1. "A fundamental part of how we make progress in the Christian life is noticing the difference between where we are and where we want to be, or even maybe where we could be."

2. "We act as if we have to do this or that to get God on our side, as if God is the passive one and we are the ones who pick him and we use him as some kind of magical totem. Nothing could be further from the truth."

3. "God's help for us is not a response to our working to help ourselves or to cooperate with Him, or to pull ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps. God's election of us creates our new love for Him and the new action then that we begin to follow."

4. "Since the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and us in them, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not naturally anyone's spiritual Father. And things are not naturally okay and fine with any of us."

5. "We in Christ are being brought in to the very love of the Trinity."

6. "Everyone needs to understand the sweetness of the blessing of adoption. What beautiful pictures there are around our own congregation of families that have reached out in love and have chosen to adopt, to bring to their very hearts, to give their very lives to this little boy or this little girl."

7. "Consider how confident you can be of his love for you. Consider how freely you can offer your own love to others if God has so freely and fully supplied your needs."

8. "Anyone who thinks that ease, naturalness, like falling off a log, is the essence of love will never see God's love in the cross."

9. "We look around at the news of the day, at the events of our own lives. Perhaps we discern nothing. But we look to Christ and we see that we are in the middle of something far greater than we had before realized."

10. "From the eternity past of election to the provision of Christ's sacrifice in history to God's intervention in our own lives in our own days to His good plans being fulfilled in the fullness of time in eternity future—we have a literally unending cascade of blessings."

Observation Questions

1. In Ephesians 1:3, what does Paul say God has blessed us with, and where does he say these blessings are located?

2. According to Ephesians 1:4, when did God choose us, and what does the text say was His purpose in choosing us?

3. What specific action does Ephesians 1:5 say God predestined us for, and through whom does this action come?

4. In Ephesians 1:7, what two things does Paul say we have "in Him," and what is the means by which we receive them?

5. How does Paul describe God's grace in verses 7-8, using what specific words to characterize how God has given it to us?

6. According to Ephesians 1:9-10, what is God's plan "for the fullness of time," and what two realms does this plan encompass?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why is it significant that Paul repeatedly uses the phrase "in Christ" or "in Him" throughout this passage (verses 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10)? What does this tell us about how we receive God's blessings?

2. The sermon contrasts the lie "God helps those who help themselves" with the doctrine of election in verse 4. How does understanding that God chose us "before the foundation of the world" change our view of salvation and our relationship with God?

3. What is the difference between being a natural child of God and being adopted as a son (verse 5)? Why does Paul use adoption language rather than simply saying we are God's children?

4. How does the phrase "redemption through His blood" (verse 7) demonstrate that "ease is the essence of love" is a lie? What does the cost of redemption reveal about the nature of God's love?

5. What does Paul mean by "the mystery of His will" in verse 9, and how does God's plan to "unite all things in Him" (verse 10) provide hope and purpose for Christians living in uncertain times?

Application Questions

1. The sermon emphasized that we pray "in Jesus' name" to acknowledge our complete dependence on Christ for access to God. How might you change the way you pray this week to reflect a deeper understanding of what it means to come before God only through Christ?

2. If God's election of you happened before you did anything good or bad, how should this truth affect the way you view your own worth and security as a Christian, especially during seasons of failure or doubt?

3. The sermon stated that confidence in God's lavish love empowers us for sacrifice and service. What difficult act of obedience or service have you been hesitant to pursue, and how might meditating on God's costly redemption give you courage to take a step forward?

4. Knowing that God's plan is to "unite all things in Christ," how might this change the way you view and engage with fellow church members who are different from you in background, personality, or preferences?

5. The sermon concluded by saying Christians should be marked not by "alarm, anxiety, and fear" but by "joyful certainty." What specific fear or anxiety about the future are you carrying right now, and how can the truths of Ephesians 1:3-10 address that fear this week?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Romans 8:28-39 — This passage expands on the themes of God's predestination, calling, and the unshakeable security of those who are in Christ, reinforcing that nothing can separate us from God's love.

2. John 17:20-26 — Jesus' prayer reveals the love within the Trinity and His desire that believers be caught up in that same love, connecting to the sermon's point about adoption into the Father's love for the Son.

3. Galatians 4:1-7 — Paul explains the transition from slavery to sonship through adoption, showing how God sent His Son so that we might receive adoption and cry "Abba, Father."

4. Colossians 1:13-23 — This parallel passage describes redemption through Christ's blood, the forgiveness of sins, and God's plan to reconcile all things to Himself through Christ, echoing Ephesians 1:7-10.

5. 1 Peter 1:18-21 — Peter describes our redemption with the precious blood of Christ, emphasizing the costliness of our salvation and that this was planned before the foundation of the world.

Sermon Main Topics

I. Introduction: Studying God's Word and Our Times to Make Progress in the Christian Life

II. Meeting Paul and the Ephesian Christians Through This Ancient Letter (Ephesians 1:1-3)

III. Lie #1: God Helps Those Who Help Themselves—The Blessing of Election (Ephesians 1:4)

IV. Lie #2: I'm Fine—The Blessing of Adoption (Ephesians 1:5-6)

V. Lie #3: Ease Is the Essence of Love—The Blessing of Redemption (Ephesians 1:7-8)

VI. Lie #4: The Best We Can Do Is Live for Today—The Blessing of God's Plan for Consummation (Ephesians 1:9-10)

VII. Conclusion: Living with Joyful Certainty in God's Unending Blessings

Detailed Sermon Outline

Well, friends, as a pastor, I study the Bible, and I study the times that we live in.

Studying the times means studying my own heart, my own thoughts, reflecting on my own life, and it means externally studying youg. Studying other people today, what they write and say, what they're thinking. A fundamental part of how we make progress in the Christian life is noticing the difference between where we are and where we want to be, or even maybe where we could be.

Throughout this year as God enables us to meet, I want us to look at the New Testament letter of Paul to the Ephesian church. So if you grab your Bibles, open them to Ephesians. You'll find it right after Romans 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians. It's right there in the New Testament. I want to take a moment to introduce you to this ancient conversation that comes back to us through this letter as we meet Paul and these Christians.

That he writes to. The substance of what Paul says to them and to us is about God and His blessings. That's really a summary of the first half of this book, chapters 1 to 3. The second half then, very typical Paul, chapters 4 to 6, are some of the implications of these great truths Paul has talked about for how Christians should therefore live. So we come today to the beginning of the letter, Ephesians chapter 1.

And let me read it for you now, beginning at verse 1.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, who are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 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.

Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the promise of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the beloved. 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, 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.

Well, in reading this letter, we're listening to an old conversation, as it were, between people who know themselves to have been blessed by God, Paul and these first century Asian Christians that Paul was writing to. Let's look again at that Introduction to the letter, verse 1, Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul identifies himself as you're accustomed to seeing. If you're used to reading the New Testament, the writer will give their name usually at the very beginning of the letter. And he could have brought out all kinds of facts about himself that we learn in Galatians or 1 and 2 Corinthians, but he only says one thing.

He just reminds them of who he is by describing himself with one descriptor as an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. An apostle is one specially sent as a messenger on behalf of another party, and lest any readers think that Paul appointed himself to this role, he adds, by the will of God. And when he says that, what do you think he's recalling?

Real question, somebody shout out an answer. Damascus Road. Yeah, it's exactly when he is not a Christian, not a follower of Christ, and he is literally walking the way to the city of Damascus, a great city where they have already become followers of Jesus. And he is going there with special letters to persecute those Christians.

And while he does that, the risen Christ appeared to him and, as it were, arrested him and required of him his life and his service.

Now by the time Paul was writing this letter, two or three decades have passed from that time, and he's shown himself to be the most indefatigable worker for the spread of the message of Jesus Christ. In fact, these Christians in the church in Ephesus knew that themselves. Paul had been their preacher.

For two or three years. They had known him well. So when Paul writes to the saints who are in Ephesus, these included people well known to Paul, and among whom Paul himself was personally well known. And just as an aside here, since that word saint occurs, all Christians are saints. Saints are not two or three people who would be recognized After their death, when a church votes to recognize them as a saint, that's a later perversion of the idea.

When you see the word saint in the New Testament, it is referring to all of the Christians, all of the people in the church, all of the, he says here, faithful in Christ Jesus there at the end of verse 1. And Paul has a simple greeting and prayer for them in verse 2. He says, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace, God's undeserved favor, more on that really throughout this letter, throughout this year. And then peace.

And that peace is not a reference to an emotional response that we have to God's grace, though we may very well have that kind of emotional response, but this is rather a statement of the reality legally that now exists between faithful Christians and God. There is now peace between us when there was hostility and even spiritually speaking war. He's made His enemies His friends.

So when Paul begins here with this blessed be the God and Father, that blessed be is a way of praising God. He's saying that this God is worthy of being blessed, that is, of being praised. And the reason Paul gives here is that God has blessed us. What does he say that this God and Father, our Lord Jesus Christ, has blessed us with?

Every spiritual blessing. Paul is saying that all of our blessings come from God through Christ. This God saves us. He is the cause of our salvation. He is the source of every blessing we receive.

And that's why it's right that when we gather as Christians we begin with praising Him. That's why normally when we gather we begin by singing songs and hymns. And those songs and hymns that we begin with usually are songs and hymns of praise to God because we want to remind to remind ourselves of the one into whose presence we're coming. But lest we misunderstand what Paul means by blessing here, he's not mainly meaning the earthly blessings God may give us of a good family or a nice trip or success at work. No, Paul specifies here that he is speaking of God's blessing Christians in the heavenly places in Christ.

That's a phrase that you see Paul using repeatedly in this letter to the Ephesians. He mentions in verse 20, God had seated the resurrected Christ in the heavenly places. And on in chapter 2, verse 6, this is the place where we as Christians have been spiritually resurrected and seated. So friends, particularly when we gather as a church, we are specially, palpably participating in the rule and reign of Christ, the session of Christ, even even now spiritually through His church. We're getting a little preview of the end breaking in right now when we're still in the middle of the story.

This also fits with something you might notice throughout our passage, all of these blessings are part of our union with Christ. They are found only in Christ. The blessings that Paul is about to rehearse here indeed, all the blessings that we Christians know from God, we only know in Christ. Because of Christ, through Christ, in our union with Him, by faith, and being filled with His Spirit, identified with Him by the sovereign action of God. Outside of Christ, apart from Christ, Sibbes said, God is terrible.

Not meaning that God's character is any different, but that our ability to approach God through His grace, which is the kind of essential oxygen that we need to live spiritually in His presence, that that is entirely dependent on our coming to Him through Jesus Christ.

You realize that's why we Christians pray like we do. At the end of the prayers, I just prayed, Did you notice how I ended in Jesus' name? There's nothing in the Bible that says that we have to do that verbally. There's nothing in the Bible that says we have to end our prayers saying Amen. There are reasons we say Amen and that we encourage everyone to say Amen.

If somebody else has led in prayer, if I've led in prayer, if David's led in prayer, and you agree with what's been prayed, say Amen out loud so you can you verbally own it so people around you realize that's your prayer too. But that little phrase before that, in Christ's name or in Jesus' name or for Jesus' sake, what we're saying when we pray that is we're acknowledging that the only reason we have any expectation that God will hear and honor our prayers is because of what he has done for us in Christ.

That apart from what He has done for us in Christ, we have no reason to think that God would listen favorably to anything that we say. And so I would just give you advice as an older brother in the Lord, stop saying dismissively at the end of your prayers, Jesus' name, amen. Just don't ever pray like that again.

Grow up spiritually. Refresh yourself. Refresh the people around you when you pray. And realize, while the Bible never tells us to say those words, you're performing a task for yourself and for others every time you pray, reminding us how it is that we, sinners as we are, can expect God to hear our prayers favorably. So in just a couple of words, in Jesus' name, in Christ's name, we have this whole theology of our dependence upon Christ.

We're summarizing it. So when you say in Jesus' name, just give a little pause before, then say it slowly like you mean it, and then a little pause afterwards. And say, Amen.

Well, to summarize this first couple of verses, the first couple of verses are the blessed. Verse 3 is the blesser, God. And then verses 4 to 10 are the blessings. So if you want a quick outline of the passage, that's it. Verses 1 and 2 are the blessed, Paul and the Ephesians.

Verse 3 is the blesser, God, praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And verses 4 to 10 are the blessings that He gives. And speaking of those blessings, we have before us some of the Bible's richest verses for the Christian, stuffed with blessings. But these blessings are often hidden from us today by the lies that we believe in this age. So in the rest of our time, I want to expose four lies of our age that would hide these blessings of God from you and me.

Let me just go on and tell you what these four lies are because I know what you're like as a congregation. Let me just tell them to you. You can write them down. They're all short. Lie number one, God helps those who help themselves.

Lie number one, God helps those who help themselves. Lie number two, I'm fine. Lie number two, I'm fine. Lie number three, ease is the essence of love. Ease is the essence of love.

Lie number four, the best we can do is live for today.

The best we can do. Is live for today. Let's take each one of these in turn as we walk through the rest of our passage and do some deprogramming and liberating us from unbelief. God helps those who help themselves. Of course, there are ways in which that's true.

We're supposed to be faithful stewards of our blessings, but most fundamentally in how we relate to God. I think there are a lot of people today that imagine that if there is a God, He must be a being that deals with us fairly. We're on a kind of spiritual pay-as-you-go plan. That is, we put in the coin of good behavior and then God answers a prayer. We go out to church during COVID 30 minutes away from where we normally are through snow.

That's putting in three coins for the week. We can pray a little extra big this week. Because of what we've done. That's the kind of thing that a lot of people think. We act as if we have to do this or that to get God on our side, as if God is the passive one and we are the ones who pick him and we use him as some kind of magical totem.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing. The first blessing that Paul mentions here that God has given Christians in Christ is election. Look at verse 4.

You see this blessing that is really the headwaters of all the other blessings He gives us. Election, verse 4. Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. You see what the Bible clearly says here: God elected us. Very much like the fact that God predestined us, as we'll see in the next verse.

God knew us. He established a relationship with us. God chose us before we chose God. And He chose us not because of anything He foresaw we would do. Do not misunderstand this.

You misunderstand this and you greatly impoverish yourself and your own understanding of God's love for you. This does not mean that we don't need to choose God, but it is telling us the reason that we do choose God is because God has chosen us. You're saying, Really? Really?

Yeah, you remember the first one to confess Jesus? Peter. Remember in Matthew 16, he says, you, are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And then do you remember in the very next verse, Matthew 16:17, what Jesus says to him?

He says, Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.

So Paul here says that God chose us in Christ. What does that mean? Well, that we can't help ourselves in the way we most need help. That we have needed God to save us because we can't save ourselves and that what He's done is to save us by sending His Son. As we read here, Christ is the means of our salvation.

We Christians are saved because we are united with Christ by faith. The eternal God knew us ahead of time and God's choice of us happened, we read, before the foundation of the world. God's chosen us. He said that we should be, here's the purpose of God's choosing of His electing us, that we should be holy.

Now my guess is when you read the word holy you normally think of how you behave or how you should behave. But here this would most fundamentally mean a holiness that we have been given.

Christ's justness has been imputed to us, accounted to us. And certainly in true Christians, this does produce a moral holiness, not hypocrisy, a growing holiness of our own reborn selves. But the most basic holiness we Christians walk in is not our own holiness, of stumbling, but growing sanctification. But it is Christ's perfect holiness. Thus, ultimately we will be, as Paul writes here, blameless before God.

You realize, if he's talking about you and me in our own selves, we could never be blameless before God. We've already blown that by our sins. God can forgive us of those sins, but they still happened. We will never be blameless before God in that sense. So what does he mean here by blameless before God?

Ah, he must mean that Christ's Blamelessness has been given to us as a gift. When we come before God, we come in Christ's record, not our own. We come when we pray in Christ's name, not our own. If we come as Amber, as we come as Tim, he has nothing that we require of him. But when we come as Tim in Christ, or Amber in Christ, Ah, well then what would He not give to His dearly loved Son?

We are blameless before Him as we appear in the perfect righteousness of Christ, which is exactly what God has elected us Christians to have and to do. So God doesn't fundamentally help those who help themselves. God's help for us is not a response to our working to help ourselves or to cooperate with Him, or to pull ourselves up by our own moral bootstraps, God's election of us creates our new love for Him and the new action then that we begin to follow.

Lie number two.

I'm fine.

You know what I mean here. We think that because we're born on this earth, we're all God's children, we're all fine. Many things... by the very nature of things, I must be fine. We assume today that if something is natural, it's good, or it's as close as we can come to what's good.

But friends, if you think like that, you'll never understand the Bible's teaching on adoption. You'll never understand the blessings that you see here in verses 5 and 6. Look again at verse 5, In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the beloved.

So this teaches us that God adopted us. God not only elected us, that is, chose us for good, praise God that He did that. But this is not just that, it's something still more. He chose us not just for good and for salvation, praise God for that. But now here in verse 5 we find that there is even more blessing in how God has related to Christians.

He has elected us to adopt us. He has adopted us as sons. Why would He do that?

Well, by using that kind of language, there's only one answer that that could be: because He loves us.

Notice the way the ESV correctly, I think, has that in love, which is at the end of verse 4. They have it at the beginning of verse 5. It's the explanation for the way that God has acted toward us in predestining us to be adopted as sons.

Of course, adoption is going to be related to love. This predestination is no cold fact of history or impersonal fatalistic philosophy. This is God predestining us, electing us, to use the language of verse 4, but specifically for adoption to himself as sons. So, friend, if you just come into life assuming you're fine, that there's no problem, then you don't realize that you are a spiritual deserter and rebel, that you are a spiritual abuser of God, that you are by nature a spiritual orphan.

Since the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve, and us in them, The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not naturally anyone's spiritual Father. And things are not naturally okay and fine with any of us. At least not as far as we're talking about just fine with God. Paul is presuming that we are not all by nature all we can or should be, especially not in our relationship to God. In his love he's telling us now to the Christians there in Ephesus that God predestined us to be adopted.

He planned and purposed our adoption. And he did this, we read, through Jesus Christ. We are caught up in the love that God, Father, Son, and Spirit, has for himself. You want to meditate on this more, this super sweet truth When you go home this evening, read John 17.

Read that prayer of Jesus where He says at the very end of it, I made known to them your name, speaking to His heavenly Father, and I will continue to make it known that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.

And I in them. We in Christ are being brought in to the very love of the Trinity.

This is all we read here in Ephesians 1:5 according to the purpose of God's will. And that then is why the praise here doesn't go to us. Good work on deciding to follow Christ. Or to our good work even as citizens or church members or family members. But we read here in verse 6, To the praise of God's glorious grace.

The very purpose of our adoption here is to cause people, maybe other beings, to praise the glorious grace of God. So our election and our adoption is to the praise of God's grace because it's not based on anything that we do fundamentally, rather it It is God's loving favor toward us in Christ. That's what Paul means with that last phrase in verse 6, with which God has blessed us in the beloved, that is, in Christ.

So if we were really fine, God wouldn't have needed to adopt us any more than Connie and I need to adopt Annie or Nathan. We don't need to adopt our natural children. Everyone needs to know this bit of theology. Everybody needs to understand the sweetness of the blessing of adoption. What beautiful pictures there are around our own congregation of families that have reached out in love and have chosen to adopt, to bring to their very hearts, to give their very lives to this little boy or this little girl.

Praise God for how that image is the way God has related to us in Christ. And if we would be related to God in a positive and happy way, he would have to relate to us at his initiative, because one thing we are not by nature is fine. And so we see here that he has adopted us. Lie number three, ease is the essence of love. Ease is the essence of love.

What I mean by that is I can tell what real love is because it comes naturally, as easily as the snow falls or the sun shines or the lover's kiss. In real love things just fit and flow. I am naturally disposed to love this person or that person. It feels natural. It feels right.

It feels easy.

Well, that assumption that we have today about our lovable-ness, we seem to assume that we must be easy for God to love, right? Well, that's not what we find when we read about this blessing of redemption in verses 7 and 8.

God so loved the world, that is, He loved in this way that He gave His only begotten Son. Look here in verse 7. In Him, that's in Christ, we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.

According to the riches of God's grace, which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight. So, friend, this blessing too comes only in Christ. And what is this blessing? If we thought of the blessing of election up in verse 4 and adoption in verse 5, what is this blessing? Well, we see right there in verse 7, we have redemption.

You see, if God would adopt sinners, that necessitates our being forgiven. And to be forgiven, we have to be redeemed. That is, we have to be purchased by payment. The whole system of sacrifices in the Old Testament was to teach God's people to associate forgiveness with the sacrifice of life. So we're not surprised there to see then that phrase in verse 7, Through Christ's blood.

Did you realize how costly God's love is? What did Jesus teach? Even the Son of Man, Jesus said, referring to Himself, came not to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many. What is redemption?

It's a resetting of value. Redeeming, to deem again. It says, Paul writes here in verse 7, the forgiveness of our trespasses. So though the sacrifices in the Old Testament didn't purchase redemption or forgiveness, they all pointed to the one sacrifice that would, the one offered on Calvary. And it's the dearness of the price that God paid.

The expense he went to in order to forgive us, to redeem us, to adopt us as his own. That explains why Paul goes into the extravagant language here in verse 8 according to the riches of God's grace which God lavished upon us. It's like when we come to that third stanza and it is well, and our hearts just swell up. Well, that's what's happening here with Paul. When he gets to this point of redemption through Christ's blood, his language begins to strain to express it.

Riches of God's grace lavished upon us. Brothers and sisters, I don't know all the ways that Satan has been tempting you to belittle what God has done for us in Christ, but I hope that you see here that God is in no way stingy or miserly or begrudging or reluctant in his dealings with us in Christ in grace. He is rich in grace. All wisdom and insight were involved in devising with us this plan to redeem us. And to love us so, consider the cost God paid to redeem us and to adopt us as His own.

The choice God made.

My non-Christian friend, if God has paid such a lavish price, made such lavish provision for us, why would you starve yourself apart from him? Why would you leave yourself liable to his charges and judgment on the last day? Why would you choose to remain an orphan?

Another month, another week, another day, the holy God who made us against whom we've all sinned, has sent His only Son to die in our place in the place of all of us that would turn from our sins and trust in Christ. He raised Him from the dead. The Son presented the sacrifice of Himself to the Father who accepted it on the behalf of all of us. You too, if you will trust in Christ. Oh, friend, if you want to know more about what that would mean to be forgiven for your sins, This is the kind of church where you get to talk not just to the pastors, though we're happy to talk to you, you can talk to any member.

And people who are turning up 30 minutes from where we normally meet during COVID in the snow are almost certainly members of this church. So you can talk to pretty much anybody sitting around you when this service is over about what it would mean for you to trust in Christ and be forgiven for your sins. I'll just stay down here for a little bit afterwards. If anybody wants to come and talk to me about this. Believer, if you've been trembling and faltering in your steps in following Christ lately, unsure of your perception of how committed he is to you, think again.

Consider how confident you can be of his love for you. Consider how freely you can offer your own love to others if God has so freely and fully supplied your needs.

Dear church, it is this wealth that we know of God's loving blessing of us in Christ that gives us confidence to serve Him in the ways that involve us in sacrifice. How do you think you'll be able to do hard things? For some of you that's decided to stay in D.C. to help CHBC. For some of you that's decided to go someplace else to work in another church to try to bring it to better health.

For some of you, it's to move someplace in the world where there is no church, to be able to see a gospel-preaching church established. How do you think you'll be able to do any of those things if you're not confident of God's love? Being aware of God showing His love for us by loving us in this way wins our hearts to take the great news of Christ around the world. Regardless of how easy it isn't. Anyone who thinks that ease, naturalness, like falling off a log, is the essence of love will never see God's love in the cross.

The best we can do is live for today. The best we can do is live for today. What do they mean by this? You only live once. There's no lasting meaning to anything, so just live for the moment.

This is the philosophy of despair or hedonism, abandon that we've encountered in everything from some of the passages that have been considered in Ecclesiastes recently that Bobby's been leading us through. To passages of Nietzsche that Carl Trueman quotes in his new book that the Elders have been studying together. Against this agnosticism about tomorrow, Paul recounts here God's blessings to us of the confidence we can have of God's success for all of us in bringing about His purposes in the final consummation of history when Christ returns and the dead are raised and the curse is finally broken. In fact, it's in light of the confidence that we can have of God's plan and purposes that we see here that we can know His will will prevail and that we can plan to live in love as He calls us to. Look again at verses 9 and 10.

Let's remind ourselves of what good news God is promising us in this coming consummation of all of His promises to us. Look at verses 9 and 10.

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 and Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.

So, the God who has chosen us and predestined us to adoption and sent His Son to redeem us, it's the same God we read here who is making known to us the mystery of God's will. By mystery, or Paul doesn't mean a puzzle to be solved or a whodunit case to be cracked. Rather, mystery here indicates something once secret in the council of God, but now revealed: God's salvation in Christ. This would never have been, and we never would have known about it, if God hadn't done it and if God hadn't told us that He did it. Friends, this is the great consummation that we have to look forward to: the disorder and the rebellion and the terror and the tragedy of this fallen world is not the last word.

There will come a time when the forces of evil will be disarmed, when, according to Philip Ephesians 2:9, Everyone will bow and acknowledge Christ as Lord, not in the sense that everyone will be saved, but everyone will acknowledge His Lordship. This will be God's final universal victory in Christ when all creation acclaims Christ as Lord from the begrudging bass notes of hell to the chords of joyful praise and acclamation of the redeemed in heaven. And don't misunderstand Paul here. The final victory that he speaks of has already begun to be won. We are in the last stages now.

Christ is even now reigning over all. We read in 1 Corinthians 15, He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The idea is that His reign is beginning in the church. This is the point to which history is running. The completion of Christ's victory, the consummation of Christ's reign.

This is our future.

Now such language I know sounds strange to you if you're not a believer. Maybe it sounds strange even if you are. We're not taught these days in school that history has a meaning. It's all presented as selfish struggles. It's all oppressors and victims.

Rushings for power and advantage with one group succeeding for a moment and then as surely as the tides rushing on the shore falling back with another incoming wave.

That certainty, monotonous and meaningless, is what history is presented as being. In such history heroes fade and meaning is extinguished. And friend, that is part of the story.

But that's not the whole story or even the main story. In Jesus Christ, God has shown us what He's up to, what He's about in history. And the history really is His story. And this is why, my Christian friend, we can have such great hope to sustain us through dark times. We look around at the news of the day, at the events of our own lives.

Perhaps we discern nothing. But we look to Christ and we see that we are in the middle of something far greater than we had before realized. We are in the middle of God working all things according to the counsel of His own will, bringing all things together under the authority of Jesus Christ. That is the point of all of history, the point to which it is inevitably leading, whether or not it's obvious to us every moment of the day or every day of the year. This mystery of God saving us, of His blessing us by choosing and adopting and redeeming us was all we read here in verse 9, according to His purpose which He set forth in Christ.

Friend, again and again we see Christ as the center of God's plan. Jackie Glanski was talking to me after the service this morning, and Jackie, I don't know if you're here, but you were saying how you were noting through the passage When you were studying this passage with somebody else, in Christ's, all the ways Christ is at the middle of it. Paul was called and sent by Christ. The Ephesians are faithful in Christ. Paul was praying for their grace and peace in Christ.

He praised God as the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. God has blessed us in Christ. God chose us in Christ. God predestined us for adoption to himself as his sons through Jesus Christ. God has blessed us in the beloved, that is in Christ.

In Christ we have redemption through Christ's blood. So it's in this Christ that God has set forth His mystery. We read in the last verse of our passage, verse 10, as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Christ. And the unity that Paul has in mind is especially the unity of Jews and Gentiles coming together as God's dwelling place in Christ. Things in heaven and on earth will ultimately include heavenly beings mentioned in chapter 3.

Along with the redeemed. Friend, do you want a purpose today? Do you want to get on the right side of history? Join the local church.

Start participating in that rule and reign of God. In the church we have the preview of what God's ultimate plans are. The reconciliation of a numberless host to Himself, joining with the unfallen intelligences in heaven in knowing and loving and being loved by the true God through all of eternity. Where, as C.S. Lewis suggested at the end of Narnia, we go further up and further in, and where every chapter is better than the last.

Our lives today are not simply lived for the immediate moment, but in the light of the purposes of God that we know He intends. And that we are sure that He will accomplish. It's in the light of what God is doing that we chart our course for this year, this month, this week, for whatever time the Lord will give us.

And now, because you haven't heard me say it in a while, we should conclude.

God has blessed us in so many ways. Election, adoption, redemption, the consummation of all things in Christ. We, friends, are rich in God's blessings. From the eternity past of election to the provision of Christ's sacrifice in history to God's intervention in our own lives in our own days to His good plans being fulfilled in the fullness of time in eternity future. We have a literally unending cascade of blessings which overcome our deserved eternal fate and the sting of our passing trials as surely as the victory of Christ's tomb swallowed up the suffering of His cross.

Friends, if all this is so, then we as a church should not be marked by alarm, anxiety, and fear. The future is not a ground of foreboding for us. As we see that our society is in moral bankruptcy. As we see that our own career is almost over or our own family almost gone or our own health almost spent. As Christians, as a church, we are to be marked not by fearful anxiety as we look ahead, but by a joyful certainty Almost 70 years ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones was preaching through Ephesians at his church in London.

It was in the early 1950s, and nuclear tensions were new to the world, and they were high, and they were afraid of yet another world war.

Lloyd-Jones said, reflecting on this passage to his congregation in London, Do you know that these things are so marvelous that you will never hear anything greater either in this world or the world to come? Do you realize that you have a part in these things? I do not know whether another world war is coming or not, but whether it be war or no war, as Christians we are in the plan of God. No bomb can be invented, no bacteria can be cultivated and used, No chemicals or gases can be brought into use that can ever make the slightest difference to these things. Look at the ultimate, look at God's grand and glorious purpose.

Think of and live for the ultimate restoration of that glorious harmony which is coming when we with our whole being shall praise the Lamb that was slain. He has redeemed us. Let us sing blessing and honor and glory and power be unto the Lamb forever and ever. Let wars come, let pestilence come, let hell be let loose. Nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That is the Christian message for today. Thank God for it and rejoice in it. Amen. Let's pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this word of yours which teaches us so fully and clearly of your grace in Christ. Cause our hearts to sing in trust of youf and youn promises. We ask in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen.