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We want hope, but we want to know it isn’t empty—especially when other powers seem to have the final say over our lives. In Ephesians 1:20–21, Paul points to God raising Jesus from the dead and seating him above every rule and authority, but do we live as if we believe that?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher uses the image of a temporary license plate—valid but expired—to describe how people try to live without fully submitting to God’s authority. What are some modern equivalents in your own life where you catch yourself operating with a “temporary tag” instead of accepting God’s permanent authority?
The sermon presents Jesus’s resurrection not as a future IOU but as God’s proof that He has already paid for everything He promises. How does living as if that’s already true—rather than waiting for it to happen—change the way you approach decisions, fears, or struggles this week?
The sermon contrasts the power of a river (indifferent and destructive) with God’s power (intentional and protective). When you think about submitting to God’s authority, which image feels more natural to you—and why might the second one be harder to believe?
Paul lists “rule and authority and power and dominion” to say Jesus is above all of them. What are the powers or authorities—whether cultural pressure, financial insecurity, relational approval, or something else—that you find yourself most tempted to fear or trust in place of Jesus?
The preacher says we don’t have to live counting down the days until God has power; He’s in power now. What would change in your daily life if you truly lived as though the resurrected, reigning Jesus were actively in control right now, not just someday?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
I think most of you know that I am— we can’t go backwards, hang on a second here, we’re going to go backwards, but then I’m going to need you to turn the lights back on. Can you turn them back? Thanks. Okay, take two. It’s sort of like setting up a picture, and that’s exactly perfect because that’s what I was going to talk about. Most of you know I am a shutterbug. I love taking pictures. I think I’m at almost 250,000 on my computer now. I love taking pictures.
A number of years ago, I went on Kickstarter. Not sure, has anyone here used Kickstarter, the crowdfunding thing? It’s kind of fun. Yeah, it’s pretty neat. You can go on, and people that have a great idea can put the idea up there and say we need to get 1,000 pledges of people to pledge the money towards this, and then we’ll have enough money to do it. Someone went on there and had this service they wanted to launch called Flag. Flag was a shutterbug’s dream. It was an app that you could upload your photos into, and every month you received 20 prints for free.
The idea was that they were going to sell advertising on the back that you don’t see anyway after you put it in a frame or do whatever with it. But people would pay for the ad on the back, and everyone would receive these photos. As you’re flipping through them the first time, you see the ad. Like if you used a phone, it would put the GPS coordinates and map and all that sort of stuff on there as well, so you’d have a reason to look back there. Then they’d use the crowdfunding to get it started and go from there.
Well, I couldn’t resist. I signed up. I was excited. I’m going to get my 20 prints a month. I never got them. Others didn’t either because it didn’t work out. They weren’t able to pull it all together. The business plan didn’t work. They tried to get started. They bought all this fine paper and this high-tech printing technology and documented it along the way, but they ran out of money before average people like me actually got to enjoy getting free prints. And that’s the challenge.
I’ve used Kickstarter a number of times. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t because you have a certain level of risk when you’re trying to start something. Every single project paints this incredibly hopeful picture. Here is the amazing thing that’s going to happen when you pledge on this. They are required though towards the bottom to have a risk section that describes how could this go terribly wrong. And of course, you get excited and you don’t really pay much attention to the risk section, at least at first. You get burnt a few times and start to pay more attention to it.
In life in general, whenever we hear hope, the follow-up is, but is it just empty hope? We started talking about that last week. We talked about how the Christian life isn’t just a wistful life. But it’s one thing to say that; it’s another to actually be able to count on that. That God isn’t doing a cosmic Kickstarter here promising us pictures of a beautiful eternity that he doesn’t actually have backing for.
Scripture says no, it’s not that way. It’s not that way because God already has it all paid for. It’s already taken care of. And he hasn’t just said he’s already got it taken care of because that project pretty much implied it was all already taken care of. They just needed a little extra to allow them to expand even more. And we’ve run into those sorts of things. But with God, he’s actually given us the proof that he has it all taken care of. And we see that in the resurrection.
Because, you know, hope without backing ends up being just disappointment. But scripture isn’t about hope that can ever become disappointment, but hope that always is victorious. And so that’s what we’re going to be thinking about tonight as we’re nearing the end of our series in Ephesians 1. We have just one more installment next week. We’ll be going back and looking at our calling as a church. But before we get to that, we need to completely ground ourselves in the one reason we can actually say, what should we do as a church? And it’s not wistful hope. It’s not even like we talked about last week, the fact that we can say, God’s promised, so now we know that this is something we can do. It’s that God’s promised and already accomplished in the resurrection. And let’s pray tonight that we feel and experience that reality in our lives.
Father, would you help us to understand that you haven’t just made a wonderful promise. You haven’t just made an incredible promise. You haven’t just shown even little things. You’ve completely already accomplished what you promised. And because of that, we can proceed with confidence. Lord, we want hope, but we want to know that that hope isn’t empty. And we pray that this day that you would remind us of the true fullness of the hope that we have in you. We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, it starts in verse 20. Let’s take a look there. Ephesians 1, verse 20, if you want to turn there. What does Paul say? He says that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in where? In the heavenly places. God has shown his power. All the promises we talked about last week, they all come to this that we see there. How has he done these things? That he’s done them in the resurrection.
I’ve talked to people who say they’re Christians before, who say they don’t believe in the physical resurrection. And I always wonder, why are you bothering that? Because this is it. This is the centerpiece. Either Jesus is alive, and so everything he says makes sense, and everything that we’re called to do makes sense, or Jesus is not, and we really ought to eat some of the snacks over there, the refreshments, and go home, because there’s no point. No point at all.
Now, the interesting thing about resurrection, Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t the first time those in Israel had contemplated resurrection. The Jews had a theology around resurrection. They expected that God would bring a resurrection. At least some of them did. The Pharisees did. We sometimes like to, a lot of times, beat up on the Pharisees, and they earned it. But one thing that we don’t want to overlook is they actually got this part, that God’s promise wasn’t just a passing promise for this life but the reason that we were in relationship with God was to be in relationship to him forever.
And so they looked to the resurrection and said, we’re going to talk about God’s power, and the way we know God has power is that God someday will raise the dead. And, you know, that’s a pretty impressive thing to say. But it was pretty impressive to say you could get 20 prints free every month in the mail. If they don’t come, it’s less impressive. It’s actually worse than if it had never been said at all, right? If God says he’s going to resurrect, but it doesn’t actually happen, how awful is that to live your life looking towards the resurrection, and then it doesn’t come?
But the beautiful thing we find in the New Testament is that the resurrection has actually happened, not fully, right? Well, we’re alive here today, so we have not been resurrected yet. There are others, loved ones around us that we grieve over being separated from because of death. They haven’t been resurrected yet. But God doesn’t say, I’m just someday going to show my mighty power. He says, no, I have shown my mighty power, and you can see it in the first fruits of that resurrection. You can see that in Jesus being resurrected. It’s here now.
God’s ultimate power, the Jewish teachers of the law, they were exactly right. If you want to know God’s power, look at what he does with the resurrection. What they missed is the fact that God actually did that demonstration of that power and achieved what that power is going to do for all people who trust in Jesus right in front of them. It’s here now.
And if God’s power is in Jesus now, what does that tell us about Jesus? Well, it tells us that because he’s shown his power, and he did it 2,000 years ago, it’s already happened, it’s there, that today as we trust in Jesus, that Jesus is already in power, that he’s already there for us, that he’s at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. And so everything he calls us to, everything he asks us to do, everything that we’re meant to be as Christians, we can do it not because we hope maybe somehow it’s going to work out in the end, somehow the crowdfunding will happen, but because it’s already been funded.
Disciples saw it right before their eyes in two parts. They saw first Jesus overcome death, and then they saw him ascend into heaven. And sometimes we get caught up in that, well, what did it look like for Jesus to ascend into heaven? And I’ve seen people draw these, trying to make it look absurd, diagrams. Oh, there’s Jesus, and he just passed the moon. No, I mean, what does it mean for him to go up into the sky?
The point there was to give a, sort of like we’ve been talking about sacraments in Sunday school, to give a visual so that people could understand the spiritual. Jesus could have just easily vanished. He had come and gone for weeks after the ascension, but in that moment he ascends into heaven, the heavens, the physical heavens, so that the disciples could see very clearly the testimony that he was ascending into the spiritual heavens. I think he was only physically moving upward until the clouds closed up and he couldn’t be seen anymore. There wasn’t any more need to do that.
The place of God isn’t some physical place that you just have to have the right coordinates to in space and you can arrive at. It’s not that kind of thing. But rather, the ancient world recognized, here’s this grand, majestic thing outside of our reach, and they associated that with the divine. And Jesus says, okay, if this is your picture of power, let me show you, I actually can go there. I can triumph over death and I can ascend into the heavens. What do you think that means? It means I’m in power. That you can trust what I’m saying because it’s not a crowdfunding project that might happen eventually. It’s happened right now. It’s happened in history.
A few weeks ago we talked about how we’re sealed by the Holy Spirit as we become Christians. And this is the other part of that that’s so essential. Because if we’re sealed as Christians, but the Holy Spirit doesn’t have the power to do anything, then we’re just sealed in our hopelessness. I can still go almost 10 years later onto the Kickstarter website and see that I have successfully pledged to the flag project. But those pictures are never going to come.
The Holy Spirit’s pledge on us is simply an empty promise that doesn’t do any good. The key here is the sealing that we’ve been talking about is tied to the reality that Jesus has accomplished exactly what he promised. That he’s resurrected and he’s in power. Not just risen, he’s reigning. And that’s really, really important. Because if we know that we’ve seen a mighty demonstration in this world that the indescribable power of God to take all the sin of the world upon himself and to triumph over it, it gives us a sense of what it means to say that Jesus reigns.
What the power of his name really is. It’s not just something we say. It’s not just a nice way to make ourselves feel warm and fuzzy. He is God. He’s accomplished exactly what he said. And then we have history beyond that. And we’re left to ask ourselves, what are we going to do? Are we going to listen to what happened in history or not? Are we going to live as this is reality, that this history has happened? Or are we going to say, oh, this is some nice stuff, but I’m not sure. What are we going to do?
I was thinking this week back to the flood of 93. Most of you here remember that. A few of you, you can’t be. Some of you were actually born after the flood of 93. That’s crazy. That’s crazy talk. But for those of you in that category, let me just say briefly, it was an incredible demonstration of the power of the rivers around here.
As we just saw, huge swaths of our area covered under water. If any of you have ever gone up to the car lots over by Mitterer’s Mall and you’re kind of overlooking the hills, you can go over there in 93, and it looked like you were overlooking a giant ocean or a lake. It was just water out there. We’re down 370 now. Anyone maybe like something over in Chesterfield Valley, some kind of shop or entertainment place or something? You go over to Chesterfield Valley, Topgolf, I have never been by here, a lot of people like that, all those sorts of places—all of that was underwater. You wouldn’t know that today.
You go over there and it’s a thriving area with all kinds of things being built, constantly new things being built. The one shopping center over there for a while was the longest in the world. You have all the stuff, and all of it was essentially a lake a few decades ago. Kind of weird to think about. But if you drive over there and you get off at the first exit coming from St. Charles down 6440 and you get off there and you drive down the road, there’s a little Phillips 66 station. It’s been there for decades.
And the flood happened and it’s still there. And you go to that little station and you’ll see up on the building a line, a little red line and a little marker below it that says flood of 93. And it reminds you exactly how powerful that is because you may very well be looking up at this marker on the building in all this development, and it was under that power. It reminds us, yes, there is that power.
And so what do you do if you want to build by the river? If you realize there’s that much power there, that you can build whatever you want, you can build it as nice as you want, and it might be submerged, it might be washed away. How many homes and businesses were simply eradicated? They just went down the river when it happened. Well, you can ignore it and just hope it won’t happen again. And in 93, a lot of the people that were affected by the flood, that’s exactly what they’d done. They said it’s not going to happen. Others acknowledged the power and tried to build levees around the areas they were going to build in, and that would hopefully protect them. But faced with the power of the river, a lot of those levees collapsed.
Now in a place like Chesterfield Valley, they built a better levee. It’s another wonder. Is it better enough? I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to have my livelihood or my home in the path that was purely protected by a big mound of dirt. Personally, I wouldn’t. But many have. All of us have questions how we plan when we face power. And we have the question how we’re going to face God’s power too.
We can say, well, you know, I’m going to build a little levee and try to keep my life pretty righteous, and God’s holiness as it flows, it won’t knock over that levee. But we can’t build a levee strong enough. We can say, well, Jesus said he was coming back, and that was 2,000 years ago. Nothing’s going to happen. But I can guarantee one of two things for each and every one of us here: we’re either going to be alive when Jesus comes or we’re going to die. We’re going to face that power. What are we going to do?
Well, when it’s about the floodwaters, a lot of people say, well, I’m going to just try to plan well enough. Well, we can’t plan well enough on our own. But here’s the difference between God’s power and the power of a river. The power of a river doesn’t care about you. The power of a river doesn’t care about anyone or anything. It just flows. But the one who has all the power in the universe, who actually made the rivers and all their power, he cares about you. And he says, yes, I’m in power. Yes, I have power, the power that will wipe out anything and everything that is opposed to me. But you can come inside my levee. You can actually be swept to good places on my current. I will protect you.
So we’ve not only seen that God had power, but for the Christian, our invitation is to understand that God is in power right now, and yet it might be that all we see is that mark where it says the resurrection of 33. That’s estimated, right? We don’t know what year. I’m not trying to make a biblical case for AD 33 particularly. We know sometime in that early part of the first century, God’s power came into this earth in a way that had never been seen before. And we can look at that and say, I want to respond to that. And unlike a flood, I don’t need to respond in fear. I just need to respond to the love that the power himself offers me.
Verse 21—far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. God’s power is here and it’s now. And we may not see it always, but it really is like the river. The mighty Mississippi is still mighty even when it’s not over its banks and flooding. The question is, do we look at that mighty river and say, that’s a mighty river, I should respect it? And the question with God is, do I look at God’s power and say, this is the power that shapes everything else, this is the power that actually changes things, and not do I respect it, but do I love him? Do I live in relationship to him?
It’s really interesting, the wording that Paul uses here. And what he wants to make clear as he builds this case, and he reminds us exactly what Jesus has said he was going to be: that he’s seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Again, we’re speaking metaphorically here because we’re speaking spiritually. But that he’s in power, that’s what that means.
It’s that we don’t have to live hoping for the day that God has power and can rescue us. Even the sure day that someday God will have power. We’re not counting down the days, right? Sometimes you see that when a new politician is elected and the old one’s going out, and there’s sort of that race on the losing side. Can we get more done before the end of the term? And on the new side, can we block what’s being done before we get to the person who’s actually going to make it the way we want it? We don’t have to live like that as Christians. God’s already in power; he’s in power right now. We can live as those who follow the one who’s in power right now.
As Paul says here, that he has the name that is named. He’s above every name that is named, not only in this age but in the age to come. What Paul wants us to understand, in other words, is there isn’t a time when Jesus isn’t in power. You look at right now, he’s in power. You look at the future, he’s in power. Every single moment we will ever see, he’s in power. And so, we’re not waiting. We’re waiting for him to do certain things in his power, but he’s already in power, and we can live according to that. And he’s not sort of in power.
It’s kind of interesting as these things get listed out. We see this a few places in Paul’s epistles. He says here in verse 21, far above every rule and authority and power and dominion. What does that mean? Well, in the teaching of the rabbis, they divided up the ranks of angels into different categories of authority. Some of them were under the category of rule and authority and power and dominion. They actually used those terms to refer to the different ranks. Sort of like in, say, the military today, you might have a general and an admiral, captain, whatever it might be.
Paul’s interest here isn’t to say, and this is how God actually ranks angels, is to say, whatever you think might have power, those are the things I’m talking about that God has power over. Now, the Israelites had come to believe that there were angels over the different realms of the earth, the different nations. They had different spiritual rulers over them under God’s administration. And those rulers could determine what your destiny was, where you were going in life.
But that Israel, as the chosen people, had the special relationship with God. Well, they’re getting closer to the truth. And part of what Paul is breaking down here is to say, if you trust in Jesus, that’s true of you. It’s not where you live physically. It’s not whether you’re physically descended from Abraham. It’s are you in relationship to him or not? If you’re in relationship to him, all the powers of the spiritual world combined have no say over you. It’s just him.
Other nations may have been controlled, but Israel wasn’t. They were led by God himself. And as we trust in Jesus, we’re brought into that covenant of God’s people. And as we think about the heavenly powers, we don’t have to look at them as markers of a flood warning us of what bad things could happen to us, but rather as testimonies of the power of the one who loves us.
Paul goes on, he mentions that Jesus’ name is above every name that is named, and there he also has a reference. The one is really focused on the Jewish world. The second one would have a lot more appeal, would make a lot more sense to the Gentile world. Because, see, if you were in the Gentile world, maybe you’d decide to gain authority in your city by becoming a magician. And by magician, you didn’t mean illusionist. You didn’t mean someone who does performances for show. These are people who said, I have ability to control the spirits, control spiritual reality in this world.
And what Paul says there is whatever names they name off, whatever spirits they think they knew and they could control, they’re never going to find a spirit they can name that could possibly be greater than Jesus. We already have the best. And so whether you’re a Jew who is looking at the ranks of angels, or you’re a Gentile and you’re looking at the spiritual world thinking maybe there’s a way to gain an edge, whatever it is that you trust in as a power, Paul says, Jesus has authority over all of it. He controls all, everything we can think of.
I think that’s really important for us to hear because while we don’t spend a lot of time today thinking about how to tap into spirits, most of us at least probably, and even though we believe in angels, we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to rank the angels either, which angels controlling what region or anything like that. We don’t spend time on those things. The point is just as true because Paul’s main point isn’t don’t care about spiritual authorities; it’s that don’t care about whatever you think is most authoritative.
The reason he names the spiritual authorities is because the people of the time really did believe that those spirits had authority over the physical world, and so they were greater than the physical world. Today we often live as if the physical world is what’s really important, what really matters. And so today Paul would probably list out a different list. He’d say far above all job advancement plans and human resource accomplishments and standardized testing scores. Above every technology and every political advantage. He has authority over all of those.
There’s a loophole. I mentioned last week there were two things that we almost jokingly in society acknowledge are the things that without loopholes that we’re not gonna get away from, right? Death and taxes. And I was thinking about that afterwards and I thought, well, you know, in Missouri we’ve kind of tried to at least avoid the one to a degree and you can see that whenever you drive down the road because you drive down the road and how many people are driving with those temporary tags in their cars? You know, the ones that are faded and barely legible because they expired three years ago?
Well, why are people driving around with a flapping piece of paper in their back window rather than a nice stylish show-me-state license plate on the back of their car? Or if you’re in New Jersey, as Greg is, you know, you have, that’d be the Garden State, right? I think that’s what it’d say on there. Or I’m not sure what the motto would be in Guanajuato, but you know, wherever it is we have something, and it’s certainly nicer than a flapping piece of paper that’s just blowing and fading. It takes away from your car, right? Why are people doing that?
Well, it’s because people believe that somehow they’re going to avoid at least one of those two things. They might not be able to avoid death, but I can avoid taxes because you pay your sales tax on your car when you go and you get your license plate, right? So you don’t renew your license plate, you don’t have to pay the tax maybe. Well, proving the point that you can’t find a way to avoid death and taxes, they’re going to now start charging the sales tax for a car at the point of sale where you buy the car. And so in a few years, we’re not going to have temporary tags in Missouri at all. This is going to be something that is in our history books.
And so while people thought they could skirt the authority and somehow get around it, ultimately it’s not going to happen. Just close it up. A lot of times we live life like we can get the temporary tag with God. Eh, you know, I don’t really know. I know there’s something out there that I need to deal with, so I’ll get the temporary tag. I’ll do some spiritual things. I’ll say some spiritual things. I’ll have that tag, and yeah, it’s getting frayed in the window. It’s just flapping around as I’m driving down the road and no one can read it anymore, but I haven’t had to pay the full tax.
Sometimes even as believers, we get a little discouraged as we see people doing that. Just like I get discouraged sometimes when I’m driving down the road and see all those temporary tags and think, oh, why? Why did I just go stand in line and pay that money to renew my license plate? Why? And we say to those Christians, why am I doing this? Why do I come to church? Why do I read God’s Word? Why do I try to live as He’s called me to live? If I ever do get caught and have to pay the tax, I can’t afford it anyway.
What Paul’s saying here is that yes, there will be the day those temporary tags aren’t going to work, but here’s the good news. Here’s the beautiful news. God issues us the license plate and doesn’t charge us anything for it. He’s already paid it. It’s not something we’re going to go into the bank and count the pennies and figure out if we can afford. It’s not where we’re going to order it and it turns out that God ran out of license plates. It’s not where someone else will end up with a better license plate. We’ll get the personalized one and we don’t.
We trust in Jesus. We receive Him. We put His name on the vehicle of our lives. The plate that says, I love you, God. And that plate won’t expire. And that plate won’t fail.
Whatever divides us, whatever we fight our hearts out for because somehow we’re going to make this life right and we’re trusting in that, it’s not as great as Jesus. Whatever we think we should do, whomever we think we should follow, whatever we think we should avoid. Oh, I need to avoid the police officer that might see my temporary tag. Whatever it is that we’re trying to do to somehow make it through and think, I’ll deal with it, Paul says, whatever that is, it’s not greater than Jesus. Whatever it is that we’re acting as if is the authority that’s going to determine whether our lives are good or bad, it’s not greater than Jesus.
That’s a question I think that we need to ask ourselves. Where am I living like that? Where am I living like God’s authority isn’t already here? That there’s some other authority I need to fear. There’s some other authority I need to trust. There’s some other authority that’s going to determine whether I get pulled over with the expired plate or not. Because all of us have those places where we act like that. We might say, well, I know I shouldn’t, but we all act like that.
Our calling here is to say, no, Jesus proved that he’s in power. He triumphed over death. He ascended into heaven. He’s in power. He’s inviting us to say, I don’t need to trust in all these other things. I don’t need to fear other things either. I need to just trust in him because he’s greater than everything else.
And the beautiful thing is, while we’re still waiting for the day that Jesus returns, if we internalize that truth, if we live that truth, then we get the bonus of actually getting to experience the last days now in the good sense. We think of last days; oh no, the horrors. No, as we think about the joy of it, that Jesus returns, we get to experience his reign now because he is already reigning now. And it’s just a matter of actually saying, okay, God, I know I keep chasing after all those other authorities. I keep living as it depends on whether I can pay the fee for my license or not. But I realize that you’re the only one who can, and I realize you already have. And I just want to put that license plate on.
Because our king isn’t just the resurrected king. And our king isn’t just the someday greatest authority of all kings. Our king is the resurrected king who’s king right now. And we can live in the confidence of that.
Would you pray with me please? Father, would you help us to be those who trust in your power? As you have sent your Son into the world, that his name is the name at which every knee will bow and every tongue confess. And so even though now at times it feels like it’s a far-off promise, that you’ve already shown us that you really are in power and that you’re in power over whatever we can name as being the greatest, the most important, the most determining to our hopes and our dreams.
And Lord, would you help us to take those places where we have created idols, where we trust in other things and place them before you, and live instead in the hope that you offer to each of us, that anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Would you help us to proceed in life as those who aren’t living constantly on the edge wondering if things are going to work out, but those who know that you have already ensured that it will. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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