We all know what it’s like to chase after things that look like they’ll satisfy—achievements, credentials, the sense that we’ve finally earned our place. Ephesians 1:1 stops that chase cold, pressing the question of where our calling and our life as God’s people actually come from.
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So here we are. In a brand new series. We’re going to be exploring Ephesians 1 this summer. I am really looking forward to that. Jason, welcome back, Jason. Last time he was here, we didn’t quite manage to lock him in the dungeon before he left, and we’ll have to work on that before he tries to go back again, but we have him for the next few weeks here. It’s summertime, so we’re going to get to hear from him. He’s going to be preaching next week. I know you’re in for a treat if you haven’t yet gotten to hear Jason preach. You’re definitely in for a treat. And if you have heard Jason preach, you’re also in for a treat, just to be clear.
I’m looking forward to it, though. Jason and I have been batting around ideas for a summer sermon series for, oh, the last couple months, trying to figure out where it was that God wanted us this summer, and here’s where we ended up, and I am excited. We were supposed to start this series last week, obviously. It didn’t go quite how we had hoped.
It’s interesting. I can kind of reflect a little bit lighter on this since, thankfully, I know all of you have been praying for my mom, and she is recovering well. She’s tired and sore, but she’s recovering, so praise God for that. Thankfully, thankfully. And you know what? I realized I’m doing double duty running the cameras, and I have it pointed the wrong way right now, so excuse me just a moment here. So you don’t hear a disembodied voice for the rest of the service.
So for those of you that are online, I think most of you know this, but my mom helps to make sure that you can see what’s going on. Yes, we miss her on all sorts of levels, but for those of you online, it’s reminding you of that. But we do miss you. I can’t wait for my mom to be back, hopefully next week, but it’s just taking some time to recover.
That said, it’s one of those odd things when preaching on a text. It seems like you have to process through the very subject that you’re preaching on. Part of where we’re going to be going today is thinking about how it’s God that’s the one that has things planned. He’s the one that does things, and you know, I had a really good plan for last week. I was really looking forward to what we were doing, and it obviously wasn’t what what I thought, what any of us thought, but God has a good and faithful plan, and thankfully we see his goodness and his mercy through it. And we get to be here tonight, and we get to be here tonight with joy, and I have to say moments last week, I didn’t feel like that was going to be the case, and anyway, thank you again for all your prayers and care.
I need you to bear with me tonight and talk about black bears. Did you know that there are black bears being spotted in the area? Here’s a bear. This is at the Wentzville Walmart. Now, I’ve seen a lot of things in the Walmart parking lot over the years, but I’ve never seen a bear before. But there is a black bear. And interestingly, in 2010, they said they think we had about 300 black bears in Missouri. We now have about a thousand black bears in Missouri. The population is going way up. They’ve been working actively on trying to restore native bear habitat, getting to the bear necessities of it so that we can have enjoyment of bears again from a distance.
Because here’s one of the things that happens when you have more bears. You’re going to encounter them. It might not be at Walmart. It might be in your backyard where you keep your trash can or your picnic basket or your bird feeder. And the bears, they really like it when humans cater for them. They think that’s pretty neat. But it’s not necessarily neat in the long run because here’s the thing that the conservation department has realized. If people have food out in areas where bears are active, the bears are going to eat the food and then the bears are going to come to where humans are more. And as much as it’s kind of neat from a distance to see a bear and as much as we may have had a favorite teddy bear as a kid, that sort of thing, real bears are not creatures that we really want up close and personal, right? Anyone want to be up close and personal with a bear? Ellie does. Okay, well, you know, if you get too close to a bear, you might end up in a mall and it’s not the kind that you shop at. You don’t want to be close to bears.
I am especially cheesy tonight. Anyway, it has been an interesting week. But here’s what they said. A fed bear is a dead bear because what happens? The bears start coming around humans more and then they start to expect the humans to feed them. They expect the food. They start to demand the food. They start to become more aggressive. And so while black bears generally like to avoid human beings, and so they can roam and stay safe, when we start to feed them, what ends up happening? The conservation department has to kill them. So if you appreciate the black bears, don’t feed them. Sounds counterintuitive, but that’s what they advise. And the reason is it ends up leading them down a path of destruction. They need to be nourished in the proper way, the way that God intended them to be nourished. And when we disrupt that by providing that nourishment, it messes everything up and ends up being deadly for them. Because if it’s not deadly for them, it may end up being deadly for us.
And I saw that bear from a couple weeks ago, and I thought about it, and it struck me how much that’s like what we encounter. You see, Satan and the world love to put out picnic baskets. And they look delicious. They smell delicious. They draw us in. But we smell those aromas, and we seek after them, but we’re not seeking after where we can get genuine spiritual feeding. And so they end up being deadly to us. And to those around us, just like the bears. We need the proper nourishment just like they do. And let’s pray tonight as we come to God’s Word in Ephesians 1 that we would be nourished and understand where our source of nourishment is. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for allowing us to be together tonight. Lord, I thank you for this church family, for their care, for their love. Lord, what a blessing it is that you are the good and gracious God who allows us to be brought together and to care for each other and to help each other and to help each other be nourished. And as we look at your Word tonight, Lord, would you help us to nourish each other in encouragement and in prayer and to understand how you are the ultimate source of nourishment. We only are those who point each other to you. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So, if you’re in the church, and you’ve been in the church, one of the things you want to do is to serve. And that’s a good thing. That’s what we are called to do, right? If you are a Christian, you should be serving. You should be active. That’s our calling. We’re not called just to sign up for the membership and then pretend nothing has happened.
But something that we see here as we look at Paul’s leadership is that we’re not called to serve. But something that we see here as we look at Paul’s leadership is that we need to think about where the nourishment for serving as Christians comes from. And we see that in the first part of verse 1.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. Now, Jason’s going to make fun of me. He probably will do this in next week’s message. I couldn’t even make it through a full sentence here. He probably will do that. He says to count on it, for those of you online. Yeah, I know it’s coming. But there’s a reason why we want to pause here. Paul is packing more than we might catch. Because we think, oh, here’s a standard greeting. He’s giving his greeting. Whom is it that’s writing? And that’s true, but how he identifies himself is crucial for us to understand how we should identify ourselves as well.
Paul’s an apostle, and what I’m not saying is that we should identify ourselves as apostles. If you go out this week and say that, hey, Tim said that we should learn from Paul how to identify ourselves, and so I’m now an apostle, and you start telling everybody you’re an apostle, that wasn’t quite where we were supposed to be trained to go tonight.
But how does Paul understand that he’s an apostle? By the will of God, he says. Galatians chapter 1 verse 13. We’re just going to pause there. He goes on to say what to do with that, but note here what he’s saying.
So here’s what Paul is not saying. He doesn’t say, an apostle by my academic achievement, having studied under the greatest rabbis, and understanding through my own abilities that God is the one who has sent the Messiah into the world, that God’s come into the world, and so now I, as Paul, a very brilliant man, am an apostle. He doesn’t even say, an apostle because I wanted to be one.
Why is he an apostle? Because God willed it. God made him an apostle.
And in that, while you and I, none of us are going to be apostles, we are going to be called by God, and the thing there that we need to hear is how that happens. It happens because God wills it. We need to be attuned to what God is willing.
Sometimes our temptation is to think, well, I want to serve where I want to serve. I want to serve where it’s fun. I want to serve where it’s exciting. And that’s not entirely untrue. God has gifted us with things, and when we’re serving in the way that God intends us to do, it should be at least somewhat enjoyable. If everything we ever do for God is miserable and painful, and we feel like we’re constantly just wishing that somehow God would let us off the hook because we don’t want to do it any longer, if that’s where we always are, then we probably have misunderstood where God’s calling us. He’s not going to do that to us.
But if we think, I’m going to serve where it just is enjoyable to me, I’m going to serve where I’m amused by serving, we’ve missed the point too.
Paul was enjoying, you might say, his previous career as a persecutor of the church. We looked at that a couple weeks ago. I know our children’s Sunday school tonight looked at the story of Stephen. What was Stephen’s encounter with Paul like? It wasn’t a wonderful evangelistic encounter coming from Paul. Stephen was the one doing the evangelism. Paul was the one killing Stephen or arranging for his death. But it’s where Paul wanted to be. He wanted to advance. God wanted him to go and preach the gospel. God says, no, you’re not going to do what you wanted to do. You’re not going to do what you thought was the right thing. I’m going to guide you to where I want you. And not because of his merit.
Galatians 1, 1. Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ, and God the Father who raised him from the dead. The dead.
Why is Paul an apostle? Paul is an apostle because God has called him to be an apostle. Because Jesus lives, Paul is an apostle. Because the Lord has encountered, given Paul an encounter with himself. He has had that experience. That is why Paul is an apostle. Paul is an apostle. He’s not an apostle for any other reason.
We talked a couple… Well, let’s see, that was actually last Monday. I really am. This last week, I’ve lost all perspective on time. It was last Monday on Steadfast. We were talking about the story of Matthias and his choosing, and how they wrestled with who was going to be an apostle and who wasn’t. And as they were wrestling with that, they had a couple of requirements. The person who was going to be an apostle, they thought, was going to be someone who had been with Jesus the entire ministry and who had encountered the risen Lord. They were partly right on the experience you needed to be an apostle. They were wrong that you needed to be with Jesus from the moment that Jesus came to John the Baptist. They were right that you needed to encounter the risen Lord. And so Paul gets a unique experience here. He was not with the other apostles throughout the ministry of Jesus. He was opposed to the apostles after Jesus is resurrected. But what does he get that is special and amazing and indescribable? If he’s going to persecute and kill Christians, he actually encounters Jesus. And not in just some metaphorical sense, not even in the spiritual sense that we say that… We rightly say that we encounter the Holy Spirit, but in some way that is incredibly concrete and incredibly special and you and I shouldn’t be expecting to encounter him. Paul gets a special encounter and a special commission. So he can fulfill that requirement. He can be an apostle.
But there are a lot of reasons that Paul could have thought he should be an apostle. He had gotten an incredible education. And one of the striking things if you study Paul’s letters is that Paul writes as a deeply educated man. He is a man of letters, as they would say. Paul doesn’t just know Judaism. He knows Judaism like the back of his hand. The Old Testament scriptures, they are his life’s blood. He knows them, but he also knows the classical world. He knows what it means to be literate in Greek culture. And he can stand in that culture and respond in that culture and interact in that culture in a way that would garner respect. He has the credentials.
But that’s not what makes him an apostle. We rush after these things. And some of these things are good. These were tools God used, right? God was preparing Paul as he garnered this education, as he interacted with people, as he learned things. He was being prepared. But it wasn’t what made him an apostle.
To think so would be to chase after that deadly picnic basket. Chase after it. Think it’s going to nourish us.
Paul understands that his authority comes from one place and one place alone, and that is from God, not himself. Not his achievements.
And Paul speaks with authority, and he does. If you read his letters, Paul speaks with authority. But Paul speaks with authority because he knows that God has sent him to say the things he’s saying. And he’s not speaking on his own authority. He’s speaking on God’s authority. And notably, because of that, he’s bound to what Jesus has taught him. And I don’t fully understand that process, and scholars have debated it. You know, how much did Paul surround himself around those who had been in the ministry of Jesus, and he learned things that way? How much of it was in that time that he encountered Jesus, that Jesus gave him an experience that’s beyond what our brains can handle? How much of it’s from this and that? It’s interesting to think about, but the key thing is that he’s going back to what Jesus said, and what Jesus has commissioned him to do.
And he only brings up his credentials, even the credential of encountering the risen Lord, to the extent he needs to in order to deal with those who would try to undermine what he’s teaching. Why does he say he’s encountered the risen Lord? Why does he say he’s encountered the risen Lord? Why does he even mention what he learned as a young man, as a Jew who had not yet come to believe in Jesus? Why does he do that? So that those who try to question what he’s teaching cannot get the upper hand there. God had given him tools. These were tools. When people said, well, why would you believe that dumb superstition about a man rising from the dead? Why would you believe that? Paul can say, well, you might want to talk to me like I don’t know anything, but I actually, I understand the scriptures, and I can out-argue you if that’s really what you want to do. You think you’re going to go and use Greek styles of argumentation and impress everyone and show how you’re smarter than me? Let me run circles around you. And Paul does that, but he doesn’t do it to show off. He does it when it’s necessary, because the one thing he wants to defend, the thing that matters to him, is the fact that God has sent him, God has called him to go do something, and he’s not going to let anyone question God. It’s not about himself.
We’ve all been in people’s offices where they have all kinds of impressive credentials, certifications, diplomas, awards. You go in, and there’s just, the walls are lined right here. Here is someone of achievement. You know what I’ve found over the years, though, and I bet many of you have found, there are oftentimes those people you go, you go into their offices, and those offices are messy and disordered, and the diplomas are stacked over in the corner, they’ve never even been hung. And that person’s way more helpful, and knows way more. And those credentials over there may actually even be more impressive. They just don’t feel the need to show them off. They understand what their calling is.
How many times did I have a professor who had an office that you had to kind of climb over stuff to get to the desk to talk to him, and he was wonderful, right? She was wonderful. You’d learn all kinds of things way better than the person who had this impressive-looking office. Because it wasn’t about impressing. Paul isn’t about impressing. He does mention credentials, right? Sometimes they matter, sometimes achievement, sometimes experiences matter, but that wasn’t what he was about. He wasn’t about making sure that people looked up to him, he was about making sure that people understood who Jesus was.
Remember what Jesus says in Matthew 23. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.
Even though we know some of Paul’s credentials, and even though when necessary he brings them up, he’s actually living this out. Because all the false teachers that were challenging him, all the people that said, here is what you really should believe, here is who Jesus really is. Don’t listen to that, Paul. Well, they were hauling into, they came into town, and the first thing they did is they put up easels with all their diplomas on it. Right here, look at how impressive I am. And the next thing they did is they put up their awards. And then they put out their book table and had all the quotes from all the important people around the Greco-Roman world proclaiming how great their teaching was. And Paul came into town and said, would you mind if I sell some tents so I can earn some money so I can teach you? He didn’t play that game.
Paul was down in the trenches. It wasn’t about glorifying himself. Neither should we be. And I think that’s a challenge and something that if we’re seeking to serve over time, we’re going to have to wrestle with. There are going to be times we need to ask, am I bragging about God’s endorsement or being powered by it?
Because Paul could have bragged and bragged and bragged. He could have talked about how he was the special one, right? Even more special in some ways than the Twelve, because after all, I mean, the Twelve, they had to go through years of training with Jesus before they were anything. But Paul, he’s just going down the road killing Christians, and suddenly Jesus says, hey, you’re really important. You go and be the apostle to the Gentiles.
I don’t mean to say anything, guys, but Jesus kind of picked me for a special mission. That wasn’t Paul’s approach. Actually, it was the opposite. Because it wasn’t about bragging about, look, I’m endorsed by God. I can write these letters and the back cover of them, it has an endorsement from God himself on it. Best epistle written in years. God, right? That wasn’t the way it was. Paul simply said, I’m here because God sent me. God told me to minister to you. And I want you to know about him.
Our Christian celebrity culture can spend an awful lot of time talking about God, right? Our Christian celebrity culture can spend an awful lot of time, just like all worldly celebrity culture, wanting us to know about the people. Look for those who are more concerned with you knowing about the person, Jesus.
Now, again, this is not to say that if God calls you, it’s wrong to enjoy that. It’s not even to say that if God leads you to do something and you’re in the midst of it, oh, thank you, Jackie, that it can’t be, well, refreshing, right? It can be refreshing. And you can enjoy that refreshment, right? That is a good thing to be refreshed. A very good thing. But it’s not the mission.
And, you know, it’d be kind of ironic if over the next few minutes, I decided to extol the virtues of purified water from Sam’s Club. And that’s what I talked about for the rest of the message. You can quench your thirst and then recycle for the planet, it says. And I went on and on, and I started to talk about reverse osmosis purification and so on and so forth, right? And that became my thing.
Here’s the irony in the Christian life. When we start to brag about, well, I know these people. I’ve done these things. It’s like spending our time talking about what’s quenching our thirst, being refreshed by it, but then focusing on that, right? I enjoyed taking that sip, but I’m thankful for it so that I can keep talking about God’s word.
And what we want to make sure is that as God refreshes us in all sorts of ways, whether it’s giving us an opportunity to gain a certification or a credential, whether it’s giving us an opportunity simply to share the gospel, that we don’t get so caught up in, look, I’m important now. I’m doing this now, that we forget what we’re really about.
There’s a joy in the process of doing what God’s called us to do.
What’s the emphasis? Well, you know, the emphasis changes when we remember where the source is, and we keep that in mind. Because our human nature, we want to think that, yeah, we know, intellectually, the source is Jesus. The source is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We want to think, yeah, the source is kind of me. I’ve worked hard. I’ve studied hard. I’ve been dedicated. I’ve done this, I’ve done that.
And we say, no, the fact that I even could do those things, how could I, to the extent that I did them, how did I do them? It was by God’s strength, by His blessing, by the opportunities He gave me. And we remember that He is the source. Then we realize that everything we do, every way we serve is grounded in Him. And so, like Paul, whatever it is that we happen to do, wherever God is using you, we understand that it’s all about bragging about Jesus, not about us. And it goes beyond where we serve.
Our nourishment for life is in Jesus, too. Verse 1, 1, second half. To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus. And are faithful in Christ Jesus.
See, the same thing is true of the Ephesians themselves. And then say, to those wise and discerning Ephesians who understood when they heard the gospel preached by us, those of us who really knew, they understood what discerning people we were, and therefore, in their discernment, they became discerning people as well.
To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful, how? In Christ Jesus.
What does it mean to be faithful? It’s not about personal merit here. It’s about being set apart by God. That God is the one working here. And we see that by the way He refers to them. He refers to them as the saints. And we don’t always use that term, depending on what church tradition you’re in, you don’t hear that term used of the broad group of believers necessarily all the time. But it’s a perfectly biblical thing to do. In other words, saints, those separated, those made holy in Jesus.
So he’s saying, why am I writing you? Because God separated you. It’s where Jason took us in Isaiah chapter six. How did Isaiah, the man called to be a prophet of God, survive encountering God? It wasn’t because he was so holy in himself. It wasn’t because he had achieved such great things at Jerusalem University. Why was Isaiah able to do it? Because God purified him.
Why are the Ephesians receiving this? And why do they have the treasure of the gospel that they get to carry forward? Because God has purified them. Not by their merit, but God’s setting them apart.
What does it mean to have faith? It means to believe in the truth that Jesus is the one who works. Jesus is the one who saves us. It’s all about him, and it’s all from him.
Ephesians 2:8. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God, not a result of works that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
You see, Paul is saying here, just in case they didn’t catch all that in verse one because they read through it like we often do and didn’t take every bit of it apart, he goes back to it in chapter two and says, let me explain to you, you’re made for good works. And Christians, yes, we should be doing good works. We should be serving like we’ve been talking about. How do we do it? Because God’s made them for us. He enables us to walk in them. It’s all from him. He is our nourishment. He is where our source is for every good thing we do and the very life that we live.
I’ve been in a bit of a battle with my dishwasher. I don’t know how, but it seems like I, maybe, this probably makes me, you’re going to think, how can you be so dim, Tim? But I usually don’t check inside my glass, my clean glass, before I drink out of it. But I’ll be drinking out of it. I’ll have a glass of water for lunch or something. I’ll look down and I’ll think, there’s something moving in there. And I don’t, I’m not entirely sure what’s wrong with the dishwasher, but somehow glasses go in and they come out dirtier than they went in. This is not a good thing. And it tries. It tries really hard. Do you hear the water swishing around? It’s doing all this. It gets some of the stuff off. But somehow it’s depositing more dirt on, even as it’s trying to clean itself.
I’ve gotten a little better at checking it. It’s happened enough that I haven’t gotten as good at checking it as I should have by now. Sometimes it takes me a little while. But here’s the clear thing. I need to take those glasses and I need to wash them by hand, even if they’ve gone through the dishwasher. That’s the message there, right? The dishwasher cannot do it on its own. It will not get through it. It might make it look sparkly on one side and on the other side it’s all water-splotted and on the inside there’s, I don’t know what that is. It needs to be washed.
That’s when we’re trying. When we think that we’re going to make ourselves one of the holy ones, when we’re going to make ourselves one of the saints, and we go about it just like that dishwasher does. We start spraying the water on them. We get the good detergent and we’re spraying and we’re washing and we get kind of nice and shiny and we think, oh. And then people start to compliment us. Hey, you live a good, faithful life. Maybe you can give me some advice. And then we think, wow, I’m really shiny. Maybe I’ll just polish a little extra here. I’m doing pretty good here.
It only takes that moment where someone takes a sip out of our lives and they say, wait, what’s that swirling around in there? And I say, no, you know, we don’t have the ability. We can’t really cleanse ourselves. We aren’t the source of our cleanliness.
We need someone to pick up our attempt, our dish washing, and pick it up and clean us because we can be clean in one spot and then dirty in another.
One of the greatest lies that we hear is that we can somehow get things perfect in our lives on our own. That maybe then it’ll be time to be in church. Maybe then it’ll be in time to encounter Jesus. Maybe once we get it right, then Jesus will use us.
But if Jesus is the source of how we serve and Jesus is the source of our life, we realize, no, it’s about Jesus working in me. It doesn’t mean that we abandon being righteous. Not in the least. Paul doesn’t write the Ephesians and say, you know, if you want to just be dirty, filthy, horrible sinners and scoundrels that don’t reflect Jesus at all, that’s okay because you can’t do it anyway. No, he says the exact opposite of that. He says, look to Jesus for it. Understand that he’s your nourishment. He’s the one that can scrub off that dirt. And he can do something that you can’t do because every time you scrub some of the dirt off, you’re depositing more dirt. Just look under your hand while you’re holding that glass. It’s filthy under there.
He says, but Jesus can actually make you clean.
How much closer can we be in our walk with him if we simply realize that he’s the one who’s got this? He’s the one who’s working. That he’s the one that we’re faithful in. That as Jesus is working, that we can go and do the things he’s called us to do. If we’re looking on how to serve, that he is the one who nourishes us. If we’re looking simply to live a righteous life, that it’s in him that that happens. If we’re looking for eternal life, it’s in him that it happens.
Everything else we chase after, we’re going after those picnic baskets. And the world and Satan love that. Because you know what Satan knows? It clearly is the Department of Conservation. I don’t mean anything bad to them. I’m not saying that they’re, that sounds really bad. Just like the Department of Conservation, Satan.
But if you hated bears, you might give the wrong advice. Make sure to feed the bears lots of picnics. Give them all of your trash. Because then you’d know that the Conservation Department would have to come along and euthanize those bears. And Satan says that to us. He says, eat of all the things that will build you up. Think about how important it is what you’re doing. Talk about how great it is that you believe in Jesus because you realize that you need to. Make sure to tell people that don’t believe that they’re stupid and they’re foolish. And that you’re not. And all the while Satan knows exactly what’s going to happen to us. Exactly the same thing that would happen to that bear.
But Jesus says, you’re not going to be refreshed on your own. You need my living water. And he takes us and he gives us that nourishment. That nourishment’s available for you and it’s available for me. Praise God for that because we can’t do it on our own.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, would you help us to understand that our source of life, our source of nourishment, it only comes from you. Lord, we can’t do it. On our own, we won’t do it. But Lord, would you help us to understand how you work and to trust in you and to take our joy and our hope in you. Not in ourselves. Not in our abilities. But in yours. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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