Ephesians 2:11-22 – Navigating Change

Well, good afternoon, and welcome everyone to our last second service, at least for a while, and our last service, uh perhaps ever, in this building where we where we are right now.

Uh we, as uh Philippa mentioned in her prayers, we've been here for six and a half years, and today we conclude our tenure here and move.

Uh literally after this service, we'll take everything down and the uh the rental van uh has been parked outside.

We'll be packing everything up and moving over to the point village.

And from next week we'll be meeting at the Odeon uh cinema at the point at 10:30, which is great news for first service people because they get a little bit they get a little bit of breathing room, maybe not quite a lie-in, but a bit of wiggle room.

They got half an hour later.

You guys need to do some planning, maybe?

A little uh little extra alarm, perhaps, something like that.

So at service at 10:30.

Uh, there's no 12 p.m.

service uh next week.

One service with uh more people, larger space, still socially distanced in screen two at the Odeon in Point Village.

Uh let me pray for us as we look at God's word together.

Our Father, we thank you for your grace and your kindness to us as a church.

We thank you for your grace and your kindness to the church in uniting us in the Lord Jesus, in revealing yourself to us through your word.

Help us now, not only to understand it by your spirit, but but by that same spirit to be transformed by it.

We ask it in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Uh, one of the things that God has given uh human beings, uh, because we're made in his image, that's what Christians believe.

Uh we're made in the image of a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

He is three persons in one God, he is a community, and so one of the things that he's given us as his image bearers is a need, a longing for community, for connection, for feeling like we belong somewhere.

Our use of uh social media betrays the fact that we like to know and be known.

Or if you're just a lurker, you just like to know.

You just like to know what's going on in other people's lives.

When you move to a new area or begin college or start a new job, one of the things that we wonder about, one of the things that we think about is who will I connect with?

Will I get on with the people who are there?

Will I find long and lasting friendships?

Will I have that sense of belonging?

And things can uh be very difficult.

I remember my my first year, uh, full disclosure, I'm a university dropout.

I dropped out of my first year of a university degree.

I eventually went back, like I haven't just kind of rocked up here a couple of weeks ago.

Uh, but when I first started university, I was miserable.

And there's lots of reasons for that.

But part of the reason why I was miserable is I felt so disconnected from everybody.

Those places and those experiences are enriched when we find connection points with others.

God has given us that need for community, that need for connection, but you know what?

He's also given us the place where that need is met, where that longing for connection is satisfied.

And that place is the church.

If you've not been brought up going to church like I was, that can sound very strange.

Or if you were brought up going to a church where you sat there and you were quiet and you simply left as soon as the service was over, then that idea again can sound very strange.

But the fact is that God, who is a relational being himself, has made us relational beings and has given us a place for us to express that in the gathered people of the church.

City Church has always been a place where we have strived and sought to hold out the offer of community and connection to those who came through those doors over the last six and a half years to be a family of faith where people can have that sense of belonging.

When we were smaller, and we were very small for a long time, but when we were smaller, uh people would leave us and we would have them up the front and we'd pray for them and we'd send them off.

Perhaps they were moving back home, perhaps their time at university had finished, and they were moving on to another city somewhere else, and we'd pray for them and they would speak about their time at City Church, and time after time after time, one of the sources of great joy was the people talked about having a family here, feeling that sense of belonging, connection.

I'm too sensible of our defects to think that we have done it perfectly.

I'm sure that we haven't.

I suspect that we're not doing it perfectly now.

But over the last seven years, this place, this place of bricks and mortar, has given us the opportunity to build that family, that community.

It's given us the opportunity to worship together, uh to eat together, which we did a lot, to laugh together, weep together, party together, sing karaoke together.

And today we say goodbye to City Church in Chancery Place at Dublin Christian Mission.

And we move on to a new location with a very different dynamic.

Do you want to know what the irony of that is?

When City Church first started, the one image that I kept on using that I didn't want City Church to turn into was a cinema.

A place where you came in and you watched the show and you left.

My biggest fear amidst all of the excitement of the changes is that that mindset would creep in.

Over the last three weeks, we've been thinking about navigating change, how we need that fixed point in the sky, that guiding light, that polaris that is the Lord Jesus, that all of humanity is journeying towards, that that uniting of all things under him.

That as we travel, we need a mindset that's what Paul prays for the Christians, that that seeks wisdom, that is full of hope and joy.

And finally, as we close out this series and make this transition, I simply want us to encourage one another with the thought that we navigate change together.

We do so in community, as a family of faith.

You see, our longing for connection is not some mere add-on to our life, not something that we can take or leave.

That's what one of the really hard and mentally taxing things uh about COVID has been that we have felt so disconnected and cut off from others around us.

Some people need it more than others, admittedly, but no man is an island and we all desire connection.

We're made to navigate the seasons of life with other people, people who know us and who we know, who love us and who we get to love.

In this passage, Paul is talking about how God has brought us, you and me, together into a new community under the rule of good King Jesus.

And so let's look more closely at this passage.

First, let's ask the question of this passage: what keeps us from community?

What keeps us cut off from one another?

Because that's where Paul begins.

The news at the minute is obviously full of hostility, warfare, division, strife, peoples against peoples.

But we don't even need to look on the news.

We can look at our own cities, we can look at look and look closer to home.

We see divisions between classes, races, backgrounds, divisions in our own families, where there's disconnection and tension, even hatred.

Sin always seeks to cause division and separation.

You think right back to the garden, to Genesis chapter three, where God commanded Adam and Eve not to disobey him, uh, not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and yet they listened to the lie of the snake, who is Satan.

They aspired to be like God, and so they took of that fruit in disobedience and in treasonous rebellion.

And what happened?

They hid themselves.

But they didn't just hide themselves from God, they hid themselves from one another.

And this double alienation has played out all over the world and down the millennia.

People cut off from God, and as a consequence, hostile to one another.

There is a breach in our life.

There are two, in fact.

There's the vertical one between us and our God, and the horizontal one between one another.

In the ancient world, there was no two groups more hostile to one another than Jew and Gentile.

They despised one another.

The quote marks around the phrase the uncircumcision in verse 11 is a derogatory term that the Jews called the Gentiles.

You can uh maybe think that we rightly don't utter uh derogatory, racially charged terms.

You can think of what they are.

I don't need to say them out loud, but in the ancient world, the uncircumcision was one of those.

It had that sort of connotation.

The Jews despised the Gentiles, and the Gentiles were equally hostile in return.

Most of us.

In fact, I'm not aware of anybody who traces their lineage back to ethnic Israel, uh, though apologies to you if you do.

But most of us come from that Gentile side of the that side of the ledger, that Gentile side of the division.

And Paul, just for uh a verse, reminds those Gentile Christians, you and I, of how far we were from God and from the people of God.

How separated, how cut off we were.

He uses five terms in verse 12.

We're just gonna note them uh briefly.

The first in verse 12, if you're looking at it, if you've got it on your phone, if you've got a Bible on your lap, he says, remember that you were separated from Christ.

Remember how much emphasis he had put on in in chapter one about how all of the blessings of God are the believers in Christ, how we're redeemed and adopted in Christ.

And he just reminds the Gentile believe that the one time you were separated from Christ.

The promise, the promises of the Messiah, God's anointed king, they didn't belong to us Gentiles, they weren't ours.

We were separated from Him.

He's saying, remember the one time you were without Him in the world.

I think in our, and forgive me, this isn't true of everybody in the in the room, but those of us who kind of have a have a Western Eurocentric mindset, uh, we can sometimes tend to think that Jesus is ours, that Jesus was some sort of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

Uh, and it's worth remembering that we were once separated from Christ.

He goes on, secondly, not only separated from Christ, but alienated from the commonwealth of Israel.

That is, as Gentiles, we had no rights of citizenship in the people of God.

No entitlements in the people of God.

Third, that we were strangers to the covenants of promise.

God had laid down such great and wonderful promises to the people of God in the Old Testament, beginning really chiefly with uh with Abraham and with the promise to make all things new through him.

Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

God comes to Abraham, this 70-year-old man, and says, I'm gonna I'm gonna restart and I'm gonna do it through you, old man.

And I'm gonna make you a new people, and I'm gonna give you a new place, and I'm going to bless you so that you're a blessing to the nations.

And those are the promises that build and evolve all the way through the Old Testament.

So they come to Sinai after the uh the great dramatic rescue from Exodus and they receive the law, and God comes to dwell in their midst, in the in his presence in the temple.

Or God comes to great King David a thousand years before Jesus and makes a promise to him and says that one of your sons will sit on your throne eternally.

Well, Paul is reminding us is that we were unaware of all of those things, that those promises weren't ours.

They weren't ours to sue God on.

We were strangers, ignorant of what God was doing in the world and how he would bring them about.

Fourthly and fifthly, he says that we were without hope and without God.

Without hope and without God.

The ancient writer Catullus, who died about 50 years before Jesus, he was a Roman poet.

He knew nothing of the Lord Jesus.

Uh, but in one of his poems he says this he says, the sun sets to rise again, but when sets our little light, we must seep through a never-ending night.

He captures a sense of the hopelessness of the of the Gentile world, of being cut off from those promises of God.

That death is that never-ending night.

And isn't that what many think these days about life and death?

The long sleep of death that leads to a hopelessness and despair.

It's easy, isn't it?

Especially if you've been brought up in the church or in Christian circles, or even just in the West, to think that we have some right or claim on the blessings of God.

I think perhaps that Paul begins here in order to remind us of how far off we were, in order that we might see again the glories of what God has and is creating in his son, the Lord Jesus.

What is separate what is that keeps us from community?

That sin that disconnects us from God, that alienates us from him and from one another.

So Paul goes on, and secondly, then how is this new community established?

Look at verse 13.

But now, but now in Christ, you who were once far off, that's you, Gentile Christian, that's me, Gentile Christian, you who were once far off, have been brought near.

How?

By the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down in his flesh the dividing law of hostility.

Paul told us at the start of chapter two how we individually were dead in our trespasses and sins, how we were saved by his grace, how that vertical breach was mended.

Now we learn that God has effected a dramatic reversal in our condition, no longer far off, but brought near.

Despite our alienation, despite our hopelessness, despite our estrangement, God has brought us close to Him and to one another.

How has he done this?

By the blood of Jesus.

You see, Jesus doesn't just save you as an individual, he doesn't just remove that barrier between you and God.

He brings us all together into the new family of God.

Let me illustrate this uh briefly.

Um Peter, would you come up and keep your mask on?

Duncan, would you come up?

Ross, uh, would you come up?

You can maintain social distancing from from from from me.

It'll still work and from from one another.

But if you you you kind of that that works well actually.

Um because if I go here, I can illustrate it even more.

Uh uh, no, oh okay, sorry.

So what has happened?

They have all come closer to me, but as they have come closer to me, they have also come closer to one another.

Imagine for a second that I'm God.

I know my wife says that I shouldn't do that, but but in being brought close and gathered to me, they have closed the distance.

How much greater if we didn't have to have social distancing?

But they have closed the distance between one another.

You can go back to your seats, and that is what Paul is saying that as as God draws people to himself by the blood of the Lord Jesus, they come close again to one another without social distancing.

He has done that through his son.

And Paul emphasizes that in verse 14 with the with the words he himself.

He himself is our peace.

We have not brought it about by our own strength.

How will lasting peace and reconciliation be brought about in our world?

It is not by strength of arms, it is not by diplomatic ability, but only by the peace that Christ will bring.

That is why Christians, when they, maybe even you this week, have scrolled through your newsfeed and seen what has gone on in Afghanistan or in Haiti.

One of the prayers that that wells up in the Christian is that prayer from the very end of the book of Revelation, where we just kind of say, with John, come, Lord Jesus.

Because only he will bring that lasting peace.

And he, verse 15, has made one new man.

So it's not so much that we Gentiles join the Jewish people, though there is that kind of image in the book of Romans.

But here, what Paul emphasizes is that Jesus makes one new humanity.

One new people.

That is the church.

We at City Church are a visible expression of God's reconciling work in the world.

Ah, visible, not the visible expression.

We must not think too much of ourselves, but we are a visible expression of God's reconciling work in the world.

We come from different nationalities, different social backgrounds.

And whatever hostilities may have existed between our peoples, whether racial or economic prejudices or suspicions, they have no place in the community of the church.

We are a new humanity, a new people.

Why?

Because Christ has torn down the dividing wall.

In this context, what was the dividing wall of hostility?

The dividing wall between Jew and Gentile was the law.

The Old Testament law which separated Jew from Gentile.

It was a source of pride for the Jews and a source of resentment and scorn for the Gentiles.

And Jesus has done away with it.

How?

By fulfilling it.

By perfectly keeping it.

In a way that we never could.

We could never keep the law.

You're not good enough.

I'm not good enough.

You're not good enough to flawlessly, consistently keep the big ten.

Never mind the other 603.

One man who is the savior of both Jew and Gentile has done it.

One savior in whom all of humanity finds life and forgiveness.

Are brought together in him.

That is how this community is created.

That is how the community of City Church has been created.

And the result?

It's that we have peace.

That's our third point.

What does this community look like?

It looks like a place of peace.

Not peace in the sense of peace and quiet after a long day where you shut the door and you shut out the world and you open up a your favorite can or bottle of whatever it is that you would like to open up.

No, peace here is more than that.

As wonderful as that can be.

Peace here is wholeness.

It's harmony, it's rest, it's safety, it's peace with God and other people.

Right at the very core of your being.

That's what Jesus achieved.

And that's what Jesus is building and expressing through us, through the church.

And so he says, verse 19, so then, remember how far off we were, those five terms, separated, cut off, alienated, strangers, without hope, without God.

But Jesus has acted, verse 19, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

In the church, in city church, there is no such thing as a foreigner.

There are no foreigners in the church, no strangers in the church.

We all belong here.

What do you need in order to belong to the church?

What do you need in order to belong to the people of God?

You need to be a sinner who trusts in the Savior.

That is it.

We are no longer aliens excluded from the borders of heaven, but citizens of the kingdom of God, and our passports are stamped with the blood of his son.

We are part of his household.

The word household in the ancient world stressed a number of different ideas.

It stressed the idea of security and safety, but it also stressed the idea of identity.

In the West, we've kind of we kind of lost that about maybe 100, 150 years ago.

Though if you come from an Eastern culture, the idea of the household that you come from is still a strong identity marker.

And it carries that sense here.

That we're part of the household of God, that that's our identity.

What that means is that we are no longer primarily Irish or English or South African or Indian or German.

Our home is not primarily the green fields of Athenae or the vineyards of France or the misty mountains of South Korea.

We are part of the household of God.

This is why, as Christians, you have this experience of being able to go anywhere in the world and kind of find a home amongst God's people.

And I hope that's increasingly true of those of you who are getting to know city and making it your home.

Certainly it's been true as I've as I've traveled in the world, you know, you go on holiday and you kind of you Google, is there a kind of a is there a church kind of nearby that isn't a complete disaster?

And you think I'll go along to that, and what you find is people who are warm and welcoming and who love you, and they don't know you from Adam.

You might be a total jerk, but you know, Duncan was just telling me that they liked him in Portugal, and I mean that's what the gospel does.

How amazing! Seriously.

The gospel creates connections across time zones and continents where where you get invited out for lunch and get given a bed to sleep in.

Have you just rocked up in a in a city?

You remember a young Welsh guy was doing like a busking tour of the British Isles, and we hadn't been going long as a church.

We were still meeting on a Sunday evening, and he just came in.

We were having food because we always had food.

Isn't that right, Abby?

We always had food.

And and so he came along and I was I got talking to him.

I was like, Where are you gonna where are you gonna stay?

And he's like, Oh, I've got my tent.

I'll just I'll find, you know, maybe go to the Phoenix Park and find a private area where the where the wardens won't won't find me.

And I'm like, no, no, no, like come home, come and have a home with us.

We'll feed you, we'll give you a bed for the night, I'll take you to your boat trip the next morning.

Why?

Because we were brothers, we just hadn't met yet.

You see, when you're part of the household of God, those things like nationality, education, salary, position, sexuality, personality, all of those things get relativized.

They're not of primary importance.

We are all children of God in Christ.

More than that, therefore, we are a community being built on a foundation.

Verse 20, built on what foundation?

On the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Himself being the cornerstone.

That is the stone that is set in place first that makes sure that the whole building is built right, that it's not lopsided.

We, like any other Bible-teaching local church, build our community, our life together unashamedly, first and foremost, on the reliable, trustworthy, first century witness and declaration found in the scriptures of who Christ is and what he has done for us.

It is foundational to our community life.

It is an unswerving commitment that we hold and that we carry with us wherever we would meet.

It will be the same next week.

And as a result of building on this foundation, what are we being built into as we begin to draw to a close?

Verse 21 and 22.

In whom the whole structure joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

What is Jesus doing?

He is building us together into what?

Into a holy temple.

What was the temple?

The temple was where heaven and earth kissed.

It was where God met with his people.

It was where God's presence was particularly fixed.

Yes, in a sense, God's God, and so we say, well, God's everywhere.

But God has always particularly placed his presence with his people.

And so that is what we are being built into.

That is what Jesus is working in our midst, to be a place where God dwells by his spirit.

Whereas God, he is here.

He is among us and in us by his spirit.

He is building us into a temple, into a place where people will come in order to meet with the living God.

And just as that has been true of this physical structure, it will be true of any place where the people of God gather.

God's presence will be made manifest by his spirit in screen two of the Odeon Point village.

Isn't that a marvelous thought?

God is here.

We are the living temple of the living God.

And he's building us, growing us, changing us.

The start of chapter two, in a sense, he bought us with the blood of his son.

And now he's refurbishing us.

In the way that you might you might buy a house or you might buy an apartment, though not in Dublin.

But anyway, that's a whole other sermon series.

But you might buy a place.

You go in and you think, oh well, I own it now, but I'm gonna change that, and I'm gonna change that, and we're gonna we're gonna knock through that, we're gonna make that bigger.

You make it more fit for purpose, but that's what God is doing in our community.

He's bought us and now he's growing us, he's refurbishing us.

And what is he refurbishing us with?

Unity and peace.

So one of the ways that this plays out with one another is that we seek ways to show that that unity, that peace that exists between us, even if we're from different ethnicities, different cultural backgrounds.

So we we show hospitality to one another.

And we overlook those small cultural faux pas, misunderstandings about what is served or the way that it's served.

Because if God shed his blood for us, we can have lunch.

If God has gone to those lengths to love us, to redeem us, and to build us into a new people, we can take five minutes to get to know someone new.

All of us go through life where we're navigating changes.

We go through life with seasons of tension, one degree or another.

Maybe in our marriages, in the relationships with our children, maybe even the relationships with our parents.

Sometimes those seasons are calm, and sometimes those tensions are raging.

In those times, the miraculous source of power to be patient and to tolerate the other person, even when they are unbearable, is because the of the peace that God has lavished upon you in his son the Lord Jesus.

That if God has, remember how far off you were, that if God has welcomed us by the blood of his son, we can forgive again.

We can persevere again, we can give that person another new start.

And for us as a church, as we navigate the uncertain waters of the coming weeks and months and pray that God blesses it, we do so knowing that God has made us a community together by the blood of his own son.

That we have been united together under his good rule, a fellowship, a family, a place of community, of connection and belonging.

That we might be meeting in a cinema, but we do not possess the culture of a cinema, but that of a family.

That intriguingly different way of doing life with one another.

That to some people will look beautiful and will cause them to ask more and press in further.

Because the aroma of our life together smells sweet and they want more of it.

And by his grace they will see that it is only by the reconciliation, the removal of that vertical barrier, of being broad close to God, that they experience the full, sweet life of our community together.

That's what we want going forward, isn't it?

That's what we thank God that we've had.

In all of the imperfect ways that we've had it.

And we journey forward in faith, saying, please, Lord, give us more of it.

What a wonderful thing, even next week.

That we will be one service all together, by and large, as an expression of what we have always been.

One family of faith.

Under the rule of good King Jesus.

Let's pray.

Father, give us grace.

We pray to show unity and peaceableness to one another, to our brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus.

Help us ourselves to know the peace of sins forgiven, of being brought close to you, of being made part of your household, knowing that identity.

May that free us.

Free us to be a people who hold out the blessings and joys of that to people who are so far off, hopeless, and without you in the world.

Help us, we pray, as we navigate these changes together.

In the name of and for the glory of the Lord Jesus, we ask it.

Amen.