Ephesians 1:1-14
So we are going to begin the book of Ephesians today and we’ll be here for the next three months. A couple of comments real quick. We have spent the last seven months in the Gospels studying people that met Jesus and there’s been great fruit from that in this church. I want to just tell you, I think I mentioned this a week or two ago, but we had a whole handful of people, mostly adults, make commitments to follow Jesus and be baptized over the spring. We’ve done a lot of other wonderful things in the church, outreaches. Of course, I mentioned our youth camp and VBS, all very significant things and a lot of wonderful ministry times. You know, it’s just a beautiful thing to be, for example, at a church camping trip and seeing a teenager engaging a youth leader in tears getting prayer by the side of the lake. And, you know, I’ve seen 500 things like that happen in the last season in this church.
And it’s just wonderful evidence that God is moving in so many ways among us in the last season. And I don’t know about you, but do you ever read on social media? There’s a lot of stuff. I don’t know why it pops up for me, and I’m only on like one platform, and I’m barely on it, but I see a lot of articles about people deconstructing and people falling away from the faith and leaving the established church. There’s a big movement now about how like the whole Sunday morning thing is a farce. Have you guys seen any of this? Anyone else seen this? There’s a big movement now about like church was never meant to be, you know, a once a week thing where you meet and have a building and like paid staff and like kids church. And it’s like, it’s a rising thing kind of on the heels of the deconstruction movement.
And I just, I just, I see a lot of that. People trying to say church isn’t this and it wasn’t this. And I just want to tell you, I want to affirm you. We are doing a great thing here. We are preaching the gospel here. We are serving the poor here. We’re training leaders. We are making disciples. We’re praying for the sick.
We’re teaching children the ways of God. We’re turning people away from sin. We are worshiping in spirit and in truth. And these are good and right and simple, plain things that the scripture calls us to do. So I would just encourage you. I feel a tremendous amount of the pleasure of God on our church as we seek imperfectly to follow him. And I think you should too. I would just tell you, just receive the delight of the Lord. Like, what we’re doing right now matters. There’s not a lot of groups on the earth that are getting together trying to be good, trying to find God and follow God.
Most people that are on the earth are getting together for pleasure, entertainment, and wickedness. And us making commitments to have, you know, hamburgers together on Tuesday night and go to a ladies’ retreat and meet on a Sunday morning faithfully and study the word of God. Guys, it’s a narrow road thing. and the Lord delights in this. He really does. I feel his delight as we seek to follow him in that. So be encouraged. We are in Ephesians. We’re going to begin studying Ephesians verse by verse. Several of you guys have told me that you’ve already been reading it or listening to it. Good job. Let’s give everyone a hand for that. Keep reading. I encourage you. And we’re going to start the book this morning, and I’ll give you the theme of this book as I see it. And it is, what is this book about? It is simply that the gospel of Jesus, that is knowing the love of God and knowing what God has done for us, if we will receive that and walk in that, it will radically transform every part of our lives. That’s what this book’s about. It starts out giving a lot of theology saying this is what God has done for us. And then the book, as it gets into the middle and final section, it says, and that works out in your life in this way, and it transforms you. I think we have a really neat opportunity in the next three months to digest this and let the Holy Spirit transform us. Amen? So let’s do that. Let’s pray, and we’re going to look at the first 14 verses.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we come in your presence this morning. We wait on you.
We want to hear what you’re saying to the church. So we say, Holy Spirit, come among us. Move, blow like the wind, rage like the fire. pour out like the water all ways that you’re described in the word of God and we say that we want you we want to have ears to hear what you’re saying
we know like somebody said earlier that your word never returns void and that you’re always sowing so we give you permission this morning and in this next season these next few months
as we’re in your word we say that you have permission to transform us to sow into our field to sow whatever seed you would you are the good sower you are the good shepherd and we trust you i pray that we’d be transformed as we go through this book and lord i invite your power to come this morning would you come and would you open our eyes to see things as you see them lord and that our lives would be changed Holy Spirit, come among us and teach us. We want to hear you.
So we just open our lives to you, God, and say, have your way in us. May it be.
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to read 1 through 14, but first I want to give you guys a little background on the book of Ephesians. And I don’t want to spend too much time on this because I want to get into the passage. but I think it is important for us to understand what in the world is Ephesians. So just a very quick background for us, and you can find a lot more of this if you go and investigate yourself. But this is a letter that was written to a specific church and a group of believers in a city called Ephesus. That was around, it’s in modern-day Turkey. We have a couple maps I just thought for fun to show you. And so if you look down there in the bottom right, you’ll see Jerusalem. That’s where it all went down. And then if you just curve up there to the kind of the middle of the map in the red, you’ll see Ephesus. So it’s right there on the coast, and it was a city that, as I said, is in modern-day Turkey. We have another map of the city of Ephesus itself, which is really cool because it kind of gives you an idea.
They’ve obviously, you know, can’t see this, but this has been reconstructed through, you know, archaeological finds and such. But it’s very interesting to see just some of the things that, if you look at this, it helps us understand what went down in Ephesus. As we read in the scripture, of course, right on the left side, that was the water where the coast was, and there was a lot of trade that happened. And then this huge mountain in the middle, the green space, was a large undulation of earth that rose up, and then behind it was one of the temples. And I’ll talk about that in a little bit because that was one of the key central things of the city was their worship. So you can, again, look more, but I just think it’s fun sometimes to look at these maps and learn little bits and pieces about the places that this passage is written to. And Paul spent several years there starting a church in Acts chapter 19 and 20. We have a record of Paul, the apostle going and doing all kinds of wonderful things. And it’s just a wild story, guys. It’s a wild story.
If you haven’t read Acts, it’s a great book to read. And in Acts 19 and 20, Paul spends time in Ephesus for several years. And the Spirit of God comes powerfully on this group of people. This is the one where you might remember they’re shouting out, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. This was Artemis, one of the Greek gods, also known as Diana. And they believed there was this belief that there was this meteor that came out of the sky at some point. And it landed right there. And they thought that was a sacred piece of the Godhead. And so they named that as they built this temple and worship around it.
And they literally were worshiping this rock. And they built their church, their temple in that area. And so when Paul and the disciples came and began proclaiming Jesus Christ is the Lord. And you can be forgiven of your sins. It was an affront to them. Because they had lived in this culture of just awful practices. It was very evil if you look into what the worship looked like. And so that’s why in Acts, when Paul’s preaching Jesus, they’re shouting out, no, no, no, great is Diana. Great is Diana. We worship Diana.
We worship Artemis. Great is that. That is the God of the Ephesians. But you know what? That didn’t stop God. And he just like pulverized that city with the love of Jesus. It was awesome. Again, you can go read. The Spirit of God came very powerfully in a small group. Many miracles happened.
This is where Paul, they take handkerchiefs that Paul touched and take them to sick people, and those people get healed just by proxy of touching a handkerchief where the power of God had resided. Many were converted. Magicians, you might remember, began turning from their magic practices and their worship of Diana and Artemis and the temple, and they left it behind. And at one point, they made a big fire. Again, this is Acts 19 and 20, and they burned. And it gives you the value of how much it cost, all the books they burned that were dedicated to this other magic religion in the worship of Diana. And I did the math. It came out to $12 million in today’s currency. So they burnt $12 million of paraphernalia of worshiping idols in the name of Jesus. There was a big riot that happened. Paul was manhandled. And it goes on and on and on. Later on, Paul puts Timothy in charge of this church. So Timothy became pastor of that church. And many believe that this is actually where Mary, the mother of Jesus, lived. We don’t know that, but that’s one of the traditions.
And then you might remember if you’ve read in Revelation, there’s seven letters to seven churches, and one of them is Ephesians again. So it comes up again. We just see all this information about this church. And Paul is writing this particular letter from prison about 10 years after all that stuff I told you that happened in Acts 19. Everybody breathe in.
That’s a short history of the church of Ephesus. And before we jump into the passage, one last thing I just want to say is that, you know, you got to think about when this was written, it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t like an AI. Like, hey, what’s AI called? What do you call it?
Garbage. Chat, GBT, Alexa or Siri, like all this. Yeah, you don’t be like, hey, like, can you write a letter to my mom and tell her happy Mother’s Day? You know, like it wasn’t like that. It was like you had to get parchment. You had to get like ink. And like you had to think through this thing was traveling probably on foot or on horseback to other people far away. And, you know, just the idea of writing a letter and it getting transmitted to people hundreds of miles away was a big, big deal. So he really thought through is what I’m trying to say. He really thought through what he wrote.
And this letter went and was read to the churches and says a lot to us today. So today we’re going to look at the passage, and I’ve titled this The Blessed Return Blessing. And what that means, guys, is people that are blessed, when we realize how blessed we are, the first thing we do is we return that blessing back to God. And this is where the letter starts. And, you know, knowing who you are in your Christian faith is extremely important. When you know who you are, you know what to do. When you don’t know who you are, it’s difficult. I read this, it was a thing on men, men’s discipleship, and it said that the best way to destroy a man is to take away his purpose.
When a man has no purpose, he doesn’t know what to do. And that goes for all of us. So knowing our purpose, knowing who we are, it’s sort of like if we had a baseball game,
and I was the team captain, And I said, okay, you got your glove, great. Run out in the field. Well, where do I go? What are the positions in baseball?
Pitcher, shortstop, very important. First base, second base, third base, right field, center field, outfield, left field, whatever, yeah. Catcher, very important. What if, like, you were just given a glove and, like, go out in the field, and everyone just went out in the field and there was like no, I don’t know who I am. I mean, what would happen? Do you think you’d win? Probably lose. So just like that, if we don’t know who we are, but if you know I’m going to shortstop and no ball’s getting by me, then you’re going to be effective. And so in the same way, if we know who we are in Christ,
it strengthens us to have a place to stand on and live from. So let’s read chapter 1, verse 1 through 14, and I’m going to share a few thoughts on it.
Ephesians 1.1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to the saints who are at Ephesus and those who are faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 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 blameless before him, in love he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself, according to the kind intention of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved. 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 he made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his kind intention which he purposed in him, with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In him also we’ve obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to his purpose, who works all things after the counsel of his will, to the end that we who were first to hope in Christ should be to the praise of his glory.
In him you also, after listening to the message of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who was given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of his glory. Amen.
So, Ephesians 1, chapter 1, verse 1 through 14. That was a lot, wasn’t it? That was a lot of theology. Now, I’m going to try to break it down and say, what in the world does that mean on August 2nd? 2026 for you and I. And the great news is it means a lot. It means a lot of wonderful things.
I’m going to kind of skip around. I have a lot of backgrounds, but I don’t want to spend too much time on that. Paul is known for writing very long sentences. That was in the Greek, that’s just one or two sentences. So for us, I think it’s broken up to three or four, but it’s just a long sentence. And some people believe that actually is a poem. This is not, you know, it’s not for sure. But there’s a lot of assonance and other literary language and use of different things. So it’s very possible if you look at that in the actual Greek. It could have been a poem. We don’t know. Either way, it’s very poetic.
Mention some things, adoption and predestination, which I’m, for the sake of time, not going to talk about. But if those are the things that you say, well, I want to know what that means, let’s go to coffee. We’ll talk about that another time because it’s not central to the passage. What is central to the passage and what I want to focus the next 15 or 20 minutes on is that I believe this passage calls us to three things. And the first thing it calls us to is embrace, to embrace our identity in who we are. We just read a lot in those short verses about stuff that’s been done for you. Maybe you didn’t understand it all. I’m going to break it down because there’s some weighty theological terms. Now, if you think about this, I want you to think about everyone who’s hungover right now in Augusta, right? Or the people that had one-night stands last night.
The people that are sleeping right now in their own urine. This is the world outside of church. It’s not as clean as the world makes it look. The world without Christ is depressed, anxious, scared, and lost, and often destroying itself.
And so for Paul to say this to a bunch of people that came out of idol worship is super significant. He’s telling them, you used to be one way, but now because of the work of Jesus, because of the love of God, you are this. And guys, we are also coming out of the worship of idols and magic books and all sorts of things that we sought to destroy us. You’re in this room right now, including all the kids and teenagers. You’re here because you’re seeking something better for your life. You’re pressing on. You wanted to leave that wide road of destruction. And you said, there’s a better way, there’s truth, there’s a way to orient my life that’s fruitful and peaceful and full of joy and love and forgiveness. And so, we, before Christ, we were one way, but in Christ now, we are another way. And some of us can relate to that.
Others can’t. You know, some of you guys may say, well, I’ve never really had a real bad life. Well, good. That’s great. You’ve missed out on a lot of bad things. Praise God. And others in this room right now, you’re thinking, gosh, yeah, I really know what that means. I really know what it means to be redeemed. And so there’s a contrast. And, you know, he starts here with some hyperbole.
If you look in verse 3, he says, Blessed be God who blessed us with every blessing. It’s just the blessing rolling, this trinity of blessings. God is blessed who blessed us with all these blessings. And then for the next several verses, he lists what those are. and I’m gonna go through them quickly with you. In verse four, so what are those spiritual blessings? What are those blessings in Christ? Well, in verse four, he says, you were chosen before the world was made.
So think about that for a moment. There is a living God who chose you, who thought about you. He knows what you’d look like. He knew what your hair color would be like. He knew what would make you laugh. He knew what your favorite flower would be. He knew the things you would like to eat and not eat. And before the world was made, he had you and I. He had his creations on his mind.
And he chose that you and I would be redeemed through his forgiveness. Isn’t that great? Verse then four continues. It says that you’re holy and blameless. So who are we in Christ? Who is our deity? We have the capacity to be holy and blameless. This is incredible to think about because there’s a loud voice of guilt and shame in the world. right now. And we as followers of Christ have the capacity to be people that are holy and blameless, that you can have a clear conscience over all your lusts and all your lies and all the hatred and bitterness maybe that you’ve carried. Because of the work of Christ, the things you’ve done can be washed away and we can walk in blamelessness. Guys, having a clear conscience is an incredible gift. Most people on the planet, if you even try to start getting deep with them in a conversation, they’ll break eye contact because there’s guilt and fear and shame. And Paul is saying, you have the capacity because of the work of Christ to be blameless with a clear conscience.
In verse five, he says that you were adopted by God. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a moment, but that we were adopted by God. Then in verse 7, he says that you’re redeemed and you’re forgiven. Redeemed, bought back, forgiven. Abby and I were at Barnes & Noble, one of her favorite places. We still go there, even though there’s been shootings there recently near the mall. So we pray ourselves up and go, and I’ve not heard gunshots yet. And we were in there last week, and we were at the register and we were talking to this young lady. Her name was Dusk, beautiful name. And so we’re checking out and everything and I was like, Dusk, what’s the last good book you read? And she lit up, lover of books. And she began telling me all about this book.
It was like the fantasy genre, you know, and it was something about this knight who had, you know, something happened to this knight. And she tells me this story, and we’re sitting there, and there’s a crowd growing of a line. But she didn’t care. She’s like, someone asked me about my book.
And so she tells me, and I said, that sounds like a great book. And then I said, what’s, like, if you could sum the whole book up in one sentence, what would it be? Like the whole book.
And she said, well, it’s the story of a knight being restored. And she said, boy, that’s a good question. And she thought about it, and then she wrote this down for me. She said, if I could sum it up in one sentence, it would be this. No transgression is beyond redemption.
Wow. And I said, that kind of sounds like the gospel of Jesus.
And I asked her to write it down, so now I have a new bookmark. Lord, get her. May it be. So we have the redemption and forgiveness. No transgression that you or I have done is beyond redemption. In verse 9 and 10, it says that we’re part of God’s plan. That he has a plan. That your life right now, even if your life is a disappointment to you,
that you’re part of a plan. God has a plan for you, and he’s orchestrating your life, and that you can align yourself with that rather than fight against it. In verse 11, it says that we have an inheritance, so there’s something coming great for us. And then in verse 13, it says that we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit. So this is just an overview quickly of in verse 3. He says, you have all these spiritual blessings, and we bless God who’s blessed us with all these blessings. And then Paul says, I’m just going to list them for you. And so there we have a list of some of them. And just for a moment, you might look at that and say, big deal. Let’s just think for a moment about the contrast of these things. Because this is narrow road stuff. The contrast to this is what the world’s living in right now. And so I’ll have these on the wall also. The opposite of being chosen before the world was made was you’re left out. You’re neglected. Have you ever felt neglected? Have you ever felt left out? And those that don’t have the love of God, maybe they’re trying to attach themselves to a person or a thing or a substance or, you know, an activity or a promotion or an amount of money or, you know, something they’re doing. But it’s an attempt to feel a sense of purpose. And often it leaves us wanting. The next one, the capacity to be holy and blameless. Well, if we’re not that, we’re guilty and stained. And as I said, just the world is walking around feeling guilty. The opposite of adoption is alone, being forsaken. The world without Christ is forsaken and alone. We’re redeemed and forgiven. The opposite of that is that we’re, instead of being redeemed and bought back, we’re still owned by Satan. We’re owned by shame. Our master, from the time we wake up to the time we go to sleep, is sin and shame and Satan.
And the opposite we have is that we could be redeemed by God. Part of his plan, the opposite of that is directionless and without any purpose. And again, just we’re looking at the narrow road and the wide road. We’re contrasting those. Without Christ, we have no purpose. I mean, maybe your purpose is to make money and be healthy. And I would say, well, those are decent things. But you know what? You were made for more than that. You were made for way more than just to make money and have a career.
The opposite of having an inheritance is to have nothing beyond this life or death. In other words, when you die one day, it’s over. You have nothing else. You have no value. Beyond just your flesh and blood, you have nothing. And the opposite of being sealed in the spirit is unsealed, which I would say is hopelessness and insecurity.
So knowing this embracing our identity, Paul gives us this list of theological terms that tell us that we have this incredible definition by God, identity by God. And you might look at this again, and you might look at these things and say, well, big deal. Like, yeah, of course, I’m a Christian. I get all those things. Here’s what I hope you’ll remember when you leave here today.
In this passage, there is no talk anywhere about your good works.
In all of that, the way God looks at you and I and defines us has nothing to do with how good you’ve been.
It’s all about what he’s done. And also in this list, there is nothing about how bad you’ve been. Just think about that for a moment. We spend so much of our lives trying to be good and maybe trying not to be bad, so Santa Claus will get us a big bag of presents, right? I mean, isn’t that what we teach our kids? Maybe faulty.
The gospel says all these things that God says about you that Paul lists off here. I can just see Paul writing this. I just think he had a big smile on his face. He’s like, you’re this and this, and we get this and we get this. and it has nothing to do with you. See, in historical documents, I looked up a few famous documents, and they all tend to list our responsibility in the agreement. Several examples are the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. They talk about all these benefits we’re going to get, but they also list the things that you have to do as a citizen to get those things. God’s document, the gospel for you and I, has none of that. It’s intensely not focused on you and I, and it is intensely focused on God’s personality.
And if you even look in here, you see things in like, in verse like seven, the riches of his grace in verse eight, he lavished his, he lavished that upon us. There’s this description of the personality of God, and it’s not about us. And the attention, guys, in this first passage is very important. It’s foundational. The attention is drawn away from ourself, and it’s drawn onto the Lord. In other words, prepare to be very offended. You’re not part of this equation. This is not about you and I, And it never was and it never will be. Thank God. It’s about what he has chosen to do for us. So rather than striving for something, and some of us in this room right now, like you’re here because you’re seeking and you’re striving after righteousness.
But see, Christians don’t strive. We rest in what has been done for us. We receive. And as we receive, our lives are surrendered to him. Eight times in this passage, Jesus is named, and I counted the pronouns, 30 different times in what we just read he’s referred to. Guys, 30 times in the opening of Paul’s letter, he refers to Jesus Christ. What I’m trying to say at this first part as we get to the second two and conclude is that the focus here is on what God has done. It is about his work.
And Paul’s trying to tell us, give your attention to the giver of blessing. Our calling is to see, receive that, and bless him in return. Well, two other callings that I’ll deal with a little more quickly. And the second one is the call to deal with me.
Because I just told you some wonderful things.
But there’s a tremendous problem.
It’s you.
I looked up in the Webster’s Dictionary and discovered that the word I is a word. It’s an actual word. It’s a letter, but it’s also a word. I wrote here a small but very powerful word that will always be in violent conflict with the work of God in your life. Me. If it’s dealt with, your spiritual life will flourish. If it’s not, your spiritual life will stagnate. We spend so much time feeding ourselves, looking for things to fill us, to make I number one. And we have all these titles that we might walk about. And Paul’s here saying, you’re this. And maybe these are some of your titles.
I’m a doctor. I’m straight. I’m gay. I’m famous. I’m a failure. I’m a singer. I’m a dropout. I’m independent. I’m a husband. I’m a wife.
I’m a millionaire. I’m homeless. I’m poor. I’m a grandma. I’m a Sagittarius. I’m a first chair flute player. I’m a Gen Xer. I’m a boomer. I’m Gen Z. I’m a housewife.
We have all these names, these things we put on us, some good, some not so good. And in this passage, we just don’t see any of that. I was on an airplane a few months ago, and I had to wait for five hours on the runway. combined two runways everything went wrong so if you’re waited on an airplane it kind of stinks and you hear all the you know it’s like okay i think lord of the flies is about to happen on this airplane like you know 30 minutes in you see people starting to you know and then an hour in they’re asking for water and then two hours in this half five hours guys we sat there five hours Fortunately for me, I had just bought a book that looked interesting to me. It’s called Beyond Life and Death by Jet Li. And so I read this entire book on that airplane with a little light.
And I want to read you a really neat quote from it because this was very, very meaningful to me. We’re talking about getting rid of ourselves.
And I’ve learned this because some of my best friends have been Asian and Chinese. And so I’ve learned that Chinese, they have a Chinese name, and then they’ll tend to have an English name. So whenever I meet a Chinese person, when I become closer to them, I’ll always ask them, what’s your Chinese name? In fact, my brother married a Chinese girl, and they had been married like two years, and we were sitting there at dinner one night. It’s like, so what’s your Chinese name? And she was like, oh. And she told me all about it and told me what it meant. Meanwhile, my brother, her husband, was sitting there like, what? You have a Chinese name? It’s kind of funny.
So, just to give you some context, because Jet Li is Chinese. My path through life has given me many names. Each name tells a part of my story. None of them expresses the whole truth of my being. My given name is Li Lianzi.
In 1982, I acted in my first movie. The publicity team at that time thought Li Lianzi was too difficult for the English speakers to pronounce. So they decided we needed a different name from that market. I remember I saw a promotional poster for my movie from the Philippines, and it listed my name as Jet Li. I asked them, who’s Jet Li? They said, that’s you. We named you that. Because Jet sounds like Jai, your personal name. You move so fast, you’re like a jet.
To this day, I still don’t know who came up with the name Jet Li, but to the most of the world, that’s been my name ever since. That movie became a massive success. In the film, I played a young warrior monk named Yu Huan. After the film’s release, I became Yu Huan in many people’s minds. If they saw me on that street, they’d say, Yu Huan! Later, I played a folk hero, Wang Fai Hong, in another movie, and the exact same thing happened. In the Taoist tradition, we are given another name, which my teacher gave me, Tian Yan.
Then, in 1987, I was given the name, my courtesy name, by an author, Yang Zong. You keeping track of all these guys? Then in 1997,
another mentor gave me another name,
Ngodrob Dorje. Then in 2003, I made my first pilgrimage to India, and they gave me this name, Karma Ningjai Bu. His conclusion.
From Li Liangje to Jet Li to Yu Wan to Yang Zong to Tianyang to Yanggrab Dorje
It’s a very introspective book. Who am I when all those names are stripped away from me? And I would just ask you to think about your life and all the names maybe that you put on yourself. All the things, the titles, the things that maybe you think and I think are the things that hold us up and define us, you know? And I would just suggest to you that in the eyes of God, like some of those things are bad and we want to wash those off of our lives. And some of those things are good, but in the eyes of God, that’s not what you are. See, I’m not a pastor. I’m not a father. I’m not a husband. I am loved by God.
at the core of who we are. And not that some of those things aren’t good, but we want to disassociate from what maybe we would say, this is the me that I’m going to bring to the table and realize that who I am is based on the love of God for me. And there’s two very destructive voices that are always speaking to us. If you’re taking notes, I would encourage you to think about this part. The first voice is shame.
Shame is always trying to define you and I. You know, April said this when she preached a few weeks ago, that there’s advertisements everywhere around us, and they’re all telling us what we lack. Every ad you look at, it’s there because it’s trying to get you to buy something that you don’t have yet that you need. The message under that is you don’t have this yet, but you’ll be better if you do.
All day long, that voice of shame is telling you and I, you’re not complete, you’re not good enough, you did this bad thing, and this is who you are. And there’s another just as dangerous voice that’s always trying to define us, and that is praise.
Praise is always trying to define us. It’s this looking to be praised, looking to be affirmed, looking to be recognized, looking to be noticed. Like how many times have you checked your latest post on social media wondering how many likes you got and how many people recognized you? And it’s very dangerous. So those are two voices that are constantly coming at us, shame and praise. And, you know, I would also suggest that those two voices work in our relationships with one another. See, like, if I’m defining you by either shame or praise, I’m not loving you for who you are. And if you’re defining me, like, if you like this church because you think I’m a good preacher, you’re only seeing a part of who I am, but eventually when I disappoint you, you will not like me anymore because you’re not loving me conditionally.
You’re loving me on the condition that I preach a good message for you. If you get married and you think your spouse is gorgeous, but one day that changes, Your love stops because you were defining them by that thing that you praised them by. And, you know, that is something that’s a whole other message, but just getting ourselves out of the equation. And to conclude, the third call is a call to worship. This passage defines us as being loved by God overwhelmingly. It draws us to abandon our focus on ourself. It shows us the character of God that we would become enamored with it. And I believe if we receive these promises, we really are drawn irresistibly to worshiping God. If you look at verse 3 again, he says, blessed be the Lord, right?
Then he tells us all these things, guys. And then at the end of verse 14 where we stopped for today, he says, all of this is to the praise of his glory. In other words, the end caps, the bookends of this whole passage, it starts with praise God because of this, and then it ends with praise God because of this.
A story I’ve told before that I think fits here is I remember years ago we had coffee out there, and we used to keep the coffee out at 10 o’clock when the church service started. And it was like 10.05. And I was fixing the air conditioner. I was trying to do something. I don’t remember what it was. I was running around and a lady walked in and she started getting coffee. And I always felt bad. Like, why are we serving coffee when worship’s happening? We’re basically giving people an excuse to get here late and get their coffee instead of engage in the praise of the wonderful, beautiful, almighty God.
And I said, hey, worship started. Like, you know, get on in there. You know? And she was pouring her coffee, I remember. And she said, oh, it’s okay. It’s only worship.
And my heart just died. Because, number one, to hear her say that, that’s how little she valued this thing that we do. I’m just getting my coffee. It’s just worship. It’s just God the Almighty in there, you know? Like, it’s no big deal. Like, my coffee’s kind of better than God. I’m kind of bored of God, maybe, is what she was saying.
But if we can leave that self-absorbed place, and we can find the awe of God in this, the blessed people return blessing. I want to tell you one last story that I shared this with you guys about a month ago, last time I preached. And my friend who’s battling cancer, I was talking to her again a couple of days ago, and she got breast cancer, and she had a horrible series of surgeries and chemo treatments and had reconstruction begun because it was a double mastectomy. Then that got infected, and then they had to redo everything, and now she’s re-beginning the chemo again because they found another thing behind her, her sternum bone. She’s been dealing with this for like nine months. It’s just awful, just awful. If you’ve ever been with someone who is dealing with cancer, it destroys the person’s body, and it destroys their will. And so I went and spent a day with her old high school friend a month or two ago. And we were talking again a couple weeks, a week or two ago, because my daughter and I were going to go out and we’re trying to plan a visit between all this stuff.
And she was telling me she was meeting with her newest oncologist and she was just like, when’s this going to end? Like, when is this going to end? And she went through this series, and maybe you can relate to this, just this series of like tragic situations. Like I was living my life and then this thing happened to me and it just stopped and it just took everything away from me. And I’m just this shell of who I used to be. And my life now is just going to a hospital three days a week and getting chemo and not having energy the other four days of the week to do anything. And so she’s meeting with her new oncologist and they’re talking about 30 more treatments. And she said this. She said, Jeff, and I said to her, I said, like, when am I going to start winning?
Now, her oncologist had been through her own cancer battle.
And she said this. She said, Christine, you already won.
And then she began to talk to me about how her doctor said, listen, this has happened. But you’ve had 50 great years without cancer. You have a husband. You have two amazing kids. You have an incredible business that’s blessing people. You’re still breathing. You’re still walking. You could get here. And you know what? You’ve got a hope.
You’ve got a chance. You’ve already won. And the doctor reframed it. And is that a brutal thing to tell someone who might be dying? It kind of might be. But at the same time, this person had been through it themselves. And the point of it was you’ve won so much. I know it stinks right now. but you’ve got so much of a blessing that’s covered your life. And let’s focus on that and find a way out of this.
And for her, that was a big turning point out of that hopelessness into thinking, wow, but look what I do have. Look what I have been given in the midst of a very difficult time. And I would just tell you guys today, all of us are in different difficult places, but I want to tell you this. This is what the passage is telling us today. I think it’s prophetic. Guys, you already won.
There’s hard stuff ahead. There’s hard stuff you brought in here. But reframe your mind into the truth that Paul gives us. Inform your face. You won. It’s been done for you and I. We are loved by God and we can choose to walk out of ourselves and walk in that truth. And when we do that, things begin to change.
Amen? All right, let’s stand up.
