"In Christ" | Ephesians 1 | Dr. Jake Porter

How many of you have ever heard the phrase, said the phrase, count your blessings?

Count your blessings.

How many of you grew up singing the old hymn?

Count your blessings, name them one by one.

Count your blessings.

See what God has to.

Yeah.

Okay.

Maybe somebody said it to you growing up, or like me, saying it a thousand times in that classic old hymn.

When we count our blessings, we often think about the good things that we can see and that we can name, right?

Like, if you ask me, what are all the blessings in your life?

I would say, oh, my family and my health and the work that I get to do.

And I have a home that I love and I have wonderful friends.

And, you know, maybe you think about something that you prayed for for a long time and it finally happened, or you finally received that thing.

Scripture teaches us to absolutely receive all of those things with gratitude because every good and perfect gift comes down from our Father above.

But there's something interesting about the way we experience or can experience those kinds of blessings.

Think about a time in your life when you believed that there was something that would make life significantly better if you could just get there.

If I could just get that degree, if I could just get that job, right?

If I could just attain that point of income or salary, right?

Or if I could just get married, or once we have kids, or once we can buy this home, or whatever it is.

Think about how you you felt when you got there, and there was some excitement, but have you experienced that excitement then fade?

Psychologists call this something called the arrival fallacy.

The belief that once I arrive at this future destination, then I'll be happy and I'll be satisfied.

And sometimes we arrive, and it's good, and we rightly thank God for it, but eventually the novelty fades, and then something else appears on our horizon.

And most of the things we count as blessings, they can also be lost, can't they?

Circumstances change, jobs disappear, bodies age, people we love die.

Rip dolly.

I've grieved, I've grieved.

Right?

If our sense of blessing rests entirely on our circumstances or our possessions, then it will always be fragile.

So here's the question I want us to begin with.

Is there a kind of blessing you don't eventually outgrow or adapt to or lose when your circumstances change?

Today, I get to kick us off through a new series where we're going to be traveling verse by verse through the book of Ephesians.

Paul knew the city of Ephesus well.

He spent several years living there, helping to start the church there, and now, roughly seven years after he's left, he writes to these Christians from Roman imprisonment, which makes what he is about to say to them about what he and they possess especially interesting.

The man about to tell us how blessed we are is writing from prison.

Now, there's a basic movement to Ephesians that is really going to guide us through the whole series.

In the first three chapters, Paul focuses on what God has already done for us in Christ.

Then in chapter four, he turns toward how we are to live in response.

Chapter 4, verse 1.

I urge you, therefore, to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you've been called.

So the first half establishes the calling that we have and what God has already done for us in Christ.

And then the second half teaches us how to walk in it.

And that movement gives the big idea for the whole series.

I think the message of Ephesians, one way you could put it is this that you are rooted in a love you didn't earn before you are sent into a mission you couldn't live on your own.

You're rooted in a love you didn't earn before you're sent into a mission that you couldn't live on your own.

And that order matters.

Paul doesn't start, and the Christian life doesn't start with what we need to do to be good.

He begins by rooting us in what God has already done.

Starting there in verse 3.

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.

Paul doesn't tell us how to become blessed.

Right?

What's the verb tense there?

He has blessed us already.

And he has already blessed us.

Notice what it says, with every spiritual blessing.

Do you believe that?

I mean, I want you to just pause for a moment and consider what that means if that's true.

And Paul apparently gets so excited explaining what those blessings are.

Because verses 3 through 14, if you look at the Greek, it is one long, enormous run-on sentence, roughly 200 words.

It's the longest sentence in the entire New Testament.

It's it Paul wasn't trying to win an award for grammar.

Several years ago, back when I was pastoring another church, my mom was in attendance, is a member there still.

And my mom was a language arts teacher for 34 years, okay?

Taught and reading specialist.

And I remember I preached this and I talked about how this is a run-on sentence and the grammar is terrible in the Greek.

And my mom was so disappointed that the perfect word of God would have bad grammar in its original.

But I think the point there is like Paul is overwhelmed.

He's so excited.

Once he starts recounting what God has done for us in Christ, okay, once he gets into these blessings, the praise just keeps pouring out.

And he names blessings far more permanent than anything that this world can give us or take away.

And it all points to the big central idea for this morning, which is that before God tells you what to do, he wants you to know what he's already done.

So before you start thinking about what does God want me to do?

What should I do?

How should I live?

What's God's will for my life?

God wants you to first be really clear on what he has already done for you.

One phrase that runs underneath the entire passage is in Christ or in him.

I hope you have a Bible open or a Bible app on your phone.

And you could just skim even right now.

Just skim verses 3 through 14 and look at all the times it says in Christ or in him, in him, in Christ, in Christ, in him.

The blessings, these blessings aren't benefits God hands us from a distance.

They are ours as he has come to us through the person of Jesus Christ and his work on our behalf.

We cannot separate anything here, all of these spiritual blessings from this person of Jesus.

They are ours because we are his.

Verses four through six.

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, which with which with which he has blessed us in the beloved.

Now we've only made it to this first point, and Paul already uses a couple of words that Christians have been arguing about for, you know, going on 2,000 years, okay?

Chosen and predestined.

Now I'm not going to avoid them because they're right there in the text, okay?

Paul says, it's very clear, he chose us in him, in Christ, before the foundation of the world.

And he says, in love, he predestined us for adoption to himself.

But I want you to remember the context.

This is about worship.

Paul is worshiping here.

He is not trying to explain every little answer or answer every little question about what we call the doctrine of election and how God's sovereign choice and human responsibility fit together.

That's not what he's trying to do here.

The purpose here is to praise God.

Christians who love Jesus and take the Bible seriously have worked out the mechanics of those two things.

God's power, God's choice, and our freedom to choose or our real choices that we make.

Work those things out differently.

Okay?

Good Christians with a true love for Jesus and the Word of God.

Put that together in various ways.

And those are fun conversations.

And I'm happy to have that conversation with any one of you here, but it's not what this passage is about.

I don't want the questions Paul doesn't answer here to keep us from seeing what he clearly is saying.

He's saying that before the foundation of the world, God made a decision.

That's what he's saying.

If you are a follower of Jesus, hear the wonder of this truth.

Before you ever existed, before you accomplished anything, before you could do anything to earn his attention or affection, God had already determined, I'm going to set my grace on you.

That is why this doctrine that can get us all tripped up and get us into all kinds of arguments that I don't think go anywhere.

But when it's rightly understood, you know what it does?

It keeps us from ever being proud in an unhealthy and untrue way.

Paul doesn't bring this up to give us a reason to boast.

He brings it up as a reason to worship.

The story of our salvation, of my salvation, began long before I was ever here, before the world was even created.

God's grace doesn't begin with your response toward God.

Your response begins with God's grace toward you.

And we can get so tangled up in the mechanics that we just miss how extraordinary a blessing Paul is talking about here.

If you don't know me, by day, my work is as a psychotherapist, all right?

My wife and I, we own a mental health clinic, and I do a lot of couples' work.

So I'm a counselor, I'm a licensed professional counselor.

And I can tell you, I've never met a human being who doesn't deep down in their heart have a desire to be chosen.

It's there.

Think about how much of our lives are shaped by this desire to be chosen by someone.

As kids, we wanted to be chosen for that team.

And as we got older, we want to be chosen for this school or the right job or that promotion or, you know, this friend group.

We want someone we love to choose us.

It's wired into us as human beings.

It and and I mean, like literally, there's science that shows it is biologically wired into us to want this.

Well, doesn't that make sense if God, before we were ever created, decided that he would in fact choose us?

There's something powerful about hearing someone say, in one form or another, I want you.

I choose you.

The problem is that so much of the choosing we experience is based on what we bring to the table, isn't it?

Right?

You get chosen for the team because you can play, you get chosen for the job because of your resume.

And because so much of life works this way, it becomes easy to imagine that God works this way too.

But Paul takes this back before the foundation of the world and says, your relationship with God begins with God.

And notice where he goes next.

Verse 5 says, In love, he predestined us, listen, for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ.

That that tells us what that gives us an earthly picture, right?

Of what this being chosen is about.

Adoption as sons.

The goal was never merely that God would tolerate you, and one day he'll let you into heaven holding his nose.

He chose you to bring you into his family.

Now, in the Roman world, when Paul wrote this, adoption carried enormous weight.

It established an entirely new legal identity, and it gave the adopted child standing and inheritance in the family.

In fact, in that day, a biological child could be legally disowned, but an adopted child was forever.

This language is what Paul is reaching for.

God has given us a new identity and he has brought us into his household.

Last week, Russell talked about our strategy as a church for helping us do the Christian life.

How do you do the Christian life?

And he talked about our discipleship operating system.

And one of those movements and context is he talked about is belonging.

Belonging.

Well, that idea, that's not just because like we want you to feel kind of good so you stick around.

It's not like a marketing strategy.

Belonging is grounded in something much deeper than just finding some people at church who have some similar interests and can remember your name.

Following Jesus means belonging to his people.

Because first, in Christ, we belong to God.

We don't work our way into his family.

We are welcomed into it by grace.

And we want to embody that and live that here in this church.

If you're here and maybe it's your first time, and maybe it's not just your first time in this church, it could be your first time to a church.

You may be here and still uncertain about this whole Jesus thing.

I'm telling you, you belong.

You can belong here before you've done anything.

You know why?

Because I belong to God before I did anything.

We get to pay it forward in that way.

But don't miss verse four.

God chose us so that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

Grace doesn't mean that God is indifferent to who we become.

Now, holiness is not the condition that convinces God to choose us.

It is part of the purpose, though, for which he chose us.

We don't pursue holiness, that is, being set apart from the world.

We don't pursue that, hoping God might welcome us into his family.

We pursue holiness as sons and daughters who've already been welcomed home.

We're moved by what God has done.

And in gratitude, we choose to live in this different, set apart way.

And if you find yourself wondering, but how do I know whether I'm chosen?

Paul points us back to the first phrase we started with in Christ.

You look to Christ.

Do you trust Christ?

Do you believe in what He's done?

God's chosen you.

Before you could prove yourself, contribute anything, or even existed in Christ.

The Father's made this choice.

And then beginning in verse 7, Paul moves on to the second extraordinary blessing here: that in Christ, the Son redeemed you.

In him, verse 7 says, In him we have redemption.

Notice the tense again.

We have it.

Paul doesn't say that someday we might have it.

He says we have it.

This belongs to us right now in Christ.

Now the word redemption carries this idea of being set free through the payment of a price.

The Bible teaches that we are all born into a fallen, sin sick world, and we're born dead in our trespasses and sins.

He'll say that explicitly in chapter two of this book.

And that as we ourselves sin against God, as we break his law and go our own way and live our own way, we become part of this slave market of sin and we owe a debt for the trespasses against the law of God.

But God, Paul says, redeemed us.

He set us free.

He paid the price of our debt.

And he tells us what that price was through his blood and what it means, what it achieves for us.

The forgiveness, he writes, of our trespasses.

This is another place where what Jesus offers far outsedes the blessings this world can offer.

We can grow as humans, and I hope we are all growing.

We can change our habits, we can make amends in broken relationships and try to repair what's been damaged.

We can go to therapy, and obviously, I'm a big fan of that one.

All right, those are good things, but there is something that none of those things can do.

They cannot forgive sin.

They can't.

You can become a better person tomorrow that doesn't undo what you did yesterday.

And if we measure ourselves not against the people around us, but against the this holy God who created us, all of us, myself included.

Have things in our stories that cannot be explained away as merely mistakes.

Paul calls them trespasses.

At its root, we have lived as though our lives belonged to us rather than to the God who made us and sustains us even now.

Christianity doesn't begin by telling us to clean all of that up so that God will accept us.

It tells us that God has done what we could never do ourselves.

In him, we have redemption through his blood.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, entered into our world and he lived the life that you and I failed to live.

He never broke the law of God.

And though without sin on the cross, Jesus gave his life for sinners, taking upon himself the judgment of our sin that we deserved.

And then on the third day, God rose him from the dead.

Because of what he has done, forgiveness is offered freely to anyone who comes to him, trusting that he will give it.

Paul says this is all he writes, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us.

And I love that word lavished.

Y'all, these verses 3 through 14, back when I was a pastor, I've come a long way.

Russell's helped me with this.

I preached five sermons on these verses, averaging 55 minutes apiece.

I preached a whole sermon almost on that word lavished.

I'm gonna give you one paragraph right here.

This is the kind of thing that, like, before I had kids, people said it, and I'm like, yeah, but I believe and I believed them.

Okay.

Parents, think about when you're really excited about your kid's birthday and something you got them.

Or Christmas morning, and then waking up and coming down and seeing, you know, if you do Santa, what Santa brought, or what you got, whatever, what you know, right?

And that feeling, the joy of giving to these little ones.

There's no reluctance, there's no like, well, here's Christmas, here's your birthday present, right?

I guess I have to because I'm your dad.

No.

God is not up there reluctantly dispensing small portions of his grace.

Because he said he would, or because you finally earned it or did, he is lavishing it on us.

He is eager to pour it out on us.

This forgiveness, this total redemption.

So if you're here this morning and you're not sure you would call yourself a Christian, or you've been around Christianity, maybe, but you've never, you've never entrusted your heart and your life, and your eternity to Christ.

You've never done that.

Hear this the greatest blessing you need isn't better circumstances, more success, finally getting your life under control, whatever that means.

You need to be made right with the God who made you, and that is exactly what Jesus has made possible, and he is ready to lavish you with grace.

You don't have to earn your way to him, you couldn't.

You don't have to clean yourself up to qualify for it.

You, if you could qualify for it, it wouldn't be grace.

But you come to Christ, you acknowledge your sin, your need for him, you trust that his death and resurrection are sufficient for you and for the forgiveness you need, and you surrender your life to him as Savior and Lord.

You belong, so you surrender.

Paul's promise isn't that God might forgive you if you perform well after.

He says, In him we have redemption, the forgiveness of our trespasses.

It is finished.

It's finished.

That's the gospel, that's the good news of Jesus.

And if you've never trusted Christ, you can do that today.

But the blessing of redemption is even bigger than just the forgiveness of our individual sins.

Verses 9 and 10, Paul says that God's plan is ultimately, he writes, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

So, Paul, what he does is he pulls the camera way back from looking at you individually.

God isn't merely saving isolated individuals so that one day we can each individually escape this broken world.

We see fragmentation everywhere in this world, don't we?

Division between people in families and communities, in creation, even within ourselves.

I'm a divided man.

I do not do what I want, and that which I do not want to do, I do.

I'm a divided man.

Sin doesn't merely make us guilty, it tears apart what God intended to be whole.

And God's answer to all of that, brokenness, is Jesus.

The same Christ who redeems us through his blood is the Christ through whom God intends to bring all things back under his rightful rule.

The gospel isn't merely God's plan for getting you into heaven.

It's God's plan to put his broken creation back together and right again.

We don't see all of that yet, but history is moving somewhere.

It is moving toward Jesus.

So your redemption is deeply personal, yes, but it is so much bigger than something personal just to you.

There are things you can accomplish, acquire, and improve in this world, but none of them can do what Jesus has done.

In Christ, you are redeemed, you are forgiven, you have been brought into a story in which God is making all things new.

And then Paul names one more extraordinary blessing in this passage.

In Christ, the Spirit sealed you.

Verse 11, in him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

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

So Paul has now taken us from eternity past, where the Father chose us, to the cross, where the Son redeemed us, and now he turns attention to the future, where he says we were sealed with the promised spirit.

A seal in Paul's world communicated ownership and authenticity.

Paul says that when you trusted in Christ, God gave you his own spirit as the mark, the seal, the mark that you are his.

You belong to him.

He is one with you now by his spirit in Christ.

But Paul goes even further, verse 14, he tells us the spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it.

There's that future.

The word translated guarantee refers to a down payment, the first installment of what is promised in full.

Think about earnest money when you buy a house.

You put down real money now as a pledge that the rest is coming.

God has done something infinitely greater.

He has given us his own spirit as the first installment of everything he has promised.

And that speaks of another blessing we spend our lives trying to secure, and that's our future, right?

We save for retirement, we buy insurance, we plan for our children, and those are good things.

I hope you're doing them all.

But eventually we encounter the limits of our control, don't we?

The world can offer us ways to prepare for the future, only God can guarantee it.

And notice where our assurance rests.

It doesn't rest in how tightly we're able to hold tight to God and be faithful to Him.

It rests in God's commitment to hold on to us.

The Father who chose us and the Son who redeemed us have not left us alone to make it across the finish line.

God placed his own spirit within us as the guarantee that he intends to finish what he has begun.

And once again, Paul says this is all to the praise of his glory.

A refrain through the whole passage.

You can see it there throughout those verses.

He chose us to the praise of his glorious grace.

We hope in Christ to the praise of his glory.

The Spirit guarantees our inheritance to the praise of his glory.

And that's why this 200-word sentence sounds just like this burst of worship.

Paul's been counting his blessings, and his list looks so much different than what I might say if he just caught me some random weekday and asked me to list the blessings in my life.

Because circumstances change, possessions disappear, bodies age.

The blessings of this life are real.

I'm not minimizing the many ways God is taking care of us.

We should thank him for those things.

But underneath them all are the blessings that this world cannot give and take away.

In Christ, the Father chose you.

You belong.

In Christ, the Son redeemed you.

You are forgiven.

And in Christ, the Spirit sealed you, and you are secure forever.

And if this is all true, how do we then respond?

Well, remember that before God tells you what to do, He wants you to know what He's done.

Grace produces a response.

And so here's the call to action I have for you this week.

Okay?

I want to give you two very simple things to try to do this week.

First, start each day with gratitude for God's grace.

And specifically, here's what I would challenge you to do.

At some point every day this week, open up to this passage.

Ephesians 1, verses 3 through 14, and just identify one thing in that passage that God has already promised you and done for you.

Ephesians 1:3–14

One thing.

He adopted you, redeemed you, forgave you, sealed you.

Name that grace.

Name that grace and spend some moments thanking God for it.

Think about what it means.

And then, second, do one thing intentionally each day in response to the reality of that blessing.

Maybe there's something you need to surrender to Him, someone you need to love better, an act of obedience that you've been avoiding, an opportunity to extend grace to someone else, extending to them the grace that you yourself have received.

Choose one thing and do it.

Not to earn God's grace, but consciously because you recognize you've already received it.

And in just a moment, Russell's gonna come up.

We're gonna have a time of response.

Russell's gonna come up and we're gonna have communion.

The Lord's table.

We're gonna come to the Lord's table.

We will take the bread and the cup and remember the blessings that we've talked about this morning did not come cheaply.

But they came through his blood, by which we have the forgiveness of our sins.

It all brings us back to Jesus.

So as we come to the table this morning with gratitude, remember the grace that you did not earn, the Savior who gave himself for you.

And then as you leave this place for another wake, let's let a week, let's live in response to that.

Would you stand with me?

And we're gonna give you just a moment here to think of about a couple of questions.

What did I hear and what must I do?

What did I hear and what must I do?

And we'll give you just a moment between you and the Lord.