Good morning.
My name is Tommy.
I'm the rector here, and on behalf of our church,
I'd like to welcome you.
I'm delighted that you're here.
And I'm so glad that we get to open God's Word together today.
I love the lectionary readings.
They've been speaking to me very personally lately,
and I'm just thankful for that.
You know, the word blessing is an interesting word
because we hear it all the time.
And in many ways, I would say it's an overused word.
I mean, it's a word that we use to describe
all kinds of good things that happen in our lives,
and that's not always bad.
But we might, for instance, take a picture of ourselves
on vacation this summer and post it online,
put hashtag blessed under it.
What a blessing to be here.
You know, some people use the word blessing
as a way to kind of humble brag about their own successes.
I've been so blessed with all of these promotions
in my job, right, and all the hard work that I've done.
We say it after people sneeze.
We hear this word quite a bit.
And there's nothing really wrong with that,
but the problem is that we use this word so much
that I think we've lost a lot of the sense
of what it actually means to say that we are blessed.
Whatever difficulties you might be facing in your life,
whether they are internal struggles like anxiety,
depression, hopelessness, or external struggles,
conflict or job stress or parenting stress,
whatever difficulties are pulling at the edges
of your attention right now,
whatever difficulties keep you up at night
wringing your hands, whatever we're dealing with,
the thing that we most need to get through those challenges
is God's blessing in our life.
That's the thing that we most need.
We're going to look at these opening verses
of Paul's letter to the Ephesians,
probably the most extraordinary description
of the meaning of God's blessing for us
that you'll find anywhere in the Bible.
And we're going to ask a couple of questions.
What is a blessing really?
And then what is God's blessing for you
and for me this morning?
Let's pray and then we will open God's word together.
Our heavenly Father, we know that you are present.
We know that you're with us.
We may have some awareness of that.
We may not.
We may not feel it at all.
But Lord, we know that does not matter.
What matters is that you are present.
We ask now that you would speak.
These are not mere words written on a page.
These are living words.
We pray that you would speak through your word
and bring us face to face
with the word become flesh, Jesus Christ.
We pray that somehow in the mystery of your Holy Spirit,
your word would become flesh in us,
that we might be changed by what we hear
and receive from you this morning.
We pray this in the name of Jesus,
by the power of your Holy Spirit.
Amen.
So what is a blessing?
A lot of times when we hear the word bless or blessing,
we think of it as a kind of way of encouraging someone,
well-wishing them, blessing them.
And in one sense, that's true,
but in the Bible, it means far more than that.
If you consider examples of blessing in the Old Testament,
for instance, when Isaac blesses Jacob,
or when then Jacob goes on to bless his 12 sons,
or when Samuel anoints and blesses David,
what we see in every case is we have someone in authority
declaring a person's true purpose
and their true identity.
This is who you are,
and this is why you're here.
This is the purpose of your life.
This is the course that your life is meant to take.
And because of that,
because a blessing speaks to your identity and your purpose,
blessings can have tremendous power.
They're able to shape and direct
the course of someone's entire life.
And that is exactly what a blessing is meant to do.
It's meant to shape and direct the course of your life.
Now, that is why the Apostle Paul
begins his letter to the Ephesians the way he does.
Imagine you're the Apostle Paul,
and you're sitting in prison in Rome,
and you've heard about all of these issues
happening in the church
that you helped to start in Ephesus.
There is strife.
There is personal sin.
There is racial tension and division.
There's a rise of paganism.
There's demonic oppression and spiritual warfare.
And you have one shot to write a letter
as their pastor to address all of these issues.
How would you begin?
This is how Paul begins.
He believes that all of the issues
in the Ephesian church are symptoms
of the fact that they have forgotten
who they truly are
and why they are here.
So the first half of his letter,
he essentially says again and again and again,
remember who you are.
Remember who you are.
And as we'll see,
remember whose you are.
And see, every human being has this deep longing
for identity and meaning and purpose.
We want to desperately…
We're desperate to know why we're here,
who we are,
what we're meant to become.
And the worst possible thing
is to have no sense of identity
and no sense of purpose.
So we're all searching for it.
Some people look for it in their career.
A lot of people come to D.C.
with an identity that is centered on their career.
But what happens if your job
doesn't turn out the way you hoped?
What if you get fired?
What if you get laid off?
Even if it has nothing to do with you,
it's not your fault at all.
Something like that happens.
If your identity is centered in your career,
that will threaten your entire sense of self-worth.
It's not uncommon to talk to people
who have lost their job
and they say,
I don't know who I am anymore.
I don't know what the purpose of my life is.
Why to get out of bed anymore?
If you begin to root your identity
in your appearance,
that works for a while,
particularly if you happen to be somewhat attractive.
But you know, that does fade.
It will fade.
You know, it kind of creeps up on you.
If you've centered your identity
in your appearance,
as that fades,
your sense of self and self-worth
will begin to fade with it.
Right?
If you root your identity,
the sense that this is who I truly am
in your inner world,
how you feel,
what you desire,
what you'll find is that
that inner world is tumultuous.
Your feelings have a tendency to change,
not just over years,
but maybe over the course of an afternoon.
And so what you'll find
is that if you're trying to root your identity
in your inner feelings and desires,
it's like chasing the wind.
You're going to have a perpetually insecure
and fragile sense of self.
That's why people who define themselves this way
are constantly looking for external sources of validation
to gain that sense of stability.
If you root your sense of identity in your children,
what happens when your kids get older?
What happens when your children begin to make choices
that you don't agree with?
What happens when they make mistakes
or do things that you're not proud of?
And you begin to wonder,
is this reflecting on my parenting?
Do people around me think that I'm a bad parent,
that I have failed because of the thing
that my child did?
If you've rooted your sense of identity in your children,
as they get older,
as they leave,
as you successfully parent them out of your house,
I've heard people say,
well, now that my kids are gone,
I don't know who I am anymore.
I don't know why I'm here.
I don't know why I get out of bed.
I have no purpose.
So in all of these sources of identity,
we find they don't work.
They don't last.
They don't give us that thing that we hope they will.
And that's because there's only one place
that we can go to figure out the truth
about who we really are and why we are really here.
There's only one being out there
who has the authority to answer those questions
in our lives.
And that is the one who authored us.
Right?
If you want the truly authoritative answer,
go to the author,
which is God himself.
God's blessing means God speaking
with ultimate authority into our lives,
declaring this is who you truly are,
this is why you're here.
And then giving us everything we need
to live that out.
This is who you are,
this is why you're here,
and here's everything you need to pursue that.
You know, we can spend our lives
searching for identity and purpose.
We can only truly find it in the blessings of God.
So that's what a blessing is in the Bible.
Now, how does God answer this question
of identity and purpose in our lives?
Well, this entire passage
that we're looking at this morning,
beginning in verse 3,
is one long run-on sentence in the Greek.
Paul is so filled with things that he wants to say
to try to answer this question for us
that he just goes on and on and on and on and on.
The entire thing is just one long run-on sentence.
But what it lacks in grammatical quality,
it makes up for in theological depth.
It is a staggering statement.
What is God's blessing for us?
For everyone who puts their faith in Jesus,
there are three things here
that are most true about your identity
and your purpose.
They're more true than whatever
you have come to believe
about those things in your life.
Number one, verses 4 to 6,
Now, if we don't understand
what Paul is saying here,
it's easy to get caught up
with the wrong idea about predestination.
Paul is not talking about this
in the context of unbelievers,
as though people might come to Jesus
and say, I want a relationship.
And he says, well, you're not on the list.
That's not how it works.
The gospel is open to everyone
and anyone who comes to Jesus in faith
will be saved.
Paul is writing this as a pastor
trying to encourage his flock.
There's a time and a place
to get into the theological mysteries
of predestination
and all of what that means
and how it relates to free will.
But here, Paul is writing as a pastor
and he's trying to encourage his people.
And friends, he's writing
in a culture of abandonment.
This is an abandonment culture.
This is a culture where people
would routinely sell wives
they didn't want anymore into slavery,
where they would routinely get rid of children
they didn't want anymore.
There was a trash dump
outside the eastern gate of Ephesus,
and that's the place where people
would take and discard babies
that they didn't want.
And slavers knew this,
and so slavers would frequent that area
and they would look for babies
healthy enough
that they might turn them into slaves,
sell them and turn a profit.
It was a culture of abandonment.
Some of the Christians
that Paul is writing to
had probably been abandoned
by their birth parents.
And the point he's trying to make
is that if you're someone
who has come to faith in Jesus,
that's not by accident.
That's not because of anything you did.
Jesus doesn't look at you and say,
oh, well, I'm really surprised you made it.
Good job.
You figured it out.
God wanted you.
Before he laid the foundations of the earth,
he wanted you to belong to him
and be part of his family.
He had you in mind.
That's the ultimate truth about you.
That is more true about you
than anything anybody has ever told you.
That first and foremost,
you are wanted by name.
You're chosen.
You belong to him
because he wants you.
And a lot of problems arise in our lives
and in the world
because we don't know this.
Because instead of living like men and women
who have been adopted,
we live like orphans.
You know, some of us try to cobble together
a sense of identity and worth
by relying on our careers
or our appearance
or our children like we said before.
You know, and as long as we have those things,
we're okay,
but when we lose them,
it destroys us.
Maybe we feel threatened
when we see other people
with jobs or looks
or families that we don't have
and we feel like their success diminishes us.
We're living like orphans
when we think that way.
Some of us care way too much
about the approval of other people.
We can't handle critical feedback
even from people who care about us.
We can't receive hard words in love
because we feel so threatened,
so diminished.
Some of us go around demanding respect.
We're living like orphans when we do that,
like it's all up to us.
The gospel says
you don't have to live
like an orphan anymore.
You have a father who chose you
and you belong to him.
God had you personally in mind
before he laid the foundations of the earth.
He set things in motion
so that one day
you would come to know him
and become part of his family.
You have the ultimate security
of knowing that you belong to God
because he wanted you.
There is no greater security
to be found anywhere.
And the language of adoption
means that you belong to him
once and for all.
You can fire an employee.
You can fire a servant.
But once you're adopted,
especially under Roman law,
an adopted child became
in every way indistinguishable
from a birth child.
So once you're adopted,
that's it.
You're his forever.
So number one,
you've been adopted.
That's who you truly are.
You're wanted.
Number two,
you have been redeemed.
Verses seven through 10.
Now this is one of the most important words
in the Bible
if you understand the context.
You may already be getting a hint of this.
This city of Ephesus
was a center of slave trade
in this part of the world.
A quarter of the population, roughly,
somewhere between 20 and 30%
of the population were slaves.
So it was a huge, huge business.
And the way it would work
is that people would go down
to the slave market in Ephesus
and you would peruse,
you would look through
and inspect all of the available slaves
and you would figure out
the ones that you were interested in
and then they would go up
on the auction block.
And depending on how much interest there was,
the price could be driven up
higher and higher and higher.
And so slaves could be very, very costly.
And occasionally,
a person might want to free
a loved one who was a slave.
They might want to free
a friend who was enslaved.
And in order to do that,
you had to pay a price.
So you would have to purchase that slave.
You'd have to purchase their freedom.
You would purchase them
and then you would release them.
And that, again,
could be very, very expensive.
But this act of purchasing a slave
in order to set them free,
that is the word
that the Apostle Paul uses
to describe what Jesus Christ
has accomplished for us.
And that word is the word redemption.
We have been redeemed.
Now here's the picture
that Paul is painting for us.
He's saying the world
is like a great slave market.
The entire world
is like a great spiritual slave market.
We are all slaves
to Satan and to sin and to death.
And Jesus came into the world
because he was looking for you.
He came into the slave market
looking for you.
And he would not stop
until he set you free.
And he was willing to pay any price.
And the price got higher
and higher
and higher.
And Jesus was willing to pay
the ultimate price.
And verse 7 tells us the price.
We have redemption
through his blood.
On the cross,
Jesus purchased our freedom
once and for all.
The highest price ever paid
in history
to redeem a slave.
An infinite price.
And you know,
if we value things
based on the price paid for them,
what does that mean about you?
It means you are a being
of infinite worth.
It means that everyone you meet,
it means that everyone
sitting around you
in this room
is infinitely valuable
because the God of the universe
paid an infinite price
for that person.
Again, a lot of problems
in our lives arise
because we don't know this
in our hearts.
We forget it.
There was an article
in the New Yorker
about slavery
in the country of Mauritania.
And it's one of the worst places
in the world for slavery.
Even though it's technically
been outlawed,
there are still
entire communities
made up exclusively
of slaves.
And that's the only life
they've ever known.
It's the only life
their parents have ever known
and their grandparents.
It's the only reality
they've ever known.
And there's a quote
from one of the people
in the article.
Mauritanian slaves
are not restrained
by chains.
Slavery is a
psychological institution.
They interview
people who try to escape.
This one boy
tries to escape.
His mother says,
what are you doing?
I want to escape slavery.
Why?
Who do you think you are?
You're a slave.
Why would you leave?
Another former child slave
said to the interviewer,
to the slave,
his identity
is his master.
His identity
is his master.
He believes,
she believes
that they are slaves.
Therefore,
they are.
Setting a person
like that free
requires much more
than simply throwing
open the door
and saying,
go build a life
for yourself.
They need their identity
to be rebuilt
from the ground up.
with every brick
being a new brick.
You are no longer
a slave.
You are free.
You have been redeemed.
And only when they begin
to see themselves
as free
will they begin
to live
as free people.
And that's not unlike
how the apostle Paul
sees sin
in the lives
of Christians.
When we disobey God,
Paul doesn't say,
oh, you're breaking
the rules.
Stop breaking the rules.
Shape up
or ship out.
He recognizes
what's actually happening.
He says,
you're going back
to your old master.
You're allowing
that old identity
to be your master.
And he continually
appeals to us
as he does
in this letter
to put off
that old self.
Be renewed
by the spirit
of your mind
and put on
the new self
that you've gained
in Christ,
the one that has been
redeemed and set free.
Remember who you are.
It's like a drumbeat
throughout this letter.
So he says,
remember who you are.
You've been adopted.
You've been redeemed.
And then number three,
the third thing
that we see here.
You have been sealed.
Now what does that mean?
In the Roman world,
if you were a soldier,
you had a tattoo.
If you were a slave,
you had a brand.
These were marks
of ownership
that told everyone
around you
who you belong to.
And virtually everyone
belonged to someone.
And Paul says,
God has put his mark
on you.
He adopted you,
he redeemed you,
and now he's put his mark
of ownership on you.
It's not a visible mark.
It's the gift
of the Holy Spirit.
You have been given
the Holy Spirit
which is a sign
and a seal
of who you truly are
and whose you truly are.
And the Holy Spirit
guarantees not only
that we belong to God,
but it guarantees
and it reminds everyone
in the world,
including us,
that we have
an inheritance to come.
He says in verse 3,
God has given us
every spiritual blessing.
He doesn't just give us
just enough to get by.
He's given us
every spiritual blessing.
There's nothing
he has to give us
that he has not entrusted
to us.
He holds nothing back.
And verse 14 says,
the Holy Spirit
is like a down payment
of that.
It's a guarantee
of the full payment
to come at the end
of all time.
It's a guarantee
that one day
at the end of all time
we will receive
the full inheritance
that has been set aside
for us.
And that inheritance
is the promise
that one day
God will restore
all things.
The heavens and the earth
will be joined together
and we will live
with him
as one community,
one community.