Sermon Notes: Ephesians 1:13-14
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Sermon Notes: The Mystery Made Known: Ephesians 1:3-12
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Ephesus had been a great Greek city going back as far as 1000 BC. It’s on the western coast of modern day Turkey. Under Rome, it was the capital of its province and a very magnificent city. Had a theatre that seated 30,000.
Paul first came to Ephesus in Acts 18:19. He experienced especially fruitful ministry here, along with excessive opposition. He leaves Ephesus to go to Jerusalem, where he is arrested and eventually taken to Rome. It is from Rome, where he would eventually be executed, that Paul probably wrote this letter to encourage the saints that he left behind.
When Paul first came to Ephesus, he preached to the Jews in the synagogue. But only a few of them received his teaching. So he withdrew and preached to the Gentiles in a place called the school of Tyrannus (19:9).
Apostle
This letter is from Paul, who has been called to be an apostle, by the will of God.
Jesus
Paul is an Apostle of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew name Joshua, or literally “salvation.”
Christ
Christ is the title that Jesus was given. The Hebrew word for Christ is “Messiah,” Christ is the title that Jesus was given. The Hebrew word for Christ is “Messiah,” meaning someone who has been anointed with oil to set them aside for a particular office. This was done for Kings (1 Sam. 16:13); Priests (Ex. 28:41; 29:7, 21, 29; 30:22-33); and Prophets (1 King 19:16).
This anointing with oil usually corresponded to an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, gifting someone in a way that related to the office that they were to fulfill.
All of these Old Testament offices, however, were pointing forward to one man, who would perfectly embody them all – namely, Jesus Christ, Jesus the Messiah, Jesus the Anointed One. This is why, when Jesus begins his official ministry, his baptized and the Holy Spirit falls upon him (Mat. 3:13-17).
Saints
The letter is to the saints. The word saint means “holy one.” All Christians are saints, because we are all holy in Christ. However, he further defines what he means by “saints.” He says that they are the “faithful,” that is, those that believe in Christ Jesus.
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We live in a world where rough things happen. Despite all our advances in technology, everyone in this room will still die. We still get sick. We still have financial challenges. We have the heartbreak of wayward children. We still have to deal with the perversity of sin that we can still find stirring under our own breastbone. In other words, as it says in Job, man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. How are we to respond? If we want to avoid platitudes, tough times demand tough thinking.
“In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you” (1 Thess. 5:18).
“Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;” (Eph. 5:20).
The context of the Thessalonians exhortation is this. Paul is delivering a rapid-fire series of exhortations to them, including esteeming your leaders, being at peace with one another, warning the unruly, comforting the feeble, and so on. He then tells them to pray without ceasing, and comes to deliver our text. Right afterward, he says not to quench the Spirit. Now this cluster of exhortations shows that Paul is not assuming that the Thessalonians are somehow living in a la-la land, where it is quite easy to “give thanks in everything.” There are tough challenges in the same breath. This is not an exhortation only for those who live under marshmallow clouds and glittery rainbows, and who cavort in the meadow with sparkly unicorns.
In Ephesians, we find something similar. Right after a warning that the “days are evil” (Eph. 5:16), leading on to a caution about drunkenness (v. 18), Paul tells them to fill up on psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and tells them to “give thanks for all things.” This is what it means to be filled with the Spirit.
We are Christians, and so we should want to do as we are told. We should not want, under pressure, to reinterpret what God must have “meant.” We were not told to be “realistic.” We were told to give thanks in and for everything. This means that it is time for us to put on our big boy pants. “Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men” (1 Cor. 14:20).
We have to learn how to argue our case with God, as the psalmist frequently does. We must avoid, at all costs, murmuring in our tents, the way the children of Israel did in their tents in the wilderness. We may press our case with God, but we may never forget that His infinite and holy character is the only possible foundation for any sane argument. If that foundation is missing, then we have no argument, we have no complaint, and nothing is wrong with what is happening to us. You may appeal to God, and you may do so with loud cries. Jesus did that (Heb. 5:7). You may argue with God. Many holy men and women did that. You may not accuse God. You may not try to become a devil to God. You may not adopt into the premises of your argument anything other than the promises of God, grounded as they are in the character and attributes of the immutable and holy One. In short, whenever you argue with God, both of your feet must be firmly placed on the covenant of grace.
If God is up in Heaven, wringing His hands, and saying “oh dear” along with the rest of us, there is no possible way for us to do this. Since God wants us to do this, requiring it as He has, He wants us to get this premise down into our bones. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). We live our lives “according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will” (Eph. 1:11). And God saved us by grace through faith because we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).
So we are not being asked to thank God in and for an isolated anything. Everything that happens is part of a purpose, plan, plot, stratagem, and so on. God is running a play. God is telling a story, and so you thank God for this verb’s place in the story. God is not telling you to thank Him for that same verb in an infinite, godless vacuum. No—there is no such place.
Now it is psychologically impossible for us to thank God for the sin when we are in the middle of committing it. But that is a limitation created by the sinning. Such a limitation does not place our disobedience outside the story—others may thank God for how He is using our sin for His glory. Remember that whenever we thank God for the cross of Jesus Christ—which we are to do constantly—we are thanking Him for the worst murder that was ever committed on this planet (Acts 2:23; Acts 4:27-28). We are thanking Him for the murder, and we are thanking Him in it. What we are not doing is joining in with the spirit of murder.
When the pain is sharp, when the burden is heavy, when the event is uncertain . . . the wait is long. We don’t mind waiting when we have something to divert us, but if the pain, or the burden, or the anxiety prevent us from being diverted, all we have is a long and interminable wait. “Wait on the Lord: Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: Wait, I say, on the Lord” (Ps. 27:14).
“But why do we have to wait?” we complain. We are happy to have patience, so long as we can have it now. But God does not want you in a day-at-the-beach story. He wants you in an adventure story. And have you ever noticed that your worst experiences are frequently the best stories later?
Take “lousy experience x,” the thing that just happened to you this last week, and which still has you reeling. How do you process it? What precisely are you to do? You pray a prayer, something like this: “God in Heaven, I understand and believe that You govern all things for Your glory and our good. I believe that You are my Father, and that You do all things well. Therefore, I want to thank You in my trial and for my trial. Specifically, I want to thank You for lousy experience x, and ask You to receive my praise, as I sing the Doxology. ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’”
So it is not enough to speak the truths of God. We must speak the truths of God, supported by thereasons of God. “Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: Behold, your God will come with vengeance, Even God with a recompence; He will come and save you” (Is. 35:4).
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Last week we distinguished discipline from punishment. That initial distinction was that discipline is corrective and punishment is concerned with retribution. But once we have accepted the duty of administering parental discipline, we discover that discipline falls naturally into two categories—corrective and formative.
“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).
The charge here is given to fathers. Taking all of Scripture together, we know that both father and mother are engaged in this crucial task, but it is worth noting that the central charge is here delivered to the father. The father is responsible. He is responsible in the first instance not to be a provocation to his children. If he stumbles them into wrath, his sin is prior to theirs, and is much more grievous (Luke 17:2). Instead of this kind of provocation, he is required to provide them with a Christian education and upbringing. The words underneath nurture and admonition are paideia and nouthesia. Taken together they encompass and necessarily require a Christian education. What we mean by education is not as big as this charge, but is necessarily a critical component of it.
Raw requirement without instruction is a form of provocation. Don’t allow requests for explanation to displace obedience, but if your child routinely hears nothing more than “because I said so,” something is wrong. The two phrases in this verse are connected.
So what is the difference between the kinds of discipline I mentioned above? When something has gone actively wrong, corrective discipline puts things back on track, restoring the fellowship between parent and child. This kind of discipline fixes something that has gone wrong. The second kind of discipline prevents things from going wrong in the future. The second kind of discipline instills character, against the challenges of a future day. It is corrective in anticipation.
The first kind of discipline would occur if mom told her son that she wanted him to get his math homework done before playing any video games, and she then discovered that he had done nothing of the kind. When the consequences fall on him that would be a sample of the first kind of discipline, a corrective discipline concerning an incident in the past. The second kind of discipline is the exercise of having to do the math homework in the first place. That is equipping him for a future day, it is hard in the meantime, and that is formative discipline. It is corrective also, but it is preventative correction.
One writer has helpfully noted that education is not about information, but rather formation. Education, done right, is a character-building process. One of the grand mistakes that parents often make is that of opposing academics to character issues. They are not in opposition. Learning to do the kind of work that children have learned to do for millennia is not opposed to character formation, it is character formation.
If a group of boys were working with shovels to dig a big ditch, and the father of one of the boys came out and pulled his boy aside to spend the morning doing anything other than digging, this would not be an example of “focusing on character instead.” It would be an example of declining to do so.
The word that Paul uses here—paideia—is an enormous word. Every language has common nouns, like chair or shoelace, and every culture has large, all-encompassing words. In our culture, an example of one of the large words would be democracy. You wouldn’t be astonished to find a three-volume study of that word in a used bookstore. But if you found someone had done the same thing with a common noun, studying shoelaces through history, you would begin to suspect deep personal problems. I say this because the word paideia was one of the ancient world’s “all- encompassing” words, and what it meant was this. It referred to the process of enculturation. It was the education of the citizen, preparing him to take his responsible place in the polis. The apostle Paul saw our participation in the commonwealth of Israel as an exercise in the glorious citizenship of the heavenly city.
Now Paul requires fathers to provide a Christian paideia, and he required this before there was such a thing as a Christian culture for the children to be “enculterated” into. In order to fulfill his requirement here, the early Christians had to build such a culture—which they went out and did. We are privileged to have significant aspects of what they built still functioning as part of our heritage. We don’t have to start from scratch, but we still have a lot of rebuilding to do.
When children are little, parents can fall prey to the “grip of an idea.” They may have all kinds of fantastical notions about education stratagems, health weirdness, child discipline, food phobias, and so on. For much of this stuff, we can (and should) say with Paul, “Let every man be fully convinced in his own mind” (Rom. 14:5). But we should also make a point to note that those who compare themselves with themselves are not wise (2 Cor. 10:12).
If you have never seen this kind of example, spend some time seeking it out. But be careful. We learn by imitation, but we also envy that way. You have to learn to copy without comparing.
This is important because one of the great truths I discovered while building my house concerned the nature of concrete work. The one bright spot was that a couple hours after the pour, no matter what, you were all done. Now your children are that wet concrete.
This does not obligate you to a particular course of action, but it does obligate you to a certain demeanor. Your people surrounding you have taken a vow before God to help you in the Christian nurture of your children. You are not obligated to do “whatever” anybody says, but you are obligated to be willing to hear about it without getting your back up (Ps. 141:5). This is because certain sins and blunders run out ahead of you, but others trail behind (1 Tim. 5:24). Parental folly is the kind of thing that has a long fuse. “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid” (Prov. 12:1, ESV).
So fathers are given the charge to educate here, but the charge flows out (necessarily) past the boundaries of the family. There is a feedback loop here. The children are being prepared to take their place among their people, and their people are preparing to receive them.
In bringing up children, success is found in them going away. In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis comments on a kind of “need love” that doesn’t want to let go. That is not what we are after.
And what happens in the Christian school family or homeschool family is not supposed to be happening in isolation. Part of the reason this is such a challenge is that “our people” are often sinful and unreasonable. That is precisely why they need us, and why we need them. Hiding from the sin out there won’t protect us from the sin in here. And this brings us back to the touchstone of grace. The only place to hide from sin is in Jesus Christ.