Title: What Has God Done For You Lately?
Text: Ephesians 1:3-14
The Big Idea: God is the initiator of mercy and grace in our lives and so much so that all we can do is respond with heartfelt praise.
Introduction:
My son and son-in-law and I watched the Bronco game against San Diego on Sunday… it was admittedly a sorry end to a hopeful season, despite the injuries that dogged the team all year. In fact, I thought Mike Shanahan had pretty much proven his ability as a coach given the youthfulness of his team and the growing promise of a good season this year. So, I have to admit that when I read the paper on Tuesday morning I was surprised to see that Pat Bowlen had fired Mike Shanahan “for the good of the team and everyone concerned.”
Sport writer Susan Davies stated, “Initial reaction by fans was one of shock, A few expressed sadness but the majority supported the decision to fire Broncos coach Mike Shanahan. Season ticket holder Cris Mabon explained it this way, ‘If a guy doesn’t get the job done – you cut him loose.” (Susan Davies, Fans reaction to Shanahan firing, KOAA.com, 1/1/2009)
Over the last couple of days I have collected a few fan reactions to Shanahan’s firing but the one that intrigued me most was one by a fan named Jon Hawkins. He was quoted in the Denver Post on December 31, 2008. He said, “It is time to move on. History doesn’t repeat itself. What have you done for me lately?”
I can’t say that I think it is necessarily a coherent statement, but who among us can reel off a great spontaneous quote with a newscaster’s mic in one’s face while the cameras are rolling? However I was taken by the question he was apparently posing to Mike Shanahan, “What have you done for me lately?” It just so happened that a few weeks ago, I posed that same question in a proposed sermon title for today.
We live in what some describe as a disposable culture where we feel little loyalty to anyone or anything. People change churches, switch insurance companies, lay-off long time employees, and fire coaches at the slightest hint of dissatisfaction or the hope of a better deal or something bigger and better. If we want a change, we make it. We live in a culture where we dispose of one person and acquire the services of another based on what is in it for “me.”
The fan posed that question to Mike Shanahan and rhetorically anticipating either “nothing” or “not nearly enough” determined that Mike Shanahan was history. What if we were to pose that same question to God? What has God done for you lately? Nothing? Not nearly enough? Are you ready to give God the boot? Are you poised to sack God? Has God disappointed you to the point that for the good of all concerned, you are going to can God? Are you planning to put a pink-slip in God’s mailbox this year?
Before you do, I would like for us to look at what God has done and is doing for us keeping in mind the fact that, “God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we belong to Christ.” Ephesians 1:3 This morning what God has done for us in heavenly places is now what God has done for us in the concrete world.
The first spiritual blessing is this:
1. God loved us and chose us.
“Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure.” Ephesians 1:4-6
Before there ever was a world as we know it, God loved us and chose us… his unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family. And this gave him great pleasure. Before Genesis 1:1… God loved us and chose us to be his in and through Christ.
One of the wonders I have experienced and observed over the years is the way we love our children and our grandchildren, before they are. A little girl may dream of one day having a real baby. In time she meets and marries a man who loves her dearly and wants to spend the rest of his life with her. They decide to have a child and she becomes pregnant. The couple loves and longs for that baby long before the baby is and when the baby is born the tenderness and love they feel for that little one is inexpressible.
Annie was an adventurous orphan girl at New York City’s Hudson Street Home for Girls during the Great Depression. Miss Hannigan was the proprietor and generally set about to make life miserable for the girls. She forced them to scrub floors in the middle of the night, sew piecework strips of fabric, peel potatoes, and wash mildewed walls. The children dreamed of being adopted.
One day, billionaire philanthropist Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks decided to improve his public image by borrowing little Annie for a week. His secretary, Grace Farrell went to the orphanage to pick up little Annie and escort her to the Warbucks mansion. She is amazed by the beauty of the place, the immense floral displays, balconies, spiral staircases, and stained glass windows. She feels as if she is in heaven.
Grace asked Annie, “What would you like to do first?” and Annie responded, “Well, I could do the windows first, then the floors, that way if I drip…” Then Grace interrupted her, “Annie, you don’t understand. You won’t have to do any cleaning while you are with us. You are our guest.”
Later as the maids and butlers dance around the room and prepare the banquet table for an enormous feast, all Annie can say is, “I think I am going to like it here!” (Annie, Columbia Pictures, 1982, directed by John Huston, written by Harold Gray and Thomas Meehan, PreachingToday.com)
Such is the love of God as we tell it and try to understand it in human terms. What has God done for you lately? God has chosen you and loved you and joyfully welcomed you into his family. “See how much our heavenly Father loves us for he allows us to be called His children. And we really are!” I John 3:1
So we like little Orphan Annie find ourselves in this new spiritual place and we say, “I think I am going to like it here!” What God has done for you lately is this: You are held secure in the arms of your Heavenly Father… nothing you have ever done or will ever do can separate you from the love of God. You really are God’s chosen child and that will never change. That is what God has done for you lately.
A second spiritual blessing is found in our understanding of how God made us his.
2. God purchased our freedom.
“He is so rich in his kindness that he purchased our freedom through the blood of his Son, and our sins are forgiven…” Ephesians 1:7
In his book A Community Called Atonement, Scott Mcknight cites the value of metaphors in understanding how God has acted to resolve the issue of our sinfulness and to restore us back into a right relationship with him. He quoted G.M. Cairds (p. 36) in explaining how a metaphor is a lens we may look through in order to see something we never would have noticed without the lens.
In the bible there are numerous uses of metaphors to help us see what God has done for us.
One of the first metaphors is that of Scapegoating. In the Old Testament the priest would lay his hands on the head of a goat and in so doing transfer the sins of the people onto the goat who would then wander out into the wilderness carrying the sins of the people away with him. We are familiar with the Isaiah 53 text in which the prophet describes what God has done for us in Christ by saying, “All of us have strayed away like sheep. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord has laid on him the guilt and sins of us all.”
Another is the use of a Legal or Judicial System to describe what God has done. If we look through the lens of a court of law we hear the righteous judge forgive us or pardon us from all our sins. In Romans 5:1 we read, “Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God thorough our Lord Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the most popular lens through which we look at what God has done for us in Christ is that of what is called the Penal Substitution metaphor.
In the story The Last Emperor, the young child who is the last emperor in China lives a life of luxury. When asked, “What happens when you do something wrong?” He answered, “When I do wrong, someone else is punished.” (Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Gracie?, Zondervan, 1997)
In the substitutionary view of the atonement Jesus steps forward and takes our place, dying in our place for our sins. You have heard me quote I Peter 3:18 many times. “Christ also suffered and died for our sins once for all time. He never sinned, but he died f or sinners that he might bring us safely home to God… Christ died for all the sin of all the men of all time – that he might bring us to God.”
The metaphor used in our text today gives us another lens through which to look at the mechanics of how God dealt with our sin and restored us in right relationship with him. It is sometimes called the classical view of the atonement. In the Ransom view a ransom is paid to satisfy the claim on our sinful souls. The idea is that Adam and Eve sold us over to the Devil but God, in Christ, pays a ransom to free us from the claims of sin and Satan.
Our text says, “God is so rich in his kindness that he purchased our freedom through the blood of his Son, and our sins are forgiven.”
The paying of a ransom implies the buying of something back.
The growing piracy crisis off the coast of Somalia give us a fitting image of what it means to pay a ransom in order to liberate or set free something that his been captured.
The Horn of Africa is a primary shipping lane for cargo being transported to and from the United States and elsewhere. The Somali pirates have learned that piracy is much more profitable than fishing so armed attacks on cruise ships, oil tankers, and cargo ships are common. The pirates hold ships, their cargo, and their crews until a ransom is paid. Not long ago a Ukrainian ship carrying thirty-three Russian tanks and other arms was captured and later released when the shipping company agreed to pay a handsome ransom. The original ransom demand was for $22 million but the average ransom fetched in the Gulf of Aden is $2 million. (Robyn Hunter, Somali Pirates Living the High Life, BBBC News, October 28, 2008)
What God has done for you lately is this: God has purchased your freedom. God has ransomed you from the clutches of your sinfulness and Satan by purchasing your liberty through the Jesus Christ. The ransom God paid is good for all of your past, present, and future transgressions. That is what God has done for you lately.
And a third spiritual blessing that is given us by God is an inheritance.
3. God has given us an inheritance.
“Furthermore, because of Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us from the beginning, and all things happen just as he decided long ago.” Ephesians 1:11
An inheritance is something one receives or comes into one’s possession as a right to or portion of an estate. An heir is someone who is entitled to inherit property of some endowment from another person. Those of us from less affluent families sometimes envy those who receive a boost in life when they receive an inheritance from parents of other loved ones. I remember vividly the envy I felt when a family I knew received an inheritance from Uncle Ralph… Uncle Ralph’s estate purchased homes for each of their three children and took grandpa, grandma, their three children and their spouses, and all their grandchildren on several cruises.
Most inheritances are not disbursed until after the death of the one making the bequest… so many folks, while not wishing for the death of their loved ones, certainly look forward to receiving an inheritance.
I read an article in the New York Times recently that should sober anyone who is planning on receiving an inheritance. It was titled, “8 Reasons You Should Not Expect an Inheritance.”
1. People live longer and people who live longer spend more of their money.
2. Social Security and Medicare will probably offer reduced benefits in the future. That means people will be dipping into their nest eggs to cover the loss of those benefits.
3. Fewer people have pensions and what retirement they do have is linked to the market… as we have noted of late, when there is a downturn in the market, interest income drops and people must dip into principal to live.
4. People who pay their health care costs out of pocket face an insurmountable challenge. A 55 year old couple who pay their health care out-of-pocket can expect to spend $1 million to finance health care for the rest of their lives. Assisted living and health care living can exhaust a sizeable estate in a short time.
5. Divorced people pass on less… two people living together can live cheaper than two people living apart.
6. People tend to drain their home equity when they are cash strapped in their later years… reverse mortgages serve to create income streams for aging homeowners.
7. More people are using the equity from their paid-up life insurance policies to create additional income for living expenses. So there is no insurance money remaining to be inherited by a beneficiary.
8. Transfer of wealth is increasingly happening while the older generation is still alive. Grandparents may help subsidize college educations for their grandchildren or transfer their assets to their children. (Ron Lieber, 8 Reasons You Should Not Expect an Inheritance, The New York Times, June 21, 2008)
While our anticipated earthly inheritances may be iffy, our text states, “Furthermore, because of Christ, we have received an inheritance from God…” Ephesians 1:11
What God gave, is giving, and will give to us in Christ is one we do not have to wait for or wonder about. In fact it is already given to us. It is already ours. It is yours and it is mine now. God isn’t going to outlive his resources. God is not going to be dipping into his nest egg to get by. God’s estate is not linked to Wall Street. God is not going to be exhausting his resources in health care center living. And God is not going to be taking out a reverse mortgage on his heavenly mansion. God’s promise is secure and it is ours.
Whatever our fears may be for this life, we have no such fears for the next. In Revelation John wrote of seeing a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And he saw a holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven. And he heard a loud shout from the throne saying, “Look, the home of God is now among his people! God himself will be with them and they will be his people. He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever.” Revelation 21:1-4
What has God done for you lately? God has given you the gift of eternal life and a home in heaven forever. So what’s left to do?
Conclusion:
This is far from an isolated incident and I could make the point in the telling of a number of similar stories. But this one readily comes to mind. One Sunday Bonnie and I had lunch at The Olive Garden. We ordered our lunch… Bonnie had something chicken and I always have the Mixed Grill. We enjoyed our salad, bread sticks, and our lunch when it was brought to us. When we were finished with our meal we asked for take-home boxes and our check. That’s when the server informed us that someone had picked up our check, including the tip and told us we were all set to go. We did not owe anything. There was nothing we had to do. Everything that needed to be done had been done. (Idea adapted from Rob Bell, Repainting the Velvet Elvis, Zondervan 2005, p. 151-152)
The only thing Bonnie and I could do was accept the gift as freely given and freely received.
Whenever something like that happens all any of us can do is say, “Thank you.”
4. We can only receive God’s grace with gratitude.
“God’s purpose was that we who were the first to trust in Christ should praise our glorious God. This is just one more reason for us to praise our glorious God.” Ephesians 1:12 and 14
The Big Idea this morning is this: God is the initiator of mercy and grace in our lives, so much so that all we can do is respond with heartfelt gratitude and praise.
