Introduction

For the past two months we’ve been talking a lot about

• Rebuilding the church into what it should be
• Being zealous for good works instead of just knowing things about God

And if some of those lessons sounded hard it’s because they are. The work that God has set out for us is no easy thing to do. So that’s why we’re going to spend the next few weeks learning how to do it all together.

When Adam was in the garden God said it wasn’t good for man to be alone. Even in paradise he needed a helper. Well it’s not good for a Christian to be alone, which is why God has given us the church – a group of people who all are untied in faith in Jesus Christ.

We have a difficult job ahead of us but we are all Stronger Together. We’re going to be studying through Ephesians, which focuses on unity we have in Jesus and within the church.

Connect

How many people are desperate for a family?

Last year the Surgeon General released a letter to the public Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.

• Heard people say they felt “isolated, invisible, and insignificant”
• They told him things like “I have to shoulder all of life’s burdens by myself,” or “if I disappear tomorrow, no one will even notice.”
• Studies that he cites show that 1/2 adults is lonely

They were telling him this before the COVID lock-downs

I’ll always remember my grandpa saying that he was forever stuck in California. It’s where he grew up, it’s where his friends were, his community. If he moved he would lose all of that and he had no idea how to get it back in a new city. But he also recognized that my family could move to just about anywhere and immediately have a community – the church.

If you didn’t have the church, would you be one of those lonely people? Would you have to do so much of it by yourself? Would anybody else care that you died?

Ephesians 1:3-14 is God’s answer to our epidemic of loneliness.

Every Blessing

It’s the longest sentence in the New Testament – a whopping 202 words as Paul originally wrote them – all 14 verse one long and winding thought.

It has been called:

• A golden chain of many links
• A kaleidoscope of dazzling lights
• A snowball of blessings growing larger and larger

I call it overwhelming – and I think that might be the point. Paul says in verse 3:

Ephesians 1:3 ESV

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

We sing that song “Count your many Blessings, Name Them One by One” and I’m sure that if I listed all of my blessings one by one I could write a long sentence about how God has given me this, and that, and this, and that, and on and on.

Paul is focusing on the spiritual blessings from heaven. And when we hear that we might be thinking of some sort of division between spiritual blessings from heaven and physical blessing from the world.

Paul is not talking so much about their substance, some abstract blessings vs a blessing like having a nice job or a house –  he’s talking about their origin.

• These are blessings that originate from the Spirit, so if we’ve received the Spirit by being baptized we can lay claim to them.
• And he calls them heavenly blessings

Would you care for some gas-station sushi? Probably not, I’ve had it before can’t recommend it. Because you associate gas stations with low quality, dirty, the workers aren’t motivated to see if its expired or something. But what if I offered some Japanese sushi? Maybe you don’t like raw fish, but you’re more likely to think quality, care, high value.

Well, God’s not offering you gas station blessings – he’s offering you blessings from the heavenly places.

You know, we always talk about how great heaven is going to be and you might all have your own ideas of what the best place ever should be like: my dad, my brother and I always talked about being three old men standing around beating each other over the head with our canes. Because to us, the coolest thing we could do was hang out with each other and if we couldn’t do that in heaven, then was it really that great of a place?

Well Paul is saying that all the cool things we’re going to experience in heaven are already being given to us now. Blessed be God the Father because he’s giving us a taste of heaven while we’re still hear on earth.

You Were Chosen

The first blessing Paul wants to talk about is that we were chosen.

Ephesians 1:4–6 ESV

⁴ even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love ⁵ he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, ⁶ to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

Everybody wants to be chosen:

• We want to be chosen by an employer
• We want that person who’s just so cute to choose us
• We want our accomplishments to be chosen for recognition

Growing up I was not athletic at all. Mom and Dad tried with my siblings, but they took one look at me and didn’t even ask. And so I had to go to PE knowing that when it came time to choose teams, I was one of the ones chosen last. And I wasn’t really being chosen – it was a forced choice. You eventually had to pick someone like me so everybody got to play.

Well God chose you.

Adopted

In other words, Paul says God adopted you.

Some people try to use that as an insult. “Ha-ha, your parents don’t love you. That’s why they dropped you off at the orphanage with Stuart Little, and he got adopted before you.”

But what they don’t realize about someone who’s adopted is that somebody, for no other reason than the love in their hearts, decided to go through all that paper work, money, time, waiting, disappointment. And when they brought their new child home they loved them and made them one of their own, graciously giving them their name and committing the rest of their lives to their new adopted child.

Can you imagine the bragging rights an adopted child has? Did you know that Sacred Selections paid $60,000 in adoption and legal fees for a baby to be adopted recently? And then the parents had to pay even more on top of that? For too many people getting pregnant is scary, something they don’t want, something they try to avoid at all costs. An adopted child was chosen at all costs.

And nobody forced these adoptions. I talked with the families who have adopted children in this church about their adoptions process. They already had kids of their own. They weren’t counting on them to be stellar individuals with great promise of becoming rich doctors or football players. They picked them for no other reason than they wanted someone else to join the family.

My parents were stuck with me.

God adopted you and for no other reason than that he wanted to bring you into his family. It was like in verses 4-5 “In love he predestined us for adoption.” He did it according to, not the purpose, but the good will of his pleasure.

God picked you up and said “You’re mine. I’m your dad now. Come join the rest of the family.”

Blessed be God our Father for choosing us. For adopting us into his family so that we don’t have to be alone anymore.

Redeemed

And this is how he did that.

Ephesians 1:7–10 ESV

⁷ In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, ⁸ which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight ⁹ making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ ¹⁰ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Redemption is the act of God buying us back from the powers of sin and death, a purchase he made with the blood of Christ. So we could say this is how God adopted us. We’re not stuck at the abusive orphanage anymore but have been purchased by God.

And Paul also talks about redemption being forgiveness.

Keep an eye on where all of this is going:

• He adopted us
• Through redemption which is forgiveness
• All of which is done through grace
• This is, in verse 9, the revelation of the mystery of his will
• His will, or plan, in verse 10 is to unite all things in Christ

Or another way of saying it is that God forgave you of your sins so he could adopt you and unite you with everyone else.

Well how does God’s forgiveness bring that about?

Think about that last bad thing that you did. Were you really eager to share it with anyone? Did you feel really sociable and feel like partying? Or did you tend to isolation and hiding?

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not  love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone  that he is really free.”
―       Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms

Adam and Eve

Remember when Adam and Eve were created? They were in the image of God and could hang out with him in the garden because they didn’t have any sin. And they hung out with each other and helped each other out with all the gardening and baby making?

Remember what happened after the first sin? They hear God coming through the garden:

Genesis 3:8 ESV

⁸ And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

And God starts asking how they knew they were naked and all Adam can do is point the finger at Eve:

Genesis 3:12 ESV

¹² The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.”

Do you think Adam was feeling particularly close to God or his wife at that moment?

C.S. Lewis had an interesting take on Hell. It was this ever growing and expanding city – and not just because more people chose sin over Jesus, but because everybody was always moving away from each other. Because they were bitter, and angry, and hateful. and some people were ashamed – and so they kept building their houses further and further away from people so they could hide themselves and be completely alone.

Because that’s what sin does. It doesn’t bring anything together, it breaks them.

• It breaks marriages
• It breaks promises
• It breaks people

So God sent his son to die on the cross so you could be redeemed with his blood and forgiven. You don’t need to run away anymore. You don’t need to hide. You don’t need to be ashamed. You’re forgiven. You’re now united in Christ with everybody else that’s been redeemed.

Blessed be God our Father for uniting us with his family.

You Received an Inheritance

Now that we have been adopted into Christ’s family we have the blessing of an inheritance.

Ephesians 1:11–14 ESV

¹¹ In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, ¹² so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. ¹³ In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, ¹⁴ who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.

When God freed Israel from Egypt he called them his firstborn son and led them to their inheritance – the promised land.

And now here we are waiting for our own inheritance. And just like Israel, who complained about it being so far away and so difficult to get to we can have doubts. So God has given us the Holy Spirit as a guarantee of it.

Other translations will say it’s the pledge, the down-payment, the first installment. When you give a deposit there’s the assumption that there will be future payments made as well.

So everything that the Spirit has already given us:

• Adoption
• Redemption
• Forgiveness
• Unity

Is a taste of the inheritance. As great as all these blessings are, it’s just a Sam’s Club sampling of heaven. When the Kingdom of God comes in its full realization, when the fullness of time comes for all things in heaven and on earth to be united in Christ, then we have all of these things in a perfect and unlimited manner.

Praise God for giving us such great gifts now which are only a hint of the unimaginable joy we will have with him in heaven.

Application

So we have all of these spiritual blessings from the heavenly places. Are we supposed to just sit around and enjoy them like a spa day?

What am I going to do now as a result of this God’s blessings?

Praise That Grace

The first thing I’m going to do is let people know how great God is for blessing me in all these ways. That’s what Paul is doing when he starts in verse 3:

Ephesians 1:3 HCSB

³ Praise the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.

The blessings that God gives us are worthy of praise. Three times in this passage we’re told that he has done all of this to the praise of his glory, (or his glorious grace).

Speaking personally, that’s something I need to get better at.

• Maybe we’ve been locked into this super straight-lace style of worship that emphasizes reverence. That is so us. I had to bribe the college students for a good morning. I’ve been begging them for a hallelujah or something. I love hearing Kim give a loud amen after a powerful song.
• And if our praise of God is so silent in here I’m not very confident that it’s any louder out there. Maybe we’ve been convinced that you just don’t talk about religion and politics in polite company, and more and more these days it just seems to be just religion that’s not allowed.
• Maybe we just don’t appreciate the blessings. We either take them for granted or refuse to accept them at all by choosing to remain isolated.

So here’s what I’m thinking I’ll start doing:

1. I’m gonna start living in the joy of the Spirit – praise God, thank you Jesus, and amen. Maybe that sounds a little to Charismatic or Pentecostal for you – but we should be living in a constant state of gratitude for all God has given us.
2. I’m also gonna make my time with God’s family the highlight of my weekend and tell people about it.
3. Got no problem gushing over how great a movie was
4. We’re eager to tell people about this new restaurant we tried
5. We evangelize on behalf of all these other things without a second thought because we see the value of such things. I’m going to start telling people about how valuable all of you and God are to me.

Live That Grace

And then after I’m done talking about how great God is, I’m going to show people how great God is.

The Spirit has given us a taste of what heaven is like through our adoption and unity in Christ. When people step into this church building it should feel like they’re visiting in heaven on earth. Our actions and way of life should mirror what heaven is to be like: one big family.

So just as God has blessed me with adoption, I’m going to live out God’s will in heaven on earth by adopting other people.

You can adopt:

• One of your kids friends

My parents adopted my best friend Paco. We didn’t just teach him the truth, we made him a part of the family. So much to the point that he moved to AZ with us, leaving his family behind. And then he has to come up with excuses as to why he’s visiting us for the holidays instead of his biological family.

• A co-worker
• Your neighbor
• Someone in this church
• You can literally adopt someone

It is bringing in all of those lonely people and showing them what heaven is like. A place of belonging, of unity, of forgiveness.

It is God’s will that all things be united in Christ. We do that by opening our doors and making space at the table.

Conclusion

Are you alone? You don’t have to be. God wants to bring you into his family. It’s been his desire since before the beginning to have a big family and he chose you to be in it. And we’ll all be stronger together with you.

But you won’t have any of these blessings unless you are in Christ. That’s how all of these things happen. And you can only enter into Christ through the waters of baptism.

If you want adoption, redemption, an inheritance, a family – there’s a seat at the table for you and we’re all willing to squeeze together to make room.

We are stronger together because God has brought us together in Christ and sealed us with his Holy Spirit.

Everything is “in Christ.” Are you?