Stronger Together

Greeting

Good morning Lighthouse! Before we get started, would you once more greet your neighbor for me, and tell them one nice thing about them.

Now before I get started, two quick plugs that I want to personally make, and the first one is that today at our 12 PM service we are going to celebrate and honor 7 students who have completed the first year of the Lighthouse Leadership College. I want to name them here - Yessica Angulo, Carlos Avilez, Miriam Avilez, Jay Castillo, Melissa Mendez, Omar Saucedo and Nataly Soto. Can we celebrate them for just a moment. We are now building our interest list for this Fall. So if you would like to join the Leadership College, we begin in September following Labor Day weekend. You can join our Interest List now, and we will begin to send you all information for our next enrollment.

The second announcement is that later this month we start something absolutely EPIC here at Lighthouse, and it is a 6 week Son’s Group. Who are our Son’s? All Lighthouse Men, from 9th grade on up. We are gathering on Monday evenings for community, worship and impartation. Together men, we are going to dive into your formation as I preach through the book, Fighting Shadows by Pastor Jon Tyson. You can register for that group now by scanning the QR Code on the seat back in front of you. I want no less than 100 men as part of this journey. Women, feel free to sign up your husbands. They NEED TO BE HERE.

All right, let’s get to work Lighthouse.

Reading

Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Sermon Title: Stronger Together

Introduction

I LOVE a good sports movie.

Recently I made my sons watch the movie Rudy. This is part of their spiritual formation. That’s how serious I am about sports movies.

Of course, my all time favorite sports movie would have to be Remember the Titans. I don’t think you get to go to heaven if you do not watch this movie. And of course, starring in this movie is Denzel Washington, but that’s not the point.

The point is, I LOVE a good sports movie.

I was thinking about the DNA of a good sports movie, and there is one thing that I think every sports movie has in common, and that is the team having to overcome internal adversity, so that they can overcome external adversity.

So what we see in a lot of sports movies is the team isn’t jelling. They aren’t united. They are fighting among themselves and as long as they are fighting each other, they have NO CHANCE of beating their opponent.

Transition

So, the reason I say all of that, is because when I read Ephesians Chapter 2, it reads like the rising action of a good sports movie. It shows us that the church that Paul is writing to has to overcome internal conflict if they are going to be successful in overcoming external opposition.

So let’s dive into Chapter 2 today.

Alive in Christ

Paul writes to the Ephesians and repeats this idea that we are in Christ.

Paul’s letter is a reminder to the believers who they are in Christ. The reason I believe that there is this constant repetition of in Christ is because they had been Christian just long enough to forget who they. They had lived in this new found faith just long enough to start making majors out of things that should be minors. Paul was calling out this error and he was working to bring them back to the central message of the Gospel.

And of course, this was unique to the church in Ephesus, right?

We here in America, we do a good job of keeping the main thing the main thing, don’t we?

We don’t ever start making our faith about politics do we?

We don’t read the Bible through the lens of our personal biases, do we?

We don’t ever start making more about “our purpose” than God’s purpose, do we?

We all know the answers to those rhetorical questions. The American Church has done some strange things with the message of the Gospel. And this is why it is so important that we are reading through this letter in its entirety so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

Paul reminds the readers of who they were before Christ, and who they are now that they have encountered him:

Ephesians 2:1–2 (NIV)

As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.

Ephesians 2:4–5 (NIV)

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.

Paul reminds us that we are alive in Christ.

Here is what this means for us here today.

Man kind is made in the image of Christ. We bear his likeness. If we know it or not, or believe in it or not, we are all image bearers or our creator.

But to bear His imagine does not make us fully alive in Christ.

We need to first see Jesus, who is all of God wrapped up in humanity.

Then we are to be born of His spirit. That simply means that the we need his Spirit, the Holy Spirit to fill us. When you think of a baby that exits the womb, the first thing the Doctor needs to do is to get this child breathing. Once that child breathes, there is life. When God created Adam in the garden, he was the image of his creator, but it was at the moment that God breathed into him that Adam became fully alive.

We all bear the image of God, but until we receive his Spirit, the very breath of God breathing in us, we are not fully in Christ. So we have to breathe Him in… We have to be born of His spirit. We need to receive the Holy Spirit.

But John informs us that we also need to be born of the water, which means we need to be water baptized.

That is when we take our next step of obedience and we submit to water baptism in the community of our church to declare that now I am fully alive in Christ!

John 3:5 (NIV)

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.

Galatians 3:27 (ESV)

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

So NOW we are living. Now we are in the body of Christ. Now we are Christs representatives here in this earth not only declaring who Jesus is, but showing this world who Jesus is as we let his image be formed in us.

Galatians 4:19 (NIV)

My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you,

And this brings us back to our key verse that we read:

Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

We are made alive in Christ to do good works.

Now, if we read that verse absent of the following verse, we will miss out on what the good works we were created to do.

Where it all Begins - Reconciliation

So let’s read the subsequent verse and fully walk out Paul’s letter.

Ephesians 2:11–13 (NIV)

Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

Let’s make sense of this verse…

Whenever the Bible says “therefore”, you have to ask yourself what is it there for?

Therefore is a conjunction of thought. It brings the previous thought of created for good works into now what verse 11 is telling us to do.

So here it is… Paul is now going to take this powerful and prophetic declaration of who we are and then bring us to the biggest challenge that faced the early church.

Persecution was not the biggest challenge to the early church, although it was a challenge.

False teachers was not the biggest challenge to the early church, although it was a challenge.

A place to gather was not the biggest challenge.

The biggest challenge to the early church was reconciliation.

This was primarily manifested in racial reconciliation, but also in gender, social status, and religious reconciliation

What is reconciliation?

apokatallassō - to restore and create harmony in relationship.

As children of God we are to be reconciled to Him and to each other.

We are reconciled to Him when we are born again, but the challenge is to be reconciled to each other.

Let me give you a vision of God’s family - Jew and Gentile (non-Jew) are now one together in Christ. We are no longer foreigners but members of His household.

Listen, the church is His household, not ours. He sets the rules. And here are His rules:

Galatians 3:28 (NIV)

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

At the time of Paul’s writing, race, social status and gender were dividing the church.

Today, the church continues to be separated by race, politics, gender, and social status.

And if Paul were alive today his message of reconciliation would be just as loud today as it was back then which means we have learned nothing! We have not advanced enough from the early church, and that is truly a shame.

Pastor Derwin Gray says it this way, when the church is fully reconciled “We represent the future in the present.”

Racial Reconciliation matters because race may be the single greatest reason for a fractured church.

Ethnocentrism, the division of Jews and Gentiles

Today, entire denominations were formed around racial segregation

More recently, politics are dividing the church

Anything that divides the body of Christ is an “anti-Christ”

The church, God’s family, was always supposed to be counter-cultural to the world around them. When the world was dividing, the church was to be uniting. When the church does what God called the church to do, it is an irresistible movement that should cause those who are far from God to take notice and want to be a part.

The way that we reconcile should grab the attention of the world long enough so that we can make Jesus known!

The church has spent far too much time trying to make itself known, and failing to make Jesus known.

This world needs Jesus, and that happens when Jesus’ representatives here on this earth are representing Him and representing Him well!

Love God & Love Others

Jesus was asked what is the greatest commandment that your followers should keep. And His response is the greatest summation of our Gospel: Love God & Love Others.

Do you want to know what is absent from that response?

Us.

Ourselves.

Our purpose.

Our destiny.

Our Dreams.

Whatever you want to call your personal ambitions in life, they are not present in Jesus’s response. And that is such a contrast to what is being preached in most pulpits. Most pulpits are preaching “your purpose, your assignment, your potential”. But if you preach your purpose absent of God’s purpose then you are no longer preaching a message of “being in Christ” and your message has become “Christ in your plans”.

That’s not the gospel!

Jesus is King, not you.

Jesus is Our Savior, not your business.

We want to make much of Jesus, and not much of your personal success.

He is not your divine life coach in the sky. He is your Lord, He is your savior, and He is your King!

Now, if you are wondering how I got there and what that has to do with reconciliation, it has EVERYTHING to do with it!

When you fail to love God and to love others, you will step over the people that you are supposed to be reconciled with in order to accomplish your dreams and your desires.

But when we chose to love the Lord with our whole hearts He will give us the ability to love beyond our own biases, beyond our own experiences, and beyond cultural expectations.

And at the macro level of this letter, Paul begins by telling the reminding the individual in the Ephesian church who they are in Christ so that they could be victorious out there. Out in Ephesus. Outside of the church. And now in Chapter 2 he makes the reader look within the church and exam their unity. They needed to really consider the way they were treating one another. The way they were loving one another.

Conclusion

In 1994 the nation of Rwanda endured the genocide of the Tutsi. The ethnic majority of Rwanda was the Hutu and a nationalist group rose to influence and began a genocide of as many as 800,000 people. That is nearly 1 million people killed. In 1994.

In the aftermath of this conflict the leaders of the nation compelled their citizens to forgive and to reconcile. They founded a group called the Ukurrkuganze, and it is a group of genocide killers and survivors.

But how do you reconcile from something that terrible?

Alice Mukarurinda shared her story of hiding in a swamp but was assaulted by a man who with a machete cut off her hands and killed her baby daughter.

That man is Emmanuel Ndayisaba, and this is him pictured with Alice 20 years later.

After Emmanuel served a prison sentence he saw Alice at a meeting and he asked her for forgiveness.

After two weeks of thought and long discussions with her husband, she said yes.

These are Alice’s words; ”We had attended workshops and trainings and our hearts were kind of free, and I found it easy to forgive," she says. "The Bible says you should forgive and you will also be forgiven."

This is the good works we were created for. Reconciling people back to Jesus and to each other.

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