You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indy. This fall, we're studying the book of Ephesians, learning about the new life that we find in Christ. Now here's the teaching. Good morning. I am Jeff Schultz.

My wife, Amelia, and I have been here at Faith for about nine and a half years. I'm the interim lead pastor here, and I am so excited, to start this study with you all through the book of Ephesians. Just a couple things before we dive in today. We're only looking at the first three verses. And, I know that we just spent a little over two years going through the book of Acts.

So that's not an indication of how long it's gonna take us to get through Ephesians. We're not going three verses at a time. But there is, a lot here that I think God wants to speak to us about, And, hopefully, it will be helpful and encouraging. Before we jump into it, let me just set the stage for us, so you know who we're talking about and and what's going on here. Ephesus was an ancient city in the Roman Empire on a major trade route between the East and the West.

So it was a very, important city. It was rich. It had a 25,000 seat amphitheater, a library that rivaled the one in Alexandria in Egypt, most significantly that it was known for its, magnificent temple to the goddess Diana or Artemis, whose worship also included ritual prostitution. So it's a city of prominence and power and perversion and oppression. Now the Apostle Paul, who's the author of this letter, you may remember from our study in the book of Acts, he had brought the good news of Jesus to this city of Ephesus.

And many people turned from paganism and became followers of Christ. They started living out their faith in such an impactful way that it started threatening economic livelihood of the idol makers. And that led to a riot that forced Paul to leave the city. And now about ten years later, he's writing back to these believers. Now if you have a study note, you like geeking out on details study Bible, you like geeking out on details like this, you may have a note in your study Bible, that that inscription in Ephesus doesn't appear in some of the earliest manuscripts of this book.

And as you read through the letter, you'll notice a couple of times, it sounds like Paul maybe doesn't actually know these people. So it's possible likely maybe that this was a circular letter that was to the church in Ephesus, but also to some of the surrounding communities in the area. This letter, especially this first chapter, gives us a picture of an amazing God. A God who has existed before time began, a God who has plans and purposes for people who hadn't even been created yet, a God who is the source of all life and joy and goodness and blessing in himself, and he wants to share that life with us. That makes me wanna hear more about this letter.

Let me ask you as we start this passage and put it in some context. Do you consider yourself blessed? Would would you say I'm I'm blessed? And what would define that? A few years ago when I was in the store buying an economy sized bag of store brand Choco Puffs, I had a flashback to my childhood.

My dad had been a very successful ad executive, and when I was about seven or eight years old, he decided he was gonna leave that and go back to grad school, which was a radical change in lifestyle for us. I remember dad bringing home generic cereal from Meijer's Thrifty Acres because it cost half as much. And I was frustrated and disappointed. What happened to count chocula? Right?

Like, doesn't my dad get it? Coco Puffs is the cereal we need. It has all the cool ads on TV. There are toys in the box. That's the the cereal that all the cool kids eat.

Does he want me to be uncool and generic? Does it doesn't what I want matter to him? I I remember being unhappy with cereal that came in bags instead of boxes and store brand jeans instead of Levi's and, generic soda. And I ended up becoming frustrated, resentful, disappointed. It led to conflict with my parents.

Maybe some of you can relate. Of course, now that I'm older, I have a different perspective. And, when I was the one buying cereal for a house full of growing kids, suddenly, I started wondering how does Kellogg's get away with charging $6 for a box of corn and sugar. Right? And how can I get in on that?

I can also look back and see what I was like as a kid and maybe some ways that I'm not as different as I like to think I am. We Christians say things like, oh, you know, I'm so blessed by this new car. Oh, we went on a mission trip, and I came back and realized how blessed we are in America. It it's common for us to sort of connect being blessed with having a car that runs well and enough money in the bank account and someone to share my life with. I'm I'm blessed if I have good health and pleasant situations.

But are those things the evidence of God's blessing? Because there are hundreds of millions of Christians around the world who live on less than $5 a day. And the first followers of Jesus, I mean, for most of them, it was a one way ticket to suffering, rejection, imprisonment, and martyrdom. Were they not blessed? What does it mean to be blessed?

That's what we're gonna look at this morning. If you haven't already, open your Bibles to, Ephesians chapter one. Paul begins the letter this way. Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God to the saints who are in Ephesus. Now Paul, again, was this, Jewish, had grown up in the Jewish faith, was a persecutor of Christians initially, and then met the risen resurrected Lord Jesus, had a dramatic transformation in his life, now becomes a follower of Jesus and has been commissioned by him to take the message of who Jesus is and what he has done to the Roman world.

And an apostle literally just means one who is sent, one who is commissioned for a job or or a mission, and he is writing to the saints in Ephesus. Now, who is a saint? What does it mean to be a saint? In our common language, how we commonly talk about it, you know, it's an especially godly person. It's kind of a super Christian.

Maybe they perform miracles. Someone someone, you know, who's on maybe kind of a higher level. But the word here, the Greek word Hagios means holy, literally, or set apart. And as we read through this letter and through other similar letters in the New Testament, you'll see that that term saint is applied not to a subset, but to everyone in the church. It's applied to everyone who's a follower of Jesus Christ, not just some super Christians.

And the significance of this is I I think Paul wants to help us understand when when you come to know Christ and follow him, some incredibly significant, transforming, dynamic things happen to you. Paul talks about us being taken out of the dominion of darkness and and into the kingdom of his son whom he loves. He he talks about how we've been brought from death to life, how how we were orphans, and we've been adopted into God's family. And all those things are because we are in Christ. To believe and follow Jesus is to be related to Jesus in a significant way to be in him.

In fact, it's a phrase in this first chapter that if you look at it occurs about 12 or 13 times. It's the most significant and repeated description of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. And who is Jesus? He is the sinless perfect Son of God. So if you are a believer in Jesus, if you are in Christ, when the Father looks at you, he sees the righteous sinlessness of his Son.

He sees the the perfect obedience of Christ because of what he has done for you. That's the people to whom Paul is writing, people who are connected to Jesus by faith, and because of that, they are now saints. They are declared holy and righteous in God's sight. And then as we're gonna see the the rest of our Christian life is learning how to live up to and live out of that reality. We are not saints because of what we do.

We are saints because of what Jesus has done, and that is good news. It's an amazing blessing. You are blessed if you are a Christian because you are a saint, you are holy in God's sight. That's the first thing that I think Paul wants us to understand. I am blessed because I'm a saint, because I belong to God.

All of us long for identity. Right? That that's part of what it means to be a human, to make a name for ourselves, to be to be known for something. And looking back on that frustration and disappointment that I experienced as a kid, my goal was to fit in and be liked so that I would have an identity. I would be worth something because I had Levi's jeans, because I had a a polo shirt, because I had the cool bike, and then I would be known.

I would be worthy. I would be set apart. We don't grow out of that desire for identity. We just become more sophisticated as we grow up about how we pursue it. I I wanna prove myself.

I want people to be impressed with me. I I wanna make a name for myself. I want people to validate me. And Paul is saying that is not a blessing, that is a curse. It is a burden that Jesus wants to relieve us of.

Being a saint means that you are blessed because your identity and your significant are not about what you are doing. It's not about your performance. It's about what Jesus has done, what God has done for you in Christ. That is good news. Paul goes on to write to these Ephesian believers as the ones who are faithful in Jesus.

Literally, it's the believing ones in Jesus or the ones believing in Jesus. You know, we we tend to skim through these things at the beginning of the book. Listen to this. This is a deep, rich description. It means those who have believed in Jesus and are trying to live according to that faith.

If you were a Christian, you you have trusted in Jesus, you have turned from a life of sin, you've said, I I believe in who he is, what he's done for me, that he's died for me, that I am accepted by God because of Christ, and I put my I put my faith in him. And then we try to live out that faith daily, and we blow it. We stumble, we fail, we fall. And when we do, Paul wants us to remind ourselves of this truth again and again, that I am loved. I am accepted because I have believed in Jesus.

The question of faith is not whether we believe in God. It's whether we believe in the God that we say we believe in. The issue of faith is not whether we believe in God, it's whether we believe in the God that we say we believe in. In other words, do I really trust the God that I sing about and that I proclaim and that I say that I trust in? And and one of the ways to find out the answer to that is pay attention to the times when when I'm tempted to doubt god, to question his goodness, when something doesn't go right in life.

And what is it that I run to or look to for comfort, for hope, for peace, for identity? That's what I'm putting my faith in. But to be blessed is to know that you are a saint, that you belong to Christ. And that means I continue trusting in him and believing in what he says about me. I'm blessed because I'm a saint.

Just like in our day, it was common in the ancient world to introduce letters with, sort of greeting and well wishes. Ellie was sharing she, sponsors a compassion child, and she noticed that, the the letters from her compassion child often go, dear Ellie, I hope that all is well with you and, and that you are healthy and and things are good in your life. What's cool in in kind of a nerdy way for me is that Paul takes this way that people commonly started letters in the ancient world, this one Greek word, haram, which just means greetings. And he modifies it slightly to haris or grace. Grace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Grace is a word that we've we've have no doubt heard over and over and over again if we've been Christians for any time at all. It describes the way that God relates to us out of the abundance of his goodness and kindness. It is God's undeserved blessing that flows from who he is. Paul is talking about living in the awareness of God's grace to us, his undeserved kindness that he continues to pour out grace upon grace to us. That's the second thing that Paul wants us to see.

I am blessed because I know God's grace. You know, as a kid, I I listened to, well, the lies, the deceptions, the stories of people who told me that I needed, that I deserve an Atari game system and the cool five speed bike with the banana seat and the chopper handlebars. And it was cool at the time. Come on. And I'm grown up now, and yet I can still struggle with the same problem, right, that I want whatever it is that I think I deserve.

And Jesus comes to us in the gospel with a message and an invitation that frees us from that terrible, destructive sense of entitlement. I didn't deserve to be born at all in the first place. I I don't deserve to live in a land of peace and prosperity. I don't deserve my gifts and abilities and skills. I don't deserve the measure of health that I have.

I don't deserve the number of years that I've lived here. It is all grace. It is all undeserved goodness that I have done nothing to earn. And knowing that changes my perspective and how I see what's happening in my life. Lorraine was a member of our, church in Saint Louis where we served for about twelve years.

One of the things that defined Lorraine was a baseball cap that she wore almost all the time that had a little saying on it, too blessed to be stressed. And I kind of laughed it off at first. Yeah. It looked kind of corny. That was her answer whenever you asked her how she was doing, too blessed to be stressed.

Over time, I got to know some of Lorraine's story. Lorraine's mother had died shortly after she was born and her father either couldn't or wouldn't take care of her. She was taken in by an aunt, and the aunt's husband. And, Lorraine lived with those adoptive parents taking care of them until they passed away. She worked several jobs in in kind of manufacturing environments and never found romantic love in her life.

In the last few years, Lorraine was declining in health and struggling to breathe with a lung disease that was probably partially caused by the work that she had done for so many years. The last year or so of her life, Lorraine was literally struggling every minute of her existence to simply put air in her lungs to keep her alive. And all that background, all that history, everything she'd experienced, her answer to how she was doing, too blessed to be stressed. It's a woman that I wanna be like. Right?

Lorraine knew pain and loss and loneliness and discouragement and struggle, but her understanding of her life was framed by an awareness that she lived constantly in the undeserved goodness of Jesus to her. We are blessed because we come to Christ empty and he fills us. We come to Christ broken and he puts us back together. We're blessed because we come to Christ dirty and sinful and he cleans us up and calls us holy. We're blessed because we come to Christ blind and he opens our eyes.

We're blessed because we come to Christ sick and he heals us. Come to Christ, and he is the one who blesses you and all of it is undeserved. You come to Christ ruined, and he restores you. And he does it out of the riches of undeserved, unearned grace and kindness. I am blessed.

You are blessed if you know God's grace. And then Paul prays that we would know God's peace as well. Verse two, grace to you and peace from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. When we think about peace, right, we normally think of not being at war, right, an end of hostilities. That that's true.

But the idea in scripture is that peace is more than that. It means things have been settled, issues are taken care of, there's no anxiety, there's no worry, there's calm, there's there's wholeness in the relationship, and things are working the way they ought to. Paul's gonna tell us later, explain, and remind us how outside of knowing Jesus, because of our sinful rebellion and rejection, our self directed lives where we want to be at the center, we are by nature children of disobedience and objects of God's just condemnation of our sin. And the amazing thing is that when we come to Jesus Christ in faith, our sins are transferred to him, and the sinless perfect life that Jesus led is credited to our account. The righteous demands of God's law that I don't live up to are met in Jesus Christ.

And all of God's judgment towards sin has been poured out on his son. And all the hostility is ended forever. You now live in God's peace towards you and in you. I'm blessed because I have God's peace. I remember out of that frustration, out of that disappointment in my life saying hurtful, unfair, unkind, ungrateful things to my parents.

I created conflict with them because I was in conflict in myself. I was unsettled and unhappy, and you're not giving me what I want to be happy. You're not doing what I think you ought to be doing. And so I didn't have any peace in myself because I determined that for me to have peace, things had to go the way that I thought they ought to go. And I wasn't getting what I thought I deserved.

The opposite of an attitude of grace. Right? For me to have peace, you know, I needed cocoa puffs and Levi's jeans and a Lacoste shirt with a little alligator on it, and I mistrusted my parents. I misjudged them. You're wrong.

You're bad. You don't care about me because you're not doing good to me, and so there was conflict. You know, sometimes, we'll say, I just I don't have any peace with God. I get it. I I think that's usually because of one of two things.

One is maybe you never have come to Christ. Maybe you don't have peace with God, but because you're not reconciled to him through what Jesus has done for you. And you need to deal with that by coming to Christ, by receiving the offer of God's grace and forgiveness and peace to you to receive it as a gift. But sometimes, for those of us who have received Christ and we feel like we have no peace, it's often because we're believing some lie, some distortion of the truth. One of the lies that we can believe is somehow that God is angry at us.

Right? Because I failed, because I've sinned, because I've screwed up, God is angry at me. And the bad things that are happening in my life are because God is punishing me for what I've done. I'm judging. I'm being judged by God.

I'm I'm living under his condemnation. It's a lie because if you are in Christ, all of God's judgment and condemnation has been laid on his son. There is no condemnation for us. Yes. We can suffer the consequences of stupid, foolish, sinful decisions, But it's not God punishing us.

It's not him condemning us. And we need to remind ourselves things are settled between me and God. I am at peace with him. He loves me. I can trust him.

He is not doing wrong to me. He will not abandon me or forsake me. I am the child whom he loves. Sometimes we lack peace because we live in a broken world where things are messed up and where people are messed up, where our bodies are messed up. We experience all the pain of that.

Some of you know grief, sorrow, loss, difficulty, maybe maybe you suffer physically. Maybe it's broken relationships. Maybe it's beyond the receiving end of unfair accusations. The daily news reminds us painfully violence and greed and dishonesty and injustice and oppression still flourish in this world. Friends, people made in God's image are suffering unjustly.

Individuals and governments ignore laws and violate human rights. And it's appropriate to be upset and confused and disappointed and restless and even angry over those realities. And Paul's gonna talk later in Ephesians about how God calls us to confront spiritual forces of darkness and powers of evil. But as much as God cares about what we do in response to suffering and wrong, he cares about what suffering and confusion and wrong are doing inside of us. We cannot reflect Jesus' grace and peace when we are in turmoil and torn up in ourselves.

James writes, The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. And he goes on to say that peacemakers who sow in peace will reap a harvest of righteousness. We're called to be peacemakers because we know the peace of Jesus ourselves. How can we be peacemakers if we're torn up and angry and unsettled and critical and bitter and resentful inside of ourselves? That's what Jesus wants to free us from.

Right now, would you be willing to take whatever that thing is that's overwhelming you, that that's hurting you, the burden that's consuming you and give it to Jesus? It doesn't mean don't do anything about it. But in that, can you believe that he is good, that he knows what he is doing, and you can trust him in whatever it is that's wrong, and that he will guide you in a way to respond to it in a way that is right so that you can respond from a a heart of grace and peace and holiness as God's holy people instead of judgment and anger and bitterness. That's the peace that Jesus wants us to not only know, but to reflect. I think if we put all this together, we would say to be blessed is to be in Christ.

To be blessed is to have Jesus. You know, we live in a world that's a lot like Ephesus, one filled with wealth and idolatry and immorality, and it tells us that the good life is making a name for yourself and getting whatever your heart desires, and you'll never have any peace until you do. Jesus wants to free you from that, from those dangerous, destructive lies. The only way that we will be healthy and happy and joyful and sane in this world is to echo what Paul writes in verse three. Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing.

Now I'm the kind of person that I don't mind writing up bibles. I don't think God gets upset. It's, you know, it's not some magic special book. It has God's words in it, but it's a book. So if you're the kind of person that's okay with underlining things, underline that word every, every spiritual blessing.

Because Paul wants to remind us and help us live out of this reality, God is not holding out on me. God is not withholding some blessing that I deserve, that I should have. There is no blessing to be had from God that God has not given me or will not give me. Next week, we're gonna we're gonna get to unpack all that that means in this next beautiful section of Ephesians one and how God has poured out all these blessings on us in Jesus. But this is the thing that Paul wants us to see.

There is no blessing from God that he is withholding from you. There just isn't. He has poured out on you, bless you in Christ with every, every unlimited, no exclusions blessing that he has to give to you in Christ. I have no idea why I was born where I was or I have the family that I have or the gifts that I have, but it's not because I deserve it. I didn't earn it.

God is not holding out on you. He's not holding out on us. To be blessed is to be in Christ. Whatever gifts and opportunities that God gives me, if I take advantage of them, I may be prosperous and successful. But if that happens, that's not the definition of being blessed.

If that happens, whatever level it happens, I think Jesus is going to ask me, what are you gonna do with that? Who are you going to bless with it? Is it gonna be about you or you're gonna use it to serve and bless others and honor me with it? This book, this letter to the Ephesians is about helping us see and understand and live out what it means to be genuinely new people in Christ, to be people whose thinking and acting are renewed into wholeness. The way for us to find sanity and joy and peace in this Ephesian world is to keep going back to what Paul is writing about here.

There's this message from the gospel that I belong to Jesus by faith and the father loves me and sees me as holy and he is giving me grace upon grace. And because of that, I live in his peace. If there's not been a point in your life where you've come to know and believe that that's true for you, let that be today. Let that be now. That you would say, Jesus, I know that I put myself at the center and I don't belong there, and I wanna turn from that and give you all the brokenness and selfishness and and pride and take you as my lord and savior.

You died for me. You love me. I belong to you. Because your blessing is not in your health. It's not in your job.

It's not in your money. It's not even in your family. Your blessing is this, that you have a God who knows you, who loves you, a God who gives hope to the hopeless, a God who gives life to the dead, a God who fills the hungry and blesses the needy, and receives gladly all who will come to him, A God who comforts the grieving, a God who makes peace with rebels, a God who takes people who deserve judgment and condemnation and adopts them into his family, and who blesses you with every spiritual blessing in Christ. And in response to that, we say, I am so blessed. Praise be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let's pray. Father, I I feel so inadequate to preach the unsearchable riches of your grace, your goodness to us in Christ. I pray that by your spirit, you would open our hearts to treasure you, to see that Jesus is the blessing and that you are not holding out on us. And if we have Jesus, we have the best that you can give us. Forgive us, father, for the ways that we turn your good gifts into idols that we think will give us life and happiness.

Open our eyes to see the grace upon grace that you pour out to us in your son. And thank you, father, that we would be blessed to be known and loved by you, to be recipients of your undeserved goodness, and and that we could be the people through whom you would expand your blessing and your life to others. You are so good. You are worthy of all our praise and glory and honor. We pray in Jesus name.

Amen. Thank you for engaging with our community by checking out this podcast. If you would like more information about our church and ministry, you can find us at faith church n d dot com.