Fellowship of the Blessed

Introduction

As Covid cases drop throughout the Bay Area and vaccinations make its way through the most vulnerable members of the population, I feel like its a good time for us to start preparing to gather again as a church. It’s hard to beleive that’s its been nearly a year since the first shelter in place order here in San Francisco. I remember thinking to myself, that this would be for a month, maybe a couple months max, and I could have never imagined that it would take this long to get this virus under control. And so much has changed in our world over the course of that time. Whether we realize or not, we have all been changed to one degree or another. The same thing applies to our church and I imagine we won’t fully understand all the changes until we all meet up again.

Many people who were a part of the church are no longer here for a variety of reasons. Our church is located in a city that has experienced some of the most dramatic shifts in demographics in the entire nation. In addition to that, the events of the past year has revealed some philosophical differences in the way we view the truths of Christianity, the role of the church, and how Christians are meant to live out the mission of God.

With all of these uncertainies surrounding us, it’s important for us to think about how we will emerge out of this pandemic as a church. Because how we entered into the black box of the pandemic is not the way we will come out on the other side and so we need to get ourselves ready for whatever is about to come our way. As we prepare to navigate these uncharted waters, it’s vitally important for us to be on the same page in regards to what we believe about Christianity, the church, and our relationship to one another. And for these reasons and more, I beleive that a study of the book Ephesians will help prepare our church for whatever is to come.

Ephesians 1:1–10 ESV

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Main Points

We are going to take this entire message to answer this one important question.

What are the blessings of being a Christian?

I think many of us would consider ourselves to be blessed. Despite the pandemic and the turmoil in our world, most of us can still count our many blessings. We have our jobs, we have our health, we have friends and family who care for us, and we have a roof over our heads. But if some of these things were taken away from us, would we still consider ourselves to be blessed? And I think the honest answer to that question is a good gauge of where you are in your relationship with Christ because it reveals whether or not your relationship with God is based on material blessings or the promise of spiritual blessings. Anyone can feel blessed simply because of good circumstances or a fortunate turn of events, both Christians and non-Christians can share those sentiments. But it is only the Christian that can experience the peace that comes from the unchanging, unending, and constant spiritual blessing that is lavished upon us by the grace of God. And a Christian who considers these spiritual blessings to be secondary to the material blessings of God, should rightfully question their experience of the Gospel, their understanding of Christianity, and the level of maturity of their faith.

And this connection between our desires for blessing and our relationship with God is fairly obvious. Most people would much rather have material blessings right here on earth rather than spiritual blessings that are found in heavely places. (After all, what does that even mean?” But if the main gauge of your relationship with God is material blessing, there is very little distinction between us and the non-believing world? Biblical theologians have historically divided the blessings of God into two categories. Materials blessings that come from the general grace of God and it is available for everyone regardless of belief or maturity. Jesus describes this phenomena in Matthew 5:44-45

44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

God causes material blessings to fall on people whether they are just or unjust, whether they believe or don’t beleive and as God’s people who are called to imitate that type of general love to those who are outside of the faith. But there is a second category of blessings reserved solely for those who believe, and all of these spiritual blessings that Paul talks about here have been stored up as a special and unique gift of grace to be lavished upon those who are adopted into the family of God.

The first of the spiritual blessings is the fact that God has chosen us before the beginning of time to be His sons and daughters. And I don’t know where you stand on the theogical spectrum regarding the doctrine of predistination, nor do I really care except for this major dividing line. If you beleive that God left the decision of your salvation entirely in your hands for you to choose freely of you own will, it puts into question many passage of the Bible but more importanly, it diminshes the depth of God’s love along with the sovereignty of His will. For someone who became a Christian later in life and didn’t grow up in the Christian, I can say with complete certainty, “If God had not chosen be first, I would have never chosen Him.” Salvation comes through the will of God and not any human decision. I’m not diminishing our free will but I’m simply putting it in its right place, a distant second to the will of God. If not for the purpose of His will, it would have been impossible for me to be a Christian.

That is a blessing that is hard to describe or even to measure in tangible ways but it leaves you amazed when you reflect on it even for a moment. There is this old song that speaks to the wonder and amazement that the Gospel was meant to evoke in our hearts as we ponder this spiritual blessing:

Why have You chosen me out of millions Your child to be? You know all the wrong that I've done O, how could You pardon me, forgive my iniquity To save me, give Jesus Your Son

There is no material blessing that can come close to measuring up to the blessing of being chosen by God to be His child. If I was offered all the riches of this world, I would not trade this blessing for any of it.

The second spiritual blessing that we find here is that we will be counted as holy and blameless before our God. That despite our many sins, God will see us as His saints. We know that the Apostle Paul originally wrote this letter to be circulated among all of the churches in Asia Minor and read to the general congregation. The intended audience of this letter was not just for leaders or mature believers but the entire church and yet we see that Paul addresses every single Christian as saints and those who are faithful in Christ. Now the question is “Was Paul just being polite and really nice or is there genuine truth in what he is saying?” At my previous church, there was an associate pastor who wrote emails like he was writing from the Bible. Most times, when we write emails, we’ll put hi, or if it’s an informal relationship we may put hey, and sometimes if we are busy and need to get to the point, we’ll just omit the greeting altogether. However, this colleague would write emails with greetings like Dear St. Mark or to the beloved servant of God. It really threw me off in the beginning because I didn’t know if he was being genuine or trying to be nice or simply being facetious. Eventually, I got to know this pastor and it was evident that he was being completely authentic and I used to look forward to his emails because they would be a reminder of my identity in Christ.

Neil Anderson, who was one of my old professors from seminary taught a course that revolutionized the way I think of myself and the way I think of others in the church. In his book “Victory over Darkness”, he writes, “Being a Christian is not jus a matter of getting something; it’s a matter of being someone. A Christian is not simply a person who gets forgiveness, who gets to go to heaven, who gets the Holy Spirit, who gets a new nature. A Christian, in terms of our deepest identity, is a saint, a spiritually born child of God, a divine masterpiece, a child of light, a citizen of heaven.” Imagine if every single person in a church lived in the awareness of who they are in Christ and attempted to align their life to to this identity. I think we would all agree that it would change the very culture of our churches and how we even look at one another.

Many Christians come from church backgrounds where their sinfulness is emphasized far more than their saintliness. From a purely psychological standpoint, this wreaks havoc in our pursuit of godliness. If we believe that our core identity is sin, the primary struggle we will engage in is trying not to sin and most times unsuccessfully at that. But if our core identity is that we are holy and righteousness based on the grace of God, our main battles will be trying to do what is good in the eyes of God and we won’t waste as much time feeling bad about ourselves and trying to clean up our lives.

Martin Luther understood this tension that is caused by residual sin and he described it perfectly in the Latin phrase “simul justus et peccator” which means simultaneously righteous and sinner. As he penned those words, Luther had the correct order in mind, that your primary identity has to be a saint and your secondary identity, the one that is fading away, is a sinner. Sadly, some of us are uncomfortable with this notion that every Christian is considered a saint first and a sinner, second and we end up getting ensnared by our sin as opposed to living out the purpose of God as saints.

This bring us to the third spiritual blessing that we see in verse 7, we have been redeemed through His blood, our sins forgiven according to riches of His grace.

In our day and age, we underestimate the power of this blessing and take it for granted. Without the shedding of Christ’s blood, there is no forgiveness of sin, and if there is no forgiveness of sin, there can be no relationship with God. Now, I have realized that the concept of sin and our utter need to be forgiven by God is something that is not as tangibly felt in our post-modern world. The notion of absolute truth, the difference between good and evil, right and wrong have all been placed up for debate. (30 years ago, there wer clearer distinction regarding the concept of sin) And it’s not that sin has become less sinful or impacts us less, in fact sin is far more dangerous when it is hidden by altering its definition.

Call sin what you will but it’s negative impact still alter our lives. In the Bay Area, it seems very few people really feel good about themselves. Everyone is striving to become better, to improve themselves, and to be the best you possible. We would never consider these ambitions to be driven by the existence of sin in our lives but inherently every single person understands that there is a standard that they are failing to live up to. Most of us confuse the discontment and angst in our hearts as something that is created by not reaching our own standards. However, I don’t think that is entirely the case. The Greek word for sin is the word “hamartia” and more than just a description for human vices, it literally means to “miss the mark”, “to not reach a given standard”. So much of our unhappiness comes from the fact that we fail to hit the mark in our lives and we know it. And more than simply being a failure to meet our own standards, I beleive God has placed a standard in the heart of man that can only be reached by the riches of His grace.

To reach sainthood is to climb to the highest pinnacle of virtue, it is the best version of you possbile, but at the same time it is utterly out of your reach. You cannot attain it apart from the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the shedding of His blood for the remission of your sin. Only the Gospel of Christ can bridge the gap between the perfect standard that God has placed in our hearts and our daily failure to hit that mark. The grace of God then causes us to rest, to stop striving against a hopeless goal. But ironically, when we stop in our striving, when we are still and allow God to be God, He transforms us and changes us from one degree of glory to another.

What heights of love, what depths of peace, When fears are stilled, when strivings cease! My Comforter, my All in All, Here in the love of Christ I stand.

Numbers 6:24–26 ESV

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

When my children were young, there was a time of day when I was the most happy with them, when I felt the most love for them, when my faced litterally shined upon them…it was when they were sleeping, when they were finally still after a day of getting into trouble, crying, making my life miserable. But in that moment, when all of their strivings of the day had ceased, I could look on them and feel this incredible love in my heart grow for them and I would bless them with a prayer. If I felt this way, I could only imagine what our Heavenly Father must feel towards us, the blessings that He bestows, when we are finally still and know that He is God. (Let’s prepare our hearts for communion.)

Conclusion

The apostle Paul was keenly aware of all the problems in the church. That’s why the Holy Spirit prompted him to write all these letters. He knew all about the arguments and divisions, the many different matters of sin, and he was even aware of all the negative rumours behind his back. (He is not a good preacher, he only talks big in his letters but not in person, he is not that impressive to look at.) But none of this negativity dissuaded him from extending the grace and the peace of God to every single beleiver that he encountered. For me this is an example of a mature believer whose primary attitude and disposition to other believers is that they would live under the blessing of God.

Communion

1 Corinthians 11:23–26 ESV

For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.