Vision: To the praise of his glorious grace (Ephesians 1.1-14)

The next few months are going to be critical for us as a church. As we said earlier, we have plans to purchase a building. Many of you have put in so much time over the last eight months or so on this project. I can’t overstate how grateful I am for you. And for those of you who haven’t been working, I trust that you’ve been praying, and I’m incredibly grateful for that as well.

But I feel like we need to get real for a minute and say things as plainly as possible. Over the next few months, one of two things will happen.

Scenario 1: God will miraculously give us what we need to sign the commitment to purchase at the end of September. At this point, the team who has been working hard to raise funds will go into overdrive, trying to raise the rest of the money, contact partners, get everything ready for the purchase. And if God makes that happen, then we will need to go to work getting the building ready.

That scenario is really exciting; but we’ll be working so hard that the risk of a burnout for many or all of us will be very high.

Scenario 2: We won’t be able to get what we need to sign the commitment to purchase, and the project will be dead in the waters. In one sense that will at least be clear: when we’ve prayed, we’ve said, “Lord, if you don’t want this to go through, please don’t let it go through.” So if it doesn’t, at least that’s a clear indication that this building isn’t the place for us. And all the work that’s been put into the project can go to another building a little further down the road; nothing will be lost.

On the other hand, we’ve put so much work into this, and we’ve dreamed about it and wished for it for so long, that if it doesn’t work we’ll have to navigate a kind of withdrawal as a church. What will church life look like if we have to stay in this building for longer than we’d hoped? What will service look like for many of you, if you’re no longer working on the building project?

One of these two scenarios, or a variation of them, will happen in the next few weeks. And in either case, we need to remember the point. Why we’re doing any of this in the first place, and who our God is. 

So this week we’re going to go really big, and see a very broad overview of God’s plan for the world he created—and by extension, the direction we want to go as a church. And then starting next week, we’ll be taking three weeks to talk about how we believe God calls us to act in his plan for the world.

We’re going to be in the first fourteen verses of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians today. And here is God’s plan, in two sentences that these verses hit again and again (and which Paul spends the rest of the letter fleshing out): 

1. In Christ, God saved his family.

2. In Christ, God will save all creation.

3. In Christ, God will be glorified.

In Christ, God has made a family for himself (v. 3-6, 11-14).

V. 3:

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, 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 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. … 11 In [Christ] 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.

Now I know that people always get hung up on the word “predestined” in verses 5 and 11, and it’s a really important word we’ll come back to in a bit. But there are other two key words here: adoption and inheritance.

The Ephesian church was likely made up of mostly Gentile believers, so unlike Jewish believers, they didn’t have any claim to the God of the Jews based on their ethnicity. And yet, they have been adopted by this God; they have received an inheritance from him, just as if they were natural-born members of his people.

Paul’s saying that Christ came and lived and died on the cross and rose again to reconcile people to himself, and out of those people to build a family. And as we saw before, God’s plan was to unite people to himself from all nations, all people groups, all socioeconomic backgrounds, and from these really disparate groups to make one huge, global community. A community not based on mutual advancement or on nationalism, but on God’s incredible grace to us in Jesus Christ.

I hope you see that if this is the goal of the gospel—to take people from all countries and nationalities and backgrounds and social groups and make them one new family—then Paris is the ideal place for the gospel to take root. In essence, the gospel allows us to take the good of community living (that we’ve more or less left behind in our modern culture) and splice it into the good of the multiculturalism we have in our city. That unity and diversity that our society so badly wants today? The only thing that can actually make it happen is the gospel. The gospel allows us to be different people, from different backgrounds, and yet still be rooted and anchored into one community, with a common faith, a common ethic, and a common love.

It’s really easy to read these verses and to be personally, individually encouraged by them—I am every time I read them. But we should never miss one really important truth: every first-person pronoun we see here is plural, never singular. It’s never “I”; it’s always “we”. God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world. He adopted us; he redeemed us; he forgave our trespasses; we were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.

Christ did not come just to save “people”; he came to save a people. He came to save a family. His plan is not individualistic. He pours out his love on us as individuals, yes; but he never does it to the exclusion of all the other people he has saved.

Look around you. Look at your brothers and sisters in Christ. If they have placed their faith in Christ, there is no Christian faith for YOU, without THEM. The Christian faith comes with the luggage of all the Christians around you, along with everything packed inside.

In Christ, God has reconciled his people to himself. Now there may be some people here today who don’t know Christ, and who aren’t following him today…but who will know him, and who will follow him soon. God knows who you are, and he knows what he is planning for you. If you will come to him in faith, your salvation is every bit as sure as ours; it is so sure that Paul can refer to your salvation, and ours, in the past tense. God has already done this, even if we don’t believe it yet. And the day that you believe in him after hearing the gospel, you will be sealed with the Holy Spirit—what God has planned for you will be made official. Your adoption papers will be stamped, and your inheritance—which we’ll see in a minute—will be waiting.

So the first part of God’s plan is to reconcile his people to himself. The second part of his plan is to reconcile all of creation to himself.

Christ will reconcile all of creation to God (v. 7-10).

V. 7:

In [Christ] 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.

It’s one of the central truths of the Bible: God created the world perfect and unified. His creation was perfect—no sickness, no disease, no suffering or death. It was a place where heaven and earth overlapped, in a sense. The perfect God was united to his perfect image, man and woman, in this perfect creation. But man rebelled against God, and that rebellion is called sin. Sin is like a cancer that came into the world with that first rebellion and corrupted everything. It essentially separated heaven from earth, and the universe became a place of suffering and sickness and death.

You know how a lot of kids draw on the walls when they’re little? They think they’re redecorating and it’s pretty, but in fact they’re just ruining a perfectly good paint job? My kids never did that, thank goodness; but if they had, I would definitely have sat them down and dealt with the problem; I would try to get them to change, to help them become the kind of kids who don’t draw on the walls. But does that mean I’m just going to leave my walls unpainted and scribbled on? Of course not—after dealing with the kids, I’ll repaint the walls to get them to look the way they did before!

Now, put yourself in God’s shoes. You’ve created this beautiful, perfect world—a veritable paradise—and you’ve created man in your image to live in this world. And man screws it all up. Man corrupts everything, and the entire creation is broken. If you were God, and you saw this, would you really just save man and throw away the rest of your creation? Would you not also want to take your creation that man had broken and corrupted…and make it new again too? Bring it back to its original glory and splendor? In fixing what man broke in himself, would you not also want to fix what he broke in the world you created?

Well, Paul says that’s exactly what God wants, and that’s exactly what he will do. When Christ returns, he will rid creation of sin, once and for all—and all of its effects. No more sickness, no more death, no more evil, no more sadness or guilt or disappointment. The Bible calls this renewed creation the new heavens and the new earth.

Now this isn’t just a detail; the new heavens and the new earth aren’t just an aesthetic bonus. This promise is God’s determination and power to always do what he sets out to do. His plans will never be thwarted. If he means creation to be a certain way, he will make it that way. If he plans for us to be a certain way, he will make us that way.

All this is important because so often we think of our faith as something a little unsure, like maybe there’s a chance that everything we hope for in Christ won’t work for me. For the Christian sitting next to me, sure—they’re doing really well—but I don’t think I can make it.

And you’re right. You can’t. You can’t. But he will.

I mentioned earlier that the word “predestined” is important here. It is, because it means that all of this was God’s plan all along, and it is all his doing. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, and he’s the one who brings it to pass. 

Take time this week to look at the first fourteen verses of this letter, and ask yourself what exactly we contribute to this picture. We come with our sin, we hear the gospel, we believe the gospel (which in chapter 2 Paul will say is also God’s doing!)…and then we praise him. That’s it. Every substantial action in all of our salvation comes from God. He is the main actor here; he is the one who brings it to pass, which is why all of this is to the praise of his glorious grace.

In Christ, God will be glorified (v. 6, 11-12, 14).

You may have noticed that I skipped over one of our key words earlier. We talked about adoption, but we didn’t talk about “inheritance.” I skipped over it because I knew we’d be coming here. 

When we talk about the new heavens and the new earth, and the firm assurance we have that God will make all things new again, it’d be easy to imagine that that is our inheritance.

But it isn’t. As wonderful as all of this will be, the beauty and wonder and joy of heaven is not the main focus of our inheritance. Our inheritance is something else.

Look at v. 11-12 one more time: 

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.

What is our inheritance? That we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. You see, the focus of our salvation, the focus of our hope, and the focus of our inheritance are all one and the same: Jesus Christ. His majesty. His grace. His beauty. His glory. He is the sun around which the solar system of our faith orbits, and that is very good news for us, because we were created to see him and marvel at him and reflect his glory back to him in praise. 

Three times in these verses, Paul says it. V. 6: To the praise of his glorious grace. V. 12: so that we might be to the praise of his glory. V. 14: to the praise of his glory. That’s the goal of everything God is doing in the world and in us—that is the goal of everything he is doing for us.

And it’s not an egocentric goal on his part. We’ve all heard stories of people who discover their passion—a piano prodigy starts playing for the first time, and he realizes, “This is what I’m here to do. This is what I was born for.” A couple has a baby, and as they look at that baby they’re overwhelmed with love for that baby that they think, “This is what we’re here for.”

V. 6 and v. 12 and v. 14 are God saying to us, “This is what you’re here for. To see my glory.” God’s glory is everything he is—all of his attributes—made visible. We can’t even conceive of how incredible seeing God for who he really is will be. Heaven will never be boring. It will be one marvel after another, one breathtaking scene after another, with one central focus the whole time: God himself, manifested in Jesus Christ.

And that’s huge, because every time we see Christ, we’ll be reminded that we rightly shouldn’t be there. Not only are we not divine—not only are we creatures, and he is the Creator—we’re sinners who have rebelled against him. And the only reason why we’re permitted to see this unbelievable God is because Christ came and lived and died and was raised to make us holy.

Heaven will never be boring. We deserve none of it, and in Christ we receive all of it. Where else will we possibly want to look than to him?

Conclusion

This is the plan of God: to save his people and to save all things in heaven and on earth, to the praise of his glorious grace. I wanted to start this new school year with a big vision of God—as big as we could possibly get—because this vision is essential for what will follow.

After this passage, Paul is going to talk about how this plan works itself out in us as individuals and as a body, and then in chapter 4 he’s going to get super practical: since all these things are true, this is how we should live. But he started the letter the way he did, with this passage, for a very good reason. If we begin with “Here’s what you need to do,” we’ll get it wrong every time. 

Oswald Chambers wrote: “The full flood of my life is not in bodily health, not in external happenings, not in seeing God’s work succeed, but in the perfect understanding of God, and in the communion with Him that Jesus Himself had… The life that is rightly related to God is as natural as breathing wherever it goes. The lives that have been of most blessing to you are those who were unconscious of it.” 

We can be of little use to God, and we will find very little joy in him, if “ministry” is our focus, or even if “the Christian life” is our focus. Because there will always be something that makes the Christian life difficult; there will always be some circumstance or some sin or weakness in us that will make it less than we think it should be.

But the person who keeps their eyes firmly on God, on his work in Christ, on what he has done and who he is, is finally able to serve as he should, and rejoice as he should, because he isn’t preoccupied with “finding his place” or “using his gifts” or “being good enough”. His place is with God—and that’s where he is! Such a person is as content sweeping the floors as preaching, because as he sweeps the floors he knows that he is blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

And this person’s service is joyful, because he knows that God works all things according to the counsel of his will—he perfectly accomplishes his plan. So there is no pressure on us.

For the next three weeks we’re going to be looking at the vision of our church, and how we believe God calls us to work out our salvation in our specific body, in our specific context: to embody the gospel in Paris, to train disciples who make disciples, and to send out Christians equipped for the ministry. But we will never be able to fulfill that vision if that vision is our focus, and we will never be happy if we try. 

Our focus has to be him. He is too good and too great to be bottled into a three-point vision statement, or in a list of items in our calendar. He is our vision; he is our heart; he is our joy. 

This is the plan of God: to save his people and to save all things in heaven and on earth, to the praise of his glorious grace.