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. Good to see all of you today.

I'm Jeff Schultz, one of the pastors here at Faith and excited to get into this rich, broad passage of Paul's letter to the effusions. Let me ask you, have any of you ever received a cancellation notice from your insurance? It's kind of a weird thing that can happen, right? We send these companies money to pool together what we send them along with other people to help incur debts that we might run into unusual expenses. And then, ironically, when we take advantage of that policy that we're paying for, we may get a letter to them saying, like, sorry, you you actually took advantage of the policy.

Now we're taking it away from you, and you need to find someone else to carry your insurance. Now, right, we understand that as a financial decision that companies have to make. We understand insurance pools and how all that works, business decisions. But but if you're like me, I mean, it still seems a little odd and then, sometimes maybe you wonder, is God like that? Do we ever get to a point where maybe we've messed up enough?

If someday maybe you're gonna get a letter from God like one of those cancellation letters? Dear mister Schultz, we're writing in response to this morning's request for forgiveness. I'm sorry to inform you that our records indicate you have reached your quota of sins. According to our records, since employing our services, you have erred 1,427 times in the area of greed, and your prayer life is subpar. In addition, while your understanding of doctrine is in the top twentieth percent, your application of that doctrine puts you in the lowest category of our subscribers.

In spite of numerous warnings and encouragements, you have unhealthy tendencies not to trust God. And, because of your sins, weaknesses, and failures, you are a high risk candidate for eternal life. Therefore, grace has its limits. You need to search for other forms of coverage as your policy with us is canceled. Jesus sends his regards.

Do you ever wonder, in in maybe those dark moments, if somehow God is gonna get to the end of his patience with us? I've carried you so long. I'm I'm done. Right? Like that that's it.

Maybe it's not that. Right? Hopefully, we don't wrestle with that as a serious fear, but there are other fears and things that make us question what's going on. Right? Relationally.

As a couple? Are are the kids gonna be okay? How am I gonna get through life on my own? Financially, man, other people seem to be getting ahead. I'm not in the 1%.

Everything seems to work for people that already are on the inside and have a big pile of money. Am I gonna get to the end of my life and and have enough to make it? Social, political anxieties. Yeah. Nothing like that.

Right? It seems like we're heading in the wrong direction. Right? What what is going on in the world? There's threats and violence and injustice.

It seems like the system isn't working. Our community, our country have all kinds of problems, and the people in charge seem to be just looking out for themselves, doing whatever seems good to them. Where is this all gonna end up? Well, we're continuing today in a series we started last week, looking through the book of Ephesians, seeing, first of all, this God, this amazing God who is full of life and joy and wholeness and and blessing and goodness in himself, and and he invites us to know him and have that kind of life ourselves in a in a new kind of life with him through Jesus. But it raises the questions for us.

The the reality of life as we experience, is God really good? Does he know what's going on? Is he doing anything? How does what I'm experiencing fit into what the Bible says about who God is and what he's like? Can I trust that he actually knows what he's doing?

I think what Paul wants us to see in the passage that we've heard read this morning is this, The only way the only way I'm gonna have security, I'm gonna have hope is trusting that God knows what we need, and that everything is filtered through his loving purposes. In in other words, I have security trusting in the Father's love. I have security trusting in the Father's love. If you haven't ready, go ahead and open your Bibles to the book of Ephesians. We're in chapter one looking at verses three through 14.

It's this amazingly rich, broad, complex passage of scripture. It's literally all one continuous thought, one sentence in in the original Greek. There there's no punctuation marks, and so if you look at different translations of it, you'll see they they put kinda commas and they connect phrases in different ways, and and those are all legitimate ways to look at the passage. It's it's this huge sweep from the past before creation even existed all the way to an an eternal future, And it's my mom was a music major in college, and and she was frustrated with her three boys. She tried to get all of us to learn an instrument, and I, you know, picked up a little bit of piano as a kid.

I I know, you know, a few chords and I can find middle C. Diving into this passage feels a little like stepping onto a stage at Carnegie Hall and sitting down at a Steinway to play Chopin. That's that's how rich this passage is, and and one of the things I'd encourage you to do this coming week is to come back to this passage and just soak in it, reflect on it, because what we can do here in twenty five minutes or so together, it's impossible to do justice to all of it, but let's try. Okay? If I have security in trusting in the Father's love, I think the first thing that Paul wants us to see is this.

I can trust the father knows the right thing to do. I can trust the father knows the right thing to do. He knows what I need. And and here's how it's expressed. Paul starts out again.

Blessed be the father, God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing. Another way we could render that is every blessing of the spirit, every blessing of God's spirit in the heavenly places, not meaning that they're off somewhere in another geography, in another place, but that the reality of heaven and the life and the joy that God has in himself has entered this world and is available to us through Jesus Christ. And and he goes on to say, this in he has chosen us before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless. He's predestined us for adoption. Verse seven, in him we have redemption through his blood.

The center of God's work and his purposes expressed in knowing what we need is sending his son Jesus to shed his blood on the cross to redeem us. We don't we don't use that word redemption much in English anymore. If anything, it's, you know, maybe related to turning in coupons at the grocery store. There's a little bit of sense to that in terms of what Paul is getting at here. It it means the payment of a price in order to purchase or redeem something, to rescue it.

It's an image that comes from going into the slave market in the ancient Roman empire and paying the price to buy someone out of slavery and make them your own. And Paul is saying that is what God has done for us because we could not do it for ourselves. We are broken and twisted and turned inside on ourselves in all the wrong kinds of ways, but God has sent his son to pour out his life in place of ours in order to rescue us from that brokenness and that twistedness. The forgiveness of our trespasses, and he goes on to say, according to the riches of his grace. Trespasses is this image of, you know, this broad category of what we call sin, and and in this particular case, it's it's an image of stepping across a line we're not supposed to cross.

There's just something in us that wants to do that. Right? I I remember driving home, from our church that I served at in Saint Louis, and and it wasn't very far from home, but I would always pass this little strip mall on on the way where I would turn right at the stoplight and head towards our house. And one day as I was doing that, I noticed a sign that said, Shortcutting traffic prohibited. I had never once thought about shortcutting through that parking lot until I saw that sign.

And all of a sudden, the thought came, oh, that would save me a minute or so. Why can't I go through the parking lot? Who are they to tell me that I shouldn't go through the parking lot? It would actually be to my benefit. It's a picture of of what God has come to undo in us, this twistedness that that says God establishes barriers and borders and boundaries, not to restrict us, but to actually guide us in the right way.

But there's something in us that just says, well, if that's what that law says, I just want to go right beyond it because I know best. And that's what God has actually come to rescue us from, to set us free from. All of this is this picture of God knows the absolute worst about us. The stuff that that we don't wanna tell anyone, the stuff that we've never told our spouses, the stuff that we've never told our closest friend, our counselor, God knows it, and he loves us. He loves us anyway because in love, he chose to forgive us.

In fact, in in verse five, to adopt us to himself as sons or sons and daughters through Jesus Christ. Does God know what we need? God knows exactly the right thing to do, and the demonstration of it is what he's done for us in his son. And I think for many of us, we wonder, is it is it really true? Can it can it be that good?

That's where Paul goes on to look in verses thirteen and fourteen. When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of Lord your salvation, and believed in him, you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our inheritance. God knows that we tend to look at ourselves and doubt and and wonder. Is God's love and forgiveness really big enough to deal with that? And he has given us the Holy Spirit as a a promise just because, because God had promised in the Old Testament, I will send my spirit on them.

I will write my laws on their hearts. And God fulfills that promise through Jesus on the day of Pentecost as we saw earlier in the book of Acts. And the spirit is not only God's promise, he is a seal, a mark of ownership, like like branding a horse or a cow. The Holy Spirit comes to live in us to to remind us, to demonstrate that we belong to Jesus and that he is a guarantee, a pledge. It was a picture in ancient commercial transactions of, like, a a down payment, a deposit.

But but more than that, god is not just giving us his spirit to live in us as a as a promise, but actually a foretaste of what life ultimately will be like. If if you've come to know Jesus and you have the Holy Spirit living in you who helps you understand God's word, who who empowers you to follow his ways, who who comforts you, who gives you wisdom, who reassures you of the father's love because the father knows that's what we need. The holy spirit testifies to our spirit that we are, in fact, children of God. Oh, what a beautiful picture. And he has a a greater plan and a purpose for our lives because he knows that we sort of live aimlessly according to our own will and desire and direction.

Verse four, he chose us to be holy and blameless before him to the praise of his glorious grace. In verse 12, that that we might be to the praise of his glory. We find confidence knowing the father's love for us because he knows what we need, that we need, that we are called to a bigger life than what we can set for ourselves, what our lives often look like. If you knew that you, you know, sort of had a a get out of jail free card, that that you were bulletproof, that that you were untouchable, you could do anything that you wanted at all, literally with no consequences, on. Let's be honest.

Right? We do what the diplomats at the UN in New York City do. There was a study that came out a few years ago that discovered that, international diplomats at the UN and New York City had $18,000,000 in unpaid parking tickets and traffic violations. How do they get away with it? Because they have diplomatic immunity.

And international law says that diplomats cannot be held liable in courts of their host country. So diplomats in New York literally drive any way they want to because there are no consequences. You were chosen in Christ to be holy and blameless in the sight of God, to live for God, to to grow, to look like the Son who has rescued you. You have been declared blameless, and now God says his purpose for your life is to help you grow into that, to look like God what God has declared you to be. We're called to reflect the the present reality of Christ's kingdom in our lives and in the world that that we become agents of peace and justice and righteousness and goodness and kindness and love that we have experienced from the father.

You have confidence because your father knows the right thing to do for your life and in your life and through your life. And I have confidence because I can trust the father knows the right way to do it. He knows the right thing to do, and he knows the right way to do it. I think that's what Paul is getting at in an unusual way back in, verses four and five. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

In verse five, he predestined us for adoption as sons. Paul goes back before the world even existed. In Christ, the father determined to make us who did not yet exist to be like the son through the work that the son had not even done yet. It's this action, this this choice that we call election or or predestination, the words that Paul uses here, which can be kind of a a a confusing difficult concept, maybe even contentious. It makes us raise questions like, didn't I choose God?

Doesn't God call me to to seek him? Yes. Yes. You you did choose God, and, yes, he does call us to see him, but Paul would say because in eternity, God had first chosen you to seek him. Listen to how this works out.

From eternity past by his unmerited favor, God chose us to be his children. And and listen, this is what we actually want to be true. This is actually good news for us. My my daughter, Isabelle, and I had a little game that we played at bedtime. After I had, read to her and sung to her and prayed with her, I would start to head out the room, turn out the light, and I would say, I love you.

And she would say, I love you more. And I would say, I love you most, and she would say, I love you mostest. And then I would say, sorry, honey. I win because I loved you first. Before you were ever born, I chose to love you simply because you're my daughter.

Before I knew the the beautiful, funny, smart, loving, caring, intelligent girl that you would grow up to be, I loved you. Before I knew anything about you, before you had done anything. I chose to love you simply because you're my child. It's a picture, I think, of what Paul is trying to say here to us. It's good news.

God did not choose you because you were smart or because you were good or because you were intelligent or because you were productive or because you were useful. God chose you in Christ before He created the world, and it's hard for us to grasp because we're finite. But it's not a problem for an infinite God who exists outside of space and time. God did not look down through the quarters of time and see something in you that made you worthy, that made you deserving. If He saw anything, He saw your need.

He saw our brokenness, our inability. And that's what gives us hope and confidence. God did not choose you because of anything that I have done. And because of that, that also means there's nothing that I can do that will make God reject me. It it doesn't depend on me.

It depends on what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. It wasn't up to me to make God love me and earn my way to Him, so there's nothing I can do to make Him unlove me and kick me out of His family. I I grieve God with my sin. I I damage our relationship. But listen, God is not caught off guard by that.

He's not surprised by it. He never looks and says, oh, man. If I had known Jeff was gonna do that, I never would have chosen him. Like, he he knew it all before I even existed and before I'd done any of it. That is good news.

And it doesn't make us robots because God works through our choices. God works through human decisions and responses. God has an eternal purpose that he is actually working out in the middle of what we do and what we don't do. God calls us to respond to Jesus in faith, to follow him, to trust him. But listen, my confidence is not in how strong my faith in Jesus is, because it goes up and down.

My obedience goes up and down. My confidence comes from knowing that God chose me outside of anything inside me. He knows the right thing to do and the way to do it. And thank God it's about what Jesus has done and not what I have done. And and it means then that I'm not caught in a in a performance cycle where I have to look good and justify my place in God's roster.

I can stop obsessing about how I think I'm doing and how I think other people are doing, whether I'm in or out, or or if I look good, or if I look cool, or if they choose me to be part of the group. God chose me. God chose me because of Jesus, because of his love for me in Christ. My identity, my worth, my significance, my security is not what my boss thinks about my work, what my spouse thinks about my relationship with her, what my friends think about my house, what my kids think about my parenting. It means when I'm weak and sick, when I get old, when I can't do the things that I used to do, I have confidence that God loves me and God keeps me because he knew all those things about me before he saved me.

If I can't drive a car, if I can't leave bible study anymore, I can't sing the choir anymore, if I can't hear very well, if I can't feed or even care for myself, All of those things are going to happen to every one of us at some point, and we need to know God loves me simply because He is love when I have nothing to offer him. Because I have nothing to offer him except my sin. And that frees us to stop looking for something in ourselves to to boast about as we boast in the cross of Jesus Christ. He is my wife. He is the guarantee of God's love for me and his purposes to me to make me his own.

And I can trust that God knows the right way to do things because as Paul says in in verse seven, we have redemption, forgiveness according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished on us in all wisdom and insight. There is no wisdom or insight or knowledge that God is lacking. He is the source not only of this never ending fountain of grace and kindness and goodness, but of wisdom and knowledge and understanding. There's nothing happening in your life or in this world that God is not aware of and he's not involved in. I can trust that the father knows the way to do what needs to be done.

He is the God of all wisdom, all knowledge, all grace, and thank God that he knows it's good that it doesn't depend on us to accomplish his purposes in us. And finally, I can trust that the father knows the right time to do it. He knows the right thing to do, the right way to do it, and the right time to do it in. What Paul says in verse 10, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. Paul, talks about this mystery that God is is bringing together, the mystery of his will to unite people who were his old covenant, old testament people with the Gentiles like us in into one people of God in in a way that nobody almost could anticipate or could imagine is possible.

And that he would do it through the sacrifice of his son, which is not just something that happened in the past, but is pointing forward to what God is going to do ultimately, that he is going to reconcile all things. He is going to sum up. He is going to bring to unity. He is going to gather together, in various translations, all things through Christ. In Christ, God is, in fact, in the process of tying together everything, all of history, all of human action.

He is bringing together all things to unite them according to his eternal purpose. For those who respond to his grace and offer forgiveness, he will unite them to himself in life and forgiveness and wholeness. And those who reject him, it will be the demonstration of his justice against rebellion and sin and evil. Because apart from Christ, man, we don't we don't even need God's revelation to tell us this. Everything is broken and twisted and dysfunctional and disunited.

We see it in ourselves. We see it in our families. We see it in the world. But through Christ, God is bringing back together all things and uniting them in one day that will be the only reality, that things will be brought back to the way God intended them from the beginning. And that means in the middle of my life that it's not pointless, it's not random, it's not hopeless, it's not out of control.

In fact, it's a hope that I can be, and in fact, one day I will be better than what I am now and will be what God ultimately created me to be. And that he's at work right now in all of the difficult, painful, hard, frustrating things that I experienced to even though the things themselves are are bad, to redeem them and use them for his purposes, to unite me to Christ, to make him like his son. And he promises that he will not give up on me or doing that work in me until he brings it all to completion in the fullness of time. And my struggle, our struggle, I think, is that, man, I want the fullness of time to be today. Right?

When when we walk through the brokenness and the ugliness and the profound mess of this world, It can be hard to believe that this is part of God's plan. Why isn't the fullness of time now? And we get hints in other places in the Bible. God is not slow to fulfill his promise, but he is patient wanting all people to come to repentance. God is patient with me.

God is patient with the people who've sinned against me. God is patient with the broken, twisted, ugly, evil things in the world that they would come to repentance and find life in Jesus just like we have. And the work that God has started in us, Paul promises, God will bring to completion. He will make us into what he has called us to be. What greater hope could we have?

What higher calling? I can't put my hope in life turning out the way that that I wish it would. That life is going to be about avoiding pain or succeeding in my career, finding the love of my life, or that people will like me or be impressed with me. But I have this hope. The father loves me, and he has chosen me because of his son to be adopted into his family, to be holy and blameless in his sight, and to be at work in everything that I'm going through to make me look more and more like his son.

We've had a a number of memorial services recently for people who passed away and had some beautiful celebrations of life, people who have reflected the goodness and the kindness, the generosity, the grace of Jesus. And it's good for us to remember that even in the losses, even in the pain, in the suffering, death does not win. Jesus wins because Jesus is even able to take suffering and death and turn it to his purposes because we die. We go to be with the Lord. And those who have gone before us in Christ, they're beyond sorrow.

No more suffering. No more sorrow. No more sin. No more sickness. We have hope that even in pain, God is using grief and struggle and sorrow for our ultimate good and in ways that we can't make sense out of.

Not that the things themselves are good, but that God is good in the middle of it, and it's part of his purpose. Because I have hope that God has called me, he's chosen me, he's put me on a path to eternal joy and glory that is being worked out here and now. This whole passage is, it's just amazing, not just in the scope of what's here, the the breadth, the beauty of it, but it is actually a picture of of the father, son, and spirit, a Trinitarian God working together in unity to accomplish those purposes together, the father creating the plan, the son accomplishing it, the spirit applying it to us. It it goes from past to present to to eternity future. And we live in the unfinished middle, in the fog and the confusion and the and the uncertainty, and we can't see the end, but we see Jesus.

And we have the holy spirit living in us to guarantee the father's love and his good purposes and all the uncertainty that we're walking through right now. Think of the difference that it would make it if we live just with this constant awareness of being people who are so deeply flawed, but even more deeply loved. The confidence we'd have, the security, how it would take away fear and anxiety. Think of the difference it would make if if we live just with this awareness that the father knows. The father knows what's going on, that he has all wisdom and all power, and in some way we cannot understand is working out all things according to his plans.

And that in all that uncertainty, he's pouring out, he's lavishing on us the riches of his grace. He's not holding back. Think of what it would look like if our church was really known for being a community where people are courageously honest about ourselves, that we're not threatened or put off by people's brokenness and and messes. And and instead, we're people who are are willing to embrace one another in the brokenness and weep over the wounds and speak the truth in love and grace and patience trusting that God knows and God is at work. Think of what it would look like if if we went out into the places where we live and where we work and where we study and where we play, and they become places of grace and peace and kindness and restoration because we're there and the father is at work through us.

Oh, that's what Paul wants us to see, to trust that the father knows what we need, he knows the way to bring it, and he knows the right time to accomplish it all. Would that change the way that we view interruptions and and annoyances in our lives? You have confidence in your life, in your past, in your present, in your future because God has poured out his love for you in his son, Jesus, and he is in control. He's your loving father, so trust in him. Let me pray for us.

Father, thank you for the, amazing sweep of these promises, the the rich amazing expanse of these truths and ask that they would come to grow more and more in our hearts so that as we experience all the anxieties and fear that we struggle with in our lives and in this world that we would turn to you to find security because of your love, because of your work in us, because of your promises. Father, help us to see things in our lives that that we run after, that we tend to put our confidence in, the ways we tend to numb ourselves from pain and disappointment, and how they can't give us the freedom or the peace or the purpose that you want us to have. Help us to turn to you, to see your love that gives us meaning and security and wholeness and hope as we walk with you. We love you, Jesus. We thank you, and we pray in your 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 faithchurchind.com.