Christ Church Washington D.C.

Therefore, I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers.

It is very common in Paul’s epistles for him to affirm his thankfulness for the people he’s writing to and to affirm that he prays for them regularly. You should think of these as the personal and intimate moments of Paul’s letters. They show us his love for the people and that they had a close relationship.

We know that Paul had stayed in Ephesus for a little over two years. We learned that from Acts 19. So he was well invested in this church and in these people. They knew each other personally. When Paul wrote this letter, he had been away from Ephesus for approximately five years or so. So when he says, I heard of your faith in the Lord and your love for the saints, he was referring to the years since his departure.

And this implies that every church and every Christian should be known for these two things, faith in the Lord and love for the saints. And this is relevant to each of you as individuals, but it is especially relevant to a new church plant. You all are just getting started. You’re at the beginning stages. Everything is fresh. You’re still getting to know each other.

It’ll take some time to grow and get established, but what should your goal be as a church? What should you be known for? What kind of reputation should you want? It can be tempting to have high and mighty plans for ourselves.

But Christ Church DC should be known for its faith in the Lord and its love for the saints. Everything that God wants you to do can be summarized by those two things. It should remind you of the two greatest commandments. Love God with all of your heart and love others. Love your neighbor as yourself, especially your fellow Christian and your fellow church member.

So Paul mentions the Ephesians in his prayers and starting in verse 17, he’ll explain how he prays for them. What are the things he prays for? That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him. Paul prays that the Father would give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation. How should we understand the word spirit here?

Revelation in the knowledge of God is not an attitude. It is not a personality trait. It’s something that only God can give. So I take the view that the Spirit here is none other than God the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. I usually prefer the New King James Version, but if you have the ESV, you will notice that they capitalize the S in Spirit to denote that it’s about the Holy Spirit.

Paul prays for the Ephesians to have the Holy Spirit, and it’s the Spirit who gives us wisdom in Revelation. Now, this might seem strange since the Ephesians already had the Spirit. Didn’t he say they were sealed by the Spirit up in verse 13? Yes, it’s not as if they didn’t have the Spirit.

But we believe that God is infinite. He has no beginning and no end. We could never stop knowing more or having more of Him. Even in the resurrection for all eternity, we are going to keep learning things about God. We’re going to keep knowing Him deeper, further up and further in.

So praying for more of the Spirit makes perfect sense. You have the Spirit, but the Spirit is infinite. There’s always more to be given. And we pray like this too, if you think about it. You might say, Lord, fill me with your Spirit today to trust you and obey you. We’re already filled with the Spirit, yet we pray to be filled. God’s already given us the Spirit, yet we pray for the Spirit to be given.

In verse 18, Paul prays for the eyes of their understanding or the eyes of their heart to be enlightened. He’s talking about their perception of things. He wants their perceptions to be enlightened in specific ways. First, that you may know what is the hope of his calling. The calling here refers back to verses four and five with God choosing us and predestining us.

You have been called to be holy and blameless, to be adopted as sons, and to be made acceptable in the beloved, meaning Jesus. The hope of this calling is that you will receive the future inheritance. This was talked about in verses 11 and 14. Hope means that you look ahead with anticipation.

The inheritance theme continues, but this time there’s a difference. The inheritance here is said to be God’s, and his inheritance is in the saints. We have an inheritance in God that we hope and long for, but now we learn that God has an inheritance in us. He gives value to us. He views us as his riches.

We are glorious to him. We are his prized possession. Paul wants you to know that. He wants you to know how God perceives you. And I hope you marvel at this because it is truly amazing when you know that you deserve nothing good from God. You deserve only condemnation yet God loves you so much that he views you as his rich inheritance.

A third purpose of being enlightened is given in verse 19, that you may know what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of his mighty power. God’s power toward us is exceedingly great and mighty, and that must be true for him to love us as sinners, to choose us, predestine us, adopt us, and accept us.

It is not a weak God who can love sinners. It is a powerful God, an all-holy God who can love sinners. And again, when you realize your own depravity, you should marvel in His power toward you. But Paul turns his attention to God’s power in Christ specifically. What did God’s power do objectively through Jesus? Verse 20…

Notice that Paul moves from hand to feet to head. Jesus is seated at God’s right hand. All things are under his feet, and he is the head over all things. Hand, feet, and head. This gives us a picture of a complete and mature man, a human who is the king of the universe.

In the Bible, the hand is symbolic of power and might. The man Jesus, the human Jesus, has God’s power. He rules and reigns with God’s power. Being under someone’s feet means they have victory over you. They are exalted and you are humbled. All things under Jesus’ feet means that Jesus has the victory.

He has been victorious and he will continue to be victorious, not just in heaven, but on this earth and in history.

Being the head of something represents covenantal authority and all that that comes with, like leadership and responsibility. Jesus has been given all authority in heaven and on earth, making him the last Adam. He is the new head of humanity and the new head of the church. Jesus is the human ruler above all things. He is true man, like us, who is also true God.

These last few verses in Ephesians 1 present us with the basic gospel message, the good news that Jesus Christ is Lord. Let me ask you, is Jesus Lord over some things? Is he Lord over most things? No, the Bible says all things. Jesus is Lord over every person and every institution.

He’s Lord over your problems, your sicknesses, your enemies. He’s Lord over all wicked rulers, whether it be Satan, the demons, the Caesars, or presidents and congressmen. And yes, Jesus is Lord over your favorite podcast. He’s Lord over every social media post on every anonymous Twitter account. He’s Lord over everything.

When you have to choose between Jesus and anything else, you must always choose Jesus. In our culture today, it is easy for many people to give lip service to Jesus. They’ll agree that Jesus is Lord, or they’ll claim Christianity for themselves, but they don’t actually compare their beliefs and actions to Scripture and seek to be reformed by it.

That is one job of the church and we can do it because we have Jesus and Jesus has all the power.

I promise I don’t want to get too political on you this morning, but Jesus being Lord over the state and Lord over America is a legitimate application of our text. And just because you’re a church in DC, that doesn’t mean every sermon should be about politics, right? You need sermons that relate to men, women, and children at every stage of life.

But being in DC, the political world is very much a part of your life and many of you work in politics to various degrees. So as an example, what does it mean to say that Jesus is Lord over politics? What does it mean to say that Jesus is Lord over politics? It means that when the Bible speaks on civil government, we have to pay attention.

Just as with any other topic that the Bible teaches. 2 Timothy 3, 16 says, all scripture is profitable for instruction in righteousness. All scripture would include the parts about civil government. We have to know what those laws are. We have to meditate on them. And we have to let them shape and inform our opinions.

Now, when we talk about God’s law in the civil realm, it’s common for people to make all kinds of false assumptions. We have a gentleman outside this morning calling us fascists and wearing a shirt that says he’s fighting fascism. Well, guess what? We are against fascism as well.

That’s not what I mean by a biblical civil government. In my view, a biblical civil government would be limited to matters of justice. Law enforcement, judges, courts, national defense. And that is about it. A government in a Christian society would be a restrained government and it would actually result in more liberty, not less.

More liberty, not less. To be clear, I’m not talking about ceremonial priestly laws that have been fulfilled or have been abrogated in the new covenant. Those laws were for Israel only and have been fulfilled by Christ and or in the church.

I’m talking about crimes, meaning acts of aggression and their punishments, like restitution for theft and the death penalty for kidnapping, rape, and murder. I’m talking about defensive-only warfare. I’m talking about free markets, free trade, money, sound money, and avoiding debt.

As it turns out, God has a lot to say about those things and our government has not been obeying for a long time. And both sides of the aisle are to blame. Don’t think I’m just picking on one side here. The Bible is an equal opportunity offender. In fact, we should be more vocal about the conservatives who claim the name of Jesus and then turn around and disobey him.

We have to point the finger at ourselves because judgment begins in the house of God. That’s as far as I’ll go with the political talk. But if you’d like to explore these issues in depth, I do have a sermon series available on the St. David’s website. And you may not agree with all of my conclusions. That’s fine. Things like this should not divide us. But we absolutely must be studying the same playbook.

We have to be studying the same playbook. We don’t follow conventional wisdom. We don’t follow, well, this is what everyone else does or this is how it’s always been. We don’t believe the ends justify the means. We follow the Bible. We follow God’s word.

Finally, in Ephesians 1, Paul says, the Father gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Jesus is over all and fills all, meaning everything is sustained by him and finds its completion in him. He is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Everything comes full circle in the person of Jesus.

But notice that Paul calls the church the fullness of Jesus. That’s interesting. He says the church, which is his body, the fullness of him. How are we the fullness of Jesus? This has to do with the church being a means of revealing and manifesting Jesus to the world.

If the church is his body, then the fullness of Jesus will be made known in and through the church. This means we have a responsibility to be faithful and to accurately represent Jesus to the world. How do we do that? By having faith in the Lord and love for the saints. Work on those two things and everything else will fall into place.

This also reiterates God’s love for us. We are his rich inheritance. He values us and he values us enough to give us this mission. He values us and lets us share in the victory of Christ. All things have been placed under Jesus’ feet and what did Paul tell the church in Rome?

He said,

Be how the Ephesians were. Be known for the same things. And take caution that you not leave your first love. There’s actually a second letter written to the Ephesians in the Bible, which is found in Revelation 2. It was written just a few years after Paul’s letter, and in it, Jesus admonished the Ephesians for leaving their first love.

You have a mission. You have a hope. You have victory in Christ. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit and forsake the grace that he has given you. Stay faithful and persevere. Jesus is the complete and immortal man from feet to head and he is Lord over all things. Submit to his word in every area of life and watch what his power will do through you.

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