian, that you actually believe these things. Marvel at that, and then extend that to your brothers and sisters, each one of them are miracles of God's grace. Celebrate what God's done in a brother or sister, that will melt away unforgiveness and bitterness. It will melt away the divisions that can happen between people. Just understand, they are trophies of God's grace, just like you are, and be humble and energetic in evangelism. Our job is to get out and take these words and share them in this community. We need to preach the Gospel. We do need to live out the Gospel so that our preaching isn't undermined, but we need to proclaim these words. But just like Elijah on Mount Carmel with the animal there, the sacrifice and the wood, and all that, it's all there, but they're waiting. Elijah's waiting for what? Fire from Heaven, right?

Only God can convert a sinner. So go out in the college campus, go out in the workplace, go out in your neighborhood, go out and interact with people you didn't even know you're going to meet. And you can do all of the arranging and you can preach the Gospel, but the fire has to fall from Heaven, and it will, if God wills. He has that power. So understand evangelism and missions that way, that's what's going on, the sovereign grace of God. Parents as you're raising your kids, the fire has to fall from Heaven. It's not behaviorism., BF Skinner, it's not that. It's that you can preach the Gospel, you seek to live it in front of them, but they have to be converted by sovereign grace, pray for it and teach them that that's what has to happen. Marvel at these attributes of God. Marvel at His mercy. Marvel at His power, marvel at His love. Focus on these things and His grace.

Believers, Meditate on Your Union with Christ

Cherish each one and meditate on your union with Christ. I think we need to understand that more. It's a kind of a hard thing to grasp. His death is my death, His life is my life, I'm united with Him, “I'm with Christ in the heavenly realms.” We need to ponder that mystery of our union with Christ more. It's not easy to understand, but we need to ponder that. And let's rejoice more in being seated at the right hand of God, take those six things that I listed, the fact that you have access to God and that you have security and access and honor and wisdom and joy and fellowship, all those things. And just feed on them, pray more, intercede more. You're at the right hand of God through Jesus, intercede, pray for it. You have access, you have influence through prayer. Alright, all of that is for Christians.

Gospel Proclamation

 I'm going to finish by just appealing to you who came in here today unconverted, though I hope you're not still unconverted. I hope that as you heard the Gospel clearly proclaimed to you today, something moved inside you and your pupils were no longer fixed and dilated. You're like, "I see it, I see that I am a sinner, I see that Christ is a savior, and I call on you, Jesus to save me. And I ask that you would forgive me of my sins and I ask that you would restore me to fellowship with God. I want to be in the family of God." Call on the name of the Lord and He will save you.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for this time that we've had to study these amazing words, these incredible verses, and I want to just thank you for the Gospel, I want to thank you for saving each of my brothers and sisters that are here. Thank you for saving me. Father, I pray that you would do a work of sovereign grace around us all the time with other lost people. Help us, O Lord, to see them be safe, help us to be bold in evangelism in preaching the Gospel. And Lord help us to be rich in worship this week. Even as Daniel and the team leads in closing song, help us to just sing by the Spirit of our thankfulness to you, in Jesus' name, Amen.

In 1959, a pastor named C.S. Lovett wrote a book enabling people, helping people to evangelize. He used sales techniques that were common in the business world at that time to teach evangelistic techniques, and the name of the book was Soul-Winning Made Easy. So I just stopped and pondered that title in light of the text we're going to look at today. Soul-Winning Made Easy, friends, soul-winning, that is the genuine conversion of a human soul to faith in Christ is a supernatural act of sovereign grace by Almighty God. In every case. If you are a Christian today and you're listening to me, you are a miracle of God's grace. It doesn't matter if you are raised in a Christian home and you can never remember a time that you didn't know Jesus, or you might have lived for years in vanity and pride, and wickedness. It doesn't make a difference. If you are a genuine believer in Christ, God did a miracle of grace in your soul. And he deserves praise and glory and credit for it. And we are healthy as we understand that. There is no soul-winning ever made easy. Honestly, soul-winning is impossible for us. Absolutely impossible. It is not the work of an evangelist, or a pastor, or an apostle, it's not the work of a VBS teacher or a Sunday school teacher, it's not the work of a parent, a godly mother or father or a friend, a co-worker, a fellow student, it's not the work of any human being because it is a resurrection, a spiritual resurrection, something only God can do. On the contrary, no soul-winning is ever difficult for God, ever. There are no particularly hard cases for God. God doesn't have to particularly sweat any of them. They may seem difficult on our part, but they aren't. And so I think there's this one verse that sums all of this up, when Jesus had that encounter with the rich, young ruler, remember? And Jesus talked about how difficult it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said to His disciples, when they asked, "Who then can be saved?” He said, "With man, this is impossible. But with God, all things are possible."

And that's true, especially when it comes to this issue of a soul-winning and a genuine conversion. So as we come to Ephesians 2:1-3 we come to, I think, in the Bible, the clearest depiction of our spiritual condition, before we came to Christ. The clearest depiction of the spiritual state of people apart from Christ. I think perhaps Jesus's most stunning, most amazing miracle before He was crucified was His resurrection of Lazarus from the dead. And how He worked with sovereign power, how God worked with sovereign power to raise a dead man who had been dead for four days. And Jesus made this astounding claim before raising him physically from the dead, he said, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die," then he called out to the tomb in a loud voice, "Lazarus come forth." And the dead man came alive. And he sat up still wrapped in grave clothes and came out of the tomb, still wrapped in grave clothes. That was His greatest miracle.

But again and again, Christ asserts in His teaching that the conversion of a soul is really a spiritual resurrection. That people can be dead even while they live. Yesterday we were walking around Duke's campus and Kyle showed me a statue in the Duke Divinity School, of the Prodigal Son and the father and the older brother, three figures in the statue, it's very profound, very moving. And so, the Prodigal Son is on his knees holding on to his father around his legs. And the father is pleading with the older brother, who's there with his arms crossed across his chest, and it just captures that moment. But you remember what the father said. "We had to celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found." To one disciple who wasn't ready to follow Jesus, wasn't ready to immediately follow him, he said, "I've got to go bury my father," he said, "Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead.” And He also said in John 5:24-25, "I tell you the truth, whoever hears my Word and believes Him who sent me will not be condemned, but has eternal life. He has crossed over from death to life." And in the next verse He says, "I tell you the truth, the time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the son of God and those who hear will live.” So this teaching of a spiritual resurrection is well-established in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. So if you're a Christian today, God raised you from the dead, spiritually. And Ephesians 2:1-3 asserts this plainly.

Now, we're going to look back at what you were before you were saved. But in order to do that, I want to just get some context. It's been a number of months now since we've been in Ephesians, and now I go back and just see what we already learned in Ephesians 1, and just do a little bit of review and bring us right up to Ephesians 2:1-3. The letter was written to Ephesian Christians. Paul greets them and then after that he just begins with praise and worship. "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” So it just begins with worship based on our salvation. “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless in His sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ. In accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the one He loves. In him,” in Christ, “we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. And God lavished on us all wisdom and understanding through the indwelling Spirit that He has given us as a downpayment, guaranteeing our future full inheritance in Heaven." So that's what God has done with us.

And then Paul prays in Ephesians 1:15-23, the end of the chapter there, that the Ephesian Christians would understand things, that the “eyes of their hearts would be enlightened.” He wants them to know more about their salvation, and more specifically, about God's work in their salvation than they have before. So he prays that the “eyes of their heart would be enlightened.” I believe the, “eyes of the heart” is faith. And faith comes through the ministry of the Word of God, and so he just wants to minister truth to them so that they can see spiritually what God has done. And he prays, first and foremost, that they would just simply know God better. “In the knowledge of Him, in the knowledge of God.” But then he prays for three things, that they would know “the hope to which He has called them, the riches of their glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power at work in we who believe.” Then he takes up on that issue of power, he says, "I just want you to know how much power is at work in your life, spiritually. It's already been at work in your life." And he says, "That power is like the working of God's mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead physically and ascended him through the heavens and seated Him at the right hand of God, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only the present age, but also in the one to come and God placed all things under His feet. And appointed Him, Christ, to be head over everything for the Church, which is His body. “The fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.”  “Now that power that God the Father exerted in Christ is the same power that's at work in you because you were dead too.”

That's right where we're at, at Ephesians 2:1-3. And so, he begins by talking about their spiritual deadness. He wants them to know. And now here's the thing, we're going to be rummaging around in some of the most depressing dark, sad truths there can ever be about the human condition today. But this is what hit me as I was in BFL today. Richard, I was listening to you brother and it was great, but just something hit me, "I have to write this down." So I asked my wife for a pen, and she found one in her purse, which is a minor miracle, it's amazing, all the things in a woman's purse. But there it was. I mean, tissues are there... It's just... I won't go on, but anyway, just the pen. And so I wrote this down, "You will cherish the good news in proportion to how well you understand the bad news." You will cherish the good news of the gospel in direct proportion to how well you understand who you were apart from Christ. And your deadness and your lostness. And so, paradoxically, and this is the amazing thing, the more you rummage around in these dark depressing difficult teachings, the happier you're going to get as a Christian. It has power to free you and to bring you joy and energy in the Christian life. So let's look at what it says, carefully. 

We Christians Should Know What We Were

Beginning at chapter two, verse one, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live." We need to know what we were, and he makes it plain so that we can know what we were, what kind of power has brought us to this amazing point already, and that kind of power is going to be with us to the end so that we are fully assured and have rich hope and great energy in the Christian life, but ultimately, so God will get the full glory for our salvation. That's ultimately what's going on, so we need to know this so we don't boast about all that we did. And so, he's telling Ephesian Christians, he's not telling non-Christians here, although non-Christians need to know these things, but he's telling Christians, "This is what you were, God's already been at work." Now in these whole, these 10 verses that you heard Wes read, and we're going to be going through them slowly. There's just so much truth in them. So five sermons, God willing, on those 10 verses, we're just going to be going through it. But there's not a single command and there is no imperative, it's all just truth. He's just telling us what's true. And notice, he says in verses 1-3, there's the "you" and "we" language. "As for you, you were dead... " But they can't keep on like that. And then in verse 3, "We were all like that." For all in that condition, there's no one different than the other. That's amazing for Paul was a very moral individual, very religious individual, and you can be morally, religiously dead, or you can be amorally irreligiously dead, it doesn't make a difference, you're dead apart from Christ.

“You” and “We”: Dead While We Lived

And Paul includes himself in that, you and we, we're all in this together. And so what does he say? "You were dead while you lived, you were the living dead." "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live." So you were biologically alive, but you were spiritually dead. So you may have been full of energy, you may have been active in pursuing many things. Laughing, playing, eating, walking, going to places, involved in great projects, doing things, achieving things. “Your bodies were fearfully and wonderfully made,” though you didn't know they were made by God, but your hearts were energetically pumping blood, your livers were cleansing the blood of toxins, your kidneys too. Your bones were the structure of your body as you were moving around doing great things, and they were pumping out also blood cells and just doing amazing things. Your brain was thinking thoughts all the time. Yeah, you were biologically alive, maybe even vibrant doing things. But you were dead. And he says, "They were dead while they walked." NIV just simplifies it to “live,” “even while you live.” But it's walks. So your daily life, it was a daily lifestyle of deadness. Of being dead, spiritually. And it's amazing how the spiritually dead don't know they're dead. Well, that’s the essence of the satanic deception, they don't know they're dead. And it's amazing how even Christians having come to life maybe don't really fully understand that they were dead.

The Nature of Spiritual Death

That's why Paul wrote verses to Christians. “Do you know, you were dead and now you're alive?” And so they just don't know the condition. “So what's the nature of this spiritual death while you are dead in your transgressions and sins?” he says. What is that? It has to do with the law of God. It has to do with God's moral commands. Ten Commandments, “You shall have no other Gods. You shall not make any idols. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Honor your father and mother. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, or covet anything that belongs to your neighbor.” Well, we violated that law. Jesus said concerning the Ten Commandments, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not murder,' but if you're even angry with your brother in your heart, you've committed murder in your heart, you're guilty, you're in danger of the fire of hell."

And the same thing with adultery, "You've heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery,' but if you even look at a woman lustfully you've committed adultery in your heart." Jesus is just taking the Tenth Commandment on coveting and just extending it to all of them. It's a matter of the heart. Because you covet with the heart, all of it is a matter of the heart. God searches the heart and we have transgressed His law. And then the summary, Two Great Commandments, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. With all your strength, all your mind, all your soul, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” We have not kept these commandments. We have transgressed, we were “dead in our transgressions and sins.” And the law of God stood opposed to us, and accused us. And what is the nature of this deadness? I think it has to do with being unable to respond. We think about it, when there's been an accident and you think about it, I am just amazed at EMTs and other people that come to accident scenes as a living, just day after day. I don't know how they do it.

But sometimes you know the situation where they're trying to ascertain. They think somebody may be dead, but the EMT will push the eyelids back and take a pen light and click it on and shine it in the pupils. And if the pupils are fixed and dilated, they say the person's dead. Well, that means they're on unable to respond to a stimulus. There's just no response. Well, that's the essence of our spiritual deadness. God is putting out rivers of evidence of His existence and of His glory, and of His invisible attributes through creation, and then even more clearly through the Word preached, people hear the Gospel, they hear all of this and they do not respond. Unable to respond. That's the essence of the deadness that we had. Like the parable of the seed in the soil, you remember “the seed fell on the path and the birds came immediately ate up. It has to do with the hardness of heart and unresponsiveness.” We “suppress the truth in wickedness,” “our minds were set on the flesh and therefore we did not submit to God's law,” Romans 8:7, "Indeed we could not." We were spiritually dead. The worst of all is when it comes to the Gospel, they hear the Gospel and there's just nothing there, there's no response. There's no sense of conviction of sin, no need for a savior, no crying out aloud to Christ to save them, no sense of impending wrath and judgement, no fear of these things. They're spiritually dead.

The Origins of Spiritual Death and Powerlessness

Now, how did this come about? Well, we believe biblically it's something that we wouldn't understand except that we're told in the Bible that the entire human race died in Adam. We sinned in Adam, and died in Adam spiritually, but then, individually, case by case that gets applied when we understand moral right from wrong through the law written in our hearts, and even more when the word of God comes. And when the commandment came, Paul says in Romans 7, "When the commandment came, sin sprung to life and I died." "Once I was alive apart from the command," Paul said, "but when the commandment came, sin sprung to life and I died." So as soon as you violate your conscience, you do what you know is wrong, you die spiritually. So that's it, and it's everybody all over the world. This is universal. It's every nation, every individual as soon as they understand right from wrong, they die. Now, this is a desperate spiritual condition. We are utterly powerless to change it. Just, that's why this language of spiritual death is used, there's nothing we can do to change it. It says in Romans 5:6, "You see at just the right time when we're still powerless,” powerless, “Christ died for the ungodly.” We were powerless we could not make a change in our condition. How can a dead person raise himself to life? How could that happen? How could you raise yourself to life? It's impossible, it's absolute complete helplessness.

I've heard this said, and I don't know if people still say it, but I remember when I was in college, I remember after I came to Christ some of my fraternity brothers were talking to me and they said, "Christianity is just a crutch for the weak.” Do you realize how arrogant that statement is? "Yeah, I'm thankful I'm not so weak, I can get by without Jesus." Look Christianity is not merely a crutch for the weak, according to this text it's a resurrection for the dead. You flatter us when you say, "It's merely a crutch for the weak." I wasn't weak, I was dead, and it's a miracle of grace that I'm alive.

So this is a key piece of the puzzle and understanding the absolute sovereign power of God over salvation is something only God can do. So non-Christians are in a desperate spiritual condition as were we all. Ephesians 2:12, which Daniel quoted a few moments ago, "Without hope and without God in the world." We're surrounded by people like that. I mean, on the college campus, we were at Duke, we were at State yesterday, just looking around, just so much activity, but I just wonder how many of these people, how many of these students are dead, spiritually dead. Because I was thinking about this text and I was looking at people. Are they dead while they walk, dead while they live? I mean, there's just so much of this and they're without hope and without God in the world.

Well, more than that, though, the text says, "We were willing slaves of sin." Look at the text again, Verse 1-3, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath." Now, if you know what to look for, you're going to see the three ancient enemies of the human soul right in this text, and they're in this order, the world, the devil and the flesh.

We Followed the Ways of this World

In our text, you'll see in that order, the world, the devil, and the flesh. First, the world, we followed the ways of the world, the text says. What does that mean in verse two? While the living dead are active, they're walking, they're following something. But what are they following? They're following the ways of this world. They're actively following. They're living, they're “walking according to,” it says literally in the original language, according to the ways of this world. There's a way of thinking. There's a way of living, and the crowd of non-Christians are like sheep for the slaughter, day after day, following after certain patterns that they learned, that they inherited. You know it's amazing to me how independent-minded and proud lost people are, and they think that they are masters of their own fate and captains of their own soul, as one poet put it. Well, they're just making it up in their lives, doing whatever they want to do. No, the text says they're actually following the ways of this world. That's what they're doing. They're just followers. They're walking a well-worn path to destruction, a broad gate and a broad highway that leads to Hell. The ways of this world is literally the age of this world, the mentality, the outlook, the assumptions, lifestyles, patterns of thinking, patterns of living. All of this is part of it. Now, it was handed down from generation to generation, the traditions that mix in, their ways of doing things, ways of living. And then you got some influence, a lot of influence from your parents, and then family as you were growing up, but you had classmates in school or however things just start to influence you, and you see the way things are in the world and you start to follow that way.

The ways of this world, they're just inherited. Day after day, millions of people all over the world are being indoctrinated in the ways of this world, so selfish patterns, self-indulgent thoughts, leading to addictive choices. And the world has a vast marketing side to it, trying to persuade you to follow in their thinking, to follow in their thinking, to indoctrinate you. Again, we were at Duke yesterday and came in there in the Bryan Center, in the Student Center, right on the first floor, you walk in to the right, there's the office for, I don't know what. I'll put in the words I think they embrace: "The celebration of sexual diversity." Sexual diversity, not just any kind of diversity. Now they're just zeroing in on that. That's one of the first offices you see when you walk in the student center.

They are indoctrinating, they are training, they are drawing people after the ways of this world. Jesus put it this way: "To what shall I compare this generation? They're like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to others. We played the flute for you and you didn't dance. We sang a dirge and you didn't mourn.” What does that mean? When the world says it's time to dance, you better dance. And the world says it's time to mourn, you better mourn. That's indoctrination. That's the ways of this world. It's training us to think like they do. And that world system is deep and it's complete. It involves philosophical assumptions, religious teachings. It teaches an anti-God way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It defines life, it defines liberty, it defines the pursuit of happiness and hands that to you, and that's the way of this world.

We Were Willingly Dominated by Satan

And secondly, we were willingly dominated by Satan. It says in verse two, "In which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the king of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” So behind this world system, this anti-God world system, is this seething, malevolent, brilliantly intelligent individual, this created being, called the devil or Satan, who is the king of the kingdom of the air. The Bible teaches us about him. That's who Paul is talking about in the text here. He was a created being, created powerfully, created intelligently, created beautifully, created morally good, but at some point, he desired to take over God's throne and he fought a battle and he lost, and he was thrown to earth along with the angels who joined him in his rebellion. In Revelation 12:9 says, "The great dragon was hurled down, that ancient serpent called the devil or Satan who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the Earth and all his angels with him." So those are all the names, the “great dragon,” “ancient serpent,” “devil,” “Satan,” and he's got angels with him, what we call demons, and they are spiritual beings, and they have set up this world system. And he's incredibly powerful, he's clever, he's intelligent, he's called the “god of this age.” He “masquerades,” it says, “as an angel of light.”

And it says in 2 Corinthians 4:4, "The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the Gospel, of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” “He is the ruler of the kingdom of the air. He is a spirit, and he's at work in those who are disobedient.” Now we're going to have this more unfolded for us in Ephesians 6, where we're told, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” So, we were slaves of Satan. We were in chains, in hidden, spiritual chains by Satan, and by his demons. And the only thing that can remedy that is a transformation by the power of God in which the blindness that this god of the age has put on us is healed by Jesus. Praise God. John 9, "For judgment, I have come into this world so that those who see may become blind, but those who were blind may be able to see." And it says in 2 Corinthians 4:6, "For God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ." We see the light of Christ because Jesus heals the eyes of our hearts. But Satan is actively tempting people. He's drawing them to disobey. He's drawing them. “He's the Spirit at work in those who are disobedient.”

We Indulged in the Lusts of the Flesh

So we have the world in verse 2. We also have the devil in verse 2, and then in Verse 3, we have the lust of the flesh. “All of us also lived among them at one time and gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts.” So what is the flesh? The flesh is a sinful tendency. The lusts of the flesh are desires that come from that rebellious heart, that seeking pleasure and satisfaction and meaning and purpose in life from sin. That's the essence of the flesh. It takes natural drives and desires like a desire for food, a desire for drink, a desire for pleasure, a desire for sex, a desire for possession, a desire for achievement and a good feeling that you get in achievement and pushes all of those things beyond boundaries set up by God. So, the desire for food becomes gluttony. The desire for drink becomes drunkenness. The desire for possession becomes materialism. The desire for a feeling of achievement becomes pride and arrogance. That's the flesh. It's inside all of us.

So we have these three enemies. You've got the world and the devil on the outside hammering on your soul, and then you've got the flesh, inside, responding and drawn to those temptations. That's the condition that we were all in. “All of us also lived among them.” And there are these lusts and these desires that come, and we tend to think of the lust in terms of like sexual temptation or drugs or other things that just pull us toward that, but even there's the lust of the mind, the lust of the mind. I was reading in National Geographic, which in many respects I enjoy reading, but when it comes to issues of origins, not so much. And there was this author, Brian Switek, wrote an article for National Geographic entitled "Evolution is Beautiful." So I said, "Alright, bring it on. I've read these things before. Let's do it.” Here it is. “We are creatures of time and chance,” okay? Another word for chance is luck. “How wonderful is that? Out of all the innumerable possibilities in the history of life on Earth, a string of lucky circumstances billions of years long, transpired in such a way as to allow the origin of our species, and this unintended state of nature makes a humble bee pollinating a flower, a sunrise, the division of a cell, the jagged outline of a mountain in twilight.” This is good writing. I was enjoying this except the overall message. “The petrified record of the dinosaurs and everything else in existence, all the more spectacular because it's all a lucky chance that might not have happened. None of that was ordained to exist and yet evolution and other ongoing natural processes have nonetheless generated phenomena which are not only beautiful but comprehensible to us.” Ah, we can understand them by science, see? Therefore, there is no need for the supernatural to invoke or to appreciate wonder.

So we don't need to invoke a god. Indeed we don't need to thank a god. Do you see how God has been robbed of His glory in this? See, God made all those things that are listed in there and He deserves to be thanked and praised. But what he's saying is, "I am attracted to. I think evolution is elegant and beautiful and attractive." That's the lust of the mind, philosophical systems, etcetera. These things draw the cravings of the mind. So also a successful corporate raider can just love the way he has hatched a scheme to take over a multinational conglomerate, buy it, and then break it up into little bits, sell it off and make a billion dollars. And he's just on his private jet just cackling with delight at the great idea he had. The lust of the beauty of the cleverness of the plan, all of these things.

Paul Specifically Mentions “Will of the Flesh

And Paul specifically mentions here the will of the flesh. The will of the flesh enslaved us. Your flesh had a will. And so, people talk about free will. Let me tell you something, okay? Whenever somebody asks me, "Don't you believe in free will?", I always ask the same question, "Free from what?" Because your will never be free from your nature. It'll never be free from your heart. And thank God it's not free from His powerful influence either for me as a Christian. And so, we were slaves of our will and “we were by nature,” the scripture says, “objects of wrath.” That's the final thing he says. Romans 3 teaches the same thing. Ephesians 2, universal enslavement to depravity. This is true of all of us.

Universal Status as Objects of Wrath

It was true of the law-abiding, self-righteous Pharisee, who was advancing in Judaism beyond anyone else of his time, but it's also true of everyone else. It's true of ISIS jihadists who are beheading people. It's true of atheists who are pumping out atheistic philosophies on college campuses or in books. It's true of Planned Parenthood executives that are making money on baby parts. All of us, all of us lived like that. There's no difference, and that's very humbling, isn't it? And to God be the glory, because what it means is people from those categories, all of them, can be saved by the Gospel, and we can have good hope in that. We were by nature objects of wrath. What does that mean "by nature?"

What it means is the way we were living, the way we're thinking, everything about us, was crying out for death and judgment to come down. It's like we were designed like a lightning rod to ask for, beg for, a strike from God. And God in His amazing mercy and patience did not strike us but saved us. “We were by nature objects of wrath.” What that means is every single day we were apart from Christ, we were storing up wrath for the day of God's wrath when His righteous judgment will be revealed. Well, when is that? Well, it's coming. We don't know when. But Judgment Day is coming. It comes after death and it comes at the end of the world. Judgment Day is coming and that day is a day of wrath, a day of the condemnation of those who are outside of Christ. On that day in Matthew 25:41, "The King Jesus will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.'"

Jonathan Edwards in probably the most famous sermon ever preached on American soil, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, was meditating on Revelation 19:15. This is what he says. So Revelation 19:15, “we read of the wine press of the fierceness and wrath” of Almighty God. The words are exceedingly terrible. If only it had been said the wrath of God, the words would have implied that which is infinitely dreadful, but it is the fierceness and wrath of God, the fury of God, the fierceness of Jehovah. Oh, how dreadful that must be. Who can utter or conceive what such expressions carry in them, but it is also the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God. It's as though there would be a very great manifestation of His almighty power in what the fierceness of His wrath should inflict as though omnipotent should be enraged and focused on our destruction, the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

Now, we were by nature under that wrath. And I've reached now, in Ephesians 2:1-3, the end of the verses that I'm going to look at today. One preacher put it this: Ephesians 2:1-3, we've reached the edge of human capability, the edge of what we were, and we were dead and lost and under wrath. But you know I can't leave it there.

Next week, I'm going to preach a sermon which has a two-word title, "But God." And so this morning as I was going over this sermon, I just said, "Oh, how could I possibly... I didn't intend to leave it at that,” but just look at the verses that follow: "But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages, he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus."

Brief Proclamation of the Good News

“But God” stepped in and changed everything. “But God” willed to save us and not to condemn us. “But God” sent Christ for us who took our punishment in our place and died on the cross. “But God” motivated by the great love with which he loved us. “But God” refused to give us up in our wickedness and our sin to what we truly deserve. “But God” who raised Christ from the dead physically, raised us from the dead spiritually and will someday raise us from the dead physically too. “But God.” So as I was going over that, I was just absolutely melted at that point, filled with thanksgiving. And so by way of application, can I just urge you, if you're a Christian, meditate on these until you are happy and blessed and melted and thankful, because God has stared down into the black hole of what you were and chose to save you in Jesus.

If you are sitting here listening to me and you just are, your heart is thrilling because of Jesus and you're just so thankful to Jesus, that's because God by the Holy Spirit has worked that in you. Give Him all the praise and glory. And like I said at the beginning of the sermon, your cherishing of the good news will be in direct proportion to your understanding of the badness. Understand it, then. Go with what Paul says here. Go over these verses again. They have the power to set free a heart into worship and thanksgiving. They have the power to slaughter a complaining Spirit, amen? I mean, this week, you're going to face adversity. You're going to have problems this week. Things aren't necessarily going to go perfectly your way. Think about this: “You were dead in your transgressions and sins” if you're a Christian, but God raised you from the dead and you're alive now. Just give him thanks in the middle of that time.

Also, this has the power as a Christian to make you more forgiving to other sinners, doesn't it? I mean, you see how God has dealt with you, how gracious He's been with you? How can you not be gracious to others even if they aren't converted? I mean, you read about ISIS people beheading, or planned Parenthood people profiting, or atheistic people writing and teaching and all that, and it can get you angry, and I understand all that. But understand that's who you were too. And just yearn for those people to hear the Gospel that someone would go and be willing to even perhaps die to bring them the Gospel. Another thing this does is it teaches us what evangelism and missions really is. We have a limited role, but we have an important role. Our role is to get the message of the Gospel out to people who are dead in their transgressions and sins.

Our job is to deliver that message. It is God's job to raise him from the dead spiritually. Now we can't measure success by those conversion rates or anything. That's up to God. So that's what evangelism and missions is, so celebrate that. Also, understand the same three enemies that enslaved you and had you spiritually dead, they're still attacking you now. It's why you still have problems in your life now. The world, the flesh, and the devil are still at it, and that's why you struggle with sin. Just be aware of that. But know this: You've been delivered. You don't ever have to sin again. You're free from the world, the flesh and the devil and its effective reign over you. You have been set free from sin and are now a slave to God.

And then finally, if I could just speak to you, if you are not a Christian, if you came in here, maybe you were investigating, maybe you were invited today, maybe you're a student at one of the universities, maybe you came in off the street and you know you're not a Christian. You know you're on the outside. These verses describe who you were when you walked in here. Maybe they don't describe you now, though. Maybe just in this 45-minute time, you've seen yourself for the first time of who you really are under the law of God, under the just judgment of God, and under the wrath of God, and you have fled already in your heart to Christ. You don't need to do anything. You're not saved by works, but by faith, by the grace of God through faith. We'll get to that in Ephesians 2:8-9, "For by grace are you saved through faith, not by works." So I just am pleading with you trust in Christ. Flee to Christ through faith. Cast all of your sins on him. Cast all of your burdens on him. He is a great and a majestic Savior.

Close with me in prayer, if you would. Father, I'm just melted, thankful, joyful at this incredible assessment of who I was apart from Christ, and I just want to thank you for saving me and each of my brothers and sisters that are in this place now. Thank you. And Lord, I just want to say please give us thankful hearts day after day, enable us to rejoice even in the midst of dire circumstances. Oh Lord, enable us to rejoice. And God, give us a heart for the lost that are around us, oh Lord. I pray for the college campuses here. I pray for Duke and I pray for NC State and I pray for UNC Chapel Hill and I pray for Central. I pray for these four universities. They're real close to us. Lord, I pray that there would be an amazing work of your sovereign grace to bring many students to faith in Christ this year. And God, I pray for each one of us, oh Lord, that we would be faithful to take the Gospel to those who need it so desperately all the while knowing that we were saved by the same grace. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.

Amen, amen. Well, a good church will do a lot of things for you - a lot of information, a lot of encouragement, a lot of fellowship, etcetera. This morning, you're going to get, I hope, sound financial planning for your retirement, and by that, I don't mean the retirement that's going to last just perhaps at most two or three decades; I'm talking about your real retirement, the one in eternity. I want to challenge you to store up treasure for eternity, and to be as you've already heard it in my prayer, liberated from the bondage of covetousness and from enslavement to money.

Now, as I've thought about my preaching life here at FBC, I don't think I've ever preached a topical sermon on money in almost 17 years. So you all are privileged to hear my first topical sermon on money. Now, you may wonder, why have I not done that? Maybe it was just pride on my part; I didn't want to seem like one of those TV preachers that was, you know, oh, you got to grab your wallet as soon as you come into church, and it's like such a cliché. But the fact of the matter is, the more I've studied and looked at scriptures teaching on this, the more I realize how important and vital this topic is.

Now, if you are going to gather around yourself today some financial experts from history to help you plan for retirement or help you invest soundly, who would you choose?  I love reading about history about our country. I like reading about some of the great figures from the past. So, I've got a couple of guys I have in mind. Like I wouldn't mind getting some financial planning from Andrew Carnegie, who was a Scottish immigrant, came over penniless, and by the end of his life was, I think, the wealthiest man on Earth, and was a meticulous and careful investor. Or how about John D. Rockefeller, we could do that. How he saw a small business opportunity in petroleum and eventually grew to dominate 90% of the petroleum industry in the US, I wonder what that would be worth today, 90%. But he was a multi, multi-multi-millionaire billionaire, and he would be a good advice giver. How about in our day and age, Warren Buffet, if you wanted a worldly financial planning, here's a guy that started very, very small, and now he's worth, just through sound investing, 72 billion dollars.

But I would commend someone else to you for retirement planning, how about Jesus Christ? All of those men are just going to give you worldly advice. I want to hear from Jesus, I would commend him to you because I think he's the greatest investment planner that has ever lived, and I think some of the words that we're going to study today are going to bring us wisdom in ways that I think we really need it. Kyle already hinted at this, but there's an incredible amount of teaching on money in the New Testament, and really indeed throughout the Bible. We need to face all of Jesus's teachings on this topic, fully 15% of his recorded words are about money. As a matter of fact, he talked more about money than he did about heaven and hell combined. As you heard, a third of the parables are about money, and the reason that he said so much about money is that it's an incredible indicator of the health of your soul. And what you do with your money is a very, very clear indicator of what's going on in your heart, just as your words are. You know a record of your words out of the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks, so also out of the fullness of the heart, the wallet spends. And so if we had a full record of your words and a record of how you spend your money or what you do with your money, well we would know the condition of your soul.

And so we're really getting right away to the issue of salvation. Has God done a saving work in your life, have you actually been moved from darkness to light? Have you actually been rescued from death and brought over into eternal life? You remember the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector, unscrupulous tax collector who had been defrauding people for many years, and how Jesus invited himself over for dinner, what a great story that is. And he was there, and at some point, the Lord sovereignly moved in grace on Zacchaeus's heart, and "Zacchaeus stood up and said, 'Look, Lord. Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor. And if I have cheated anyone out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.' Jesus said to him, 'Today, salvation has come to this house. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.'" Now, this is a stunning moment in reference to the topic we're looking at today. Notice that Jesus didn't merely say, "Hey, you know, that's a good idea. I want to commend that kind of initiative." No, it's like, "This is how I know that Salvation has come. That you, you greedy tax collector has been defrauding people for years, is finally set free from that, and been delivered."

Or how about the case of the rich young ruler who comes to Jesus? You remember that one? And he comes and says, "Good teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?" He said, "Why do you ask me about what is good? No one is good, but God alone. If you want to eternal life, then keep the commandments." And the man assured Jesus that He had perfectly kept all of God's commands his entire life, including Honor your father and mother. I find that interesting. I would like to have gone and talked to the rich young ruler's parents and see - was he the perfect son? But he was certainly, he kept all of God's commands. And then "Jesus said, 'One thing you lack. If you want to be perfect then sell all your possessions and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.'" And you remember how the rich young ruler went away sad, because he had great wealth and he could not give up his money. Money had such a grip on his heart.

Now, we do not say in Christian ministry that everyone needs to sell everything they have and give to the poor or they won't go to heaven, but Jesus identified fundamentally a God that was enthroned in that rich young ruler's life. He's able to search with those eyes of blazing fire and know what's going on in people's hearts, and he needed to give it up, and no one can enthrone the true and living God without first dethroning the false gods. And money is one of the great false gods there is in our age. And we need to have that, or is it's just going to say, later in the text we're looking at today, "No one can serve two masters." You cannot serve both God and money. So the basic principle here is there's a powerful relationship, a powerful connection between our true spiritual condition and our attitude and actions concerning money and possessions.

Or think about Jesus, the one time he was sitting and watching all of the people giving their money at the offerings and along comes this poor widow who puts in her two little copper coins, and Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this woman has put in more than everyone else. All the others gave out of their abundance, but she gave the all that she had to live on." Now, can you imagine your standard worldly wise financial planner, right at her elbow, she's about to give those two copper coins and doing everything they can to stop her from doing it? It's not wise, they would say. It's foolish for you, but in Jesus's mind, she gave more than anyone else. What that shows me also is that Judgment Day is going to be a day of big surprises, a day in which we'll find out who the true heroes were. And maybe not the upfront people, the people that are the most famous, but this widow and her two copper coins represents the hidden servants of God that God is going to reward more highly than anyone that ever lived. But again, the issue of money.

And then the parable about the Rich Fool, and this one really sends chills down our backs, you know this parable that Jesus told in Luke 12, "The ground of a certain rich man produced an abundant harvest... " I love that. You know, what did he do? Nothing, but his ground that he happened to own made him a wealthy man. "He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store all this abundant crop that's come in, this amazing harvest. I know what I'll do, I'll tear down my barns and build bigger barns, and then I will store up all of these things and I'll say to my soul, Soul, you have plenty of things for years to come. Eat, drink and be merry.'" And then this terrible word comes to him from God; "God said to him, 'You fool. This very night, your soul will be required from you,'" now meditate on that word, required. That is a summons from the King, and when that summons come, you cannot refuse. "'Then who will get all that you have stored up for yourself?'" And then Jesus commented on the parable saying, "This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself, but has not been rich toward God."

The question I want to ask here in our American setting is, how many of us are living essentially like this rich fool? How many of us are building bigger barns to store up the ever-increasing resources that are flowing in, what does it mean for us to build bigger barns, what does that look like? But what does it mean to store up for ourselves things for years to come? And even more importantly, what does it mean to be rich toward God? That's what I want to know from this text that we're looking at today, I want to know what does it mean to be rich toward God. I yearn for the people of First Baptist Church for all of you who hear me, to be rich toward God and so proven to be so on Judgment Day. I want you to invest in eternity.

So that brings us to Matthew 6:19-24. The text there says this, "Do not store for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. If your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness? No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other or will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." So that's the text we're looking at today.

Let's get a little bit of context. This is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, that Jesus taught one day, Matthew 5-7. In chapter 6, I think a unifying theme of Matthew 6, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount is motivation. What moves you to do what you do? And so in verses 1-21, he goes through people who give to the needy, but do it in such an ostentatious way that they get rewarded immediately by praise and honor; they announce with trumpets what they're doing. Or those that pray so conspicuously that they get immediately rewarded for what they do because everyone honors their piety, or people that fast in such a dramatic way that everyone honors them, immediately, he's getting right at their motivation, what motivates you toward a life of piety? He's talking about motivation, but then in verses 19-34, what motivates your physical life, is it a desire for wealth and anxiety over basic needs? Are you concerned about food, clothing, and shelter? And you're worrying about it and you think about it all the time. What motivates your life?

Now, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ's constant concern is talking about the Kingdom of Heaven, what life is like, and specifically our relationship to the king. That we would understand how loving our Heavenly Father is and how able he is to provide for us, he wants us in a right relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Now, He zeroes in here on this issue of storing up treasure. Look again at verses 19-21, He first states it negatively, "Do not store up treasures on earth." And then he turns around and does state it positively, "But, do store up treasure in Heaven." The underlying assumption here is you're going to be storing up treasure somewhere. One place or another, you're going to be storing it up. I think it's the same logic at the end of the Sermon on the Mount where he says, "Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock." And then the house gets tested, but it survives. And then, "…everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice, like a foolish man who builds his house on the sand…" But the implication is both are going to be building, you're going to be building something. Every day you build something, the question is, what's the foundation, are you building on the rock? Is what you're building going to survive, or is it going to crash when the judgment comes? Frankly, then the idea here is the same. You're going to be storing up. Everyone stores up. Non-Christians store up, they just store up wrath for the day of Judgment, but we, we are called on to store up wisely.

And isn't it beautiful that Jesus lowers Himself to our level, and instead of just commanding us, He reasons with us why we should store up treasure in heaven. And that is the impermanence of earthly treasure. Verse 19, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." So he's reasoning with us. He said, "You've seen the way it is in this world. You've seen what can happen to material possessions, what can happen to the money and what can happen to the things that money can buy. They're impermanent, you can't count on them. They're going to be taken from you, they're going to be destroyed in some way." So moth and rust represents the inherent weakness of things in this corruptible world, things never look better than the day you bought them. And then they begin to degenerate immediately after that. You know what I'm talking about. It's just not as shiny, it's not as appealing, and so it's susceptible to decay; everything is that way, all the physical things. And then there's the issue of thieves, that's the inherent vulnerability of your possessions, that they can be stolen from you, another human being, an invading army can come in. A clever burglar can come in. A swindler can come. It could be stolen from you. Greatest thief, of course is death, all of us knows that we're giving it all up at death, that we will not have it with us at that point, we came into the world as Job said, naked, and we will leave the world naked.

Randy Alcorn, who's written very helpfully on the topic of money, possessions and eternity, has this one slogan that stuck with me for years. "You can't take it with you, but you can send it on ahead." I mean, if there's one slogan that sums up this whole sermon, that's it. "You can't take it with you, but you can send it on ahead." How do you do that? By faithfully investing in God's work, by giving to the needs of poor and needy people, either spiritually poor and needy, because they haven't heard of the gospel, or materially poor and needy. Giving the needs of the church, you'll send it ahead. Everything given by faith for the glory of God cheerfully will be waiting for you on Judgment Day and will make you rich for all eternity. That's the principle that we've got here, do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth, but rather, store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, because it's permanent. Moth and rust do not destroy in heaven, there's no decay in heaven, and there are no enemies in Heaven, there are no thieves in Heaven, there are no covetous people in heaven, everyone will be perfectly happy with their own hoard [chuckle] and no one's going to want yours or going to take it from you, they'll be happy you had it. Listen to last week's sermon, you'll understand. They will rejoice that you have the joy of being so wealthy in heaven, and nothing will steal it from you.

Well, the great issue here is in verse 21, the state of your heart. What's really going on in your heart? For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. What dominates your thinking? What dominates your heart? What do you hope for as you look ahead, what are your hopes based on? What do you yearn for? What makes you happy as you look ahead? Now, here we come to the issue of the basic idea of biblical rewards, both earthly and heavenly. "Do not live for earthly rewards," he said, "Don't set your hope on those kinds of things, don't look to the luxuries that money can buy."

Recently, I saw a photo of Rafael Nadal who was playing in the French Open, and he had a watch on it that they, a watch on his wrist that they said was worth three quarters of a million dollars. I thought, Oh my goodness, so I was intrigued.  Not ever thinking I'd own such a watch - imagine how that would drive you crazy? How you couldn't sleep at night? Where is it? Is it okay? You know, I mean, well that's worrisome. But then I found out, hey, that's just the beginning. There actually is a watch made by hand, that's the most expensive mechanical watch in the world, expensive because, not because it's diamond-encrusted but because of its intrinsic value. As a time keeper, 2.5 million dollars for a mechanical watch made by a German watchmaker, takes him one full year to make it. And you got to stand in line behind other multi-billionaires of which you'd need to be one to buy a 2.5 million dollar watch.

And I'm thinking, isn't it amazing that people live for those kinds of things? But you say, "Well, that's not me." It's like, yeah, but that doesn't mean that materialism doesn't grab your heart, too even though you don't have a 2 million dollar watch. The bottom line is, we need to store up treasure for ourselves in heaven. And people say, is that appropriate? Should I be thinking like that? Should I be thinking about myself? Should I be ambitious for things for myself? Well, the text seems to imply that, yes, absolutely, you should. You should yearn to be rich, but you should just be wise about it, you should yearn to be rich in a way that you'll never lose your wealth. That's what he's talking about. Don't be a fool in yearning to be rich for yourself.

Jonathan Edwards, when he was 19 years old, made a series of resolutions, and resolution 22 is the kind that just sticks with you as you hear it and understand it. He said this, "Resolved, to endeavor to obtain for myself as much happiness in the other world as I possibly can with all the power, might, vigor and vehemence, yea, even violence I am capable of. I want to be as happy as I possibly can in the next world." That is the same thing as storing up treasure in heaven, I believe, and he says it's going to take vigor and vehemence and even violence to be maximally happy on the other side of Judgment Day, that's what he's talking about. So if living for rewards is intrinsically selfish not to be avoided, then why does Jesus talk about rewards so much? Why does he say to the persecuted people, "Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven." In Matthew 5:12, why does he talk about loving your enemies in such a way that, if you only love your friends what reward will you get? Everybody does that. Or then as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, in terms of giving to the poor and needy, don't announce it with trumpets, because if you do, other people will praise you and you'll have your reward in full. You want your reward from your heavenly Father who sees what is done in secret and will reward you. And he says it again and again, same thing with your prayer life, he sees what is done in secret and will reward you. He sees what you do with fasting and he will reward you.

So if it's wrong to yearn for rewards, then why does he talk about it so much? I think what we fear is that the sense of the rewards is kind of covetous and selfish and self-focused. But the fundamental thing is the Bible teaches again and again, God will most certainly repay. Remember in Hebrews 6:10 says, "God is not unjust; He will not forget your work and the love you have shown Him as you have helped His people and continue to help them." We just want you to keep on doing it and don't get lazy. God's not unjust, that implies that if he does not reward faithful service to his church, he has in some way violated a contract. He has promised to reward us and He will. He most certainly will. But I think the thing is, we are forgetting that he's at the center of every good thing that we do. Everything we do in service to Him is a display of his power at work in our lives, isn't it? Doesn't he say in John 3:21, "Those who live by the truth come into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they did has been done through God." So we come up to the judgment throne and say, Here are the good works that you worked in me, by your Spirit, to God be the glory.

There's nothing covetous about that or idolatrous, that's just simply taught in Revelation 20:12, that on Judgment Day, "I saw the dead great and small standing before the Great White Throne and books were open… and the dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books." So it's definitely going to happen. 1 Corinthians 4:5, "The Lord will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of men's hearts, and at that time, each will receive his praise from God." The quality of our work is going to be tested. If we build with gold, silver, costly stones, or on the other hand with wood, hay and straw, that day, Judgment Day is going to test our life's works with fire and whatever survives that will be our reward. This is coming.

Our righteous acts are in some way woven into a crown of honor that we will be delighted to wear to show our faithful service to the king. Says in 1 Peter 5:4, "When the Chief Shepherd appears, you elders who have served faithfully will receive a crown of glory that will never fade away." Now we know what happens to those crowns in Revelation 4, all the 24 elders just continually casting their crowns down before the throne. And that's their way of saying, This is mine, but I ascribe it to you. But there's nothing I have that I didn't receive. All of it is from you and goes back to you. Now, the ultimate reason why rewards are not, is not idolatrous or covetous is because the center of the reward is relational with God. If you were to say, I am setting my heart fully on something that has nothing to do with God, but it brings me pleasure, I enjoy it, I look forward to it, I want more and more of it. That's the essence of idolatry. But if you say, I'm setting my heart on God, and I want Him to be pleased with me, and I want him to give me honor and praise, and emblems of His pleasure in me, there's nothing idolatrous about that, it's purely relational between us and God.

For me, the most important words on rewards is in 1 Corinthians 4:5, which you just heard, but I will say it again. "Wait till the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness, and will expose the motives of men's hearts. Now, listen to this, at that time, each will receive his praise from God." Those three words, that's the essence of the reward we're seeking, we want praise from God, that's not praise for God, we'll be doing plenty of that in Heaven, to God, be the glory for everything. But no, that's God praising us. Or we could use commending us. Or as he says, "My Father will honor the one who serves Me." It's God honoring, God praising, God commending us for faithfully serving Him, it's taught so many places in the Bible.

There should be no sheepishness about it. We should yearn for that. I want God to be as pleased with me as he possibly can be. I want to find out what pleases my Lord and I want to do it. We want those famous words spoken over us, well done, well done, good and faithful servant, been faithful of a few things, now I'm going to put you in charge of many things. Enter into the joy of your Master. In other words, let me tell you how happy I am with how you lived your life, that's the essence of the reward. It says in Hebrews 11:6, "Without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him." So he is the reward.

Now, on the other side, we have the danger of a lost reward, and that comes through materialism. Look at verses 22 through 24, "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Now, the question we have to ask as we read the Sermon on the Mount is, is this a warning for Christians? Is this something we need to heed here should we be worried about our souls? Well understand the Sermon on the Mount was given to the disciples who gathered around him and sat down and they'd professed themselves to be followers of Christ. And he from the very beginning said, "Blessed are the spiritual beggars for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He's talking to believers. And he is warning us concerning a great danger.

Now, I've said before in other sermons, and it stuck with me and it's helpful, there are two great dangers that face every human being, and they're infinitely unequal.  The greatest danger that any human being faces is that they will lose their soul on Judgment Day, what would it profit someone to gain the whole world and forfeit their soul, that's the greatest danger any of us faces. The only way to escape that is by simple repentance and faith in Christ, not by what you do with your money. Not by buying your way into Heaven; you cannot use your money to pay for sins, but by knowing that you're a sinner and knowing that you have come to Christ, trusting in Him and Him alone and receiving forgiveness of sins, that removes the greatest single danger there is to any human being.

But the second great danger, and this is for Christians, is that you will waste your life. That you will waste yourselves, you'll waste your time and your energy and your money on things that just don't matter, they have no eternal consequence. And so he is warning us here. He's warning us that materialism, a yearning for material things, chokes out the seed, making it unfruitful. The thorns grow up, and they suck water and nutrients from the soil and deprive the good seed of bearing fruit, and they block the good seed from seeing light. And the thing dies. That's a danger, and so we have to be warned about the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth.

And so He zeroes in on your eyes and he says, "The eye is the lamp of the body." Now, why does he focus on the eyes? He says, If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. "The eye is the lamp of the body." And researchers tell us that we get 70% of our information about the surrounding world from our eyesight. But He's using a metaphor here, He's saying, if you see things as they really are by faith, if you see the world as it really is, if your eye is single. What is it you will be seeking first above anything else, He's going to tell you in a few verses, "Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness." Your eye is single, you're like an Olympic Archer, and you're zeroed in on the bull's eye, and you know what you're here for, you know what your life is for. And your eye is single. And if your eye is single, your whole body, your whole life will be radiated with the glory of God. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. You're seeing things wrongly.

And the core issue here, as we said, is the heart: either you "will hate the one and love the other." Be devoted to the one and despise the other. If you allow materialism to creep into your heart, you'll someday abandon your first love, you won't love Jesus, you won't love His kingdom, you'll start living for money, you'll start living for possessions; that will be your life. God then makes a claim on your entire life, all your resources, all your time, and all your money, and because we love the master, this service is not burdensome to us. Ultimately both God and money force a choice, you can't serve us both, you have to make a decision, we were made to be servants, you're going to serve someone. You can't say, I'm going to serve no one, I'm going to serve myself. Well, you've been deceived. Human beings were created to be servants. You're either going to serve God or you're going to serve Satan. You're either going to serve God, or you're going to serve money or sin. You've got to make a choice.

So what application can we take from this? Well, first and foremost, look to your soul. What do your spending habits say about the state of your soul? I think it's right for some of us to be alarmed at this teaching, to be alarmed that I don't want to be the Rich Fool; I don't want to be told by God that I lived my life for money. My whole life, everything was lived for the wrong things. And then he speaks down those terrifying words, "You fool, this very night, your life will be required from you," I don't want to be a fool. So have you been converted? Is there fruit in your life concerning even a reference to your money, how you're spending your money, is there evidence of fruit that you have been converted?

Second of all, just if you're already a Christian, you know you're a believer, but you want to grow in this area, how are you investing your money, what are you doing actually with your money? Now, many of us may not consider ourselves wealthy, you need to get out more, dear friends; let me tell you two different ways that you can get out. Go on submission trips. Go to Haiti, go to Africa, go to Asia, meet the Christian brothers and sisters there. Alright, and then just do some reading, 20 centuries of church history. I would have to say I'm addressing right now among the top one percentile of wealthiest Christians that have ever walked the face of the earth. And you may say, well, that can't be true, just do the research, you'll find out what kind of condition our brothers and sisters live in around the world. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with being wealthy, we just need to be warned; 1 Timothy 6, warns rich people, we need to be warned how we're investing our money. Just because you have a nice home doesn't mean you're materialistic, but it might mean that you're materialistic. Just because you drive a nice car or you yearn to get a better car, doesn't mean you're covetous or idolatrous, but it might. You can't excuse yourself from the inquiry, look at your heart, is there evidence of materialism there, What do you set your heart on? What are you living for? What gives you hope for the future?

And let me just start right here where I think it's reasonable to start, what are your giving patterns here to First Baptist Church? I can tell you with a clear conscience, I have never known anything about any specific member, and their giving patterns at FBC, and I hope I never will, unless they tell me, but don't tell me unless you want to. But I don't know what the book show I don't know what you give. I can look in the eye and say, I don't know. But I believe based on research done in general in churches - and just research out there - there is probably a percentage of you that never give anything at all. And if you never give anything at all, I'm just speaking a word of concern and warning to you, I wonder how it can be that you never give anything at all and you not be idolatrous or covetous, that in some way money has seize your heart. But let's just start there. Is there any pattern of, a possible pattern of, idolatry as shown by what you give to First Baptist Church?

You may ask, Well, what guidelines because I want to increase my giving from what it was to something more, and people quickly soon ask about the issue of the tithe. Well should I tithe? Well tithe is an old English word that means a 10th; we don't use it much, but at this point, it's in Christian parlance, just has to a tithes and offering a 10th. Can I start there? Well, I think that's a good, actually a very good, place to start if you were giving zero before then let's start at a tithe. Now, Randy Alcorn, and one of my favorite statements from the book says, “The tithe is the training wheels of Christian giving.” Some of you may know I ride a bike for exercise, I enjoy doing that. How would you feel if you saw me and my bike had training wheels? Well, would you come up and talk to me about that? Would you find that interesting? Would you find it disturbing?  How long you've been riding now, Andy? How is that going for you, can I help with that? I'd be willing to run alongside you for a little while and help you. Here's how the logic goes.

Every spiritual practice of the old covenant is enhanced and improved in the new covenant, so if they're giving a tithe in the old, it is not appropriate for us to say, free from the law, happy condition, I can give less than they gave in the Old Covenant. That's not the way to go. Instead, it's like, What can God's grace do in my heart to so completely free me from materialism that I give more and more than I've ever given before. So that's the question you have to ask. Do you sacrifice? Do you defer pleasure so you can give. Do you say, Okay, here are some things we like to do, they cost this amount of money, for a time, we're not going to do those things, take that money and we're going to give it to the church or give it to a Christian ministry. That's what we want to do.

Is there a pattern of sacrifice in your life? Probably no chapters get as practical on how to give as a Christian than 2 Corinthians 8, 9, I would commend those two chapters, and those two chapters, just give some principles, like give consistently. Actually, in 1 Corinthians 16, it says, "Set aside something in the first day of the week." And some ask, “Do I have to give every week?”  I would commend it to you, I'd commend weekly giving to you, just like I'd commend daily prayer, would you be able to cluster all your weeks prayers in one day and say, got it, done. No, it's a daily discipline we take in the word of God daily, I think in the same way giving can and should be a weekly discipline. Now, you may disagree and you can give monthly, that's fine, but there's just a regular pattern of giving and it's a discipline, it's something you just know it's God's money and give by faith as unto the Lord. It says in 2 Corinthians 8:5, "[the Macedonians] didn't give as we expected, but they gave themselves first to God and then to us as the Lord led." So by faith, give yourself to God and say, What do you want me to do? How do you want me to give?

Thirdly, give generously and sacrificially, give in such a way that it does in fact pinch the way you live. Again, 2 Corinthians 8, the brothers in Macedonia gave far beyond their ability to give, it was just an amazing display out of their poverty it weld up into generosity. And then fourthly, give cheerfully. Friend, can I just tell you, if you can't give it cheerfully, don't give it. But would you please give? And would you please give cheerfully. There's no point in giving if you don't give cheerfully, what are you saying when you'd be grudging God, this money, well, I guess you need the money God, and then you're so grumpy and irritable about it. Do you honestly realize what's happening, you are entrusting money to God, that he would go do something with it in the kingdom, and he's a very good manager of money, and he is keeping a record of what you have now by faith, generously given, cheerfully. And you'll see it again on the other side of Judgment Day. What's to complain about? Be cheerful, God loves a cheerful giver. Because he is a cheerful giver.

Start with the FBC budget. Alright, the budget is the annual.  Basically it's - I love what Ryan says - its church's ministry plan in dollars and cents. So what we spend our money on as a church is on ministry things, now some of them are practical, like AC on a Sunday morning, thank God for that. Cost money, but they're just physical things, but then there are other things in terms of outreach and missions that we do. So First Baptist Church's budget over the last five to six years has been essentially flat. What do I mean by that? It hasn't grown. Do you realize that when it doesn't grow and things like air conditioning, electricity do go up, which they go up every year, you're basically then going back to ministry commitments and reducing the giving in those areas. I would say in the Triangle region, Research Triangle Park area, and all this Triangle region, I think the population is going up, I think it is a lot. So that means healthy churches should see more and more people attending and have more and more money to spend on the Lord's work, so I don't want to keep seeing our budget flat year after year after year. Let's challenge ourselves, let's ask the Lord to enable us to make more money and give more money than ever before, let's see how He'll bless our budget, so start with the budget. Then move to other specific funds like this is the Lord's supper.

And so we have the Deacon Benevolence Fund, what do we do with the Deacon Benevolence Fund what we give to needy people first and foremost in the church, and then secondly in the community. We recently had a number of difficult situations financially in which people have had needs, and the Deacon Benevolence Fund has been there to meet the needs, that is a very quick way to give to widows and to other needs going on in the church, and we have those needs. So if you're not prepared this morning to give to the Deacon Benevolence Fund. That's fine, I understand. But we have it every time we have the Lord's Supper, you can so plan ahead say, “Oh Lord's Supper is coming up,” Deacon Benevolence Fund and you can give any time to the Deacon Benevolence Fund, doesn't have to be just the Lord's supper.

Then there's the issue of missions, you know, every Christmas we give to the Lottie Moon Christmas offering, and we have done very well over the years. We're in the top, I think, hundred churches in the Southern Baptist Convention - not percentage-wise. We're in the top hundred, which is pretty good for a church our size, but understand this, the amount we give $130,000 to Lottie Moon would not support even I think one of our units on the field, so we really are counting on other churches. So I don't think we should strain our shoulders patting ourselves on the back that we give $130,000. I'm grateful for the generosity. But I know that we could give more if we sacrifice more.

And then there's the issue of the Great Commission Fund. Many of you know about it. Many of you don't. In a few moments, we're going to commission, some missionary - did you get my text? Okay, thank you. I'm one of them, I forget. We've got to talk about it. So we're going out and Daniel just came back. The Great Commission Fund helps pay for these mission trips. You may not be able to go on a mission trip but you can support others. Now, what happened was the Great Commission Fund started with some incredibly generous one-time gifts, and we've been kind of living off that for a while, but the number is just going down, money out is greater than money in. That's good because it means there are a lot of people wanting to serve, but we need more money. So Walter Lee at our business meetings, our members meetings, has said he's put a challenge in front of the church. Now, a lot of people don't attend members meeting, so I'm taking that because I think it's great - and I'm giving it to you guys now. It's the rule of 20s, you ready for this? If 20% of the membership of FBC gave $20 a week or a month... Let's go with week $20 - maybe I say month - $20 a month for the entire year, it would generate $20,000, that would be a sufficient increase in what the GCF has to give. Right now, the giving tends to cluster on summer trips and all that kind of thing, and then dissipates. Wouldn't it be awesome if just January, February, March, April, May, the GCF is just real high and people are just generously through discipline giving to it. I would commend that to you.

Then, beyond FBC, there are so many parachurch ministries and mission agencies like Wycliffe and YOM and Cru, and Campus Outreach, and they're doing all kinds of good works, whatever you want to do, invest in it. If you're interested in the persecuted church, give to the Voice of the Martyrs, if you're interested in famine or disaster relief, give to that. Randy Alcorn gives some good principles and how to research some of these companies and how to give wisely, but just give. Bottom line, dear brothers and sisters, like Paul says in Philippians 4, "Not that I'm looking for the gift, but I'm looking for what may be credited to your account." I want you to be rich on Judgment Day. That's why I preach this sermon.

So let's close in prayer and we'll go into the Lord's Supper. Father we thank you for the time we've had to study concerning finances, tithes and offerings and generosity. Lord I pray that you would make us a generous people help each one of us to look and say, Is there a principle of sacrifice in my life financially oh God deliver us from the scourge of materialism and covetousness and idolatry. Help us instead to live for you and to be generous in Jesus name, Amen.

Recently, a statement that Jesus made that I've thought about for years, but it hadn't hit me in quite as powerful a way.  I think actually one of the most surprising things that Jesus ever said, if you think about it one way, He said, "Behold I am sending you out like sheep among wolves."  Just think about that.  That Jesus, the loving, Good Shepherd, would send us out surrounded by foes way too strong for us, with sharp teeth and that we are in and of ourselves, completely defenseless.  They're way too powerful and too strong for us and He's immersing us in an ocean of enemies.  "Behold, I am sending out like sheep among wolves."  Now, why would our loving Good Shepherd to that?  As I have pondered that, it relates very much to what I am about to preach on, which is the sovereign power that Jesus Christ possesses, in this world even, to protect His sheep, to care for them, to nurture them, feed them, enable them, to thrive in a hostile environment.  He is so confident in the power of His throne over all things, that He sends us out “like sheep among wolves.”  And He knows that we will not be devoured, that nothing that Satan can devise against us will do us any ultimate harm.  But in the end, all things will tend toward our salvation.  Isn't that a marvelous thing.

Paul Prays for Knowledge

We're looking this morning at Ephesians 1 and you heard what Adam just read.  We're in the section in which the apostle Paul is praying for the Ephesian Christians.  We're learning by that as we're going section by section through that prayer, many things.  He is praying the Ephesian Christians and we're learning doctrine from what he prays and how he explains his prayer live. Now we saw last time, Paul prays for knowledge. As Andy highlighted, and I mentioned last week, he does not pray there specifically that they would have power, we're going to talk a lot about power today.  It's a prayer for knowledge, spiritual knowledge.  In verse 17, he prays that “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a Spirit,” capital “s” I think, “a Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.”  That we would know God better, infinitely better as a result of  the ministry of the Holy Spirit. That He would continue to teach God to us.  Beyond that, in the next sermon, we saw three other things that he prays, that is the primary thing that he prays.  In verse 18, "what is the hope to which He has called you."  Also, in verse 18, "what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints."  In verse 19, "what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe."  So, hope, riches and power, he prays that they would know them, that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened, concerning these things and that they would have a sense of all of them.

Focus: The Power of God on Display in Christ

Now we're going to focus this morning on power in particular, because Paul picks up on the third of those three prayer requests and goes on from there to talk more about the power of God at work in the Christian life.  That's the focus, the power of God on display in the person of Christ.  Christ has an analogy to the power He displays toward Christians.  Look at verses 19 through 21, “the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come.”  In other words, the same power of Almighty God, that He used in raising Jesus from the dead and moving Him through the heavenly realms to sit at God's right hand in heaven, or above the heavenly realms.  That same power is at work in you Christians, in all of you Christians, guaranteeing you final salvation.  How encouraging is that? 

Paul is going to complete his train of thought in the next chapter.  Sometimes the chapter divisions aren't helpful, but there is just too much to handle in any one sermon, so for me they're very helpful.  He's going to complete the thought in the next chapter.  In Ephesians 2:1-6, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live."  He goes on from there to describe the deadness, spiritual deadness, “but God, being rich in power and mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions.  It is by grace you have been saved,” verse 6, “and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”  In other words, just as Christ was physically dead, so you were spiritually dead. And just as God raised Christ physically up from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, so God has raised you spiritually from the dead and seated you with Christ in the heavenly realms.  That's the analogy being set up. 

Now, the key to this whole concept is the idea of our spiritual union with Christ by faith.  If you're a genuine believer in Christ, you have been made, in a mysterious way, one with Christ.  The doctrine of our union with Christ is fundamental to this whole thing.  So, big picture, is that Paul is praying for assurance, that’s what he’s doing.  He's praying for the Christians to have assurance of their salvation, their final salvation.  Borrowing a phrase from another epistle, he is praying that they would be absolutely certain that “He (God) who began a good work in them would carry it on to completion, until the day of Christ Jesus.”  Now, that sense of confidence, that sense of total assurance of salvation is indispensable to the healthy Christian life, as something we need.  We need a sense of that assurance.  Paul's prayer definitely gives that to us as we understand it's doctrines.

God’s Power only Discerned by Faith

Now, God's power in this matter can only be discerned by faith.  An unbeliever can't discern this power.  It is nothing that an unbeliever can see.  It's something that only comes by faith and I would say that the more developed you are in your faith, the more you will see it as well.  Look again at verse 17 and 18, he says, "I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”  In verse 18, he prays also, “that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened in order that you may know.”  He goes on from there.  So, he's talking about wisdom and revelation through the Holy Spirit.  He's talking about the eyes of the heart.  Last week, we talked about that.  I believe that the eyes of the heart equals faith.  By faith, we see invisible things, that’s the eyes of the heart, and so  I argued that last week.  By faith we will perceive this power.  Without faith you won't see it.  The stronger and more energetic your faith is, the more developed your faith is, the more you're going to see this power. 

The focus of all of this is the power God has already exerted on you as a Christian, but it also implies power He's going to continue to exert toward you to finish your salvation. So, both of them are uploaded here for us.  What has God already done, oh Christian, man or woman, boy or girl?  What has God already done, what miracle has He already worked in your soul?  You would know that and have a sense of that and you would have confidence that it’s going to continue right to the end. 

Paul goes step by step, looking at Christ's exaltation.  We get a sense of going from step to step to step, ever higher.  So, first God raised Christ from the dead, physically.  Second, God ascended Christ, raised Him up through the heavenly realms to sit with Him at His right hand.  Thirdly, He subjected all powers to Christ. And then fourthly, He made Him head over everything for the Church.  So there’s a sense of ascending levels of Christ's exaltation here, ever higher.  We're going to trace those out.

Christ’s Resurrection: A Clear Demonstration of God’s Power

The first display of God's power is Christ raised physically from the dead, verses 19 and 20.  Christ's resurrection from the dead is a clear display of the power of God.  I remember I used to speak at conferences and they would always give me the "after lunch slot."  Have you ever gone to a conference and gone to the 2:00 slot after lunch?  That's a killer!  I remember one time I said to the people, "I'm not going to fight it.  I'm just going to speak in a very low, kind of monotone voice.  I might just kinda walk back and forth in a little slow pendular motion.  I mean, why fight it?"  Anyway, cold people are easier to preach to than hot people, I think. They're very urgent and eager and looking forward to the sermon being over, because they're freezing, but they're alert.  Hot people are very sleepy.  So, my strategy is that I'm going to modulate my voice, I'm going to use dramatic pauses, and then I'm going to come at you a little bit to keep it going.  You can also fan yourself with the bulletin, whatever is necessary to help you.

Alright, the fundamental Gospel that Paul preached to the Ephesians is based on the historical fact of Christ's resurrection.  That's Christ resurrected, that's what they preached.  Without that, there's no Gospel.  So, that’s the historical fact of Christ's resurrection from the dead is the foundation of everything he is saying here.  In verse 19 and 20 of the KJV, “according to the working of His mighty power which He rot in Christ when He raised Him in the dead.”  Now, if God can raise Jesus from the dead physically, His power is sufficient for your complete salvation.  That's the logic. 

Death: An Awesomely Powerful Enemy

Now, death as we know is an awesomely powerful enemy.  Death was, before Christ, an undefeated enemy.  No one had ever triumphed over the grave.  Jesus died on the cross, His body was taken down off the cross, it was wrapped up in linen cloths with some sticky aromatic resins, about 75 pounds worth, by Joseph and by Nicodemus, and his body was laid a cave that was carved out of a rock, a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid.  His dead body was laid there and a big stone was rolled in front of the entrance of the tomb.  He laid there dead, cold, lifeless through the rest of that day and through the next day.  His heart was still, it did not beat.  His lungs did not fill with air.  His muscles did not move.  There was no brain activity at all.  He was dead.  No power on earth could have raised Jesus from the dead.  There is no human power or skill, even today, even after two millennia of scientific research, medical research, there is no power greater than death.  No Greek physician could have come in there with a combination of potions or balms or techniques or therapies that would have made any difference at all.  He was dead.  Death, an enemy far beyond human power.  We then, must see in understanding the nature of death and we have experiences with it perhaps every day, especially in the animal world.  We probably see a dead animal every day and we know that when the spirit has left the animal, when the life, we’ll put it that way, has left the animal, it never lives again.  So it's true of humans, as well.  As the beast dies, so we die and we don't live again.  We know that.  We have experience with that. But, the power of God is seen immediately in Jesus' condition.  It comes through the prophecy made in Psalm 16 that He would not see decay.  If you know anything at all about what happens to the body as soon as the immune system is done, the microbes take over.  That was well known back then.  They wouldn't have known about microbes but they sure knew about odor after four days because Martha said, "By now there's going to be a bad odor because He's been dead now for four days."  That begins immediately the decay process.  But, God would not permit it in the case of Jesus.  So, Peter preached Psalm 16 at the resurrection, saying, "Seeing what was ahead,” David who wrote Psalm 16, “spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that He was not abandoned to the grave nor did His body see decay."  That's the power of God.  But then suddenly, on the third day, something happened that changed all of human history.  Jesus' dead body was miraculously transformed into an eternal mystery, something that the New Testament calls a "resurrection body."  This was something that had never existed before in redemptive history, and I believe that there is no other but Jesus'.  It's described for us as we've seen recently in 1 Corinthians 15.  Ultimately with this amazing phrase, “it is raised a spiritual body.”  “Spiritual body,” and that’s a mystery we don't fully understand.  But the key is that it is different than Lazarus and it's different than Jairus' 12 year old daughter, or any of the resuscitations that happen in the Bible, in this one issue, Romans 6:9, we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again.  Death no longer has mastery over Him.  That's a resurrection body.  He cannot die again.

So, Jesus, oh, I don't know, sat up in the tomb?  I picture Him passing through the linen cloths and the aromatic resins, all that sticky stuff,  and just passing through.  Picture Him based on John 20, taking off the head cloth and folding it up by itself separately.  Then in some way, passing right through the wall of the tomb.  I don't know how this happens but Jesus can do amazing things in that resurrection body.  He goes right through the tomb.  The angel comes later and moves the stone so they can get in and sees that He's gone, but He didn't need to be let out.  I've often thought of Him knocking, saying, "Angel, let me out please."  That did not happen.  He's already gone.  Just like He raised up through the grave clothes, He's gone through the walls.  He can do that.  It's a mystery we don't fully understand.  But, the key that you need to understand is that He can never die again.  That's a resurrection body.  And that, dear friends, is a supernatural display of the power of God, and that same power is at work in you, already at work in you. 

Power of Christ’s Resurrection At Work in Your Life

The same power that raised Christ from the dead physically has already been at work in your life, but God wasn't done exalting Jesus Christ.  He had a higher exaltation planned for Jesus than mere resurrection.  Look again at verses 19 through 21, “according to the working of His mighty power which he wrought in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principalities and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this world but also in the one to come.” So, God also put His awesome power on display by what happened to Christ after His resurrection from the dead. 

 The Ascension of Christ

Now, the resurrection from the dead proclaims, “Christ lives, and He lives forever.”  The exaltation of Christ to the right hand of God, proclaims Christ reigns and He reigns forever.  And so, we have the ascension of Christ.  After Christ's resurrection, He spent 40 days with His disciples, and with the apostles, teaching them many things about the Kingdom of God, establishing their knowledge of what we call the Old Testament, the Scriptures, as they testify to Jesus.  And after that 40 days was over, He led them to a very high mountain, He led them to the Mount of Olives and at that moment, all of them were there, and suddenly, Jesus was taken up before their very eyes and He moved up off of the surface of the Earth.  He went up higher and higher until at last, a cloud hid Him from their sight. But that was not the end of His infinite journey at all, actually.  It says in Hebrews 4:14, "Therefore, since we have a great High Priest who has gone through the heavens,"  not gone “to” the heavens, gone “through” the heavens, passed through them.  Now, scripture reveals that there are three heavens.  There's the sky, the first heaven, blue sky and birds of the air fly through it.  Then there's outer space where the sun, the moon and the stars are.  Then there's, what we would generally call, Heaven where spirit beings are, angels, departed saints, etc. 

The Session of Christ

But, scripture reveals that Jesus has gone above all that, above all created realms, above all orders of creation, infinitely above all of that.  Why? Because Psalms 8:1 says, "Oh Lord, Our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth.  You have set Your glory above the heavens."  Again, in Hebrews 7:26 it says, "Such a High Priest meets our need, One who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens."  So, there our Great High Priest has offered His own blood for us right before the throne of Almighty God and Christ is infinitely above all powers in the heavenly realms as is His appropriate status as the Only Begotten Son of God.  He goes through the heavenly realms and then He sits at the right hand of God.  It's called the Session of Christ.  He sits down.  The right hand is a place of access to God.  It's a place of honor and it's a place of power, of influence.  So he has access to Almighty God, to God the Father, He is honored by God at His right hand and He has complete access to the Father at any time, all the time.  And to sit in the presence of Almighty God makes Him coequal with Him.  Angels are falling on their faces or standing ready to serve like slaves but Jesus sits in His presence as a coequal at the right hand of God.  Also, the sitting of Christ pictures the completion of His priestly ministry, His atoning work is done.  Hebrews 10 says, "Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties.  Again and again he offers the same sacrifices which can never take away sin.  But when this priest had offered for all  time, one sacrifice for sin, He sat down at the right hand of God and by one sacrifice, He has made perfect forever, those who are being made holy." So the sitting of Christ at the right hand of God shows the completion of His atoning work on the cross.  Now, He's not done with His intercessory work, but He's done with His atoning work.

 Now, this very thing was predicted in Psalm 110, verses 1-2 where the Lord speaking through David by the Spirit said, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'"  Then in verse 2 of that Psalm, "The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion.  You will rule in the midst of your enemies."   Isn't that powerful?  So, that was predicted a thousand years before Jesus was born, "Sit at My right hand."  But then, now it's a fact.  In verse 20, "God raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms."  It's done.  He is seated there.  Again, you can only see this by faith.  Only by faith will you know that Jesus is seated at the right hand of Almighty God.  Again Hebrews 1:3 says the same thing, "After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven."  Many verses teach this.

The Seating of Christ at God’s Right Hand: A Display of God’s Power

Now, the seating of Christ at God's right hand is a display of God's power.  Christ was as low as you can get.  He was despised, rejected, hated and killed as a criminal, dead in the tomb.  God raised that One up to the highest place there is in the universe.  That's what He's saying.  Philippians 2:9, "Therefore God, exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."

Implications for Christians

So, what are the implications for us?  That One up there, the One that’s seated at the right hand of Almighty God, He is our Savior.  He is the lover of our soul.  He is our brother.  That's who He is.  We have the ultimate friend in the ultimate high place.  Just like when you have a friend in a high place, you expect them to kind of "rig" some things for you?  Help you out a little bit?  Oh, He's doing more than that.  We're going to talk about this, but He is in the ultimate high place to help us.  Not only that, His exaltation is our exaltation.  That's where we find our honor.  Not in anything the world can do.  My honor is that I'm seated with Christ at the right hand of God.  That's my honor and yours too.  What Olympic Gold Medal or what certificate or what degree from university, what could equal that?  None, nothing.  Now all of this is because of our union to Christ.  It's not independent or not like Satan trying to usurp a throne.  No no no, it's because we are united with Christ.  It's in Him, completely.  Look again over at Ephesians 2:6, "God raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ."  That's three times in one verse, lest you miss sit.  It's only because of our union with Christ that this exaltation has come to us sinners.  That's it.  Also, there are warlike implications here too.  What do I mean by that?  Christ has enemies.  Christ has enemies, and the statement in Psalm 110 is, “sit at my right hand”, God the Father is saying this to Him, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet."  Then again in verse 2, which we don't quote as much, "The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion.  You will rule in the midst of your enemies."  Surrounded by your enemies, you will rule.  So Christ is seated at God's right hand while Almighty God Himself, God the Father, employs His omnipotence, the totality of His wisdom and power to crush Jesus' enemies under His feet.

The third display of God's power, Christ's ruling, verse 21, "He seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and above title or name that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the age to come, and God put all things under His feet."

“Rule and Authority and Power and Dominion”

What does the text mean by, "rule and authority, power and dominion?"  Now, this is fascinating.  “Rule and authority, power and dominion,” gives us a glimpse into the spiritual world around us that we wouldn't have any other way.  Only by the Bible can we understand spirit beings and what they do in the invisible realms.  This brings into the realm of angels and demons and other spiritual beings that scripture describes that we don't know very much about at all.  There are different kinds of angels.  There are different levels of angels.  Just the biblical word used in reference to one archangel, in reference to Michael, archangel in Jude 9 means ruler angel.  So this implies different levels of authority among the angels.  Once that door is open, then there are all kinds of differentiations of power and responsibility that could be imagined at that point.  I'm not going on a flight of fancy here on angelology, I'm just trying to understand the word, “archangel,” and what, “rulers, authorities, powers and dominions” might mean.  It implies that some spirit beings are more powerful than others.  Also, other verses talk about other beings that aren't mentioned in other places in scripture.  For example, Isaiah 6 mentions seraphim.  Which is Hebrew for "burning ones."  They're not mentioned anywhere else in the Bible.  Seraphim, some kind of spirit beings that are around the throne.  The Book of Revelation speaks of four living creatures, remember them?  The four living creatures with six wings, one was like a lion, one was like an ox.  One had the face of a man, one like a flying eagle.  They are covered with eyes all around.  Fascinating.  The book of Ezekiel mentions spirit beings like this as well but slightly different, similar language, but different too. 

Now again, the idea of an archangel like Michael gives us a sense of dominion or realms of angelic power or dominions or realms of angelic responsibility, as though God put various angels in charge of various other angels in various aspects of His creation.  Probably the best book to develop this would be the book of Daniel.  The book of Daniel gives us a glimpse into the invisible spiritual realms that other books don't really give.  For example, in the book of Daniel, an angel tells Daniel that Michael is one of the chief princes who came to assist another angel in his struggle with the so-called, King of Persia, whoever that is.  Since no human could ever resist an angelic being, you have to think that it's another angel and apparently a little stronger than the first messenger angel that was sent.  He couldn't get by him.  He was too strong for that messenger angel, so Michael had to come and the two of them had to work together to get the message to Daniel.  Wow, how powerful then, must be this evil, this wicked King of Persia, whoever he is. 

Some commentators think the King of Persia refers to Satan, possibly so.  Or, the King of Persia refers to one of Satan's minions which makes Satan even more powerful, which is terrifying.  That's possible as well.  Satan, kind of ruling over the whole evil world and then different nations assigned to different evil archangels.  It's possible. 

Paul will use this same terminology in Ephesian 6 to talk about our spiritual warfare in verse 12.  For it says, "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms."  All of these terminologies are evil because we're struggling against them. “Rulers, authorities, powers, demonic forces.”  If you want to have a sense of how powerful they are, look at the book of Daniel or the book of Revelation to see just the kind of glory and power that angels have.  Daniel 10, there Daniel looks up and saw before him "a man dressed in linen with a belt as fine as gold around his waist.  His body was like chrysolyte, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze and his voice like the sound of a multitude.”  In other words, when he spoke, it sounded like a thousand people speaking at once.  Daniel, when he had that vision, literally fell on the ground.  His companions couldn't see the angel, but ran for their lives.  Such terror overcame them.  Daniel, later in that encounter said, "I can't breathe.  I can't have a conversation because I can't breathe."  And so, the angel has to help him up and give him strength so that he can even have a conversation, yet this astonishingly, gloriously powerful being needed help from another being to get by the King of Persia. 

You can see why Martin Luther, talking about Satan and his dark kingdom, saying, "Did we in our own strength confide, trust our striving would be losing."  That's part of what Jesus meant when He said, "I am sending you out like sheep surrounded by wolves."  Way too strong for you.  It could be that various demons are assigned to various political nations, to various rulers, to various issues that are of interest to Satan's kingdom.  It could be that demons are assigned to mimic or imitate deities in other false religions like gods and goddesses.  I do believe that demons are god and goddess impersonators that enable religions to crop up because there is a supernatural aspect to them.  It says in 1 Corinthians 10:20, "The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I don't want you to be participants with demons."  He openly says it, that behind the idols behind the stone statue, there is a supernatural force, demons.  Don't be involved in that.

Well, at any rate, Satan's vast kingdom of wickedness is well organized and invisible “rulers, powers, authorities and dominions” may extend then into the human realm as well so that Satan becomes a puppet master through his demons behind princes, presidents, kings, potentates and governors and even minor officials, the movers and shakers, CEO's, and the influencers of our world.  He is the behind-the-scenes puppet master.  In 1 John 5:19 it says, "The whole world lies under the power of the evil one."

But, Christ is infinitely above all of that.  Aren't you waiting for that?  Isn't it a relief? Oh, please say it! Well, I've said it, Paul said it!  He is infinitely above all of that, so far above all “rulers and authorities, powers and dominions” that it can't even be measured, the gap between Christ and them.  Even the most powerful dictator, and emperor, and king, and president, and prime minister and the demons behind them and Satan himself, they are as nothing compared to Christ.  I revert to Isaiah 40 here, "Surely the nations are like a drop from the bucket.  They are regarded as dust on the scales, he weighs the islands as though they are fine dust.”  “He,” Christ, “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.  He stretches out the heavens like a canopy and spreads them out like a tent to live in.  He brings princes to naught and reduces the rulers of this age to nothing.  No sooner are they planted, no sooner are they sewn, no sooner do they take root in the ground, than He blows on them and they wither, and a whirlwind blows them away like chaff.”  That's the kind of power that our Savior has.  He is “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion.”  That's what the text says.  Look at it, it's right there on the page, “far above all rule and authority.”  Thus, rightly did He say, "All authority in Heaven and Earth has been given to Me." 

“Every Name that is Named”

And He is also above every name or title that can be named.  He's far above them all.  “God exalted Him to the highest place,” Philippians 2, “and gave Him the name that is above every name.  That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on the Earth and under the Earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.” 

So what does this mean, 'above every name?'  "Name" is a reputation.  It's tied to a history, the events, the things you achieved in life.  It's also related to power like, "Stop in the name of the law," or something like that.  I don’t know, does that ever work?  You know, the criminal is running away, the police yells, "Stop in the name of the law." “Oh, I’ll stop.”  I wonder if that's ever happened in history, but that's it, the idea of “name”.  "In the name of the law!"  It's a matter of authority.  Jesus is above all authority, and above every reputation.  Remember when David wanted to build a temple for God and God spoke to him through Nathan the prophet.  He said, "I'm going to build a house for You."  Then he says this in 2 Samuel 7:9, "Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on Earth."  Yes, but Jesus's name is greater, infinitely greater than David's name.  We know David, he's famous.  You know David and Goliath, very famous, well known.  Jesus is more famous.  Jesus is greater.  “And not only in this age, but also in the one to come.”  Christ's power is both present and it is future.  As a matter fact, Jesus's name, His reputation is going to grow forever.  Now, you ponder this one, His reputation is going to grow forever because it says in Isaiah 9:7, "Of the increase of His government and peace, there will be no end.  He will reign on David's throne and over His kingdom from that time on and forever."  How then will Jesus's reputation keep growing?  It will keep growing in your mind and in mine, and in our hearts.  We'll think, wow, I didn't know You were that great.  He can say, "Oh, I'm greater still."  Forever!  We're going to get to that more in Ephesians 2:7.  I'm going to preach a whole sermon on that one verse. You’re all like, “well what is that verse.”  Look later, please, we're almost done.

 All Things Under Christ’s Feet

But, forever you're going to have a sense of the greatness of Jesus's name, His power, and His kingdom will never end.  It will go on forever, and all things are placed under His feet.  Total domination over His enemies, verse 22, "And God placed all things under His feet."  Exactly like Psalm 110, "Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet.  You will rule in the midst of Your enemies."  So what that means is that Jesus delights in defeating Satan every day.  Not just once at the cross or at the empty tomb, every day He beats him.  Beats him like a drum.  Everyday, He ties up the strongman and plunder his house for more elect, and Satan hasn't been able to stop him for over 2000 years.  I think that's part of the reason He keeps Satan around. "I'm just going to beat you again today.  I'm just going to beat you and beat you and there's nothing you can do to stop Me from saving the elect.  Nothing you can do.  I will build My church and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it."  There's nothing that Satan can do to stop Him.  He's been binding the strongman and plundering his house for 2000 years.  He actively controls daily life, every day on planet Earth.  I believe He sustains it and upholds planet Earth “by the word of His power” because that's what Hebrews 1 says He does. 

You know what I picture? We've had a number of very tragic earthquakes recently. You know how Samson went very powerfully through the Spirit and he went to the pagan temple, remember? And He brought it down.  I picture Jesus stronger than Samson but going into a crumbling, destroyed, corrupted, sin-cursed world and holding it up, until all the elect can be rescued.  I think it literally happens that some of God's elect were just about crushed by some earthquake and something held the slab up off their body and somehow rescue teams got to them and later they came to faith in Christ.  You can picture, who is holding the slab up so that that person can survive and later come to Christ?  Jesus is!  He is that powerful.  And he continues to permit His enemies to exist and to act in the rebellious ways that they do.  He permits them to attack His people.  He permits them to make unjust laws.  He permits them to even martyr His people.  He permits them to oppose Christianity.  He permits them to fleece the people, and strip them bear and plunder them.  He permits all of this wickedness because it is ultimately part of His wise, complex, sovereign plan to build His church in glory.  If He wanted to shut them all down, all these “rulers and authorities, powers and dominions,” He could do it right now, instantly, and they’d be done! 

Not only does He permit them to do these things, He restrains them and puts boundaries around what they can do.  He doesn't allow them to do more than He wills for them to do.  So, they're on a chain, they’re on a leash, these wicked rulers and authorities, and powers.  He limits them.  Think about Revelation 2:10, what Jesus said to the suffering church at Smyrna.  He said this, "Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer.  I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you and you will suffer persecution for ten days."  Do you not see the leash in there?  Satan is going to only put some of them in prison, not all of them.  And he's going to put them in prison, not kill them like he'd like to do because he's a murderer.  And they're going to be in prison for ten days, not ten years or ten centuries.  He limits what can be done to His suffering people.  Now you may say, "Why does He allow any suffering at all?"  Well, because the blood of martyrs is seed for the Church.  This is how the kingdom advances, by kernels of wheat falling into the ground and dying.  That's how it happens, and He permits that, also for our sanctification.  But, they, our wicked enemies are on a leash.  They’re limited in what they can do.  Even our temptations, all of them are filtered.  Isn't it wonderful to think of Satan and demons asking permission to tempt us today?  "No temptation has seized you except what is common to man but God is faithful and will not permit you to be tempted beyond what you can bear but with the temptation, will make a way of escape so that you can bear up under it."  No temptation will come on you today except what God has allowed and filtered through.  In Job 1:10, Satan frustrated says, "Have you not put a hedge around Job and everything he possesses?"  Yes, He's put a hedge, a wall.  He has to ask permission to get at Job, and so also with us. 

Now, we see a clear illustration of this the night that Jesus was arrested.  I want you to ponder this.  Remember they were there to arrest Jesus.  He said, "Who are you looking for?"  They said, with 600 soldiers present, "Jesus of Nazareth."  Jesus said, "I am He"  When Jesus said, "I am He" they drew back and fell to the ground.  Then He asked them again, "Who are you looking for?"  They said again, "Jesus of Nazareth."  Twice they stated their orders now, "Jesus of Nazareth."  Jesus said, "I told you that I am He.  If you're looking for me, then let these go."  That's your Good Shepherd out in front of you filtering what trials you can handle. Because John tells us in John 18:9, "This happened so that the words Jesus had spoken would be fulfilled, 'Of all that you have given Me I have not lost one.'"  He doesn't allow any physical trials to come on us that would cause us to be lost, spiritually, and so He filters all of those things.  Not only that, but Christ punishes the “rulers and authorities, and powers.”  He punishes them for the wickedness they do.  Remember King Herod?  He wanted to kill Peter, he already killed the Apostle James.  God orchestrated Peter's escape, remember?  He also orchestrated Herod's death, because some time later, short time later, Herod was speaking in front of some huge crowd that was fawning on him because they wanted something from him.  They said, "This is the voice of a god not of a man because he was dressed in beautiful, golden robes."  “Immediately, because Herod did not give glory to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.”  That is our Sovereign King bringing judgment, vengeance on an enemy of the Church. 

The final display of this will be on Judgment Day when who do you think it will be before whom all nations are gathered?  Jesus is the judge of all the Earth.  Jesus is the one who will sit on the throne and separate people one from another as a shepherd separates His sheep from the goats.  It is Jesus in His glory who will do that.

Christ Wields Power for the Church’s Good

Now, the final point I want to make today is the purpose of all of this power, in Christ, is to benefit the Church.  It’s to benefit you and me.  This isn't an honorary position that Jesus has here like an honorary diploma or an honorary gold medal, or something like that.  This is real power.  And He really wields it for the Church which is His body, He the head over the body.  He really is wielding everything for the Church, for the benefit of the Church. 

Now, the idea of head and body, He is the head, we the body.  It's one of leadership and authority, but also union and connection.  So, if I take a hammer and smash your toe, which I won't do, but if I did, the pain signals will go right up to the head.  The head will cause the mouth to speak and say, "Why are you hitting me?"  So, it was said to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?" "Who are you, Lord?" "I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.  When you attack my members on Earth, you attack Me." There's a union between the head and the body.  That's not just negative it's also positive.  Anything you do for any Christian, you do it for Him.  We know that from the sheep and the goats.  “Give a cup of cold water, give food, give shelter, give anything and you've done it to Him.”  That's the union between Christ and His body.  Now the headship, the authority of Christ over the body is different than He has with the powers and principalities and all that.  He dominates them by secret, hidden, providential power.  He rules us by persuasion and by the power of the Holy Spirit.  We are delighted to be ruled by Him.  And so we follow Him gladly. 

The final phrase in the chapter, it speaks of the Church, His body, which is the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.  Now that's a mystery.  You can imagine a man saying to his wife, or the wife to the husband, "You complete me. You fill me up. I'm not complete without you."  Can you imagine Christ saying that to the Church?  That's hard to picture.  He was complete before ever He entered the world.  He was perfectly full before He ever entered the world.  Paul notes that.  He says, "He fills everything in every way."  How are we, His bride, how are we His fullness?  I pondered this for a while and I would urge you to meditate on it, but here's the thing, we are why He came to Earth.  We are the completion of His mission.  The elect redeemed, raised from the dead, spiritually and physically, in resurrection bodies, in the New Heaven and the New Earth, finally saved.  We are the fullness of what He came to achieve.  We are the fullness of Christ in His saving mission.  And so it says in Hebrews 2, "Here am I and the children God has given Me."  Can you imagine Him saying that to the Father?  I brought them, I brought them Father, all of them, and none of them are missing.  “Here am I and the children that God has given.”  We are the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. 

Alright, what applications can we take from Ephesians 1?  Is there a lot in this chapter, or what?  What rich, rich verses.  There are so many things we can say.  I want you to marvel at the display of power that God has already put on display in Christ, and apply it to yourself.  The same power You worked in Christ, You're working in me and around me to save me.  Same power, all the time.  And I don't need to fear what Satan is doing or what demons are doing or any government officials are doing.  I don't need to fear anything because God has all power.  And my King, my Savior, my Brother is at the right hand of God and is ruling all things for me.  And His enemies are being made a footstool for His feet.  I need fear nothing.  All of my temptations are filtered.  Meditate on that.  What that means is that you can kill all of them.  You can kill your temptations the way that Jesus's enemies are dead under His feet.  What that means is that you can be holy with the power of the Holy Spirit inside you.  My final word is to any that are here who are outside of Christ.  Maybe somebody invited you here today.  Maybe you came her by means of the website.  Maybe you just walked in off the street.  I'm so glad that you're here.  I'm delighted that you're here.  The greatest display of power there is in the universe is the salvation of a sinner, from dead in transgressions in sins to alive in Christ.  All you have to do, all you have to do is repent and believe the Gospel, that God sent His Son who died on the cross for sinners like you and me and if you repent and believe in Him, you'll have eternal life.  Trust in Him.  Close with me in prayer.

Father, we thank you for Ephesians 1 and all the rich, powerful teachings that there are in it.  Oh, Father, take these ideas, these thoughts and press them to our hearts, oh Lord, that we may know you better, and that we might be more fully aware of the power of God that is at work in our souls to save us. Finally, we thank you for these truths.  We thank you for the Holy Spirit who has illuminated them to us.  We pray these things in Jesus's name, Amen.

On July 16, 1969, three men sat reclining side by side in chairs trying to control, I would imagine, their breathing and calm their hearts from beating too wildly for the mission that was about to unfold, the journey that was about unfold for them, the longest and most dangerous journey any human beings had ever attempted.  It would be a journey of almost a quarter of a million miles.  Amazingly, as they looked out the window of the little capsule that they were sitting in, they could see their destination right there in the window, the Moon.  For those three men were Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin.  They were the Apollo 11 astronauts who successfully landed on the Moon and as they were on the launching pad there and the countdown was nearly it's end, it would have been reasonable for them to think about the kind of power it was going to take to get them to the Moon.  I would have been thinking about it if I were sitting on a rocket that size and understood that they there were 36 stories of liquid rocket fuel under me at that particular moment.  As they were counting down and about to light it.  Those guys had a very casual attitude, "Let's light this candle."  That kind of thing.  But, the incredible power it was going to take came from the Saturn 5 rocket.  Now, for me as an engineer, I am amazed at engineering achievements and I think that the Saturn 5 might be one of the greatest, one of the pinnacle achievements of human engineering in all of human history.  It was the culmination of almost a decade of research as a result of John F. Kennedy's challenge to our nation and to it's scientists to, within the space of that decade, put a man on the Moon and return him safely back to Earth.  It culminated in the staggeringly powerful Saturn 5 rocket, still the tallest, heaviest, most powerful rocket that has ever been launched from the surface of the earth and delivered a payload into outer space.  The Saturn 5 was as tall as a 36 story building.  That's taller than any building in Durham, 58 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty.  It weighed 6.5 million pounds at launch.  It could deliver 1/4 million pounds, actually more than 1/4 million pounds into orbit.  As it was launched, the powerful liquid oxygen engines gave the rocket over 7.5 million pounds of thrust causing the earth to shake like an earthquake for miles around.  The total power of the Saturn 5 was equal to that of 85 Hoover Dams.  That was the power for their journey to the Moon, the greatest physical journey ever made.  

Now, as we come to Ephesians 1, it describes a journey more astounding than that.  Far more astounding, if you understand it.  The infinite journey of a sinner from dead in transgressions and sins to perfection in heaven, the New Heaven and the New Earth.  Just as it was reasonable for those astronauts, to understand to some degree and to trust the kind of power it would take to deliver them to the moon and get them back, so I believe that it is imperative for Christians to understand and trust God's power for our journey.  That's what's in front of us this morning as we look at Paul's prayer for the Ephesians in Ephesians 1.  Paul prays for Christians to understand the astonishing journey that lays ahead of us, and the almost inconceivably great power that God is going to work in us and around us, to deliver us in the end, to Heaven.  The power of Almighty God.

Context: Paul’s Prayers for the Ephesian Christians

Now, he begins in verse 18, as we are right in the middle of Paul's prayer for the Ephesian Christians, “that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened.”  Now the overall context here of Paul's prayer settled into Ephesians 1, one of the most richly theological chapters in all of the Bible.  It begins by praising God the Father who has “blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”  This God, Our Father, “chose us in Christ before the creation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless in His sight.”  “In love, this Father, predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ.” It was the Father who sent the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shed His blood on the cross. We have been “redeemed by His blood,” it says in verse 7.  And we have received redemption, the forgiveness of sins. We should understand this.  In verses 11 through 14, Paul talks about how that Gospel, the finished work of Christ, was delivered to individuals on Earth.  Delivered, in this case, to Ephesians who lived in ancient Turkey.  They “heard the word of truth, the Gospel of their salvation. Having believed, they were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit of God.”  He calls the Spirit, the deposit, the pledge who guarantees our full inheritance.  That means that the Holy Spirit takes some of our final inheritance, who is ultimately God, fellowship with God in Heaven, He takes some of that and makes it available to us right now, into our hearts.  This brings us directly to Paul's prayer for the Ephesians in verses 15 through 19.  Paul says that ever since “he heard about their faith in the Lord Jesus and the love for all the saints, he has not stopped giving thanks for them remembering them in his prayers.”  He's talking about his prayer life for them.  We looked at this last week. 

Paul’s First Prayer: Knowledge of God

Paul prayed that by the power of the Spirit, that by a “Spirit of wisdom and revelation,” they would know God better.  They would be developed in their knowledge of God.  That God the Father would dispatch, would unleash the Spirit of God in their hearts to the result that they would know God better than they have ever known Him before.  We talked about that last time.  But, he has still more of the ministry of the Holy Spirit in view here in his prayer life.  He wants more for the Ephesian Christians, and so he continues in his prayers.  He prays that they would understand the secret working of the Holy Spirit in their hearts and how rich they are in Christ, and how much power is delivered for their final salvation. 

The Eyes of Your Heart (vs. 18)

He begins by talking about the eyes of their heart.  He says, "I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened."  Look at that in verse 18.  What an incredible expression this is, the “eyes of the heart.”  What could this mean?  Well, the heart, biblically, is the very center of your being.  It's the part of you that thinks and reasons.  It's the part of you that understands, the part of you that loves and hates.  It's the part of you that yearns and decides and feels.  It's the part of you that believes.  That's your heart, biblically, it's the inner person.  It is the soul, the immaterial part of you, the inside of you.  That's what the heart is.  Well, then, what are the eyes of your heart?  What do we mean by that expression?  What did Paul mean?  Well, the eyes, we understand what our eyes are.  Our eyes are exquisitely complex organs that God created, one of the most astonishing things God ever made.  Perhaps the most second complex organ in the body.  I was talking to Dr. Alan Carlson before worship today.  He said, "The ear is up there, it's pretty complex too."  But, I mean the body as a whole is amazing.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made but the eye is an amazing creation.  About 80% of what we learn about the surrounding physical world comes by eyesight, we're told.  Our eyes are made up of over 200 million working parts and can process over 36,000 pieces of information every hour.  The eyes are the way by which we receive a constant stream of valuable information.  So, by the eye we live in a world of light, a world of fascinating things and we see those things.  We study them.  We are aware of their placement relative to us, of their size and shape, of their color, their motion and speed.  By the eye, we constantly perceive the way things really are in the physical realms.  How things actually are around us, that's what the eye does for us.  Therefore, I think that the eyes of the heart is the way that we understand spiritual things.  The way we are able to get the lay of the land, spiritually.  The way we're able to perceive invisible, spiritual realities.  There is a spiritual world around us, an invisible world, a world not perceived by light and by sight.  This invisible, spiritual world is perceived only by the eyes of the heart.  Yet, in the rest of the scriptures, this ability to perceive, to see invisible things is given to faith.  Again and again, faith is given this ability to perceive invisible spiritual realities.  Oftentimes in scripture, faith and sight are compared and contrasted.  So, it's a reasonable thing to see faith as the eyes of the heart.  For example, we have 2 Corinthians 4:18, "We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen."  So, how do you do that?  Well, it's the eyes of your heart, I think Paul would say.  You fix the eyes of your heart not on what is seen, but what is invisible.  In the next chapter, 2 Corinthians 5:7, he says, "We walk by faith not by sight."  So faith and sight are compared and contrasted there.  Hebrews 11:1 says, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."  So, faith perceives invisible things.  It has to do with the invisible.  Later in that same chapter, it speaks of Moses and says that he “endured as seeing Him who is invisible.”  That's in the faith chapter.  So, it's by faith that we see God who is invisible.  It is by the eyes of our heart, by our faith that we first saw Jesus Christ as the Son of God, crucified, dead, buried, raised from the dead and ascended to Heaven.  It is by the eyes of the heart that we see all of those things.  Remember how Jesus said to doubting Thomas, "Because you have seen me, you have believed.  Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed."  Then also 1 Peter 1:8, it says, speaking of Jesus, "Though you have not seen Him, you love Him and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with the joy unspeakable and full of glory." 

So, the invisible Savior, how then do we see Christ?  How do we see His life?  How do we see His death and also His resurrection?  Well, we see it by faith in the Word of God.  We see is by faith in the Gospel.  Paul uses the same kind of language in Galatians 3:1, there he is very put out with them and very frustrated with the fact that they are drifting from the true Gospel.  So, he chides them, but he also tells us something about the ministry of the Gospel.  In Galatians 3:1, he says, "You foolish Galatians.  Who has bewitched you?  Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was publically portrayed as crucified."  Well, how is that done?  Certainly not by a film, or a video or anything like that, or by getting a very talented artist to paint a painting.  Not at all, he's talking about the preaching of the Gospel.  That when the Gospel is preached it is before the eyes of the heart that Christ is portrayed as crucified.  More than that, it is by the eyes of the heart that we can perceive deeper truths about who Jesus actually is.  2 Corinthians 4:6 is a great verse for teaching this.  It says, "For God who said 'Let light shine out of darkness' made His light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”  So, it goes back to creation and where God said, "Let there be light: And there was light.”  God has done that in the heart of every genuine Christian.  God has spoken light into the darkness of our hearts.  Into the deadness of our hearts.  God speaks light and He says, "Let there be light."  But, it's not a physical light.  It's not that kind of light.  It's a spiritual light.  The light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.  God speaks that light.  And where God says, "Let there be light," He must say, "Let there be sight."  There is no point in there being light if there is no sight.  So, God opens up an organ of spiritual sight in the heart while He speaks the “spiritual light of the glory of God in the face of Christ.”  That organ of faith, that receptor of light is faith.  It is the eyesight of the soul and by that faith, by that eyesight of the soul, the eyes of the heart, we see Jesus as God, as crucified for our sins, as resurrected physically, as ascended into Heaven, by the eyes of the heart by faith we see that.  The eyes of the heart is faith. 

Enlightened

Now, he prays that the “eyes of their hearts would be enlightened.”  What he is saying is there is yet more for you to see.  Your faith can develop.  You can actually grow and see more clearly into the invisible spiritual realms.  There is more to see.  So, he prays that the Holy Spirit would enlighten them or show them more about the spiritual realms, and specifically, about their salvation.  Now, this happens, I think for us, especially by the ministry of the word of God and the Holy Spirit's use of the word of God.  That's how it happens. 

So, it says in Psalm 119 verse 18, the psalmist there, speaking about the word, says, "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your word."  That's a great prayer, isn't that to pray, before you have bible study?  That is a great prayer.  You settle down to have your quiet time and you just pray Psalms 119:18, "Oh Lord open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law."  God has the power to do that over our hearts.  He has the power to take away blindness from our hearts.  We have insight.  We have revelation.  We have illumination to the word of God.  You see things that you never saw before.  Remember how Jesus, after His resurrection, appeared to His apostles in the upper room.  They were struggling and they couldn't believe, for joy and they were doing all of these things and He's giving them physical evidence of His resurrection.  He's allowing them to touch Him and He's eating broiled fish, but ultimately the proof is going to come from scripture.  It says powerfully in Luke 24:45, listen to this, "Then He opened their minds so that they could understand the scriptures."  That's what it means, "May the eyes of your heart be enlightened."  So the Holy Spirit uses the scripture and teaches you new things you didn't know before.  That's the ministry of the word of God, the ministry of the Holy Spirit in illumination.  Now here, specifically Paul is going to zero in on 3 things.  We've already seen them.  This is what he wants them to know.  Specifically this.  The hope of your calling, the riches of your glorious inheritance in the saints and God's incomparably great power toward you who believe.  Those 3 things. 

What is Hope?

So, let's zero in on each of them and try to understand them.  First, what is the hope of your calling?  He wants the eyes of their hearts enlightened so that they can understand the hope of their calling.  Now, Christian hope is different than worldly hope.  What is worldly hope?  Worldly hope is a vague desire for something good in the future.  Not in any direct way connected to expectation that it will happen.  So, for example, I hope it doesn't rain on our church picnic, or on our vacation.  Or, I hope that I get into the top college or program of my choice.  Or, I hope that I do well on my final exam even though I didn't study.  Something like that.  Or, I hope I meet the man or the woman of my dreams sometime in the next 2 or 3 years.  That's the way people use hope.  “Oh, I hope that I get a better job.”  Sometimes, often actually, it's pitted against expectation.  I remember over the years, I have been a Red Sox fan for many, many years.  For years, all it was, was a torture chamber because every year they would just disappoint us in new, creative and diabolical ways.  It was just a lesson in torture.  Cubs fans have a different type of torture.  They never were close.  Red Sox fans were always close and would never enjoy the championship.  Well, before 2004, when everything changed, there was an article in Sports Illustrated about Red Sox fans who had been through so many various patterns of torture.  The article concerning Red Sox fans was entitled, 'Hoping For the Best, Expecting the Worst.'  Well, that really sums up worldly hope.  It is a worldly thing, it has no eternal consequence, it's contrary, often, to expectation.

Now, biblical hope is entirely different from this.  Biblical hope, I would define it this way, is a strong confidence, in the heart of the Christian, that the future will be bright based on the promises of God.  Let me say that again.  Biblical hope is a strong confidence, in the heart of the Christian, that the future will be bright based on the promises of God.  So, hope always has to do with future things.  It's about the future.  It says clearly in Romans 8:24, "Hope that is seen is no hope at all.  Who hopes for what he already has?"  There's no need to use hope for what you already possess.  We don't hope for things that we have.  We could take the same idea and say, "Hope always has to do with positive things, things that we want to happen, that we yearn to happen, good things."  So, who hopes for what he doesn't want?  We wouldn't use the word, hope.  You might dread it or fear it, if it's something that you don't want to happen.  You wouldn't use the word hope for it.  So, hope has to do with positive, future things.  And, Christian hope is based on the promise of God.  The best verse for this is in Romans 4:20 and 21 where it talked about Abraham. Against hope, in hope believed, it uses the hope language and then it says, "Abraham, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised."  That's the vibrant life of Christian hope.  God has made us a promise, He is able to fulfill it.  He will be faithful to His promises.  It's a buoyant confidence that we have, a persuasion, an assurance that we have, that the future is bright.  It's indescribably bright.  I mean the future from this moment, on.  I mean the future for the rest of the day is bright.  The future from now until you die, is bright.  The future beyond your death is indescribably bright.  That's hope! 

What is the Hope of Our Calling?

Now, what do we mean by the hope of our calling?  The word calling is used in 2 senses in the New Testament.  One is just the general call of the Gospel that goes out when evangelists, pastors, missionaries just preach the Gospel.  They just proclaim the word of God to anybody and everybody, to mixed group.  So, the call goes out, "Repent and believe in Jesus.  If you trust in Jesus your sins will be forgiven and you'll go to Heaven when you die."  Then there's this invitation, "Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest."  This is spoken to a mixed group.  I think it's that general calling, that physical calling of the Gospel that Jesus had in mind when He says, "Many are called but few are chosen."  There is that broad calling. But, then there is a supernatural, sovereign, powerful calling of God that transforms someone from being dead in their transgressions and sins to being alive in God.  That's God calling people out of darkness into light.  Again, Romans 4:17 speaks of the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that do not exist as though they existed.  By His calling, He makes them exist.  So, He says, "Let her be a Christian." and she is a Christian.  "Let him see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God."  And he sees it.  That's the calling that we have.  That's what's referred to, I think, in Romans 8:30 where it says, "Those whom He predestined, He also called and those whom He called, He also justified.  And those whom He justified, He also glorified."  The hope of your calling.  So, theses Ephesians have shown their calling by “their faith in the Lord Jesus and the love for all the saints.”  Paul prays that they would know what kind of hope their calling should give them.  So, because of what God has already done in you, you should be so filled with hope because Phillipians 1:6, "He who began a good work in you will most certainly carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."  And in John 6:39, Jesus said, "This is the will of God that I shall lose none of all that He has given me, but raise them up at the final day."  The future is indescribably bright for you if you have been called by the Spirit out of darkness and into light.

Why is it Vital for Us to Understand This?

Why is it vital for us to understand this?  Why does Paul pray for these Ephesians, that they would be filled with hope?  That they would know the hope of their calling.  Well, it is vital for us because we are surrounded by hopeless people.  Desperate people who are living, Ephesians 2:12, "Without hope and without God in the world."  They have no hope.  They don't have the hope that we have.  God's made them no promised outside of Christ.  God's not promised them any good in their Christless state.  They have nothing to look forward to except the fearful expectation of judgement and the wrath of God.  They have nothing to look forward to except death.  There are no promised made to people in a Christless state.  They are living like that.  They're hopeless, and you see the hopelessness in their eyes.  You see the hopelessness in the way they're scrambling and clawing for something to give them meaning.  And they're not finding it.  Then they see you.  They see the way you're living your life.  And if you're filled with hope, if you are filled with confidence that the future is going to be bright based on the promises of God, they want to ask you to “give a reason for the hope that you have,” 1 Peter 3:15.  That's going to be the foundation of your evangelistic ministry.  Live openly in hope and people will ask you, "Why are you so different?  What's the reason for it?"

The Christian Life is a Life of Supernatural Hope

In 1736, an as yet unconverted John Wesley, was traveling back to England on a ship with a bunch of German Moravians.  He had been a failed missionary in Georgia and was just casting about.  He had no real idea of what genuine Christianity was.  He was a legalist and desperate.  But, he was on board with some genuine Christians, these Moravians, and they were in the midst of a terrifying storm.  It was so bad that they heard the timbers of the ship creaking and cracking.  The mainsail was shredded by a rogue wave that washed over the deck of the ship.  It was so bad that the ship almost couldn't be seen and was covered with water.  Somehow, it rose again out of that and it was a terrifying storm.  In the midst of this, these German Moravians were singing and praising God without stopping, utterly fearless and he knew that he was terrified to die.  Afterward, he went the leader of the Moravians and said, "Weren't you afraid?" And the leader said, "I thank God, no."  "So what about your women and you children?  None of them were afraid?"  " None of us are afraid to die."  Wesley knew that they had something.  They had a hope, even in the face of imminent death, that he didn't have. 

I believe hope is a corklike buoyancy inside the Christian.  Nothing submerges it.  So, God will sometimes light a lamp and put it on a stand.  Through afflictions, through bad diagnoses, through other trials that we go through, He lights you up and puts you on a stand in the midst of very hard circumstances.  He says, "Radiate hope, please."  Because you're surrounded by people in exactly the same circumstances.  You get the same diagnosis and have the same economic problems but they don't have Christ.  Radiate hope.  We need to be corklike and buoyant, and if there had been a big block of cork on the deck of that ship and it got washed overboard, it wouldn't haven't been trouble at all. You can't keep it down.  So, Paul prays for these Ephesian Christians, that they would know the hope of their calling, so that they can radiate light in a hopeless world. 

What are the Riches of His Glorious Inheritance in the Saints?

Secondly, he prays that they would know the riches of their inheritance.  What are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints?  Paul is praying that the “eyes of their hearts would be enlightened.”  That they would know, simply put, how incredibly gloriously rich they are.  Staggeringly rich in their inheritance.  He prays that eyes of their heart would be enlightened this way.  That they would know in the future world, in the heavenly world, in the New Heaven and the New Earth and in the New Jerusalem, they will be staggeringly wealthy.  It will be greater wealth than anything anyone of us has ever experienced in our lives here on Earth.  Paul prays that the eyes of their heart will be enlightened so that they would know, Romans 8:18 that “their present sufferings aren't even worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”  We ourselves will be radiantly glorious.  We're going to “shine like the sun in the kingdom of our Father,” Matthew 13:43.  We're going to be in resurrection bodies.  Our bodies will be strong, powerful, tireless, free from decay and corruption in the pattern of Christ's resurrection body.  And, within us, we will have no darkness at all, no wickedness, no indwelling sin, none of that affliction.  We will dwell in a perfect city, surrounded by a perfect world, Revelation 21:1 and following, "Then I saw a New Heaven and a New Earth for the first Heaven and the first Earth had passed away and there was no longer any sea.  I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold the dwelling of God is now among His people and He will dwell with them and they will be His people and God Himself will be with them and be their God.  There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.  Everything is new."   

We're going to see the perfect glory of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit irradiating that world so that there's no need for sun or moon or stars or lamp, radiating that world.  Revelation 22, "No longer will there be any curse.  The throne of God and the Lamb will be in the city and His servants will serve Him and they will see His face.  His name will be on their foreheads.  There will be no more night.  They'll have no need of the light of the lamp or the light of the sun for the Lord God will given them light and they will reign forever and ever."  We will see the perfect New Earth and New Heaven.  I have a hard time imagining how beautiful and marvelous it will be.  I think it will be very much like this world, but with no decay or corruption and no wickedness.  It will be staggeringly beautiful.  It will be a perfect Earth as God intended it to be.  Better than that, we will own it, forever, because there is no moth or rust there.   There are no thieves to break in and steal.  It will be given to us, our inheritance, for it says in Matthew 5:5, "Blessed are the meek for they will" what? "inherit the earth."  What does it say in Romans 4:13?  "Abraham and his offspring receive the promise that he would be," listen to these words, "heir of the world."  Heir of the world, which by the way, is the great upgrade from just getting the Promised Land in the Old Testament.  You'll get that, but you're going to get it all.  Heir of the world! 

Vitally Important for Christians to Know How Rich They Are

So, Paul prays that these Christians would have their faith strengthened, the eyes of their heart enlightened so that they would know how rich they are in eternity.  Now, why is this vital for us to know?  Well, it's vital for us to know this because it affects the way you live.  If you believe that you are infinitely wealthy in the next world, you will be free to live like an alien and a stranger in this world and not hold on selfishly to material possessions or hold on selfishly to your time and your opportunities here on Earth and live for yourself.  You're freed from all that to live like and alien and a stranger.  And, why do you need faith to see it?  Well, because most of our brothers and sisters in Christ, in the world, live in staggering poverty.  Here I am not preaching a prosperity Gospel, I'm telling you that they live in mud huts with dirt floors and thatched roofs.  And, they're living radiant lives for the glory of God.  They're sharing the Gospel to their tribes’ surrounding areas.  They are assembling today for worship and praising Him.  And, there is no evidence of this wealth at all.  So, the eyes of their heart have to be enlightened for them to see it.  And they see it and they know that they're going to be staggeringly wealthy in the next world.

Thirdly, Paul prays that they would know the immeasurably greatness of God's power toward us.  Verse 19 says in the NIV says, "His incomparably great power for us who believe."  KJV has it this way, "What is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe."  The exceeding greatness of His power.  ESV has, "What is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe." 

Now, remember the opening illustration of the Saturn 5 rocket and it's astonishing power to lift that payload, 1/4 million pounds and the 3 astronauts, off of planet earth and put out into orbit and eventually toward the moon.  Why is that much power needed.  Well, one word, gravity.  The Earth is jealous of its positions and won't let anything go.  And so, if that Apollo mission wasn't going to come crashing back down to the earth in a terrifying fireball, they needed sufficient power to get to escape velocity and escape the gravitational pull of the Earth.  Well, in the same way, we are relentlessly opposed in our journey by the world, the flesh, and the devil, and they will not let us go unless they are overpowered.  And God will overpower them in your case.  Praise God.  You need to know the immeasurable, the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe.  You need to have the eyes of your heart.  Paul heaps up phrases here, to talk about God's immeasurable power, His astonishing power.  Now, one Bible that I saw had a heading here, "Paul prays for power."  No, wrong!  He does not pray for power.  That would be a good prayer to pray, but that's not what he prays for here.  He prays for knowledge of power.  It's not that they would be powerful.  That's not what he's talking about.  That they would know how powerful God is toward them.  That's a big difference, isn't it?  God's power is absolutely beyond our ability to comprehend.  By His breath He made the universe.  By the word of His power.  And, by the same “word of His power He sustains it.”  He keeps the sun burning every instant.  I mean, think about that.  It's just amazing.  Do you realize that in just a single second the sun puts out enough energy to keep our world civilization with its energy needs going for half a million years.  One second, half a million years of energy.  Now, we're told by cosmologists that the sun is an average, even smallish star, that there are trillions and trillions of stars.  We're told by Isaiah 40:26, "Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens,” look at the stars, “who created all these things?  He who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls them each by name.  Because of His great power and His mighty understanding, not one of them is missing."  That's the kind of power that God has.  It cannot be calculated, actually.  It's beyond our ability to comprehend.  It's surpassing greatness of His power, the exceeding greatness.  It goes beyond your ability to comprehend, and it goes beyond Satan, and the world and the flesh’s ability to hold you back from Heaven.  It is exceedingly great, far greater than your enemies.  It's a power toward us who believe. 

Power IN US: Past, Present, and Future

Now, I want to talk about this power.  The pattern of this power that Paul gives us is that the power is like the exertion of God's mighty strength which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion.  It's like that.  It's like what God did physically to Jesus by raising from the dead and seating Him at the right hand of the throne of power.  He's going to finish the point in Chapter 2 saying, "Now as for you, you also were dead in your transgressions and sins and God raised you up with Christ and seated you with Him in the heavenly realms."  You've already made that journey positionally.  That power has already exerted.  So, he wants them to know what kind of power has already happened in their lives to get them to this point, and what kind of power He will unleash to finish the journey.  Power inside of them to transform them from hating God and hating Christ and the mind of death, to having a whole different way of thinking, a radical change, the heart of stone removed and the heart of flesh put in.  They're thinking differently now, they love Christ where they used to hate Him.  That power has already happened inside them.

Power FOR US: Past, Present, and Future

And there was a power that's already happened around them, surrounding them.  God orchestrated, providentially the circumstances of your conversion.  He orchestrated powerfully, the things that needed to happen, the combinations of conversations that you needed to have to bring you to faith in Christ.  That power has already been exerted.  In Ephesians 1:11 he says, "God works everything after the counsel of His will."  So, you get saved.  He wants you to know what kind of power He's already shown in you, and what kind of power He will continue to work in you and around you for the rest of your life.  God will continue to work inside you.  He'll continue to transform you by the renewing of your mind.  He will continue to protect you from the world, the flesh and the devil.  We are going to talk about this, God willing, next time, how Christ seated on His throne, will not allow anything to happen to His people, beyond what they can bear, but, will make a way of escape in every temptation so that they do not get destroyed by it.  He is exerting immeasurable power toward you right now and will until the day you die.  Paul just wants them to know that. 

Are these True of You?

Now my question to you is, do you know this?  Do you know that this is happening in your life or are these just words to you?  Are you a Christian?  Have you been born again?  Have you had the heart of stone removed and the heart of flesh put in?  Are you delighting in these things?  Is there an elevation in your heart over these things or are you distant and dead from them?  And, if there is a joy in these things, in hope, riches and power, if there's a delight inside you, thank God, He's worked in you.  Thank God, He's given you salvation in Christ.  See already the kind of power that He had to work in you and give Him praise and glory.  But if not, I plead with you, trust in Him.  It's the word.  Just hear the word, believe it.  There's nothing more that needs to happen.  The Gospel has been here, we've heard it multiple times this morning.  How God sent His Son.  How Jesus lived a sinless life.  How He died a substitutionary death on the cross.  How He rose again from the dead on the third day and that if you repent and believe you'll be forgiven of all you sins.  Trust in that now, while there's still time.  

Now, if you're a Christian, I would urge you to exult in these things.  I would urge you to go back over these things like three beautiful Hope Diamonds.  Grand, glorious diamonds that you pick up and say, "Oh, Hope.  God give me Hope.  I want to be buoyant in Hope.  I want to have a joy in my life that's radiant.  I want to be hope-filled in a hopeless world.  And riches, oh God, make me know how wealthy I'm going to be in the New Heaven and the New Earth.  Help me have a sense of the riches in my inheritance in the saints.  Lord, help me to have a sense of how much power you're exerting around me all the time so that I'm not fearful and I'm not laying back but instead I'm attempting great things for God and expecting great things from God.  I'm living a great life doing God's service here.  I want to live that kind of a life." 

Pray Like Paul Does for Yourself and Others

Finally, I would just urge you, to take these words and pray them horizontally for other Christians.  Get the church phone book and choose 5 people.  Pray these things, hope, riches, power for 5 people in the church.  Maybe one of you could pray them for me.  Let's pray this for each other.  This is how Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians, that they would know the hope of their calling, that they would know the riches of their glorious inheritance in the saints and that they know God's incomparably great power for those who believe.

Close with me in prayer.  Father, we thank you for the things that we've learned today.  We thank you for Paul's prayers which are so deep and rich and powerful.  Lord, I pray right now that we would have the eyes of our hearts enlightened, that we would have illumination through the Spirit of the truth of Paul's words here and that we would be buoyant, hope-filled people.  I pray that we would minister hope to Christians who are discouraged and struggling with their afflictions.  I pray that we would go in the name of hope to minister hope.  Lord, I pray that we would know how rich we are in the future.  I pray that every Christian that's hearing the sound of my voice would know how rich they will be in the resurrection, in the New Heaven and the New Earth.  Lord, I pray that we would have a sense of the immeasurable greatness of your power to us who believe. In Jesus' name,  Amen.

I have to be honest with you, I have always struggled with prayer my entire Christian life. From the very beginning of my Christian life, I wasn't really sure how prayer worked. I'm still not entirely sure how it works. I remember early, maybe a few months after I came to Christ, I was being discipled by a guy with Campus Crusade for Christ. We were working on a car. I'll never forget this. I was trying to get a spark plug changed and it just wouldn't work. We worked on it together for about an hour, to the point where I couldn't even look at the car anymore. I was so frustrated by this. He said, "Why don't we pray?"  I said, "Why should we pray?"  He said, "What?" I said, "Well, why should we pray?  God's just going to do what He's going to do, anyway."  He rebuked me without giving me an answer to that deep theological question. We never did get that spark plug in. I'll never forget driving my car with one of the spark plugs out. It sounds worse than if it has no muffler. I'll never forget the guy running out and telling me to turn the engine off. I’ll never forget that. He said, "One of the spark plugs is missing!"  Well, we knew that. We said that we couldn't get the spark plug in and he looked at me like I was lower than a worm. "You couldn't get a spark plug in?" he said, "Give it to me."  He took the spark plug and reached back and his hand came back empty. I said, "Where are you going?"  He said, "I'm going to get a wrench to tighten it. It's in."  It was just like that. I felt like a total loser. Now, Tim, my discipler later said, "God answered our prayer. The spark plug got put in."  I said, "Yeah, but I didn't want all that trouble and I didn't want to be ashamed."  And still those words that I spoke years ago have plagued me and haunted me in reference to prayer. Why should I pray?  God's going to do what He's going to do anyway.

 Have you ever struggled with prayer?  Do you struggle now?  Would any of you say that your prayer lives are exactly what they should be?  Well, I don't know anyone that would say that. Even those that are flourishing the most in prayer, still yearn for more. There was a time in Luke 11 when Jesus's disciples came upon Him praying. They watched Him praying and they watched Him finish His time of prayer. They said to Him, "Lord, teach us to pray."  I feel that don't you. Say, "Lord, teach me to pray. I want to pray, better than I do."  It seems to me that in Ephesians 1 and again later we'll see in Ephesians 3, the Lord has to some degree said to all of us, "Have you considered My servant Paul?  He'll teach you to pray."  We can learn from the Apostle Paul, what to pray for and how to pray. So, as we come to Ephesians 1 and we're going to focus this morning on 15-17, we're going to learn better how to pray. My desire is that as a result of this sermon and this study, all of us will pray better. That we will flourish actually in our prayer lives, that we will pray better individually, that we will pray better corporately because we need that.

Now, Paul begins in verses 15 and 16 with thanksgiving for the Ephesians’ genuine conversion. The Apostle Paul has already unfolded in verses 3-14, I would say the single most magnificent sentence in all of scripture. It's one long sentence, 12 verses. He has unfolded in a very quick way, the theology of the Ephesians’ salvation. How it began “before the foundation of the world.”  How God chose them in Christ before the foundation of the world and how “God the Father predestined them in love to be adopted as His sons” and how God planned this entire salvation out before anything came to be. And how then, Jesus, God the Son, shed His blood. We have “redemption” in verse 7 “through His blood,” and how God the Spirit applies that to us individually when we “heard to word of truth, the Gospel of our salvation having believed we were sealed with the Holy Spirit.”  So we have the work of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, in the salvation of these Ephesian Christians.

What Moved Paul to Pray?

Paul tells them how he’s been praying for them. He says in verses 15 and 16, "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers."  We have Paul beginning with thanksgiving and also we see his intercession for them. There are parts of prayer that are adoration and thanksgiving in which we thank God for who He is and what He's done. We worship Him, we praise Him. We then acknowledge our own neediness and our inadequacy for the challenges and we confess those things to God and say, "We need You. We have to have Your help."  So we are confessing that God is all sufficient and we are needy. So, Paul begins with thanksgiving and then he moves on to intercession, making requests for the Ephesians. Now, what was it, he says that moved Paul to pray for the Ephesians?  He says, "Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints," Paul had heard greatly encouraging reports about how the Gospel had transformed their lives. In other words, he had compelling evidence of their genuine conversion to Christ.

Marks of Genuine Conversion

So, what are marks of genuine conversion?  How can you know that you're born again?  How can you know that you're elect?  How can you know that you're saved?  He talks first about faith in the Lord Jesus. It's not enough for someone to believe in God. A lot of people say that they believe in God. Jews believe in God. Muslims will say that they believe in God. Hindus believe in God. Paul is moved specifically by their reports of their faith in the Lord Jesus. They believe in the Lord Jesus, he says. Now, the Gospel came to Ephesus and at the center of the Gospel is the truth about the Lord Jesus. This cuts to the center of what a sinner has to believe to be saved. Jesus is the center of the Gospel, specifically His saving work on the cross. Look again at verse 7, “in Him,” that is in Jesus, “we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” So faith in the Lord Jesus means, "I have renounced any effort at self salvation. I am not self sufficient. I cannot atone for my own sins. I am a sinner. I have cast myself on the saving work of Jesus on the cross. I have trusted in Him to save me.

But, who was this person who died on the cross?  Who was this individual?  The simple two words, Lord Jesus, sums up a lot of doctrine about the Christian religion. "Lord" emphasizes the deity of Christ. "Jesus"  emphasizes the humanity. This man, this human being, born of the virgin Mary, in the ordinary way as a baby was raised and grew physically, he grew in wisdom, stature and in favor with God and man. He just grew up before the eyes of witnesses, of neighbors who saw Him grow up from a little boy. He had flesh and bones and blood. Who needed food, air and water in order to survive. He, in many ways, was just the same as you and me. He had no “physical appearance, beauty or majesty, there was nothing in His appearance that was unique.” He wasn't glowing with the glory of God all the time. He did, on the Mount of Transfiguration, but that wasn't His consistent appearance. He looked ordinary, very ordinary. He was a normal human being. He got tired and needed to sleep. Most of all, He could die. He was a human being in that He could die. That's the humanity of Jesus. We also see the deity of Christ, the Lord. The deity of Christ. We believe that Jesus is God in the flesh, that He is truly the Lord Jesus Christ. The Ephesians came to believe that their Savior was not only human, able to shed His blood and die, but also God as proven by the resurrection from the dead. He was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead. This is essential to our salvation. It says in Romans 10:9, "If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved."  You have to confess to the deity of this man, Jesus. This confession, this conviction, that Jesus who lived 2000 years ago is actually God in the flesh, can only come about by the direct working of the Holy Spirit of God on your heart. Only if the Holy Spirit of God works on you and in you, will you ever be able, truthfully, to make the confession “Jesus is Lord.” It says in 1 Corinthians 12:3, "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit."  We can never make that confession except by the direct action of the Spirit of God. Paul believed and had heard that these Ephesians could make that confession. They believed in the Lord Jesus. They had left their pagan ways, their belief in many gods and goddesses. They turned their backs on all of that and they believed that Lord Jesus was their personal savior and their God. This is the first evidence of their genuine conversion. Secondly, he talks about their “love for all the saints.” This is the other great transformation in the Holy Spirit, not only vertically, believing in the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, believing that Jesus is God vertically, but horizontally. It transforms how you treat others, and especially how you treat other Christians, how you feel about other Christians he mentions.

Now, the natural man not born again, has no special desire for fellowship with other Christians. I know I didn't. Before I was converted, I didn't like Christians. I didn't want to be around them. I think that the Apostle Paul would say, " I was in the exact same condition, brother. I didn't like Christians at all. As a matter of fact, I used to drag them off to prison, both men and women."  Paul hated other Christians. He had no desire for fellowship with them. So, non-Christians tend to see us Christians in a number of bad ways. They see us as narrow-minded bigots, perhaps. You're going to hear that kind expression more and more as the 21st century unfolds here in the US, narrow-minded bigots. Killjoys, hypocrites, perhaps uneducated in some ways, worthy of mockery and disdain, this is the way that non Christians see Christians. But, once someone has been genuinely born again, that all changes. It is impossible to love the Father and not love His children. One of the great evidences of the transforming work of the Spirit of God is your love for all the saints, for other Christians. How can we explain this? How can we explain that I would say that any genuine Christian who is sitting and listening to me today, would much rather be in the extended presence of another spirit-filled Christian than even the most famous, or influential, or fascinating or athletically skillful non-Christian for a day. I would much rather spend the day or travel with a Spirit-filled Christian than even the most famous or influential non-Christian. I think you all know exactly why. “What fellowship does light have with darkness?” What are we going to talk about?  We're going to disagree about the most important things. It doesn't mean that we can't have a communication or a relationship, we do try. I’m just telling you that I have deep love and attraction for other Christians, even if I've never met them. You know what I'm talking about. You can be with another Christian from another country. You could not even share the same language, but through a translator you have immediate fellowship with that person, man or woman, boy or girl. It is beautiful, the “love for all the saints.”

The Holy Spirit had worked in these Ephesians, a genuine work of conversion, a belief in the deity of Christ, the Lord Jesus, and a genuine love for all the saints. Now, let me just stop and apply this right now to you. Do you see these two things in your life?  Can you rightly assess yourself and say, "I believe that Jesus is Lord. I believe in the deity of Jesus. I believe that He died on the cross for my sins. I believe that I am a sinner, saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus and I have called on the name of the Lord Jesus for my salvation. I believe that God raised Him from the dead, proving that He is Lord."  Can you make that assertion and is it played out in you life by the way you treat other Christians?  The genuine love that you have for the brothers and sisters. 1 John says a lot about this. You can't say “I love God and hate your brother.” If you are a genuine Christian, you're going to love other Christians. Do you see these evidences in yourself and if not I just plead with you now to trust in Christ for the salvation of your soul. It could be as Daniel said earlier,  "This is the very reason why you came here today."  That perhaps for the first time you understand the Gospel and now you call on the name of the Lord for your own salvation. 

Thanksgiving: God is Responsible for Every Genuine Conversion

Well, Paul goes from this evidence that they're genuinely born again to thanksgiving to the God who brought it all about. I think this is just so vital. It could be that some of us are depressed, and sad, and struggling in life because we don't give thanks enough. We're not thankful to God in any and every circumstance. We haven't learned the discipline of thanking God at all times. So these two evidences of genuine conversion move Paul to thanksgiving. He thanked God because God the Father had sovereignly worked these things out through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Paul gave credit where credit is due. It's so important that we see the theology of thanksgiving. There are so many things that I could say about that but what I want to go to is, you thank the one responsible. To the one who gave the gift, you say thank you to that one. We see the sovereignty of God in salvation by what Paul thanks God for. He thinks God is responsible for their salvation so He thanks God for it. I see the same thing in Romans 6:17. It's one of my favorite theology of thanksgiving verses. Romans 6:17 says this, "Thanks be to God that though you used to be slaves to sin you wholeheartedly obeyed that form of teaching to which you were entrusted.” I preached a sermon once with this simplified title from Romans 6:17, "Thank God You Obeyed."  Now, meditate on that for the rest of the afternoon.

How in the world can I give God credit for something I did?  Paul did. Thank God you obeyed. Thank God you believed. Thank God you repented. It is God who worked these things in you. Thank God you're a Christian! Paul does that. He gives thanks. Paul continually thanked God for his own conversion, but here he goes beyond that. He thanks God for other people's conversion. Thank God you obeyed, not just thank God I obeyed. I'm grateful for that, oh eternally grateful. But, I'm grateful for your salvation too and as a matter of fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that it's reasonable to be equally thankful for your salvation as for mine. The same God worked them both. So, I am growing in that discipline of thanking God. I know that when I get to Heaven I will be equally thankful for the salvation of all of my brothers and sisters in Christ as I am for my own because it will be a clear display of the sovereign grace of God. We need to give God thanks. We need to give thanks for our own salvation. You need to be like that one leper, the Samaritan, remember, that came back, the other nine walking on their way. Ten lepers cleansed. One of them remembered to go back and give thanks in Luke 17. He fell at Jesus's feet and couldn't stop crying and thanking God for his cleansing. We have received a greater cleansing than that. We have received cleansing from sin. We have been delivered from Hell. We have been adopted as sons and daughters of the living God. Thank Jesus every day. Thank God for your salvation, but then go beyond that. Thank God for other people's salvation. Do it in prayer. That's what Paul does.

We also see the perseverance in prayer here. Paul says that from the first he heard, he has never stopped thanking God for them. He didn't just say one thanksgiving prayer, "Thank God for the Ephesian Christians."  But he continued to thank God. Look at verses 15 and 16, "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and you love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you. I have not ceased giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers."

The Need for Perseverance in Prayer

We need perseverance in prayer and this may be the rub here, this may be the problem. The fact that God is not a vending machine and that He doesn't immediately dispense the things that we ask Him for, even though they may very well be in His plan and may very well be in accordance with scripture. In Luke 18:1, Jesus taught them the parable of the persistent widow for the reason that they should always pray and never give up. Why are we tempted to give up?  Because God's timetable is not our own. Because God will not be ruled by us. He is the King, we are the suppliants. We are the servants asking for grace and mercy. He's not the servant, the slave that comes immediately and does whatever we ask, but He takes into consideration our requests and does what His wise plan has ordained to do. Also, because prayer is meant to transform us as well as to transform circumstances. We are to be genuinely, gradually, consistently transformed by a habit of prayer. I think often of the idea of a piece of cold, black iron being put into a bed of coals and then the bellows by the blacksmith blowing air on it. It just has to be in there a while to get it heated up and soft, yielded to the blacksmith so it can be shaped and molded. My heart starts in prayer, cold and distant so I need to be there for a while. Not on just any one given prayer time but over a long period of time in my life. I need to ask again and again and again for these things.

Prayer is a form of training of our souls. What physical trainer ever says, "I want you to do one push up and one sit up for me today, there you're done."  I know you'd love a trainer like that but you would have a kind of secret instinct that he or she wasn't doing you much good. You don't seem to be getting into better shape. I think you know why. But, a physical trainer that wisely pushes you close to the breaking point, you know that trainer is doing you some good. The Lord doesn't instantly answer our prayers. He wants to grow and to develop in maturity, to learn how dependent we are on Him. He wants us to care more about the things we're praying for and so we need perseverance in prayer. Paul prays day after day. He refused to rest. He refused to cease. He continued to give thanks for them. God was as worthy of thanksgiving on Wednesday as He had been on Tuesday of the previous week. It never changes. God is immutable. He always is worthy of thanksgiving. Paul literally made remembrance, he continued to think about them, remembering their names. He spoke their names to God in prayer and so should we be in our prayer lives. We notice that he also gives prayer to the “God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory.” Look at verse 17, "The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him."

Paul’s Prayer: Directed to God the Father

Paul's prayer is directly to God the Father. Here I want to give you a Trinitarian theology of prayer, based on scriptural evidence. The usual pattern of prayer is that prayer is made to God the Father by the mediating work of God the Son, Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. As far as I know, there is no biblical evidence whatsoever for prayer directly to the Holy Spirit. As far as I can find there is only one prayer in the New Testament that is directly to Jesus. That is when Stephen was being martyred and he looked up and he saw heaven open and he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. He said, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit."  Now, I don't think it's wrong to prayer to Jesus or wrong to pray to the Holy Spirit. Considering the Holy Spirit, if you can blaspheme to the Spirit, why couldn't you speak or address the Spirit. I think you can. But, I think that the Bible gives us the pattern of prayer to the Father. One thing I'm concerned about is that people have a reluctance to come to the Father that they don't feel toward Jesus. They seem to have much more of an affinity toward Jesus than to the Father. That would be completely wrong and heartbreaking. Jesus came to bring us to the Father. He came to be the mediator, to point us to the Father. He always wanted us to be able to see the Father in Him. He came to reveal the Father to us and so we should prayer in the regular pattern. Prayer to God the Father through the mediating work of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think we see that in Ephesians 2:18. Maybe you could look ahead just a few verses. It says, "For through Him," that is through Jesus, the mediatorial work like He is a new and living way open for us, "through Him we both, Jews and Gentiles, have access to the Father by one Spirit."  That's a Trinitarian verse on prayer. We have access to the Father. Prayer goes to the Father. We get there by the mediatorial work of Jesus on the cross.

 True Prayer Begins with Remembering Who You’re Speaking To!

I think that true prayer should begin with remembering who you're speaking to. I think we should stop. We should pause. We should be extremely reverential as we go in to pray. I love what it says in Ecclesiastes 5. He said, "Do not be quick with your mouth and do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in Heaven and you are on earth so let your words be few."  Now, that's all about reverence, isn't it?  Don't just run glibly into God's presence. Pause, stop, be mindful. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by your name.” That kind of thing, a sense of greatness and majesty of God. Let's think about it. He is the “God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory.” Think about that before you go in.

Paul Prays to “The God of Our Lord Jesus Christ”

Now, what does Paul mean by, "The God of our Lord Jesus Christ?"  Well, this is an identifier of God. Which God are we praying to?  Remember how Paul was in Athens and he saw some shrine marked with these words, "To the unknown god."  They were polytheists so they were trying to cover all the bases. I wonder if that unknown god would have been pleased with that or offended. But, we're not polytheists. We don't believe in an unknown god. We believe in One God and that He has revealed Himself to us by means of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ and by means of the Holy Spirit's work in the scripture and in creation. God identifies Himself. In the Old Testament you see this again and again. “I am the God of Abraham” or “I am the God who appeared to you at Bethel.” Or He says to Moses at the burning bush, "I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob."  He identifies Himself that way. "I am the God who appeared to your fathers."  But, Jesus is the mediator of a new and better covenant. This is a better way to identify the God that we're praying to. He is the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus, our Lord Jesus, approached God the Father as a man. He believed in the Father. He trusted the Father. He obeyed the Father. He loved His Father. He prayed to His Heavenly Father. He sought to please His Father at every moment. After His resurrection, He spoke to the redeemed. He spoke to the church in this way in John 20:17, He said, "Go to my brothers and tell them I'm returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The exact same relationship I have with the Father, I have now made for you."  So, He is our Father as He is also Jesus's Father. Now, He is the only begotten Son of God. We are adopted children, but He is our Father. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and Jesus came into the world to reveal the Father to us. Hebrews 1:3, "He is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being." "When we see Him, we've seen the Father," it says in John 14. Now, here Paul calls Him the Father of Glory. Think about that. What does that mean, the Father of Glory?  The NIV has “the Glorious Father,” but I like the Father of Glory as though He is not only glorious Himself, but He is the Father of all Glory, all emanations of illumination and radiation that there is in the universe, come from God as the source. He is the source of all the rivers of glory that there are in the universe. Everything comes from God.

Now, what is the glory of God the Father?  We think of the radiant display of God's perfections, the shining radiance who He is. He is the Father of Glory. It says in 1 Timothy 6:16, "God alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light."  I was meditating on that, "unapproachable light."  I was thinkin  about, what is that like?  You know, it says in Isaiah 6, "The seraphim were covering their faces."  Unapproachable light, the glory of God. I pictured the sun, 93 million miles away, but I thought, "Wouldn't it be something is God could make a special deal for us for just a day, and we could be 1000 miles away from the sun."  He'd have to do a Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego thing, surrounding us with a bubble of protection from the heat and radiation of the sun. But, we're just thinking about light. The sun is 103 times larger across the diameter than the earth so you could fit 103 earths, stacked up across the diameter. Let's say that we're at 51, right in the middle and were about 500,000 miles away from the sun. You'd look up in the sky and all you would see would be fire, raging, overwhelming light and fire. No heat because we have that special Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego bubble. We would be there and there's radiant light. That's what I think of being unapproachable light. That is the God that we're praying to, the Father of Glory. There will come a day in the New Heaven and the New Earth when the sun will be going. The sun, the moon and the stars will be gone. The whole world will shine, it will be radiating with the Glory of God through Jesus. That's the Father of Glory. He is the source of all glory.

As we begin to pray, we come with a sense of overwhelming awe and reverence. There is a sense of the majesty, the infinite majesty of God and how great He is. Now, what is the goal of this prayer?  Well, it's knowing God. Look again at verse 17, "That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him." 

Paul’s First Intercession

Now, this is the first of a series of intercessions. We're not going to deal with the rest of them today, there's just too many of them, and they are wonderful. We're just going to zero in on the first intercession. We come to God because He is capable of giving us infinitely more than all we could ask or imagine. We glorify God by asking for great things because He's a great God and God wants to make our requests made known to Him. And the first request should be, "Oh, God, I want to know you better. And I want this brother and this sister to know you better. That's what I want. I want the knowledge of God." 

Now, Paul is going to pray many more things than this, but he starts with this, that the Ephesian Christians would have the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God,” that they would know Him. They are already Christians, already born again and he's praying, "Oh, that they would know you better. That they would know you more fully, more deeply and more richly.

An Infinite Study

A.W. Tozer in his classic, "Knowledge of the Holy," said this, "What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."  What comes into your mind when you think about God?  It's the most important thing about you. So said A.W. Tozer and J.I. Packer, in his classic, "Knowing God,"  said this, "What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination, something which lays hold of our allegiance. This the Christian has, in a way that no other person has, for what higher, more exalted and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?"  That is the organizing directive of your life from here to eternity, beyond the time when you're raised from the dead in a resurrection body. On into the New Heaven and New Earth, you're going to still be learning God, forever, the knowledge of God. It's an infinite study and we're going to be studying it forever.

Jesus’ Deep Heart Cry for Us

Now, this is Jesus's deep cry in John 17. This is His definition of eternal in John 17:3, "Now this is eternal, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent."  That's what eternal is, to know God. This is the great tragedy of the lostness of the world. John 17:25 says, "Righteous Father, the world has not known You."  This is the work that Jesus does in every Christian at conversion. John 17:6, "I have revealed You to those whom You have given to Me out of the world.” I revealed You to them.  This is the ongoing work that He wants to continue doing. John 17:26, "I have made You known to them and I will continue to make You known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and I myself may be in them." 

What is this “Knowledge”?

So, what is this knowledge of God?  What does it mean that they may know God?  Well, it is factual. It is knowledge about God, facts about God, truths about God that come from scripture. Who He is, what He's done, His great acts in the past, these come from the pages of scripture. Facts about God. We should be zealous to gain as many facts as we can from the Bible about who God is, about His attributes, His actions, about His plans and purposes in the world, what it teaches about Him. Facts about God, but God wants far more than just that. Now, we know that no true relationship can be without factual knowledge. You can imagine a couple just beginning their relationship. They're sitting down, they're having a cup of coffee and they have one thing on their mind. Tell me about yourself, I want to know who you are. Maybe it started with eHarmony.com, I don't know. I mean, it begins with something. It's amazing how people get together these days. I was talking to a Christian about that and he said, "Are you OK with that?"  I said, "Well look what happened with Isaac and Rebekah and that whole camel thing. He went and got a servant, came back with her and that was that. They got married."  So, I'm not sure what they conversed about on their wedding night. It's like, "Tell me your name, at least. Let's get to know each other."  There's some information that we need to have here. So, I'm thinking eHarmony has more filtering going on than happened with Rebekah and Isaac. But, the servant went out and he was serving Abraham and brought the wife back for Isaac and it worked out great. Be careful with what you do with what I just said. I'm not going to that "Nth" degree, "Pastor said it was fine!"  All I'm saying is that relationships begin with a passing, a giving and receiving of factual knowledge. That’s what I’m saying. There's no relationship without it. I actually knew a couple once that had no common language between them when they got married. They got married in the 1920's, a Swedish woman and an Italian man. They both spoke broken English, so that was interesting. Anyway, moving on. The passing of factual information is not enough. There needs to be a covenant love, a deep love relationship. Think about James 2:19, "You believe that there is One God, good. Even the demons believe that and they shudder."  Demons have more factual knowledge about God than you do. Factual knowledge is essential, but it's not enough. There has to be a heart of love, a covenant love relationship of affection. In Matthew 7 Jesus said this, "Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only those who do the will of my Father who is in Heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name and in your name, drive out demons and perform many miracles?  Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers."  What is Jesus saying there?  Not, I don't have any facts about you. Oh, He has all the facts about them, 100% of the facts. But, they had no love relationship.

So, are you conscious of the presence of God in your life by the Holy Spirit?  Do you have a sense of His presence with you?  A sense of intimacy with God?  A sense that He loves you?  That He calls you His son or daughter, that He calls you by name. If you have a sense of intimacy and love affection with God, that's what knowledge of God means. A sense of close covenant relationship. Like David said in Psalm 63, "Oh, God you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for You. My body longs for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water. I have seen You in the sanctuary and beheld Your power and Your glory because Your love is better than life. My lips will glorify You."  A sense of that kind of intimacy with Moses and God on Mount Sinai where he says, " Now show me Your glory."  And He says, "No one can see My face and live. I'll put in the cleft of the rock and I'll cover you with My hand. You'll see My back as I do by."  There's that intimacy between God and Moses. Do you have a sense of a love relationship with God?  A sense of the presence of God?  I think it's a matter of savoring God, of tasting, of seeing and savoring God. Like it says in Psalm 34:8, "Taste and see that the Lord is good."  Imagine, picture a table with a heavy white linen tablecloth and like a cut crystal dish and a scoop of raspberry sorbet and a heavy spoon next to it, plated with silver. Imagine picking up that heavy spoon and scooping out raspberry sorbet, and putting it in your mouth and it's melting on your tongue. You can taste the raspberry and then swallow. Well, that description is not the same as eating the raspberry sorbet. There's nothing that I can say verbally that will be equal to experience of actually having it on your tongue. Have you experienced the love of God? 

Jonathan Edwards, in his classic sermon, "Divine and Supernatural Light," put it this way, "There's a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There's a difference in having a rational judgement that honey is sweet and having a sense of that sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes but a man cannot have the later unless he has had the idea of the taste of honey in his mind.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

 “Spirit” not “spirit” of Wisdom

Alright, so that's the end of Paul's prayer for the Ephesians. What's the means to the end? He says that it's the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.” Well, here I believe, different than almost every English translation, that the "S" in Spirit should be capitalized. I don't know if it is in the ESV. I know it's not in the NIV. So, what's the difference in lowercase “spirit” and uppercase “Spirit”?  Well, uppercase Spirit would refer to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Lowercase spirit would be a disposition in the human heart, a spirit inside yourself. Thank kind of thing. A spirit of wisdom.

I think it makes perfect sense that we were just a moment ago talking about the sealing of the Spirit. That this is the ministry of the Holy Spirit of God, to give you “wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of Him.” It is the Holy Spirit's work to unveil God and to make God appear glorious to you. It is the Holy Spirit's work to do this in our hearts. That is the Spirit of revelation. 1 Corinthians 2:10, 11 says, "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man's Spirit within him. In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” So the Spirit searches these things and brings them to us.

The Spirit of Revelation

Now, He doesn't do this by extrabiblical revelations. That's where cults start. Muhammad had a revelation from an angel and wrote the Koran. Joseph Smith had a revelation from an angel and wrote the Book of Mormon. Mary Baker Eddy had a revelation and started Christian Science. Those are cults or false religions. I'm not talking about a spirit of revelation that comes outside the bible. I think it comes from what the Lord has given us through the ministry of the Apostles and Prophets, the church built on the foundation of the Scripture, the Apostles and Prophets, and the Holy Spirit takes the scripture and makes the truths about God clear to you. He illuminates your mind and your heart. We'll talk more about that, God willing, in the future. The Holy Spirit illuminates and makes these things clear, without that illumination, you'll never know God.

Martin Lloyd-Jones told the story about a relationship between William Wilberforce who was an evangelical Christian, politician, tremendous leader in England in the early part of the 1800's, who was instrumental in the fight against the slave trade and eventually against slavery itself. He had a good friend named William Pitt, who was Prime Minister, not a believer. Wilberforce was deeply concerned with his friend. Deeply concerned with his soul. He would try to give him books. He would try to share different things with him. William Pitt was a brilliant man. The two of them had interesting, spicy conversations but still, nothing. Well, one day, William Wilberforce heard that a famous preacher, a power preacher named Richard Cecil was preaching nearby where they lived. So, he persuaded William Pitt to go with him to hear. Wilberforce said, "I had never heard a clearer exposition of the Gospel of Jesus Christ."  Never clearer explanation of the deity of Christ, the death of Christ on the cross, His resurrection from the dead and the need for repentance and faith. So much so that Wilberforce was swimming in tears. But, Pitt sitting next to him was not moved at all and afterward Wilberforce asked, "Well, what did you think?"  He said, "I must tell you, Wilberforce, I concentrated carefully on everything that man said. I tried to follow his train of thought and his argumentation and honestly, I have no idea what he's talking about."  Now, William Pitt was more intelligent than Wilberforce, but if the Spirit of God does not give you wisdom and “revelation and the knowing of Him,” you will never know Him. But, if the Spirit of God does give you wisdom and revelation, you will know Him more and more. That is the work of the Spirit.

Now, what can we take from this. What I would say is, I've already made an appeal to non-Christians to believe. I'm now going to make an appeal to you Christians to pray like this. This is a simple application. Look at your prayer life and say, "Do I pray like Paul prayed?  Do I pray without ceasing with thanksgiving to God the Father in the name of Jesus, by the power of the Spirit? And do I pray for other Christians like this and for myself? And, if not, I'm going to urge you and plead with you. Go to God and say, "Make me a prayer warrior. Change my prayer life. Give me this kind of intimacy that you gave to the Apostle Paul."  

Father, we thank you now for what we've learned in Ephesians concerning Paul's prayer life and concerning what he prayed for, for the Ephesian Christians and we give you thanks for it. We ask that you would transform our prayer lives, oh Lord. Make us powerful prayer warriors. Enable us, oh Lord, to pray as Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians, that we would see an unleashing of power here in First Baptist Church as we have never seen before even in our lifetime. We pray in Jesus's name. Amen.

We live in a incredibly complex world, don't we? I mean, we look at the world around us, we think about the earthquake in Nepal, and we think about the complexities of plate tectonics, or the mountains, the earth beneath people's feet moving, and all of that and who can understand it? And so, just geology is complex, but we think that physics might be even more complex and we think about the laws of motion and of force and reactions, and we don't fully understand all of those things. And then above that, we have the science of chemistry, more complicated still, and we don't understand all that. I especially don't understand chemistry. I'm sorry, mom. I'm sorry for all the time you spent on that, but I never really did get it. I always looked on it as a bit smelly. That's why I love mechanics. It's just clean. But above that, then comes the complexity of biology, and who can really understand life? Who can understand living cells? Who can understand the most complex living creatures are human beings, and the Psalmist said, "I praise you Lord because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made." But I can tell you, above that is the complexity of human history and the interactions between human beings one to another. And history is a complex, intricate story that was thought of in detail in the mind of God before God said, "Let there be light" and has been unfolding for millennia, now. And it's complexities are far beyond anything we can begin to comprehend.

I love studying church history. I love studying the detailed stories of the ways by which our brothers and sisters were brought from darkness to light. I love hearing those stories. I especially love hearing stories of surprising providences. What some people would call lucky coincidences, unbelievers would, but we know that there's a sovereign hand behind all of that, don't we? Many of you know the story of how it was that Adoniram Judson was brought to faith in Christ. He is the first American missionary who served in India and Burma; led 7,000 Burmese to faith in Christ after a life of terrible suffering in which he buried loved ones, two wives, children, suffered greatly, but saw 7,000 come to faith in Christ. He was raised in a Christian home; he was brought up in a solid foundation, but when he went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, he began to doubt his faith, especially under the influence of a friend, Jacob Eames, who was a deist, who was a philosopher, who was witty and urbane, and a scoffer of revealed religion, who mocked the Bible, who mocked the God of the Bible, used to ridicule and make jokes. And this onslaught from this intelligent witty, deist friend, Jacob Eames, just destroyed Adoniram Judson's faith. And he kept his rebellion against God, Adoniram Judson kept it private and secret from his family, but finally on his 20th birthday he declared himself openly to be an unbeliever.

 He went to live in New York for a while; in the course of time, he was traveling in a small village and he stayed in an inn. And he tried to sleep, but in the adjacent room there was the sound of an individual dying. It was hideous and there were cries out of desperation and of fear and of pain and terror, really, terror of death. And he could not, Judson, couldn't sleep. And he began to wonder about his own soul, the state of his own soul. Was he ready to die? Was he ready to face the God of glory? And he began to fear for his soul, and then he could hear the humor, the wit of Jacob Eames coming in his mind and really rebuking his irrational fears. And in that way he somewhat made his way through the night, fitfully sleeping, waking, sleeping. Finally, the room next adjacent was quiet and he was able to get a few hours of sleep. And then the sunlight came through the windows and he awoke and felt better, heard the birds chirping and at that point was just ridiculing his own irrational fears. Went down to the front desk and was checking out, and he asked about the individual that had been crying out. He said, "Well, actually, he's deceased; he died." Said, "Oh, well I'm sorry to hear that. What was his name?" "Well, it was Jacob Eames." Now how in the world God contrived to have that individual die in the room right next to him is just one of those remarkable moments of providence in church history. I tell you, God does that kind of thing every single day, every single day. Now some of you look back at your own upbringing and it wasn't that complicated or spectacular or dramatic, but for Judson, he couldn't leave the inn that day; he was there for hours, thinking about his own soul. And eventually that process led him to a solid faith in Christ and to the salvation of 7,000 there in his lifetime and multiplication millions beyond.

I think of another time in church history, in 1536. John Calvin was just beginning to be known. He had published his first edition of the Institutes, and it was well received. He was French and was fleeing for his life as a religious refugee from anti-Protestant France. He wanted to go to Strasbourg, where he was desirous to set himself up just in the life of a quiet ivory tower academic; that's all he wanted to be. But the road to Strasbourg was blocked because at that particular time, there was a war between Henry V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Francis I. It was pretty obscure war, not many know that much about it, but as a result, the road, the straight road to Strasbourg was blocked by refugees and troop movements. So he couldn't get to Strasbourg directly.

So he had to go through Geneva, to get to Strasbourg. He was just going to be there one day, so he thought. And a reformer there, named William Farrell, heard that John Calvin was staying at an inn or whatever they had in Geneva, all the things that happened in inns; it's amazing. And he went and confronted him and urged him to join in the reformation of Geneva. Well, he had no interest in that. He's not going to go there. Calvin was a very strong-willed stubborn individual, and he's not going. Farrell called down, basically, fire and brimstone on his life of quiet academic study. "May God curse your studies. We need you here in Geneva," and he leaves. Well Calvin couldn't sleep all night, and he's in terror of his soul and his work and all that; he ends up staying in Geneva, effectively for the rest of his life, although he was evicted, he went back to the city. And that's where he was, it was God's will. And one individual, I remember reading about this, wondered if God orchestrated the war so that Calvin would end up in Geneva. Well, that's a little simplistic, but that at least was part of God's purpose. Could God do something like that? Can he orchestrate wars, big events, headline events for small details that will come to pass decades down the road? Yes, he does that kind of thing all the time. 

One Long, Majestic Sentence Continues

As a matter of fact, this kind of view called the "Doctrine of Providence" that God sovereignly rules over the events of this world for his purposes, but the most important of those purposes is the salvation of his elect, bringing the elect from darkness to light; that God orchestrates things to do that. Was ruminated on in a small book in the New Testament, called Philemon. You know the story there in Philemon was that Onesimus was a slave who had escaped, had run away, stolen some things it seems, and had run from his master Philemon and happened to bump into the Apostle Paul in Rome, in the big city of Rome. And Paul led him to Christ. And then [Paul] wrote Philemon, the letter, the Biblical letter that we have to put it in Onesimus' hands and send him back. And what he says in Philemon, verse 15, listen to this, "Perhaps the reason he was separated from you for a little while was that you might have him back for good, no longer as a slave, but now better than a slave, as a dear brother.” You hear what Paul's ruminating? Could it be that God orchestrated all of this for his salvation and for your eternal relationship. I think God orchestrates that kind of thing all the time. And the text we're going to look at today talks about it directly. It says effectively that that's what God does. Verse 11 in particular, "In Him, we have received an inheritance having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out all things,” or everything, “in conformity with the purpose of His will."

So there we have asserted very plainly the things I've been hinting at or saying right now. “God orchestrates everything according to the purpose of His will.” Now in Ephesians 1:3-14, we have one long amazing continuous sentence in the Greek. English breaks it up into several smaller sentences so we can just handle it. Preachers do the same because there's just so much truth in all of these verses, more than could be handled in any one sermon. So the third sermon now, in these 12 verses, we look in Verses 11-14. We'll have another one again next week, God willing.

What does Paul assert here in Verse 11? Well, he says, "In Him," in Christ, "we have... " I think the best translation would be "obtained an inheritance," obtained an inheritance, it's a difficult Greek expression and gives rise to different translations. NIV has "In Him we're also chosen," but the KJV and NAS, ESV all have, "In him we have obtained an inheritance." So God has sovereignly worked to give us an inheritance. The Holman says, "We were made God's inheritance," and I think that's a wonderful theme, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Because the focus here is on our inheritance and how the Holy Spirit, we'll be told in verse 14, “is the deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.” So that seems to be the focus. 

So, “In Him also, we have obtained an inheritance," and it says that God has purposed all of these things by His own counsel. It says we were predestined, “having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will." Now we've already discussed predestination once; it's been mentioned already, so we have the word predestined twice in this one long sentence here. We had it in verse 4 and 5, if you look, "In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons.” Now, as we talked about last week, the word means to predetermine, to set the boundary lines for ahead of time, to set the lines in advance. God sets up a destination for us before the foundation of the world, predestined. So God elects individuals by name and then predestines them for His purposes. That's what it's teaching here. And in Christ, He fixed our future for us that we will be with Him eternally in glory. That predestination of our final glory in Heaven is part of God's overall grand and glorious plan for His entire universe. So God has a plan. He's worked all of this out in His mind before any of it came to be; none of this was left haphazard or random or to chance. God has pondered every tiny detail before anything came to pass. The word plan is linked with the phrase, "The purpose or council of His will," in some translations. The image there normally would be of a set of royal advisors who are around the throne, speaking wisdom into the King's ear. Those are the plans, the counselors, they're giving wise counsel to the King. 

But in God's case there are no such counselors. There is no one who can speak wisdom into God's mind that He didn't already think of Himself. It says in Romans 11:34, "Who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor." Implied answers are no one. He has no counselors outside of Himself and He needs none. There is no created being in the universe that can ever give to God any information He didn't already possess. We can never put things together in an analysis that He hadn't thought of before, and He hadn't seen that angle before and He says, "You know that's better than what I was going to do." That never happens, ever. God has thought through every detail of every aspect of His universe and of human history down to the subatomic level before any of it came to pass. God's plan is absolutely comprehensive. "In Him, we have also obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything,” or all things, “in conformity with the purpose of His will." Now you may think, "Well, you're over-blowing the significance of the phrase, 'all things’ or ‘everything.' The word "all” is frequently used to mean less than absolutely everything you could think of. I agree that that's true in the Scripture. But they're actually many other verses that testify to the comprehensive control of God over even the most insignificant details.

I mean, we see this again and again, don't we in the Bible? Like this one, Proverbs 16:33, "The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord." Now, I don't know when was the last time you cast a lot into a lap. I don't think I've ever done that, but I have rolled some dice. And so what does that say? Well, in our language, the roll of the dice comes up exactly the way God willed it to in every case. I mean it comes up a five, a three, a two. I reminded myself when I said these numbers, "Don't go over six," because there aren't any numbers over six on a die. Every number that's ever come up on any dice that's ever been rolled is part of God's sovereign plan. There's no such thing as luck. There's no such things as random coincidences.

Jesus said it this way in Matthew 10:29, speaking to fearful messengers of the Gospel who were worried about what kind of persecution they're going to get, what kind of opposition. He's guaranteeing they're going to have persecution. He's guaranteeing they're going to have opposition, but he wants to comfort them and he says, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny?" He says that because they're insignificant; they're of a very low value. "Yet not one of them falls to the ground apart from the will of your Father." What does that mean? No sparrow dies on the surface of the earth apart from God's plan; that's what that means. And He goes beyond that. He says, "Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." Well, why would that be important?  Well, you may not think it's important how many hairs there are on your head; actually some of you think it's very important how many hairs there are on your head, some of you. But the fact of the matter is, God knows exactly how many hairs there are on your head. He's very well aware. What is Jesus saying? Even the minutest details are part of God's plan. God has thought about all of that. The interconnectedness of both nonliving and living things on this planet is so pervasive; it's actually obvious to some non-Christian scientists who understand the massive effects of even the tiniest detail in the world.

There was a man named Edward Lorenz; he was at MIT. He was in the 1950s and '60s; he was an expert mathematician and a meteorologist, and he was working on early computer models of weather. And he noticed at one point, he was entering data into this... Back then, it was really, really hard to enter data. Things are just so much more advanced in the computer world now. But he had all these punch cards and these different things you had to work with and he didn't want to keep putting out decimals to the 7th decimal point, so he just truncated the decimals instead of putting .636417, he just put .636 in, .636. Everything changed in his weather model, everything. And he started to ponder that when it came to weather. And he coined a term called the "Butterfly Effect" that the details of a hurricane such as when the hurricane started, the exact path the hurricane would follow could be altered by the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly weeks before. So it became known as very famous as the “Butterfly Effect.”

Science fiction author, Ray Bradbury, actually used this concept in a short story a decade before Lorenz quoted it. He wrote a short story called, A Sound of Thunder, in which a man who loved hunting, was taken back in a time machine; all these time machine stories. And he gets to go back and hunt the biggest game of them all, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, but the rules of the game were that the company had somehow made a levitating path in the ancient world that you could never walk off, and you're only allowed to kill the specific Tyrannosaurus Rex that would have died anyway at that precise moment. The problem was that this individual, this hunter, stepped off the path. When they got back into their time, many significant things had changed and it was found that there was a dead butterfly on his boot. Now, this is 10 years before Lorenz had done the Butterfly Effect, but the death of a single butterfly changed everything. Now, I want you to think more kindly of Noah, and why he didn't kill mosquitoes or flies or anything else you wish he had killed. "That was your chance, why didn't you do it?" He was under strict orders probably, "Do not kill the ticks or the cockroaches or any of the things you hate. Let them be. They're part of the plan."

One poet put it this way, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of the shoe, the horse was lost. For want of the horse, the rider was lost. For want of the rider, the message was lost. For want of the message, the battle was lost. For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost. All for the want of a horseshoe nail." Well, non-Christians know these things. Seemingly insignificant tiny events can have actually a huge impact down the line. So if God's going to control big things, He must control tiny things; He knows that better than we do. If He's not going to control tiny things, He can't control big things. He's not just a big picture God; He has to be a God of the details.

 The Infinite Complexity of the Sovereignty of Almighty God

This isn't just theory. God says he does control details. He actively asserts that he controls those details, whether by great kings sitting on thrones, or by peasants drawing water out of a well or plowing a field. Proverbs 19:21 says, "Many are the plans of a man's heart, but it's the Lord's purpose that prevails." Proverbs 21:1 says, "The king's heart in the hand of the Lord is a water course that He diverts whatever direction he chooses." Concerning the biggest event ever in history, the death of Jesus, we're told in Acts 4, as the church was praying, “Herod and Pontius Pilate and Annas and Caiaphas met together in this city to conspire against your holy servant, Jesus. They did what your power and will had determined beforehand should happen." That's the way they prayed in Acts 4. So in Verse 11, here we're told that we have been “predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will.” So the sovereign power of God acted in history to interact with people on a moment-by-moment basis and bring about His intentions is essential to His sovereign rule in the world. God doesn't just stand aloof like the deist would say and then swoop in at key moments. Every moment's a key moment; every instant is a key moment. Every interaction is key. All of it. So it says in Isaiah 14:26-27, the prophet there ruminating on the eminent invasion of Assyria into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. And he tells the Jewish people that this Assyrian army, this king, is under the direct sovereign act of God; that He is moving this Assyrian in, and He's going to move him out again. And he says this in Isaiah 14;26-27. “This is the plan determined for the whole world. This is the hand stretched out over all nations.” Do you hear that? This is the plan; this is the hand. This is the plan; this is the hand. "For the Lord Almighty has purposed and who can thwart him? His hand is stretched out and who can turn it back?" Isaiah 14:26-27. So there's a purpose and a power; there's a plan in the hand. His heart loves, His mind plans, His hand brings about His wise and loving plan. Then He gets worshipped and praised and glorified for it. That's what's going on in the world. Friends, that includes earthquakes, that includes riots, that includes elections, that includes Supreme Court decisions, that includes everything. That includes who you happen to sit next to on a plane. It includes all of it. All of this then is applied to our salvation to bring the elect to faith in Christ, involve God moving the pieces on an incredibly complex, multi-dimensional chess board; more complex than you can possibly imagine.

God positions this person at this time to be ready to answer this specific question. And that's not enough to bring that person to salvation, but it's going to have an impact down the road. Others have done the hard labor. John 3, "You have entered into their labor." John 4. "Others have plowed, you get to be there to harvest... " We all want to be there at harvest time, don't we? I want to be there when that person comes over from darkness to light. I do too, that's great. But others did hard work in that person's life, long before they came to faith in Christ. And no, we're not robots. That's too easy. No, we're vastly more complicated, this whole thing's vastly more complicated than that.

“Herod, and Pontius Pilate, and Annas, and Caiaphas, and Judas,” all did exactly what they wanted to do. They follow the dictates of their own wicked hearts. They loved wickedness and did wickedness; that's what they did. They were not compelled; they were not forced; they were not robots. But God sovereignly overruled it. That's how that works. So this kind of detailed providential rule is going on all the time. Paul then addresses a marvelous aspect of that plan and how it moved from being Jew only to Jew plus Gentile. And that had all been part of his plan.

Lots of Debate about “We” and “You”

Look at Verses 11-13. We're going to expand out a little bit now. "In Him also, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will," verse 12, "in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ, when you heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation." Well, there's lots of debate about the "we” and “you also." What is this? Could be as simple as just "we the evangelistic missionary team" that brought the Gospel to you in Asia Minor, that's fine, and I don't have any problem with that, but I think it's bigger than that. In chapter 2, we're going to get to the issue of Jew, Gentile, unity. We're going to get to the talk, because the Ephesians are Gentiles and we're going to talk about how God has worked to destroy the barrier, “the dividing wall of hostility” between Jew and Gentile, and to remove it by the death of Christ. And how in the death of Jesus we Gentiles who were aliens, and strangers, and uncircumcised, and outsiders “have been brought near through the blood of Christ,” and how the barrier, the “dividing wall of hostility” has been removed by the death of Jesus. Ephesians 2:11-14.

God’s Beautiful Order: To the Jew First

I think that's what's going on here in Chapter 1. Just a little hint, "We who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory.” And now you also, you Gentiles, have been brought into Christ, when you heard the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation. “To the Jew first and then to the Gentile," we're told in Romans 1. Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, "Salvation is from the Jews." God said, millennia before that, to Abraham when he was still Abram Ur of the Chaldeans. He says, "I will make you a blessing and you will be a blessing and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you." We're told in Galatians 3, that Gentile Christians have become sons of Abraham, by faith in Christ. And so that's what I think is going on with the “we who are the first,” and then “you also were brought in.” God had a sovereign time and place for all of that. He orchestrated a time when Peter the Apostle to the Jews saw a vision and then was mobilized to go to Cornelius' house, and as he preaches the Gospel, Cornelius' house filled with friends and family and all that, and they're hearing the Gospel and they're believing the Gospel and the Holy Spirit comes down and they speak in tongues as a clear display of the presence of the Holy Spirit, and they're brought in. And in Christ, there is now one new man not this division anymore, but this unity in Christ. And so God has this amazing plan, overarching plan, and He's got this hand that stretched out, and He uses means to achieve His end. He's got an end in mind, and that is for all the elect to be in the New Heavens and the New Earth in resurrection bodies together in perfect unity. Glory, Hallelujah, praising Him, that's the end. How's He going to get there? Well He's worked out the means too.

God’s Eternal Plan Comes Into Time

And the means that he mentions here is the Gospel message and the Holy Spirit. So look at Verse 13, "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." So, that's God's eternal plan, coming down into time, in Ephesus. Sovereignty doesn't destroy evangelism, it empowers it; it unleashes it. Some people say, "Well if the elect are predestined, then we don't need to do anything." Man, that's crazy. I mean, who says those kinds of things? It's amazing to me, "God will do it Himself." Others say in a similar vein, "A strong emphasis on the sovereignty of God sucks the life out of evangelism because then people won't share the Gospel because there's no need." Look, the more you meditate on these things the more excited you're going to be to share the Gospel; you want to see God at work, and there's nothing that's going to stop it. It's empowering actually. As a matter of fact in all of church history, there is no one that was stronger on the sovereignty of God over all things, and especially over the salvation, than the Apostle Paul, and there was no one who worked harder in evangelism and missions than the Apostle Paul. He didn't have any problem harmonizing those things at all. As a matter of fact, it's exactly because God had chosen the elect; he was going to go work hard and suffer for them. He says in 1 Corinthians 15:10, "By the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them, yet, not I, but the grace of God that was in me." The Doctrines of Grace empower the people of God, and give us energy, and willingness to suffer, and to work hard. And so Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:10, "Therefore, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ with eternal glory." Same idea, the elect are out there I'm going to go, and I'm willing to be beaten, imprisoned, suffer, even to die if that might bring the elect to faith in Christ. So God ordains the means by which the elect are saved.

God Ordains Means by Which the Elect Are Saved

Now the end is that 100% of them will end up in Heaven, the means is explained, and that is the message of the Gospel. Now you need messengers to go out, they've got to go out, got to have messengers because it says in Romans 10, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." This is Verses 13-15. "But how can they call on the one they've not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have never heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent?" The sent ones are the evangelists; the sent ones are the missionaries. We are sent out from this room when we're done here into a world that we're surrounded by people who are without hope and without God in the world. We are sent out and some of them are elect and we're going to witness to them. And what are we going to do, we're going to proclaim “the word of truth, the Gospel of their salvation.” What is that? Well, we're going to tell them that there is a Sovereign God who rules over all things, who made laws by which we are to live our lives. Like the Ten Commandments for example or the Two Great Commandments, to love God and love your neighbor. But we don't live up to those laws; we have broken those laws. And so it says plainly in Romans 3, "There is no one righteous, not even one, there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God, all have turned away. They've together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one." So you heard “the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation.” Salvation from what? From sin, from all of that, and from the wrath to come.

Jesus delivers us from the wrath to come. There's a coming wrath. God in judgment is going to judge the world, and every one of us is going to stand before Him and give an account of our lives. Are you ready? Do you know that you're forgiven? Do you know that your sins have been atoned for? "There is no other name under heaven given to men, by which we must be saved,” than Jesus Christ. God sent Jesus as His only begotten Son who took on a human body, who lived a sinless life, did all these incredible miracles, showed his deity and his humanity, for He went to the cross and He shed His blood, and He died in our place. This is the Gospel, the word of truth, the Gospel of our salvation. God raised Him up on the third day and seated Him at the right hand of God in the heavenly realms, and everyone who repents and believes in Him receives the gift of the forgiveness of sins. That's what happened, the Ephesians heard the “word of truth, the Gospel of their salvation” and they believed it. Well, that's the means to the end, but I tell you that the word of truth is not enough; the Gospel is not enough; the proclamation is not enough. We need also the ministry and the working of the Holy Spirit of God, and without Him no one will be converted.

The Spirit must move in hearts. The Spirit must remove the heart of stone and put in the heart of flesh. The Spirit must bring the dead sinner, spiritually dead sinner, to life. Something only the Spirit can do. And so, we have mentioned here plainly the work of these Spirit of God, “the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.” Now, the sermon here continues for five or six more pages, but I'm not going to do that because I already plan next week to talk about the sealing of the Spirit. So this part, I'm saying, "Well next week we'll talk more about... " Let's just do all that next week. The Holy Spirit of God comes in and seals the individual. We're going to talk about what does it mean the promised Holy Spirit? And how does He seal us?

If you want to know ahead of time what I think about the Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity, and what the sealing of the Spirit is, think of a proclamation from a king. And you want to know if it's valid, if it's authentic. And so, they would seal it with the authoritative kingly seal. And then you knew that was from the king. So the sealing of the Spirit is authenticating proof. How can I know I'm elect? How can I know I'm predestined? How can I know I'm going to go to Heaven when I die? The sealing of the Spirit is the answer. We're going to talk about that next week. So, God willing, please come and listen more.

Why does God do all of this? Well, as we've seen, again and again, and we can't stop saying it, He does it all for the praise of His glory. That's the ultimate end. And isn't it beautiful how we see the trinitarian work here. We see the work of the Father; we see the work of the Son, and we see the work of the Holy Spirit. And it's interesting that the Father's section goes from 1:3-6 and it ends with, "To the praise of His glory." And then you've got the Son's section, picking up and it goes up to verse 12 and it ends, "To the praise of His glory," and then you've got the Spirit's section and it goes verse 13 and 14, and it ends the same way, "To the praise of His glory.” Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together working on our individual salvation, why? “To the praise of His glory.”

We're going to be up in Heaven and we're going to see it; we're going to talk to all our brothers and sisters. We're going to hear so many stories like that. One about Judson and Jacob Eames; we're going to find out how God saved people. You guys are all going to be super PhDs in church history by the time 10,000 years have passed in Heaven, and you've still got millennia more to study. You're going to learn about brothers and sisters, in every generation, and how God worked by His sovereign grace, and how awesome, and you're going to say, "To God be the glory." And you're going to see your own story in a new light more than you've ever seen it before, and you'll see that none of it was accidental, that God had orchestrated everything to bring you to salvation; and it's all for the praise of His glory.

Call to Repentance

So, applications for me, very powerfully. First and foremost, I've already said it, I can't bear the thought that any of you would leave here unregenerate. I can't bear that thought. I've been thinking about it. Don't leave here lost. You've heard twice probably maybe three times the Gospel already. Trust in Christ, trust in Him. Cast yourself in full abandonment of faith on Jesus. Say, "I'm a sinner, I have no hope, I'm not ready to die. Probably, I'd be just like Jacob Eames. If I knew I was about to die in an hour or two, I'd know I wasn't ready and I'd be terrified of the flames of Hell. I'd be terrified of hearing from God, the judge, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.' I'd be terrified of that, and I know I'm not ready." Today is a day salvation. You can be delivered. You hear “the word of truth, the Gospel of your salvation,” trust in Christ.

Trust in Providence

And then for the rest of us, let's trust in providence, shall we? Let's celebrate it; let's embrace it. Let's just say, "Isn't it incredible that God rules over everything, after the council of his will. There's nothing I need to fear. There are nothing but ministry opportunities here even in the midst of the greatest suffering," and I'm not minimizing the emotions of all of this. We do “rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn.” We go to misery, and we go to suffering, and we say, "Can we share with these people? Can we bring them out of darkness into light? Whether it's in Kathmandu or in Baltimore or wherever it is, where light needs to be shining?” So I was talking in our BFL class a few minutes ago. Just celebrate Ephesians 2:10. Just realize how explosive all this is. Let's put Ephesians 1:11 together with Ephesians 2:10. Ephesians 2:10 says, "We are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance, that you should walk in them." What does that mean that God prepared in advance? Means, the days ahead of time, weeks ahead of time, months, thousand years ahead of time. He went ahead of you and got things ready. BFL folks, do you mind if I give that same hokey illustration about the bird feeder? Hope you don't mind, I'm just going to go head and do it.

You know, you got to Lowe's, and they teach you how to make a bird feeder out of a kit and you can make a bird feeder in 21 minutes. How? Because everything's been cut, sanded, pre-drilled, the glues ready, everything's ready. Bird feeder. That's your day. God went ahead of you and laid out the kit for the good work. And He didn't tell you what the good works are. It could be with another Christian. It could be with a non-Christian. Could be with a relative, a total stranger. You don't know. Just say, "Oh God, make me ready for the good works. You got them ready for me, make me ready for them." Life is exciting that way. Let's do those good works. Let's praise Him for the praise of His glorious grace, and let's not shrink back from this doctrine. I don't understand why people do that. It plainly says it. Do you really want to live in a universe where God's saying, "I don't know. I've no idea what's going to happen next, but we'll be fine. We know how to make lemonade out of lemons. Been doing it for thousands of years, and... Well, an earthquake. I'm reacting to this. What can we do with this?" That's not the God of the Bible. You may struggle with aspects of free will, or God's goodness and suffering and all that, struggle away, but know this, everything to the detail is part of God's sovereign plan. Let's celebrate it and let's go out and prove that a church that believes these kind of doctrines is more evangelistic than it's ever been before because we're willing to “suffer anything for the sake of the elect.” We're not afraid of martyrdom, or losing your job, or losing a friendship. We're not afraid of anything; we just want to find out who the elect are. We want more people to get baptized. We're willing to suffer for these things

These doctrines have power to unleash this. And let's realize that God, the we, and they... We're going to talk more about this, but this is an opportune moment to say it. The only answer to racism is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The only answer to racial divides and disharmony that there is in the world is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It's the same thing in Kathmandu, the only answer to the grave and people dying is the Gospel of Jesus Christ; so let's shine the light. Let's look forward to the barrier, “the dividing wall of hostility” being completely removed and delighting in the friendship that we have with one another in Christ.

Close with me in prayer. Father, we thank you for the time that we've had to study today. It's been an awesome, powerful time to learn how pervasive is the plan of God. How you are orchestrating things all the time; good works, and the spread of the Gospel all the time. Help us to celebrate it and to step out in faith and to delight in it. Oh, God, give us more evangelistic fruit; give us more missions fruit. Give us more laborers for the harvest field. Help us not to be cowardly, but be like Paul was in 2 Timothy 2, “to be willing to endure everything, anything for the sake of the elect.” And Lord, please bring your elect from darkness to light, even now if there's somebody just teetering, holding back, work on his or her heart and bring them over from darkness to light, in Jesus' name, Amen.

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Ephesians 1:5-10. The main subject of the sermon is how God bestows great gifts upon His chosen people in Christ.

Please turn in your Bibles to Ephesians, chapter 1, and read along with me. As I preach through Ephesians, I think it is vital for you to see the things that I am saying right there on the page in the text, to understand how for the rest of your lives, you can go to Ephesians 1 to read over these words and find out, dear Christian brother and sister, just how rich you are in Christ.  

This is a big issue in our world. The country of Nepal, where yesterday’s earthquake occurred, is one of the poorest in the world. I have been to some very poor places and seen some amazing poverty in my life. Some of the poorest people I have ever seen are in Haiti, in Port au Prince and the City Soleil there, the tent city; they seem to have almost nothing. I have also seen some incredibly wealthy places in my life; anyone who has been to Biltmore knows what I am talking about — I think they have a golden bathtub there. The gap between the two is something that I have seen with my own eyes, that I have experienced.  

But we really do not have a fair sense of how infinitely more wealthy are the inhabitants of Heaven compared to anyone here on earth, how incredibly blessed we are and how rich is Almighty God; how Jesus, who, as 2 Corinthians 8:9 tells us, is infinitely rich, yet saw how infinitely poor we all were apart from His grace and descended from Heaven to earth to become unspeakably poor himself, that we might become immeasurably rich. That is the truth — God saw our poverty and sent Jesus to make us rich. How rich? I do not think we have a full sense of our wealth in Christ, but Ephesians 1 is a great place to start.  

A number of years ago, my family and I went to Williamsburg. I was talking to one of the people there about how the place has been built in the pattern of Colonial Williamsburg. Since I am interested in history, I wanted to know how they knew what to put in the houses, especially those of the more wealthy residents such as the governor, wealthy merchants, and such. I was told they had inventory lists of the possessions of the wealthy members of the community. These lists were meticulous, going line by line, describing the the flatware, the porcelain, different things they had, in detail. From those inventory lists of wealth, they were able to reconstruct those houses, and now visitors are able to see accurate representations of how wealthy people lived in those times. 

Ephesians 1:3-10 is an inventory list of our wealth in Christ — and we are very wealthy. We have the privilege today of going through this line by line to gain a sense of our immeasurable wealth, our richness in Christ. It begins in verse 3, which says “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” This is where I ended last week: our blessings listed here in Ephesians 1 are spiritual blessings. They are kept for us in the heavenly realms. This is directly against the Prosperity Gospel, the Health and Wealth teaching. I am not saying that God does not bless us materially or give us things to enjoy — He does. But the wealth that is listed here is spiritual, in the heavenly realms, and we possess it. And God is to be praised and worshiped because of this wealth. We should give Him all praise and glory and thank Him that every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms has been given us in Christ Jesus.  

Last week, we focused on the first of the spiritual blessings listed, which is election — God’s sovereign election (verse 4): “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.” The source of every one of these blessings, our riches — we cannot say it enough — is God’s delighted grace. God is happy, delighted, to show us grace.  

Gifts grudgingly given are no gifts at all. Do you want to receive a gift that is grudgingly given to you? That would be more of a burden than a blessing; I think it actually would hurt the relationship. You may or may not have been the stingy giver from time to time, but I think we have all encountered this person. Look at Proverbs 23:6-8: “Do not eat the food of a stingy man. And do not crave his delicacies. For he is the kind of man who is always thinking about the cost. ‘Eat and drink,’ he says to you, but his heart is not with you. And you will vomit up the little you have eaten and you will have wasted all your compliments.” The picture is of a guest sitting at the table of a wealthy but stingy man who, the whole time, is thinking how much the meal is costing him, how much that bite the guest is putting in his mouth right then is costing him. He is irritated and a bit grudging, and he says unenthusiastically, “Oh, you wanted seconds?”  

God is nothing at all like that. He loves to be generous to us, delights in it, actually. In Luke 12:32, Jesus said this: “Fear not, little flock. It is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” What is that saying but that God really enjoys making us infinitely wealthy? He truly enjoys it; it is a delight to Him.  

The cost of these spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms is immeasurable. Every one of them is blood bought. We will going to talk about redemption by His blood in good time, but I want to go ahead to look at verse 7 now: “In Him we have redemption through His blood…” I would extend the phrase “through His blood” to all of the blessings. All of them are blood bought. All of them — expensive. But God was delighted, in an infinitely mysterious way, to pour out the blood of His Son to make you and me infinitely spiritually wealthy. In 2 Corinthians 9:6, it says “God loves a cheerful giver.” That is a challenging verse — brief, easy to memorize, but hard to live out, isn’t it? We should be cheerful in all of our giving. We should take delight in the persons that we are blessing, to find joy in their joy and say “I really want you to be happy. My happiness is bound up with you right now. I am happy to give to you.” God loves a cheerful giver.  

Even better than that, God IS a cheerful giver, amen? He really delights in giving to His children. God does not give, as that text says, reluctantly or under compulsion. Meditate on that. God is not a reluctant giver of these spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms, He is delighted to give them. He is under no compulsion to give them, not forced or compelled in any way. He did not have to do anything for us. We were rebels; we were sinners; we had violated all of His laws. He did not owe us anything; not reluctantly or under compulsion has God given to us; He has done it freely.  

So many verses in this section highlight the freeness of these gifts, how generous God is in all of this, how lavish, how happy He is to give, how much He is pleased to do this. Verse 4 talks about His unconditional love: “In love [verse 4, right on into verse 5] He predestined us to be adopted as His sons.” It is a challenge to know where to position the words “in love.” Some translations position them with the rest of verse 4, and some position it with verse 5. In the KJV, verse 4 would read like this: “According as He hath chosen in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.” It cuts it there and says that God elected us to be these things: holy, blameless, and filled with love. That implies that we would be characterized by love and we will spend eternity filled with love, all of which is true.  

Another way to cut it is to link it with predestination, describing God’s attitude or predisposition toward us in giving us that blessing; the ESV and NIV and many other translations do this: “In love, [God] predestined us to be adopted as His sons.” Either way, you cannot lose. We will be filled with love in Heaven; because He first loved us, so we are going to be filled with love; we are going to be swimming in a sea of love. And we will be perfectly characterized by love. Heaven is a world of love, according to Jonathan Edwards.  

This use of the word “love” in Ephesians seems to refer to the Father’s love rather than our love. The Father set His love on us. He loved us from before the foundation of the world. His heart is drawn out after His elect, after His children. I quoted Jeremiah 31:3 last week, in which God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” — an eternal love, a timeless love. “I have loved you with a love that soars above history: before, during and after history, my love.” God’s love is immeasurable, the source of all of His blessings. He has made us incredibly rich because He loves us.  

That love will never be taken from us no matter what our circumstances are. If you are a child of God, His love is set on you and will never be removed from you. Paul makes this very plain at the end of Romans chapter 8 — a glorious chapter — verses 38-39: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.” Nothing is going to separate us from that love. You may be going through a really grinding trial right now, a terrible affliction, and Satan is whispering in your ear, saying, “This is proof, it’s evidence. God doesn’t love you.” But nothing could be further from the truth. Romans 8 makes that plain. 

The delight that God has in us is unconditional. It was not triggered or sparked by anything in you. There was not a nature or attribute of yourself that drew God’s love out from His heart. This is the beauty of unconditional love. It is coming from His sovereign, settled, determined character, His grace. That is why He loves you — because He loves you — like God said to Israel in Deuteronomy 7:7-8. “The Lord did not set His affection on you and choose you because you are more numerous than all other peoples. For you are actually the fewest of peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that He brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery.” In other words, boiling it all down, the Lord loved you because He loved you. You may think, “I don’t know if that gets me anywhere.” Friends, it gets you everywhere! It gets you to Heaven! He loved you because He loved you. It is from inside Him; it is a sovereign, unconditional love. The greatest display of it ever was in the cross of Christ, amen? Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” The cross is a clear display. There is nothing in you that drew His love out; it was just something He did.  

In looking at God’s pleasure — His delight and enjoyment — in giving, we notice the language in verse 5 that traces this out. It says “in accordance with His pleasure and will.” God’s delight and His pleasure in making us rich in Christ is centrally on display. It brings Him so much pleasure to predestine us and adopt us. This is His will, and He is pleased to do it. It also speaks, in verse 6, of His glorious grace: “…to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves.” In Christ He lavishes, overflows goodness on us — this is the nature of grace, His riches and His lavish goodness to people who deserve to be condemned. Verses 7 and 8 also speak of the riches of God’s grace: “…in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us.” Reading these verses, we have a sense of riches.  

God does not give us “out of” His wealth; He gives us “according to” His wealth. Do you understand the difference? He gives us proportionally to what He can afford. And what is that? Oh, you cannot measure it; it is infinite. He is the owner of everything in the universe. God gives to us “according to” His wealth, His lavish nature. Verse 9, “according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Christ” speaks to a sense of God’s delight and enjoyment in giving us the Kingdom.  

There are so many different ways to depict a cheerful giver, but in my mind’s eye, I picture a little girl who is knitting a scarf for her daddy; her mommy has helped her and now it is finished, and the time has come to give it to her daddy. She is rolling it up and tying it with a string so it will not come unrolled and wrapping it. She is humming to herself — she is happy, excited, and she cannot wait to see the look on his face. She is so delighted to give that gift. 

Take that picture and multiply it by infinity. That is how God feels at getting Heaven ready for you and you for Heaven. He cannot wait to show you your eternal dwelling place. He has been getting it ready all this time. Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and I will take you to be with me, and you will be with me forever.” You get a sense of expectancy the Father has to show it to you. “Here it is. Look at it and feast your eyes on where you are going to spend eternity.” So beautiful. He is delighted to get it ready for you, and to get you ready for it. 

Now let’s look at a partial inventory of our spiritual gifts. We do not have time to go through each one in depth but we will touch on each one briefly. In verses 4-10, Paul says, “In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will, to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves. In Him, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding, and He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in Heaven and earth together under one Head, even Christ.” 

I want to talk about five of these spiritual blessings from this passage: the first is predestination; the second, adoption; the third, redemption, or the forgiveness of sins; the fourth, wisdom; and the fifth, revelation, the last two being pretty closely related. So these five blessings. Let’s look at the inventory of our wealth here.  

First we have predestination in verse 5. Last week we spent a lot of time on sovereign election, and how God, before the foundation of the world, chose His children by name. You may ask, “Aren’t election and predestination the same thing?” No — they are closely related but separate concepts. In election, God sovereignly identifies who will be saved: what the names are of those individuals whom God will create and save and call by name. In predestination, God sovereignly identifies aspects and details of that salvation: what it will entail, what we will receive, where we are heading. Election is the “Who” and predestination is the “What” of our salvation. 

What does this word “predestined” or “predestination” mean? It means “to determine ahead of time what will happen; to decree something, to foreordain or to decide beforehand” as a king would. In the Greek, the word literally means “to set the boundary lines ahead of time.” The prefix means “beforehand,” and the root is related to our word for “horizon,” or could be seen as related to a boundary line. In other words, God sets up the boundary lines for His elect ahead of time. This reminds me of the account in Joshua when the Israelites conquered the Promised Land. The time came, at the end of the book, to divide the land between the twelve tribes. This tribe got this, and that tribe got that, and the other tribe got the other, but it was all determined by lot. The lot was cast and the boundary lines were set. Thus, we see this language of “their allotted inheritance.” The implication, as we see in the book of Proverbs, is that “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision comes from the Lord.” 

Thus we see that the Lord lays out the boundary lines for the inheritance. That applies to individuals as well: God sets up boundary lines for what you will get in Christ, and He does this before the foundation of the world — that is what this word is teaching. David said it so beautifully in Psalm 16:6: “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.” Every Christian should be able to say that. “Surely I have a delightful inheritance.” In the history of our own nation, the Oklahoma Sooners stood at a starting line waiting for a cannon to go off. When it fired, they took off in a race for real estate. They surely would have been looking for some land with a river or green growth which showed rich soil — to the fastest, the wisest, the strongest, the best go the spoils. That is not the way salvation works, friends. God, by His sovereign grace, goes way ahead of you and sets up your boundary lines, and then He works sovereignly to bring you to the place He has set up for you. That is predestination. 

There have been long debates over predestination, and perhaps there will be long debates this afternoon over predestination. If you are a child of God, if you accept the Bible as the Word of God, you have to deal with predestination. I hope you know that I did not make it up — I am just trying to describe what it is, and so do not blame me. In my 17 years here, I have earned the right, with fear and trepidation, to preach on predestination, so you will realize that have not been working in my basement to come up with it, and that I am so excited to roll out this new doctrine that I dreamed up today. No — we all have found it in Scripture and we are working together to understand it.  

People struggle with it; they say “How does that reconcile to my free will?” Or “How does it connect with God’s justice or His love or goodness or John 3:16: ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.’ Doesn’t this doctrine make us robots?” I do not believe for a moment that predestination makes any human being a robot. If God had wanted a bunch of robots, He would have made a bunch of robots — God can do anything He wants. It is infinitely more complicated than that. You do, in fact, make choices. You do, in fact, love things and hate things and choose things, and those choices are real and they are significant. But those attributes that you have — loving, hating, choosing —came from God. He himself, in fact, loves things and hates things and makes choices and sets determinations. In truth, our loving and hating and choosing come after His, because He is the King. There is harmony with all of these things; they are not contradictory or contrary to your reason; it simply goes far beyond it.  

Ephesians 1 says “In love, He predestined us to be adopted…” Thus, adoption as sons is predestined here. What is predestined elsewhere? In Romans 8:29 Paul uses the word in this way: “For those God foreknew He predestined to be conformed to the likeness of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brothers.” In Ephesians the fact of our adoption is predestined, and in Romans 8:29, the ultimate end of our adoption is predestined — namely, that we are conformed to the likeness of Jesus. Paul also refers to predestination in the next verse in Romans 8:30 as a guarantee of our final salvation — a guarantee of it! He says, “Those He predestined, He also called; and those He called, He also justified; and those He justified, He also glorified.” Thus, predestination gives us a sense of complete certainty of our final salvation. 

Let’s shift our focus to talk about adoption, verse 5: “In love, He predestined us to be adopted as His sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with His pleasure and will, [verse 6] to the praise of His glorious grace, which He has freely given us in the One He loves.” Paul borrows a concept that would have been foreign to the Jewish world in which he was raised, but it was well-known in the Roman world — the idea of adoption of a son. In the Roman world, a wealthy nobleman could take a slave or a friend into his home and, for whatever reason seemed good to him, make him legally his son, his heir.  

The movie Ben Hur is one of my all-time favorite movies. In that movie, Judah Ben Hur, through various ways, became a galley slave, and in the course of events, he rescued a Roman nobleman, a general, from drowning. That man became a great man in Rome, and an affectionate relationship developed between this older Roman and Judah Ben Hur, so much so that Quintus Arrius, the older Roman man, adopted Judah Ben Hur, gave him his signet ring as a seal, and made him his son, his legal heir. 

Adoption in the Roman world was a matter of legal status, of rights and privileges, as pictured in Ben Hur. The adopted son would inherit the wealthy man’s property, he could sign documents in his name, he had access to the man himself, he was “son” in legal standing. We Christians are the adopted sons and daughters of the living God — just ponder that; it is amazing! We are not like Jesus, the only begotten Son of God. There is an infinite difference in some regards. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity; He is God the Son; we never will be that. But we are like Him and we have the legal status of heirs with Christ of the universe. Remember I said you are wealthy? You are wealthy. You are going to inherit the New Heaven and New Earth. That is incredible.  

But our adoption goes beyond our legal position. Judah Ben Hur, when he was adopted by Quintus Arrius, did not suddenly start looking like his adoptive father. He did not have the Roman nose, for example; he was still Jewish. The external and internal natures were all still the same. God’s adoption, however, goes beyond legal status. When we become sons and daughters, God then works through the Spirit of adoption to conform us, in nature, to Christ, as it says in Romans 8. We become conformed to the likeness of His Son, so that He is the firstborn among many brothers. That is what is going on in you Christians right now and has been for years and will continue to the day you die. That is what will happen in glorification: instantaneously, you are going to be made like Jesus. Oh, how sweet is that. 1 John 3: “Behold what manner of love the Father has given to you that you should be called ‘Child of God.’ And that is what we are. Now, what we will be has not been made known, but we know that when we see Him, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. Now everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, because He is pure.” We are sanctified now, but someday, instantly, we will be made exactly morally like Jesus. That is the finish line of our adoption.  

Romans chapter 8, to some degree, says it is not all finished until we get our resurrection bodies. Romans 8:23 says, “We await eagerly our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” Many of you have been through adoption proceedings; they are long and they are elaborate, and they are expensive, aren’t they? In the process, sometimes you may have wondered, “When does this child, this little boy, this little girl, become legally our son or daughter?” We talk about the adoption being finalized. Our adoption will be finalized when we are in our resurrection bodies. We are in adoption proceedings now. We are secure; it is going to be finished — that is what predestination is all about: we will finish. But it will not be finalized until we are conformed to Christ in His resurrection body and His glory. 

It could be that though you are here, you are an unbeliever, on the outside looking in. Perhaps you want to know, “How do I become a child of God?” John 1:12 says plainly how that happens: “As many as did receive Him, to those who believe in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.” How awesome is that? All you must do is believe in the name of Jesus; that Jesus Christ, crucified, shed His blood for your sins. Trust Him. Right now, where you are seated, say, “I am a sinner; I need a Savior. You died for me. You rose again. I believe that; save me.” And you will be a child of God. In doing so, you will receive the gift of sonship; you will receive the Holy Spirit, who will cry, “Abba, Father” from within you. It can happen right now. 

What will you get as a result of believing in Jesus? You get many things. You get complete security, because “The slave [Romans 8:35] has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.” And you get access — that will come up later in Ephesians: “Through Him [Christ], we have access to the Father by one Spirit.” What does access mean? A few weeks ago, I saw a Tweet from Tim Keller that said: “The only person who dares wake up a King at 3:00 a.m. and ask for a glass of water is a child.” We have that kind of access. This access shows how delighted God is to see you come, as a son or daughter of God, into the throne room. He says, “Come and sit with me and talk. What is on your mind? What is on your heart?” We have that kind of access. That is adoption. 

We also have, in verse 7, “…redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” In order for God to delight in us, He must deal with our wickedness. He must redeem us from our sins. The price for that, as we have said, is infinitely expensive. A debt had to be paid. “The wages of sin is death.” It says plainly in Leviticus, that “the blood of the creature is its life, and I have given it to you to make atonement for sins.” In Hebrews 9:22 it says, “Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.” He cannot delight in us without dealing with our sins. Our sins are disgusting and repulsive to Him.  

Thus, we must have redemption. The word redemption means “a buying out of”; here it implies a state such as slavery. Think about how God said again and again in Exodus: “With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”, He redeemed them from a life of slavery and brought them into the Promised Land. In the same way, we were slaves to sin, and God has redeemed us by the blood of Jesus. He has forgiven our sins. It is so complex and beautiful: He has imputed the righteousness of Christ to us and then declared us, on that basis, not guilty of all of our sins; He treats us as though we did not commit any of those sins, as though we were as righteous as Jesus. We did not get by because we got a good lawyer. The angels in Heaven will not look askance at us, saying, “I know how you got here. You had a wealthy friend, wealthy relative, who got you past Judgment Day, and now you are here.” No. There is delight; we are treated as though we really are righteous. It is just amazing to me. Redemption is all about the blood of Jesus. That is our gift — we were redeemed from our sins by the blood of Christ. 

Also, in verse 8, Paul says that God has given us “wisdom and understanding”: “…in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that He lavished on us, with all wisdom and understanding.” God actually transforms our minds so that our minds and hearts are not darkened or hardened like they used to be. We understand things spiritually that we did not understand before. He has “taken out the heart of stone and given you the heart of flesh.” When you read the Bible before, it seemed to be a dark book;  now it makes sense to you, increasingly so. He is giving you a mind of understanding, of wisdom. In our former days, we were, Titus 3 says, “foolish, deceived, and enslaved to all kinds of passions.” But now we have been made, 2 Timothy 3, “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” We have been wise to flee the wrath to come. We have been given a new heart and a new mind. 

It is not finished yet. If you look at verse 17 of this same chapter, Paul prays that “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know Him better.” We have more wisdom to gain, more to learn. He will give it to you — in listening to preaching, reading books, or studying the Scriptures, you gain more wisdom and understanding.  

The fifth blessing is revelation. God will take the veil back from the mystery of the world, of the universe, and He will tell you what He is doing. He will show you the big picture. Ephesians 1:10 seems to explode in my mind when I read this. This is what God is doing in the world. You say, “What is He doing? We have earthquakes in Nepal, we have race riots in Baltimore, we have all kinds of things in my life, in friends’ lives, and we have all kinds of suffering. What is He doing?” He is giving you revelation so that you can know what He is doing in the world. Look at verses 9 and 10: “He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in Heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.” This word “mystery” should not make us think of Sherlock Holmes, in which he and the reader together go around looking for clues and then, putting the clues together — if you are sharp and incisive and clever — you solve the mystery. No, mystery implies part of God’s plan which has been hidden in His mind; and Ephesians 1:9-10 implies that He now pulls back the mystery through the Scripture and the Holy Spirit to say, “This is what I am doing.” 

What is God doing, ultimately? Paul says, “He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in Heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.” What does that mean? The New American Standard Version, in verse 10, puts it this way: “…with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of time.” He is administering or unfolding His plan. It is wise, detailed; it is big, and it covers everything. He is unfolding it in every generation, step by step, day after day, year after year, with a view to the end of all time when all of these things will be consummated and completed. He is unfolding, verse 10, this plan “suitable for the fullness of time.”  

What is His plan? He is bringing together all things that were fragmented, blown apart through wickedness and sin “together under one head… Christ.” The New Heaven and New Earth will be a place of perfect, pervasive, deep harmony and unity between everything that God has made and God Himself — perfectly one in Christ. What He is doing is how big. It includes the race issue in Baltimore, the earthquake in Nepal, all suffering. The universe has been affected as by a fragmentation grenade, blown apart by sin. People are blown apart by sin. We see it in individual relationships: in husband-wife relationships, marriages; in parent-child relationships, with tyranny by the parents or rebellion by the children; in relationships between one ethnic group and another. We see it everywhere, this fragmentation.  

The only answer is the Gospel of Christ, amen? And it is not just the only answer — it will work! It is suitable for the fullness of time, and it will work. In time, there will be no more earthquakes, no more tidal waves, no more floods, no more death or mourning or crying or pain, no more murders, no more injustice. Those days will be over forever. 

God’s ultimate purpose in all of this — I never tire of saying it — is worship. That is my first application: Let’s just worship God in all of this. We need to worship Him; we need to say “Thank you” to God. Go back to verse 3: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Praise Him more than you do. Take Ephesians 1:3-10 and say “Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Look at all this. Praise God for election. Praise God for Your love. Praise God, someday I am going to be holy and blameless in Your sight. Praise God that You predestined me for all this and nothing can stop it. Praise God that You poured out Your Son, His blood, for me, that I might have forgiveness of sins.” Praise God for these blessings. Just praise Him. Go over your inventory. Say, “I am rich! I am a rich man; I am a rich woman.” 

Second, I have already said it, but if you came in this place on the outside looking in, I hope that you are not still that way. I hope that ten minutes ago you followed what I urged you to do and you called on Christ, so you do not leave here under the wrath of God; instead, that you leave here an adopted son or daughter of God.  

Third, for us as believers, let’s be aware of all of the unreached people groups and others who have heard the Gospel several but haven’t come to Christ yet. We have a responsibility, a joyful responsibility. God loves a cheerful giver. Let’s cheerfully go out and share the Gospel with people. Say, “I have some good news for you.” Start tomorrow, perhaps with workplace evangelism. You might say, “How was your weekend?” Your coworker may say, “It was terrible, terrible.” “Why?” “Well, it was dreary; it was ugly and awful and rainy and cold.” The you say, “I had a great weekend.” “Really? What made it great?” “I just found out how rich I am.” He might say, “Tell me more. I’m interested. Very interested.” You would want to say, “I can tell you all about the wealth I have.” Have that conversation; see where it leads.  

Fourth, concerning adoption, I would commend to you to consider whether God is leading you, even if you have never considered it before, to adopt a child. Many of you have already reached that point. Those of you who have questions, find out from those who are further along in the process — the elders know who they are — and ask, “How do I get involved? God may be leading us to adopt a child. How do we do that?” For those of you who are in the process of it, let’s work together. Let’s pray for one another. It is a long, costly process. Let’s encourage those who have that calling. This is a great passage to lead us to talk about adoption, because adoption on earth pictures our eternal adoption. 

Fifth, let’s stop complaining, amen? Let’s just stop complaining and moaning and groaning. I know things are hard sometimes. I never tire of the illustration John Newton, who lived in the 18th century and wrote Amazing Grace, gave about the man on his way into the city to receive a vast inheritance. On the way, this heir, this soon-to-be incredibly wealthy man’s carriage broke, and it was raining. He had to get out and walk the last two miles in the rain, in the mud, and the whole time, he is complaining, “My carriage is broken, it is muddy and raining.” We want to say to him, “What is wrong with you?!?” But that is how we look to Heaven when we go about muttering and complaining. Do not do that. Say, “I am rich. God loves me. God has given me everything I need — every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.” Let’s praise Him and thank Him. 

Sixth, let’s imitate God’s cheerful generosity, amen? Let’s be cheerful, cheerful givers. God loves a cheerful giver. Let’s be like that little girl who is knitting, and say “I can’t wait to give this to somebody. I just want to give this.” There are so many of you in this congregation who have taught me about cheerful giving. I would say I barely saw it before I came here. I am not saying people had not been cheerful and generous to me before, but there are some that have been so generous to me and my family since we have been here, that you have taught us how to give cheerfully. Let us imitate that; let’s be cheerful givers.  

Seventh, let’s not stumble over predestination. Let’s delight in it. Find security in it. Do not argue over it. If, this afternoon, two of you find yourselves in an argument about predestination, stop! Go back and read the verse; stop arguing and say, “Praise God that in love you predestined us to be adopted as sons,” and leave it at that. That is what the text says. Just leave it there. 

And finally, look forward when you read or watch the news and you see earthquakes, race riots, different things, yearn for Ephesians 1:10, “Oh God, make all things one in Christ. Bring us together and make us one.” 

Close with me in prayer.  Father, it has been so good to go over the inventory list of how rich we are in Christ. Thank you that you are so cheerfully willing to give this to us. Thank you for everything you have done in Jesus. Now I pray that you would take this word and seal it to our hearts, deeply. Help us to understand it; help us to take it to heart and to embrace it. We pray this in Jesus’ Name. Amen. 

Pastor Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Ephesians 1:1-4. The main subject of the sermon is God's sovereignty in salvation and His kindness to the saints in election.

This morning we are looking at Ephesians 1:1-4. In my opinion, there is no book of the Bible that flies in such a lofty way and looks over the grandeur of the saving work of God as does the book of Ephesians. It is densely packed with truth, so densely packed that just a handful of verses, like you heard read for us a moment ago, is filled, jam-packed, with more concepts than we could get through in a couple of weeks of preaching. We could ponder them for days and days and still not plumb the depths.  

Specifically, at the very beginning of this epistle, Paul leads the Ephesian Christians in a celebration of worship to Almighty God on an infinitely deep topic. That topic is God’s eternal election, His choosing of the saints from before the world began. So difficult is this idea to grasp that many have debated these ideas back and forth with tremendous passion and even unholy intensity. 

Many Christians, knowing this, have shrunk back from thinking or talking about election or God choosing or predestination, or any difficult doctrines, thinking, “We cannot understand them; they are just going to lead to arguments anyway.” Because they want to steer clear from controversy, they might even be proud of themselves for blunting or turning away from these things. They are, they think, in a strange way, maintaining “unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace,” quoting the same book that we are studying today. 

But in doing so, they forget that God intended for us to know these things and therefore has told us about them in Scripture — not just here in Ephesians, but in many places. God gave this Scripture to us to read it, to ponder it, to meditate over it and to allow it to transform us. It is a sin for us, therefore, to fail to ponder these things, to shrink back from the title deed of our full inheritance that we have in Scripture, here in Ephesians 1. It would be a sin as a pastor to skip or avoid it, to deal with it lightly or to gloss over it — to refuse to lead FBC in a thorough contemplation of Ephesians. The apostle Paul did not do that with these Ephesian Christians. He says in Acts 20:20 to the Ephesian elders, “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable.” Then a few verses later, he says,“I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God.” So also, it is not right for us as individual Christians, or certainly not for me as a pastor, to shrink back from Ephesians 1:1-4.   

What is the right approach to engage these deep ideas? I am going to lean on Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a twentieth-century Welsh preacher, who gives us some “rules of the road”: First, we should not come with an argumentative spirit, loyal to one faction or party or another. We should never come to this topic with heat or dogmatism; Second, we should come with a spirit of utmost reverence and a sense of profound worship about these things, as on bended knees, having taken off our shoes, for the ground on which we are standing is holy; Third, we should come as if God himself were speaking these words to us, telling us deep and mysterious things that we would have no other way of knowing; Fourth, we should come based on our experience as Christians — not from a detached theoretical, academic, intellectual, philosophical standpoint — knowing that the overwhelming majority of people in the world in which we live do not believe any of these things at all. They do not believe any aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They chose to sleep in today rather than to go to a place of worship. (It was very easy for me to turn left onto Highway 15-501 this morning — much easier than it will be tomorrow morning.) Where are all the people? They haven’t moved, I don’t think, but they are not choosing to come to worship.  

Why, then, am I choosing to come to worship? Why am I here today? You could ask the same thing about yourself. Why do you believe the gospel? Why do you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God? Why are you hoping in Christ for full forgiveness of your sins and to spend eternity in heaven? Why has this happened to you and not to all of them, your co-workers, fellow students, people that you shop with at the malls? Why you?   

1 Corinthians 2:14 says,“The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” Why, then, can you understand them? How did this happen to you? If you search your own heart, look at you own experience, you will know that God, by His sovereign grace, has rescued you from the dominion of darkness, and He has, by His sovereign grace, brought you into the kingdom of the Beloved Son. To God be the glory for that! God took out your heart of stone and He gave you a heart of flesh.   

Fifth and finally, we come not with mere human understanding, but recognizing that eternal election is an infinite mystery: something that soars well beyond human ability to fully comprehend, no matter how smart or learned you are, how many Scriptures you have studied or how many books of theology you have read. This is infinite mystery. No one can fully explain or comprehend it. It is a heavenly doctrine, and thus, no human being would ever have concocted it — who would have come up with the idea that God chose us before the creation of the world, by name, to be His children? 

A few weeks ago, in Isaiah 55:8-9, we heard these words that I think are helpful now. God says this to the human race, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’” We can apply that as we venture into our study about eternal election. God rebukes the argumentative human spirit. In Romans 9:20, He says, “But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? ‘Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?”’” Who are we to argue if God has told us that He has done this?  Those are some preliminary “rules of the road” to help us.  

I tend to ask another question — it is utilitarian, but it is the way I am: What benefit comes from studying this? What do we get out of this? All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable. What is the profit? I see two profits from studying eternal election and predestination:   

First (very useful), we get humility. This doctrine has tremendous power to humble the arrogant human heart, to lay it low, to level it completely. Actually, every aspect of our salvation does that, the more you meditate on it. It is very necessary for us to be humbled. We are so arrogant. To know that we were chosen before the creation of the world, completely apart from anything positive that God saw in us, is humbling.   

Second, we get assurance. We get the security of knowing that we are going to be finally saved in the end. We are going to be in glorious resurrection bodies in a resurrected world, and nothing, no power in heaven or earth or under the earth, can stop it. This gives me assurance and confidence as I battle my own sins, day after day. Jesus put it this way in John 6:37-39, “All that the Father gives Me [that is the elect] will come to Me [one hundred percent of them] and whoever comes to Me, I will never drive away. For I have come down from heaven not to do my will, but to do the will of Him who sent Me. And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that I shall lose none of all that He has given Me [that is the elect], but raise them up at the last day.” 

If you can read those words and not end up with a surge of assurance, then read it again! Look at how much assurance comes from the doctrine of election. God will never lose any of His elect but will raise them up on the final day. Therefore, (Philippians 1:6)“… He who began a good work in you will [most certainly] carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” 

Now let’s look at the text, Ephesians 1:1-4. We could approach these verses in a variety of ways, but I am going to use the organizing rubric of election for this sermon.  We will start with Paul and the Ephesian saints as trophies of God’s sovereign election. Verses 1 and 2 say,“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul is most certainly an eternal trophy of God’s sovereign election. Amen? I know of no one in redemptive history so perfectly positioned to write this epistle as the apostle Paul. He is certainly and clearly a trophy of God’s grace. Paul makes an initial assertion here, “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God…” God the Father exerted His sovereign will in Paul’s life and changed him forever. We know the story of Paul because it has been so thoroughly covered in the New Testament, as in Galatians 1:13-14, in which Paul says, “For you have heard of my previous way of life in Judaism, how intensely I persecuted the church of God and tried to destroy it. I was advancing in Judaism beyond many Jews of my own age and was extremely zealous for the traditions of my fathers.” Paul was a very zealous, Christ-hating, church-hating Jew. In 1 Timothy 1:13, he says this about himself, “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy…” 

The circumstances of Paul’s conversion are told no less than three times in the book of Acts. It is very important. In Acts 9:4-6, Luke says that Saul of Tarsus was “breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples.” “He obtained letters from the Sanhedrin to go to synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to those synagogues who followed Christianity, he could arrest them and drag them back for trial to the Sanhedrin.” That was how much he hated Jesus. He was filled with it, breathing these things out. He was more zealous than ever, excited about his trip to Damascus. He woke up that morning a Christ-hating persecutor of the church. He went to bed that night loving Jesus and wanting to build the church. How did that happen? It is the sovereign grace of God! There is no other explanation.  

Paul might say, “If God can convert me, He can convert anyone, anytime.” By sovereign grace, he was on the road when he saw a blinding light and heard a voice from heaven: “‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute Me?’ ‘Who are you Lord?’ Saul asked. ‘I am Jesus…’” Those three words shattered his old way of life. I think that was the moment of conversion for him, when the light shone in his heart. “I am Jesus,” the radiant, majestically glorious, resurrected God of heaven and earth. “I am Jesus, [the very one that] you are persecuting… Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.” That is the way a King talks! One thing he “must do” was to be an apostle to the Gentiles. That was God’s will for his life, the beginning of his ministry, his calling. Paul is clearly a trophy of God’s electing grace. 

The Ephesian saints were also trophies. Paul writes “to the saints in Ephesus.” (Regarding the word “saint”: I was raised in the Roman Catholic church, which uses a narrow, corrupted definition of the word — I went to Saint Anselm’s School and Saint Jeremiah’s Church — referring to a person who has led a life of conspicuous holiness and exemplary service to the church, perhaps martyred for the faith, with evidence of performing at least two miracles either directly or through intercession; that person is then canonized by the Pope and venerated along with all the others who are on the list of saints.) We understand the word differently in the New Testament: a saint is a believer in Christ, a genuine Christian, somebody who has been regenerated, transformed by the grace of God. The word means “set apart as God’s holy possession” — that is what we are. These Ephesians are ordinary Christians, but they are supernatural beings. They are trophies of God’s grace.   

They lived in a place that had one of the wonders of the ancient world, centered around their religion: the Temple of Artemis of the Ephesians. People came from all around the inhabited world to worship at this pagan temple of a goddess, and this religion brought in a great deal of money for the Ephesians. But God had chosen some of them out to become Christians, so that when Paul came and preached the gospel, they heard, they repented and they believed. They also were trophies of God’s grace.  

No one becomes a Christian apart from God’s election and predestination and sovereign grace in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, every one of you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, is a trophy of God’s grace, and so am I. We will celebrate this for all of eternity. To God be the glory for our salvation! 

The greeting is appropriate (verse 2): “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace is at the core, at the center of all of this. What is grace? There are many definitions that are somewhat helpful but are, in my opinion, partial and therefore a bit weak. I prefer this definition: Grace is the settled determination in the heart of Almighty God to do us infinite good who deserve infinite wrath. Grace is something in God’s heart, and out of that determination in His heart flows everything we need for salvation. The implication in verse 2 is that we need more — grace needs to keep coming to us: “Grace to you. Grace to you. Grace to you.” We are dependent on grace — we must have more grace. This epistle, Ephesians, is a conduit, a pipeline, of grace to us. So are all epistles; so is all the Bible; so is every good worship service, every good sermon. God is sustaining our souls by grace until we are finally in heaven.  

He also says “peace to you.” Justified by faith in Christ, we have peace with God. It is a settled status of peace that will never end. God will never be at war with us, nor we at war with God; that is in the past. What is in view here is an experience or feeling of peacefulness: a heart at rest and at peace in your salvation; a sense that God is ministering “the peace of God that transcends all understanding [that] will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:7) There is a ministry of peace as you read Ephesians. It comes to you from both God the Father, who is the source of every blessing, “…and the Lord Jesus Christ” — the Lord Jesus Christ is the mediator by which all grace and peace come. Apart from Christ you have no good thing. 

Now we will examine some particular aspects of election. First, God’s purpose in election (verse 3) is worship: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” Paul begins with worship: “Praise be to God.” You should begin everything with worship. Begin every day with worship; get up out of bed in the morning and say, “Praise be to God. Praise be to God for everything.” “For the praise of His glory.” We see this again and again. He does everything for the praise of His glory. God created us to worship Him. He redeemed us to worship Him. He is keeping us in Christ and is doing all of these good things so that we will worship Him. That is the purpose of all of this, so blessed be, praised be God. May God be honored. May God be esteemed. May He be spoken well of. May He get all the praise and honor He deserves for our salvation. May He be happy and satisfied in His work. Heaven is a world filled with praise, with archangels and angels and spirits of righteous men and women made perfect. They are praising God all the time.   

Notice who is praised here: the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This is a specifically Christian, Jesus-centered designation of God. It is Trinitarian, ultimately. God is not merely the Creator of the ends of the earth — He is that, and it is Biblical to say that. He is not merely the sustainer of all living things — He is that. The King and Judge of all the earth — He is that. Nor is He merely the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — He is that. The God of the Jews — certainly. These are suitable ways to address God. But here, He is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This is who we Christians worship. We believe this is one and the same God as all of those appellations. But this is God the Father, the God who had said about Jesus, “This is my Son, whom I love; with Him I am well pleased.” (Matthew 3:17)  

Paul is zeroing in on God the Father as the source of every blessing that you have in your life, and specifically, the spiritual ones. It is easy for us Christians to be a bit standoffish with or afraid of God the Father. Perhaps you did not have a good relationship with your own biological father, or you have never seen fatherhood done well; or you read about the terrors of the law and the judgement and wrath of God and are afraid. But Jesus came specifically to reveal the Father to us. He said so sweetly and beautifully in John 16:26-27, “In that day, you will ask in My name. I am not saying that I will ask the Father on your behalf. [You will ask Him.] No, the Father Himself loves you…” In other words, “The Father loves you like I love you.”   

If you are a Christian today, you are infinitely, perfectly and eternally loved by your Heavenly Father. He cherishes you. He is the highest authority in the universe — there is no higher than God — and He loves you. He set His love on you in Christ. It is mind-blowing. He is your Father by adoption. We will spend eternity worshiping God the Father. This is our destiny, our heavenly occupation. The New Heaven and the New Earth will be staggeringly beautiful, free from all decay and all corruption, free from death. It will be exactly the world God intended when He created the heavens and the earth, only it will be glorified. It will be radiant with the glory of God. We will see the glory of God and we will delight in every blade of grass and every flower in the New Heaven and the New Earth. Every soaring mountain and lush valley, every glistening river and placid pond — all of these things will glow with the glory of God the Father. You will see them and give Him praise and honor. You will worship Him.  

Let me pause for an application: Let’s worship God the Father all the time, by the Spirit. Let’s see, even in this present sin-corrupted world, still so much evidence of the glory of God. Let’s be people of worship and live for the praise of God’s glory and say, “This is such a marvelous world. This is my Father’s world and everything around me tells me of His glory and His power.” We should be far more filled with worship.  

Second, see God’s generosity in election, with every spiritual blessing coming to us. Verse 3 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” God the Father has blessed us with specific blessings, packages of grace given to us. The lavish grace of God the Father toward sinners like us should take our breath away. Think about the father who came running down to the end of the road when his prodigal son returned home (Luke 15): “… the father said to his servants, “Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate.” Each of those things — the robe, the ring, the sandals, the calf and the feast and all — is a packet of blessing, a packet of grace. So it is with our salvation.   

God has so much grace to give us; “grace upon grace” as it says in John 1:16. Here it says “every spiritual blessing” has been given to us. How do we understand “every spiritual blessing”? It is not true that God gives us every spiritual blessing there is, but it is true that He gives us every spiritual blessing we need — to make it out of Satan’s dark kingdom, through this wicked world and beyond Judgment Day into the New Heaven and New Earth. All the blessings we need are supplied for us in Christ — everything! 2 Peter 1:3 puts it this way, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness.” “Life” in this case means eternal life; “godliness” means sanctification. We are fully equipped for the Christian life, fully equipped for Judgment Day, fully equipped for eternity.  

He mentions here spiritual blessings. He is not focusing on what we would call common grace blessings. Those are things God lavishes on His enemies and friends alike. He causes the rain to fall and the sun to shine on the righteous and the wicked alike. Those are significant blessings — food, clothing and shelter, a good job and family, fun times and hobbies — all those earthly pleasures, all the honey in this world. God does give those things, but here Paul is talking about spiritual blessings, which he then enumerates (though this list is not exhaustive): His love, in which“He predestined us to be adopted as His sons”; redemption through the blood of Jesus; all wisdom so that we understand His eternal purpose in all of this; the blessing of the Gospel, which we believed; repentance and faith; the sealing of the Spirit. We have all these blessings coming on us one after another from God the Father. 

Third, Paul tells us that these spiritual blessings are “in the heavenly realms.” These blessings must be received spiritually, by faith, or we will not receive them at all. We cannot see them; we do not have physical tokens of them. We Christians need to live much more in the heavenly realms than we tend to do. People go through many varied afflictions, struggles and trials in life —  cancer, job loss, death of a loved one, infertility, adoption frustrations, singleness, loneliness, loss of homes through flood, fire or other disaster, serious injury, or other afflictions. During such trials people may be tempted to question God’s love. They may wonder why they have not been blessed. But the blessings that we all need most are these: the spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. We have been given those. We need to realize how infinitely rich we are in Jesus. We tend to focus so much of our effort, our prayers, our drive and our minds on physical blessings in the earthly realms. We must meditate much more on these spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms.  

Some false teachers espouse the “Prosperity Gospel”. They are leading their congregations week after week to focus almost entirely on physical blessings in the earthly realms. One such teacher, Joel Osteen, says, “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money to fulfill the destiny He has laid out for us.” According to Osteen, God wants to pour out His “immeasurable favor” on human creatures. We have to reorder our thinking: “… you must rid yourself of that small-minded thinking and start expecting God’s blessings, start anticipating promotion and supernatural increase. You must conceive it in your heart and mind before you can receive it [but if you can conceive it in your heart, you will receive it].” 

What do we say, then, in response to Christian martyrs? What do we say to brothers and sisters in Christ who live in third world countries who live in what we would consider appalling poverty their entire lives but are happy in their spiritual blessings in Christ? What do we say to those who are thrown overboard by Muslims because they are Christians? Or to those who are beheaded? What do we say to house-church pastors who are afflicted by Communist governments and who have not been out in years? How does the prosperity gospel fit with that? I picture Paul and Silas with backs bleeding and incarcerated for preaching the gospel, singing praise songs to Jesus because of every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms that are theirs in Christ Jesus; no one can take that from them. “… moth and rust do not destroy and thieves do not break in and steal.” (Matthew 6:20)  

Therefore, away from the false teaching — the prosperity gospel — and instead meditate on every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm. Some of our depression, discouragement and dejectedness in the Christian life is surely caused by meditating too much on earthly blessings in the physical realms. We need to repent and ask that God would lift our hearts. 

Fourth, God’s timing of our election, chosen before the world began (verse 4): “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.” The fact of our election is plainly asserted. God chose us. The Greek word “chose” is used in many places to refer to the elect or the chosen ones. To choose means to select one or a few out of a larger group. This is one of the most valuable and yet one of the most difficult doctrines in the Christian faith. The idea of election is taught in many places in the New Testament. Jesus said it in Matthew 24:31: At the time second coming,“He will send His angels … and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.”  

Paul said the elect were constantly on his mind when he did missions and evangelism. So they should be on our minds. In 2 Timothy 2:10, Paul says, “Therefore, I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they too may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.” Evangelism here in the Triangle and missions to unreached people groups is the search for the elect. I have said before I wish they had an “E” on their foreheads, but they do not, so we preach the gospel to everyone and we know that the ones who respond vigorously, at least, are elect. It says in 2 Thessalonians 2:13, “But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth [the truth being the gospel].” The gospel came to Thessalonica, they heard the gospel, believed, repented, received the gift of the Holy Spirit, began to live the Christian life — thus, Paul knew they were elect. Peter wrote his epistle to the elect: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia.”   

What is election? It is God choosing, from among the mass of humanity, those who would believe in Jesus Christ, who would be His children. The elect are the focus of everything God did in Christ and by the Holy Spirit. This election is the ground of everything that follows, including predestination — it is because of election that everything else comes. You might say, “How does my own choosing fit into that? How do I reconcile my choosing with God’s choosing?” I like to paraphrase another verse to explain this idea. 1 John 4:19 says, “We love because He first loved us.” It is not a reach, then, to say, “We choose because He first chose us.” We do choose to follow Christ. We are finally free to use our “chooser mechanism” for the thing it was made for: Jesus and God. We choose as finally, the work of Satan and the hardening of the heart is removed and we can see things as they really are. Yes, we will choose God in Christ then. God’s choice of us is the ground of our choice for Christ.   

Look at the timing of when this election happened. He chose us in Christ before the creation of the world. If this does not stretch your brain to breaking point, you have not thought about it enough. Think again! Before the creation of the world, God chose us. Before God said, “Let there be light,” He chose you by name. In 2 Timothy 1:9-10, “This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus.” This is infinite mystery. God says in Jeremiah, “I have loved you with an everlasting love [and therefore], I have drawn you with loving-kindness.” God sets His love on us by name.  

Think of all the moments in history. When Adam and Eve were formed, if you are a Christian, He was loving you by name in His own mind while He was forming them. He was loving you by name when He flooded the world and rescued Noah. As a matter of fact, you could say He rescued Noah, in part, so that He could rescue you. He was thinking about you by name when He called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans. He was thinking about you by name during all of the history of the Jewish nation, including the Exodus — He was having a love relationship with you in His mind. Before your parents met, He was loving you by name. That is, in part, why He brought your parents together. He was loving you by name and having a relationship with you in His heart and in His mind. If this does not give you security, I do not know what will, if you are a Christian.   

On what basis were the elect chosen and others not? You may say, “Why ask that question?” It is relevant because there is one of two possible answers. One, God chose you before the creation of the world because He saw something that would eventually be in you, some attribute or some action in you. On that basis, He chose you, foreseen, because God knows the end from the beginning (which we do not deny). Or two, God chose you despite anything He saw in you, in and of Himself, by His own sovereign grace. The Bible teaches the second, not the first. How do we know that? We understand this plainly from Romans 9:11-12. Let me read these verses which are key for understanding why God chooses, why election. Romans 9:11-12 says this, speaking of Jacob and Esau, “Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad — in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by Him who calls — she was told [the older was to serve the younger].”  

It is clear: sequencing means everything to that argument. The fact of election before they even exist removes anything in the individual as the ground for election. Sequencing means everything. What do I mean by that? Consider a miracle of Jesus in light of its sequence. Suppose Jesus had been sleeping in the back of the boat in the midst of a storm — the waves, the wind and all — while the disciples feared they would drown, and He continued to sleep through the whole thing. Then suppose that suddenly, while He continued sleeping, the storm abated, just stopped, and then 10 minutes later Jesus woke up, stretched, stood up and said, “Peace, be still.” The disciples would have wondered, “Where was that 10 minutes ago? We are glad the storm stopped, but we could have used some help before that.” Would you call that a miracle? I would not. Sequencing is everything! While the storm was still going on, Jesus spoke, and then it stopped — that was a miracle. And so it is in Romans 9:11-12. Before we were created, God chose us. It had nothing to do with anything He saw in us. If there is anything good in us, whether repentance, faith, good works, or anything else, He worked them in us. To God be the glory! Thus, our election is not based on foreseen-anything. 

Fifth, God’s provision for our election is through Christ. “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world.” What does this mean, “in Him”? It means that you do not get anything except through the work of Christ. Every good thing you get, including your election, is blood bought. When God chose you, He was thinking about the blood Jesus would shed for you. You get nothing apart from that. 

Sixth, what is God’s intention in our election, our holiness? “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.” God chose us to be pure from sin. This is the ultimate purpose of our election. In justification, when you call on the name of Jesus for your salvation and you say, “I am a sinner, please forgive me,” and you trust in Jesus, you are forgiven; you are justified. You are made positionally holy in God’s sight. In sanctification, by the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, you are made progressively holy in His sight. Finally, at glorification, you will instantaneously be made actually and perfectly holy in His sight. This whole work has been for salvation from sin and from all its corruption and defilement. That is why God chose you. Therefore, holiness is very much the issue of our salvation. You should not think of holiness as this austere state of fasting and wearing simple, drab clothes, as many people tend to think of holiness. 

Rather, holiness is the most beautiful, virtuous, attractive, joyful state possible for any being. It is the perfection of joy and beauty. It is loving righteousness and hating wickedness. Jonathan Edwards says this: “Holiness … appeared to me to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature; which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefulness and ravishment to the soul… it made the soul like a field or garden of God, with all manner of pleasant flowers; all pleasant, delightful and undisturbed; enjoying a sweet calm, and the gently vivifying beams of the sun. The soul of a true Christian … appeared [to me] like such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom, to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory; rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around it a sweet fragrancy…” That is holiness. It is beautiful, fragrant, the exact opposite of all wickedness and corruption. God chose you to be holy, and that is what you will be some day; God is working that in you day after day. 

Quickly, some applications: 

First, as we reach out with the gospel, let’s make election the ground of our confidence in evangelism and missions, amen? Let’s say, “There are elect people at my work. There are elect people in my neighborhood. There are elect people in my dorm or in my classes. There are elect people here in the Triangle region that have not yet come to faith in Christ. Oh, God, make me an instrument of bringing them over from darkness to light. I want to be part of that work.” Do you see how that will give us such confidence along with humility as we reach out with the gospel? Unreached people groups will be reached, because there must be elect from each tribe, nation, and language.   

Second, I appeal to you who are non-Christian visitors here today. I do not know who you are, but we are so glad you are here. You have heard the gospel today. You know enough. Jesus is God’s Son who died on the cross for sin. Trust in Him. Do not leave here unregenerate. Do not leave here lost. You say, “What about election? How do I know?” You do not need to worry about that. Just come to Christ. Believe in the gospel. Then you and all of the people who know you will know you are elect.   

Third, let’s be a people of praise, worship and thanksgiving. Let’s stop complaining and instead spend more time worshiping. The complaining is based on earthly things in the natural realm. You have been given everything you need in the spiritual gifts in the heavenly realms in Christ. You are fully equipped. Praise Him, worship Him. Get up in the morning and say, “I praise you, God, that you chose me by name before the creation of the world. I praise you, oh God, that you sent Jesus to die for me.” 

Fourth, ponder the mystery of election. Do not press the eject button on this doctrine in your mind; do not shrink back from it. Return to it, meditate on it. Read and ponder Romans 9:11-12. Not by works, but by Him. That is the contrast. It is not “Not by works but by faith” — that is not what he says. Not by works, but by God. 

Fifth, focus in your daily conversation, more than you every have before, on spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms. Talk about them with your friends. 

Sixth, yearn for holiness in daily life. Do not look at holiness as stark austerity but as delightful and beautiful. 

Finally, pray more than ever before for God’s elect in unreached people groups to be reached with the gospel. Pray for FBC to be more involved in missions than we have ever been in our history. Pray for a flowering of missions in this church. 

Close with me, if you would, in prayer.  Father, we thank you for the meditation that we have had today in the deep topic of election. It is beyond our ability to comprehend how you could choose people by name before they are even born, before they could do good or bad, but Lord, you have. I thank you for that. I pray that you give us a rich, full understanding of what we have in Christ and how Christ shed His blood that we might receive each blessing. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.