©2003 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

09/21/03

More On The Manifold Wisdom Of God

Ephesians 3:10

9/21/03 More On The Manifold Wisdom Of God

EPH 3:10 in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.

We have spent the past two weeks looking at that statement from Ephesians 3:10,

and we have spent at least the past two months getting ready for it.

It is the statement in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians

in which he allows us to see ourselves through the eyes of God,

the statement in which

he allows those of us who are Christians

to gain a remarkable new insight

into what God gained through the death of Christ.

As Christians we talk a great deal

about all that we have gained as a result of Christ’s death for us.

We talk a great deal about it

because God talks a great deal about it.

Even in our study of the first two chapters of Ephesians

we have seen Paul flooding us with information

about all that we have received from God

as a result of the death of Christ for our sins.

He began early in the letter

by telling us that (EPH 1:7) In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace...

But that was only the beginning.

He went on to tell us about how He revealed to us the mystery of His will,

and how He gave each of us His Spirit as a pledge, a down payment of what is yet to come,

and how He brought us into an eternal Father/child relationship with Himself,

and how He raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the presence of God,

and how He took us from isolation and emptiness

and brought us into His family, the Church,

forming us into what Paul describes as,

 ... a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.

Just in these few pages of Ephesians

Paul makes it clear

that through Christ our past, our present, and our future for all eternity

have all been profoundly altered as a result of God’s entrance into our lives.

We are no longer what we once were,

and what we once were

will no longer determine what we will become.

And I can’t run by that without just making a comment

about the wonder of the recreative affect of the hand of God on our past.

I just made a statement

that God’s entrance into our lives

has profoundly altered our past, our present, and our future.

We can more easily understand the effects of the hand of God on the present and the future,

but that business about the past is more difficult.

How can God’s entrance int our lives now

alter things that we have already done,

events that have already taken place in our lives?

And yet the truth is

some of His greatest healing,

and most powerful recreative work within us focuses directly on our past.

He doesn’t alter the events themselves, of course,

but He does,

or rather, if we allow Him to, He can profoundly alter

both our perception of them

and their impact on our lives now.

I see Him doing this in two huge ways.

He does it both with the sins we have committed in the past,

and with the sins others have committed against us in the past.

With our own sins

God breaks the natural cause-and-effect relationship

that always exists apart from Him

between who we were

and who we now are and will continue to be.

Nowhere is this more powerfully stated

than right here in this book of Ephesians that we’re studying.

EPH 2:1-5 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins ...But God ...made us alive together with Christ...

Isn’t that great!

Do you see what Paul does?

He takes our past and our present,

and he sets them side by side,

and then right between the two he puts GOD!

And because God exists between the two

the power of the past

to determine our future is gone forever.

I know the lies Satan uses against you,

because his tactics are universal.

In fact they are so universal

that Satan is given a special title in scripture to prepare us for his attacks.

In Revelation 12:10 he is called “the accuser of our brethren”.

You see, that’s what he does.

That’s what he’s been doing in your life this past week at times.

He’s been sifting through your past,

finding ammunition with which to accuse you.

He finds those past sins that grieve you,

those failures that cause you such agony when you recall them.

And we’re not just talking about things that happened last week

or last month.

He will frequently reach back a year,

or five years,

or ten years,

or twenty, or thirty, or fifty for his ammunition.

And then once he gets your attention with the pain of the memory

he tells you two things.

He tells you that’s who you are

and he tells you that’s who you will always be.

And then he uses those memories as his “proof”.

And you were dead in your trespasses and sins ...But God ...

And it is at those times of satanic accusations

that we most urgently need to listen closely

and carefully to the truth spoken to us by our God.

We need to listen to the titles He has chosen for us.

“My holy one...My beloved...My child...My ambassador...My friend...”

When we get to Ephesians 4:24 in this study

we will hear Paul describe for us how, when we came to Christ in faith we ... put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

...created in righteousness and holiness...

And when Satan attempts to drag up our past

and tell us those events, those failures determines our future

our only response to those accusations is, “NO!! It is not my past that determines my future, it is my God, both now and forever.”

A few minutes ago I mentioned that title for Satan given to us in the book of Revelation,

“the accuser of our brethren”.

Well, listen to this...

listen to the context in which that title appears.

This is a little glimpse into the future for us,

and one that can bring a tremendous amount of comfort

especially if we are vulnerable to those kinds of attacks.

REV 12:10-11 And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ¶ "Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down, who accuses them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony...

And did you notice that last phrase?

And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony...

Tell yourself the truth,

the truth about who you now are

and forevermore will be

because of the redemptive and recreative work of your God in your life.

We sang a song this morning that contains a few lines that says it so well.

“He breaks the power of canceled sin, He sets the prisoner free,

His blood can make the foulest clean, His blood availed for me.”

Our God alters the effect of our past on us forever.

And not just with the impact of our own sins.

He also transforms the effects of the sins of others against us.

And I’m certainly not suggesting here

that God’s entrance into our lives

somehow makes the pain of past injuries disappear.

But I am saying that,

if we are willing to take His hand

and face that pain with Him

and then place it into His hands

He will transform it from a force for evil into a force for God in our lives.

This may not be the best illustration,

but maybe it will help

to look at the pain from past injuries against us

as being sort of like a jolt of electricity.

Pain brings a tremendous amount of raw power and energy into our lives.

If we do not bring that pain to God and consciously place it into His hands,

(and we do that by choosing to forgive the person who caused the pain,)

but if we do not do that

all of that raw energy will turn into bitterness

that then drives and dominates our lives in hideous ways

sometimes for a lifetime.

But if that pain is placed into the hands of our Creator

a remarkable thing takes place

with all of the raw energy it creates.

Rather than becoming a force that produces evil and bondage,

God transforms it into a powerful recreative force for good within us.

It actually provides us with the motivation and the ability

to become very different people from who we would have been otherwise.

I find this truly amazing...

If we do not place the pain from past injuries against us

into the hands of God through forgiving those who sinned against us,

the power generated by that pain

will consume us in a way that causes us to eventually become

just like the person who injured us in the first place.

That is what bitterness does in our lives.

But if we bring the pain and the injury to God,

forgiving those who caused the pain,

God takes that pain

and uses it to recreate us in ways that forms into us

the very qualities of righteousness

that we wish the one who injured us would have possessed.

We become

what we wish they would have been.

The pain is the past turned into power in the present.

How that power is used,

either for good or for evil in our lives

is determined by how we relate to the injury that caused the pain.

All of which is to say

that through Christ our past, our present, and our future for all eternity

have all been profoundly altered as a result of God’s entrance into our lives.

And now let me get us back to Ephesians.

And, as rich as this letter is

with affirmations about what we have received

as a result of the death of Christ,

one of Paul’s primary reasons for writing it

was not to reveal to us our inheritance through the death of Christ,

but rather to reveal to us GOD’s inheritance,

to reveal to us what it was that God received through the death of His Son

that made it worth it to both God the Father and God the Son

to go through all that they went through.

By now you will remember that prayer Paul prayed at the beginning of the letter.

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

He prays that we will know at the heart level

what it is that God inherited in us through the death of His Son.

He wants us to see ourselves through the eyes of God.

Now why in the world would Paul want us to know that?

Why would God want us to know that?

Well, of course, first of all He wants us to have this knowledge because it’s truth,

and as truth it gives us better insight into the way things really are.

But there’s more going on here than just that.

You see,

we human beings are designed in such a way

that we literally become what others tell us we are.

And the more significant the voice giving us the message,

the more powerfully their message is lived out in our lives

once we believe it and accept it as truth.

We do not enter this world knowing who we are.

We enter it wondering who we are,

and seeking to understand who we are,

and turning to those around us for the answer to that question.

And whatever answers they give us

are the answers we accept,

and the answers that we then use

as the basis for our approach to life.

In other words,

we literally become whatever others tell us we are.

This is getting us a little off track here,

but the remarkable thing about this human dynamic

is that, unless the wrong messages can be recognized,

rejected,

and replaced with the truth,

we will often live out highly destructive messages about ourselves

even when they are completely untrue.

Children who are physically or sexually abused

will frequently enter their adult years

believing that abuse is a normal part of human relationships,

and as adults they will either abuse others themselves,

or they will gravitate toward adult human relationships

in which they continue to be abused by those around them.

And why are there such striking similarities between first born children?

And why do second born children so often share such universal characteristics?

There are messages about ourselves

that come to us throughout childhood

as a result of the birth positions we hold in our families,

and we tend to accept and live those messages out

throughout the rest of our lives.

Why is it that one of the few instructions

given by God specifically to wives

concerning their relationships with their husbands is, “... let the wife see to it that she respect her husband.” (Eph. 5:33)?

At the heart of that command

is this same truth -

that we tend to become what others tell us we are.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret, wives.

Most men enter the marriage relationship

believing at the feeling level

that we are in way over our heads

when it comes to being all that we need to be

in order to fulfill our role in the family.

In other words,

we go into marriage believing we’re probably going to mess this up big time.

And we just naturally turn to our mate

and delegate to them

the right and the responsibility to tell us how we’re doing.

And whatever they tell us

is what we will tend to believe

and what we believe is what we will ultimately live out.

And the most remarkable thing happens within the male temperament in marriage

when a man begins to receive messages of respect from his wife.

When we hear from our partner

messages that say,

“I believe in you.

I trust your leadership in my life.

I know God both can and will do through you what needs to be done in and for our family.”,

something happens inside a man

that causes him to seek to become in reality

what his wife tells him he is.

But my point in all of this

is simply that we human beings become what we believe others think we are.

And when it comes to God’s recreative work in the lives of His people,

this same principle becomes the foundation upon which

that entire recreative work of God within us is built.

Here’s how this whole thing works.

It begins by God accomplishing within us at the spirit level

a complete,

absolute,

and eternal transformation.

He takes that old, self-centered, rebellious spirit

that has been the driving force in our lives

prior to our union with Christ

and He removes it from us forever

in response to our faith in Christ.

Then He creates within us

a new spirit that is absolutely holy, pure, and in every way right before God.

We do literally become new creations at the spirit level

at the time we come to God through faith in Christ.

The New Testament uses all sorts of different approaches

to try to communicate this change to us.

We are told that we have been born again.

We are told that He delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son COL 1:13.

We told that we have already been raised ... up with Him, and seated ... with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus EPH 2:6. 

And on and on and on.

But when we first come to Him

we begin with just a tiny awareness in our minds and emotions

of what has really taken place at the spirit level within us.

At best we sort of,

just a little bit,

maybe believe that He really has forgiven our sins...hopefully.

But all the rest of the it

just flies right over our heads.

And, for the most part,

we just continue living out

those same basic messages about ourselves

that have been given to us by the world around us prior to our union with our God.

But then God’s Spirit begins His healing program within our lives.

But here is the truly amazing thing -

God’s whole basic healing program in our lives

is not one of trying to make changes in our lives,

but rather it is one of trying to give us eyes to see

the changes that He has already made.

Religion tries to make changes in our behavior

by convincing us that we should become different people than we are,

manipulating us with fear,

or with guilt feelings,

or with ego motivations that promise to make us look good to others.

But God seeks to change our behavior

by opening our eyes

to the truth about our real identity

and about the changes He has already brought about in us through Christ.

That is why Paul words that prayer of his the way he does.

He doesn’t pray that “we will become the people we should be for the sake of Christ”.

He prays “... that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you may 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 that, of course, is why this statement in Ephesians 3:10 becomes so critical.

It is in this statement

that God reveals to us

the crucial role He has given to each of us,

the high calling that is ours,

a calling that,

when we understand what He’s saying,

transforms our perspective on this life we are called to live.

What we do,

who we are matters more than we could ever even begin to imagine.

Well, I got side-tracked too many times this morning

and didn’t get where I wanted to go,

but we’ll take another run at it next week.