Sermon Tone Analysis

Ephesians 1:1-6

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Introduction

I want to thank you for the way in which you have welcomed us to Portage Avenue.

It hasn’t taken us very long to feel as if we belong and it is a good feeling.

Sometimes we may have experiences in which we are not felt welcomed.

I walked into a meeting once and as I walked in the first thing I noticed is that I did not know anyone.

I also noticed that people were talking to each other and seemed very familiar with each other.

For a while, I stood by myself, not sure what to do until the person who had invited me to the meeting came over and welcomed me and introduced me to some other people.

Did that ever feel good!

Perhaps you have had similar experiences.

Perhaps your life feels like that.

Perhaps you have feelings of being alone or being unaccepted.

This morning we will look at the good news that God has chosen us.

The truth of His choosing is much more profound than just feeling good that we belong.

The text we will be looking at is Ephesians 1:1-6 and will be the first in a series of messages on the book of Ephesians.

I chose Ephesians because as I thought and prayed about what to preach on, it seemed to me that there were certain themes that would be a good starting point.

I would like to begin with a focus on Jesus, as I indicated in the message I preached when I was here in July.

I would also like to think together with you about God’s intent for the church and also about the ways in which God wants us to fulfill His intent for the church.

All of these themes are well developed in Ephesians and I hope that they will be an encouragement and a challenge to us.

As we begin, let us read Ephesians 1:1-6

            The book begins in the normal way of letters in the New Testament.

Paul begins by identifying himself and addressing the believers in the church in Ephesus.

There is some debate about whether this letter was written specifically to the church in Ephesus or if it was also written to other churches in the region, or perhaps wasn’t a letter at all, but a theological paper.

Whatever the original intent, we understand that it is the Word of God and the message of the book pertains to us today.

As we read it and study it we need to do so with the understanding that God speaking to us.

Paul greets the church with a word of grace and peace from God and from Jesus.

This greeting contains themes, such as grace, peace and Jesus that we will continue to encounter as we examine the book.

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I.       Blessed Be God

!! A.   Praise to God

As Paul launches into the letter he does so in one of the most unique ways we can imagine.

Have you ever heard a child who is naturally talkative describe a particularly exciting event that has happened to them?

Their speech is rapid, excited, and runs from theme to theme without stopping for a pause.

Sentences do not have periods, but only commas.

The words come in such a rapid flow that you are tempted to invite the child to take a breath.

That is what happens in Ephesians 1:3-14 and although our English translations have provided us with periods in between, the Greek text has no period until verse 14. Paul is so excited about all that God has done in Jesus that he just spills out one expression of praise to God after another.

He is breathless with praise!

What is the content of his praise?

What is he so excited about?

We will examine all his reasons for praise over the next few weeks, but we need to understand that they are contained in one breathless sentence of praise to God.

Paul sets the tone of praise in verse 3 and declares “Blessed be…God…who has blessed us with every…blessing…” Some of the translations don’t translate this as well as others, but NRSV, which is our pew Bible, does.

The same word “bless” is used three times in this verse.

God is blessed because He has blessed us with every blessing.

This word means speaking well.

It means, “Its all good.”

It means saying good things about God because He has given us good things in a good way.

Why is Paul so excited to praise God?

Not only because of who God is, this would be appropriate enough, but also because of what He has done.

!! B.   What We Have

The other day as I was reading through various church documents I came across a financial statement which included a section listing the assets of the church – the building and related property.

Whenever you go to a bank for a loan, they want to know what your assets are, so from time to time, we may need to do a calculation of our physical assets.

That is what Paul does here, but it is not a calculation of physical assets, but rather a calculation of spiritual assets.

He talks about the “spiritual” blessings we have “in the heavenly realms.”

This may disappoint some of us who get excited about physical assets, but when it comes to spiritual assets, we know that in this life when things get tough and when we are about to face the end of life and in regard to the life to come, it is the spiritual assets which are of real value.

It’s interesting how what we value changes.

When we are hungry, we value food.

When we are tired, a pillow is our greatest asset, but when we come to the end of ourselves, when our sin is overwhelming, when we run out of hope, when our strength is gone, when we think of the future, then spiritual assets are what we are looking for more than anything else.

So when we read that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, we have the wonderful assurance that we are rich.

Although we have nothing on Bill Gates or Warren Buffet in terms of physical assets, we are much wealthier in spiritual terms because God has given us “every” spiritual blessing.

!! C.   In Christ

These blessings are ours in Christ.

This little two word phrase is one of the most important phrases in this letter.

Tom Neufeld points out, “/In Christ/ appears in one form or another more than twenty times in Ephesians.”

I will keep mentioning it because it reminds us of the importance of Jesus.

All the spiritual stuff that has happened to us has happened because of Jesus.

All we have we have because of Jesus and so Jesus is the center of our life.

Sometimes we act as if our spiritual life is about what we have accomplished or about what we know we ought to do, but I would like to invite us to think carefully about the centrality of Christ.

We have begun our faith in Christ and we will meet Christ in the end, and it is our privilege also to live our whole life in Christ because it is in Him that we have every spiritual blessing.

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II.

He Chose Us

The word “for” at the beginning of verse 4 indicates that all these spiritual blessings are now going to be identified.

We praise God because of all He has done.

The rest of the sentence is a list of spiritual assets we have in Christ.

!! A.   Chosen

One summer we attended the baseball tournament they have in Clearwater, Manitoba every July 1.

On that day this little community of 50 or 100 people swells to almost 1000 people.

We knew a lot of people there, our children were playing ball and it was a great community festival.

That day there is baseball at every level – children and youth teams, senior men’s teams and also teams that play just for fun, sometimes called “liniment league.”

As I said, we knew some people there and at some time during the day, someone came up to me to ask if I wanted to play on their team.

It felt good to be picked to play.

In the back of my mind I had a suspicion that I was chosen because not enough of their players showed up to make a team and they were looking for warm bodies to stand in the outfield, but it was still nice to be chosen.

God’s has chosen us, but his choosing is very different from the way in which I was chosen for the baseball game.

The words “chosen” and “predestined” appear in verses 3, 4 and tempt us to become involved in a debate about election.

In trying to understand these concepts, people have developed theological constructions about what the Bible is trying to say.

Some have emphasized election and have developed their theology to the extent that they believe that some are chosen for life and some are chosen for eternal destruction.

The problem with this direction is that the whole matter of salvation ends up entirely in God’s hands and takes away all human responsibility and all human motivation to go and tell the nations and also runs into serious problems with the rest of Scripture.

Some have emphasized human responsibility.

This is the thinking that has been common in our spiritual heritage.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the many passages which indicate that God has chosen and puts the whole matter of salvation entirely in our hands.

I believe that Scripture teaches both God’s call and our responsibility and that understanding this logically is a mystery.

I also believe that there is great danger in trying to distill the Bible into theological constructs.

The danger is that we end up forcing Scripture into the mold of the theological construct and stop listening to what God is trying to say to us in the Bible.

So what we need to do is listen to what God is saying in each passage.

The mention of being chosen by God in this passage gives us one important message and that is that God wants us.

When I was a teen, I learned to play chess and then taught my father to play.

For a while I was able to beat him because I had played more than he had, but it didn’t take very long before he began to win.

He began to win because he had the ability to think more moves ahead than I did.

Winning a chess game is about planning ahead to make the best moves.

God’s choice of us is wonderful not only because it tells us that he wants us but also because it involved a plan.

He has thought many moves ahead.

His plan was not made at the spur of the moment or in response to the latest crisis.