©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

02/16/03

You Are The Parade

Ephesians 1

2/16/03 You Are The Parade

We return this morning to our study

of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

After a four week break from the study

let me take just a couple of minutes

to get our minds back into what Paul is doing with this letter.

It was written for the purpose of opening up the mind of the Christian

to things that took place as a result of our entrance into Christ,

things that we would never have anticipated on our own.

It was written to reveal to us

what the church really is,

what it means for us to be a part of it,

and what God is accomplishing through it in the world.

Three weeks ago we took a break from Ephesians

to look at several principles that form the basis

for our life together here at Peninsula Bible Fellowship.

But the truth is

we really were not out of our Ephesians study.

What we were really doing

is looking at several of the key principles of Ephesians

as they are being lived out in our own local church.

We talked about how the church is not a business,

it is the body of Christ,

a group of His people who all stand equally significant,

equally valued,

equally loved before our God.

And we talked about how, as a church,

we want what we do

to be the result of the life of His Spirit through us.

As we move through Ephesians

we are going to find that those principles are central

to all that Paul wants us to understand about the church.

And, as we reenter this study,

if what Paul says is to make any sense to us,

it is essential that we never loose sight of the understanding

that the word “church” as it is commonly used in our society

has very little in common

with the way the word is used in the New Testament.

In our society

we use the word “church”

to designate a specific, organized religious institution.

Usually it is used to refer to a specific building.

And even with funny little groups like us

people tend to think of us as being the church that meets at Cook Inlet Academy.

But when the New Testament talks about the church,

it never ever uses the word

to refer to a building.

It is used to refer either to all the Christians on the earth at any given time,

or to all the Christians in some specific city or region.

In other words,

it refers not to a place,

or to a building,

or to an organization,

but to people.

As used in the New Testament,

a person would not say, “I go to church.”,

they would say, “I am the church.”

Now, let’s return to our study of the letter.

The last time we were in this study

we finished up our examination of the first 14 verses of chapter one.

In those 14 verses

Paul gave us 6 characteristics of every Christian’s relationship with God.

1. He began by telling us

that we have been chosen in Christ, “...before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.”

2. Then he told us

that we have been predestined to share a Father/child relationship with God Himself.

3. He told us that, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace...”

4. He told us that in Christ God has revealed to us, “...the mystery of His will...”

so that we can now share in an administration

that is perfectly matched to this time in human history.

5. He told us

that we have become God’s inheritance,

the inheritance that He received as a result of the death of His Son, Jesus Christ.

6. And then, finally,

He told us that in Christ we, “...were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance...”

Now, those six truths

form the foundation upon which Paul launches us into this letter.

We have looked at each of them in some detail during the past few months,

and taken together

they are intended to provide us with a full-length mirror

in which we can begin to see

the degree to which we continue to allow

not our God, but rather our enemy to shape our concept of ourselves in Christ.

Do you know what’s really going on in this book of Ephesians?

Picture this...

you step into a room

for the purpose of a face-to-face,

one-to-one interview with God Himself.

As soon as you step into the room

He reveals Himself to you in a physical form,

walks up to you,

reaches out and places His almighty hands on your shoulders and says,

“My child, you MUST be willing to face the truth about yourself!”

Now, what do you think He’s going to say next?

You think He’s going to say something bad, don’t you?

You think He is going to confront you with one of the many things you’ve messed up.

You think He’s going to place His divine finger on some tender place in your life

and make it hurt more.

And if you think that,

you could not be more wrong.

I can tell you why we tend to respond that way.

It is the result of all the residue that still remains within us

from our life prior to our union with Christ.

We’ve been here before,

but let me remind us again.

We enter this world separated from our God

and unable to hear His voice.

He alone, as our Creator, has the ability to tell us who we are.

But, because we cannot hear His voice,

and because we desperately need to know who we are

so that we can find peace with ourselves,

we turn to those around us for those answers.

But there are at least three major problems with that approach.

First, they don’t know who we are.

They didn’t create us,

they don’t know what’s going on inside us,

and they know us only by our external presentation of ourselves.

Second, they don’t really care because they are desperately trying to use us

to tell them who they are.

And third, even when they may communicate some positive input to us,

we often tend to reject it

because we say to ourselves, “Sure, but if they really knew what I was like inside

they’d never say that.”

We tend to hear and believe the negative

and reject positive

because we have not yet heard the voice of our God telling us the truth about ourselves,

about our importance to Him,

and about the value He places on our uniqueness

in ways and words we can understand.

I saw that pattern being lived out in my own life

all the way through my schooling when I was a child.

I’m left handed, which probably didn’t help,

but I had terrible hand-writing,

I was (and still am) a horrible speller,

and then, worst of all, I had difficulty reading.

I knew in the second grade

when the teacher put all the “reading groups” together

which group I was in.

I was in the one

for the really dumb kids,

the ones who needed “special help”.

I suppose today I would be diagnosed as dyslexic,

but in the 1950's and 60's I was just considered slow.

Whenever I would turn in a paper,

all the way through school

it would come back covered with red marks,

and any assignment that involved more than two pages of reading

was a death sentence to me.

Not once in 17 years of education

do I ever recall any teacher ever telling me

that I was good with words on paper.

The one clear message I received,

all the way through school,

was that, if I was going to survive in this world,

it was absolutely essential that I avoid words on paper in any form at all costs.

And I did just exactly that for the first 40+ years of my life.

And then, in my mid forties I got my first computer,

and, because spelling and handwriting ceased to be a problem,

I began to risk putting words on paper,

and I felt like I’d come home.

My point is simply this -

we make lousy mirrors for one another

because we don’t know each other,

and because we are far more concerned

about finding out who we are

than we are about telling others who they are.

But when we come to the book of Ephesians

what we have is our God

placing His hands on our shoulders and saying to us,

“My child, you MUST let Me tell you the truth about yourself!”

He wants us to know that truth

because He knows that we do not live our lives

on the basis of who we are,

we live them on the basis of who we THINK we are,

and as long as we continue to believe the lies

those lies will keep us in bondage.

So, Paul begins the letter

with 6 major statements of truth about who we are

and about who we have become through Christ.

Now, I know we’ve moved through those slowly,

and I know, too, that sometimes the slower we go the less we understand

because we loose sight of the impact of the passage as a whole.

But this morning I want to accelerate our pace dramatically

because the power of what happens in the next section of this letter

depends upon our being able to see this section as a whole.

OK, chapter one, verses 1-14 presents just a little glimpse into who we have become in Christ.

Paul presents that statement,

and then look at what he does in verses 15-16.

He says,

EPH 1:15 ¶ For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints,

EPH 1:16 do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers...

He says in effect, “Because of who you are in Christ,

and because I have seen clear evidences in your lives

that you are listening to Him,

I am making a very specific request of God concerning you.”

And then he goes on to tell them what it is he prays.

EPH 1:17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.

EPH 1:18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,

EPH 1:19 and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.

These are words that,

if we are not careful,

we can easily get lost in.

The first part of the request Paul makes of God

concerns the way his readers respond

to the knowledge he is giving them.

He prays that God will give them a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in their knowledge of God.

And then he pulls those two together into a statement

that is nothing short of poetic

in its ability to communicate what really happens in that process he’s talking about.

He says, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened...”.

Do you know what that is?

It’s the difference between facts and truth.

It’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

It’s the difference between knowing and believing.

It is the difference between me standing up here

saying to all of you, “Your God loves you with an everlasting love.”,

and your God saying to your spirit,

“My precious and beloved child, I love you and I have loved you forever.

I delight in your presence with Me,

I hold your life and your future securely in My hands,

and nothing and no one will ever separate you from My love.”

It is the difference between knowing Christ died for your sins

and living each day immersed in true inner peace with God.

It is the difference between knowing about God

and actually knowing Him.

God alone can accomplish that work within us,

and that’s why Paul prays what he prays here.

He is going to explain to us what it means for us to be the inheritance of God,

what it means to be the body of Christ on this earth,

what it means to be the church.

He knows that, if we were ever to hear and accept that truth at the spirit level

it would change our lives forever.

It would result in our possessing a confidence,

an assurance,

a sense of purpose in our lives that would become the motivating force in all we do.

But Paul also knows

that God alone can take that truth

and make it a living reality in our lives.

And so he prays.

And then he gets very specific in his prayer.

He prays that God would give our spirits eyes to see three things.

He wants us to know what is the hope of His calling,

what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,

and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.

And rather than my trying to explain to us

what those three things are right now,

we’re just going to set them aside

and come back to them again when we get to the end of chapter three.

We’re going to do that

because Paul has written these next two and a half chapters

to explain those three things to us.

And hopefully

once we’ve gone through them

we’ll have a better idea what they mean.

In fact, the 4^th chapter begins with Paul saying,

EPH 4:1 Therefore I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called...,

so obviously he thinks that by that point,

if everything has gone as he intended,

we have understood what our calling is

and his challenge to us that we “walk in a manner worthy” of that calling will make perfect sense to us.

So, when we get there

we’ll look back and see how we’ve done.

But for now

we’ll just simply use those three things as our reference points.

That’s where we’re headed,

like a group of hikers

with our eyes fixed on the peak in the distance that is our goal.

Now, even though Paul does not immediately reveal to us

what these 3 things mean,

he does take us a giant step forward with what he does next.

He tells us that these three things He wants us to understand,

... are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put all things in subjection under His feet...

Now look at this.

The first thing Paul does

as He moves us toward an understanding

of what it means for us to be the body of Christ

is to turn our attention to the work God accomplished in Christ Himself.

The picture he presents of Christ

is nothing short of majestic,

a picture of Christ victorious over death,

sitting at the right hand of God in the spirit world,

with all rule,

all authority,

all power and dominion in all of the created world

placed in subjection to Him.

But there are two more things Paul does here

that begin to reveal to us

the truth he wants us to understand.

First, he tells us that what God has done and is doing in us

“...are in accordance with” what He has done in Christ.

In other words, His work in us fits perfectly,

parallels perfectly the work of God in Christ.

It is like a puzzle with just two pieces -

one piece is the work God did in Christ,

the other is the work He does in us,

and when they are joined together

the fit perfectly and reveal the whole picture.

The second thing Paul does

is to reveal to us the final amazing step in God’s perfect plan for Christ.

He raised Him from the dead,

He seated Him at His right hand,

He placed Him as the supreme authority in all of creation,

and then he “gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”

Do you see how we so often get it all backwards?

The call of religion is a call that tells us

we are the ones who are suppose to give to Jesus.

We are suppose to give Him our time,

and give Him our talents,

and give Him our resources.

But that’s not what our God says to us.

He doesn’t say we are suppose to give to Christ,

He says He has given Christ to us!

He has given Him to us as the head of the body,

to live in us,

to express Himself through us,

to direct and guide us in the ways that are exactly right

for the expression of Himself here on this earth.

Now, there is a lot more we need to say about this,

and we don’t have time this morning,

but it is right here that we begin to see where the lies have us bound.

I think some of you here this morning

have just gone through this past week

feeling as though you are living on the fringes of the family of God,

and on the outskirts of His love.

Somewhere over there in the distance

there is some noise,

some cheering,

some excitement,

some things going on,

like hearing a parade from two streets over.

But you’ve convinced yourself

that you have no right,

no access,

no real part in the thing.

It’s not that you don’t want it.

It’s just that, well, you see yourself so utterly unqualified.

You don’t know very much about Him.

Your life has got a whole bunch of...

well, let’s just call them inconsistencies in it right now.

You really can’t imagine that there would ever be much of a role for you

in God’s grand scheme for the ages.

Oh, you’re His child alright.

You know that.

But you’ve been seeing yourself as His forgotten child,

His unneeded child,

His unnoticed child.

And if any of what I just said rings true,

you need to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say.

It is right here where God needs to begin to open the eyes of your heart

and give you the ability to see clearly what’s really going on.

You see, your Lord is not in that parade two streets over.

He is now,

and has been all week

walking right beside you.

When God gave Him as head over all things to the church,

He gave Him to you personally,

first of all, most of all to communicate His love to you.

But there is more,

so very much more.

Not only are you not on the fringes of the family of God,

but you are right now strategically placed by Him in this world

in a role that only you can fulfill.

There are several people He has placed around you

to whom He is revealing Himself through you.

They are being fed little glimpses of His love and His reality

through the way you respond to them,

through the choices you make,

through the values you bring to life.

Whether or not they recognize it is Christ in you that they see

and then respond to Him is not your concern.

I remember years ago,

when Sandee and I were still managing apartments

we rented a unit several summers

to a rather crude, grumpy Scandinavian fisherman.

We always showed him kindness and respect in our dealings with him.

Toward the end of one summer

I got into a conversation with him

and he found out that I’m half Norwegian.

When he found that out,

he lit up and said, “I KNEW there was something about you...”.

It wasn’t my Norwegian blood he saw in me,

it was my Lord Jesus Christ.”

That’s what He’s doing through us each day

in those places He has selected for us.

And there are no little people,

and no little places,

and the role you play in the lives of those He has placed around you

is at the heart of what it means to be the body of Jesus Christ.