#blessed

Good morning.

My name is Tommy.

I'm the rector here, and on behalf of our church,

I'd like to welcome you.

I'm delighted that you're here.

And I'm so glad that we get to open God's Word together today.

I love the lectionary readings.

They've been speaking to me very personally lately,

and I'm just thankful for that.

You know, the word blessing is an interesting word

because we hear it all the time.

And in many ways, I would say it's an overused word.

I mean, it's a word that we use to describe

all kinds of good things that happen in our lives,

and that's not always bad.

But we might, for instance, take a picture of ourselves

on vacation this summer and post it online,

put hashtag blessed under it.

What a blessing to be here.

You know, some people use the word blessing

as a way to kind of humble brag about their own successes.

I've been so blessed with all of these promotions

in my job, right, and all the hard work that I've done.

We say it after people sneeze.

We hear this word quite a bit.

And there's nothing really wrong with that,

but the problem is that we use this word so much

that I think we've lost a lot of the sense

of what it actually means to say that we are blessed.

Whatever difficulties you might be facing in your life,

whether they are internal struggles like anxiety,

depression, hopelessness, or external struggles,

conflict or job stress or parenting stress,

whatever difficulties are pulling at the edges

of your attention right now,

whatever difficulties keep you up at night

wringing your hands, whatever we're dealing with,

the thing that we most need to get through those challenges

is God's blessing in our life.

That's the thing that we most need.

We're going to look at these opening verses

of Paul's letter to the Ephesians,

probably the most extraordinary description

of the meaning of God's blessing for us

that you'll find anywhere in the Bible.

And we're going to ask a couple of questions.

What is a blessing really?

And then what is God's blessing for you

and for me this morning?

Let's pray and then we will open God's word together.

Our heavenly Father, we know that you are present.

We know that you're with us.

We may have some awareness of that.

We may not.

We may not feel it at all.

But Lord, we know that does not matter.

What matters is that you are present.

We ask now that you would speak.

These are not mere words written on a page.

These are living words.

We pray that you would speak through your word

and bring us face to face

with the word become flesh, Jesus Christ.

We pray that somehow in the mystery of your Holy Spirit,

your word would become flesh in us,

that we might be changed by what we hear

and receive from you this morning.

We pray this in the name of Jesus,

by the power of your Holy Spirit.

Amen.

So what is a blessing?

A lot of times when we hear the word bless or blessing,

we think of it as a kind of way of encouraging someone,

well-wishing them, blessing them.

And in one sense, that's true,

but in the Bible, it means far more than that.

If you consider examples of blessing in the Old Testament,

for instance, when Isaac blesses Jacob,

or when then Jacob goes on to bless his 12 sons,

or when Samuel anoints and blesses David,

what we see in every case is we have someone in authority

declaring a person's true purpose

and their true identity.

This is who you are,

and this is why you're here.

This is the purpose of your life.

This is the course that your life is meant to take.

And because of that,

because a blessing speaks to your identity and your purpose,

blessings can have tremendous power.

They're able to shape and direct

the course of someone's entire life.

And that is exactly what a blessing is meant to do.

It's meant to shape and direct the course of your life.

Now, that is why the Apostle Paul

begins his letter to the Ephesians the way he does.

Imagine you're the Apostle Paul,

and you're sitting in prison in Rome,

and you've heard about all of these issues

happening in the church

that you helped to start in Ephesus.

There is strife.

There is personal sin.

There is racial tension and division.

There's a rise of paganism.

There's demonic oppression and spiritual warfare.

And you have one shot to write a letter

as their pastor to address all of these issues.

How would you begin?

This is how Paul begins.

He believes that all of the issues

in the Ephesian church are symptoms

of the fact that they have forgotten

who they truly are

and why they are here.

So the first half of his letter,

he essentially says again and again and again,

remember who you are.

Remember who you are.

And as we'll see,

remember whose you are.

And see, every human being has this deep longing

for identity and meaning and purpose.

We want to desperately…

We're desperate to know why we're here,

who we are,

what we're meant to become.

And the worst possible thing

is to have no sense of identity

and no sense of purpose.

So we're all searching for it.

Some people look for it in their career.

A lot of people come to D.C.

with an identity that is centered on their career.

But what happens if your job

doesn't turn out the way you hoped?

What if you get fired?

What if you get laid off?

Even if it has nothing to do with you,

it's not your fault at all.

Something like that happens.

If your identity is centered in your career,

that will threaten your entire sense of self-worth.

It's not uncommon to talk to people

who have lost their job

and they say,

I don't know who I am anymore.

I don't know what the purpose of my life is.

Why to get out of bed anymore?

If you begin to root your identity

in your appearance,

that works for a while,

particularly if you happen to be somewhat attractive.

But you know, that does fade.

It will fade.

You know, it kind of creeps up on you.

If you've centered your identity

in your appearance,

as that fades,

your sense of self and self-worth

will begin to fade with it.

Right?

If you root your identity,

the sense that this is who I truly am

in your inner world,

how you feel,

what you desire,

what you'll find is that

that inner world is tumultuous.

Your feelings have a tendency to change,

not just over years,

but maybe over the course of an afternoon.

And so what you'll find

is that if you're trying to root your identity

in your inner feelings and desires,

it's like chasing the wind.

You're going to have a perpetually insecure

and fragile sense of self.

That's why people who define themselves this way

are constantly looking for external sources of validation

to gain that sense of stability.

If you root your sense of identity in your children,

what happens when your kids get older?

What happens when your children begin to make choices

that you don't agree with?

What happens when they make mistakes

or do things that you're not proud of?

And you begin to wonder,

is this reflecting on my parenting?

Do people around me think that I'm a bad parent,

that I have failed because of the thing

that my child did?

If you've rooted your sense of identity in your children,

as they get older,

as they leave,

as you successfully parent them out of your house,

I've heard people say,

well, now that my kids are gone,

I don't know who I am anymore.

I don't know why I'm here.

I don't know why I get out of bed.

I have no purpose.

So in all of these sources of identity,

we find they don't work.

They don't last.

They don't give us that thing that we hope they will.

And that's because there's only one place

that we can go to figure out the truth

about who we really are and why we are really here.

There's only one being out there

who has the authority to answer those questions

in our lives.

And that is the one who authored us.

Right?

If you want the truly authoritative answer,

go to the author,

which is God himself.

God's blessing means God speaking

with ultimate authority into our lives,

declaring this is who you truly are,

this is why you're here.

And then giving us everything we need

to live that out.

This is who you are,

this is why you're here,

and here's everything you need to pursue that.

You know, we can spend our lives

searching for identity and purpose.

We can only truly find it in the blessings of God.

So that's what a blessing is in the Bible.

Now, how does God answer this question

of identity and purpose in our lives?

Well, this entire passage

that we're looking at this morning,

beginning in verse 3,

is one long run-on sentence in the Greek.

Paul is so filled with things that he wants to say

to try to answer this question for us

that he just goes on and on and on and on and on.

The entire thing is just one long run-on sentence.

But what it lacks in grammatical quality,

it makes up for in theological depth.

It is a staggering statement.

What is God's blessing for us?

For everyone who puts their faith in Jesus,

there are three things here

that are most true about your identity

and your purpose.

They're more true than whatever

you have come to believe

about those things in your life.

Number one, verses 4 to 6,

Now, if we don't understand

what Paul is saying here,

it's easy to get caught up

with the wrong idea about predestination.

Paul is not talking about this

in the context of unbelievers,

as though people might come to Jesus

and say, I want a relationship.

And he says, well, you're not on the list.

That's not how it works.

The gospel is open to everyone

and anyone who comes to Jesus in faith

will be saved.

Paul is writing this as a pastor

trying to encourage his flock.

There's a time and a place

to get into the theological mysteries

of predestination

and all of what that means

and how it relates to free will.

But here, Paul is writing as a pastor

and he's trying to encourage his people.

And friends, he's writing

in a culture of abandonment.

This is an abandonment culture.

This is a culture where people

would routinely sell wives

they didn't want anymore into slavery,

where they would routinely get rid of children

they didn't want anymore.

There was a trash dump

outside the eastern gate of Ephesus,

and that's the place where people

would take and discard babies

that they didn't want.

And slavers knew this,

and so slavers would frequent that area

and they would look for babies

healthy enough

that they might turn them into slaves,

sell them and turn a profit.

It was a culture of abandonment.

Some of the Christians

that Paul is writing to

had probably been abandoned

by their birth parents.

And the point he's trying to make

is that if you're someone

who has come to faith in Jesus,

that's not by accident.

That's not because of anything you did.

Jesus doesn't look at you and say,

oh, well, I'm really surprised you made it.

Good job.

You figured it out.

God wanted you.

God wanted you.

Before he laid the foundations of the earth,

he wanted you to belong to him

and be part of his family.

He had you in mind.

That's the ultimate truth about you.

That is more true about you

than anything anybody has ever told you.

That first and foremost,

you are wanted by name.

You're chosen.

You belong to him

because he wants you.

And a lot of problems arise in our lives

and in the world

because we don't know this.

Because instead of living like men and women

who have been adopted,

we live like orphans.

You know, some of us try to cobble together

a sense of identity and worth

by relying on our careers

or our appearance

or our children like we said before.

You know, and as long as we have those things,

we're okay,

but when we lose them,

it destroys us.

Maybe we feel threatened

when we see other people

with jobs or looks

or families that we don't have

and we feel like their success diminishes us.

We're living like orphans

when we think that way.

Some of us care way too much

about the approval of other people.

We can't handle critical feedback

even from people who care about us.

We can't receive hard words in love

because we feel so threatened,

so diminished.

Some of us go around demanding respect.

We're living like orphans when we do that,

like it's all up to us.

The gospel says

you don't have to live

like an orphan anymore.

You have a father who chose you

and you belong to him.

God had you personally in mind

before he laid the foundations of the earth.

He set things in motion

so that one day

you would come to know him

and become part of his family.

You have the ultimate security

of knowing that you belong to God

because he wanted you.

There is no greater security

to be found anywhere.

And the language of adoption

means that you belong to him

once and for all.

You can fire an employee.

You can fire a servant.

But once you're adopted,

especially under Roman law,

an adopted child became

in every way indistinguishable

from a birth child.

So once you're adopted,

that's it.

You're his forever.

So number one,

you've been adopted.

That's who you truly are.

You're wanted.

Number two,

you have been redeemed.

Verses seven through 10.

Now this is one of the most important words

in the Bible

if you understand the context.

You may already be getting a hint of this.

This city of Ephesus

was a center of slave trade

in this part of the world.

A quarter of the population, roughly,

somewhere between 20 and 30%

of the population were slaves.

So it was a huge, huge business.

And the way it would work

is that people would go down

to the slave market in Ephesus

and you would peruse,

you would look through

and inspect all of the available slaves

and you would figure out

the ones that you were interested in

and then they would go up

on the auction block.

And depending on how much interest there was,

the price could be driven up

higher and higher and higher.

And so slaves could be very, very costly.

And occasionally,

a person might want to free

a loved one who was a slave.

They might want to free

a friend who was enslaved.

And in order to do that,

you had to pay a price.

So you would have to purchase that slave.

You'd have to purchase their freedom.

You would purchase them

and then you would release them.

And that, again,

could be very, very expensive.

But this act of purchasing a slave

in order to set them free,

that is the word

that the Apostle Paul uses

to describe what Jesus Christ

has accomplished for us.

And that word is the word redemption.

We have been redeemed.

Now here's the picture

that Paul is painting for us.

He's saying the world

is like a great slave market.

The entire world

is like a great spiritual slave market.

We are all slaves

to Satan and to sin and to death.

And Jesus came into the world

because he was looking for you.

He came into the slave market

looking for you.

And he would not stop

until he set you free.

And he was willing to pay any price.

And the price got higher

and higher

and higher

and higher.

And Jesus was willing to pay

the ultimate price.

And verse 7 tells us the price.

We have redemption

through his blood.

On the cross,

Jesus purchased our freedom

once and for all.

The highest price ever paid

in history

to redeem a slave.

An infinite price.

And you know,

if we value things

based on the price paid for them,

what does that mean about you?

It means you are a being

of infinite worth.

It means that everyone you meet,

it means that everyone

sitting around you

in this room

is infinitely valuable

because the God of the universe

paid an infinite price

for that person.

Again, a lot of problems

in our lives arise

because we don't know this

in our hearts.

We forget it.

There was an article

in the New Yorker

about slavery

in the country of Mauritania.

And it's one of the worst places

in the world for slavery.

Even though it's technically

been outlawed,

there are still

entire communities

made up exclusively

of slaves.

And that's the only life

they've ever known.

It's the only life

their parents have ever known

and their grandparents.

It's the only reality

they've ever known.

And there's a quote

from one of the people

in the article.

Mauritanian slaves

are not restrained

by chains.

Slavery is a

psychological institution.

They interview

people who try to escape.

This one boy

tries to escape.

His mother says,

what are you doing?

I want to escape slavery.

Why?

Who do you think you are?

You're a slave.

Why would you leave?

Another former child slave

said to the interviewer,

to the slave,

his identity

is his master.

His identity

is his master.

He believes,

she believes

that they are slaves.

Therefore,

they are.

Setting a person

like that free

requires much more

than simply throwing

open the door

and saying,

go build a life

for yourself.

They need their identity

to be rebuilt

from the ground up.

with every brick

being a new brick.

You are no longer

a slave.

You are free.

You have been redeemed.

And only when they begin

to see themselves

as free

will they begin

to live

as free people.

And that's not unlike

how the apostle Paul

sees sin

in the lives

of Christians.

When we disobey God,

Paul doesn't say,

oh, you're breaking

the rules.

Stop breaking the rules.

Shape up

or ship out.

He recognizes

what's actually happening.

He says,

you're going back

to your old master.

You're allowing

that old identity

to be your master.

And he continually

appeals to us

as he does

in this letter

to put off

that old self.

Be renewed

by the spirit

of your mind

and put on

the new self

that you've gained

in Christ,

the one that has been

redeemed and set free.

Remember who you are.

Remember who you are.

Remember who you are.

It's like a drumbeat

throughout this letter.

So he says,

remember who you are.

You've been adopted.

You've been redeemed.

And then number three,

the third thing

that we see here.

You have been sealed.

Now what does that mean?

In the Roman world,

if you were a soldier,

you had a tattoo.

If you were a slave,

you had a brand.

These were marks

of ownership

that told everyone

around you

who you belong to.

And virtually everyone

belonged to someone.

And Paul says,

God has put his mark

on you.

He adopted you,

he redeemed you,

and now he's put his mark

of ownership on you.

It's not a visible mark.

It's the gift

of the Holy Spirit.

You have been given

the Holy Spirit

which is a sign

and a seal

of who you truly are

and whose you truly are.

And the Holy Spirit

guarantees not only

that we belong to God,

but it guarantees

and it reminds everyone

in the world,

including us,

that we have

an inheritance to come.

He says in verse 3,

God has given us

every spiritual blessing.

He doesn't just give us

just enough to get by.

He's given us

every spiritual blessing.

There's nothing

he has to give us

that he has not entrusted

to us.

He holds nothing back.

And verse 14 says,

the Holy Spirit

is like a down payment

of that.

It's a guarantee

of the full payment

to come at the end

of all time.

It's a guarantee

that one day

at the end of all time

we will receive

the full inheritance

that has been set aside

for us.

And that inheritance

is the promise

that one day

God will restore

all things.

The heavens and the earth

will be joined together

and we will live

with him

as one community,

one community.