Overtaken by Grace

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

We began last week, we began our year-long study on the book of Ephesians, and we're spending here these first few weeks on Ephesians chapter 1. And so if you want to get caught up on kind of what that first week was about, and a little bit about the book of Ephesians, it's a letter to a church, to several churches actually, but Ephesus, the church in Ephesus was kind of the biggest one. And so it's a circular letter, and so because of that, it kind of gets up on some really high places and looks at some really kind of big things in Christianity. Last week we looked at Ephesians 1 verses 3 through 6 in particular, and how God set our identity in Him as holy and blameless, that this is what we are right now. And so instead of maturity, being about taking a step to get closer to God by reading our Bible or going to church, or whatever, that we aren't where God is, actually in maturity we actually should realize that we are with God in Christ,

we are holy and blameless before Him, and that in all actuality, we are sent to people in Jesus' name, the same way He was sent, we are sent to people because, in fact, because we are secure in our identity in God. In God we are holy and blameless, and we are sent just like Jesus, so then reading our Bible and praying, and becoming more like Christ, all those things are still important, but they fit within the context of the fact that we are sent to people. And if we are going to be a blessing to people the way that Jesus is a blessing to people, then we are going to go in His name, then we're also going to go in His likeness. It doesn't mean that we have to be perfect, but it means we have a different set of motivations. And we're going to be talking a little bit about that today as we continue, as Ephesians kind of fleshes this out, not just that we are holy and blameless before Him,

but how, how all this is done in Christ, and then how our new identity in Christ actually helps us deal with sin kind of on an everyday kind of basis. So we're going to be picking up in Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1 verse 7 is where we're going to be today, and we're covering verse 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 and 12. We're just going to touch on 11 and 12 today, so if you had your hopes up for 11 and 12, you just have to wait a week, okay? So Ephesians chapter 1, and I'm just going to read, we're just going to go kind of a little bit at a time, but we're going to be covering the verses so much that I don't feel like we need to read kind of all of them at once and then kind of go back. So let's just start here in Ephesians chapter 1 verse 7, okay? So it says, in Him, this is in Christ, in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,

according to the riches of His grace, okay? Redemption. It says, in Him we have redemption through His blood, okay? And this is a little bit about what we talked about last week, it's flushing it out a little bit more, because Jesus died on a cross, right? Because He lived a perfect life, died on a cross, His blood, what that did was that actually bought us out of slavery. That's what redemption means. To be redeemed is not, you know, when I was a kid, there was a big recycling effort, you know, and you would take glass bottles, like you'd have, like you see kids with like wagons in a neighborhood collecting glass bottles or collecting aluminum cans, y'all remember that? Those of you born in the 1900s, you know what I'm talking about. And it was all a big recycling effort, right? And so you kind of had this wagon, and then you would go and you would redeem these glass bottles, and so you'd get like, I don't know, man, a nickel or

something, you'd get enough, just a little bit, you know, like that was such a scam. Anyway, you redeem these things because you're turning them into something valuable. They are glass bottles that were trash, and they're going to be redeemed because they're going to be melted down, and they're going to be turned into something new, okay? Aluminum, same story, right? All these things that are redeemed, that's kind of how we talk about it, and it is difficult for us to get into the mindset of slavery, like 18th century chattel slavery in America, right? Like that's not, we're just not really there, okay? We don't really understand what it is to be a slave in that physical context, but we do understand sin slavery, right? What Hebrews 11:1 calls the sin that clings so closely, or the sin that so easily entangles, right? We do know what that's like, because we do know what it's like to feel like we cannot stop, like that we have a compulsion

to do something, even though we don't want to do it. Whether it's like a lust that won't stop or a greed that is never satisfied, a fear that always speaks up. You could be having a great day, but then that fear just starts talking to you, and you feel like you can't turn it off. You have a jealousy that will push you to hate people or toward envy. You have a pride that in your mind it justifies the condemnation of another person, right? And all of these things, like when I'm driving down the road, I don't think to myself, man, I'm so glad I'm in my pride, and I'm going to condemn this person who cannot drive today. These aren't conscious choices, right? We don't sit there and like, man, I really wish I could lust today. That doesn't happen on that level. It happens as a compulsion. It happens kind of as a result of slavery. It doesn't mean that we're not responsible,

but it does mean that stopping that or putting a cork on that or however we're going to deal with it becomes increasingly difficult because we are enslaved to it and we need to be redeemed out of it. Our identity as a slave to sin has been completely removed because Jesus' blood redeemed us out of it. Let me say it again. In Christ, if you have said yes to following Jesus Christ, if you have opened up to Him and just said, Lord, I want to follow You and it hadn't been perfect, that's fine, it hadn't been perfect for me, it hadn't been perfect for anybody. If you've said that then you have been redeemed out of sin slavery. You no longer need to be subject to that compulsion. Now, we still are a little bit subject to that compulsion. We'll talk about that in just a second. Just because we're in Christ, it doesn't mean that we don't deal with that compulsion

anymore. It does mean, though, that we are not slaves to it. We'll kind of talk about what the difference is there in a second. Our identity as a slave has been removed and we've been given a new identity, but also I don't want to skim over this because it's actually a really important point. If we go back to the verse, it says that we in Him we have redemption through His blood, comma, the forgiveness of our trespasses. Okay, now if you're like me and you just read that, that just looks like another way to say the same thing, right? And that's kind of how we talk almost. So we'll say something like, you know, or at least I will because I talk too much, but whenever I explain something to my wife, I'll say it a different way. Like right after I say the first thing, I'll say another thing, but I'm really just trying to say the same thing in a different

way just so she gets it. Okay, at least that's what I think. She, you know, she knows. I just like hearing myself talk sometimes. That's not what's going on here. Okay, that's not what's going on here. This is not that. This is actually a different point and it's actually kind of important. It's not a different way to say it. I want you to imagine, I want you to imagine that you work for Jeff Bezos. Okay, you work, you work for Amazon. Okay, some of you don't have to imagine. Some of you work for Amazon. Okay, imagine that you work for Amazon. You will have to imagine this next part, hopefully. Imagine that you work for Amazon and you have stolen 10 million dollars from Jeff Bezos, well from Amazon, right? You have stolen 10 million with an M, million dollars, and your thinking was like, man, he won't notice. He won't notice, tell me, he's a billionaire, you know? He literally has thousands of millions of dollars.

He won't notice 10 million gone, and he doesn't for a while, because you know, Amazon's a big company, right? But eventually he does find out, his lawyers find out, his CFO finds out, everybody finds out. Okay, and then you, you now are strung up. You were strung up on this. You have to pay back the 10 million dollars in full, probably with interest, but you got to pay that back in full, and you're looking at jail time.

Okay, so what I want to point out there, none of that, all that makes sense to you, right? If you steal 10 million dollars, you're going to have to pay back the 10 million dollars, and you're going to jail, right? Why? Why are you going to jail too? If you steal 10 million dollars, why don't you just pay 10 million dollars back, and then everything's free and clear? Well, that's not how it works. There's a penalty, right? There's a penalty. And we understand this in every capacity. I mean, this is like basic justice right here, but we don't think about it as two things, but it is two things. It is both the debt that we have and the penalty that we incur,

right? So we got to, we got to pay Jeff Bezos back 10 million plus interest. We got to pay him that all back, and then we got to serve jail time. We might go to jail for the rest of our lives, and we still have to pay 10 million dollars back to Jeff Bezos. There is a debt and a penalty. When we sin against God, it has two effects, not one. It has two effects. The first effect is that sin incurs a penalty, a death penalty, actually. Sin incurs a penalty. It is treason. Sin is treason against God. It's punishable by death. Okay? And look, realize I'm trying to isolate a specific thing right here, okay? This is not the whole story. Hallelujah. But this is part of it, and we do need to understand it, right? When we sin, when anybody sins against God, it incurs a death penalty, right? Romans 6, 23, for the wages of sin is death, okay? Wages of sin is death.

We incur a penalty, but also, also, sin enslaves us. Sin enslaves us. So, it's not just that, and you can kind of see this in like a small level, like when you tell someone a lie, and then something kind of like starts to expose that lie, and then you tell another lie to kind of shore up that bank, and then something else starts to expose that lie, and you tell another lie, right, to do that, to cover it up. And these might be small lies, might be big lies, but you, what we need to understand is that like that, that on a very small level is how sin enslaves us.

It, sin wrecks our lives. It puts us on a path that we cannot escape from, right? People that you work with, that you know that in your neighborhood, right, that, you know, your kids friends, like your kids friends parents, all these people that you know that are not in Christ are enslaved to sin. They are enslaved to sin, meaning they are, they are in their minds, they are forced to kind of justify themselves, work themselves out of every situation. They always still owe. Does that make sense? So, if you are, if you are enslaved to sin, it is wrecking your life, and it might be in slow motion, and it might be in fast motion, but it is wrecking your life, and it is, it is changing, it is putting it on a path that is impossible to get out of, okay? So, you have two effects. You have incurred a penalty, and you have wrecked your life. You are enslaved, and you owe a penalty. And so, in Jesus, there's

this really great old hymn called Rock of Ages. Rock of Ages, Clef for me, okay? You might have heard that before. That was not the best version of it, but you might have heard it before. But in that, in that, there's a line in there that talks about Jesus being the double cure, double cure. That's a really curious thing to say about Jesus, right? Why is he the double cure? Well, it's talking about this, right? He's the double cure because in him we have not just redemption, but also forgiveness. And it makes the same point. Colossians 1-14 makes the exact same point. It says, in him we have redemption, comma, the forgiveness of sins, right? Same, same point. So, in forgiveness, we have the death penalty for sin taken away, and in redemption, we are cleansed of what got us enslaved in the first place, right? We are set free. And this has huge, huge implications for how you and I handle sin on an everyday basis. Because look, what I've just

talked to you about, this is like imputed righteousness and like big, you know, like theology, like scholars argue about this all the time. Like, this is heavy stuff. Let me just tell you what this means. It means that first, and I'll just say it this way, it means that we can follow Jesus in freedom and not fear. We can follow Jesus in freedom and not fear. Some of you follow Jesus in fear and you believe that to be normal, okay? Some of you follow Jesus in fear because that's how you saw it, that's how you were shown by your parents, that's how you were shown by a previous church, that's how it makes sense to you in some capacity, right? Maybe that's how you learned Christ, but you learn kind of to do that in fear.

And the reason is, is because if you take away either redemption or forgiveness, you still owe. If you take away either one, if you take away redemption or forgiveness, you still owe and then you should be afraid. If you owe a debt that you can't pay to the creator, then you should completely be afraid. Yes, you should. However, just to prove it a quick way, if you have redemption without forgiveness, right? If you have redemption, you've been bought out of slavery, but you still owe because you're saddled with a penalty that you can't pay. Does that make sense? So, maybe somebody got you out of jail, but you still owe Jeff Bezos $10 million, which you can't pay anymore. You can't play with interest, you spent some of it, you know, you don't do that. If you have forgiveness, but you don't have redemption, then the penalty is taken away. You don't have to go to jail. No, the other way around.

You still owe because sin slavery still drives you back to incur more penalty. Does that make sense? So, you are still, if you are still enslaved to sin, then Jesus can forgive you all day, but tomorrow you're going to need just as much forgiveness. Do you understand? That Jesus, whenever he died on a cross, didn't just take care of the penalty that you incur, but he stopped the cycle from happening again. All of us have dealt with, or maybe tangentially, we dealt with some kind of addictive behavior, an addict that's a family member or something, but there's nothing more maddening than even being an addict or helping an addict. It's that there's this compulsion to continue to go back to the same thing that wrecks their lives. So, my dad's a smoker. Okay, so this is a little bit lower level than being addicted to meth, but my dad is a smoker, right, and he smoked ever since he was like 13. My dad's 76 now, 76. Yeah.

So, he's been smoking, you know, for 60-something years. When he was 60, he had a heart attack. Okay, he had to get like triple bypass. He almost died. He was at an AA meeting, right, he was an alcoholic for a long time. He's at an AA meeting, and he starts to have a heart attack, and there's three people there. One guy has a nitroglycerin pill, one guy's a nurse, and the other guy starts dialing 911 immediately. Okay, so all three of those guys basically together saved his life, and what I've told him several times is, dad, the Lord God in heaven did not want you to die that day because it would have been so easy for you to die that day, like so easy, like five minutes more, and no, none of the, one of those three guys not there, and you're on the slab, right, you're dead, you're gone, we're celebrating your funeral, right, like that's, we're celebrating your life at a funeral. It would have been so different,

okay, but my dad's an addict. He's addicted to cigarettes, okay, and he didn't smoke, I think, for a year, maybe, but 61 rolls around, and he's smoking again, right, and you know what his cardiologist tells him, hey, don't smoke Troy, it'll kill you, hey, don't smoke Troy, it'll kill you, hey, don't smoke Troy, it'll kill you, and you know what his lived experience is? Hadn't yet,

right, he's got the trump card, because he's alive, right, that's kind of how he sees it, okay, and I'm not trying to pick on dad too hard, there's probably a few worse things he could do than smoke, but it is a good illustration of the fact that even when you have a heart attack, and many people do, I mean, I've actually heard this from a lot of different heart attack survivors, and I've done, I've looked at some of the research, many heart attack survivors do go back to smoking. If they were smokers before, they quit for a little bit because they get scared, but then they go back, right, and look, I'm not telling you right now that like, you know, like, smoking is some like really horrible sin, like it's just like belongs on like the list of like the 10 worst sins ever, I'm just using it as an example, and so if you do smoke, and you're feeling some kind of conviction, that's fine, that's on you, I'm not trying to,

you know, that's for you to handle with the Lord, I'm not trying to deal with that right now. The point is that if you are addicted, if you are compelled to do that, then you are enslaved to it. The reality is that there is freedom that is in Christ, and that when you sin, because you will, when you follow Christ, and when you sin, our encouragement can be that you repent immediately, that you bypass shaming guilt, and you repent immediately because you don't owe anything to sin. You don't owe God like five minutes of feeling bad just so He'll accept you back. Does that make sense? And that's kind of how we think, like we think like, oh, I messed up, and depending on how bad we messed up, right, so if we messed up and it was like a two, then maybe that's only 10 minutes in time out, but if it's like, if we mess up and it's like an eight, maybe it's like a week in time out,

and time out for us means like, I can't talk to God, I won't feel God, I shouldn't read my Bible, I shouldn't go to church, I shouldn't, right, we start to disqualify ourselves, we start to hold back, right, we feel disqualified in Christ. But in this freedom that we talk about, you are set free because it's, you're set free to repent immediately because it's not your identity. You're paying on a debt you don't owe. You can repent of that immediately. You are not, you are not a sinner that should not be here. You are not a sinner that you have things that you should not have. You are not on thin ice with God as if God has somehow pulled your credentials because you messed up too bad. You are a sinner that is given a new identity as holy and blameless before him. So yes, the reality is you and I still sin, yes, but the bigger reality, the thing that kind of covers that is that sinners is not our identity anymore.

We are holy and blameless before God. You are not disqualified in Christ. Okay, here's kind of a, just a, this is a strange illustration, but I want you to imagine that you're a boxer. Okay, boxer. Now I'm left-handed, so I'll do it right-handed for you guys. Okay, so if I'm, if you're a right-handed boxer, just so you, in case you ever need to box, okay, and if you are real boxers out there and I'm doing this wrong, just tell me later. Don't tell me now. Okay, so you're a right-handed boxer. Okay, what are you going to do? You are going to jab with your strong hand. Okay, no it's not, it's the other way around. It doesn't matter. We'll just make it up right now. Okay, you're going to jab with your strong hand. Okay, you're jabbing. You're jabbing. Oh no, this is left-handed boxing. It doesn't matter. Okay, so you're jabbing with one hand and what you want to do is if you're jabbing, you want to kind of hit them in the nose. That's

kind of what you're hoping for. You're kind of wearing them down. You want those gloves to kind of drop, so you're going to jab. You might, you know, you might go low. You might go high, but you're trying to get their guard down as you're jabbing and you are doing so much jabbing. If you ever watched a boxing match, it's just forever jabbing, but then what happens every once in a while? This happens and then the hook comes around, right? Or this happens and then the upper cut comes around. Okay, the reason that happens is because you can't just swing a hook or an upper cut or just some big haymaker, you know, some big wallop hit. You can't do that while the guard's up. You have to jab to make sure the guard gets down. Okay, all right. In your battle with the enemy, okay, what he has in his arsenal are jabs and hooks, okay? Just generally speaking.

The jab, the jab are these little things. They're just somebody catch up in traffic. The jabs are like, hey, click on this. Hey, watch this. Hey, look at this. Hey, you know, say something about somebody that you shouldn't say. Hey, you know, envy somebody else. Hey, you know, just lust right here. Just this little, just a passing glance. Like, just, right? It's jabs. It's just jabs. But what happens when we let our guard down and we get jabbed and we get like hit in the nose? Have you ever been hit in the nose? Getting hit in the nose is not fun because if you get hit in the nose hard enough, like all of your, so you got maybe a little bit of blood happening. You got swelling happen. Your eyes water. And so you can't see, you are disoriented. And that's why boxers go for the nose because if you can get somebody in the nose really, then you can disorient them pretty good. And if they're disoriented, what are they

ready for? Ready for the hook. Okay, so what does the enemy do? The enemy, the enemy waits, jab, jab, jab. But what's the hook? The hook is you never belonged here in the first place. You're not worthy of being in a church building at all. What are you doing here? You're disqualified. But Satan didn't open with that, right? He didn't, you don't wake up in the morning and be like, ah, I'm disqualified. You know, like, because in your, in your lived experience, like kind of how you're making choices, you don't feel that you feel the jabs. You feel the jazz. But when you, when you fall for one of the jabs and you are disoriented and your eyes water and there's, there's get some swelling around your, your nose, you can't see, you don't know which way is up, man, that haymakers comment. It'll get you.

It's the lie that if it was a, if it was a frontal assault, right? If the, if the enemy just kind of came at us directly, we'd see it a mile away. We'd see it a mile away. But, but when we're disoriented, comes at our flank, gets us right out of our line of sight. And boy, sometimes, man, it can just take us down. The reason that we need to know what the Lord God has done for us, the reason that we need to memorize verses, like Ephesians 1, 3 through 6, the reason that we need to know those things is because when we got jabbed and then we get hooked, sometimes the only thing you can do is just to remember that your identity is holy and blameless before him. You have to cling to what's true even when you feel disoriented and you feel disqualified and you feel like you're on the outs with God and you don't, you don't feel like you belong in a church. You don't feel like you belong in a

service. You don't feel like you can have a quiet time with your kids. You don't feel like you can lead family devotion. You don't feel like you can sing this song. You don't feel all that. You don't. You don't feel it because you, you, you got a swollen nose and maybe you got a, maybe you got a big bruise right here. But the reality is you are not disqualified before the Lord because you didn't do anything to qualify in the first place. What'd you do? What'd you do to become a Christian? Believe? Repent? I mean great, but that's, we're not talking about like a great feat of strength here. Why did God choose you? We've already looked at this, we're going to look at it again. Why did God choose you? Because you would, you'd make a great Christian? No. No, not even close. There's a whole other plan going on. We're going to get to that. There's a whole

other plan going on that the reason that God calls you to Himself is to, is out of His grace. It's out of His riches. It has nothing to do with you. And so then the identity bestowed upon you is the exact same thing. The identity that God gives you is not, it's not up to you. It's up to God. In fact, as we looked at last week, it says that we've been adopted as firstborn sons.

Adopted as sons. We talked about last week how it's kind of full legal status, right? To be adopted as firstborn sons means that you have, that you have legal status to an inheritance. We're going to get to an inheritance a little bit, but legal status. But there's also this, just this idea of God being our Father, right? Whenever Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray, what does He start with? What's the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, anybody? Our Father. Let's think about that just a second. Our Father, possessive, plural, Father. Our Father.

I know many of our stories are full of imperfect Fathers doing imperfect things, right? We know what imperfection looks like, okay? We get that, feel that, sometimes feel that our whole lives. But when we have God as our Father, man, I just, I was given this a very long, long time ago. This is back in high school. I was given this story and it just administered to me in the moment. It has administered me since. I've told the story since and it has administered to other people since. I just want to tell you, like, I want you to imagine a father of a little baby. We got a little baby right here. We got a little Alistair, okay? A little Alistair right here. Josh is the father of Alistair. Josh Wood is Alistair's father. Alistair's four months, almost six months, excuse me, sorry. I'll get that right. Usually you can tell between four and six. So, within a few months, Alistair is going to begin, like, pulling up and going to

begin walking, right? That's a fun time, man. If you've ever, anybody ever tried to teach a child how to walk? That's good times, man. They're cute and they do a little tree trunk. They don't know how to walk yet. It's really, really cute, okay? And so, how is Josh going to teach Alistair how to walk? Melissa, I'm sure you will also. I'm not trying to exclude you here. I'm just talking about father right now. It's all, bless you, you're going to do a great job, okay? But how does he, how does, how does Josh teach Alistair how to walk? What does he do? He holds his hands, right? Sticks his fingers out, little baby hands on the fingers, right? And then he just goes. He just goes. Now, how many steps is Alistair going to make, like, his first attempt? I mean, zero, his first attempt. And maybe, maybe he gets a step in there. And then, and then what happens? See,

Miraculous, do you start skipping down the road? No. What happens? False. Falls on his bottom, right? You hope it's just as bottom. You're, you know, you're kind of doing that number, right? Like, oh, don't, don't, don't fall in your head or something. Especially first time parents. God bless you. Oh, so many joys. So many joys. You're so nervous. We love you. We love you. We're excited for you. Okay.

Now, what if God forbid, Josh, you should not do this. But what if, what if whenever Alistair falls, you just get, you get so mad, boy, you just right back, kick him. Whoa, right? Whoa. Who would do that? Right? Who would do that? That's exactly what you think God does to you whenever you mess up. That's exactly the same thing. You do the same thing. You think that you need to be running marathons and God's like, I'm just trying to teach you how to walk. And when we fall, we are worried that God has the boot ready to go. And we are going through the goal post, man. Like we are worried about getting whipped beyond belief because we messed up once.

And Hebrews tells us the Lord does discipline those he loves his sons, right? The Lord does discipline us. Yes. And amen. He does that. But can I just tell you, like, even a terrible father would never punt their little kid who's trying to learn how to walk, right? We never do that. So why do we think that's how God acts with us? Why do we think that? I think it's because we have a jacked up view of our identity before him. I think we've just had taken too many jabs and too many hooks, and we are wondering why we feel disqualified all the time.

But here's the reality, man. The reality is like, man, we look at, you ever just, you ever watch people watch a baby, right? I'll sit in a coffee shop. Everyone's while a baby walks in. I look at the baby first. Definitely. But then I watch other people watch the baby. You know what happens? Everybody smiles. Like, everybody smiles. Even the crotchety, you know, old guy in the corner just, you know, like, who'd probably screamed to the kid to get off his lawn that morning. Just kind of melts a little bit with the baby, right? With the kid. And we are fallen, imperfect, like, really selfish people who need all the kind of sanctification in the world. Like, we deal with sin all the time, right? We are part of fallen creation, and we can't help but smile at a baby. Like, what do you think your father in heaven thinks about when he looks at you? Do you think he's disappointed?

Do you think he's wondering why you're not further along? I guarantee most of you do. I've talked to too many people. I've heard too many stories. I've experienced it too many times myself, right? That you have a disqualifying kind of voice in your head that you aren't good enough. And this is how we have this new identity in Christ. We have a new identity before God. It's holy and blameless because Jesus did something for us that turned us into an adopted child, but a fully adopted child. We're not just a child that kind of gets to sleep outside sometimes. We're in the house. We have our own room, right? Jesus has made a home in our heart, and he has a home for us. He speaks of that way in particular, because it's not just like, that we're acquaintances or we're co-workers or anything like that. It's that we are adopted as full sons. It enables us to fight sin and temptation because we can remember who we are.

And we discussed this last week, but I want to look at verses 7 and 8 together. Ephesians 1, 7 and 8 says, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight. Listen, it bears repeating, this is all done according to the riches of God's grace. God has made you to be new in Christ because he can and he wanted to. Not because you're a good candidate. Not because you go to church. Not because you donate to Harvest House. Not because you don't say cuss words or say, pardon our French when you do. We're not earning things, right? God has lavished his grace upon us. And as he does that, as we'll see in verses 9 and 10, as he lavishes that grace upon us in all wisdom and insight, there are a few things that fall into place. Look at verse 9, very beginning, it says, it says, making known to us the mystery of his

will. So God has done all this. God has done all of 7 and 8. All that he's done that in Christ, you know, right, our blood is, sorry, excuse me, Christ's blood has made us new. It has redeemed us and forgiven us according to his riches. And he's done all this to make the mystery of his will known. God needed us to realize something for the grace to turn into wisdom and insight, otherwise the impact would kind of be lost on us, right? So God, he's doing that to us, for us, and he's enlightening us to be able to see it. He's making known to us the mystery of his will. What does mystery mean? It can be a little misleading. We think of mystery like Scooby-Doo. Like there's a secret wisdom out there that is still hidden, right? But whenever Paul is talking about mystery here, it's not something hidden that only a few select people will ever get. This mystery is a revealed mystery. It's an open secret. Ephesians is making the opposite point.

It's not a mystery that we can't have. It's actually a mystery that we do understand, a mystery that we do have. It's an open secret to those who are in Christ. And so maybe to think about it this way, before Jesus redeems us through his shed blood, forgiving us according to the riches of his grace, people in the Old Testament would see things, they'd hear things, they'd perceive things, they would try to understand, but their understanding was limited. So they would look at Isaiah and the Isaiah prophecy about the suffering servant, they would say, why is there a suffering servant here? Right? So this is before Jesus came. Why is there a suffering servant here? Why did he need to come? Why is Israel under Egyptian rule or Assyrian rule or Babylonian rule or Roman rule? Why is God's people enslaved? Why are we enslaved?

Why hasn't the Messiah come yet? These are real questions. This is part of the mystery of what's happening in the Old Testament. They don't understand because it's not revealed yet. This is why in Habakkuk 1 verse 2 it says, it says, oh Lord, how long will I cry for help and you will not hear? Or cry to you violence and you will not save. And we ask the same kinds of questions, don't we? We ask things like, why did I lose my job? Why did my life turn out this way? Why can't I get over this? Why am I dealing with this debilitating depression? Why is my health so bad? Am I not married yet? Right? All of these questions, we don't understand, we don't see it. And these questions, what this is telling us in Ephesians chapter 9, Ephesians chapter 1 verse 9, it's telling us these questions and more questions. It's not like there's like an immediate answer,

like just, you know, if you start following Christ, you then know everything. That's not really what it's saying at all. It's saying that all of these questions and more all find their resolution in God's revealed mystery. They all find, it begins to make sense. So 2 Peter 3 9 says, the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. What that's saying is that there's a way our life looks that looks slow, but it's actually not slow. It feels slow, but it's not slow. Why? Because there's a bigger plan going on than whatever plan you got to get to next. Right? There's a bigger, there's a bigger kind of thing happening that you're a part of. You can't see the bigger thing. You can just see this. And so if you just see this, it looks slow, but it's not slow. It's God and his big plan working things out. God has redeemed

and has forgiven you as part of a bigger plan. And God's plan, we will see here in nine and ten, we're going to read it together. Read these verses. Sorry, back to back. Making known to us the mystery of his will 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. God has redeemed and forgiven us as part of his bigger plan. And that bigger plan is to unite all things in Jesus Christ. That sounds really big and nebulous and kind of hard to get our arms around. So let's try to understand it a little bit because this is kind of the wisdom of God's revealed mystery, right? God has revealed these things in Christ, okay. Excuse me. And his plan is coming at just the right time, right? In the fullness of time. Meaning all these things that have happened before,

all these different eras of history have all happened for a reason, that it is all coming together in Christ, okay. It's always been in the works, the fullness of time. This is a destination. This is a reason. This is a culmination to unite all things in him. And here's what that means. That means that Jesus is the centerpiece and it means that he's the explanation, okay. It actually means a lot more than that. I'm just trying to like give like two big things. This word, which is literally a recapitulation, bringing all things together in him, it's kind of big and there's a lot of meaning to it, but I just want to draw out two things, okay. Number one, it means that Jesus is the centerpiece or a different way to say it, the cornerstone. Now I hesitate to use the word cornerstone because we don't make stone arches anymore, so maybe we lose the significance of what a cornerstone is. A cornerstone, if you're

building stone arches, cornerstone, if you've ever seen this in like an architecture, stone's line, the archway, but then the stone in the middle is like bigger and fatter. You ever see that? It's bigger and fatter because it's bearing the weight of the other stones, right. We're not going to deep into, not going to deep into physics here, but that's why it's a big deal. That cornerstone's bearing the load of everything else, and if you take the cornerstone out, it all crumbles, right. And so this is, it's like, it's like he's the cornerstone here. Whenever he came and died and rose and ascended, everything that came before and everything that came after became clearer. When people were figuring out the Messiah was coming, oh the Messiah is Jesus, oh Jesus is supposed to be the Messiah, but he's dying on a cross, this doesn't make sense. They had to readjust the whole archway, right. They had to figure out, okay Jesus fits in here

and this changes everything else. Jesus is the centerpiece. He's the cornerstone, right. All things are uniting in him. There's another way to say that would be, that he is the ultimate reason for everything, right. He's the ultimate explanation for everything. Second Timothy 1:9 talks about it this way. It says that Jesus saved us and called us to a holy calling because of his own purpose and grace which he gave us, sorry this is God the Father, which he gave us in Jesus Christ before the ages began, okay. I'm not trying to, you know, get too meta here, but what I'm trying to help you understand is those choices that you made when you were 16 years old that you thought had no bearing, you can understand now that you're older they had a ton of bearing, right, which, like where your parents moved, right, and what you did in that situation that has a lot of bearing on who you are now. Where you went to college or if you went to college or not,

that has a lot of bearing on your life now, okay. You can see now because you're on the other side of it what that choice has brought you, okay. You can kind of understand those things. With the Lord, what he's saying to us here is that in Christ, when you are following Christ, that's not like you have all the answers, but what you can have is the confidence that the choice you're making now is going to have eternal significance. To you it feels like where you're going to go to lunch, but to the Lord God in heaven it is part of his big plan to unite all things in Christ, and I realize like that's a difficult thing to kind of connect, but you need to understand this because it gives your decisions proper weight, right. For some of you you think like, oh, you know, am I going to read my Bible this morning and what does it matter? Am I going to go to

church today? Why does it matter? Am I going to pray for this person? Like I said, well, does it matter? Am I making it? Yeah, yes, yes, it does. It all makes a difference. It all makes a difference. It's all according to Christ's big plan, right, or God's big plan to unite all things in Christ. All those little choices that you really you think don't add up to anything, and we consider like, you know, we talk about wasting time or we talk about, really, in Christ, your ability to see what a decision is going to, the effects that it's going to have later, you don't have that vision. You don't have that insight. You think you do because

you're human and you're proud, right. Like, I mean, we think we have control over our lives and we don't. We think we have, we think we're the master of our own destiny. We're not, right. This is, this is human folly. This is basic humanity 101 that we think our choices either are serving our own purposes or they don't matter, and that's not true. The reality is your decisions, your choices, even ones you made at 16 or even ones you made at 10 or even ones you made at five, like those choices are fitting into a bigger picture. And here's the, here's the really good news. Here's the really good news in Jesus Christ is that all those choices that you made, and you can look back on your life and you can say, I regret that choice. I regret that choice. I regret that choice. I regret that choice. The hope we have in Christ isn't that somehow we'll finally make it and be, be okay, you know, in this, we'll finally live a good life here on

Earth. That's not our hope. Our hope in Jesus Christ is that not only is our future going to change, but also all these things that happen in our past have a purpose now in our life. There's no wasted moments, right, that the Lord God in heaven is pooling those things together. And you could have had, you could be sitting there right now and have the worst week ever. You could have had the worst week of your life this week. But what we find in Ephesians and what we know in the Lord Jesus Christ is that those things are not wasted. Those weeks are not something you just need to forget about. Those things that are happening to you, the Lord has a plan in them. You can actually rejoice in those things. And I'm not telling you that, you know, if, if you're, you know, having a heart attack on the floor, then you need to start singing him and praising the Lord. I'm like, call a doctor. Okay. That's what I'm saying is that when you look back on

that and when you, when you even, when you're in the middle of experience, something very difficult, the Lord God in heaven is not surprised. He's looking at it and he's confident. And he says, this is all happening according to my purposes. I'm not flinching. I'm not second guessing. I'm not hesitating. These things are going, are happening according to my good pleasure, according to the riches of my grace to give you wisdom and insight. Look, I'm not up for blind optimism, but I am up for a Christian world perspective. And in a Christian perspective of the world, we know the creator personally, and he's doing things for his glory and our good. That is a reason for optimism, a real one. Not like, Oh, it'll be fine. Well, we'll, you know, we'll just forget about it. No, it won't be fine. God has taken it into account. God has made it happen. What are

the choices that you are making now? What's the choices you've got to make this week? More than like where you're going to eat lunch. But like, what are the choices? Are you going to cooperate with God's plan to unite all things in Christ? You're going to cooperate with that? You can. That's actually the beauty of, of being a Christian is that you can, you can cooperate with the Lord on that. And then every day kind of basis, even with small things, even with small encouragements, the spirit is, is directing you toward that. And it starts with prayer. So even as we're praying and singing, even as we're singing, man, I would encourage you just pray.

I want to end with these, these last two verses. We're actually going to cover them a lot next week. I just want to say one little thing about them. And then we'll be, we'll be singing Ephesians 1, 11 through 12. It says, in him we have obtained, listen to the hope here. In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works, listen, who works all things according to the counsel of his will. Amen? So that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be the first to pray, to the praise of his glory. We're going to discuss this next week, man. What a hope. What a hope. What a reason for optimism. What a reason to believe that the Lord God in heaven is not wasting your life, not wasting your time. Man, what a reason.

Let's pray. Lord, thank you for your word. Thank you for optimism in you. Not, not blind, not, not silly. Everything's going to be okay. Not ignorant, but an optimism that is grounded in you. An optimism that says it's, it's all going to be worth it one day. Not, not, not hopeful thinking. Not, not crossing our fingers. Lord, you have set those things in play. You have made us according to your will and you have plans for us. Help us to cooperate with you. Help us to pray to you. Just like we're doing now. That's in your mighty name we pray.