Called by His Will
- David Fairchild
- Jan 24, 2010
- Series: Ephesians
Ephesians 1:1-2: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
This morning we continue our exploration of the great book of Ephesians. Last week we gave a kind of orientation to set the scene and explain some of the overarching themes that run through the book. Today we get to jump in and start with the first two verses, which is Paul’s introduction to the church at Ephesus.
Most of us would have to admit that we don’t give much thought or importance to an opening greeting in an email or letter. Opening remarks are like a necessary speed bump to get to the real reason a person is writing us. In fact, living in an email and text age, the idea of a thoughtful greeting is a bit outdated. And this habit carries over when reading letters in the Bible. We skim over them so we can get to the important stuff.
However, if we do take our time, we start to see how loaded these introductions are with deep gospel truths. In fact, I’d say that what Paul mentions here in these first two verses are a summary of the entire letter. Paul speaks of being called by God’s will and addresses this letter to the “holy ones” or “saints” that are full of faith in Christ and who have grace and peace from God the Father and His Son Jesus who is no less than the Lord of the universe and the promised Messiah of the Old Testament.
For him, words are opportunities to talk about Jesus. In this short space he mentions Jesus three times. This Jesus person seems incredibly important to Him. If we look at the entire first chapter it appears that Paul is caught up in worship. He’s so overwhelmed with these realities that the first 14 verses are one long run-on sentence in the original Greek. He can’t help himself. He’s bursting with the loftiest words about His Savior.
Commentators have mentioned that you’re not supposed to pile words upon words the way Paul has done. But they forgive him because he is a man fully possessed and captured by the One he’s writing about. Paul isn’t thinking about proper grammatical rules. Instead, he’s in chains, imprisoned for his love and devotion to King Jesus, and yet when he writes, he soars. When he speaks about God’s work through Christ it’s like he’s spreading his wings and taking flight.
If someone wrote a letter like this to you, you’d have to ask, “Are you ok?” “What happened to you?” We get kind of embarrassed when people are so effusive with their open declaration of their love for Jesus. It makes us a little uncomfortable doesn’t it? We want people to be more like us, tempered and not overdoing it. Paul would have driven us nuts if we were around him. When Paul wrote this letter it was about 20 years after he met Jesus. Yet time and maturity didn’t cause him to chill out and get in line. In fact, Paul was more impassioned and more excited about Jesus the longer he lived. What causes our excitement for Jesus to plateau and level out? What causes boredom or apathy to creep into our life with Christ?
When we look at the life of Paul, we recognize that an amazing dynamic and power was at work in him. He had a sense of who he was and what his life was for. He had a sure sense of his purpose for living. He believed that everything he was and did was now invested with a power and dynamism. Nothing was accidental and his life was never to be normal. I want to argue that the reason the stranglehold of apathy didn’t cripple Paul was because he was sure of his identity and his calling. Look at what he says in verse 1:
Verse 1a: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God”
A Messenger of Christ
If you know anything of Paul’s life and history, you know how absolutely stunning these words are. For Paul to say that he was a messenger for Jesus was no less than a miracle.
If you’re not familiar with Paul’s background read Acts 7 and 8 to get an idea. He was a religious lion who was trying to devour the church. He was given letters by the Jewish leaders to hunt down, arrest, and if necessary, execute followers of Jesus.
He hated Jesus and he hated Jesus’ people. The reason he hated Jesus and His people was because of what they dared to claim: That everything that God promised to this world and to His people was being accomplished in Jesus. Salvation came through Jesus. The Kingdom was coming through Jesus. The restoration of the entire universe had begun through the grace of Jesus. Morality, bloodline, education, social standing, and religious zeal didn’t profit anything if your heart was not in love with His God’s only Son, Jesus.
They dared to say that God didn’t save you because you kept all the laws. This God was about liberation and freedom and He was cutting them loose from their religious chains. He was giving them something they could never earn, His unmerited and scandalous grace. And this grace was won through the death of Jesus. God came to them in the person of Jesus, and he came to rescue them from their self-righteousness and bondage.
For a Pharisee of Pharisees and a true Jew through and through, this infuriated Paul. All his efforts and all the things he did to earn God’s favor were considered by Christians to be a loss and not a gain. The more zealous Paul became for his religious cause, the more he kicked against God’s grace and message. He was utterly lost in anger, hatred, bitterness and misplaced zeal, until he met the one he hated.
Called by God’s Will
One day, Paul was traveling to Damascus to find more Christians to persecute and Jesus appeared to him. Paul dropped to the ground and Jesus said to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?...I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting” (Acts 9:4-5). Paul got up after this encounter and was blind, but for the first time could really see.
Paul met Jesus. Jesus came to him not because Paul was looking for him, quite the opposite. Jesus came to him and by his will called Paul to himself. Paul came to know the voice of the Lord that day and he was never the same.
He went from being a persecutor of the church, trying to shut their mouths, to the one who was willing to give his life so that he could be a messenger for Jesus. His entire identity was remade when he met Jesus.
He met true beauty, true righteousness and true holiness in person and realized he was nothing in comparison. All he could do was respond to Jesus’ call. Paul spends the rest of his life proclaiming boldly that God is not impressed with our performance, but with the performance of His son. Paul gave himself to tell others that we are not able to save ourselves and it is only God’s grace that will bring us home. Paul once believed that our behavior made us righteous and acceptable to God, and now he writes this letter to the Ephesians to say that it is our faith in Jesus that makes us righteous and our behavior is a result of what we believe.
He was set aflame by this one calling until the day he died. He lived with profound passion. He was utterly mastered and possessed by something greater than himself. Apathy simply didn’t have the soil to grow. Is this our experience with Jesus? Are we arrested and mastered by his calling to come and follow Him?
In a world that produces convenience, comfort and endless consumer choices, where life is safe, easy, sanitized, climate-controlled and plush, apathy is going to be close. It is corrosive to our soul. The most compulsive of shoppers and channel-surfers move from feeling good to feeling nothing.
We are bombarded with images that continuously teach us that our identity is wrapped up in how we look, feel and spend. We are told that our greatest calling in life is to find self-fulfillment and happiness in love relationships and purchases. We are systematically conditioned to lose ourselves in the great machine of economic progress as we play our part as needy addicts looking for a fix to cure our boredom.
Paul had full confidence that he was a messenger of Christ purely by the will of God. If this calling came to him purely by God’s will and not his efforts, it wasn’t up to him to maintain it. It was God’s will to call him to Himself and define the rest of his life. And “will” simply means, God’s desire, choice and pleasure.
To be honest, being called by God’s desire and choice can also cause us to not take ourselves so serious. We can handle ourselves with a little more levity. When we talk to others about how God chose to love us by His own pleasure, we can laugh and say, “I know, it’s crazy isn’t it? I don’t deserve it, but here I am being loved by the maker of the Universe.”
God’s Will is our Defense
Because Paul’s apostleship is by the will of God, he doesn’t have to defend it, God does. He knows who he is because he knows who God is!
Along with Paul, we can say that because we’ve been called to Christ by the will of God, we don’t have to defend it. There is no need to defend our record because God didn’t call us to Christ because of our record but by His grace.
This is why Paul could confess that he was the greatest of sinners and yet an Apostle with full authority at the same time. It’s God’s will for him to speak for God, not his.
When others slander us or gossip against us, we can say with Paul, “I’m not the defender of my righteousness, Jesus is. And if you knew how much of a sinner I really was, you’d understand why all I have to count on is Him.”
If Paul thought God was going to love him based on his record, and that record included killing God’s children, he would never have the confidence and assurance he has. Grace means everything to him. It is the rock upon which he stands. He has nothing else to turn to now but trusting God’s grace.
God’s Will is our Confidence
Because Paul’s calling is by the will of God, he now has the right to speak to speak the gospel to others. It isn’t because of how eloquent he is; it’s because it is God’s will that he is a minister of the gospel. This gives him great courage to confront, rebuke or encourage someone because it’s not his authority that he’s coming in, it’s God’s.
It’s the same for you and me if we believe we’re called by God’s will. We can now approach one another without fear of rejection. Whether someone accepts our words isn’t ultimate any longer. Our love for them isn’t dependent on their acceptance, but God’s choice and pleasure. And since he accepted us purely by His grace, we can now love others without strings attached. This kind of confidence in God’s will creates a new community of people who are no longer held hostage by one another, but can love each other freely, in and out of good times.
This new identity transformed how Paul saw himself. He simply trusted God’s description of him over his own. And the effect of that new identity changed how he saw others.
Seeing With New Eyes
Verse 1b: “To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus”
For Paul to address believers in Ephesus as “saints,” or more specifically “holy ones,” would have been completely unthinkable and offensive to a good religious Jew. Paul has the audacity to give these pagan-born gentiles a name and description reserved for the true Israel of God most often associated with the priests of God.
How in the world could he call them “holy ones?” In a place where sin was glorified in politics, philosophy, entertainment, and religion, Paul calls them “saints.” If there was anything that Paul would have hated more than Christians, it would have been unclean, sin-infested pagans. But God’s grace and calling truly did change his vision. He could now see what only those who have been saved by grace can see, the true identity of one another.
To be “saints” to be “holy ones” meant that you were set apart, consecrated, different. Looking at their past and customs, a Jew would never consider these people set apart. But Paul did. Why?
Paul realized that their being set apart was not due to how moral and religious they were. Their being set apart was solely because God had made them holy, made them saints, and by his grace set them apart from the world for himself. Paul realized that being holy to get God’s favor was nothing more than oppression. Because God had set his love on them, because God gave them His grace and opened their hearts to believe the Gospel, they already had His favor. Now all they had to do was live out of their new identity. He could see them for who they really were.
This is not only the reason Paul can dare call them “saints.” It’s also the reason that he can assure them of the grace and peace they’ve been given.
He sees them as the “holy ones” and then assures them of what they already have.
If you’ve haven’t seen the movie Avatar, you’re one of only a few here. If you have, you probably remember the theme of “seeing” in the movie. One of the ways that they were included into the community of the Na’vi was how they saw each other. When they could see beyond surface appearance and were able to look deep into who each other truly were, they would say, “I see you.” As corny as that sounds (and it is a little corny), there is something communally profound about being able to see each other for who we truly are, not just how we appear outwardly. When we look deep into a person and remember who they are in Christ we, in essence, are seeing the real person.
This is how God sees us. We are already accepted by Him and righteous before Him. And fully loved and accepted by His love.
How do we see each other? Do we see each other in all of our failures and flaws? Do we see only the standards we fail to keep? Do we hold our record of wrongs against each other? Or do we, like Paul, fight to see each other the way Jesus does?
You see, fighting for a true vision of ourselves will always lead us to truly see each other. If we don’t believe our new identity is given by grace and secured by grace, then we won’t see each other with eyes of grace. Instead, each failure is an opportunity to gloat over how righteous we are in comparison.
Are we seeing each other with eyes of grace? Are we looking past the failures and fighting to see Christ in us. Are we seeing each other how our Father sees us and how we want others to see us?
The Foundation of our Call and Identity
Verse 2: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
If we find ourselves struggling with our calling to Christ, our identity and how we see others, we have to realize what we have and where it came from. Grace and peace came from God, our Father. Not our disappointed judge, but our Father! And from Jesus Himself, not from our efforts. The Father and Son have sent us their grace and peace.
Paul is fighting to form their identity. This is the purpose of the letter: that they have grace and peace from God our Father and from Jesus.
Instead of using the Law as a manipulative tool to get them to change so they no longer bother him, he’s speaking gospel assurance to them because he loves them. He wants them to be fully who they are. When we are motivated by frustration towards one another, inevitably we’re not going to speak grace and peace. Oh, we might be slick enough to throw in gospelism, but the truth is that it’s not grace.
When we reject each other or avoid one another, grace and peace are not at work softening us. You see, if God gave us his grace then we can give grace. If God gave us peace with Him, then we can give words of peace to one another.
Because of grace and peace that have come from God, we can now love each other so much that we fight to remind each other of who we already are and what we already have. We need to continually speak words to remind us of grace and peace we have from God.
We need to fight to overthrow our past opinion of ourselves and that means speaking words and grace and peace.
If we believe we’re saved by grace then we’ll also believe that anyone can be saved. There is no sin and no one who is beyond the saving grace of God. This gives us hope and a new vision for others who don’t know God. We’re not spiritual superiors to anyone. We are fellow sinners who need God’s grace just like everyone does, and we are simply grateful God has given it to us.
How was that grace and peace won for us?
Jesus Christ the Lord, the second person of the Trinity, through whom all creation was made, humbled himself and came to us. We weren’t looking for him. He came to us and instead of demanding that we straighten up and get with it, He lived in our place. He experienced all the temptations we experience, all the disappointment and sorrow, all the betrayal and pain we do, but He refused to give in. He didn’t sin. He stayed faithful to God for us. He came to be a substitute for us so that he could, by his suffering on the cross, become the curse of sin for us. The curse that the Law of God demanded, He became.
Instead of peace, a war was waged upon Him at the cross. God’s justice came down upon Him and crushed Him as He stood in our place, He took our punishment.
Jesus became a curse and swallowed our war so that He could give us grace and peace. So that we can now, remembering where it came from, can give grace and peace to one another.
Kaleo, the holy ones of God, grace and peace has been give to you by God the Father and by our Lord Jesus Christ.
0 Comments | Login to Post Comments