A Glorious Redemption

The sermon emphasizes the importance of reflecting on God’s glorious redemption, as exemplified by the apostle Paul in Ephesians. Listeners are encouraged to find strength and motivation through the truths of being chosen, redeemed, and sealed by God in Christ, ultimately leading to praise and worship.

 

What do you do when you are discouraged as a Christian?

What do you do when you feel like giving up?

What do you do when you are tired of trusting God and you feel as though God is not showing up?

You do when you feel that his faithfulness has failed.

The book of Ephesians, we find the apostle Paul and he begins his letter in the most unusual way.

Paul usually greets the people he is writing to and then he begins an introductory Thanksgiving.

 

But here in this letter, it’s different.

Paul begins with his greeting as normal but then instead of going to into the introductory Thanksgiving for the Ephesians, Paul begins to praise God.

He begins to worship and the question is, why?

We’re not told out of all the letters that Paul wrote, Ephesians is discernible as not having a proper, explicit reason, reason for its writing.

And if you think of it, Romans was written in preparation for a missionary journey to Spain.

Colossians was written to combat some type of heresy.

Galatians was written because of these Judaizers trying to deceive God’s people.

But Ephesians we don’t know explicitly why Paul wrote the letter.

Of what we do know are the circumstances that surround the writing of this letter.

And it could be that Paul might have been discouraged.

Seems that Paul is trying to motivate himself and by extension, he is trying to motivate the readers of this letter.

You see, Paul is in jail and the reason he is in jail is because of the work of wicked men who accused him falsely.

In his time in jail, Paul encounters difficulties.

He is not free to preach the gospel as he once was.

He is under the restrictions of the Roman rule and if if that weren’t enough, some so called Christian brothers are using Paul’s imprisonment to shame him.

Seems that Paul has reason to be discouraged.

And despite these reasons and circumstances to be discouraged, Paul begins a letter to a church that is dear to him with praise.

In his moment of distress and hardship, Paul is praising God.

And the reason Paul is praising God is because God’s redemptive purposes are glorious.

And suppose we as a church are going to be excited about what God is doing. In that case, one of the ways we overcome discouragement, and one of the ways we overcome these moments of difficult circumstances that surround our lives is by looking at God’s glorious redemption.

It seems that Paul is ripping a page out of Asaph’s playbook.

Asaph wrote Psalm 7,7 and when he wrote that Psalm, he was also discouraged.

He wrote and says, I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, and he will hear me.

In the day of my trouble, I seek the lord.

In the night, my hand is stretched out without weary.

My soul refuses to be comforted.

When I remember God, I know when I meditate, my spirit faint.

But what he gets to is after some internal deliberation, he says in verse six, I said, let me remember my song in the night.

Let me meditate in my heart.

Let my spirit make a diligent search, and he asked this question: will the Lord spurn forever and never again be favorable?

Has his steadfast love forever cease for his promises and and end for all time?

Has God forgotten to be gracious?

Has his anger shut up his compassion?

In verse ten, he says, then, I will appeal to this, to the years of the right hand of the most high.

He began to ponder the work of God.

Asaph pondered God’s work and meditated on God’s mighty deeds, the distrust turned to rejoicing, and the turmoil turned to gladness.

It seems that Paul, in this moment of discouragement, is doing the same thing.

This morning, you might feel discouraged, tired, overwhelmed, saddened.

During a difficult circumstance, a sad province.

But I’m here to tell you that the antidote to your discouragement is reflecting on God’s glorious redemption.

Because when we reflect on God’s glorious redemption, our soul will be lifted to exuberant praise.

When we reflect on God’s glorious redemption, Our souls will be filled with exuberant praise.

So this morning, Paul shows us four truths, four glorious truths that, when we reflect on them, will cause us exuberant, should cause us exuberant praise, and the first one, we find here, is this: God chose us in Christ.

As the first blessing that we see enumerated for us, Paul says, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessings.

Okay, Paul?

What are the spiritual blessings that we have in Christ?

Well, the first one is that we are chosen.

We are chosen to belong to God.

But think about that.

He says, we were chosen in him before the foundation of the world.

We can’t even begin to fathom these internal deliberations that God made within the members of the Godhead.

Before the six days of creation, before the seventh day of rest, God chose you, if you have placed your hope in Jesus Christ.

That means you’re no afterthought.

You are not a second-class Christian.

When God decided you’re not a second-class Christian, God decided to have pity because there was no other religion for you.

God chose you before time was created.

Before days were formed.

God chose you in his Son.

That is a glorious truth.

That you are no accident.

That God is not interested in you because no one else is interested in you, and he has pity on you because he sees that no one has pity on you.

God chose you.

You are the object of his affection.

Why were you chosen in Christ?

Well, first, he says, to be holy and blameless beforehand but notice what it doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say that he would chose you because you were blameless in holy.

We look at all world religions.

This is why that catechism question is so glorious. If we look at all world religions, the only way you’re accepted before God is through your performance.

You look at Judaism, you look at Islam, you look at Hinduism, Buddhism, the major world religions.

You have to show yourself acceptable to the deity.

Yet in Christianity, the beauty of the gospel is that we’re chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, before right or wrong was ever done.

God set his affection on us, his people.

The second reason is verse five.

He predestined us for adoption to himself.

God not only chose you but he wanted you to be part of his family.

This is what one commentator says.

He says, this is a pretty long quote.

So, I hope you can follow along.

Words will be on the screen.

Greco, Roman, adoptees were often members of the father’s extended relations.

In the case of believers, God has taken the most distant foreigners to be his kin for the inheritance of his whole estate.

Not the deserving or good, not many well-born, powerful, or wise, but those who were by nature, not of his kin at all, but children of wrath and darkened sons of disobedience.

His helpless, wicked, sinful enemies under fraud to the realm of darkness.

God does not place those these new sons into a subordinate inferior family.

He appoints them all to become co heirs of his natural firstborn son.

And whom the whole creation is summarized.

For co-rule over all things with him as those who have been so have been co-seated with him in high, in the high heavenlies.

These stupendous acts of divine grace have no parallel in Greco-Roman society.

It surpasses even the unthinkable idea of the Roman Emperor adopting a slave from the most barbaric hinterlands to be the next emperor.

It is no wonder that Paul exalts in the praise of his glory, of the glory of his grace, which he bestows on us in his beloved.

That is the glory of the gospel.

God, when he wants to bring this to himself, he he not only chooses us, but he chooses us so that we are his very own sons and daughters.

And we are now co-heirs with Christ himself.

So, we see here that this should bring us joy.

It should bring us excitement.

It says God chose you according to the purpose of his will and to the praise of his glorious grace.

So, it is clear that God chose us but the question is, how does a holy God make sinners part of his family?

If it is true that God chose us and predestined us for our doctrines as sons and daughters in God, The question is how does God make sinners?

How does a holy God make sinners part of his family?

Well, this is what Paul will move on to next.

And this is the second blessing.

Why should we worship God?

Why should there be exuberant praise within our lives that he redeemed us through Christ?

So, the second glorious truth that we can reflect on and join Paul in exuberant praises is that we are redeemed through Christ.

Look at verse seven.

It says, in Christ, we we have redemption.

It’s ours.

We possess it.

We possess it presently.

We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.

The Ephesians understood this idea of redemption, which was done for usually kidnapped persons or slaves trying to buy their freedom.

The redemption happened by the paying of a ransom.

Now, this doesn’t mean that God paid the devil the ransom for our souls as some thought long ago.

Here, the idea is that God satisfied his just wrath.

That the wrath of God was satisfied fully and finally in Jesus Christ.

That God’s righteous judgements that we should have bore because of our sins were fully and finally satisfied on Jesus Christ, our lord.

Christ is the one who interposed his precious blood, as the hymn says, and rescued us from damnation and brought us near to God.

And it doesn’t say that God did this in a way that he was trying to calculate his every move in a way that he was trying to be stingy.

But verse the verse continues to say that Jesus that God lavished his grace upon us.

He lavished his grace upon us with all wisdom and insight.

Now, we are instinctively aware that lavish and wisdom, and insight probably shouldn’t go together.

I mean, if you think of spending lavishly and spending lavishly with wisdom and insight, we usually don’t put those things together.

When we think of someone spending lavishly, we think of someone who came upon some riches and started to lavish their money on homes and cars and foolishly spends their their money.

And end up broke.

Going from rags to riches back to rags.

We’ve heard numerous stories like that.

In our society.

But here it says that God when he is spending his love, when God is extending his compassion, he is doing it lavishly, but he is also doing it with wisdom and insight.

Paul is saying that there is no mismanagement on God’s part.

Rather, how God lavishes his grace shows us both his wisdom.

And insight.

God knows you need grace.

God knows you need mercy.

And he knows that you need You need mercy lavishly.

And therefore, he expends it, extravagantly on your soul.

Hear this quote from Dane Ortlund who wrote the book, Gentle and Lowly.

And that book is talking about the heart of Jesus for his people.

And hear these words.

He says this,

God is not poor in mercy.

He is rich in mercy.

Nowhere else in the in in the Bible is God described as rich in anything.

The only thing he is called rich in is mercy.

What does this mean?

It means that God is something other than what we naturally believe him to be.

It means the Christian life is a long, lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God.

In his justice, God is exacting.

In his mercy, God is overflowing.

He is rich unto all.

That is he is infinite, overflowing in goodness.

He is good to a profuseness.

He is good to the pouring forth of riches.

He is good to end abundance.

Just as the Old Testament doubles up the word to have mercy in Jeremiah thirty one twenty.

The New Testament calls God rich.

And mercy.

That is the God that we serve.

And so we can joyfully join Paul with exuberant prayer because God is rich in mercy and has brought us redemption.

In verses nine to ten, Paul says that even the revelation of what God is doing through Jesus Christ is gracious.

It was a plan formally hidden in the Old Testament, but now, it’s revealed in Jesus Christ, and that plan is to unite all things in heaven and on earth under the lordship of Jesus Christ. The question is, if God is going to unite all these things under Jesus Christ, how will God do this?

Well, Paul gives us an answer in verse eleven, and that brings us to the third glorious truth that when we reflect on it, we can join Paul in exuberant praise, and that truth is that we have an inheritance in Christ.

We have an inheritance in Christ.

Look at verse eleven.

In him, that is Jesus.

We have obtained an inheritance that has been predestined according to the purpose of him, who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

Paul is saying that we as Christians have been given an inheritance, and in verse fourteen, he will say that the Holy Spirit guarantees that inheritance. Paul doesn’t elaborate on what this inheritance entails, but when we look at the New Testament, we see that Peter does.

Peter is writing about the inheritance and using words similar to those Paul uses here.

He says in First Peter 1:3 that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are blessed.

According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

To an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.

So, this morning, the inheritance that we have in God cannot fade.

It cannot be defiled and cannot perish.

We are accustomed to things deteriorating our bodies and the possessions that we have deteriorated, but your inheritance in Jesus Christ is unfading, imperishable, and undefining.

Peter says that God is waiting to reveal that inheritance on the last day.

And so, this inheritance comes through our adoption because we are adopted children of God according to why we were predestined.

Now, we have this inheritance.

We are co-heirs with we are heirs of God, co-heirs with Christ.

Again, the refrain that we hear again and again throughout these verses is that God is doing all these things according to the purpose of his will.

So, this is no afterthought.

This is God, this is not God’s second guessing.

He is deliberately blessing his people.

If you’ve ever received a gift, that was an afterthought.

One of the problems when a gift is an afterthought is that the person who usually receives the gift has no need for it or doesn’t know what to do with it.

Since the gift is not thought through, the person giving it doesn’t know if the person receiving it will need it or be able to use it.

But that is not how God gives us gifts.

God grants us an inheritance that will be revealed in on the last day and we will enjoy it.

We will cherish it.

And so we have been promised this inheritance God has chosen us.

If God has redeemed us through Christ and given us an inheritance, the question is, how are we sure that we will attain this inheritance?

How do we know that we will receive it fully?

Well, the last reason that Paul gives us for the praise of God is found in verse fourteen.

There, he tells us that God keeps us by his Spirit.

The reason that we know that we will inherit what God has given to us in Christ Jesus.

Is that God has given to us his Holy Spirit.

It says in verse thirteen, when we believe the word of salvation, God sealed us with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession.

Amen.

The spirit of God coming to dwell among God’s people is the down payment, the guarantee that God is going to make good on his promise.

The idea here is of earnest money.

Several years ago when me and my wife bought our home, we had to give earnest money to the realtor.

We were indicating with our earnest money that we were for real.

That we were not going to walk back on the purchase of the home.

And God in a sense has given us earnest money.

He is so committed to bringing about his glorious purposes that he has given to us of his Spirit and now because his Spirit dwells within us, we have a guarantee that one day, we will dwell with him unhindered forever to praise him and glorify his name.

So, Paul gives us four reasons.

We can have exuberant praise of the word.

We we can exuberantly praise God this morning.

This morning, there might not be much reason externally speaking to rejoice as you consider your circumstances.

Like I said earlier, you probably come tired, exhausted, even depressed.

Life has been challenging.

You might have come this morning excited and elated but you are excited about the wrong things because your excitement is based on temporary things.

This morning, what we find in Paul is that we should find our joy and our exuberance and the realities that God has made us his people.

He chose us.

He redeemed us, Granted us an inheritance, and gave us his promise of the Holy Spirit so that we can have an assurance that no matter what happens in this life, what will never change is that we belong to God forever.

And this morning I pray that that is a source of comfort for you.

And that in your moment of potential discouragement, you may find the desire to praise God.

Because God has worked for glorious and marvelous salvation.