Grace upon Grace - Tewantin

EPHESIANS – the Gospel of Grace Ephesians 1:1 - 2:10 Grace upon Grace July 14, 2024 – Rev’d Chris Johnson This morning we come to this most marvellous of New Testament books – Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. • • • John Calvin described it as his favourite letter. Armitage Robinson called it ‘the crown of Saint Paul's writings’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge who I quoted in E-News this week, thought it was ‘the divinest composition of man and the Queen of the epistles.’ This morning we are looking at Ch 1 and the first half of Ch 2. There is so much to take in here so strap yourselves in for the ride. In this passage Paul deals with many of the great doctrines of the Christian faith but he does so as an act of worship. This is not dry academic theology, this is theology wrapped up in praise, honour and glory to God. In the first 14 verses the little phrase ‘to the praise of his glory’ is repeated three times. This theology lead Paul to worship and we should to. I want to talk about this passage under two headings, • the earthly dream and • the heavenly dream And then wrap it all up in ‘the praise of his glory’. What do I mean by the earthly dream? This is the dream every human being has for a happy life. It may be straight out hedonism but it's also about fulfilment and significance. For you, it maybe having a worthwhile career where you've been able to work your way up the ladder and achieve some significant goals. Or it could be about raising a happy family. Seeing your children grow up happy and healthy and hopefully marry well and have their own family. It maybe to do with sport; being gifted in a particular sport and achieving highly with lots of trophies in the trophy cabinet at home. It maybe to do with having a particular lifestyle, a dream home, going on a dream holiday, wearing fashionable clothing or anyone of a multitude of lifestyle choices. We all have earthly dreams, which one is yours? I remember when I was a teenager, I had a dream of finding a girlfriend who loved the South’s Rugby League Football Club in Brisbane as much as I did and would go to the games with me. And you know what, I married Lynda who really doesn’t like Rugby League at all. But she takes a very gracious interest, asking me the score at the end of each game. 1 So we all have an earthly dream of how we would like life to workout. However, there is also a heavenly dream. This is a dream that God gives those who are ‘in Christ’. This is the dream we find in Ephesians and especially Chapters one and two. It's the dream of being in Christ and pursuing Christ. The word Christ or Christ Jesus or the personal pronoun referring to him, occur 29 times in this passage. That is 29 times in just 33 verses. It is all about Jesus Christ. After the initial greeting Paul begins his epistle in v3 with these words, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ”. When I use the phrase ‘heavenly dream’ I'm especially thinking about Verse 3. The heavenly dream is the fact that “the Father has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ”. Then the rest of the passage gives rich content to the nature of these blessings. I want to look at these blessings in terms of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because in broad outline that's how Paul presents them here in verses 3 to 14. • V4 It is the Father who chose us in Christ before the creation of the world. So we'll look at predestination. • V7 shows us the work of the Son. It is Christ who redeems us through his blood which gives us the forgiveness of our sins. • V13 deals with the Holy Spirit. It says when we believed we were marked in Christ with the seal of the Holy Spirit. So I hope you might notice here Paul setting out ‘the spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms’ in terms of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So firstly the Father who chooses us, predestines us. V4 says “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will.” And in v11 he says, “In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will.” Many Christians over the years have found these verses di^icult. How can it be about God choosing me? Isn’t it my decision to follow Christ? How can it be God's prior decision? Well the simple answer is that, for grace to be grace it has to be God's prior decision. The complex answer is to plum the depths of this grace. To understand grace we need to look at Ch 2 verses 1 to 10. V’s 1-3 set out a very bleak picture of the human condition. Paul says that before God intervened, we were dead in our transgressions and sins. We followed the ways of the world. We were under the influence of the ruler of the Kingdom of the air, which is 2 Satan. We were disobedient. We gratified the cravings of the flesh. We were by nature deserving of wrath. To put it simply we were spiritually dead, cut o^ from God and without hope. Dead people can’t help themselves; dead people need resurrection. The truth of the gospel is that we are unable to lift a finger to help ourselves and the rescue has to come totally from God. We need nothing less than resurrection, not a lesson in morality, but resurrection, we need to be raised up to a completely new life in Christ. And that is what Paul says in Ch 2 v6, “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Predestination is about God choosing us to be raised up to this new life in Christ, and he made this choice before the creation of the world. It is not your cleverness that worked it out. It is not your good heart that wanted to reach out to Christ. It is only that God softened a spiritually dead heart to consider the things of Christ and be raised up with him. It is all of God's work from beginning to end and we should simply stand in awe and marvel. There is so much more which could be said but the simple point is that one of the great spiritual blessings in the heavenly realms, is that the Father chooses us before the creation of the world and it is all of grace. Secondly, Paul talks about the blessings we have because of the work of the Son. V7 “In him we have redemption through his blood the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us.” The work of the Son is redemption. However did you notice that in this verse redemption is closely linked with grace. Did you notice that our redemption is ‘in accordance with the riches of God's grace’. Every spiritual blessing in fact is closely linked with grace. That is why we are calling this series Ephesians – the Gospel of Grace. What does the word redemption mean? It means to buy back. Do you remember the illustration Dave Smith gave in his sermon at his Commissioning? Soon after he arrived from England, at the Coles’ checkout he was asked, do you want to redeem flybuys. He didn't have a clue what they were talking about! Redeeming flybuys is about making a payment of some flybuy points in order to get some free groceries. Redemption in Christ is about Christ making the payment in order to give us the gift. How did he make the payment? V7 says by shedding his blood (which of course is referring to the cross). And this is the way our sins can be forgiven. And V7 goes on to say it is in accordance with the riches of God's grace, which he lavished on us. To help us understand this better, again I want to take us to Chapter 2 and perhaps the best known verses in the Bible on grace, v’s 8-9. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast.” This passage is well worth memorising and in the Connect Group study guide we encourage you to do that. 3 One of the best definitions of grace is that it is the unmerited favour of God to undeserving sinners. • Grace is about the merits of Jesus Christ. • Grace is about the love of God at the cross, Jesus willingly taking the rap for sin, so that we could be set free. • In Pauls’ words, Grace is about the redemption we have through the blood he shed on the cross. This is indeed lavish grace. So we come to the third member of the Trinity and this is in v13. “You were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.” I take it that the seal we are marked with is simply a settled inner conviction that the gospel is true, that God is good and he has provided everything necessary for our salvation in Christ. The seal of the Holy Spirit is the conviction that these things are true. The Spirit is also spoken of here as a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. This is a commercial metaphor like when you buy a block of land, you put down a deposit to secure the land. Say the land costs $500,000, you put down a deposit of $10,000; This is the down payment, it guarantees you the land. Your name is on it. The Spirit is the down payment, in fact part of the promised inheritance. So the Holy Spirit is the personal presence of the living God, leading and guiding us to our final inheritance. So my friends, being blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ is enormous. It is Grace upon Grace. And these blessings come to us in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This past week I have become acutely aware of the fragility of life. I heard the story of a young man who quite inexplicably developed a bleed on the brain and has collapsed into a coma. The doctors are not giving his wife any hope that he will come out of the coma. This couple have four children between the ages of six months and 10 years. So tragic. This week I also visited John Murdock (a member of our Tewantin congregation who many of you know.) John is doing it tough. I asked him if I could share his situation with you and ask your prayers, and he said yes. He has been through over 2 months of chemo-therapy and radiation. He is very grateful to those of you who have been on a roster driving him down to the Sunshine Coast University Hospital each day. Debilitating as that is he is also battling with being fed through a tube in his nose. He says it's horrible stu^. John had a scan on Thursday which will show whether they are able to operate. He sees the doctor next Tuesday morning where he will get the result. He says he knows it is in God's hands and he is accepting of whichever way it goes. I want to pray for him now pray for him now. Loving Father, we pray for your servant John. We thank you for his faith in you and his perseverance as he has walked this path of su^ering. Lord 4 Jesus, I pray that this week you would assure him that he is chosen by you, redeemed by the blood of Christ and sealed with the Holy Spirit. Grant him a special assurance as he visits the doctor this Tuesday morning. We do ask that you would lay your healing hand upon him, that surgery might be possible and above all that your will be done and your glory revealed. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen. And there have been a number of other pastoral situations this week which are just so sad. At the beginning of this sermon I talked about the earthly dream. We all have a dream how we would like life to turn out. There's nothing wrong with having earthly desires. We are created beings put in a beautiful creation to enjoy. The problem though is we worship the creation rather than the Creator.What is devastatingly sinful is that our primary desire is not for God. We have an over developed desire for the pleasures of this world, and a grossly underdeveloped desire to find our pleasure in God. So I want to ask you where is your dream? Is it only an earthly dream? People who only have an earthly dream are very vulnerable, because life is very fragile. There are any number of Gurus and Experts out there who will try and convince you they have the certain formula for success and happiness. But the truth is life is very fragile. The earthly dream is very fragile. So do you have a heavenly dream? And by that I don't mean head in the clouds wishful thinking; I mean the great truths of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. I mean knowing that you are “blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” • Blessed by the Father by being chosen before the creation of the world. • Blessed by the Son who redeemed you by shedding his blood on the cross to forgive you. • Blessed by the Holy Spirit because he has put a seal in your heart looking forward to that final inheritance, that great day of Christ. These are all great truths that evoked for the Apostle Paul worship. After talking about the Father choosing us, he says in v6,“to the praise of his glorious grace.” After talking about the Son redeeming us, in v12 he says, “for the praise of his glory.” And after talking about the seal of the Holy Spirit, in v14 he says again, “to the praise of his glory.” I hope your heart also this morning might be led to worship and the praise of his glory. Amen 5