Christ Church Washington D.C.

It’s just, you know, you should do something about that. The whole freedom of speech thing, you know. Particularly ministers, so they’re just sitting around and one says, hey, let’s plant a church in Washington, D.C. And all the other ministers say, let’s go. Why not? Let’s go ahead. In all truth, this is a remarkable moment.

At Christ Church in Moscow and broadly throughout the CREC, we understand that worship is warfare. We mean that. We live in an enchanted world. We are not materialists. There are such things called heavenly beings. There are cherubim and seraphim. There are archangels and angels. There are thrones and powers and dominions.

And so you being here is actually a big deal. It is through faith that the promises of God are materialized in this world. It is through faith that you can stop the mouths of lions. And it’s through faith that you can be persecuted, as Hebrews 11 says. But faith is essential. It is the essential conduit through which God establishes his kingdom. And as we are here to worship him, we’re offering ourselves up to him. And God has drawn you here for whatever reason.

And we are trusting that what God did on Mount Carmel with Elijah, he will do something similar here today. He always answers in fire as we offer ourselves up to him. So be greatly encouraged. There are saints that are not gathered here with us, but scattered throughout this nation that I know have sacrificed for this work, pray for this work and are with us certainly in spirit. It was determined that we would start by preaching through the book of Ephesians.

And I was assigned the first two verses containing Paul’s introduction to his letter as well as maybe briefly talking about the book as a whole and what we’re getting into in coming weeks. As I prepared, I thought that it was perfectly fitting that we begin with Paul’s announcement of grace and peace. It is abundantly clear that we need those two pillars, grace and peace, which is our only source of sustenance and life in this life and in the one to come.

We need that grace and peace and it’s abundantly clear that our God stands ready to give them to us, give both of them to us without measure through his son Jesus Christ. So with that, let’s consider a survey of the text. The Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the saints in Ephesus around 60 AD and he was in prison in Rome. He had visited Ephesus about 10 years earlier on his second missionary journey.

And then he visited them again on his third missionary journey. Now this Ephesus sat on what is now the western coast of modern-day Turkey. So he’d been there, he’d seen the church established, he’d seen the Gentiles established, he’s arrested, and he’s sending this letter back to see them strengthened in the faith. Paul was an apostle, particularly to the Gentiles. So he’s going to those who are not Jews, and he’s announcing the gospel to them, the good news of salvation in Christ.

In this letter, you could divide Ephesians right down the middle. The first three chapters are all indicative. They’re all statements of grace and truth that the saints are simply to believe.

And then the second half of the book, that’s chapters 4 through 6, are full of imperatives. He says, now that this is what you are, now that you are the children of God, this is how you should live. And this is how God always deals with his people. That first half of the book is full of very familiar phrases. If you’ve grown up in the church at all, glorious phrases, just potent with truth. For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, Ephesians 2a.

Ye were sealed with that promised Holy Spirit. Ephesians chapter 1 verse 13. Ye are no more strangers and foreigners, you Gentiles, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 19. The Gentiles are fellow heirs and of the same body and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel. Ephesians 3 verse 6. I just mentioned here that you can say to the Gentiles and the Jews, I mean it wasn’t exactly a friendly relationship back in the day,

And you can say, you’re now one body. That sweet protester, I think we only had one. Sweet protester, I mean, do you not think that God can like humble that protester and she can be a sweet or he can be a sweet saint with us right here? Like…

He finishes up that first half of the book with an infamous benediction. It’s one that we’re putting our hope in today. Now unto him that is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. Unto him be glory in the church. That’s Ephesians 3, 20 and 21.

In the second half of the book, he says, this is the vocation that you have received, now this is how you should live. And it’s full of various imperatives. Put on the new man, which is after God created in righteousness and true holiness, Ephesians 4.24. We must put away bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, Ephesians 4.31. We should walk in love as Christ has loved us, Ephesians 5.2. He gives instructions for households.

He gives instructions for how society should be ordered, and then he tells the Ephesians to put on the full armor of God in Ephesians 5 and 6. He concludes in the same place where he began with grace and peace to the saints.

Now, that’s the survey of the book. When it comes to our two verses today, at the outset, Paul identifies himself as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that by the will of God, verse 1. He’s writing to a particular people. They’re identified as saints or holy ones or those who are faithful in Christ Jesus, verse 1.

And the first message he wanted to deliver them was the message of grace and peace, which comes in the only way that grace and peace can ever come, through the Lord Jesus Christ. I want us to consider what it means that Paul was an apostle of Jesus Christ, and then consider grace, and then consider peace.

So let’s begin with his apostleship. It shouldn’t be lost on us that Paul calls himself an apostle. That was not only an office in the early church, but it was the office of one who was sent by Jesus Christ to deliver mankind the word of God.

In the next chapter, Paul says that the household of God is built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles. The prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New. You should step back and think about this. We don’t believe that the revelatory office of prophets and apostles continues. We don’t believe that that’s going on anymore. But we believe it did happen. Wouldn’t that be wild to have that friend Isaiah? Isaiah just happens to actually speak the very word of God to man.

It’s what Christians believe. God is not silent. This is what the prophets did in the Old Testament. This is what the apostles did in the New Testament. And Jesus showed up to Jerusalem and said, oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets. They didn’t want to hear the voice of God. And when the apostles come in the New Testament, everywhere Paul goes, it’s always trouble. And it’s apparent that this revelatory office is a difficult office to be in because many people want to stop up their ears against the word of God.

Now, what rebellious man always wants and what has marked our land in a particular way is Christ without his apostles. Christ without his apostles. I’ll tell you what I mean by that. A pagan nation doesn’t have Christ or his apostles. They may not even know the name of Jesus Christ and they don’t know his revelation. But a lapsed nation, a fallen nation, a nation that was Christian to the core,

Which is to say, we would rather listen to our own minds than hear what Christ has to say. Now this is tricky because it’s so deeply embedded into our culture. So when Thomas Paine wrote his Common Sense, it was very well received by people in this land, and that’s great. When he went on a few years later to write The Age of Reason, he lost all of his former friends because he attacked religion and he exalted human reason to the place of a golden calf, the same way John Locke does shortly after him.

It says, human reason, you can live by reason. Reason can dictate to you how you are supposed to live. It’s crazy. I mean, G.K. Chesterton was far better. He said, the madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who’s lost everything but his reason. Lose everything but your reason, what’s your reason going to do? Your reason’s a good baseball glove. It can catch data. It can catch revelation all the time. Creation, Bible, it can sit there and compute and work the data. But if you have no data to crunch, what are you?

Well, you have your mind enough, but you don’t have anything else. You don’t have revelation. This is exactly what Thomas Paine was up to, what John Locke was up to, and what has by and large established itself in our land and how we think. Thomas Paine actually lost all of his old friends. Only a few mourners came to his funeral, and even the Quakers wouldn’t let him be buried in their cemetery. That’s tough. Shows you how people used to think and how people are thinking now.

We could turn our guns on empiricism with its sense perception or romanticism that simply wants to go with its gut. We have a lot of just going with the gut today. But whatever bush man seeks to hide behind at the end of the day, it is a faulty cover against the apostolic word. Christ has sent his prophets and apostles into the world and there is simply no hiding from them. You can kill them, but it’s not the same thing as refuting them. You can slander them, but that’s not the same thing as

Answering them. You can try to hide from the spirit of all truth, but you would be safer hiding from a tornado in a tent village. You can’t get away from this living word. However man stops up his ears, God is here and God is not silent.

And the message today is the same as it was in the days of the Old Testament Israel. Today, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the day of provocation and in the day of temptation in the wilderness. When your fathers tempted me, they proved me and they saw my works.

Like the word of God is dangerous. The apostolic revelation of God is dangerous. It is sharper than any two-edged sword. It meets you at the secret place. The glory of how God speaks to his people is that he speaks to you through his word and you know what he said. You hear his voice. And the warning is today if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts. And sometimes that’s just, you need to put away that little secret sin. Stop it. Put it down. You need to out yourself because it’s secret sin.

Do it. And you know it’s the Spirit of God working upon you. You know that you need to do this particular task. And He comes and He works. And in that moment you have a decision. Your decision is obey or harden your heart. You harden your heart, it all shrivels up. You obey, you find the risk that was involved in obeying the Lord Jesus Christ results in remarkable blessing.

So hear his word, trust him, and obey. There are many who haven’t. You have that rascal king Ahab of the north, Ahab and Jezebel, the infamous woman, brought Baal worship into the north, and you had Jehoshaphat, king of the south,

And Ahab was with Jehoshaphat. He wanted to go fight the king of Syria. And Jehoshaphat says, that’s great, but let’s inquire of the Lord first. Should we go fight the king of Syria? Ahab gathers 400 prophets, and every one of them are saying, go on up, Ahab. It’s a great idea. You will be victorious. Now, Jehoshaphat from the south must have known something was up because he goes, is there anyone else? You’re like, 400 prophets is a lot of people.

Is there anyone else? He’s like, yeah, there’s one. Micaiah. But he never prophesies anything good. Okay. And it’s a wonderful story because Micaiah walks in there, the only true prophet of God, and he goes, go on up, Ahab. Everything will be fine. I promise.

And Ahab says, how many times, Messiah Jew, are you that you speak the truth and only the truth? And Micaiah turns in an instant and he says, I saw all of Israel scattered on the hills like sheep without a shepherd. And he brings truth to Ahab. And Ahab looks at Jehoshaphat, see, I told you, he never prophesied anything. You want to say, Ahab, that’s because you’re not listening.

If you listen, if you would believe, if you would obey, it would be good for you. It would be good. It’s always good. When the apostolic word comes to you, it’s good. We are not here really hoping that this kind of gathering of the Democratic Republic will somehow pull along the kingdom of God in a wagon. Like, put the Bible in there and let’s see if we can get it onto the hill.

Charles Spurgeon said you don’t defend the Bible, you just like preach the Bible, just let it go. Just does it. It’s always effective. It is always working. You never miss. Your faith comes from that apostolic word. It’s because God has spoken to you that you actually have woken up and started to believe him. This is a word for people who like to build. It’s a remarkable thing to have an entrepreneurial spirit.

D.C. is not the only place that has type A people. There’s type A people other places, but I really like, I love when I come to the hill, it’s like type A people running, just running everywhere. My wife’s like, what did you see? I saw a lot of flyaway shorts is what I saw. Just everyone running, you know, I’m driven, I’m diligent, I’m coffeed up, I’m caffeine. That’s great.

You should be diligent and driven. You should be waking up early and going to bed late. As you do so, remember what Paul said in another place. Let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, all different kinds of levels, some great, some small.

Every man’s work shall be made manifest, for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire. And the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward. If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss. But he himself shall be saved, yet so as by fire. It’s 1 Corinthians 3, 10-15. Some people are going to go to heaven with nothing.

You’re gonna get to heaven, but it’s like you’ve been saved by fire. And every single thing that you have built is going to be burnt up when that day of testing comes. And I’m talking about your law and your statues and your children and your education and your schools, everything.

The exhortation is build upon the foundation that is Christ because there simply is no other foundation. And I mean genuinely so. Like speaking, acknowledging Christ is Lord of every endeavor, everything that we do. Body and soul, giving myself, and not just being at lip service, a genuine heart commitment, a humility that you say, I’m going to do whatever the Lord Jesus Christ says. The whole project is going to be built upon Him.

Now let’s consider the grace of God. When that sword of the Spirit is unsheathed, and he begins to do his work on you, the shocking revelation is that it is a work of grace. Paul is an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the word to the saints in Ephesus was, and is to the saints here in DC, grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, what’s striking about grace is as soon as it appears, it begins to shake things up.

You have the Gadarene demoniac, the man from the land of the Gadarenes. He was the one who, and Jesus said, hey, what’s your name? He said, Legion, for we are many. This man is howling at the moon at night. He’s cutting himself with stones. He’s in the mountains. He’s in the graveyard.

What do you mean? Grace shocks people. They’re like, we kind of liked him better when he was howling at the moon. He’s down here talking to us about getting rid of our sin now. This is difficult. We have to be with this guy. That’s exactly what grace does. People get forgiven. People get reconciled. Teams form. Relationships form that you didn’t know were going to happen. Everything gets shaken up.

But as it is with all of God’s good gifts, the enemy has sought to distort God’s grace. He wants to deface it. He wants to misrepresent it and turn it into a limp grace that is palatable to all and equally received by every man.

But God’s grace is nothing of the sort. Nothing can cause a riot like the advent of God’s undeserved favor. Okay? Because here’s what happens. You get a bunch of blessings. Somebody else doesn’t. Or somebody else gets a bunch of blessings and you don’t.

And you say, what gives? I say, God. God gives. He gives these blessings willfully and he doesn’t give them evenly. It’s striking, you can see one of the idols, one of the confusions of our own land is this notion of equality.

Equality, this is what will get us in trouble, this is what will get me in the papers, things like this. Liberty and equality, they’re both wonderful things, but if you go back to some of those bad guys that say liberty is freedom from external constraints, which they start, which is foolish, no. Liberty is freedom from our sins and freedom from tyranny.

What about equality? If you get rid of God, you lose all sense of what equality is. Equality is for you to be treated equally according to a particular standard that talks about how you’re supposed to do kinds of things, like what kind of things you should do or not do. And we treat you equally according to that one rule that God has revealed to us. You get rid of the rule, what do you have? Well, to treat a woman equally means you must treat her exactly like you treat a man. And to treat a man equally, you must treat him exactly as you would treat a woman. And everyone here knows that’s dumb.

And we turn the grace of God into that. It’s an egalitarian peanut butter spread that everyone has access to, and it kind of just comes forth from a mindless machine. It’s not God in his divine favor smiling upon you as his child. It’s just this gooey peanut butter egalitarian spread, right? But we know God hasn’t designed the world that way. I would like to be able to jump as high as LeBron.

But I can’t. I can’t. And around here, if we talk about that inequity between me and LeBron James, it would take like two seconds before somebody was starting some kind of policy that was like helping white men jump. You would be emblazoned on the right. It would be like a whole product line of helping. Now I’m out there saying, we want bigger calves. When do we want them? Now.

What are you talking about? God gave certain people gifts and abilities and he gives them in various ways and it’s glorious. Be thankful for what God gave you and then be thankful for what God gave someone else. Be thankful for the grace of God which he has poured out on you.

This is the parable of the hired laborers, Matthew 20. Wonderful story. Jesus tells the story. He hires the first guy, and it says a penny in the KJV, which is confusing. Let’s say it’s $100. He hires the guy at the beginning of the day for $100. He says, work all day, I’ll pay you $100. And he hires more men later, and he hires more men later. He hires a guy at the very end of the day who works like one hour. He gets off work and goes and has a beer. When the guy comes up that’s only worked one hour, the owner pays him $100.

He works back to the first guy that he hired for $100, and he pays him $100. What do you think the first guy said? What gives? He worked for one hour. I worked all day. And the response is…

The key is to see that he does so willfully, and you see this in verse 3 through 6. It’s coming up probably in the next week or two. But after this wonderful doxology of God choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before him and being adopted into his family, he says, according to the counsel of his own will, meaning God has a will and he chose you, he loves you,

It’s not a machine. We’re here worshiping the Father who is called you son, who is called you daughter, and he’s done so by his grace. We get this grace when we are dead in our sins, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 5 says. When we are dead in our sins and in our trespasses, God made us alive. Now if there is a fundamental problem that would mark the kind of errors committed on our nation’s capital,

It would be this. It’s a foundational misunderstanding of the central problem of man. We think that he just needs more education. It’s not the problem. We’re grateful for education. We love it. I have a PhD and I teach at a college. It’s great. But it’s not the fundamental problem. The problem is that men are dead in our father Adam. You can throw a lot of programs at a dead man. He never seems to catch them.

Doge helped us to discover that we pumped a lot of Social Security to dead people. It was very kind of us. We just wanted to make sure they were OK. But it didn’t work. It didn’t work. Now, this gets creepy. Why do you think we do that kind of thing? Because the god of our land is the god of Demos. It’s the god of the people. Vox Populi, Vox Dei, the Latin says, the voice of the people is the voice of God.

If you get rid of God and you start talking about government of the people, by the people, for the people, which is fine within its context, it’s totally not fine once you remove its context. And then what do you do? You exalt the Demos, and what does the Demos do? It starts to try to raise the dead through giving them social security. You can’t raise the dead. Man can’t raise the dead. God raises the dead.

It’s what he does. It’s what he did for you. It’s what he’s done for us. That’s why we are worshiping him here today. The fact is, in Adam, all die. Our first father broke covenant with God, and in so doing, the human race was given over to sin, death, guilt, and shame. And there is no way to work your way out of that condition. From that dead condition, man cannot mobilize, he can’t organize, he can’t monetize. All men are children of wrath, having inherited that condition from their father, Adam.

The only thing that can be done is God giving life, which he does so freely according to the counsel of his own will. You have received that amazing grace and when God raises a man up by grace from death to life, the result is that his troubled soul is set right.

Without this particular blessing, man is awash in a sea of shame, regret, bitterness, and envy. And riddled with all of those troubles, he is vulnerable to every type of manipulation. If you’re a man who is easily manipulated, it is because you have all of that guilt and shame and bitterness boiling down there within you.

You could line up men from the ages and you could line up men on this Capitol today who have twisted and turned in every direction in order to find peace for their souls, but unsuccessfully. The problem boiling at the bottom of your swamp cauldron is the men and women that have no peace with God.

And therefore, no peace with each other and no peace with themselves. Now, many prophets have come and they have preached peace, peace when there is no peace. Many false messiahs have come. Man has sought peace in the bottom of a whiskey bottle, on an adulteress’s bed, in a corrupt compromise, and in some kind of payment to make sure that the documents never see the light of day. All of that.

He told his followers 2,000 years ago, peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. John 14, 27. There’s a message here to the saints first that are gathered here and then a message to D.C. more broadly. To the saints here, the message is abide in that peace.

It’s the peace of Christ. Paul says, having a righteousness that is not my own, I have it, but it’s not mine. It’s Christ’s, but I have it. Same thing with peace. I have a peace that’s not my own. I have a peace. It is Christ himself who is peace, and he has given it to me.

And abide in that peace. Walk in that peace. Let this community that forms here on the hill be like those Narnians in C.S. Lewis’s book, The Horse and His Boy. He says, they walked with their shoulders back, their arms would swing. It looked like they were ready to be friendly with anybody who was friendly and didn’t give a fig for anyone who wasn’t.

There’s freedom, power, and glory in that kind of peace. Peace that runs all the way down to the bottom. Peace that makes you a man who cannot be twisted and turned. A woman who cannot get anxious and fall into all of those difficulties that come when anxiety riddles the woman or the wife or the daughter. That peace is glorious and you should abide in that peace.

The Apostle Paul had it when he’s in Galatia and he goes to preach the gospel to a people. They drag him out of the city, stone him with stones, think he’s dead. And when he comes to, what does he do? Let’s go back in the city. Who does that kind of thing? A man who has peace with God. A man who says, I genuinely know exactly where I’m going. I don’t know exactly how I’m going to get there, but I have peace and it is the peace of Christ.

To the broader people here on our nation’s capital, this is the word to you. You will have the peace of God guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus, or you will be left to cover up your nakedness with manufactured fig leaves.

This Christ is the second Adam who came to our land of darkness, death, corruption, and conceit, where men hide in the shadows and cut themselves for their shame and howl at the moon and break every chain that tries to bind them. This Christ was beaten, bloodied, slandered, abandoned, and falsely tried at a kangaroo court. This Son of Mary and the Son of God went straight into the lion’s den of our twisted perversions

Today is the day of his mercy if you will listen to his apostolic word.

Our God and Father, we thank you for looking upon us in love and favor. We thank you that you have given us your word, that you have spoken your very son to us. We thank you for your spirit’s work in our midst, and we thank you for the grace and peace that you’ve given us. We ask that you would receive our worship now as we lift up the prayer you’ve taught us to pray, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

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