All In
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Handout
Series Intro
Series Intro
We are going to be doing a series through the book of Ephesians. There is a lot to discover as we go through the book but you find that as we do there is a real sense of invaluable treasure to be found in Christ.
Ephesians is effusive. As Paul begins talking about Christ in the opening verses, he can’t contain himself. We will look at that today. He cannot contain himself.
Because he sees the value found in Christ.
Ephesians is like the best of parts of antiques roadshow.
People bring in things they value, that they found in grandma’s attic or have had in the family for years to define the value of it.
And they expect it to have some value but they find out that because of the creator of the piece it is actually worth way more than they could have asked or imagined.
Now the value is not what they think it was it is it is way more than they thought.
They are overwhelmed at the true cost.
There is an owner of an archive of baseball cards from 1871 from the Boston Baseball club.
They were from her great great grandfather
These were gifts with a note from the players, autographed letters.
At the end the consultant appraised the collection at 1 million dollars
And the cost is not what it was for a previous generation but the cost is what it is to the newest generation.
We find in Christ whenever we try to value Christ He is always above. He is always more so.
Ephesus, where Paul writes this letter to, was a very pluralistic city. Gods were everywhere and every step determined a choice of who to worship and when. There was no better choice, just many choices.
Paul is communicating that Christ is not an option amongst many gods but the best choice.
And we need to know that because we are constantly asking questions concerning value. We want to know that what we are doing matters and what we are pursuing matters. And we will relentlessly chase anything making promises of meaning in our lives. This is why advertising is so effective.
You’re telling me that I matter?
You’re telling me there is meaning?
And they are. Until you purchase that thing.
The culture makes offers it cannot deliver on.
This is what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer call Dining while only reading the menu. They write in Dialectic of Enlightenment about culture regarding the offers of our cultural systems that: “the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu.”
That is our best shot. We can see what it offered in the menu but there is no delivery on it.
Ephesians tells us we are better off with Christ
As we get into the message for today we are going to look at this idea.
- sermon notes in newsetter and website. If you want to follow along
Read Ephesians 1:1-4 together. As you read it what do you notice about the passage? What observations can you make?
We are invited in to experience the best that Christ has to offer. This is a Vision of Christian Hope.
We are invited in to experience the best that Christ has to offer. This is a Vision of Christian Hope.
The phrase in Him occurs 7 times in this passage
When we feel outside, marginilized or embattled in life. We need something greater than us to call us back.
We are brought in entirely in the book of Ephesians.
Paul will point us to Christ who is greater
Paul will show us what it looks like for us to live lives reflecting the greatest Christ.
So let’s look at how the letter opens
God’s victory is bigger than the cosmos
God’s victory is bigger than the cosmos
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,
As the letter opens, Paul is effusive. He is overflowing in praise. He just can’t tell the story fast enough. This whole section is really just one run on sentence. We have added punctuation in the english translation, but not Paul. He just raced to get all the words out.
The center point in this passage is God Himself. Wherever we turn we find Christ. Wherever we turn we see the work of God displayed in the person of Christ.
This is cosmological
Cosmology is how you understand the cosmos. How you understand the beginning and development of the universe.
Paul saw the God as the center and definition of the cosmos.
What other cosmological worldviews can you think of? It’s important to understand belief and how other people believe to be able to articulate ours.
He is the creator and maker.
And while there are lots of things observable and unobservable in the cosmos, none is larger than God Himself.
There are lesser gods that Paul understands.
We hear that in “principalities and powers”
But no matter what influences or what creates, Paul is communicating that God is bigger than all of that. There is none in the cosmos that reigns higher than God.
No matter where you go you see the author.
Monet’s gardens.
You are walking inside a painting.
As you walk through it you see that, yep, this has to be Monet’s home.
As you walk through Ephesians you say, yep, this has to be God’s work.
And the point of this book is that, as you walk through the actions of someone’s life, you say, yep, this is the victory of Christ. This is what the Gospel looks like in real life.
He sees God as the author and as well sees the world embattled.
Paul understood the world to be at force with principalities and powers. We will run into that statement a couple of times.
What do you think principalities and powers looks like in our world? Where do you see them in day to day life?
And that many of those principalities and powers have rebelled against God.
And that those principalities and powers have influence over our world.
Paul sees all of that, sees difficult and destructive things and still opens the book like this.
Not because he doesn’t seem them, in fact the opposite, he does see them. He just sees Christ as better.
Paul sees all that is going on in the world and still says three times in the first 14 verses, to the praise of His glory.
I think one of the issues of modern Christianity is simply that we have held out Jesus as one option among many. Jesus is a choice that we make like what we have for lunch is a choice.
And I get that, that is where we are in our culture. We now believe that there are many options and that Christ is one option.
This is called pluralism. Where do you see people talk about Christ like He is just one option out of many?
We may not say we believe that but we easily live like we do.
We need to realize that not all choices are equal.
We need to see that which is beyond ourselves, God who is beyond and bigger than all we can know. His rule and victory extends beyond the choices we make daily.
God’s Victory is longer than time itself
God’s Victory is longer than time itself
even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love
Ephesians is a book where Paul is stretching our understanding of God.
We will see Him in the next passage ask for our eyes and heart to be opened, that we would see Christ for who He is, experience Him with the body of Christ.
We are being called to stretch our imagination and understanding in order to fit who Christ really is.
It’s important for us to know that Christ is active before the foundation of the world. That means the way in which we are formed, our activity, our identity, the way in which we define ourselves goes back that far.
We may want to define our lives by our birthdate. But it goes back further
We may want to define it by 1776, but it goes back further
Or by 1507 but goes back further
or by 1492 but keep going back
Before all of that we were beginning to be formed in Christ. Our lives become marked by God in His victory beyond years and decades and generations.
How do we sometimes define our identity in places that are not found in the foundation of the world? How are those areas not as strong as finding our identity in Christ?
Sometimes we think that we came up with Christianity all by ourselves. But we have to be stretched to realize that God is beyond years and decades and eons.
It is easier to form Christ around our own ideas of what He is like.
But how can we do that when His ideas of us were being formed before the foundations of the world?
Even when we aren’t sure which way to go, when we aren’t sure of the right direction, we recognize that God has gone before us and that God comes after us and there is no place that He has not been.
Last week I was in Wisconsin and I flew into the Mil county airport. My aunt and uncle picked me up to take me to where I was staying at my moms house. And we took I43 from the airport to my moms house, about a 40 minute ride. Along the way there is major construction happening, tearing down bridges that cross the expressway. IT looks a lot different than from when I grew up. Now my uncle was sharing the plan for the construction. He was born and raised in Milwaukee and served for 40 years as a Milwaukee County Sheriff. He knows milwaukee better than anyone I know. And even though I grew up there during the ride he was telling me all about the roads and what they were planning on doing and when and why. I got an inside scoop on what is happening because my uncle knew that area inside and out. He was there before I got there and stayed there after I left.
We have an inside scoop in understanding God’s timing. We may not know why everything is different, why the bridges are gone and being rebuilt but we are travelling with someone who does.
as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
We have come from somewhere and we are going somewhere.
The biggest issue facing our culture is that we think we have to create everything. Meaning, direction. All of our culture is the negative reaction toward something previously trusted. So we have built a culture that is suspicious of everything and in so doing believe that the only one we can trust is ourselves.
Now that sounds nice until you get lost without a GPS.
It is important to know that we are moving in a direction. That we are called to a place and a time.
It’s like being in the middle of watching a good movie or reading a great book. We aren’t at the beginning and we aren’t at the end. We are somewhere in the middle of something frustrating happening, maybe between relationships or between situations. Maybe the world is blowing up or there are aliens attacking or someone is simply in a disagreement and has the vapors in some 19th century Jane Austen novel. In any case, we are caught in the middle and we forget we are in a great and incredible story written by a perfect and redemptive author.
in the middle all those tensions and scrapes cause us to forget that we are in a story with a foundation and an end. We just think we are bouncing from tension to tension.
That there is more to us than us and more to this world than this world.
If the previous verse about time is about identity then this passage is about meaning.
We are wound up in Christ as we face the fulness of time. When Christ shows up again, when He brings together Heaven and earth.
In this passage Paul is talking about the renewal of all things. Christ not only as savior but also as reigning King.
We are not left to our own to figure everything out. We can look forward to Him.
What happens when you begin to realize the aspect of meaning found in the end?
Many of you know that this past week I was at a memorial for my friend Roo. He was 42 years old and passed away last month.
He had a heart and double lung transplant when he was 35.
For the past 7 years he has been on the edge of eternity. There were times when he was sick and times when he was well. He was in multiple comas due to operations and sickness. I was called home at least 3 other times because he certainly was going to die.
But each time he beat death. He knew he was not going to live to be an old man. He was constantly staring eternity in the face. And if formed him. We was always looking not to himself but to the fulness of time. What would it look like to be embraced by Christ?
And as his memorial proved, person after person after person attested to the strength of his faith. His pastor talked about the many times they would get together and talk about faith and death and dying. Because it was his reality. He lived on the edge of it constantly.
But when you look out into the edge of your life, you find yourself finding more. Roo learned that. As he edged closer to having to grapple with eternity he found a depth in faith that few of us even dream of. I spoke last week at his memorial and I called him a paradox. The sicker he got the stronger he was.
Read Acts 7:54-60. This is where Stephen is killed. While this is not prescriptive of how everyone experiences death it still shows what happens when we bump up at the edge of the fulness of all things. How does Stephen respond to his captors and his end?
We can find our lives within that victory
We can find our lives within that victory
so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.
Paul wants us to know as we begin Ephesians that in Christ we are never outside looking in.
Paul wants us to know as we begin Ephesians that in Christ we are never outside looking in.
We never have to live at the margins
We are brought in.
And we are given what we need to behold Christ.
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
- We are Given Wisdom and Insight
It is not just that we are redeemed and restored, that we have forgiveness according to his richness, he has done so in all wisdom and insight.
These words are like the lenses we need to see with. Paul will spend time even later asking for God for the eyes to see what God has done.
We need to wear the lenses of wisdom and insight to see what things really look like
Wisdom is the ability to see through things as they really are. God gives us the ability to see what things really look like. To understand reality
And insight is the capacity to act accordingly
These lenses show us and empower us to live in Christ’s victory. To be the praise of His glory.
We hear this refrain, to the praise of His glory.
God’s glory is the way that He has chosen to reveal Himself. It is God’s revelation of who He is.
When we live the praise of His glory. We reflect the reality of who God is.
God has shown Himself in the person of Christ,
The writer of Hebrews calls Him the exact representation of His being
And as we see Him we reflect our lives based on how He has revealed Himself.
We get to be part of what the One who holds the foundations of the earth and the fullness of all things together.
We don’t always get to understand everything in the moment, but even in moments of bewilderment, we have someone who is greater than any depth.
Ephesians will constantly invite us into that story, never to be outside looking in again.
We would love for you to be a part of God’s story
It begins with declaring He is both the foundation and the fulness.
He is our greatest hope and source for help
And we need it. Our sin nature keeps us stuck.
But Christ who has all things brings us out.
So if you are outside looking in
Or if you want to be invited into something greater
Or need to be reminded of God’s victory in our lives we are going to do 2 things
Worship
Close in praying for you . Come on up.
What do you think it means to live as “the praise of His glory?” Close in prayer for each other that your group would be to the praise of His glory.