"No Longer Strangers" | Ephesians 2:11-22 | Jake Porter

Well, good morning to you all.

Special welcome to our guests who are here.

I've met a few of you before the service began, and hopefully I can meet a few more of you after.

My name is Jake.

I get to be one of the pastors and serve on the teaching team here at Neartown Church.

We're glad you're here.

We are continuing a series where we're going through the book of Ephesians, and I really want to encourage you to open your Bible.

The verses will not be on the slides on the screen today.

So open your Bible or open a Bible app on your phone to Ephesians 2, starting in verse 11, because it's important to me that you see that what I say comes from that book.

All right.

So you can follow along in that way.

Most of us want to belong, to have people in our lives who know our stories, notice when we're missing, and a place where we can say, hey, these are my people.

I belong here.

My day job is working as a licensed professional counselor, do a lot of marriage work, and I've spent much of my career studying relationships and attachment science and all of this stuff.

And research confirms this desire for connection is deeply, deeply wired within us.

So there was this meta-analysis.

And a meta-analysis, in research, it's a cool thing because they take all of these other independent studies and they put them all together for like a mega study.

So there was a meta-analysis that combined 148 independent, peer-reviewed studies of combined over 300,000 people.

And what they found was that those who had stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival over the period of time that they followed them.

Isn't that interesting?

Social isolation and loneliness are also, research shows, linked to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, cognitive decline, just overall quality of life.

Belonging and having that sense of belonging, it doesn't just like make life better.

We were made for it.

We were created for it.

Scripture tells us why.

In Genesis chapter one, God is, you know, making creation and he repeatedly declares, and it was good.

And it was good, and it was good.

And then we get to chapter two, and God says for the first time that something is not good.

It is not good, what?

That man would be alone.

And if you think that is specifically just talking about marriage and a man and a woman coming together, that it certainly includes that.

But it's not limited to that.

We are fundamentally created for relationship.

Relationship with God, who himself exists as relationship, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and relationship with one another.

But sin fractures both.

Sin.

And what is sin?

Sin means falling short of God, his glory, his design.

That's what makes Ephesians chapter 2, 11 through 22, the passage we're looking at this morning, so powerful.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

Paul is writing to people who once stood on the outside of the people of God.

He uses words like separated, alienated, strangers, being far off.

But Jesus doesn't simply forgive these people as individuals and kind of just, you know, give them a clean slate.

He brings them near.

He tears down what separated them.

He makes strangers into family and then says that God is building those people together into a place where he intends to live, to manifest himself.

The main idea of this passage today is that in Christ, outsiders become family, and strangers are built together to become the very home of God on this planet.

So Paul guides these Christians to look in three directions, and we have kind of have these three movements through this passage.

To look back and remember where they came from, to look to Christ, okay, and what he did to bring them near, and then to look around at what they have become together.

We often treat belonging as something to find.

Like we've got to go find it.

Where are my people?

Where do I fit?

But in the Christian worldview and in the Christian faith, belonging begins by recognizing what Christ has already done.

It doesn't begin with anything you or I do.

He brought near those who were far away, and he made them family.

So before showing us where we belong now, Paul asks us to remember our hard truth.

There was a time when none of us belonged.

And that's the first section of the passage, verses 11 and 12.

Remember how far away you were.

And interestingly, this is the first command in the book of Ephesians.

Ephesians 1 · chapter mention

Chapter 1, he's mostly praying to God.

And so the first command that we see is remember.

Remember.

He asked these Gentile Christians, Gentiles, they were non-Jewish Christians there in the city of Ephesus to recall who they were before they knew Christ.

And in verse 11, he notes that they were called, notice there, the uncircumcision by the circumcision.

Centuries of religious and cultural and ethnic division had separated the Jewish people from the Gentile people, leaving Gentiles as outsiders to the covenant of God.

Then in verse 12, he describes just how far outside they were.

Look at the words, the phrases he piles on top of one another.

Separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenant of promises, having no hope without God in the world.

Paul emphasizes the distance with these words.

Separated, alienated, strangers, without hope, without God.

They didn't just need a little self-improvement, little tweak.

They were far from God and outside of his promises.

There's something interesting about belonging.

You often don't realize how much it matters until you don't have it, or feel like you don't have it.

Maybe you walk into a room, has this ever happened to you?

You walk into a room where everyone else knows each other, they know the stories, they have their inside jokes, right?

They know where to sit and what to do while you're kind of trying to figure out where you fit and how you plug in.

Nobody even has to be unkind to you in one of those situations.

You just simply kind of feel it in the moment, like, I'm not one of them, at least not right now.

I gotta figure some stuff out.

That's a small thing compared to what Paul is describing here.

But most of us know the feeling.

And historically, these verses describe most of us too.

There may be some folks in this room of Jewish descent, but most of us here in this room are what the Bible would refer to as Gentiles.

We weren't born into Israel or its covenant promises of the Old Testament.

But, you know, as I was reflecting on this passage, I've I was like, yeah, but you know what?

There's this cultural barrier that we have, there's a challenge for us to make that really makes it difficult for us to feel what Paul is trying to convey here.

Because we live here in America, and we're in the Bible belt, okay?

And some of you grew up in church, and you had a Bible in your house, and you went to vacation Bible school and you knew the songs and the stories, and you may have called yourself a Christian before you really even understood what that meant.

And even if you didn't grow up in that kind of a household, you you had it in the air, right?

You sang Christmas songs and you heard this and that, and you know, this Bible verse and that Bible verse.

So maybe you never really felt like an outsider to the Christian faith.

But being around Christianity is not the same thing as being in Christ.

That phrase that Paul keeps repeating in this book over and over and over.

Paul already told us earlier in this chapter what Pastor Russell actually preached last week, that apart from Christ, chapter 2, verse 1 said, we were dead in our trespasses and sins in which we once walked, and that it was God, chapter 2, verse 5, that made us alive together with Christ.

You can grow up culturally close to Christianity and still be spiritually far from God.

So when Paul says remember, what he's wanting us to do is to recall the distance that the grace of God had to cross to reach us.

No one inherits salvation through family heritage or church attendance.

That's not how it works.

We must be made alive with Christ and brought near to God.

Remembering that we were far off matters because grace feels ordinary when we forget the distance that Jesus crossed to reach us.

Believing that I naturally belong or that others belong less means I'm forgetting my own story.

The ground is level at the foot of the cross.

Nobody in this room needs Jesus any more or less than anyone else in this room.

Remembering matters.

Paul says, remember, not so that we live in shame about who we were, but so that we live in gratitude, with gratitude for what God has done and humility toward everyone else that he invites into his family.

If God can save me with all the things that I have done to go against him and his will, I know he can save anybody.

Before any of us were insiders, we were all outsiders.

And thankfully, Paul doesn't just leave us there.

Verse 13 begins with two of the most hopeful words in scripture.

He says, but now, and that brings us to section two.

Remember who brought you near.

Remembered who brought you near.

So in verses, if verses 11 and 12 describe the distance, verse 13 gives us the turning point.

But now in Christ, Jesus, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

I want you to notice who closes the distance here?

Who closes the gap?

Paul doesn't write that we found our way to God.

He doesn't say you found God, but that you have been brought near.

It is God who acts and brings us near, and he does it by the blood of Jesus Christ.

And Paul extends this reconciliation to God to also a reconciliation with one another.

Look at verse 14.

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

Through the cross, Christ creates, look at verse 15, one new man.

One new man.

Verse 16 says that he reconciles both Jew and Gentile to God in one body.

Look down at verse 18, he grants both access in one spirit to the Father.

Now to understand how powerful that statement would have been to the folks to whom Paul was writing.

Imagine, I want you to really try to put yourself in this scenario I'm about to describe.

Imagine you're a Gentile.

Well, that part you may not need to imagine.

But you're a Gentile 2,000 years ago, and you've traveled to Jerusalem because you have come to believe that the God of Israel really was the true God.

You come to believe this.

And you know that this God, yes, he's everywhere because he's omnipresent, but his special presence, his glory dwells in the temple in Jerusalem.

And so you travel all the way to Jerusalem and you see the temple there on Mount Zion.

And you are approaching the temple, the place where the very special presence of God dwells among his people.

And you're getting closer and closer and closer, but eventually you come to a barrier.

You see, the temple was arranged, think of it, in these restricted courts, moving outward from the innermost sanctuary called the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was and where the presence of God dwelt.

So there was the Holy of Holies.

Okay?

And you would move out from that, and there was the holy place.

And then one layer out from that was the court of the priests.

And then one layer out from that was the court where the men of Israel could come and bring sacrifices representing their family.

And one court out from that was the court where the women of Israel could come and participate in the worship.

And then five steps down and through a wall, three cubits thick of stone, was a court, was the court of the Gentiles.

Eventually you would reach that court, the court of the Gentiles, separated from the inner courts by these walls, and a warning saying, Any Gentile who crosses here, it is his own responsibility that he dies.

That's basically what it said over every entrance past that place.

This far and no further.

You could worship the God who dwelled there.

But because of your ethnicity or your heritage, there was no there was a point beyond which you could not go.

Imagine what that communicated.

Other people can go closer.

You can't.

Paul's in prison as he's writing this letter to the Ephesians.

The event that eventually led to his imprisonment began when some Jews accused him of bringing a Gentile named Trophimus beyond that point in the temple.

Paul broke the boundary down.

He didn't respect the wall.

And Acts specifically tells us that Trophimus was an Ephesian.

So Paul is writing to Christians in Ephesus about a dividing wall while imprisoned because he had been accused of taking one of their people beyond it.

He's got some moral authority to speak here.

And Paul says, Jesus has torn down that wall.

Jesus tore down the wall.

Now here's what's fascinating.

As he writes this letter, and as it is read in Ephesus, the wall was still physically standing.

Did he lie?

Was he wrong?

If you had traveled to Jerusalem when Paul wrote that letter, you'd see it.

It's right there.

It's still there.

But something happened at the cross that was more determinative than the wall that was standing right there in front of them.

The wall that had been there for centuries.

The wall still physically existed, but it no longer represented the spiritual reality that had changed because of what Jesus had done.

Christ opened access to the Father that no stone wall could close.

So these Christians had to see with eyes of faith.

They had to believe that what Christ had accomplished was more real than what they could actually still see.

And they had the cur had to have the courage to live accordingly.

And if that wall no longer determines who has access to God, it raises an interesting question.

Where is God's temple now then?

If that wall, which once meant something, no longer does, where's the presence of God now?

Well, we'll come back to that.

Put a pin in that.

For now, just notice that Jesus doesn't solve the division by turning the Gentiles into Jews or Jews into Gentiles.

Their ethnicity, their histories don't disappear.

Instead, verse 15 says his purpose was, look at it there in verse 15, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two.

So making peace.

This speaks directly to our tendency as human beings to divide ourselves into two groups.

This is what we as humans have done across cultures, across the millennia.

We have divided people into two groups.

You know what those groups are?

Us and them.

Us and them.

Racism and antisemitism contradict the work of Christ.

You cannot look down on anyone because of race, ethnicity, or heritage while looking at the cross where Jesus died to create one new man of people from every tribe and tongue and language and nation.

But there's an even more subtle temptation.

We keep asking identities other than Christ to give us what only Christ can provide.

I am not going to get political here.

But I am.

We are in the middle of an elect.

Who is sick of the ads and the text messages and all of that?

Okay.

We try to have these identities do something for us that only Christ can do.

Sometimes that's a racial or an ethnic identity.

Sometimes it's a national identity.

Sometimes it's a political ideology.

We can find versions of that temptation on both the political right and the political left, believing that if our group gains enough power or everyone gets sorted into the right categories, we'll finally have justice, belonging, and peace.

Now listen, government and politics can do important things.

And we should pray for and do what we can to see that they are instruments of righteousness.

But no political movement can accomplish what Paul describes here.

It cannot reconcile sinful human beings to God, nor can it create one new humanity that Jesus creates through the cross.

Our foundational identity is not defined by ethnicity, status, or politics.

Our unity is a person.

He himself is our peace.

He is.

Following Jesus is deeply personal, but it is never private.

We often frame the gospel strictly in singular terms.

Jesus died for me.

God forgave me.

Yet Paul repeatedly uses communal terms: both one, one body, one spirit, one new man, one father.

Jesus reconciles us to God and to one another.

And you cannot have one without the other.

As we would say here in Neartown Church, no one is meant to follow Jesus alone.

There are, there's no such thing in the Bible as a Lone Ranger Christian.

Following Jesus means belonging to his people.

Ask yourself, am I rebuilding, dividing walls that Jesus died to tear down?

Or if you're not rebuilding them, are you still respecting them as if they matter?

Because Paul says, you see the wall there with your eyes.

I'm telling you, Christ tore it down.

We must not treat anyone Christ bought with his blood as an outsider.

Sometimes faith means living according to what Jesus says is true, even while the old walls are still visibly standing.

The divisions and hostility may still be real.

But faith doesn't pretend those realities don't exist.

It just refuses to give them the final word.

Because none of us got here by being close enough.

Every one of us who enjoys the salvation of Jesus Christ enjoys it because we were brought near.

And now Paul wants us to see where Christ has brought us.

So the last section here, verses 19 through 22, remember where you belong now.

So a few minutes ago, I we kind of left, we put a pin in something, right?

We left a question hanging there.

If the old temple and its dividing wall no longer determined who could approach God, where's the temple of God now?

And we actually know that a few years after this book was written, the temple was literally physically torn down.

Okay.

Not so where is God now?

Not his omnipresent being, and where God's everywhere all at once.

But his special place of the revelation of himself, where his glory is known on earth.

Well, Paul's answer would have been almost unimaginable to these Gentile believers.

You know what he says?

You, you are that place.

Or more precisely, you together.

Or, as the Texan translation would say, y'all.

Y'all are the temple.

Look at verse 19.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but y'all, that's a plural, that's the second person plural there, not you individually, y'all are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.

Notice the complete reversal.

Back in verse 12, they were alienated and strangers.

Verse 19, you're no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens and members of the household of God.

You're not a visitor, you're not a guest, you're family.

You're brought all the way in.

And Paul shifts the metaphor then from family to a building.

He goes on, he says, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.

The cornerstone of a building was the first one set, and everything else was organized around that cornerstone.

The entire structure takes its orientation and its strength from the cornerstone.

And so the new temple of God, which is his people, his family, the church, is oriented completely around and takes its strength completely from Jesus Christ.

In Christ, this whole structure, verse 21 says, is being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him, you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Think about how extraordinary this would have been to the listeners receiving this letter in Ephesus.

For generations, God's dwelling place among his people was associated with that temple in Jerusalem.

And if you were a Gentile, you could only approach so far, this far and no further.

But Paul says that's not where you need to look anymore.

The people who once stood outside the temple are being built now into a temple themselves.

Now, this reaches all the way back.

I could unpack this for an hour, but I'm not gonna do that to you.

But this reaches all the way back to the very beginning, Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, where God plants a garden and he puts Adam and Eve in this garden.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention Genesis 2 · chapter mention

He tells Adam to work it and keep it.

Interestingly, those two Hebrew verbs, you know, the other time they show up together, work it and keep it, is when God talks about the priests in the temple.

Work it and keep it.

And so the idea is that his presence is in the garden and the people are in the garden with him.

And they were to expand the boundaries of the garden, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, have dominion, subdue it, and expand the boundaries of the garden.

Why?

So that the glory of the earth the Lord would cover the earth as the waters cover the seas, and the whole earth would be like this big temple for God and his people bearing his image to be together.

And then sin enters the picture and it fractures this relationship.

And his people are cast out of the garden because of their sin.

They can't stand in the presence of God.

But God sets up this system of worship and these sacrifices, these animal sacrifices that the book of Hebrews tells us it wasn't the blood of the animals that really covered their sin, but that was a picture pointing forward to what God would do one day through this promised figure called the Messiah.

But in this period of waiting, he first instructs them to build a tabernacle that they can move around in the wilderness with them, and God's presence would be with them.

And then they settle in the promised land and they build the temple in Jerusalem, and the temple is there.

But then they rebel, they're exiled, they're cast out, just like from the garden.

It happens again.

And there's a period of silence for centuries.

Until John tells us that the word became flesh and tabernacled among us.

A lot of translations say dwelt among us.

It's literally the word tabernacled.

Now all of a sudden, it's not a physical structure, but a person.

A person.

And then after the death and resurrection of Jesus and the coming of his Holy Spirit poured out on his people, Paul now says there's a new temple to follow this tabernacle.

That God's dwelling place is now his people.

Paul speaks in the plural.

You all, you together, are being joined together and built together.

Individual stones fit together around Christ, the cornerstone, to form God's dwelling place on the earth.

And that's where this becomes very practical.

One of the movements of our discipleship strategy here at Neartown Church is belong.

We talk about belonging and the importance of belonging.

We say that church is not simply a gathering you attend, it is a people to whom you belong.

And Ephesians 2 gives us the theological reason why.

You can attend church without really belonging to its people.

You can come into this room, you can sing, you can listen to a sermon, and leave while remaining largely unknown.

But that's not Paul's picture.

God is joining us together.

God is building us together.

Following Jesus is deeply personal, but it is never meant to be private.

And belonging isn't always easy.

Can I get an amen?

Yeah.

Right?

If you're actually known, you will eventually disappoint others or be misunderstood by them.

You'll discover things about other Christians that irritate you and frustrate you.

And they'll discover things about you that irritate and frustrate them.

Could it be that God has a purpose in this?

You don't get to choose all the other stones God puts in this building.

But remember, Jesus Himself is our peace.

Our belonging isn't based on finding people exactly like us.

That would be really boring in the end, and none of us would grow.

So maybe the question isn't simply, do I go to church?

Maybe it's am I allowing myself to belong?

Do I have people here who really know me?

Am I moving beyond sitting in a crowd toward relationships where I can encourage and be encouraged, challenge and be challenged, forgive and be forgiven, and be helped to follow Jesus.

Because no one follows Jesus alone, not effectively.

Earlier we imagined the Gentiles standing outside the temple, looking toward the place where God dwelled and hearing you can come this far, but no further.

Paul's message replaces the barrier.

In Christ, God brought you near, made you family, and is building you together into a dwelling place for his spirit, from strangers to God's very dwelling place.

That's where you belong now in Christ.

And before I give you any kind of step to take or practical thing to do this week, I just want to be clear.

I don't want to be misunderstood.

You don't become a part of God's family by joining neartown church or any other church.

Though sin separated us from God, Jesus lived the life that we could not.

Jesus, the eternal Son of God, came, took on flesh, perfectly followed the law of God.

That I can't do that, and you can't either.

And he then went to the cross to take upon himself what I deserve and what you deserve for when we break the law of God, when we fall short of his glory.

He died for us and then rose again.

And this finished work on our behalf grants forgiveness and reconciliation and adoption into God's family.

Being near to Christianity is about being in Christ.

If you've not trusted Jesus, today you can do that.

You can cross over the line of faith and you can say, Lord, save me.

I trust in what Jesus has done.

I'm gonna trust in his death to pay for my sin.

And when you trust in Jesus, when you put your faith in him, when you put your hope in him, this mysterious exchange happens where his righteousness is given to you as your sin is taken up by him.

Now for those of us who are in Christ, the question is are we living like people who belong to Christ and to the people Christ has given us?

So here's here's a practical step this week.

Take one step from attending to belonging.

One step.

If you've been attending Neartown, here's a really practical way to do it.

If you're not a mission partner here, that's what we call members here.

If you're a mission partner, if you're not a mission partner here, but you've been coming here, and if someone were to ask you, hey, where do you go to church?

you'd answer Neartown Church.

I want to encourage you to sign up for our next Discover Neartown class to learn more about getting involved in belonging here at the church.

I believe it's October 11th.

You can find out details on our website, neartownchurch.org.

If you are a mission partner here, you've already joined, remember that belonging is an ongoing movement, not a box to check.

Take a step toward deeper community.

Join a loop tube or loop tube.

What is that?

A loop group.

Or a Sunday team to serve, or you don't even have to do that.

Just invite somebody to lunch.

Linger after service for conversation.

Share your life more openly with someone here that you think you could grow to trust more.

This doesn't require becoming an extrovert or making a dozen friends or whatever.

It just means living into what Christ has already made true of you.

You belong to his people.

You're no longer a stranger, you're no longer an outsider, you are members of God's household.

Christ has given you a people.

Take one step this week toward living like you belong.