Last winter I took a course on
Jonathan Edwards. We reviewed his life,
his sermons, and some of his important writings. I had forgotten how difficult
it is to read some of the eighteenth-century writers. Many wrote with surprisingly long sentences;
some of Edwards’s sentences stretched for half a page or more. I wondered, at time, if there was a shortage of periods in colonial New England.
Keep long sentences in mind as you read
Ephesians 1:3-14. Although my text for
this message is verse three, I want you to read the entire passage so you’ll
have a feel for what Paul is doing here.
In the Greek text, those eleven verses form one long sentence in which Paul
focuses our attention on the activities of the gracious God who has created one
new people through Christ.
As such, we are on sacred
ground. When Moses stood before the burning
bush, the voice of God told him to take off his shoes because he was standing
on holy ground. I am not going to ask
you to remove your shoes but be assured we are beginning to walk on holy
ground.
Paul’s first words form a prayer of
praise. His heart so overflows with
praise that once he picks up his pen he can scarcely put it down.
His words encompass the span of
salvation history from eternity past to eternity to come. He reveals how each member of the Trinity is
involved in our salvation. He reminds us
that what God has done for us through Jesus Christ did not begin at
Bethlehem. And that is part of the
mystery and wonder of what God has done through Jesus.
But these words do more than review
what God has done; they challenge us.
They challenge us to embrace concepts we find hard to understand, to
admit we may not have all the answers to some pretty big questions. Just as significant, these words challenge
our persistent activism, calling us to pause to spend time in worship and
contemplation.
You see, the life-changing
blessings we have thorough Christ should prompt us to praise God. Why? The verse implies three reasons.
GOD’S BLESSINGS ARE
ABUNDANT
If someone regularly overheard your
prayers, what would they think--especially if your prayers were the only source
of their theology? After listening to
your prayers, might they assume God tends to withhold his blessings?
Paul sees God as a God who blesses.
This God is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The nine words are
packed with meaning.
Of course, that is a “Christian”
name for God. None of the Old Testament
prophets knew him as such. For his
Jewish readers, Paul not only links Jesus to the God of the Old Testament, he
declares that Jesus has a special relationship with that God—Jesus is the Son
of God. Elsewhere, Paul will refer to
Christians as “children of God,” but the thrust of the New Testament is that
Jesus is the “Son of God” as no one else.
In referring to Jesus as “Lord” and “Christ,” Paul was using terms
Christians from either Greek or Jewish backgrounds would understand. “Lord”
clearly implied deity; “Christ” identified Jesus as the Anointed One, the
Messiah God had promised to send.
Of course, Paul is again reminding
us that we receive blessings because of our union with Jesus Christ. He is not
simply the “Lord Jesus Christ,” he is “our
Lord Jesus Christ.” Yes, God blesses non-Christians but Christians have
special insight into why God blesses them.
The words “every spiritual blessing” remind us of the abundance and breadth
of these blessings. Here’s how Phillips
translates the phrase, “every possible spiritual benefit.” Paul does not say “some blessings;” he says,
“every blessing.” Any blessing we may
need is already ours in Christ.
At the core of the word “blessing”
is the concept of something good for us.
Every good thing we need has already been taken care of. We don’t need to wonder if God is going to
bless us or act for our good in the future—he already has.
GOD’S BLESSINGS ARE
ACCESSIBLE
What does Paul mean when he says
these blessings are “in the heavenly realms”?
It is a phrase Paul used only in Ephesians, so we cannot gain insight
from his other writings. Is he saying
our blessings are locked away in some heavenly trust fund, only to be available
when we die?
The New Testament scholar J. B.
Lightfoot says, “The heaven of which, the apostle here speaks, is not some
remote locality, some future abode. It
is the heaven which lies within and about the true Christian.”
We often speak of eternal life as
something we will not experience until we enter heaven in the future. The New Testament presents “eternal life” as a
quality of life the Christian experiences right now.
A few months ago, the United
Kingdom celebrated Queen Elizabeth II’s ninetieth birthday and just last year
she became the longest reigning-monarch in British history. Several television
shows and movies have been made about her in the past few years. When King
George VI died in 1952, Princess Elizabeth became queen. She was regarded as queen and enjoyed the
privilege of being queen even though her coronation did not take place until
sometime later.
In a sense, this pictures what Paul
is talking about. Christians—living here
and now—can already experience and exercise some of the blessings of
heaven. This why one modern paraphrase
renders the phrase as, “He has already
given us a taste of what heaven is like.”
GOD’S BLESSINGS ARE
APPROPRIATE
The blessing we need now, we have
now. They are appropriate to our needs;
they touch our lives where they most need to be touched. Paul describes these blessings as “spiritual
blessings.”
Years ago, I knew a woman named
Lynn; she was married to the owner of the store where I worked. She and her husband were Christians but
Lynn’s faith had something of a childish quality, not the “childlike” faith
Jesus commends but a somewhat immature faith.
I recall her bursting into the story one day to tell us she had just
bought a fur coat at another store in the mall.
She said she had been looking at it for some time but felt it too
expensive. Then, she happened into the
store and found it on sale. “God,” she
said, “wanted her to have the fur coat, so he had the store put it on sale.” In
a world where millions would consider any coat at all to be a blessing, Lynn
believed God had wanted her to be fashionable.
There is no doubt God blesses us
materially, but his greatest blessings are never material. A spiritual people need spiritual blessings.
So, what are the blessings we need?
Remember, I said Ephesians’ message
could be summarized as: “Through Jesus Christ, a gracious God has created one
new people to have fellowship with him and w with each other as they live for
him and work for him in the real world.”
To understand something of the kind
of blessings we need, we need to understand Paul’s concept of the “real
world.” The biblical concept of the real
world includes the physical world around us—trees, roads, buildings, animals,
the environment we study in the sciences.
But the Bible also recognizes there is a spiritual world, a realm where
Christians are often engaged in conflict on behalf of the Kingdom of God. Later in the letter, Paul will refer to that
aspect of the real world:
…Our struggle is not against flesh and
blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of
this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
realms.
The blessings God gives us are
designed to deal with this real world.
We need spiritual blessings to deal
with the spiritual problems of doubt and despair.
We need spiritual blessings to face
opposition to the gospel.
We need spiritual blessings to be
victorious over temptations we face every day.
We need spiritual blessing to
defuse shame and guilt when we fail.
We need spiritual blessings to
overcome the pride that keep us from seeing our need of God’s blessings.
We need spiritual blessings to
maintain hope in a world that would infuse us with cynicism.
We need spiritual blessings to keep
loving when it would be easier to walk away from the unlovely.
We need spiritual blessings to keep
on despite frustrations.
We need spiritual blessings to
override the skepticism that prompts us to believe the material world is all
there is.
We need spiritual blessings to
emerge as victors in the struggle with evil.
We need these blessings and we may
have them. God has already given them to us.
Paul nowhere suggests there is a class of Christians that has these
blessings while there is another class of Christians that does not have
them. There are no second-class citizens
in God’s Kingdom.
I enjoy reading about great
Christians of past ages. These men and
women are sometimes described as “spiritual giants.” We do well to admire them but we are wrong to
think of these Christians as having blessings God keeps in reserve for his
favorites. This text tells us that you
and I already have all the spiritual resources we need. But we don’t always make what is ours a
reality in our loves. Sometimes it’s a
problem of doubt. Sometimes it is a problem of sin. It is never a problem of
God’s unwillingness to bless; He is willing to increase our faith, willing to
forgive our sin.
When we see God as the God who
blesses us, our churches should be filled with an atmosphere of praise. Paul, a learned theologian, had reviewed
God’s saving activity again and again, yet he was still moved to praise when he
considered them.
We sing, “Count Your Blessing;”
don’t bother. You don’t have enough
fingers and toes—even if you remove your shoes on this holy ground. Instead simply praise God.
But this is not just a call to
praise God. It is a call to appropriate
the blessings God has already given us. Ask
yourself if you are living as a short-changed Christian.
Make sure you’ve accepted his
greatest blessing—the blessing of salvation.
