Ephesians 1:1-19
Ephesians • Sermon • Submitted
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Intro
Intro
More states have their state fairs in October than any other month.
When that time of year comes around highlights of food from the fairs always shows up.
The highlight is always new extremes of deep fried food on a stick.
I have seen deep fried snickers bars, oreo’s, things like that.
Last year i lost all faith in humanity when I saw a vendor who takes a cheeseburger, bun and all, dips in in batter, impales it with a stick and fries it.
Food on a stick is nothing new it is an ancient street food fare for travelers low on money, and needing portable sustenance
This letter is the christian message on a stick to baby believers in baby churches in the midst of a brutal place
When you hear Paul is writing a letter you may think of quaint Paul pondering calmly with quill in hand
But the reality is he’s in a roman prison
Damp, full of screams of death, rats, starvation, and darkness
With no resources he wants to tell the story of reality of the christian message
probably through a crack in a wall to someone risking their life he has to put the story on a stick
This letter is the story of reality
The truth of who God is, who we are, what God is doing, and how we as the church display to the cosmos the truth of the Christian message
We are going to see 3 things in this opening chapter
The Christian Message in a Name
The Christian Message in a Sentence
The Christian Message in a Prayer
The Christian Message in a Name (1:1-2)
The Christian Message in a Name (1:1-2)
There is a quote i read that said this
“There have been societies who didn’t use the wheel. But there has never been a society who didn’t use stories”
God made us this way
Paul’s life is the story of the Christian Message
Remember Paul has no room for wasted words transcribing the letter through a jail wall
Every word matters and every name tells the Christian Message
Pauls name tells the Christian Message
He wasn’t always called Paul
His original name was Saul
His life was the life of the jewish national pride
Paul would have had a Make Israel Great Again bumper sticker
He was named after the king saul
Saul was chosen because he was tall, athletic looking, probably 6’3 240 high cholesterol suffered from male pattern baldness at a young age but had a great shaped head to pull it off…something like that....
But Paul was wrecked by the story of the christian message
He saw the risen christ and believed
It changed everything
SO he changed his name…to Paul
Want to know what Paul means…it means small...
From the story of self, self striving, worldly greatness...
The Christian message changed it all upside down
its all here in His name for himself
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by God’s will:
To the faithful saints in Christ Jesus at Ephesus.
His name and mission are all from the radical saving of the Christian message
It is by God’s will
The initiative of God before time began to save a people for himself to display to the cosmos His scandalous love and power and glory
That is the christian message he lays out here on a stick
He is writing to people he knows get it too
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by God’s will:
To the faithful saints in Christ Jesus at Ephesus.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This letter was meant for a group of churches in what is Turkey today
But he tells them their name
The saints…not in the holier than though way…like I think of my wife when I cant parent anymore and she still has patience and I think she is a saint
the names he gives tell their gospel story
grafted into the epic of gods redemptive drama
Saints ties them to God’s people of the past…makes them part of the promised people in Daniel…and tells them they are who will stand victorious in John’s Revelation
So imagine this…how can you make sense of a prison sentence?
How can he encourage these baby believers in a city that is culture unhinged
Magicians, every job had a temple to the god of the business where on your way into work you would sleep with a prostitute to have a good day as a CPA or whatever...
How can he encourage them to look to Christ not Rome to define and bring them the good life?
Know the story unfolding around you …the promise that in this story of the christian message the good guys win
they are named characters in the greatest drama the universe has ever seen
Every part of everyday is this drama …Pauls name tells he is part of it ....Their name tells them they are part of it
this is the Christian message
Didn’t know a 2 verse greeting had all of that in them huh?
What is this cosmic drama?
The Christian Message in a Sentence (1:3-14)
The Christian Message in a Sentence (1:3-14)
Paul’s english teacher would have failed him
In the original greek letter these 12 verses are one single sentence …complex as all get out
holy red ink run on sentence minus 10 points for paul
This sentence is the story of God, where God is the main character, and the cosmos is his stage
Verse 9 - 10 are the whole of the letter
He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he purposed in Christ as a plan for the right time—to bring everything together in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth in him.
The letter focuses on what God did through the historical work of Jesus Christ and does through his Spirit today, in order to build his new society in the midst of the old.
This is why part of our mission is to restore …to be part of God’s plan before time began and what he has already begun to restore all things to how they are supposed to be in a world that is not how it is supposed to be
The Christian Message in a sentence is the reality of what is going on around and in us, how it came into being through Christ, how its origins and nature were revealed to Paul, how it grows through proclamation, how we are to live lives worthy of it, and how one day it will be consummated when Christ presents his bride the church to himself in splendour, ‘without spot or wrinkle or any such thing … holy and without blemish
Why would he do such a scandalous thing?
When we treat him with contempt
We don’t worship him as the God he is or acknowledge Him
He leads into the heart of verse 10 with why…its because it is who He is
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he richly poured out on us with all wisdom and understanding.
It is not because of anything in me
it is because of verse 8 because he is wealthy in grace
He is wealthy in mercy and patience
God’s ridiculous grace isn’t a pat them on the back go get em you got it from here
it is undeserved unmerited unearnable and unlosable scandalous ridiculousness
I don’t have to earn it…i can’t
I don’t have to hide…he knows and cares
You aren’t a dissapointment to the God of the universe
you arent a meme all of heaven laughs at
Think about this..the one whose opinion matters most is as satisfied and pleased in you today as he will ever be if you are in this saviors redemption
this is the mystery he is talking about
The word mystery here is that of a secret
Like we are let in on a secret ....and we are to let others in on it
the mystery the secret he lets us in on is the privilege of seeing life as it is, where it is going, and what God is doing to restore what is broken to what it was meant to be
We can know like Paul that this whole thing is linear
it is moving to restoration…united in Christ…so he is forever on display as glorious
That thing you wish you would never do again but do is going to be resolved
That pain is going to be resolved
That thing that happened or the thing that will happen will be resolved
At the end of the Lord of the Rings movies one character Sam wakes up from what he thought was death and is surprised to see his friend Gandolf is alive
He asks him “is everything sad going to come untrue”
The answer of Christ to us is YES
Everything sad will come untrue because of Christ and will somehow be better for once being broken
The Christian message in this sentence recognizes that there is currently something very wrong with the world.
It is place where we can’t hold on to successes
It is a place that is filled with sadness. Cursed by sin. Groaning as it awaits its redemption.
Christ already started the restoration when he died and rose and ascended his throne
those sad things will be made untrue. The curse will be rolled back. The world will be changed.
This is the sentence
This is the reality of the world
paul saw all of his life in this story
We are all in this story if you believe it or not
What is your story? Is it the one where you are part of this unfolding restoration or is the worlds story that can’t make sense of a broken world and tries all it can to fix it
there’s secular narrative of no narrative - nothing more than what you see
Try to have a good life
Chalk up the bad to just the way it is and live for the moment.
Some people here may believe this is the world
Nothing bigger going on
Nothing linear we are going too
As the great theologians “Loverboy” sing…everybody’s working for the weekend
Theres the secular narrative of the story of self
I determine what is best for me and everything must conform to it
Everything is tailored to me
even our search engines track our habits so our recommended books are what we would look for anyway
Self views all of culture as a good to be consumed…when we run low we exert more force to maintain my way of life
The story is about me
There are lots of churches that you can go to that serve the self
Six flags over Jesus get some therapeutic Ted Talk to make better decisions because it is about me
The christian message tells a much different story
Everything is part of the display to the cosmos the scandal of the gospel
your everyday is part of the redemptive drama initiated by god before time began
It is the message of The god who takes initiative
In him we have also received an inheritance, because we were predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of his will,
It is easy to believe there was a big bang and off we started
then god looked at some problems and said wow thats surprising
It looks bad down there let me do something to help
Maybe we will find it and choose him but we can take it from here god
that is not the message in this sentence
Before the world began his plan was to glorify Jesus
Before he made the world he planned to make a world where people would worship Jesus knowing we wouldn't
Set his affections on those who would be His and died to save them...
So that this Jesus would be glorified forever as the scandalous savior of His people
That is the Christian Message
This plan is what he has been, is, and will be working out until time ends
that is the story we are all in
The Christian Message in a Prayer (1:15-19)
The Christian Message in a Prayer (1:15-19)
The world has always looked to define its own story
We reject God’s true story
But we cannot remove the longings for things to be different His story gave us
Pray to the Gods worship Ceasar and the Roman good life could be yours
Karl Marx wrote of ‘the new man’ and ‘the new society’.
Expressive individualism is the creed of today
stop at nothing to have what makes self feel good and demand the world conform
That will surely create the people we want to be…and the world we all want
Paul tells a more radical vision .
He sees our problem as something even deeper than becoming your true unhindered self
Our core problem is we have seperated ourselves from the source of life and the story all of life is part of and moving too.
he gives a more radical solution.
He writes of nothing less than a ‘new creation’.
Through Jesus Christ God is recreating men and women
creating a single new humanity in place of the disastrous self help story of the world
Reaching people, teaching the christian stroy and restoring what has been shattered
Paul is seeing God reach teach and restore people now
This is the prayer for God’s New Society that only the christian message can create
The Christian message says I am being united through Christ to God but Also united now to others how I was made to be
There is no lone ranger christianity
It is making a new people
It has already begun
He sees it
It is the blinders coming off
It is being let in on the secret that unlocks the whole thing
He wants it for everyone he can tell
That is what he means in this prayer
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you may know what is the hope of his calling, what is the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
The heart is the old testament name for the causal core of who you are
it is the way you see the world, make sense of the world, believe what life is about, who you are, all of it
He prays we will see
Like Christs call to Change the way you see
He has been let in on the secret and wants us to know it
And others are getting it…making a new people a counter cultural city within the city
What happened in Him is happening all over the known world and He thanks God for it
Do you know what excites me?
This
That I was a horrific addict who wanted to end my life…that God had set his affections on me before time began..looked at me at the time he had set and said this one is mine
Now as a display of His glory he has saved me as the foremost sinner to show the the world the glory of his salvation how great his patience is and how far reaching he is to save
Pail is overwhelmed by it all and it pours out in this prayer
The new man, the new society we all long for has come
Now we are a people who learn more and more and more how the full grace we already have reaches every part of life
The implications of the christian message are inexhaustable
A new people display the message
Paul is reminding these believers in a secular world that they are a new community
They are a counter cultural city within the city…why we are named West City..we are part of this same story of reality
Through the city within a city God is at work..right now no matter how it looks
Doing more than we could imagine so that the entire cosmos might see the Glory of His scandalous plan. That plan is uniting all things in heaven and in earth in Christ restoring and renewing the whole creation to what it was supposed to be
He wants them to see it
He wants everyone who will read this letter to see it
He prays the christian message
He prays that we will open our eyes change the way we see the story we are in
Find that what we long for is found in Him
Be part of this story it is the only way to life
History is moving to His ends
What part of the story are you in?