Dr. Bradford Reaves
Crossway Christian Fellowship
Hagerstown, MD, USA
www.mycrossway.org
View this and other messages at: https://mycrossway.churchcenter.com/channels/8118
This morning we are beginning a series that I expect will take us through the Summer, unless Jesus comes back first. But I don’t think there is a better and more timely text for us than the Paul’s letter to the Church in Ephesus. Ephesians consists of only six chapters. And in most Bibles it is only four pages long. It contains 155 verses. It will take you only about 20 minutes to read the entire letter aloud. Yet, it is an incredibly powerful letter. Commentator William Barclay calls Ephesians “the queen of the epistles.”
It’s been a long couple of years. I don’t need to remind you of all the difficulties we are facing in this world today, but it is important to remind you because it situates the Word of God into our world and our situation. We’re not studying this in a vacuum.
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"Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 1:1–3 ESV)
The idea of blessings has been adopted and overused in our society today. People will say, “I’m blessed” all the time. And they use the term in a way that simply means “Everything is going great.” Really, it’s become synonymous with the phrase, “I am lucky” or “My circumstances have been kind to me.” (MacArthur)
That is a worldly perspective of blessings. That’s not the kind of blessing I’m talking about today. When I’m talking about blessings. I’m talking about the eternal and spiritual blessings of God that are unique and reserved for His chosen saints.
There was an elderly Italian man, laying on his death bed. The man was weak, his breathing was labored and he could barely walk. But suddenly while he laid there laboring to breath, he began smell the aroma of fresh baked Italian fig cookies- His favorite. With what little strength he could muster, he got out of bed made his ways down the stairs in near agony. If it weren’t for the pain, that sweet aroma would convince him that he might already be in Heaven. Entering the kitchen he found on some wax paper hundreds of his favorite, fresh-baked cookies. Maybe he was in Heaven? Or maybe is loving wife of 60 years was giving him one last treat. With what little energy he had, he stretched his arm to pick up a decadent cookie. He almost had the cookie past his parched lips and into his mouth, when his hand was met with the sharp sting of his wife’s spatula. “No!” his wife said, “They’re for the funeral.” (Credit: Shawn Drake, Sermon Central)
The blessings of this world world are fleeting and guarded by worldly people. The blessings of Christ are there for us today and beyond our funeral. These are blessings are eternal, that comes from heaven, and given to us by God. These are not the lies of prosperity.
Most of us, at one time or another, have dreamed about winning the lottery. Jack Whittaker, who won $315 million in a lottery in West Virginia in 2002, told Time magazine, “I wish that we had torn the ticket up.” Since winning, Whittaker’s daughter and granddaughter died due to drug overdoses. Just eight months after winning, he was robbed of $545,000. His life is a nightmare. “I just don’t like Jack Whittaker. I don’t like the hard heart I’ve got,” he said. “I don’t like what I’ve become.”
Nearly all winners struggle suicide, depression and divorce. “It’s the curse of the lottery because it made their lives worse instead of improving them,” says Don McNay, a financial consultant to lottery winners. Even winning a million dollars isn’t considered a blessing.
The kind of blessing I want to talk to you about and what Paul was writing to believers through the Epistle to the Ephesians is the amazing blessings from God to the believer. Once you open your eyes to what God has done in your life and is going to do in your life, you would never think about trading it, even for a million dollars.
“Our thanks are due to God for all temporal blessings; they are more than we deserve. But our thanks ought to go to God in thunders of hallelujahs for spiritual blessings. A new heart is better than a new coat. To feed on Christ is better than to have the best earthly food. To be an heir of God is better than being the heir of the greatest nobleman. To have God for our portion is blessed, infinitely more blessed than to own broad acres of land. God hath blessed us with spiritual blessings. These are the rarest, the richest, the most enduring of all blessings; they are priceless in value.” (Spurgeon)
If you look at verse 3 for just a moment, you notice that Paul uses the word blessed or blessing three-times. The world blessing comes from the root eulogeo—that’s the verb form from which we get the word eulogy. The first thing he writes to the church after his salutation is “Church, you are to bless God because He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.” What an amazing way to open a letter!
The Christian life is different. We understand God’s blessings and the blessings of life differently. We understand the world different. We understand how we relate to our families differently. And we understand the forces and powers in this world far differently.
Why? Jesus said in Matthew 13:11 “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.” When Christ came to earth, he came preaching, “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand!” (Matthew 4:17). Jesus came offering to all who believe, the riches of the Kingdom of Heaven. That means that we must reject the kingdom of this world and the ruler of this world in exchange for the eternal King and his eternal Kingdom. That’s the mystery or secrets Christ is talking about.
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"making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ" (Ephesians 1:9 ESV)
That’s what this letter is about. It is so we the church can understand and enjoy the blessings of this kingdom today. The blessings of God and His abundance is not something that is far away and elusive to our lives, but they -all of them- are here for everyone who is willing to trade the fleeting and temporal blessings of this world for the eternal blessings of Christ’s Kingdom.
That is the broad picture of what Paul is telling us in the book of Ephesians. The mystery is revealed. It begins with chapter 1, where God lays out this plan according to His purpose. It then goes to chapter 2, which tells us how that plan is activated through the life-giving and unifying gospel of Jesus Christ. It comes into chapter 3 and says that this gospel brings together Jew and Gentile into one body. Then chapters 4 through 6 show us how to apply these to our life.
This book is a treasure trove of blessings. Every single one of you are blessed. And you have access to the riches of heaven. I don’t know if there will be regrets in heaven. But I believe there will be many Christians who will get to heaven and when they look at the riches in heaven, and realize they were available to us right now, they will wonder why they allowed themselves to struggle.
So let’s go back to the introduction and examine Paul’s salutation: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” (Ephesians 1:1). Most of us have an understanding of who Paul was and his role in the early church. He was a Pharisee on the Sanhedrin that was part of the persecution of the early Christians and during those efforts to eradicate the world of the “The Way,” Paul (then Saul) encountered Jesus that resulted in a dramatic conversion and he himself became an ardent follower of Christ. You can find his testimony in Acts 22. Eventually Paul will himself be martyred for his faith in Christ.
Now he defines himself as “an apostle of Christ Jesus.” He is specially called, and commissioned by Christ to be an emissary of Christ. He speaks with the authority of Christ. Essentially, the apostle was called by Christ to do five things. One, preach the gospel. Paul says, “Woe is me if I don’t preach the gospel.” Secondly, teach and pray—if you borrow the language from Acts 6:4, where the apostles said, “We’ll give ourselves to the ministry of prayer and the word. Third, do miracles, 2 Corinthians 12:12, the signs of an apostle. Fourth, Acts 14:23, build leaders. And fifth, write Scripture
The other half of verse 1 is to whom the letter is written: “to the the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” (Ephesians 1:1)
Now the saints are the blessed. The saints are the fruit bearers on the vine of Christ. “Hagios” means “Holy Ones.” Nine times in Ephesians believers are referred to as saints; and what this emphasizes is that they are, before God, righteous. But more than that, having been justified, they are therefore in the process of being sanctified.
“At Ephesus” is where these saints are located. Some scholars believe that Paul wrote this letter as a blanket letter to all his churches in general. There are a number of reasons this may be the case. There are no personal aspects in this letter. There are no references to local people or local events or local issues in this church. And in some ancient manuscripts there’s a blank where it says, “who are at _______” We could just as well say in that blank, “To the saints who are at Crossway Christian Fellowship”
The epistle is written from Paul to all the saints and Paul is writing it from Rome. Paul is a prisoner there during his third missionary tour. This letter will be carried and delivered by Tychicus and Onesimus, along with the letters of Colossians and Philemon.
Verse 2 provides us with a short doxology that is going to lead us into an amazing statement from verse 3-14 (which is one long sentence in the Greek). Ephesians 1:2 “2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace— “charis”, is the undeserved kindness of God toward man. Peace, “eirene”. means peace with God and peace with each other. Those are the first blessings: grace and peace. “Grace is the fountain; peace is the stream that flows from that fountain.” (MacArthur)
Paul was, of course, the preeminent theologian of grace. We will learn much of God’s grace in Ephesians. We understand that grace is God’s unmerited favor toward sinners. However, I wonder how many of us really grasp what that means to us personally?
I recently read a blog by Rachel Watson titled, “Sharing Heaven with Serial Killers.” Watson wrote that Pastor Roy Ratcliff visited serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer many times in prison. Dahmer was convicted of 15 murders and sentenced to many lifetimes in prison. Pastor Ratcliff shared the gospel with Dahmer. Dahmer struggled to grasp the depths of God’s grace, which is not hard to understand why. For someone who had committed such heinous acts, God’s grace must have seemed unattainable. But, in 1994 Dahmer said, “I have accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.” Of course, we don’t know the sincerity of Dahmer’s profession of faith. However, not everyone was happy about Dahmer’s conversion. People don’t want serious killers like Dahmer to go to heaven. People, however, are quite sure that they themselves deserve to go there. And as soon as we think like that, we don’t understand grace.
None of us deserve God’s grace. All of us deserve God’s wrath, justice, and hell. But, thanks be to God, as Paul teaches us in his letter, it is “by grace we have been saved through faith. And this is not our own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9).
This will be a life-transforming book. The blessings that Paul pours out in this book are spiritual blessings, not temporal ones. You can begin by recognizing that you are the blessed because you’re in Christ. You’re blessed in the heavenlies, not in an earthly sense and those blessings don’t terminate on death. Your blessings are anchored in heaven and supply all your needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus.
Will you come to him today?
