God Blesses Us

Welcome to our Women's Bible Study on the Book of Ephesians, which is titled Finding Purpose. And today we're gonna cover Ephesians chapter one, verses seven to 23. Your study guide says verses one to 23 because you had to back up and write those verses in your journal. But the image behind me says seven to 23, and we already studied verses one to six. So we're picking up our lesson in the middle of that long sentence, which is verse three to 14. Remember that exciting long sentence that's almost as long as the Gettysburg Address, where the Apostle Paul just burst into this lengthy description of how we have been blessed by the Lord. And in your study, you identified seven aspects of that blessing. You dropped them into three buckets, how we've been blessed from God the Father, through Jesus Christ, and from the Holy Spirit. And so last week we studied the first of those two. I'll just remind you, and we'll put it on the screen, blessings number one and two. He chose us before the foundation of the world, and he predestined us for adoption. We are emotional creatures, and it doesn't get any better to us than when someone picks us. When someone chooses us, that really resonates with us. And that's what God did. He chose us to be his own, even before he laid the foundation of the earth. And then, as if that wasn't enough, he adopted us into his family. Even after he knew what we would become, he still followed through and adopted us. But that's a lesson for chapter two, like we said. So now we're gonna continue and look at the blessings through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. But first I wanna say something. I want us to pause for just a minute and think about the context of who this letter was written to. Because we always like to say in our Bible studies, before the Bible was written to me, it was written to someone else. It's very important for us to identify that someone else and think about their life. So let's think about the life of the Ephesian believers who came to Christ that this letter is being written to. Because they came to Christ during what we identified in chapter 19 of Acts as a revival, a great revival. Do you remember last week we talked about revival is characterized by belief, repentance, and then opposition. And we had all those things that we saw going on in Ephesus when Paul was there. People were coming to Christ, they were repenting of what they had been involved with. Do you remember the big $6 million bonfire of all of their magic arts books? And then the counter opposition, the two hours of chanting, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. So that's these people. And they believed, but they had no Bible to instruct them about all the details of what they believed. There's quite a bit of emotion that can go along with revivals, but it needs instruction. So the last great revival in our country was more than 50 years ago. And it lasted for quite a while. Paul and I actually came to Christ at the end of that great revival. And so we just turned our lives over to the Lord, dedicated our lives to the Lord, and then we were able to march down to the Christian bookstore and load up our arms with the study Bible, A.W. Tozer, C.S. Lewis, John Stott, J. Ellswold Sanders. And immediately when we made that decision, we were informed. I don't know if God does that for everyone, but we were, we had the blessing. That's what Paul's doing for these people. He's taking what just happened to them, becoming born again, in what was probably somewhat of an emotional, although I know it's spiritual, but emotional response, and now he's educating. And so that's what's going on here. It's useful for us as well, detail by detail, blessing by blessing. He wrote so that they could understand their place in the kingdom so that they could fulfill their purpose. As we read it, we also need to understand our place so that we can fulfill our purpose. So verse seven, here we go.

All right, here comes blessing number three. We have been redeemed. For the Ephesian believers, redeeming things and redeeming people since they lived in a trade-oriented city was commonplace. If a person had become indentured for some reason, there was a path for them to be ransomed, to be purchased out of slavery, to be redeemed from their sad state of affairs, and it required a payment, it required a transaction. Paul was educating them that Jesus paid the price for their redemption with his blood. There was a similar transaction in what had just happened to them. Now, we don't observe those things in our regular culture, the transaction of redeeming people, but we do have a Bible, and so we're familiar with redemption. We're familiar with the story of God reaching into Egypt and redeeming his people out of Egypt and bringing them into the land of promise. We're familiar with the story of Ruth who was redeemed by her late husband's distant relative. So we can understand these things. In modern culture, if I were teaching a children's ministry lesson, I would talk about pop cans. I would talk about the redemption of a pop can because here in Oregon, we have to pay 10 cents every time we purchase a bottle. And then we can exchange that. Here's the bottle. I get my 10 cents back. There's a transaction that goes on. I used to love collecting bottles and taking my little grandkids down to the bottle drop place, you know? And it doesn't get any better. You just put those bottles in there and you see the numbers tick up, and they're like, Grandma, we got $9.25. I'm like, let's go to Dollar Tree, you know? And they're like, yes, but it's a scary place now. I would not take grandkids to that place. It's too bad. It's been ruined. Don't go there. But in our case, Jesus has paid the ransom price with his blood, and we were won back. And the concept that Jesus Christ redeemed me through his blood helps me to understand what happened to me when I got saved. Blessing number four, we'll put it on the screen. We are forgiven. People only need to be forgiven when they do something wrong towards someone else, when they offend another person, when they trespass the boundaries of a relationship. And we learn here that every one of us has sinned and has offended God. Our sin has offended God, and we need forgiveness of that sin. Because now we believe that Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, and we've accepted what he did, the riches of God's grace has been lavished upon us. I love those colorful words. The riches of God's grace has been lavished upon us. And grace could be defined very well as God's kindness toward undeserving people. God's kindness toward undeserving people will run into that 12 times in this study. The Ephesians needed to understand the lavish nature of God's grace. How God forgave their trespasses. This is what happened to them when they believed. And this is part of God's plan and his purpose from the beginning. It is the mystery of his will. But God isn't just like, all right, I forgive you, now move along. That is not God's forgiveness. God's forgiveness is, I offer you forgiveness now. I want you. And it's a unification. It's becoming united. Sometimes if someone offends us, we'll forgive them, but in our mind it's like, move along. I really don't wanna see you again. That is not how God has forgiven us. He has brought us in. It was his plan for the unification of his creation to unite all things in him. Now, in human families, the unity of the family usually means the sharing of the wealth. We have wills. We have inheritances. And that's where the direction that this is going is into an inheritance. So let's read verse 11.

Okay, let's identify blessing number five. We have obtained an inheritance. Not only are those who are born into God's family no longer carry the penalty of sin, no longer carry the guilt of sin, but we have been elevated to an inheritance. I have never personally received an inheritance on this earth, but I love reading this because I have received an inheritance. I know that because I belong to Jesus Christ, I have an inheritance. I am a co-heir with Jesus, and what does Jesus have? All things. And so this unification with the Lord teaches me that I have been given this inheritance. Now, inheritances are typically pre-planned. You don't just decide willy-nilly, you know, okay, give this to this one, give... No, they're planned, especially in very wealthy families. They are planned in detail, and there's trusts, and there's timing, and there's all these things that go with it. But that's why I like the significance of some of the phrases that Paul uses, predestined according to the purpose of him. God is purposeful in what he has planned for us, according to the counsel of his will. Now, by the way, these pagan gods and goddesses that some of the people clearly must have resonated with in a place like Ephesus, great as Artemis of the Ephesians, they did not do anything purposefully. They were very fickle. You never knew if you were good enough. You never knew if you did the right things. You had to just keep trying, trial and error, to see if... And so I think Paul is being very purposeful here to say, now you belong to Christ, and it's very different because Christ chose you from the beginning. He pre-planned your inheritance. Fantastic. Paul was thinking about believers with different backgrounds, I think, when he talked about this inheritance, and he addressed the two different kinds of groups. Did you notice in verse 12, he used the pronoun we. He said, we who were the first to hope in Christ, and I think by that he meant those who were Jews, and then they put their trust in Jesus Christ. We who were the first to hope in Christ, and now as we start in verse 13, he says, and you also, seeming to mean those who were Gentiles, those who were involved in pagan, and so he's making it very clear. We and you, all of us, these blessings abound to all of us now who are in Christ. Let's read verse 13.

So we're going to put up our last two blessings, number six and seven, together. We have been sealed, and our inheritance has been guaranteed. These are the blessings that we have identified as from the Holy Spirit, and so let's first talk about the seal, and what that would have meant to them living in a city of trade. A seal probably would have conjured up some commercial sort of connotations, a stamp or an imprint on the document or on goods, claiming who owned that particular piece of goods or whatever. Okay, it was a claim of possession, this unique property, and for us, we can process it the same way, because we have learned that in accepting Jesus Christ, now we, the Holy Spirit, comes to live with us. What is one of his functions? To seal us, to claim us, to give us the mark of God upon us, to claim us as God's particular possession. But there may have been some of these believers that had a more agriculturally thinking mind, and they may have processed the word sealed in a different way, and I wanted to bring this up as well. I want to put an illustration of how you graft a stem into a tree, because this is the Bible talks about this as well. We can picture ourself as this stick that has been grafted into the tree, but it's that third illustration I want you to look at. Then it is sealed. It is sealed with this particular substance that holds it together, and that is also a good perspective of being sealed by the Holy Spirit. The protection and preservation properties is a blessing to us as well, especially for someone who doesn't yet fully understand their place in Christ, because we can't get to our purpose if we don't understand our place. And so I like this aspect. Either way, if it's a stamp of ownership, or if it's a seal that protects and preserves us, it is a blessing that we receive from the Holy Spirit, who has come to live in us because we are in Christ. And then finally, the last one is the guarantee. Paul was educating them that the Holy Spirit now lived in them, and that he was a guarantee that this inheritance would actually happen. He was like a down payment. If you put a down payment, you put money on the table, and you say, I promise I'll come back and finish the transaction. If you give an engagement ring, you put the ring on the finger, and it says, I promise I'll come back and finish the transaction. A guarantee is all about a promise, and that is what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. It is a promise that God is going to finish the transaction that has begun in us. So now look, this letter was written to believers, okay? So the legitimate question is, what if you're not sure that you are in Christ? And that's a good question. I want to take us to verse 13, because it gives a path for someone who reads about these blessings and says to themself, I don't know if I really am on the inside. Look at verse 13, this phrase. It's in the past tense. When you heard the word of truth, the good news, or the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, that's it. That was their path. That's what had happened to the Ephesian believers. So now we can take that, and we can say to ourselves, let's just change that into the present tense, and now I see the path for becoming in Christ, and to receive all these blessings. If you hear what you're doing right now, hearing the word of truth, the good news about salvation, and if you believe, that is the simplicity of becoming in Christ. Now look, there are natural and there are flesh and pride things that are going to stand in the way, are going to resist a spiritual change like that, but the simplicity stands. You see what has been, you hear what has been happened, what has been done for you, and you say, yes, I believe God chose me from the beginning. I believe Jesus died for my sins, offers me forgiveness. I believe the Holy Spirit lives in me. Boom, you are born again. So I like that we can take that phrase and make it mean something to us as well. Okay, second half of this lesson is, and the second half of the chapter, is a prayer for the believers. First Paul educated them on all of their blessings, and now he prays for them to apply these blessings to their lives, for it to go from their head, from the education, down into their heart. And it starts like this, verse 15,

I want to remind you, Paul had history with these people. He had been there for two years, but not all of them, some of them now had come to Christ since Paul had left, since his last contact with them. So he's praying for those that he knew, and he's praying for those that he didn't know, those that he doesn't know. But he says here, he says, but I heard about your genuine faith, and what I heard was, because of your love for one another, this has proved your faith. So I know that you're part of us because I have heard about this, and it's also our privilege to pray for people whom with we've had history, and people that we haven't had history with. It's a simple way for us to fulfill our purpose, is through prayer. So I want to take some of this and ask the question, how can we pray for people? Because this should be an inspiration for us when we see the Apostle Paul pray. How can we pray for people? How did he? pray for people. Well, one big thing that I see is as he listed those blessings to us, we were told they're spiritual blessings, not natural, not physical, they're spiritual blessings. And when Paul prays for them, he prays for their spiritual health, not necessarily their natural or physical things, he's praying for their spiritual health. So let's think about that as we keep reading verse 17,

So let's unpack this with an eye toward inspiration for our prayer life as we pray for the spiritual lives of others. The focal point in this passage is our knowledge of him. We have no spiritual health without a knowledge of God. And he uses a couple of phrases here that give it dimension. He talked about the revelation of God, which is the truth about God, which is what this letter is doing. And then he talked about the spirit of wisdom. So knowledge is knowing something, knowing truth, and wisdom is knowing how to apply that truth, what to do with that truth. And he's praying both things for them. And then he goes on to talk about heart health. I love this phrase when he says, I pray that the eyes of your hearts would be enlightened. It says heart health. The eyes of your heart would be enlightened. Why is that important? Well, Jeremiah the prophet had written to us and said that the heart is deceitful. Our heart is a problem. He says it's deceitful above all things and desperately sick. So we need heart health. So Paul prays for them to have health in the way that the heart views life, in the way that the heart views God, in the way that the heart views our own lives. Now it's okay for us to pray for physical things for people, okay? But let's not forget praying for the spiritual. That's one big takeaway for me, praying the spiritual health is a priority. It's good in your prayer groups to pray for that job, pray for that blood work, pray for that broken relationship. But you know what? People won't necessarily ask you to pray for their spiritual health. That's something we reach out and do. This summer, not a single one of you said, would you please pray that the eyes of my heart would be enlightened, that I would know the hope to which he has called me. Like none of you asked for that. We don't typically ask for these spiritual things, but we should. We should, and this is how we should be praying for others. Who are you praying for? You're praying for kids, you're praying for grandkids, you're praying for parents, you're praying for friends, you're praying for difficult people, you're praying for all kinds of people in your world to be inspired to pray for their spiritual health. And so we pray that people would grow in Christ-likeness and would grow in love and in long-suffering. And we pray that people would grow in peace and not be easily disturbed by world situations. And we pray that people would grow in their discernment about temptations and about sin and that we would deny ourselves and that we would grow to love God's Word and love God's people. These are spiritual health things. This is one significant way for us to find purpose in our life, is by praying for the spiritual health of others. It was one significant way that the Apostle Paul was finding purpose in this season of his life in confinement in Rome, was praying for the spiritual health of others. Before we move on, there's one little last tidbit in verse 18. It says, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. Now when we talk about inheritance, we've already handled it a couple of times, and so it's natural for us to just think, oh, inheritance, inheritance. It's our inheritance. That's what he's talking about. No. Here it switches. It's talking about his, God's, inheritance in the saints. We are his inheritance. That's part of his plan. That's part of the mystery. He wants us. He inherits us. You know, a friend, I put something on Facebook, and one of my friends commented and said, I am my beloved's and he is mine. I thought, okay, that's really sweet. It has nothing to do with what I posted, but that's really sweet. And then I got to this part, and I thought, that is absolutely on the target. Like, I am my beloved's, and he is mine. I am his inheritance, and he is my inheritance. And that is not something we very often think about, but God is wanting his inheritance. This whole thing is moving along for him to claim his inheritance. Okay, verse 19. We're going to look for the main focus here. Verse 19,

To me, the clear focus of this section is power. Paul piled up the power words in these sentences. Immeasurable greatness, great might, raised from the dead, rule, authority, power, dominion, and who is the beneficiary of this power? To those who believe. It's me. It's you. We benefit from his power. As I was putting my notes together, I said to the Lord, I really needed to hear that. And you do too. There's things in your life that are complicated. There's things in your life that are confusing. There's even things about your understanding about who you are in Christ that are still confusing. You need power. And look, God tells us that's what he gives us. Immeasurable greatness of his power. So comforting. We also need power over that lion heart of ours that is deceiving us. And things go wrong, and it tells us, see, God doesn't really love you. We need the power to say, you be quiet. You go sit in the corner. That is not the truth. These are the kind of things we need power for, is when the enemy is trying to deceive us, when our own heart is trying to deceive us. If you were really his kid, you wouldn't be going through this situation, because look at your friends. Their life is good. Yours isn't. No, that's just a deceitful heart. So this is where we apply the power, the immeasurable greatness of his power. Okay, now as we read these final two verses, I want to remind us of the theme that we've chosen for this study, finding purpose. When you read that, you probably think about your unique purpose, and that's fine. I just said a minute ago, one way to find purpose is praying for others. That is unique to you. But as Paul closes, I want us to think about our united purpose, because we also have a united purpose. And these last two verses are from the NIV, verse 22 and 23.

And so I said I want to talk about our united purpose, and the word here that is used is church, but I want to define it. Otherwise we think about organized religion, or we think about the way the church is used in the news or something like that. So what is the church? Here's a definition. A company of people called out from the world between Pentecost and the rapture, saved by grace and given the unique privilege of being the body of Christ. That's who the church is. We are, first of all, called out from the world. We are the saints that we talked about. We are set apart. We are the body of Christ, and we are to yield to the leadership collectively. This is our united purpose, is to yield to the direction of our head, Jesus Christ. And in this way, we participate in God's purpose. This is his purpose. So we bring our purpose into God's purpose, is to yield to him and to display to the praise of his glory, right? Or the praise of his glorious grace. So there's the end of chapter 1. You're going to dig into chapter 2 next week, and we'll come back and discuss chapter 2. Father in heaven, we just bow our It's to thank you so much for all of these blessings you have given us. Lord, if we don't take the time to identify them and to slow down and to study them, we lose track of them. And so thank you for this opportunity to review and to just really identify and to make it personal to us. And Lord, I thank you for the inspiration for prayer because our prayer lives always need inspiration. And yes, the apostle was praying for that group there, but there's so many things that we can look at as an example. And immediately today, we can find purpose in our lives by praying for the spiritual health of those that we love, those that we care about. Lord, help us to just take these things into our heart and to act upon them. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.