One of the love-hate relationships that writers have is with
their editors. I have worked with several over the years and, as writers are
wont to do, I have to sometimes grudgingly admit that their input does, indeed,
make my writing a little better. As TS Eliot put it, “I suppose some editors
are failed writers; but so are most writers.” I’m working on turning my
dissertation into a book right now and I’m sure there will be more red ink
ahead!
While working on my dissertation, one of the things I
learned from my editor that proved most helpful concerned the use of action
verbs, which are always preferable to using “being” verbs. For example, “The
pastor was preaching from the Bible” presents as a pretty boring sentence (and
the preaching might have been as well), while “The pastor preached a sermon
gleaned from the Scriptures” implies action (well, sort of). You get the idea.
Good writers pay attention to the verbs because they move
the action along, whether it’s a sermon or a novel. The use of descriptive
verbs can stimulate the reader’s imagination.
The series we’re beginning today in Ephesians looks at the
way that Paul stimulates the imagination of the churches in his day and, by
extension, the church in our time. Paul, writes descriptively most of the time,
though he is wordy at times. In 2 Peter 3:16, Peter writes that Paul says “some
things that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to
their own destruction.” Maybe Paul could have used an editor to be more clear. Nonetheless,
he paints marvelous word pictures when he describes the action of God in Jesus
Christ—the theme of every one of his letters.
If you read my introduction to the series, you know that
Ephesians is unique among Paul’s letters, looking more like a sermon than a
letter addressing a specific issue in a church, which is the pattern of most of
Paul’s letters. Ephesians, however, reads like an invitation to everyone—the
churches of his day and the church in ours—to begin living the vision of God’s
new world in the present; to live with an imagination that transcends the way
things are and begins living into what will be.
The text we began with this morning, Ephesians 1:3-14, is
one of the more dense passages in Scripture. In Greek it is all one sentence,
202 words in all, written with the same kind of breathless excitement that a
person might have in describing the greatest thing they’ve ever discovered. It
is perhaps the greatest run-on sentence in the history of the world—a rich
treasure trove for theologians and a nightmare for translators. I read about
one pastor who was looking at this passage and gave it to an English teacher to
diagram the sentence. The paper for the diagram was 12 feet long!
When you read a sentence in Greek, the first thing you have
to do is find the verb in order to put the other words in order. In Ephesians
1:3-14, there are actually seven key verbs—seven verbs that vividly describe
what God has done for us; seven verbs that mark us and invite us to imagine
ourselves differently than the world sees us or differently than we might even
see ourselves:
The first verb is blessed.
Interestingly, the Greek word here is “eulogatos,” the root word of which is
“eulogy.” We often think of a eulogy as a blessing or praise of a person at the
end of their lives. Paul begins by inviting us to bless (euologize) God because
God has been blessed (eulogized) and has blessed us from the very beginning.
God blesses as he is blessed. Indeed, the Bible reveals that blessing has been
God’s work from the beginning: Abraham is blessed with land and family, Mary is
identified by the angel as being blessed by God, Jesus blesses the children. So
often we think of blessings as something we have accumulated—family, home,
prosperity—but receiving a blessing is really a form of receiving God himself!
God blessed us with his presence—the “spiritual blessings in the heavenlies”
aren’t something we wait for later, they are available to us now. God is not
distant and remote but right with us in the midst of our stories. We tend to
celebrate people when they pass away, Paul tells us that God celebrates us now!
The second verb is chose.
God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and
blameless before him in love” (v. 4). Remember when you were a kid on the
playground and it was time to pick up teams for a game? Some of us might
remember being chosen last, kind of like default. To not be chosen makes us
feel kind of worthless, whether it’s on the playground or in the job interview,
by that certain person or for that certain honor. We can spend our whole lives
trying to prove that we’re worth something, and destroy ourselves in the
process.
Paul reminds us that there is another way. We have been
chosen, not last but first! We have been chosen before the foundations of the
world to be his. We were made for this, made in his image, crafted for God’s
purpose. We’ve not been chosen because we were the fastest, the prettiest, the
smartest—God chose us because he loves us wants to set us apart as his own.
Each one of us is of infinite worth because God chose us!
The third verb, destined,
is related to chose. “He destined us
for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to his good pleasure.”
The Greek word translated “destined” actually derives from the word that means
to set a limit or mark a boundary. It also reminds us of a “destination”—the
goal of a journey.
There’s an echo here of Israel’s story—God chooses a people,
marks them as his children through circumcision, sets boundaries for them, and
gives them a mission. Writing to churches that are largely Gentile, Paul
reminds them that they, too, have become God’s chosen people through the grace
of God in Jesus Christ. They have been “adopted” as God’s people, marked not by
circumcision but by baptism, and they have been given boundaries and a
destination as well—the destination of God’s redemptive kingdom that transforms
us and the world. All of this God does for a specific purpose, a purpose
repeated several times by Paul in this passage: “to the praise of [God’s]
glorious grace.”
When I was a kid, I memorized the Westminster Confession,
which started with a simple question: “What is the chief end of man?” In other
words, what is the purpose of human life? Answer: “To glorify God and enjoy him
forever.” We have been chosen, destined from the beginning to reflect God’s
glory. We can choose not to reflect God’s glory and reflect all kinds of other
glory, including glory on ourselves, but the way to life, the way Paul invites
us to imagine God’s new world, is one that reflects God’s glory in everything
we do and say. We were meant for this from the beginning—our worth, our lives,
our hope, is realized not by striving for our own glory, but for the glory of
God worked in us through his grace.
The fourth verb is bestowed
(v. 6). This is an interesting verb in Greek, appearing only one other place in
the New Testament, when Gabriel greets Mary as God’s “favored one.” “Paul uses
the verb here to express God’s action of bestowing his grace, his favor, on us.
God bestows grace, his favor, his pleasure in us, his delight in giving us what
we could never imagine or guess” (Peterson 62).
This is a major theme in Ephesians: God’s grace. We receive
what we do not deserve. We are favored by God not because of our own efforts
but simply because God loves us and wants to transform us into his image once
again. Grace makes that transformation possible. God meets us where we are and
then draws us back to himself.
And this isn’t just a little grace that God offers, it is lavished on us. That fifth verb, lavished, is one of Paul’s favorite
words. God isn’t stingy with his love. Through the lavished love of God in
Christ, through the blood of his cross and the triumph of his resurrection, we
have “redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,
according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us” (v. 7-8). It is
this grace in Christ that enables us to live a new life. Paul will elaborate on
this at the beginning of chapter 2.
The sixth verb is made
known (v. 9). “With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the
mystery of his will.” When you read a mystery story, you spend a lot of time
looking for clues, trying to piece them together, trying to gather up all the
information. A lot of Christian theology is like that, mining the Scriptures
for clues and arguing over points of doctrine. What Paul says, however, is that
this mystery can only be solved through wisdom and insight. Rather than
knowledge acquired, this is knowledge lived out, experienced, experimented
with. Yes, the book knowledge is important, but only insofar as it is applied.
Wisdom, as Eugene Peterson puts it, is “truth assimilated and digested.”
Insight is about seeing things differently, expanding our imagination.
And what can we imagine when we embrace God’s wisdom and
insight? That’s the seventh verb. God’s plan is to “gather up all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on
earth” (v. 10). Paul invites us to imagine a new reality in which heaven and
earth are gathered together under the rule of Christ—a reality that Jesus
called the kingdom of God. He goes on to say in verse 11, that this is the
purpose to which we have been “destined”—to live for the praise of his glory in
light of this new reality. This is what we have been called to, marked for with
the seal of the promised Holy Spirit (v. 13). The concept here is like that of
a down payment. God gives us the Spirit as a pledge that this new reality is
already coming to bear. This is our hope, “the pledge of our inheritance toward
redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory” (v. 14).
Now, that’s a lot packed into one sentence! Paul will spend
the rest of the sermon unpacking it. In verses 15-23, Paul prays for the
churches, that they may “open the eyes of their hearts” and see this great plan
of grace unfolding before them (v. 18), and know the power that God is working
in Christ, who rules over every power and authority, and who brings this new
world to bear in the present through his body, the church (v. 19-23).
In chapter 2, then, Paul gets more personal, reminding his
readers that they were once dead because they were “children of wrath” who live
outside the boundaries God set and who seek the self-serving glory of “the
passions of the flesh” rather than living to the glory of God. In verse 4,
then, we get one of the great phrases in the Bible, “But God…”
But God, the one who blessed, chose, destined, bestowed,
lavished, made known, and gathered up, gave us new life in Christ through “the
immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (2:7).
We receive this grace by faith. Ephesians 2:8-9 is a famous quote: “For by
grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of your own doing, it
is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast.” This is
Paul summarizing what he has already told us—It is God who blesses, chooses,
destines, bestows, lavishes, makes known, and gathers up. God, at his
initiative, saves us from the old life of sin and death, which we could not
accomplish on our own no matter how good we might be. But God’s purpose here is
not just to save us from the old world, his grace also commissions us for the
new world he is bringing to light. Look at verse 10: “For we are what he has
made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand
to be our way of life.”
This is the life we were made for from the beginning! We are
created in God’s image. God’s grace saves us from the brokenness of sin that
mars that image. And when that image is repaired in us, we begin to imagine
God’s new world and we begin working with God to make it a reality.
We live in a world that lives by a different set of verbs.
People believe they are cursed, they are unwanted, they have no purpose; they
are starved for love, the goodness of life is hidden, and they are scattered to
and fro by host of conflicting messages and demands.
Too often, the church has reinforced that worldview by
telling people how broken they are, as if they didn’t already know. We continue
to imagine the world as it is—a hopeless place—a place to escape rather than
embrace.
Ephesians calls us to a fresh new imagination—an imagination
stimulated and filled by God’s grace and the possibility of new life, even in
the midst of death. We are invited to imagine the world, and ourselves, as we
were meant to be. I want to tell you today, that no matter who you are or what
you’re facing, no matter how far you’ve fallen or how broken you may be…
You are blessed by a blessed God.
You have been chosen first as the one God wants.
You are destined for a life that is full of God’s glory.
You have been bestowed with marvelous grace; indeed, God has
lavished grace on you in Jesus Christ. Your sins are forgiven, your life
renewed.
You have been given the keys to the mystery and meaning of
life—the gathering up of earth and heaven together—the restoration of the world
as it was always meant to be.
Your life has a purpose within the purposes of God for the
whole world.
This is what Paul is inviting us to imagine at the outset of
this powerful sermon. Can you imagine it in your own life? Can you imagine it
for the world? When we start living in the midst of those verbs, living for the
praise of God’s glory, our lives will never be the same.
Ephesians helps us discover the new world and new humanity
that God chooses to shape through his grace. I hope you’ll join us for the rest
of this series as we look at the way this new life is to be lived out in a new
society that breaks down the walls between people, a new faithfulness that
involves both belief in God and walking with God, new standards of purity and
conduct that lift others up, and the new relationships that God brings to light
in families and communities.
