"The Foundations"

The letter to the Ephesians is a description of the riches that we have in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul emphasized these riches a great deal. As he traveled about the Roman Empire he came to colonies and to cities where people were spiritually and materially impoverished -- they were poverty-stricken people. Many of them were slaves. They had nothing of this world's goods. They were depressed, discouraged, beset with fears and anxieties, jealousies and hostilities. They were under the grip of superstition and filled with the dread of the future. They had no hope of life beyond death. And it was the apostle's great joy to unfold to them the riches available to them in Jesus Christ -- riches which, if accepted as facts, would free them, would transform them and make them over into wholly different people, would bring them into a sense of joy and love and faith. That happened again and again. So the apostle gloried in these exceeding great riches in Jesus Christ.

The epistle to the Ephesians ought to be a treasure store to which we go repeatedly anytime we get discouraged.

I heard recently about an old Navajo Indian who had become rich because oil had been found on his property. He took all the money and put it in a bank. His banker soon became familiar with the old man’s habits. Every once in a while the Indian would show up at the bank and say to the banker, "Grass all gone, sheep all sick, water holes all dry." The banker wouldn't say a word -- he knew what needed to be done. He'd bring the old man inside and seat him in the vault. Then he'd bring out several bags of silver dollars and say, "These are yours." The old man would spend about an hour in there looking at his money, stacking up the dollars and counting them. Then he'd come out and say, "Grass all green, sheep all well, water holes all full." He was simply reviewing his resources.

That is where encouragement is found -- when you look at the resources which are yours, the riches, the facts which undergird your faith. As we go through this letter to the Ephesians I hope you will read it in that way. Last week we looked at the summary statement with which Paul gathers up the great themes of this letter:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ... (Ephesians 1:3)

Then we took a quick survey of the list of these great spiritual blessings which follow. Let me give you the structure of this chapter: first we have that summary statement in verse 3, then the more detailed description of the blessings in verses 4 through 14, and then, beginning with verse 15, Paul's great prayer that his hearers would understand what this is all about.

There is an unusual structure in this passage to which I'd like to call your attention. From Verse 3 through Verse 14, in the Greek text, you have one complete, unbroken sentence filled with many adjectival phrases to amplify and enrich it. If you want to get the effect of it, take a deep breath and try to read it through with one breath. You will see how much Paul has crammed into this great sentence. It's almost as though he is taking a walk through a treasure chamber describing what he sees. He starts out with the most immediate and evident fact and tells us what that is. Then something else comes into view and he puts that in. And glory flashes upon glory here until he has this tremendously complicated sentence which includes vast and almost indescribable riches.

That is Paul's way of showing us how truth is interconnected, how you can never touch upon some of these great themes but that they lead to others, and soon you find yourself caught up with still others. That is how truth is, isn't it? Truth in nature is like that also. You can't study one subject in nature without touching upon a great many others. This is the way God builds truth.

However, there is a division of this passage. That is, these blessings gather about the Persons of the Trinity. There is the work of the Father, the work of the Son, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

In Verses 3-6 you have the work of the Father.

Then, in Verses 7-12, you have that which relates to the Son.

Finally, in Verses 13 and 14, you have the work of the Holy Spirit.

All these blessings are available to us in what Paul calls "the heavenly realms." As we saw last week, that is not heaven; it does not mean going to heaven when you die. "In the heavenly realms" is a reference to the invisible realities of our life now. It reaches on into eternity, yes, but it is something to be experienced now, in the inner life. That is what he is talking about -- your thought-life, your attitudes, your inner life where you live, where you feel conflict and pressure, struggle and disaster -- that is part of the heavenly realms. It is where we are exposed to the attack of the principalities and powers which are mentioned in Chapter 6, those dark spirits in high places who get to us, and depress us, and frighten us, and make us anxious or hostile or angry. The heavenly realms are the realm of conflict, but also the realm where God can release us and deliver us, where the Spirit of God reaches us at the seat of our intellect and our emotions and our will. It is the realm of those deep, surging urges which rise within us and create either restlessness or a sense of peace, depending on the source from which they come. So don't read this as though it were something out in space somewhere. These blessings are yours in your inner experience, now, if you are in Jesus Christ.

All of this comes to us in one great package "in Christ." If you are not a Christian you cannot possibly claim these benefits. They are not yours, they don't belong to you. You cannot buy them, you cannot discover them, you cannot sign up for a course about them in a university. You can't send away ten dollars in the mail and get a pamphlet that will lead you to them. There is no way you can appropriate them unless you are in Christ. But if you are "in Christ" there is nothing to keep you from having all of them, every moment of every day. That is why it is so important that we discover what they are.

These are much more than mere doctrinal ambiguities, mere theological ideas. They are facts, foundational truths which undergird us in every moment of our life. And, unless you understand those facts, you can't utilize them, you can't benefit from them. In that way they are like natural laws. The laws of nature operate regardless of how we feel.

With natural forces, say electricity, it doesn’t matter how I feel at the moment; it behaves the way it does and it is up to me to discover how it works if I want to utilize it. The same thing is true of these great facts. They will do you any good if you don't discover what they are and believe them enough to operate on the basis of them. We couldn't possibly cover in one message all that is wrapped up in these great truths, and I don't want to attempt it. We want to take our time going through this passage so that we might grasp these fundamental facts. So I would like to center this morning on the two great facts which are mentioned here concerning the work of the Father.

He chose us

Take this first statement:

⁴ For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. (Ephesians 1:4)

Here we are dealing with what theologians call the doctrine of election, i.e., the fact that God chose us to become Christians and to be in Christ before the very foundation of the world. If you begin to try to understand that truth, your mind will boggle. That is a fantastic statement, isn't it? We struggle with it, we question it, and therefore I submit to you that we really don't believe it, because oftentimes it doesn't show up in our actions, which is where the proof of our belief comes.

We struggle with it’s nature, "How could this be? How could God choose us, and yet still offer a choice that we must make?" And thus we sense the struggle between the doctrines of the free will of man and the sovereign election of God. Many have wrestled with this great truth and have tried to explain it with various suggestions:

Some say, "Well, God can foresee the future, so he looks down and sees that we are going to make a choice, and on the basis of seeing what we will determine to do he then says, 'All right, I'll elect them to be part of my process.'" That sounds very simplistic, and it is, because it is not what the Scriptures say. Some say, "Well, God sees what we will be when we become Christians. He sees the value that we will have toward him, and so he chooses us on that basis." Again, nothing could be more unscriptural than that idea! You see, it is true that we are chosen of God. In John 6, Jesus said so himself. He said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him," (John 6:44). That's putting it plainly, isn't it? You can't come to Christ unless you are drawn by the Father. God has to initiate the activity. But in Matthew 11 Jesus made his appeal directly to the will of the individual, saying, " Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). And that means it's up to you. You can never become a Christian until you choose to come. So both of these facts are true.

And though we can't reconcile them in our puny intellects, nevertheless we can accept them as facts and realize that it is true that we must choose. The good news is offered to us, but if we don't respond we will never obtain the benefit of it. But if we do respond, if we come to Christ, if we believe in him, then we discover a great fact: God began the process, it was he who chose us, and we have been drawn to him by his Spirit at work in our spirit. That is amazing, isn't it? But it is the first thing that Paul wants us to know.

And then we struggle with the timing of this: "before the creation of the world." Before we existed, before we ever took form seminally, let alone actually, we were chosen in him. Before there was an earth, no matter how far back in time you put it -- billions of years into the past -- yet the statement stands that you and I, as the very persons we are among the billions of people we could have been, were chosen in him. How could that be? Do you see how that boggles the mind? We must realize that we are dealing with an Eternal Being, one with whom there is not past or future, but only an eternal present, only one great now who therefore reads our future as clearly as he does the past, who determines all things by the counsel of his will, as the next verse has it, and brings them to pass so that they all work together to accomplish what he wants done. And we can only sit in amazed wonder and say, "Lord, how great thou art!"

"Chosen in him before the creation of the world!" Do you see what that does for our sense of identity as Christians? We are not afterthoughts in God's working. We are not accidental members of his body. There are no second class citizens in the church of Jesus Christ; we are all equal, chosen of the Father, selected to be members of his family, added to the new creation, the new order that God is producing in this world. What a fantastic privilege! It is not because of anything in us, as we'll see in a moment, but because of everything in him.

The purpose of all this is that we are to be holy and blameless. God says that he chose us for that reason, that we might be holy and blameless! Now, I'd like to ask a question: How many of you here are holy? Raise your hands, would you? Yes, we do have a few. Well, what's the matter with the rest of you?

These great facts are so revolutionary, so radical, that we hesitate to believe them! We hesitate to apply them to ourselves despite the fact that they are true. The reason we hesitate is that we have such distorted ideas of what these words mean. We think that holiness is sanctimoniousness and that it results from a kind of theological de-worming process we must go through, and we don't want to claim that for ourselves. But it is not that at all. Holiness means "to be restored to the originally intended functioning," to be put to the proper use, that's all. Physical wholeness prevails when the body works the way it was supposed to. And when your whole being functions the way it was intended to do, you are holy.

Now how many of you have had your whole being restored to proper functioning? You may not always function properly, but you have the capacity to do so. Ah, that's better! There are even more holy people here than I thought! It is when we begin to understand these words that we can apply them and accept them.

Now let's look at the other one, blameless. Most people refuse to think of themselves as blameless because they know that they have done many things for which they ought properly to be blamed. That is, they have made choices, deliberately, against light, against knowledge of the results. They have purposely done that which they knew they ought not to have done. They could have done otherwise but didn't. And who is not in that boat? Therefore they feel they are to be blamed. But they are confusing this word with another, because it is not sinless. Never having done anything wrong is sinlessness. But you can be sinful and still be blameless by handling your sin in the right way.

If you did something that injured someone else, and the full result of it was not visible to you when you did it but afterward you saw how much you had hurt the person, and you acknowledged it, apologized to them, did what you could to restore it, then there would be nothing further you could do. And from that point on you would be blameless. You would not be sinless -- you still did it -- but you also did all you could to handle it rightly.

The idea is the same with our offenses against God. What can you do about your sins, your evil? You can't go back and straighten it all out, no, but you can accept his forgiveness. You can acknowledge your need. You can put it back into his capable hands to straighten out the results. And when you've done that, you're blameless! How many blameless people are here today? Yes, that's better. And that is what God has chosen us to do -- to learn this wonderful process of being whole and blameless. Notice that these things are to be reckoned true even though we don't feel that way. That is the way it is in nature also.

You get up in the morning and look at the sun and say, "The sun rose this morning." It looks as though the sun were traveling around the earth. But you know better than that, don't you? You look out across the landscape and it looks flat, and you say, "The earth must be flat." No, you know better. Even though you can't see that the earth is round and revolves around the sun, you have learned to accept these facts despite your feelings. That is exactly what we are called on to do here. Accept the fact that God chose you in Christ to make you holy and blameless. And as you walk before him in his prescribed way, which is what you are. And then rejoice in that great fact.

Now look at the second great aspect which is recorded of the work of the Father, and which is related to the first,

He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. (Ephesians 1:5-6)

As the time is short and we want to have sufficient time to celebrate the Lord’s Supper this morning, we will have to leave our consideration of this second great aspect of the work of the Father on our behalf until the next time we gather.

Now, my question is: Are you enjoying your inheritance? Do you wake in the morning and remind yourself at the beginning of the day, "I'm a child of the Father." "I've been chosen by him to be a member of his family." "He imparts to me all the richness of his life." "His peace, his joy, his love are my legacy, my inheritance from which I can draw every moment of life. And have them no matter what my circumstances may be."

Do you reckon on these unseen things which are real and true? -- because, if you do, when you trust in God's grace to be your present experience, you can know that it is true of you what the Father said three times about his Son Jesus. God the Father, looking down at you can say, "This fellow here, this girl there, this man, this woman -- this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.” That is our inheritance.