Sermon Tone Analysis

How many times have you heard someone say, or maybe you yourself think that, the God of the New Testament is nice and the God of the Old Testament is mean?

Or that Jesus is nice and the Father is this big, heavenly tyrant that Jesus had to calm down?

Unfortunately, that is a thought that a lot of people have but thankfully that’s not the truth.

Back in South Carolina, there is a phrase that the older folks use when someone is so excited they won’t stop talking.

When someone is like that they’ll say, “Man, she was running 90 miles a minute.”

And perhaps you’ve found yourself running 90 miles a minute before after receiving good news or, if you were a kid, you ran 90 miles a minute because you simply ate a lot of candy.

Well, regardless, I want you to turn with me to Ephesians 1 because it is there that we will find Paul so excited that he is rambling “ninety miles a minute” as he explodes with a huge two-hundred and twenty word long sentence, though our English Bibles have periods to make it easier for us to read.

The truth that we will find in this passage over the next few weeks are life changing truths for us as believers.

The other day I heard the story of an old Navajo Indian who had become rich because oil had been found on his property.

He took all the money and put it in a bank.

His banker became familiar with the habits of this old gentleman.

Every once in a while the Indian would show up at the bank and say to the banker, "Grass all gone, sheep all sick, water holes dry."

The banker wouldn't say a word -- he knew what needed to be done.

He'd bring the old man inside and seat him in the vault.

Then he'd bring out several bags of silver dollars and say, "These are yours."

The old man would spend about an hour in there looking at his money, stacking up the dollars and counting them.

Then he'd come out and say, "Grass all green, sheep all well, water holes all full."

He was simply reviewing his resources, that's all.

That is where encouragement is found -- when you and I look at the resources which are ours, the riches, the facts which strengthen our faith.

Now one difference I hope we’ll find between us and the old native is that he would only go in to look at his wealth without ever drawing on it, but I hope that today, we will see just how rich we are and that we will draw on it to live on for the rest of our lives.

With this being said, I want us to read Ephesians 1:3-6 and it is here that we will find just a glimpse at how deep the Father’s love for us is.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

This evening I want us to leave knowing that the Father has lovingly blessed us and He is worthy to be blessed.

So, I’m going to break down these passages and hopefully we will see how beautiful and life altering they are.

Let's dive in.

The Blessed Father

As Paul opens up this paragraph, he shouts out, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…” Paul isn’t just wishing that we would give some blessing to God the Father, rather he is telling us that God is worthy to be praised.

Now, as Paul continues, he makes it clear that this God, the God of Israel, is the God and Father of Jesus Christ.

But who is this Jesus?

That was a common name of that time after all; but in verse twenty, Paul makes it clear as he writes, “He exercised this power in Christ by raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens—far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come.

And he subjected everything under his feet and appointed him as head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.”

What Paul is doing as he writes this is making it clear that Jesus is divine and that God the Father, the very one that sent our blessed Lord Jesus, is worthy of praise but throughout the Bible we usually see a reason given.

And here Paul continues and says, “who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

So, Paul is so excited because God has blessed us tremendously.

Alexander McLaren said, “God blesses us by gifts, we bless Him with words.”

And this theme of blessing is exploding here as Paul uses every sense of the word bless.

God is blessed, God has blessed, and we have spiritual blessings.

These blessings, as we will see later on, are the actions of the Father, Son and Spirit in redeeming us.

And these blessings are in the heavenly places.

What that means is that since we are in Christ, that means Christ represented us on this Earth and completed all the actions required for us as our great representative, we are blessed with these heavenly riches since the One who we are in is also in Heaven.

But what does that mean for us?

Well, what we find is that these are truths for living.

This is wealth for holding.

We may not be physically in Heaven yet, but these blessings are for us today.

I’ve hunted most of my life and I’ve really never been a huge fan of the dark, but when I was a kid, hunting in the dark really weirded me out because we were in the middle of nowhere.

No lights, barely any cell-phone service, you get the deal.

But as I would climb down from my hunting stand, and begin walking through the dark woods, I would be extremely nervous until I could see the lights from the front of my Dad’s four-wheeler in the distance.

Now I wasn’t on the four-wheeler yet, but the assurance of it being there waiting for me gave me great peace in the midst of darkness and that’s what these blessings will do for us.

But what are they?

Well, there are two things for us to see in this second point which is:

The Beauty of God’s Blessings

The first is a teaching called, “Election”, listen to what Paul says in verse 4, “Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.”

That word chose means exactly what you would think it would mean, it means that God has picked us out from the rest, that God selected us for Himself, and this is the way we see it used in passages like Mark 13:20 and my favorite is John 15:16-19 which reads,

I want us to notice a few things about this passage.

First is the person, second is the time, third is the purpose and fourth is the passage.

What we see here is that God the Father, before time even began, chose a specific people to be holy and blameless before Him.

Now, a lot of people consider this doctrine to be mean, but does this sound like a mean passage to you?

That God would choose a bunch of rebel sinners to be redeemed?

Let me remind us that if God didn’t choose to save us, we would all die and go to Hell but He chose us to be represented in Christ and that it is by Christ’s righteousness that we have been redeemed.

This isn’t a heartless teaching, even Paul says it was done in love!

God has chosen to save us so that we will stand before Him as justified people who love Him and who love one another.

So, if you ever doubt the love of God for you, remind yourself of this truth.

But we need to ask ourselves a question here, and that question is, “Why?”

Why did God choose to save us?

And how do I know if I’m one of the elect?

And those are quite simple questions to answer.

First, God chose to save you because He loved you and He wanted to.

You and I had nothing to offer Him.

It wasn’t that we were smart, or special, or cute.

Instead we were dead and we absolutely hated Him yet He loved us enough to put His love on us.

Second is, “How do I know if I’m one of the elect?” and this is a question that a lot of people struggle with, but I hope this answer will give you some help.

The way to know if you’re one of the elect is if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of your life and soul.

In 1 Thessalonians 1:4-6

This, as well as Romans 10:13 are wonderfully assuring passages here.

Guys, If you heard the gospel and truly believed, and God is at work in your life, that’s a sign that you’re one of the elect.

You didn’t believe because you were smarter than everyone else, you believed because God worked in your heart.

Isaac Watts wrote,

Who shall the Lord's elect condemn?

'Tis God that justifies their souls,

And mercy like a mighty stream

O'er all their sins divinely rolls.

Next we see verse 5, which reads, “He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,”

This has to be one of the most beautiful truths in the Bible.

O’Brien writes, “Believer’s praise God the Father because His purpose in choosing them was to bring them into a personal relationship with Himself as His children.” (O’Brien 102).

Predestination is an interesting term that we don’t use very often, but the New Testament uses it a few times.

We see it in Acts 4:27-28

We also see it in Romans 8:29-30

As well as 1 Corinthians 2:7

So, what we gather from the New Testament use of those words is that God has planned before time to accomplish, in the context, our adoption as sons through Christ Jesus.

In my notes I wrote that God has, in love, chosen to redeem us in Christ; to forgive us of our sins and declare us as righteous.

But this is the work of a judge, this mention of adoption takes the work of a father.

This work of salvation and adoption go hand in hand.

We see them in John 1:12-13

But what does this mean for us?

Well, there are two possibilities of what Paul is pulling from here.

He could be pulling from the Old Testament accounts of God’s work amongst Israel, but I agree with one writer that this is probably Paul referring to the Romans custom of adoption.

You see, in Rome at this time there was this law called, “Partria Potestas” which meant the father of the home had absolute power over everything.

As a matter of fact, if he wanted to kill his family members he could without any problems.

The father had total ownership over his family and for adoption at that time, the son had to be released from the control of his birth dad and how this worked was that the birth father had to sell him as a slave to a new man 3 times.

So he’d sell him once and the buyer would free him and he’d go back to the father’s possession, but the third time he was sold he became the son of the adopter and the son now had no more responsibilities to his birth father, he was now under the care of a new father.