ILBB Intro Sermon

I Like Big Buts Sermon Series

Introduction

December 28, 2025

Series Slide

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and a very good morning to all of you on this amazing day the Lord has made!  It is so great to be worshipping with you today! 

Just as an announcement, I wanted to invite you to join me in reading the Bible in a year.  There are tons of options out there.  I picked up this one at Hobby Lobby.  There are also options on The Bible App… I like the one called simply, “The Bible in a Year.”  The Chronological ones are hard, ones like this one, or “The Bible in a Year” from the Upper Room give you an Old Testament, a New Testament, and a Psalm or Proverb to read daily.  All in all, it will take about 15 minutes a day, then you can spend another 15 minutes reflecting or journaling on a phrase or passage you read.  That would be 30 minutes a day, that – quite frankly, I believe, will change your life, change this church, and literally change the community. So, I hope you will join me on January 1 as I begin this journey!

Now, back to today… Today is actually one of the hardest days to write a sermon for… It is a Sunday stuck between Christmas and New Year's… It’s a day when you know that only 1/3 of the congregation will be in attendance… So, what do you preach?

I could preach a Christmas sermon, after all, Christmas is now… this is the season of Christmas known as Christmastide.  I know, we think of Christmas as 1 day, but it is actually the season that includes the celebration of the birth of Jesus on Christmas Day, Epiphany, 12 days later on January 6, and the celebration of the Baptism of our Lord on January 13.  So, Christmas is a season, not a day, and a Christmas sermon would be fitting.

From 2015 to 2019, I created and advertised an event that would draw people in, as I preached on the biblical themes of the new Star Wars Movies that were being released each December.  Well, that came to an end – finally…

Another theme that works is to preach a New Year-themed sermon… I could discuss all the New Year's resolutions we are going to make and break… and how we should focus on God in the new year instead of some renewed resolution from a prior year.

One thing a preacher would not want to do is start a new sermon series on a day like today… but that is exactly what I am doing.  This week, I am setting the stage for the new year sermon series... over the next about 7 weeks, I will be focused on many of the places in the Bible where we find the phrase, “But God…” I call them the big buts of the Bible, because almost every time we see this phrase, we know that something great is coming.  Maybe things have been bad for a while, then we read the words, “But God,” and we know that something good is about to happen.

The tag line of the series is, “When God has more,” and that is where we are going to begin.

So, you can keep your Bibles open to Ephesians 3, but before we get back to that, I want to pause for prayer.

<Prayer>

Sermon Slide

What would you do with $1.7 billion?  That has been the question of the week as the Powerball jackpot grew.  On Christmas Eve, one Arkansan won the entire Powerball jackpot, making them the newest millionaire.   A quick Google search of what you could buy includes the entire company of Family Dollar stores – they sold recently for about $1 billion.  There are entire islands available for sale off the coast of Florida, Mexico, and Belize for less than that. 

You know… I can wrap my head around a million dollars, or maybe even 2 or 3 million dollars.  You invest that well, or buy an annuity with it and let it pay out $10-$20,000 a month and you can live pretty high on the hog for the rest of your life.  But, I can’t fathom living off a million dollars a week… and that’s what you would get in interest if you invested the $750,000,000 cash value of the Powerball at 7.5%.  That’s more than $52,000,000 in interest annually.

I know, there are plenty of Billionaires out there that don’t have a problem thinking about a million dollars a week.  I mean, Jerry Jones is worth an estimated $40,000,000,000 (B).  There are plenty of corporations that make a million dollars a day… but I, personally, can’t even envision that amount of money.

It is beyond anything I can fathom. It is beyond comprehension. It is far more than I could ask or imagine. 

And that brings us back to our text for today. 

Ephesians is my favorite book of the Bible.  Don’t get me wrong, I love a good battle story in the Kings, or a romantic poem from Song of Solomon, or a worship hymn from the Psalms.  I can’t get enough of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels and the exponential growth of the Church in Acts as ordinary people like you and me simply follow God’s lead in spreading the good news of Jesus.  But if I had to pick one book of the Bible, I would land on Ephesians.  You’ve got half the book that tells you why the Christian faith is worth believing… I mean, it lays out the theology, the what we believe and why… then the last half gives us practical advice on how to live out what we believe.

Today’s passage is the bridge between the two parts of the book.  After all that Paul has covered in the previous paragraphs (3 chapters for us… but remember, Paul didn’t put down chapter and verse markings, he just wrote a letter…) so, after all that Paul has covered, he ends with a doxology, a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

He has told us about the mark of the Holy Spirit on us… he has reminisced about the Power of God that is at work in us… He has repeated the hope that we have in Christ Jesus…  He has reminded us that each of us was dead in our sins, that we had fallen away from God… then one of the “big but” passages in 2:4 But God, because of his great love for us and his rich mercy, he made us alive in Christ.

As we continue reading in chapters 2 and 3 we see that we are the work of a Craftsman… that all humanity is to be united under the creator of everything through Jesus Christ.  All along, we, Gentiles, were a part of God’s plan.  We are to be united with the Jewish followers… and all God’s creation through Jesus Christ!

And now, we can know, we can experience this great love of God… we are to be rooted… deeply rooted and established, with all God’s creation.  Because of Jesus, we can know the unknowable, experience that which had previously been unexperienced.  Simply put, we now have the power within us that was at work in Jesus! 

The Bible Knowledge Commentarywraps part of this up this way…

“The result of this is that through faith Christ may dwell in believers’ hearts, that is, their whole personalities. “Dwell” (katoikēsai) refers not to the beginning of Christ’s indwelling at the moment of salvation. Instead, it denotes the desire that Christ may, literally, “be at home in,” that is, at the very center of or deeply rooted in, believers’ lives.

Hoehner, Harold W. 1985. “Ephesians.” In The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, edited by J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck, 2:631. Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.

Paul is telling us in these 3 chapters that the life we are created for is possible because of the power of Christ dwelling within us!  We are to live with Christ at the very center of our lives, impacting everything we do.  Literally, “The content of this comprehension is to know experientially the love of Christ that supersedes all knowledge.

The more [we] know about Christ, the more amazed we are at Christ’s love for us.”

And now, the only fitting response to such knowledge… the only possible response in light of all that has been said about God is doxology… praise… To know God through Jesus Christ leads to praise…

Ephesians 2:20-21

Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen

Doxologies are common in scripture, but they have a specific form.  A doxology contains three simple elements:  The name or title of the addressee, a statement of praise, and a period of time.  In its most simple form, it would read something like this, “to God be the glory forever.”

 Who is it addressed to? God.

What is the statement of praise? Be the glory

When? Forever.

So, we are going to look at these elements of this passage before us.

First, who?

…to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us…

What a description of God.  Let’s take a little extra time looking into what that means.

What is translated as “Immeasurably more” here is a superlative that’s really difficult to translate into English.  Throughout scripture, we find these types of idiomatic phrases that express more than the words themselves.  One of my favorites is in Genesis 2:7where it says that God formed the man from the dust.   The actual word in Hebrews is that God formed adam(a generic word for man) from the adamah (the word for dirt).  It’s a play on words that doesn’t translate well into English, but the best we can do is to say that God formed humanity from the humus.

This passage is the same kind of thing.  There isn’t a neat and clean way to interpret this passage from Greek into English and keep the depth of meaning. 

In the Greek, what we see in English as “Immeasurably more” or “abundantly more” is:

 = ὑπερεκπερισσοῦ (hyperekperissou) ὑπὲρ (hyper) superabundantly… abundantly abundant.

God can do more than we could ever imagine… more upon more than we can imagine… abundantly-abundantly more… superabundantly more than we could ever even ask for… more than we could even imagine…

I mean, think about it… God revealed the person of the Son, God in the flesh, through the birth of Jesus, raised by a common family from a common region of the world.  Theologians from generations before had tried to comprehend exactly how God would come into the world as Emmanuel, but they never imagined that he would come as a helpless baby in a forgotten farming community in the countryside.  Yet, God was able to do immeasurably more than they could have asked or imagined.

But here is where it gets great!  It’s not just about what God can do, but it's what God can do through you! 

What God can do is because of His power at work within us.  Ephesians 1:19 and Romans 8:11 both remind us that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you.  Jesus told us in John 14 that we will be able to do the things he has done and that we will even do greater things!

God is able to do more than we could ask or imagine because the Spirit of God is in each of us, giving us the power to do more than we could ever ask or imagine.  It’s not just about the power in ME, it is the power in US.  I can’t lift a car by myself… but if we all went out there and each of us got a hand on a car… together, we could do more than we ever imagined on our own.

Because of the way we were created… each of us as individuals working together – Gentiles and Jews, Men and Women, Slave and Free, Democrat and Republican, Native and Foreigner… together, interdependent… with all our varied gifts and graces, we can do great things… super-abundantly more than we could ever ask or imagine…

So we know the who… now the

What of Praise

to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus

One of my commentaries put it this way.  “Paul therefore ascribed to God glory which is to be manifest in the church, where the miracle of love will occur, and in Christ Jesus, who made unity among all believers possible.”

To ascribe glory to someone or something is to offer the highest possible praise and honor.  It is recognizing the power and majesty of God.  It is acknowledging who God is and who we are not.

We are to see this glory of God and ascribe this glory to God in the church… we are the living manifestation of God in the world today.  We are the image bearers of God in the world… you and I are the light in the darkness.

Why, because of Jesus… who also reflects the Glory of God… the very manifestation of God in the Flesh, living, breathing, and walking among us… the creator with the created.

To him be all glory and honor…

When?

Throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

His kingdom will have no end.

That is what this season of Christmas is all about.  God, in the flesh, coming to humanity.  The creator coming to the created to teach us to live, and to love, and to be in relationship with one another and with our Creator… to give us the example of who we are created to be. 

Why? Because of his great love for us!

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. (Jn 3:16)

And that is why we give God the glory forever and ever, Amen.