Christ Church Washington D.C.

There’s a world of mystery that’s wrapped up in that verse. He describes two ways in which the saints of his day were falling into sin. One was through getting preoccupied with strange and extra biblical codes with regard to what they ate, thinking that they could commend themselves to God with the purity of their diet.

And that means that the sins that we fall into are not just violations of God’s will. They’re actually contrary to our own physical design, contrary to the way that we are made. And that’s why sin hurts so much. If you pour gravel into the gas tank of your car, it’s bad for the engine. Your car wasn’t made to run on gravel. And when you pour sin into your body, it’s bad for you. You weren’t made for this. Sin wrecks your life.

But the solution will not be found in diets, in sexual relationships, in workout programs, in college degrees, in doctor’s appointments, in financial plans, or any other man-made solution. Our only hope is in the blood of Jesus Christ. This reminds us of our need to confess our sins. Let’s meditate on these things as we now sing this psalm.

Our sermon text this morning is from Ephesians 1, verses 3-6. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love,

May your spirit be a quickening wind, bringing life to our hearts. May we hear your word and respond with living faith, with obedient hearts, and with joyful praise. We praise things in the name of Jesus Christ, and amen. Amen. Please be seated.

So let me, as you heard last week, let me also bring greetings from Moscow, Idaho. Saints there are excited to see this work launched and praying for you all here. We’re pleased to see this going and it’s a privilege for my wife and I to be able to be here and worship with you this morning. We’re continuing on in this series in Ephesians. I know this is kind of a strange thing to have one text you’re working through and rotate out the preachers, but I’m

Pray that God will make use of us. So let’s dive right in. It’s a tight little passage. We’re just looking at

I want to start off with some grammatical observations about this passage. If you look closely at these verses and hopefully you’re able to have a text in front of you so you can kind of play along at home.

But if you look closely at these first four verses, you realize that it’s kind of strange just grammatically in that even though it’s four verses long, if you were to do your old junior high assignment of diagramming the sentence, you would discover that all the action happens just in the first three or four words.

There’s just the whole sentence is right there at the very beginning and everything else is kind of a relative clause that’s added on to it. The main clause of the sentence is just in the first several words, blessed be God, blessed be God. That’s, again, if you’re going to do the grammar, well, you could reorder those words into maybe a more standard order and have it be something like God be blessed. And once you make it God be blessed and then you diagram it, you’ve got God is the subject,

Welcome to my lecture.

The reason that God should be blessed is because he’s already blessed us with a series of things, a series of three spiritual blessings, which Paul lists in the next three verses. We bless God because he has blessed us with these three things that are about to follow. That’s what verses four, five, and six are, those three blessings that he’s blessed us with, which should cause us to bless him in response. So having said that, let’s now look at those three blessings so we can understand them. We’ll start off with verse 14.

So the first thing is that God has blessed us by choosing us before the foundation of the world to be holy and to be blameless. And what I want to dwell on for a moment, even just that verse itself, we can unpack that for the rest of the sermon. But what I want to dwell on for just a moment is the fact that he chose us. He chose us.

It’s not that we did not choose him. We do. We choose God. And we choose him with a real, true choice. We choose God. So it’s not canceling that choice out. We have each of us freely chosen to follow him. But what we understand here in this text is that our choice of him is a result of his choice of us, not the cause of it. Our choice of him is the result of his choosing us, not the cause of him choosing us.

something slightly analogous we find in first John 4 verse 19 John tells us this we love him because he first loved us we love him because he first loved us his love for us causes our love for him you can just remember that verse for a moment because when we start having baptisms in this service that’s in the charge that we give to

To the children that are baptized here. We love him because he first loved us. And so just like his love causes our love for him, so too we choose him because he first chose us. His choosing is what causes us to choose him. This choosing is often referred to as the doctrine of election, God electing Christians. All Christians believe in election of some sort because the Bible uses the word election and describes his choosing.

The question that is often debated, though, is not whether God chooses, but why God chooses. What causes his choice? Is he responding to something in me, or is this something that’s being initiated by him? What makes God choose one and not another? Is it because of something in us or something in him? And Paul tells us the answer here to that question, that God’s choice came before the foundation of the world. His choice preceded us, preceded our existence. It came before us.

Paul makes the same point in the book of Romans. This is Romans chapter 9, verses 10 through 12. So I’m quoting from Romans 9. Remember Isaac and Rebekah, and they have Jacob and Esau.

When Rebecca conceived by Isaac, and then he says, for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him who calls, it was said to her, the older shall serve the younger. Before anything had happened, in order that you could see it was God who made the choice, not them, his declaration that the older will serve the younger was made before they had done anything

In order to show that the choice was God’s. Why did God declare his choice to Rebecca before Jacob and Esau were born? So that we could see that God’s choice did not depend on them. And here in Ephesians, Paul gives us the same argument. He tells us that God’s choosing of us happened before Genesis 1-1, before the founding of the world.

God’s choice came first and this means that you are here because of God’s sovereign merciful election at work in your heart. You are here because God called you. It’s entirely him. It was from him from beginning to end. It wasn’t from you. This was his mercy to you.

And so, as Paul says, this is the conclusion that Paul draws from this truth at the end of verse four, we bless him. Because of this, we bless him. Because the source of this choice is in God and not in us, we bless him.

Next, let’s go to the next verse. Paul says here in verse five, I’ll just read it briefly, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will. Paul says here that we were not just predestined, but that we were predestined to adoption as sons. So we just covered the predestination in the election, but he says you weren’t just predestined, he says you were predestined to adoption as sons.

This choosing that God did before the creation of the world was an election to a particular kind of relationship with him. We were chosen to be sons. And that’s really significant. We need to unpack this a little bit more. In order to understand this, let’s just step back a little bit from this text for a moment and understand something more about who God is and what he is like.

From all eternity, from before Genesis 1-1, from forever, God the Father has loved God the Son. This is the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son, that God the Father loves God the Son. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prays to the Father and he says, this is John 17-24,

You loved me before the foundation of the world. And as you’re reading through John, you can see Jesus constantly dwelling on this fact that he has this eternal love that predates all of human history, that he has always eternally been in the love of the Father.

The life of Jesus Christ was, among other things, a display of this love that the Father had for the Son, set up for all the world to see. So you have in eternity the Father loving the Son. The life of Jesus Christ, when the Son becomes incarnate and lives in this earth, that life was a revelation to this world of the eternal love that the Son lived in in the Father.

Remember when the baptism of Jesus, okay, the baptism of Jesus, this is Matthew chapter 3. When he had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him. And suddenly a voice came from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Okay, Jesus is baptized, and the voice of the Father from heaven that everybody witnessing this moment can hear is

This is a declaration that this is my son. This is my son, my beloved son. All of my love, it is here in him. This is the man that lives in the love of the Father. Or several years later, right before the crucifixion of Jesus, when Jesus was transfigured before his disciples, the Father spoke again. This is Matthew 17.

Behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud saying, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. Hear him. Once again, you heard it at the baptism and then right at the end of Jesus’ ministry, he’s transfigured before his disciples where they see him, they get kind of a glimpse of who Jesus really is. This is the son of God. And part of the revelation is this voice from the father and what is it that the father declares, but the father’s love

We were eyewitnesses of his majesty, for he received from God the Father honor and glory when such a voice came to him from the excellent glory. This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. That’s 2 Peter 1, verses 16 and 17. So Peter, this is years later. He’s remembering that moment when he got to hear the voice of the Father.

The son, Jesus, received from God the Father honor and glory. It was majesty, honor, and glory. That’s how profound the love of the father for his son is to stand before it. It makes this deep impression on Peter.

Now here’s what I want you to notice in this series of verses, because we’ve stepped back from Ephesians for a moment to talk about the love of the Father for the Son. This is what I want you to notice in this series. First, that the Father declared his love for the Son and did so in front of crowds of people for everyone to hear and behold. That’s why I said the life of Jesus was about taking this eternal love that the Father has for the Son and putting it in front of us for us to all see. And that’s, he declares it and makes it so that we can all see and hear it.

Second, years later, when Peter remembers having been a witness to that moment, when the Father declared his love for the Son, Peter’s best description of it was glory, majesty, and honor. That’s what it was like to see this, to hear it. Those are the adjectives that best describe the moment. To stand and witness the Father’s love for the Son, to witness pure, overpowering glory. To see that love was to see an eternal, perfect love.

But now, with that in mind, let’s go back to what Paul is saying in our text. In verse 5, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will. The predestination of God is a predestination to adoption. And that word adoption is very significant. He’s not just coming up with random similes to describe, oh, you have this kind of warm relationship with the Father. No, he’s being very specific. He says, this is all being done through adoption.

Adoption is specifically a grace that makes you a son. Makes somebody who wasn’t a son into a son. Adoption is a grace that makes you into a son. That’s what adoption is. The sonship that Jesus Christ then has by right, this glory, majesty, and honor that he lives in by right, his eternal self-existence, that…

You sit down at the table, and we will be coming to the table at the end of this service. You sit down at the table of the Lord, not as a guest, but as a son. We will come to the table at the end of this service, and we will sit down as sons to partake of this meal. You need to understand then that hearing the gospel is about learning that you have a father. Many people have noted this, how in the Old Testament, you do not have people praying to God as the father.

He’s not addressed as a father. It’s not until the New Testament when Jesus introduces to us our father. And he does that most profoundly as he teaches us how to pray. Excuse me. As he teaches us how to pray. And he teaches us that when we pray, we pray our father. That’s because he has been introducing us as sons to the father. We will also be able to do that at the end of this sermon when we sing the Lord’s Prayer together.

So we bless him. We bless our Father who has given us this perfect love. And then this last verse, verse 6.

To the praise of the glory of his grace by which he made us accepted in the beloved. Lastly, Jesus Christ has made us accepted. What does it mean to be accepted? We tend to use that word to describe friend circles or social networks, mean girl networks that you’ve been kicked out of and excluded from or something like that. To be accepted is to be included in certain social circles. It’s how we tend to think of that word.

That’s not what Paul is talking about here. That’s not what he’s doing here. Paul is using the word accepted as a very specific term drawn from the book of Leviticus and the Old Testament sacrificial system. There’s a little side note. If you want to do a deep dive in the book of Ephesians in your own private study, one thing that’s really interesting to do is to read Ephesians at the same time that you read Leviticus and try to find all the places where Paul is using

Okay, it will not be accepted if it has a defect. This is why I say accepted here is referring to something very specific. It’s not social networks. It’s talking about your ability to stand before God. Can you stand before God as a sinner or will you be destroyed by his righteousness? To be accepted is to be declared to be perfect before God, spotless, no defect anywhere. And this is what he is promising us in verse six.

This is God’s grace to us. We don’t deserve it. We each of us know full well our defects. We just got on the floor and recited them, right? You just walk through that. We all know full well our defects. We know our sins and we aren’t fooling anyone. The scandals that are hidden in your past and the sins that continue to live on in your heart now. None of these are secrets to God.

And yet, despite our sins, through the death of his beloved son, he has made us blameless. He has made us perfect. He has made us accepted such that we can stand before him.

And so again, for this undeserved grace, we bless him. We bless him. So we started off, bless God. Why? He has chosen you to be holy and blameless. So bless him. Number two, he has predestined you to be sons by adoption. So bless him. And number three, he has perfected us to make us accepted before him. So bless him.

It’s a significant list of blessings. It’s a significant list, but I want to make one more grammatical observation about these blessings. Notice that they are all located in a specific place.

They are all blessings that are found in a particular place. They are all found in Christ. Verse 3, he has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. You’ve received all these blessings, but you’ve received them all in a certain place in Christ. He has predestined us to adoptions. Oh, sorry, I’ve skipped up to my notes. In verse 4, we find that

Again, that this was, we were chosen, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that in him, the him is referring to Jesus. Verse six, again, we see this is all happening in the beloved. All these blessings are placed inside of Jesus. And if you want those blessings, that’s where you have to be.

The blessings are all in Jesus Christ. And notice, again, I’m going to dwell on the grammar here for a moment. When you say that an object is in something else, you are giving the location of that object. That’s what the preposition in does. In, when you use that, it’s giving you a location for something. You’re describing where something is. Where is the car? It’s in the garage. Where is the vacuum cleaner? In the closet. Where is Boise? It’s in Idaho.

In the evangelical world, if I ask a Christian, where is Jesus? I think the cliche answer is, well, he’s in my heart. Jesus is in my heart. You ask Jesus into your heart when you become a Christian, and he stays there for the rest of your salvation, right? You ask Jesus in, and he is in your heart. But our text describes a different fundamental reality that we need to be aware of and understand. It describes a different fundamental reality.

Paul says that all of our blessings are located in Jesus and that Jesus is in heaven. Verse three, okay? Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Christ is in the heavenly places and in him are all these spiritual blessings. We know that he’s in heaven because we all just recited the Apostles’ Creed just a little bit ago, right? And we all confess together that Jesus, after his resurrection, ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God the Father.

The resurrected Jesus Christ is then seated on his throne in heaven, which is a place. He is in a real place. He is in heaven on a throne, seated at the right hand of the Father with all authority in heaven and on earth, having been delivered to him. That’s where he is. And our text this morning is telling us that where Jesus is,

We also are, okay, because we are in him. Where Jesus is, see at the right hand of the Father, we also are because we are by faith in him. We are in him. And actually, if you

This is another exercise you can do if you get interested in doing a little bit of close read of the text that we’re working through. Because if you pay attention to Paul’s writings, you will see that the phrase in Christ or some variation on it. In Christ, in Jesus, in him, in the beloved. It’s the preposition in.

And something that refers to the sun, okay? You’ll find that phrase is one of Paul’s favorite phrases. If you read through all the epistles of Paul and look for that phrase, you’ll find it over 170 times, okay? That’s why I say it’s very significant. He’s unpacking something really profound here. If you’re the kind of person that writes in your Bible, I know not everybody does this, but if you’re okay with writing in your Bible,

When you’re reading Ephesians, I would suggest as you’re reading it really slowly and carefully, look for everywhere that the preposition in shows up and has the object of the preposition being the sun in one way or another, Jesus, Jesus Christ, something like that. And underline that and just start to notice how prominent that theme is throughout the book of Ephesians. And because you’re going to be working through this for a while, it’s worth taking the time to just spend a little bit of time in these close reads in this epistle.

So anyhow, if you start to do that, you’re going to see how significant and how dominant that idea is in this book. And I say this because I mentioned there’s the evangelical cliche, where is Jesus? Well, he’s in my heart. But what we see Paul say is that it’s the other way around. You are in him. You are in Christ. You are in Jesus.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying it’s unbiblical to say Jesus is in our heart. There are several verses that describe Jesus inside of us. There are biblical texts for that. But I would argue these verses are really describing how we have his power inside of us. He indwells us and that he gives us his power and strength and we live faithfully like that. He indwells us. But I would say that for every one verse that is referring to Jesus in your heart,

I think I could find about 20 verses that refer to you in Jesus, that you are in Jesus. And that’s much more the dominant theme throughout scripture. And it’s really, I think, how we fundamentally ought to think about our relationship to Christ.

Not so much him in us, but us in him. I wanna spend just a little bit more of time on this last thing, just in closing, because I think the American Evangelical Church has made this image of Jesus in your heart as the primary way that we think about our relationship to him.

And when we think like this, it has the effect of making the Christian faith into something that is very private, something that is, he’s in my heart, so it’s this thing that is hidden deep down in my heart, which makes it this very private kind of faith. It makes our service of Christ into something very subjective, not something that remains true outside of my heart. It becomes very subjective because it’s this personal thing that I have, but I don’t let it out of my heart.

It makes it very subjective and something that my own private heart owes to him, but not something that is going to be owed outside of my heart. It makes my devotion to Jesus Christ into something like my affinity for mint chocolate chip ice cream. It might be powerfully true for me, but the fact that it’s true for me says nothing about whether or not it is true for the rest of the world or has any ownership or obligation on the rest of the world. It becomes this very private affinity.

But Jesus Christ is not a private thing in my heart. Jesus is a king sitting on a throne in heaven with all authority in heaven and on earth having been given to him. My salvation, though intensely personal, and I do mean that, we have a personal experience of the blessing that I’ve described. I mean, just go through that list of verses we just covered. All of those are very personal, individual things being chosen, being adopted, being accepted.

So I’m not arguing against it being a personal relationship, but my experience of these blessings is rooted not in him being in my heart, but in my being found in him on his throne in heaven. And this has certain very practical implications for how we think about our Christian faith. The mission for Christ Church DC here is,

Welcome to my lecture.

The mission of the church here is to preach all of Christ for all of life for all of DC. This is because faith in Christ has certain implications. Jesus is not a private little household idol that hides in your heart. He’s not a personal little thing that you hold here, true for you, but I’m not saying whether that has any implications for anybody else.

He is a king on a throne, and your faith in him summons you to that same throne. You notice that? He doesn’t come down into our heart. We are on the throne with him. We are summoned to that throne. We can’t have that savior without that throne. If Jesus is a private friend who is hidden in your heart, then I think it’s easy to imagine him also in a way where he needs to conform himself to the desires of your heart. We do this really often, you know, where we take certain beliefs

Because the text says God is love, which if we follow that closely means God defines for us what love is. Love is defined by his character. And we’re right to say that the sexual ethic that scripture describes for us, that is love. That is what is love. To deviate for that is unloving. But what happens is God is love is frequently switched around. And so instead of God is love,

What we’re actually being told is love is God. Love is God. That love, the love, whatever it is you feel in your heart, whatever affections or movements you feel in your heart, that is God. And you must all submit to that. But scripture doesn’t say love is God. Scripture says God is love. He is on his throne. He defines for us what love looks like. He defines for us what a marriage looks like. He defines for us. And we can go on and on, but he is on his throne and he defines these things for us.

For us, when you see him on his throne and our salvation found up there inside of him, then we see our lives must conform to his character. And this gives us something of an outline for the book of Ephesians, because what I’m really doing is kind of introducing

The book of Ephesians to you. Like a good Greek author, you see this in like the Greek epics where the first few lines actually are a summary of the whole epic poem. Like a good Greek author, that’s what Paul is doing here. He’s giving us this little initial summary outline of what’s going to follow in the rest of his book. So this is a great introduction to understand how the rest of the book of Ephesians will go. And what I mean by that is primarily

This is true of most of Paul’s epistles. What we’ll see is what feels like very tight, heady theological teaching in these first few chapters transitioning to this real sort of practical application in the last few chapters. That’s where we’re going to get into things like what is a marriage? How should fathers treat their children? How is bosses employees? How are they supposed to get along? All those things, very practical, are going to be found a little bit later.

So the book transitions in the later chapters to a description of what Christian behavior ought to look like. So what you see then is that Paul teaches us first what we believe about our salvation. Here is Jesus, and then how we ought to act. If you’re going to be in him, then this is how you need to act.

So what I want you to see here at the very start is how these two things are related. Our salvation is in Christ and those who are in him, who are going to dress themselves with Christ, who are gonna put on Christ as we will see at the end of the book of Ephesians. Those that are gonna put that on,

They need to look like him. They will look like him. They will behave like him. We don’t hide Jesus in a secret place in our heart with our lives unchanged because we are hidden in him and we are clothed with him. Let’s pray. And let me remind you now that after I pray, we will all sing the Lord’s Prayer together.

Our Heavenly Father, we bless you and we praise you. In your great mercy, you have called us from darkness to light. You have made us your sons, and in your Son, you have made us accepted. Father, we thank you for this great grace that you have bestowed upon us, and we don’t yet even know the true glory, majesty, and honor that is given to us here. But the faith that you have put in our hearts is a pledge of that future glory, and so we praise you now. And we gratefully pray as your Son taught us to pray, saying, Our Father…

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