Our Blessed God: Ephesians 1:1-14

Well, thank you, choir.

Blessed is the heart that uh knows and can say with such strength, Lord, use me.

I want to be used by you.

And so uh blessed words there, we praise God.

This morning, our sermon scripture reading comes from Ephesians.

Ephesians chapter 1, verses 1 through 14.

Ephesians 1:1–14

So you can follow along in your church Bible there, uh, on your seats there if you don't have one, otherwise you're bulletin.

Reading from verse 1.

Hear now God's holy word.

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus, grace to you and peace from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined, according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire position of it, to the praise of his glory.

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, we thank you for uh your word to us, that you are indeed the living word.

It's to you whom we come this day, and we ask, Holy Spirit, that you would do your powerful work of enlightening the eyes of our hearts this day.

Lord, we we ask that you would show us more of your glory and your blessedness, we pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So there's a saying that uh I've been I've come to consider a little a little more deeply of recent, and and and the saying is pay attention to what you pay attention to.

Pay attention to what you pay attention to.

I wonder if you've ever tried to do that.

I wonder what you might find if you did do that.

I think for some of us, you we might find that we give plenty of attention to our electronic devices.

Uh for others of us, we might find ourselves paying attention to to our social surroundings, um, to what's going on around us, the news, uh, outrage culture, cancel culture, the increasing levels of relational disconnect.

We're concerned with what's going on out there in society.

We pay attention to that.

For others, there still may it may be something else.

It may be that we pay attention to prominent voices, influencers, people with a following.

What do you pay attention to?

And you see, if we're honest, we can find ourselves being pulled into this powerful vortex of distraction, and we find ourselves, we find the posture of our hearts drawn downward.

But the good news of the gospel is that in the midst of all of this, God is pleased to renew us deeply by his grace.

And in reading this passage just a moment ago, you might have felt a little overwhelmed by just how much is packed in these few verses.

I can be a little overwhelming to read that and to and to know where to start, but uh to overwhelm you just a little bit further, and the Greek, this is actually one sentence packed with blessing.

It's a doxology, and the apostle Paul is writing this letter in prison, and it's been clear that he's been sowing to the spirit as he's been in prison, and he would have the church in Ephesus also sow to the spirit, so that they might also be blessed.

And so it's really a poem of praise and of thanksgiving for all the blessings secured for us in the gospel.

And good theology does that.

Good theology leads to doxology.

It leads to praise and thanksgiving.

Blessing of God.

And whereas that may seem odd to us that Paul would begin with praise in a prison cell, that is where he begins.

And so the first observation we see here is blessing.

Blessed be the God of our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ Jesus.

Now, this term blessed means to speak well of.

And so God is to be spoken well of because he has spoken well of us in Christ Jesus.

That's what he's saying here.

That is, because we are in Christ, he has spoken well of us, he has blessed us.

And so he goes on to say why God is worthy of being spoken well of.

He says, we speak well of him because he has given to us every spiritual blessing.

Every spiritual blessing.

God, our Father, is pleased to share with us every spiritual blessing.

I wonder how much time you spend thinking about that.

And what that says to us is that God doesn't withhold anything that's of value to his children.

Everything the Father intended to accomplish in sending Jesus His Son, He intended to share with those whom He came to save.

And so He is immensely generous.

He has given to us every spiritual blessing.

Jesus used the image of a sheepfold to describe this generous intention.

He said, I am the door of the sheepfold.

If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.

But then he says, those who enter by me go in and they go out and they find fresh pasture.

So there we have Jesus speaking to this entering and exiting, where although we are still in the world, we are invited to go in and out and to collect more grace.

But just to take another moment to unpack that a little more, Jesus alludes to the fact that these spiritual blessings are given to feed us, to feed our souls.

And so they're meant to have uh a nourishing effect on us.

They're meant to nourish us.

And that means that if these spiritual blessings just remain outside of us, if they're somewhat uh detached and nebulous out there, they're not going to benefit us.

They need to be to be taken in and to become a part of us, to be received and for us to bank on them.

You know, when we think about food, uh it's possible to sit down at the dinner table, and it's possible to have food placed in front of us.

It's even possible for us to see the steam rise off the plate and even to praise the cook.

Thank you for this wonderful meal, to see the textures and the colors.

But we would all think it falls short if we didn't also then pick out the knife and fork in our hand and put that food and take it into our bodies.

So that it produces energy within us.

And that is also true of these spiritual blessings.

They're to be taken in, they're to be digested, they're to be savored, so that they fuel our walk with God.

And so we have every reason to speak well of God, to bless him because of his generosity.

Who hasn't, he hasn't withheld any spiritual blessing from us.

And so that's the first observation.

The second observation we see here is that these spiritual blessings only come to us in Christ.

Why is that important?

Well, it's important because there are two types of blessings.

There are blessings that are known to everyone alike, and we call that common grace.

God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.

They're common.

We don't need the Holy Spirit to fetch these things for us.

But it's part of God's goodness toward us.

But when it comes to these special and spiritual blessings, they're only given to us in Christ.

Outside of Christ, we have no share in any of these blessings that the Apostle Paul is speaking about here.

All glory comes from the hand of Jesus.

He does not give his glory to anyone else.

And so he says, if you are going to receive these blessings, it is only in me that you get them.

No other hand can give you these spiritual blessings.

And so, what do these words in Christ mean?

Well, they're actually pregnant with meaning.

And I think if we were to have the opportunity to ask, without getting too morbid, the Apostle Paul, what he would have written on his tombstone.

If you and I were to ask him what words he would have inscribed, I think he would, although I'm not certain, but I think based on his letters, I think he might say, the Apostle Paul, servant of Christ Jesus in Christ.

In Christ.

Because he says it again and again in all of his letters, he says, all throughout his letters, to express this deep relationship, this deep attachment that he has to us.

And so he would have us to know this in the very core of our identity, that we are in Christ and Christ is in us.

And Christ is the arena of all our blessings.

And so it means to believe into, it means to partake of.

Which means that when we come to believe in Jesus, we don't really merely receive a benefits package from him as part of our compensation.

No.

We don't merely receive some benefits package, one that contains forgiveness and new life and new hope and so on.

It's far more profound than that.

What it means is that is to be intimately connected with Christ in such a way that what is his is now also ours.

We get a sense of this closeness and the conversion of the Apostle Paul.

You might remember Paul was ravaging the church.

This is prior to his conversion.

He was ravaging the church and he was seeking to throw Christians in prison, and he wanted nothing to do with them.

And whenever they confessed that they believed in this name in Jesus Christ, he sought to put them out of the synagogue.

And he was persecuting the church.

And yet as he was on the road to Damascus, the Lord revealed himself to him and he stopped him in his tracks.

And Jesus called out to Saul, who was later called Paul.

He said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

Now, aside from the amazing account and miraculous conversion that takes place, if we pay attention to the words here, it might seem a little puzzling.

It might surprise us a little bit.

Shouldn't Jesus have said, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting them?

After all, it was them who were being put into the prison, cast out of the synagogue.

But he doesn't say that.

He says, Why are you persecuting me?

Here we see that it's because of this deep and intimate attachment and connection to his people that he speaks the way he does.

As intimately attached as a head is to a body, Jesus is attached to us as his people.

And it's due to that deep, profound relationship that we're given possession of these spiritual blessings.

And so the Apostle Paul puts some definition to this union in other places.

He says this, he says, We died with Christ.

Spiritually, we have died with Christ.

We were buried with him.

We were raised with him.

We ascended with him, as we looked at last week.

And we reign with him.

And we will be with him in glory when he returns.

That is all part of this profound and marvelous, intimate connection that we have with Jesus Christ.

Now, each of these truths just pack a whole host of meaning, but the thing to note here is that they speak of the Father offering to us every everything that Christ has secured.

Everything that is Christ is now also ours.

It's the most remarkable reality that he would do that.

Now, what is his is also yours and mine.

And Christ is the arena of our blessings.

That's his point.

Thirdly, we observe that the locality or the realm of these blessings are in the heavenly places.

Jesus has secured for us blessings that are heavenly.

The biblical idea of earthly blessings is that they are always to be secondary to heavenly blessings.

Why?

Well, because the thrust of scriptural teaching is that earthly blessings are temporary.

They're passing, they're fading, they're going.

They ebb and they flow.

We have more of them sometimes, we have less of them sometimes.

They're not stable.

But heavenly blessings, well, they are secure.

They are stable, they are certain, and they are always there for us through what Jesus has done.

Indeed, He has secured them for us.

And so the locality of these blessings is very important.

Because they're of the kind that will always endure and stand the test of time.

They are such that we can anchor our lives around them.

We can anchor our entire identity around these blessings.

And these realities when everything else is shifting, everything else is unstable, everything else troubles us.

But as Tom preached last week, the Christian life is like an ascent.

Now that in itself is not a specifically a Christian idea.

Everyone seeks for their own vision of a transcendent life.

Other religions have their version of a transcendent life or an afterlife.

And man has always been working in an effort to close the gap of heavenly joy and earthly reality.

The only problem is the size of the chasm in between, the space between heaven and earth.

And it was true in Jesus' day also.

Jewish life was centered around the temple.

You might remember.

And the temple was built on a mount.

And so it was a very concrete and a visible reality that to go up to the temple required the need to walk uphill.

To ascend to the temple as God's house was to arrive in a more heavenly, holy place.

Man has always sought after transcendence.

So that's not the question.

The question is, how do we obtain these heavenly blessings?

How do we ascend to something greater and beyond ourselves?

How do we close that gap between heavenly reality and joy and perfection and what we face here on earth?

And Jesus gave the answer to that when he said, I am the temple.

Destroy this temple in three days I will raise it up.

And so he was referring here to the resurrection power of God to raise him from the dead.

You see, Jesus is the only one who reconciles heaven and earth.

And this resurrection power of the Holy Spirit is vital in bringing these heavenly blessings to us as we stand, as we are, and all of our need, all of our poverty.

We were given a glimpse of that, the difference of the power of the Holy Spirit, and that made in our reading earlier.

You remember the disciples weren't aware of any ability in themselves to begin a movement.

In fact, they felt completely inadequate and incapable of doing such a thing.

Peter, you remember, a few days earlier had been intimidated by a little girl which led him to deny his master.

Their spirits had been bought so low.

And so what accounted for the difference?

Well, what accounted for the for the boldness that captivated them a few days later?

Well, it can only be described as this new resurrection power that came down and was brought to them by the Holy Spirit.

They knew of no other power in and of themselves.

Their own courage had failed them.

They knew that they were weak.

They knew that they were insufficient and adequate.

They knew that they had no inability.

They were scared.

They were frightened.

They were in the upper room, and they gave themselves to prayer because of that.

And the Spirit came and he filled them.

The same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead came to rest upon them and to dwell within them.

And they knew that they, and they were under no doubt that whatsoever, that this power was not their own.

It was a life.

It was a fellowship that came to live and breathe within them.

And this heavenly power that came transformed them entirely.

You see, the nature of grace is that it gives us no reason to boast.

It's a gift.

Jesus said about kingdom life.

He said, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And what that means for us is that if you and I are indwelled by the Spirit, there is a way to receive the blessings of heaven, not by trying harder to attain them, but by admitting our poverty.

By acknowledging how spiritually poor we are.

Without the Holy Spirit, we don't make any movement toward Christ.

And so there is this powerful Indian benediction that speaks to this necessity of the Holy Spirit's work.

And it says this: it says, Now may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God our Father, be with you.

And may the Holy Spirit come upon you and disturb you and trouble you and set before you an impossible task and dare you to do it, until in your desperation you fall on your knees and you remain there until he fills you with his power, which alone will enable you to do it.

And then, but only then, may the Lord grant you with his peace.

Friends, what do we know about this impossible task?

What do you know about desperation?

What do you know about this power at work within you?

Do you sense your need at this moment?

Do these heavenly blessings appear to you impossibly out of reach?

Well, then take heart, because Jesus said this.

He says, Fear not, little flock, for it is the Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

You say, yes, I've tasted some of these heavenly blessings, but why don't I taste more of them?

Well, can I ask you, where have you been looking?

Have you been looking for them in Christ?

Or have you been looking for them outside of Christ?

Where have you been looking for blessedness?

You see, we've been given the Holy Spirit, who is pleased to respond to our cries and fetch these heavenly blessings from the shelf of heaven if we ask.

And so we must ask, and we must rely on the Spirit, who is generous to answer and to keep giving.

The door is narrow by which we take hold of them.

But come through that door, and there is an ocean of blessing to take all that we want.

You say, but I'm not worthy.

And I'd say to you, you're right.

None of us are.

But that's what makes it grace.

His undeserved favor.

I wonder how often you've come into this place and you've been led in the joy of the Spirit to rejoice and to bless God's name.

How often have you come into this place and perhaps your spirit has been down in the dust and you've been brought to the enders of yourself, and by the Spirit's power he has met you and He has brought grace to you, and He has filled you and strengthened you so that even though your feet stay here and you're in your chair, you've been lifted up to the heavens and into heaven's joys.

Those are the riches of his grace.

No, we have no claim on them.

We come to Christ without money, we come to Christ without price.

But he is so generous to give when we ask.

How that changes our view of what we and what others need will transform our lives.

That will change what we pay attention to, and where we spend our time.

And so we observe what these spiritual blessings are: chosen, adopted, redeemed, given an inheritance, sealed by the Spirit.

These are the precious blessings that have been given to us in Christ.

You know, if we were to ask, why did God choose me and shower these blessings on me?

The only answer we would give is because he loved you.

And if we were to follow up and we were to ask, but why then did he love me?

The only answer we could give is the same, because he loved you and he sought for you to be his child.

And if we were to press further and we were to say, so was it that he saw something in me that made him love me?

The answer would still be the same.

No.

He loved you because he loved you.

In fact, we were enemies of him.

Content to live at a distance, happy in our sin.

And so it's a love that he possesses in himself.

It leaves us with no room to boast, but only to speak well of him, to bless him.

And so our holiness and our obedience is not in order to earn his favor, but it's it's in thankfulness for what he's done.

That is the motivation for our obedience.

Grace upon grace.

Antoine, the author of The Little Prince, uh, wrote this.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

What he's saying here is that if you want someone to do something for you, don't focus on giving them the to-dos.

Instead, transform their longings.

Transform their inner motivations.

If people begin to long for the endless immensity of the sea, you won't have to spend much time assigning them tasks and assigning them work in order to build a ship.

Their loves will move them to do so.

They will want to do so.

Teach them, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

And I'd ask you this morning: are you being renewed by the immensity of Jesus' grace?

His love and his grace that has met you, that helps you, that encourages you, that lifts you up, or have you reduced a Christian life to a series of tasks and performance?

Oh, we could swim in the immensity of each one of these graces, these blessings, but more than these, we're invited by the Holy Spirit to swim in the immensity of our Father's heart.

A heart so love and so immense that he set his love upon us.

And in seeing us in our hopelessness and our helplessness, he made provision to send his only begotten precious Son into the world, the greatest gift he could give, who bled and died, who was battered and bruised, so that we might know his love, so that we might be forgiven, so his wrath might be averted.

And so our Lord came and he walked the walk that we should have walked, and he died the death that we should have died, so that in being our substitute we might be redeemed.

And in redeeming us, he brought us close into the safety of his fellowship, and he promised, I will never leave you nor forsake you.

He gave us an inheritance, and he gave us his spirit to seal all of this upon our hearts that we might never forget it until we meet again.

How can we comprehend the immensity or the fullness of such a heart as our God?

How can we not enjoy these being near a heart so generous and humble?

Oh, let's voyage.

Let us be people who envoyage on the sea of grace.

Let us be people who voyage with the Spirit's help, finding increasing enjoyment in Christ and in all he has blessed us with.

And let us speak well of the one who speaks well of us.

Because we are one with his son.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Oh Father, we come and we bless your name.

Oh, what wondrous things we have beheld.

Father, we praise you and we thank you for your goodness and your love.

Lord, all we can say is thank you.

We have no other gift to offer.

But our hearts of gratitude.

And so, Lord, I thank you.

I thank you for your grace.

I thank you for the immensity of your heart that has given us grace upon grace.

And that even in the midst of trials that we face, Lord, the way in which you renew us, that you minister to us, that you help us and you comfort us.

And so, Lord, we give you praise and we give you honor and we give you glory this day.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.