Blessings from the Son

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Well, Madeline came to find me a couple weeks ago. It must have been a weekend because I was in the kitchen cooking and normally only have time to do that on the weekends. And she came to find me and she brought something with her.

And she walks in there with it and she says, Daddy, look at my baby doll. And I said, yeah, I’m familiar with that. I’ve seen it.

Isn’t it so cute? Yes, it’s really cute. I just love it.

Don’t you love it? Sure. I’m glad you like it.

She just went on and on about her doll and was showing it to me like it was the first time I’d ever seen it either. And I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in her mind here. And sometimes that’s a harder thing to figure out than others.

So I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in her mind. And then eventually she says, it was so nice of Nana to get it for me. And I looked at her.

I said, I bought you that.

you did yes and forgive me but we’ve had this conversation before because I it’s the doll that I bought her for her first birthday okay and she’s almost eight I mean she’ll be eight in the fall there’s been a few years in in between those so she’s had this all this time and I bought it for her on her first birthday I went and picked it out special I had a dear friend at our church in arkansas who’s now gone on to be with the lord but he even made her in his workshop a little rocking cradle for this doll I mean we pulled out all the stops and here she thinks it’s just it’s something that nana gave her just recently I don’t know last birthday or christmas whatever but I’m saying I got that for you I was a little offended because I bought her that that came for that didn’t come from nana but she thought nana bought her that doll I bought her that and she needs to remember where that stuff comes from where her blessings come from she needs to remember and I tell you that story this morning not because I’m bitter but because I was reminded of it as I was reading this week’s passage we started in ephesians 1 last week and I’ll ask you to turn there with me again but as we as we read through ephesians 1 we get the sense that the apostle paul doesn’t want us to forget where our blessings come from.

You know, sometimes as Christians, especially once we’ve been Christians for a few years and God’s done this work of sanctification in us and suddenly we know how to act like Christians, we start to forget about the time before we were Christians or the time when we were new Christians and we seem to think or feel or act like we just came out of the womb sanctified and holy, and that this Christian life we have is something that we’ve earned, and we’re just good people. And that’s not the case. I mean, I look out here, and everybody in here, I think, is a nice person, as far as I know.

And I like you. You might naturally be nice people, but let me tell you, any spiritual niceness about you, any holiness, any closeness to God, That was his work, not yours. And the same is true for me.

But we get into this mindset of, I earned that, I built that. And the Apostle Paul wants us to remember where our blessings came from. You know, if he were writing about my situation, he’d write a letter to Madeline about how that doll came from daddy, not Nana.

But he’s writing a letter to the church at Ephesus saying, your spiritual blessings, let’s remember where those came from. Especially the spiritual blessings that accompany salvation that we started talking about last week, he said this is where they came from. The whole emphasis of this passage is on what Jesus did to provide the spiritual blessings of salvation to each and every one of us who trust in him for that salvation.

And so we talked last week about these blessings that the Father gives in salvation, some of them that were listed in Ephesians 1, his choosing us, his declaring us to be holy, his loving us, his adopting us as his children. and we looked at how Jesus made each of those things possible. If you remember back to last week, each of those where Paul points out what the Father has given us, he always tacked on to there some little phrase that told us that it was because of Jesus.

It wasn’t that he gave the list and then at the end said it’s because of Jesus. Each item on the list, you’ve got your bullet and you’ve got your point on your list and you have this blessing because of Jesus and you have this blessing because of Jesus, and the Father provided this blessing because of Jesus. It’s all woven throughout there.

You can’t miss it. And we need to understand that Jesus made all those things possible, and that means we didn’t earn any of them. They’re from Him.

Now, today’s text that we’re going to look at, we looked at verses 1 through 6 last week. This week, I want to look at verses 7 through 12. These verses follow the same general theme of these blessings that we receive in salvation, but where verses 1 through 6 focus on praising the Father for the way that He blesses us in Jesus, at verse 7, it sort of pivots and comes around to the Son and praising Jesus for what He’s done to earn us those blessings in salvation.

So the theme of the text is still the blessings of God that we receive in salvation, but it It really emphasizes the role of the Son, starting in verse 7. So we’re going to read verses 7 through 12 this morning, and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about what the Son’s done for us, what Jesus has done for us. Starting in verse 7, it says, In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses or sins, according to the riches of his grace that he richly poured out on us with all wisdom and understanding.

He made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure that He purposed in Christ as a plan for the right time to bring everything together in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth in Him. Verse 11, in Him we have also received an inheritance because we were predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of His will, so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to his glory. So again, as we read this, the Apostle Paul really wants us to remember where our salvation and where the blessings involved with it come from.

They don’t come from us or anything that we’ve earned. They come entirely because Jesus bought that for us. And how did he buy that for us?

He bought that for us with his blood. And as we read through this, and we read through what the Son has done for us in salvation in verses 7 through 12, we see that the sacrifice of Jesus can completely transform a person’s relationship with the Father. And that’s really what Paul was reminding the Ephesians about.

And let me tell you, if anybody needed their relationship with the Father transformed, it was the Ephesians. In Ephesus, in all of these early churches, it seems like you had a mixture of people who had come from a very Old Testament-centered Jewish background and had become Christ, and you had a mixture of them with people coming from a Greek pagan background. You had this mixture, and sometimes that led to some conflict because of where people had come from.

But in Ephesus, I’m certain you had some people that came from that very Old Testament temple-emphasizing Jewish background who were basically people who tried to be good and fell short. I’m sure you had some of those at Ephesus, but because of the town that Ephesus was, you had a lot of people who came from that pagan background. You had a lot of people in Ephesus who were involved in all sorts of wickedness and debauchery.

Ephesus was a major temple site for the cult of Diana, who, if memory serves, was a fertility goddess in the Greek world. There were a lot of wicked goings-on that took place in Ephesus. And when you had people in Ephesus getting saved and coming to Christ and coming into the church at that point, you had a lot of those people who were coming from that background.

They they were active, practicing, good at their job, non-believers who had come out of this pagan cult of Diana. These were people who were so lost they didn’t even begin to know how lost they were. These were people who were totally distant from the Father.

Now the people from the Jewish background also needed to be reconciled to the Father through Jesus. They couldn’t earn it. They couldn’t deserve it, but some of them had some understanding of the holiness of God.

They understanding of who he was from the Old Testament. They just fell very short of it. You had people at Ephesus who were so lost they didn’t even begin to have that understanding.

And when their relationship with the father was changed, when they were brought into this relationship that he talks about in verses 1 through 6, where they are ultimately taken from being slaves to being adopted into the father’s household, when that relationship changed, it was entirely because of the Son. It was entirely because of what Jesus Christ had done for them. So he’s reminding them about what they had received in salvation.

And again, in verse 7, he starts talking about what they’ve received directly from the Son. He points out that they’ve received redemption. Now that word redemption means that they were purchased.

They were bought back, they were given value. It’s like coupons. One of the few times in our language anymore outside of church that we use the word redeem or redemption deals with coupons.

Those coupons aren’t worth anything, are they? They’re practically not even worth the paper they’re printed on. What do they say now?

Normally one twentieth of a cent or something? So, I mean, you could get several pounds of them and go buy yourself a candy bar, I guess. They’re not worth anything until they’re redeemed.

There’s this process of redemption where you use them in a transaction for that item, and it gives them value, and then actually the manufacturer turns around and gives that money to the grocery store. I never knew how that worked until my first job at Homeland, and we had to make sure you don’t throw the. .

. The cashier does not throw the coupons away, No, because suddenly they have value. They have to be kept in a little basket, at least that’s how we did it, kept in a little basket under the register, and then those get sent into the manufacturer so the store can get their money.

Because suddenly those coupons, they’ve been redeemed, they have value now. We were purchased. We were bought back.

God looked at us and ascribed value to us. Now, again, we didn’t earn that. We didn’t deserve that.

God looked at us and he saw who we were. He saw sinners. and yet because of how loving He is and how merciful and how gracious He is, He decided to love us anyway.

He decided to show mercy anyway, and God put this value on us. And while we were enslaved to sin, the Bible describes how sin enslaves us. And people think when they’re apart from God, they’re free because they can do whatever they want.

No, sin is calling the shots. You’re not as free as you think you are. The Bible says we are slaves to sin.

And yet God looked on us in that position of slavery, that pitiful, wretched state we were in, and looked at us and decided that we had value because He had created us and because He had loved us. And at the cross, Jesus redeemed us. He purchased us back.

He bought us out of that slavery. The Bible says we are bought with a price. The blood of Jesus paid for us.

He redeemed us.

he bought us back and gave us value so when he’s describing these blessings he starts out by telling them in verse 7 about their redemption in him we have redemption through his blood jesus has purchased our freedom hey ephesians you don’t have to go back to the cult of diana you don’t have to go get involved in in gross things you don’t have to go and and and offer all your money and all your you don’t have to go bow down to these statues or be afraid of what’s going to happen to you Jesus has bought you out of that you don’t have to feel like you have to get sucked back into that old lifestyle Jesus has purchased you sometimes we will come to Christ and we’ll be worried about not being able to live the Christian life we’ll worry about not being able to live well enough or right enough not about being unable to be good enough we’ll worry about well what happens if I get sucked back into that old lifestyle.

Let me ease your mind about something, especially if you’re having this concern at this moment. If you’re concerned, well, I can never do it, you’re absolutely right. You can’t.

Not on your own. It’s the power of God. It’s His Holy Spirit that works within you.

We’re going to talk about that next week. But it’s His Holy Spirit that works within you to make that change. But if you’re worried about getting sucked back into that old life.

What if it calls and I just feel I have to come running? You don’t have to. Jesus bought you out of it.

You’re not enslaved to that sin anymore. You don’t have to come running when that sin shakes its bony finger at you. You don’t have to come running.

Jesus bought you. Jesus purchased your freedom. Now, I always want to explain there too, that doesn’t mean that we’ll never slip.

It doesn’t mean we will never mess up, that we will never fall short. We still do have this sin nature. but the thing is before we’re enslaved to sin we basically are designed we’re wired at that point our sin nature has messed us up to the extent that it becomes second nature just to come when sin calls it’s through the work of God in us that we have the ability to resist doesn’t mean we’ll never doesn’t mean we’ll never sin just means we don’t have to do what sin tells us we don’t have to listen Jesus has purchased our forgiveness.

He’s purchased our freedom from that sin. It says in verse 7 that he bought our forgiveness. It not only says redemption, but in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he poured out on us.

That word grace means that he gives us something better than what we deserve. This is how I’ve explained it to my children. Mercy is when God spares us the bad things we deserve, and grace is when God gives us something good we don’t deserve.

So they’re basically just two sides of the same coin. But this idea of grace, it’s God giving us blessings that we don’t deserve. Salvation is not something we can deserve or something we can earn.

It’s something given to us because He pours His grace out richly on us. It says the riches of His grace. God is not stingy with His grace.

You know that today? God is not stingy with His grace toward you. Sometimes we feel like He is.

It may be because we’re not asking. It may be because we’re not dealing with Him about it. But it says here, we have the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of His grace.

God was gracious enough. God was rich enough in that grace that He was willing to forgive our trespasses. Do you know what that means?

He’s wiped the slate clean. He has absolutely wiped the slate clean for us in Jesus Christ. There may still be earthly consequences to the things you’ve done before. You know, the jail cell doors don’t magically swing open when somebody comes to Christ. But as far as God’s concerned, in the highest court there is, we’re considered not guilty.

We are pardoned, and that record is expunged. Am I using all the legal terminology right, Ralph? Okay.

Expunged. That means the record has been, the slate’s been wiped clean. It’s no longer on the record.

and that sin that separates us from God and keeps us beaten down. God looks at it, and it’s not that God is forgetful. It’s not that God had a memory lapse.

God chooses not to remember it anymore. And God said, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it never happened. Why?

Because we’re so good? Because we deserve that? No, it’s because Jesus paid for it.

We have forgiveness through Jesus. And look with me at verses 8 through 10 here. It says, with all wisdom and understanding.

Now, by the way, in the Christian Standard Bible here that I’m reading, it puts a period at the end of verse 8. So it says in 7 and 8, In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he richly poured out on us with all wisdom and understanding, period. Then in verse 9, he made known to us the mystery of his will.

Some of yours may have it divided up a little differently. The Greek, as far as I understand it, of this passage, verses 7 through at least verse 10, maybe on to verse 12, is all one long sentence. And so I think sometimes the English translators divided it up into separate sentences to try to make it more manageable.

Because if I gave my whole sermon as one 30-minute sentence, y’all should be so lucky that it would only be 30 minutes, right? If I made it all as one 30-minute long sentence, eventually your eyes are going to glaze over. So I think the English translators tried to divide it up into separate sentences, make it more manageable, but the divisions are kind of arbitrary there, and I’ve seen different versions, different translations, divide the sentences up differently.

Just based on context, if I were going to divide this up, I would put the end of verse 8 with verse 9, so that it would say that he richly poured out on us, talking about his grace. And I’d start a new sentence there where it says, with all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will. I feel like the wisdom and understanding goes much better with, I think it fits with making known the mystery of his will.

So I’m just explaining to you, if you’re looking at it saying, well, he took the end off of that sentence, and that’s all from English. The Greek is all one long sentence, and I feel like those two ideas fit better together. so with all wisdom and understanding he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure that he purposed in christ as a plan for the right time to bring everything together in christ both things in heaven and things on earth in him so here’s another blessing jesus has given us it’s not only redemption and forgiveness but he’s given us a knowledge of god that we didn’t have before.

What he’s done is he’s revealed the Father’s will. Paul’s telling the people at Ephesus, Jesus has revealed the Father’s will to you. We need to understand, a lot of times we will take what we understand of God for granted.

Think about it this way. Everything we know about God is just what he’s revealed to us. If he hadn’t been gracious enough to make himself known to us, we wouldn’t know anything.

We wouldn’t even know that he existed. You might say, but you can look out in nature and see that he existed, that he exists only because God designed it that way. If we can, as the scripture says, look at creation and know that he’s there, it’s because he designed it for us to see it there.

What we know about his character is because he has revealed things to us in his word. Ultimately, what we know about his character is because we’ve seen it when he revealed it in Jesus Christ. The book of Hebrews talks about how Jesus Christ put the Father’s character and his nature on full display for us all to see. In the beginning of Hebrews chapter 1, it talks about how God in previous times spoke through the prophets, but now he’s shown himself through the Son.

Colossians calls him the image of the invisible God. In Jesus, everything God wants us to know about who he is and what he wants and what his plans are, it’s all on full display in Jesus Christ. Now, I’m not saying that we can know everything about God. We’re finite beings and our ability to understand is about this big.

And God’s nature is far bigger. I don’t know if any of you have ever seen the fourth Indiana Jones movie. Anybody?

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Some of you have probably seen it. At the end, this Soviet scientist asks these.

. . It’s a bizarre movie.

It’s in line with Temple of Doom. It’s not my favorite. But she asked these alien creatures for all the knowledge that they have.

And so they begin to give her all this knowledge and her head explodes. She just, not just her head, her whole self is just gone. Sorry if I’m spoiling it for you, but the movie’s been out for several years.

I figure if you wanted to see it, you would have seen it. That’s how I feel about, that’s how I understand what God knows and what God is versus what we’re capable of understanding. If we were to try to understand everything, we couldn’t take it.

Our heads would explode. So I’m not saying we’ll ever know as much as God. What I’m saying is everything that God has decided we need to know, he has revealed to us.

And the lion’s share of that was revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. He has made known to us the mystery of his will. Now this phrasing is a little tricky. He, Jesus, made known to us the mystery of his, I believe, the Father’s will.

because he says, according to his good pleasure that he purposed in Christ. So the he that purposed in Christ, I believe, is the Father. So this is telling us that Jesus made the Father’s will known to us. Because there was so much, even as God was revealing that there’s going to be a Messiah that comes and I’m going to deal with sin, there was so much that people still missed until Jesus came.

And really, until Jesus rose again and ascended to the Father, there was so much that was missed. And we look back at it in hindsight and say, well, it’s so obvious. that the Savior was going to be born in Bethlehem.

It was so obvious He was here to go to the cross. It seems so obvious to us because we’re looking at it from hindsight. It’s obvious to us because Jesus showed us what the Father’s will was.

He brought us right in to this understanding. And this ability to know this knowledge of God and His will really speaks to the intimacy that Jesus has brought us with the Father, that we actually can know something about Him. He’s not just a distant God in the heavens.

Now make no mistake, he still sits on the throne of this universe. And we need to treat him with the respect he deserves. But he’s not some distant stranger of a God.

He’s a God who wants us to know him. And he’s a God who wants us to walk with him. And Jesus has made that available.

Then we move on to verse 11. And we see this idea of being blessed with an inheritance in Jesus. That he’s given us an eternal promise.

It says, in him we have also received an inheritance because we were predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of his will. This inheritance is the promise of what’s to come. The Bible calls us joint heirs with Jesus.

You realize what that means? As the Bible describes how everything that belongs to the Father belongs to the Son, then the Bible says we are joint heirs. It means we get an equal share of everything.

That absolutely does not mean we ever become gods. What that means is that this relationship with Jesus, or this relationship with the Father that Jesus has, we are ushered into that relationship too. This inheritance of eternity with Him, we have that too.

The eternal life, we inherit that too. We become joint heirs with Jesus Christ. We have this inheritance. We have all these things that are promised.

We have heaven. We have the relationship with Him. We have eternal life.

those things are our inheritance because of Jesus Christ and all of this all of these blessings the forgiveness the redemption the inheritance the knowledge of God it fundamentally changes how we relate to God we don’t have to look at him as I said as a stranger as someone who we can never know or understand someone who keeps us at arm’s length that’s how a lot of people see God some people will pray and I don’t know if God even hears me. God may not even be listening. Folks, we don’t have to feel that way.

The relationship has been fundamentally changed. We’ve been brought into this relationship with God because of what Jesus Christ did for us. We’ve become his friends and his sons and daughters instead of strangers and enemies, all because of Jesus.

And folks, that relationship is only available to us because of Jesus. There’s not another way to get it. Now, I know that to some people in our modern world, that sounds narrow-minded, and it sounds unsophisticated, and it sounds unloving.

And people will periodically ask, how can you be so narrow-minded as to say that God would only make one way to heaven? Or they’ll put it on God instead of us. How could God be so harsh as to make only one way to heaven?

Folks, it’s not that we’re narrow-minded or that God is harsh, that he’s made a way to heaven. It’s that he’s only made one way to heaven. It’s that God is incredibly gracious that he even made one way to heaven.

Because let me tell you, that’s one way more than what we deserve, right? When you look at how humanity has treated God, you look at our sin, you look at where we stand separated from him, the fact that God would even make one way through Jesus is incredible and speaks to his overwhelming grace. It’s one way more than we deserve.

The one way into this relationship is Jesus Christ. That’s not my opinion. That’s what the Bible teaches, that Jesus is the only source of hope to sinners who’ve been separated from God. And the fingerprints of that idea are all over this passage, just like in the six verses we looked at last week.

Look again at each of these blessings, and you’ll see that the Bible is abundantly clear about where they come from. Redemption in verse 7, it says, in Him we have redemption through His blood. Not through many ways, we have redemption in Him through His blood.

You look at forgiveness. He says in verse 7, we have the forgiveness of trespasses. He says, according to the riches of His grace that He richly poured out on us.

Not something we earned or deserved. It came just because of the grace of Jesus that He richly poured out on us. That grace is his undeserved kindness.

This knowledge of God. Let me just read you the phrases in verses 8 through 10 that point to where it came from. It says, he made known.

Jesus revealed God in his will. He made known. He purposed in Christ. He purposed in Christ as a plan.

God’s plans, the Father’s plans, were all about Jesus Christ, and Jesus is the one who made them known. And he says to bring together, to bring everything together in Christ. Jesus was not only the framework of his plan, Jesus was the finishing touch of his plan. I watched this documentary this week about how they’re building a flood wall in the ocean to try to protect New Orleans.

And it was really interesting to watch them drive these concrete metal piles into the ocean floor, and they drive one straight down, and they drive one, I think they said at a 57 degree angle, and I thought, wow, that’s oddly specific. But 57 degree angle, and they drive them into place, and they put these things on top of them, but they said it doesn’t become the wall until we put the capstone on top that connects all these other pieces, and that’s what gives it the stability. Folks, Jesus is not only the framework, the piles driven in to be the framework of God’s plan, he’s the capstone that’s put on top that holds it all together and gives it its purpose.

There’s no way to know God’s will or to know God apart from Jesus Christ, to bring everything together in Christ. And then that verse 10 ends with in Him. And then this inheritance we see in verse 11, in Him we received an inheritance because we were predestined according to the plan. And the plan is what?

In Christ. If we want a right relationship with God, we have to go through Jesus Christ. It’s that simple. There’s one way to receive the blessings of salvation. There’s one way to have this relationship with God transformed where we go from strangers and enemies to being friends and sons and daughters.

There’s only one way for that relationship to be transformed, and that is through Jesus Christ. He is the only way for us to obtain the blessings of salvation. And so today our hope needs to be focused around Jesus. Our hope for that relationship, our hope for that future inheritance, it has to be centered on Jesus.

verse 12 tells us how to go about this. It tells us that we first put our trust in Him for salvation. It says, So that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to His glory.

It starts out with what he calls putting hope in Christ. And I would submit to you that that hope is not a wishful thinking. Well, I hope I’ll win the lottery without buying a ticket. It’s important to say without buying a ticket.

I hope, but do I really have any belief, any confidence that that’s going to happen? No. My luck doesn’t work that way.

But we use the word hope in that loose, unconvicted way all the time. That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about a hope that you can take to the bank.

It’s not wishful thinking. It’s an expectation that God is going to do what he says he’s going to do. It’s a faith.

It’s a trust. It’s a confidence in God when he says putting our hope in Christ. When he said this started by us putting our hope in Christ, what he means is they put their full confidence in Jesus Christ as the only one who could save them and bring them that relationship with the Father. Our new relationship begins with us trusting Christ as our one and only Savior, to be the provider of all these blessings.

This morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ, if you’re looking at other things to try to bring you a relationship with God, maybe you’re looking at it at church attendance if I just go to church god will love me I love what I’ve heard preachers say for years you can’t become a christian by sitting in church any more than you can become a car by sitting in a garage right that’s not how it works but maybe you’re counting on church attendance maybe you’re putting yo

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