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We turn onto the lane that looks like home, only to find barriers on both sides and nowhere left to go. Foot still on the accelerator, locked on the road to death, the only hope we have is mercy—and Ephesians 1:7 speaks right into that place: in him we have redemption through his blood.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The sermon uses the roundabout story as a metaphor for how we choose sin. How does this metaphor compare to the way you understand the nature of sin in your own life? Are there ways in which the metaphor breaks down or could be expanded?
Paul distinguishes between “redemption” (being freed from slavery to sin) and “forgiveness of trespasses” (being cleansed of ongoing sinful acts). What is the significance of this distinction, and how does understanding both concepts change the way we think about salvation and Christian living?
The bathtub metaphor suggests that getting out of sin is only the first step—we also need to be “dried off” through ongoing sanctification. What does this process look like in practice, and how do we balance God’s role in sanctification with our own responsibility to pursue holiness?
The sermon critiques a “hit and run” approach to sharing the gospel, where people are confronted about sin but left without support or continued relationship. What are the dangers of this approach, and what does it look like to genuinely walk alongside others in their spiritual growth?
In light of Israel’s exodus and adoption into God’s family as parallels to our own redemption, how does remembering that we were deserving of death—not just average people elevated to a higher status—fuel worship and a drive to share God’s mercy with others?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
I was reading the other week about a man named Victor. Victor is a gentleman who’s come to this country seeking asylum from Colombia, and he arrived here and started the proper process to receive asylum, which, as I understand it, is an incredibly complicated process. It’s not something that happens overnight, but he was going through it. In fact, one day, he was at the courthouse all day going through the different aspects of receiving that asylum that he’s been seeking. His sister was with him. They left the courthouse utterly exhausted. They hopped in their car somewhere in New York near the proper courthouse they needed to visit, right along the border with Canada, and they started to drive home. They lived, I think, a couple of hours away and didn’t really know the area, but they knew where they wanted to go. They wanted to go back home.
They came to a roundabout. If anyone else here struggles with roundabouts, I am terrible with roundabouts. If they’re one of those two-lane monsters, you know, where one lane might go all the way around or curve off here, I don’t know. Well, apparently, Victor didn’t know either, and he ended up in the wrong part of the roundabout, joining about a dozen people every day who accidentally make the turn to go into Canada. One of the requirements if you seek asylum is that you don’t leave the country. Until 2015, I understand, this roundabout ramp had a U-turn on it for people who did exactly what Victor did—that you didn’t really want to leave the country but found yourself on this roundabout. But somehow, in the wisdom of the highway department, they removed the U-turn. Once you go on that path, you’re committed. You’re going to Canada.
As soon as he realized that, because he saw on the lane that he was now committed to Canada with an arrow pointing, he looked at his sister and said, “Oh, no.” He knew he would break the terms of his asylum by going into Canada, and he hoped somehow he could convince the border guards that he was just a hapless guy that didn’t know how to use a roundabout. When he arrived at the Canadian border, he turned himself in to the Canadian border guards, who turned him over to the American border guards, who incarcerated him and sought to send him back to Colombia.
What was he going to do then? The moment that he ended up on that road, he was no longer free to go where he wanted to go. He could see the consequences coming, but he couldn’t change the path. Yes, he still had his foot on the accelerator, but he couldn’t change the path. There were concrete barriers on both sides; there was nowhere to go. He had to decide what to do, and ultimately, he leaned on the mercy of the people that knew him—his church, his family. He was a handyman, and his clients wrote into the court giving testimony of his good character and of his pursuit of becoming a good American. He was in English classes to try to master the language, and his fellow classmates wrote in on his behalf. After about a month, he was released.
As I read his story, though, I thought isn’t his encounter with that roundabout an awful lot like the way that we go through life and find ourselves in sin? We pick out the lane we think looks pretty good, and usually, we don’t think, “I’m going to bring destruction on myself. That’s why I want to get into this lane.” We turn into that lane because we think, “This looks like the right lane. This is going to take me where I want to go. I just want to go home.” We’re going to turn into this lane, and then we realize, in our faulty judgment and faulty vision of things, we haven’t picked the path to home. We’ve picked the path, a road to death land, and there’s no way we’re getting off of it. Yes, we continue to accelerate. We just push our foot down because we’ve committed to that route, and our nature drives us to that route, but ultimately, the only place we’re going is to death.
Last week, we talked about how God adopts us and the beauty of having that status—that we’re brought into the family of God—and that’s wonderful in itself. It would be wonderful if we were making the right choices on the roundabout every single time, but tonight, we’re going to think about what it means that God does that when we’re the people that constantly pick the road to death land, that we go on that sin road every single time, and we push down that accelerator, and the only hope we have is mercy because we’re not just average, everyday people who then are brought up to the status of being children of the king. We’re those who are deserving of death who are brought to be children of the king. Let’s pray tonight that we would truly understand that as we come to God’s word. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, we do come to you as those who constantly pick the wrong turn, constantly turn away from you. Lord, would you help us to understand just what it is that you do for us? Would you help us to see it, to hold on to it, and to bask and be revived in that mercy, and then to feel driven to share that mercy because of the wondrous power, the indescribable richness of it? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
We’re in verse 7 tonight of Ephesians chapter 1, picking back up from verse 6 last week. I was going to look at the first part of verse 7 to start. Paul says there, “In him we have redemption through his blood.”
Well, we like to surround the word “redemption” in the church, don’t we? That is part of our church lingo. If you’ve been in church, maybe even you haven’t been in church for a long time and you tune in tonight on our live stream, I say the word redemption, you say, “Oh yeah, churchies. I know that. When my grandmother used to take me to church, I heard that, right? That’s how Christians talk. We talk about redemption.”
The problem is a lot of times we don’t really spend very much time thinking about what does it mean? What did that word signify when Paul was writing it? The word he uses there is not a terribly common Greek word. It’s not a word that even shows up that often in Scripture other than when Paul uses it to refer to redemption just a few times. But it did have a secular meaning in the Greco-Roman world, and its meaning was essentially emancipation. It was the term that was used to say that you freed a slave. You’d pay the price for that slave; that slave was freed.
So when Paul says that through the blood of Christ we receive redemption, Paul isn’t saying through the blood of Christ God likes you a little bit more. God doesn’t mind if you come over for a potluck as long as you bring a dish. God even wants to hear from you once in a while. Seeing that God’s paid a price, you went from bondage, from slavery, not just even being a freed person but from slavery to a child of the king. You need to understand that’s the gap that Paul says.
And it comes with a brutal price. We know different prices for different things. If you came in here and you walked up to the refrigerator and you wanted a drink, and incidentally, if you do, please help yourself. But let’s say instead you saw a sign up and it said requires two forms of identification and a $100 payment. You probably wouldn’t take it, right? It’s not worth it. On the other hand, if you were looking at a house and someone said it requires two forms of identification and a $100 payment, you’d say, “What’s wrong with the house? That’s a fantastic deal.” Different things require different prices.
What’s the price for us? Jesus’ life. Hebrews 9:22 says, “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” God was preparing us for that in the Old Testament when he instructed the people of God to do what? To offer sacrifices—to take part of their livestock and bring them to the altar of God and to sacrifice those living creatures for their own sin, the sin of the people sacrificing.
Say, something dies when you sin. That’s the price of sin. That’s the price of enslavement to sin. Now, of course, no matter what the best offering ever offered—the best sheep, the best cattle—there’s nothing that we could offer that would be truly worth what we owe God. But he allowed them to start to experience that and to train his people to understand something about the cost through that. But then the Father sent his Son, the only true, perfect sacrifice to pay what it really costs.
This shows the severity of the enslavement that we were in. We weren’t just someone who had sold ourselves for a limited period of time. In the Old Testament, that was a thing you could do. You want to pay off your debts? You could sell yourself for a period of time. Depending on how much time was left in that period of time, the price would be variable on what it would be to be freed. No, we were someone who was imprisoned for life—and not just life on this earth, but eternal life. And God freed us from that. He pays an incredible price for it.
God had already set up his people to understand something about this by freeing them from worldly slavery as well. The people of Israel, they were enslaved in Egypt for 400 years. What does God do? He rescues them. This word redemption would not only speak very clearly to those who were of Greek or Roman background, who understood the idea of paying off the slave price in the Roman Empire. It also would have spoken very clearly to the Israelites who remembered from the stories passed down through God’s word and through their ancestors that they had once been slaves. When they were slaves, they had no power to get out of that slavery. The Egyptian government was more powerful than they were. They couldn’t get out; they didn’t know how to get out. They just had to keep toiling under that slavery.
So Paul’s picking up both of these things and saying, remember what the Lord has done for you in the past, and now understand that he’s done something even more for you. He’s paid the ultimate price to free you. And not just to free you, but to restore you. Colossians 1:20 says, “And through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
What does that blood do? Well, you could free a slave. You could pay that slave’s price and free that slave, and that slave then is what? That slave no longer has to work for the person who had previously claimed ownership of him. Now he can go do his own thing, but he doesn’t immediately inherit anything. He doesn’t immediately have status in society. In fact, even in that case, you might not be a Roman citizen. You might not have privileges. You might not really know what you were going to do. You have to figure that all out.
But God doesn’t just do that. He doesn’t just say, “Okay, I freed you from your past sins. I got you off the roundabout. I carved out a new ramp to get off and come back. Now what you do with that, whether you come back to that roundabout and make the same stupid choice again, then you’re just done because I’m not doing it twice for you.” He doesn’t do that.
What does he do? He pays the price to not only free us but to reconcile us with himself, to bring us into that adoption that we actually experience being in his family. God freed the Israelites not just so they were out of Egyptian slavery and then said, “Good luck finding a place to live now.” You giant people that no one wants because they’re going to see you as an invading horde. Find some place and best of luck to you. He didn’t say that.
What did he do? He told them, “I’m going to take you to the promised land. I’m going to give you a land of milk and honey. I am going to be your God. I’m going to be with you. I’m going to lead you. I’m going to have a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night that you would know that I am with you and I’m going to take you there personally.”
When God reconciles us, what does he do? He says, “Come to the table. Be part of my family.” Every week when we have the Lord’s Supper, what are we reminded? That God invites us to his family dinner. Why? Because we’re part of his family. He loves us. God’s plan is reconciliation to make things right and whole.
We sometimes miss part of that, I think. We think, “Okay, he got me up and now it’s my own.” We like going back there. It’s another one of those turnoffs on that roundabout because, “Okay, now it’s about me. Now I am going to live up to what God said I should do and I’m going to do it. At the end of my life, I’m going to look back and talk about how, yeah, God got me started and then I did it. He gave me some seed money to start my business, but I built the empire.”
That’s not what God does. He walks with us every step of the way and guides us. We don’t realize how messed up we are. We just look at that one part that we’re rescued from and think that’s it.
Josephine Martin, she has a sort of special distinction. She’s one of the few people who has been electrocuted by lightning in a bathtub. Now maybe growing up you were told you shouldn’t be in the bathtub or the shower during an electrical storm. Did anyone ever hear that? Some of you? It can really happen, especially if you’re in a house with metal pipes. Lightning strikes the ground, comes up the pipes.
She apparently had gotten done with a long day taking care of her kids and decided to have a nice soak in the tub. She got in the tub right as the storm came up. She said she remembered hearing a loud rumble of thunder and saw a white flash as the water around her rippled. The next thing she knew, she found herself lying on the other side of the bathroom, tossed out by the charge.
What did she need to do? She needed to get out of the tub. If she’d gotten out a moment earlier, she wouldn’t have gone through the excruciating pain and been tossed around. She needed to get out of the tub. Her husband could have rushed in and said, “Here, I’m going to get you out of the tub. It’s dangerous. You need to get out of there.” She said, “I’m too tired.” He lifted her out and got her out of the tub. Okay, that’d be better.
Every time we avoid getting electrocuted in a bathtub, that’s a step forward. That’s a good thing, right? But it’s not the end of the story of what needs to be done. Because if you come rushing out of the tub, what are you? You’re all over everything, right? You walk around and there’s puddles of water going around. You need something else, too. You need to dry off.
I think a lot of times when we talk about God’s reconciliation as redemption, we think about that first part—”Okay, the storm was coming. I’m so glad God got me out of that tub because I can see the lightning struck and I saw the water ripple across and I realized if I had been in there, I would have been in for a horrible shock. I don’t need anything. Oh, God’s coming over and offering me a towel. God, I don’t need that. I’m fine.”
And we don’t realize we’re just soaking wet. I mean, we’re sopping wet. And unlike getting out of the tub, our sin just keeps oozing out. We just keep getting wetter, right? It’s just coming out. We’re just sopping wet and destroying things as we go.
But the first thing is getting out of the tub. And if you haven’t gotten out of the tub of sin, if you haven’t turned to Jesus, certainly the first thing is simply turn to him. Just say, “I’m stuck in this tub, Jesus, and I see the storm of death coming. Get me out, please. Forgive me of my sins. I want you to be my Lord.” That’s the right first step.
But there’s a big question if we’re going to take step two or not. Victor, after his ordeal and everyone writing in and leaning on the mercy of the people who knew him, may have been freed from detainment. But he said, “Okay, I’m freed from detainment. I’m no longer going to show up for any hearings about my asylum. I’m just going to kick back and act like nothing ever happened and I never have to do anything again.” That wouldn’t go very well for him, would it? No, you get thrown out. He needs to keep on the process, right? And not forget the fact that he still isn’t there yet. Being released from detention wasn’t being handed citizenship. There’s still a whole process for asylum and whatever comes after that, and he needs to go through that.
Now, he needs to do things. In our case, what we need is for God to continue to do things. We need to take that step two. That second step is that Jesus doesn’t just get us out of the tub. He doesn’t just get us back onto the right spot on the road and rescue us from going into death land. What does he do? He cleanses us of the residue of death.
Second half of verse seven: “The forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace.” As I was wrestling with this passage, at first I thought, “Well, Paul’s just doing a parallelism here.” It’s something, if you read through the Scripture, especially if you spend some time in the Psalms, you know that one of the very core Hebrew ways of saying something is you say it twice. Sometimes it really is just an echo—two different ways of saying the exact same thing. But a lot of times it develops in different directions and it’s trying to show us a little bit fuller picture. And I believe that’s what Paul’s doing here.
We have some hints at that. You see, as we’re told about redemption, what’s that about? That’s about God rescuing us from our nature as sinners. We’re on that road. We can’t get off of it. We’re stuck on it. If no one has mercy on us, we’re just going to be detained for eternity. Nothing we can do about it.
But Paul uses a different word here in Ephesians 1:7, the second half of it, than he uses elsewhere where he makes similar statements. For example, Colossians 1:14, “in whom we have redemption of the forgiveness of sins,” looks the same, right? But he uses two different words for sin, and sometimes those can be used interchangeably, but especially these are two letters he writes that are very similar—very similar focus to different churches.
I think the fact that Paul changes the wording, he’s trying to communicate something here that he wants us to hold on to, especially because he prefers the other word for sin. I believe what he’s saying here—and sometimes some of your Bibles might translate this instead of “sins” in Ephesians 1:7 is “trespasses” or something akin to that—these aren’t matters of our sin as a nature, that we are sinful human beings unredeemed until God redeems us. These are about the acts of sin we continue to do.
God redeems us. He pulls us out of that bathtub. But then he starts drying us off as we continue to drip on the floor. We might be out of the danger of that electrical storm, right? If you believe in Jesus and then you die before you get anything straight in your life beyond the fact that you believed in Jesus, you’re going to be in his presence. You’re not going to say, “Well, if only you’d had 20 years to get your life in order, you were on the right track.” He doesn’t do that.
But if in God’s grace he gives us more than a few moments—and I pray for all of you that he does—we need to realize that we’re just dripping all over that floor, and it’s a nice wood floor, and we’re warping the floor as we go because it’s getting so wet.
You know, when Israel was taken to the Promised Land, when they were redeemed from slavery, they were now in the Promised Land. They were now the people of God. They were in covenant with God, and those who trusted in God for salvation, he’s faithful in that. And those people could hold on to the promise of God as he revealed further and further truth pointing toward the ultimate redemption, the Messiah.
But even the best of them, even the best of them continue to sin. In our Tuesday Night Bible Study, we’ve been going through the life of David. We just got to the end of David’s life and moved on to Solomon. You think about David’s life. David is a man after God’s own heart, a man you hold up as someone who actually loves God and writes beautiful praise songs to God and so on, in so many ways. And yet, you look at the deep flaws. David was still dripping all over the floor. Some places he resolved that over time through God’s grace. God’s drying him off. Some places he was still dripping till the day he died.
But the key thing is, being in the people of God doesn’t mean that we quit dripping. We need God to continue to dry us off so that we don’t catch cold and that we’re not destroying what’s around us. Would you rather have a cold or would you rather be electrocuted by a lightning bolt? I would much rather, much much rather catch a cold. I think that’d be a much better thing, as miserable as they are. But I still don’t want either.
God’s saying, “Don’t spend your life catching cold over and over and warping the floors and making life miserable for others and causing them to slip and fall on the wet floor. Allow me to work in you to dry you off so that you’re actually not only my child, not only saved from death land, but you’re able to quit putting off that residue of sin in life as well.”
How much is he willing to do that? We know bath towels only do so much, but God’s grace towel that he wraps around us doesn’t stop absorbing our sin. He just keeps drying us and restoring us and preparing us over and over again in this wonderful, warm embrace of God. “Forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace.”
Paul says, “I can’t even put a price on how rich God’s grace is because you can’t see the bottom of it. You can’t know the bottom of it. There is no bottom. You’re not going to drain it.” So bring all your dampness to God. Bring all your sin to God because God is willing to deal with all of it.
Jesus doesn’t just get us out of the tub. He hands us the towel. He doesn’t just hand us the towel. He dries us off with it. He knows we’re too weak to do it all. So we’re prepared to do something in response—to live lives that are glorifying to him and fulfilling what he made us to do.
We’re going to talk more about that in Sunday School Express in just a little bit, thinking about the fruit of the Spirit and sanctification and how we get from Jesus saving us to us doing things and how do those interact. But the key thing is even in us doing things, Jesus is the one bringing about that goodness in us.
Where are we dripping tonight? Where do we need God to dry us off? Am I willing to say to Jesus tonight, “Jesus, dry me off with that towel tonight. I’ve been holding on to this sin. I’ve been holding on to it because I don’t think you really are willing to forgive that much sin. I don’t think it’s really that serious. I don’t think it’s harming others. I don’t think it’s this. I don’t think it’s that.” And Jesus says, “Let me dry you off.”
And I say, “Well, what if Jesus starts that and then gets tired of it? What if Jesus starts that and says it’s too big a commitment?” He says, “That’s not how I work.”
We prayed earlier for the world and talked about, or prayed about Iran and what’s going on there. There’s a lot of interesting questions that people are asking, and I don’t pretend to know all the answers to them. But one of the big questions is, how much do we do, right? Well, it’d be a bad idea for them to have the bomb. So, okay, we’re trying to eliminate that. Israel’s been trying to eliminate that. But there’s still people in power that hate us and want us to die. Would it be good if maybe they toppled? Maybe there was regime change? Some people say, “Yeah, we need to go all the way. We need to make sure that happens.” Other people say, “But we’re not willing to commit to that. We don’t want to be over there for decades trying to somehow put a government in place.”
Think about a couple decades ago when we went into Iraq and succeeded in ending the reign of Saddam Hussein. Then the question is, now what? Because what remained? It looked pretty easy at first, and then there was the insurgency. There were those who didn’t want us there, that didn’t want what we were trying to do, and wanted to kill our men and women who were serving the country to stop it. And there was a lot of questions. How far are we willing to go? What are we willing to do?
Well, I think sometimes we think that God is sort of like us doing an aerial campaign. He comes and he bombs the forces of sin, right? I’m going to take it out. And then we think of our own human sense, right? We don’t want to be committed to something dealing with messiness for years and years and years. And even when we do, we often make it worse, so we don’t know whether it’s even worth getting involved for years and years and years. And we think, “Well, maybe God will bomb the embassies of death land in my life and free me from that, but then what happens next?”
Well, God’s the only one that can pull off genuine regime change—true regime change in the truest sense—because whomever rules Iran or the United States or anywhere else in the world, you know what? We’re all sinners, and there’s still going to be a hold of death upon that place and our place until the day that Jesus returns. But God’s the one that can defeat that.
Sometimes when we share the gospel or we share the truth from God’s word, we kind of want to do that hit and run, right? We’ll go in and say, “This is a sin in your life and you need to get rid of it. Good luck dealing with that. Bye.” I’ll just leave now, right? And whoever it is we were talking to says, “Whoa, wait a second here. You just dropped this bomb on my life. Now what? You’re telling me that my life needs to change in all these ways. Now what?”
What we need to understand is that Jesus isn’t the sort that does that. What does he do? He comes into our lives. He bombs the strongholds of sin. Then he comes in and he fixes us. And he walks with us. He steps each part of the way with us.
Jesus is ready for the insurgency of sin in our lives because it’s there. It keeps cropping up. I think if we reflect on our lives, we can see that, right? We can see when we don’t act in ways that are pleasing to God and we think, “I’ve been a Christian now for how many years? Why in the world can’t I get this right?”
And Jesus says to us, “Child, I’m not surprised. This isn’t taking you by surprise. I’m not holding an emergency session of counsel in heaven to determine whether or not we should withdraw forces and just turn you over to the terrorists. I’m in it for the long haul. There’s no question. I went into this war with sin knowing exactly what it costs, and I’m willing to do it. I’m going to do it for you.”
He’s going to rebuild the nation of our lives. He’s going to restore what’s broken. He is in the reconciliation business bringing us all the way from slave to child of God and someone who actually can flourish as a child of God.
And He challenges us as well because He has a purpose for us. Part of that purpose is sharing with others about the gospel and about what God calls the good and right path. But as we are benefiting from Him working in our lives year after year, patiently as those insurgencies crop up, He also calls us to be patient with others. When we see the insurgencies in them, we say, “Well, I understand because I’m in the same boat, and I’ll walk with you.”
Jesus doesn’t want us to just point out the flaws in someone and then move on. He wants us to be those people who are committed to doing exactly what He’s doing in our lives—not because we can fix it for them but because we know the one who can, and together we can encourage each other to.
You know, if you tune in here on the live stream and you think, “I knew it was going to be another message on sin. That’s what Christians are always talking about. Sin, sin, sin. Why?” It’s not because we want to make you feel bad. It’s because we want you to understand how much God loves you. That’s why Christians keep going back to sin.
Why is Paul talking about this? He’s not talking about it in terms of sorrow and self-berating. He’s talking about it in terms of, “Look at the glory of our God. Look at what He does that’s worthy of praise.” He wants us to understand that the fundamental truth that is for each and every one of us is that we’re on the sin road and the rails are up. There’s no way we’re getting off of it. But God takes us off of it, and He doesn’t just get us off of it and say, “I hope you can find your way home.” He drives us home to home with Him.
Jesus doesn’t do anything part way. That’s what Paul’s making sure that we hear here. He doesn’t do anything part way. He is for complete restoration. May this day and every day be a day that we understand just how complete His commitment to us and His love is.
Would you pray with me, please? Lord, we do come before you as those who often veer off onto the sin road again. Who stray from you when you call us to your good paths. Who run from those paths. Even seek to block ourselves from going down them because we think, “That’s not going to be where I want to be. That’s not going to be fun. That’s not going to be pleasing to me.”
Lord, would you help us to understand that you are a God who doesn’t just call us to something different, call us to follow you. You are the God who walks every step of the way with us. You are the God from the moment of the foundations of time, you were committed not just to redeem us from the land of death but to bring us all the way into your family, to restore us fully.
Would you help us to live as people who understand the beauty of that truth? We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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