“Knowing Who You Are”

If you have your Bible with you this morning, I'd like you to take it and find Ephesians Chapter 1.  If you would like to use one of those blue pew Bibles in front of you, you can find that on Page 976 and we will read just a couple of verses this morning as we go back to the front of this book and began a bit of a walk through it.  I trust that we will find it helpful and that maybe we will learn something new about for some of us a very familiar book and some few of you a very new book or letter is the better name for what it is.

Every year when you would report to football camp at college you had a contract.  The contract consisted of two things: One was how much you were supposed to weigh and the other was how fast you could run ¼ mile and how far you could run in 12 minutes.  Based on your position you were given your times and if you could not do those things and if you were overweight you were considered out of shape, and they had a thing for those who reported to summer camp out of shape that happened after each 2 a day practice and they lovingly named it postmortem.  [Laughter]   I've been working on my shape lately and I've discovered round is a shape.  [Laughter]  It's a whole lot easier shape to get in after a certain age.

But this book is about shaping us today, the whole thing will be, and as we go through this first part, this introduction, I want you to think about what it means to be shaped by someone or something.  Now, wives, I'm not talking about you shaping your husband and husbands, I'm not talking about you shaping your wives.  Most of us are guilty of listening to sermons for someone else.  It's very easy to listen that way, but God would have you listen for yourself.  The whole subject of the first part of the letter is knowing who you are and we begin with that this morning.  All I want to do is read the first two verses.  How the writer of the letter addresses the recipients of the letter because in these very plain words is a whole weight of meaning.

Ephesians 1, Verse 1:

Eph 1:1  Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus:

Eph 1:2  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

So we want to let this letter shape us.  We want it to have an influence on our lives and I want to help you listen to it as you have never listened to it before in your life.  We are going to look at four simple things that will help us lay the groundwork for this letter shaping us.  Its shaping us a reality of the letter in which it was written to learn to listen as if you have never heard it before and then come back to how it shapes us.  

Paul founded the church in Ephesus.  Let me give you just a little bit of background.  On his first missionary journey, he went through Ephesus, they asked him to stay for awhile, he declined because he wanted to go somewhere else and be there for a feast.  He came back later, came through and he decided to stay with these people at Ephesus.  He was kicked out… well, he left the synagogue because the Jews wouldn't hear and he lectured for about 2 years in the Hall of Tyrannus.  It says that all Asia heard the gospel because of Paul's ministry there in Ephesus.  But there were a number of things that happened in this city.  I'm going to tell you about it, and then I want to tell you about the city because these are real people, this is a real letter written by a real person to real people.  There is a great theater in Ephesus.  Some of our people in the church have actually been in the excavations of that theater in Paul's day, and something else is there, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Temple of Artemis or the Temple of Diana, a great fertility or sex goddess.  They've uncovered many things about this temple.  They've uncovered the alter and excavations in recent years and it is larger than the alter of the Temple of Zeus.  It is very significant in this city.  This was the key city in this part of Asia.  Well, this theater seated about 24,000 people and the power of the gospel had entered into this pagan city and people began to be converted.  They trusted Christ.  They had a time where they brought all their books of magic and witchcraft together and they burned them and what they burned was worth a great sum of money, and out of that we get great applications of doctrine like backward masking on the records of the Beatles to find out the satanic messages they sent us.  [Laughter]  No, we don't get that.  That was a little bit of sensational message.  When you play a record backwards, that was actually the church giving the first invention of hip-hop! [Laughter]  They thought they invented, we know we invented it.  But so many people were converted the silversmiths began to lose work because they would make shrines and gods and altars related to the temple worship of Diana.  And one of the leaders of the men began to make a stink about it.  He said, "These guys who have come in here, this Paul and these gospel preachers, guys, they are taking away our business."  And it began to get stirred up and a huge crowd got all motivated and mob rule took over and they didn't even know, the Bible says, what they were meeting for, and this huge group came into this theater.  Paul wanted to go and address them and the leaders would not let him go in because they would have torn him limb  from limb.  Finally, someone tried to speak to them who was a Jew and when they found out he was a Jew, they got so upset they began to shout for about 2 hours, "Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians." And finally the city councilmen came and got control  of them and said, "Listen, we don’t even know what we're here for today.  We're confused and we're going to be accused of starting a riot," and he dispersed the crowd.

The power of the gospel began to shape individuals in that city, and it began to shape the city.  Paul founded a church there, but let's think about this city for a minute because that's what is going to help us listen to the letter.  I've mentioned this theatre.  Can you imagine a 3-tiered theater that seats 24,000 people.  It was 495 feet in diameter.   And they thought when they built Rupp Arena that was something special!  It's nothing new.  It's been built that way for centuries.  But when you were there at the harbor, the harbor is now 4 miles away because of the silted in river mouth that ran through Ephesus or by it, but  the waves of the sea came up to the Temple of Diana and it was built so fantastic out of solid marble, that it was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.  You moved past it down this road that went around this theater and a marketplace, and this particular road was 35-feet wide and huge columns on both sides of which there are remains today.  After it went past that, it narrowed down and had lovely fountains all the way out the road, all the way out of town.  You passed the library, another small theater, you passed the middle and upper-class homes that were built on the side of a mountain some of which even had heated floors and running water.  Ephesus would have been a neat town to grow up in.  It was one of the happening places. 

Suppose you were there.  Suppose you were a gentile.  You had no real religious background other than what you knew from Diana or the great Artemis of the Ephesians; the multi-breasted sex goddess.  And that's how you grew up. By the way, when you walked down the streets you also passed the houses of prostitution.  It was just an amazing place. For some really weird reason Paul decided, rather God decided to plant a church there.  Now that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  They already had their religion.  It seems like they would be antagonistic to this thing of Christ coming in and taking over, but they did it.  Suppose you grew up there.  Suppose you were about oh, 16 or 17 the first time Paul came through and you just heard rumors of that.  And Apollos and Priscilla and Aquilla were left behind and you began to hear stirrings of people believing in this Jesus who once they had crucified and was raised from the dead, and you got curious about this and you began to see changes in those people's lives.  And sure enough, some of those Christians got to know you and they began to share with you this gospel that this Jesus died for the sins of all mankind on the cross and whoever would believe in him could have everlasting life and you began to watch these people's lives, you sensed that God did something in you; you cast your faith on him and now you are a Christian, and the Apostle Paul comes to town and he begins to teach and preach and you just catch the tail end of what he taught.  And 5 years later you get word a letter is coming; a letter from the fellow who founded the church.  This man who was an apostle of Jesus Christ and you want to hear it.

What I want you to do is to begin to think of setting yourself back.  You only hear words like this when you are sitting in a building like this.  When you are dressed like you are dressed this morning; when you are sitting with the people, and, believe it or not, most of you, except Robert and Rosa, they always move every week, are sitting in the same spot!  [Laughter]  But, you…. Sorry…. Rosa said she might go to sleep, I told her I'd call her out, so that was it!  You sit in the same spot.  And what happens is we begin to take things for granted.  How many times have you read or heard read these very opening verses and your mind is saying, "Oh, yeah, that's the Bible, Oh, yeah, that's Paul saying "Hello," telling them who he is; telling them who they are and he's going to write them a letter, whoopteedo! Is the letter shaping you in any way? Having any impact on your life?   You see, this reality in Ephesus, the power of Christ came in and it changed the city.  I want you to listen as you've never heard it before and let this letter begin to shape your life.  Now, for us as a church, it needs to shape us too.  I've been spending a lot of time reading and studying about the church and our culture.  We have a lot of tradition in what we do.  Some of it we are very comfortable with.  One of the things that is read and written a lot about is worship music, what that is.  It's really strange how we get accustomed to a certain type of music.  That's why every Christian who has the capacity ought to always travel internationally and hear Christian music in another culture and to find out that hymns written in the 1500 to the 1800s aren't the only kind of Christian music, and contemporary American Christian music isn't the only kind of Christian music, and sitting in pews and worshipping in nice buildings with Powerpoints behind us and air conditioning and lights isn't the only kind of place we worship.  What I'm saying is I want you to hear this letter as if we got it for the first time and we begin to take in what God is saying about salvation, about us as people, and sinners and saints, about God Himself, and how he does work in the lives of his people and what the church is really supposed to be. 

Because I find when I come to the Bible, if I don’t really work at it, I come with a headset on and glasses and I know what to expect from that book and that's a poor way to read.  We need to come to this book for what it is, the Word of God, and say "God, speak to me, shape me."

Now, I want to show you shaping influencing and shaping power that are woven throughout the book.  How does a book like this begin to shape us?  Obviously it is scripture, it is inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, but it's writer demonstrates by model how we are to influence others and how we are influenced.  There are three shaping influences woven through this book and as we get to each one of them I want you to see that they are intentionally positioned and put straight to us to shape us, not to just go into our minds.

1.                 The first is intercession. You can find Paul's intercession for these people, his praying for these people in Chapter 1 and Chapter 3, specifically.  But what that does, it teaches us how to pray for one another.  We'll get to those details, but he has found that's the way you shape people and God shapes us through the prayers of others and through our own prayers.

2.                 The second shaping influence that is a characteristic of this book are the bold affirmations it states about God.  Now, God is not what we think Him to be.  Our thoughts do not determine the nature of God any more than my thoughts determine the nature of who you are. And yet we have assumed so many things inside and outside the church.  Now, how many people have assumed that God is a God of love without any reckoning of scripture whatsoever?  When the fact is we wound not know that God is a God of love had we not had the scripture that says "God is love."  We can't assume the nature of God.  There are bold affirmations about Him, about His power, about His church, about how He saves, about what He wants His church to be.

3.                 There is personal application.  God walks right down into our lives and He talks to us about our walk in this world with Christ.  He talks to us about our wedded life; about how we get along with our spouse and how we treat them.  He talks to us about our children and how we parent them and how children respond to their parents.  He talks to us about our work, what kind of employee are we?  Do we work as pleasing the eyes of men or pleasing the eyes of God?  And he talks to us about our warfare, how to deal with the fact that there is a spiritual unseen realm and there are demonic and satanic things that go on.  He's not weird about that.

He just tells us how to deal with life as it really is, and if we receive the prayers, and we understand the bold affirmations, but we don't do the personal application, we put ourselves in a very dangerous spot.

So, what is the shaping power?  Can I be shaped? Some days, presently, I am very fed up with my life.  Now, that's a wonderful thing for the pastor to tell you, isn't it?  I want more!  I genuinely, truly want more.  I know enough about God that there is more and sometimes I can get a little discouraged, depressed and despairing over the productivity, the fruitfulness, the changingness of my life and then I back up and realize, "Your problem, Tony, is you are focusing on you and not the life-changer."  So he shapes us by His power and that is the power of creation.  In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  He uses the creation word three times in this epistle, in this letter.  In Chapter 2, Verse 10, He talks about creating us for good works, so I don't have the power to change, but God has the power to do exceedingly, abundantly above all that we ask or think according to one of Paul's prayers and He is creating us anew.  He's writing a poem for our lives.  He's creating a single new humanity, the church.  He's taking prejudice and racial differences apart and He's putting us together so that in eternity every tribe, tongue and nation will be praising God before his throne. And third, He's recreating us in the image of God, that image that was broken and marred by sin's corruption, to true righteousness and holiness.

Now, before we get to the details of today, you need to consider if you have any interest in being shaped.  Do you have any desire for God to come in with the hand of a potter, scoop your life up and plop you down on his potter's wheel and let it spin and Him begin to do the shaping.  His hands are strong and tender.  His hands come at the operation of his knowledge knowing everything about your life circumstantially, experientially, past, present and future, and His Word tells us for those who trusted Christ, He is in the business of rearranging our lives.  Are you set in your way?  Do you like having your hands on the steering wheel or would you like for Jesus to drive your life?

Let's look at a couple of things.  We need to know who we are and who Jesus is if we are going to be shaped by these influences and by the power of God.  Let's look at Verse 1:

Eph 1:1  Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints…

I can identify three subjects: I can identify Paul, I can identify Jesus and I can identify you, us, the recipient or the Ephesians, but it is to us, now, it's not just to them, but what we want to look at first is us, the recipients, do we know who we are? And because the letter says it is….

To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus:

Eph 1:2  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The first thing I know about me, and I know about you is that you are a recipient.  That's a wonderful thing to know about you as a human.  There is a sense in which, and this is a literal sense, not a make-believe that everything you have you have received.  Did you…. Well, I can't say that, can I?  I started to say did you determine the color of your hair?  [Laughter]  Let's see, where else could I go?  [Laughter] You didn't determine your parents, did you?  You didn't determine that you would be here alive on this earth at this particular time.  You don't determine if your heart is going to work or if your lungs are going to breathe.  Everything you have you have received and the simplicity of this greeting, not only that he is writing a letter to us, but this grace and peace comes to us from God positions us to know who we are and the more we are clear on the fact that we are recipients, we are cognizant that we are humans created in the image of God with potential that is far greater than we have ever achieved, but we are still humans, then we are set to begin to learn some things about us to define and know who is dependent upon who.

Second, we find not only are we recipients, but he says to the saints who are at Ephesus.  Doug and I were talking one day and he told me of a fellow who did this, so I'm going to ask a couple of questions.  You have to participate and I'm not trying to embarrass anyone.  If you don't want to participate, let's see…. What will happen to you? Nothing!  If you consider…. If you consider yourself a Christian simply just put your hand up and set it back down.  Alright.  Do you consider yourself a disciple, put your hand up and set your hand back down.  We have a problem. How many of you consider yourselves a saint?  We have another problem.  You see, in reality there is no such thing as a Christian that is not a disciple and a Christian that is not a saint.  What? Was Paul writing this letter to the super spiritual guys at Ephesus?  Was her writing the letter to those who memorized more scripture than the others, who gave more money to the church, who had a position in the church as pastor or leader?  Who was he writing it to?  To the saints who are at Ephesus.  This is what we do with the Bible when we come to it.  We have read into it from history and the mistakes of men and our bent to doing something for our own salvation, that, oh, I can't be called a saint because I'm not doing enough good stuff.  The word saint means holy.  How about if I asked you if you were holy, would you raise your hand?  My dear friend, holiness in the scripture, to a person, is never first your behavior, it is first what you are in relation to God.  Holiness has to do with being separated, being placed out of one place to another, being set aside and dedicated to God, and you don't do that yourself, God does that to you.  Being a saint is what God does to you.  Now, he expects that after we have been sainted, set aside by His grace, He expects that the transformation of the Holy Spirit goes to work and we become more and more practically holy through our lives as he explains later on in this book, but the people he's addressing, he's not addressing them because of their behavior, but because of their identity.  He wants them to know that they are God's set apart, chosen people; not merely citizens of Ephesus who worship Diana, but those God has picked up out of his love and grace, and set them down in Christ.  You are a recipient, you are a saint, but you are an earthly citizens, the saints who are at, or in, Ephesus.  To us, he would say the saints who are in LaGrange.

Still uncomfortable with being called a saint?  You shouldn't be.  My dear friend, learn that you are a recipient, learn that it is not by your works that you are saved, but according to His righteous, He has saved us.  Salvation is a gift that Christ bought for you.  It is not something you get by your moral status.  Christianity is not mere moral instruction.  You are a recipient, you are a saint and you are an earthly citizen.  What does that mean?  Well, I've got things a little out of order, to tell you this, but let's go ahead and put the others up there.

·                     You are an earthly citizen.

·                     You believe in Jesus Christ.

·                     You are in Christ.

One of the things we must recognize about who you are is you have dual citizenship.  You are a citizen of this country and a resident of this county or one of the neighboring counties.  You are also in Christ, seated in the heavenlies.  Your citizenship, Paul said in Philippians, is there from where you await the return of the Lord Jesus.  You have not a foot in both worlds, you are totally here living and you are totally there positionally because you are a saint, you are in Christ, you are saved and you're safe.  But, presently you are working out that salvation with fear and trembling before God, but it is His will that is working in you to see that that will take place.  And when we get so earthy and earthly we forget the heavenly, we drift.  But when we get so heavenly that we want to ignore the earth, we drift the other way.  We are to be salt and light, and you believe in Jesus Christ.  It says "to the saints who are in Ephesus and faithful."  That can mean faithful in your activity or that you have faith in Christ.  I tend to lean to that side.  You are believers in Christ.  That is the mark of you and you are in Him.  What you have is Christ's and it can never be taken way.  That's who you are!  So, knowing who you are lets you know what you need. 

Eph 1:2  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you know what grace is? I really do not have a way to explain grace.  I grew up in a Christian home, was baptized at 7.  Had a period of drifting for a few years, went to college, had a friend come on the college football team my sophomore year who was walking with Christ like no one I've ever seen.  He had great influence on my life, simply invited me to go to church.  I went to church with him and immediately fell in love with Jesus.  That's all I can say.  I fell in love with Jesus.  I recognized His love for me in fresh and new ways.  My faith in Him was deeply examined.  I went through some very serious doubts but this church and this particular person helped me greatly in a passion for Christ.  It wasn't but months after that, that God called me into ministry to the shock of my life!  However, the particular church I was in complimented my nature in a negative way.  I am extremely legalistic.  Everything in life, in my natural bent, is black and white.  It is right or it's wrong.  Life isn't that way.  And Christianity is not a religion of legalism to where if you do these things, God likes you. If you do these, God is not going to like you.  Well, the church preached the gospel of Christ, but they also preached legalism, to the point where girls in that church could not wear pants and did not wear pants and you would get really fussed at if you did.  And, if your hair was any longer than mine is right now, as a boy, then, well, you heard about it.  So, when I first came to the church out of the football team from Western, and the way I looked and dressed and acted, I was a rude awakening to some of the people in the church.  Probably wish I had been more of an awakening to them than they were to me because they didn't catch my young freedom and enthusiasm for Christ, I caught their legalism.  Because, you see, as a player on a football team, I knew if I did exactly what the coach wanted me to do and did it well, I got rewarded,  so, I figured God was the same way.  So, I took this intense mentality with me, and I'm talking about in-tense!  You're talking about a guy who was like a snapping turtle when he got onto something, I don't let go.  And I worked and I worked and I worked for God.  I mean I was good at it, too!  Quiet times, living morally, all the while totally not recognizing that when people began to dress differently than me, talk differently than me, live differently than me, I was very accusatory towards them because now I was better than them because I lived for God and they didn't.  I understood mentally the definition of grace, but I didn't understand it experientially. 

I went into ministry, finished seminary, first full-time position in a good, large church; went from there to my first pastorate.  By that time we had two children.  Moved to Florida in 1989.  We had our third child.  At that time we had 3 girls and this legalism thing, every time I jumped through hoops, the next hoop got higher.  And life was getting real!  Our kids were growing up and I was the pastor of a little church plant, and money was sparse and there were pressures all around and I kept wanting to do right for God and the more my legalistic mind kicked in, the more I felt like I did bad for God, and then I began to see the sinfulness of my own heart and I saw I couldn't overcome this, and all the while I'm a Christian and a pastor and I'm getting confused in my mind.  I understand grace, but experientially I'm living in the world of works, and I feel guilt piling up on me and I'm looking at verses like this and looking at other verses in the Bible and I'm thinking "it doesn’t match up, it doesn’t work that way!"  Because I wanted to be good.  And God just kept raising the hoops.  And, as Michael Horton says in his book, "Putting Amazing Back Into Grace," jumping through hoops is for circus animals.  I was a circus animal obeying the commander of my own legalistic mind.  So God just raised it high enough until one day I tried to jump through and I landed right here, crunch, and He just let me hang.  Thank God He let me hang!  Finally, finally, I began to experientially realize the sacrifice of Christ and what it was and that I couldn't be good enough for him, and He, in salvation, was not asking for one iota of obedience in action, just the obedience of faith, not an obedience of faith that caused me to be born again, but faith that believed God through Christ caused me to be born again.  Free, sovereign, above all things, greater than the sin that was within me, realizing that my own legalism and trying to please God was sin.  "God cannot be served with human hands as if He needed anything," the Bible says.  And so by His grace through an extremely difficult time, I began to taste the goodness of God and my identity became a bit clearer.  Grace to you, Tony…. No, no, no, don't give me something back, son, because you have nothing to give but your sin.  Grace to you and peace!

There is one thing a legalist never has and that is peace because they are always trying to balance the scale.  Oh…. Peace floods your heart when you finally bow before Christ and say, "Jesus, I have nothing to bring, I trust that you died to take care of all of my sins, save me." And you realize it is a free gift, not that you work for, not that you go through a list of do's and don’ts to get or keep, it's grace all the way, and in that grace we are justified before God and then we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ .  We are no longer God's enemy because of our sin and we have peace in our hearts because of the work Christ has done.  Who you are let's you know what you need.  And my dear friend, you can't be shaped if you don't know what you need.  I was in extremely good spiritual shape on the outside.  There were people who looked at me and thought I had it together, and I, in turn, would look at them, I would never say it, but I would look at them and look down my nose at them because they didn't have it together, and that is exactly the opposite of what a Christian should do.  We then who are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak.  I was really the weak one.  I was standing on a foundation of what I did.  They were standing on a foundation of what Jesus did.  That's grace!  But if you don't know that, you don't know what you need and it is a humbling, even humiliating thing to come to Jesus at the cross and say," I can't save myself, you must do it, I cannot."  Salvation by grace through faith alone crushes all the willfulness out of the human heart and then exalts the magnitude of the goodness and the grace and the majesty of God and you finally begin to know what it is to be changed.

So, finally, this letter and in all of life, we must recognize it's about Jesus and it's to you.  You are the object of this letter.  It's coming to you.  Jesus is the subject.  Look at the first three verses:

Eph 1:1  Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus:

Eph 1:2  Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Three times in the first verse he mentions Jesus.  The more we think about ourselves and our performance, the less we get.  The more we think about Christ and His performance that's perfect, the more we are freed.

So, three questions:

1.       Are you clear, absolutely clear on who you are? 

      You are a recipient, everything you have comes from God.  Why are we so reluctant to recognize that?

2.       Are you clear on what you need? 

      All of us need grace and peace.  Do you have that? Have you really come, throw away the cultural Christianity, have you come face-to-face with Christ the Creator, the Lord, the Redeemer of the Universe, have you come face-to-face with Him and said, "Only you can save me, would you do it?"  You need grace and peace.

3.  And finally, are you clear on who Jesus is?