Hope. Thank God for hope. After a year most of us would like to forget, and we hope by God that 2021 will be a better year than the last. 

 

Do you feel that way? I suspect many of us do. The past year was filled with challenges from beginning to end. We endured, though we didn’t like it. We persevered, but few of us got ahead. 

 

Mostly we sat in semi-isolation or worked from makeshift home offices. We went cold turkey from a lack of sports to watch and put on masks so we could go out and remain socially distanced from everyone else. 

 

It has been necessary, but frustrating. With vaccines on the way, hope swells in our chests and pushes us into a new year that may become something closer to “normal.” 

 

Today’s text is the introduction of a letter Paul wrote to a church that faced trials of its own. Yet, Paul reminded them that with their hope fixed on Jesus, they still could fill their lives with days of praise. [DD] [DD] [DD]

 

 

 

Ephesians 1:3-14 is written as one incredibly complex sentence – a grammatically challenging but breathless call for Christian people to give thanks all that God has done. [DD] Fortunately, English translations tend to break the sentence into more digestible bits.

 

Paul begins with multiple reminders of divine beneficence, blessings that come through Jesus Christ. Throughout the text, “in him” and “in Christ” are key words. The work that has changed our lives and can change others through us has come through the one we call Jesus, the Christ.

 

Paul rejoices that God has blessed us in Christ with “every spiritual blessing” (v. 3), and the first of these is that God chose to adopt us as children through the work of Christ (vv. 4-6). Theological traditions that believe in predestination depend heavily on this text, interpreting it to suggest that God has chosen certain persons to be saved and others lost, even before the foundation of the world. [DD]

 

A strong view of divine predestination is highly problematic. Among other things it robs humankind of any kind of meaningful freedom while also undermining the missionary imperative of the gospel. That mission mandate is taught far more clearly than the few ambiguous references used to support a belief that God predetermines our destiny before birth. 

 

If God has already chosen every person who will be saved, there is little point in spreading the gospel, because God would need no help from us. In the early part of the mid-19th century, Baptists engaged in a heated conflict between “Particular Baptists,” who believed that Christ died only for those particular “elect” persons, and “General Baptists,” who believed that Christ died for all. The missionary vs. anti-missionary controversy split many churches, sometimes resulting in side-by-side “Missionary” and “Primitive” (anti-missionary) Baptist churches. [DD]

 

Some non-predestinarians deal with the troublesome text by appealing to divine omniscience, asserting that God knows who will choose to trust Christ, but there is a better way to read the text. The point is not that God has foreordained Charles and Chantrese to be saved and adopted as God’s children, while rejecting Maggie and Marvin. Paul is writing to the church – to a group of people who have chosen of their own free will to follow Christ. God has in fact foreordained that every person who trusts in Christ can be saved, can become a part of the church, can experience all the blessings that God wants his children to have.

 

God saves us not only as individuals, but as a community of faith. Paul is not teaching that God’s eternal plan has a roster of predestined believers, but that God’s eternal providence has a place for every person who chooses to accept the gift of divine grace. Those who believe this cannot help but give praise to God.

 

 

 

Following his introduction of the theme in vv. 3-6, Paul begins three of the remaining sections of this lengthy 12-verse sentence with the words “in him.” Some translations substitute the word “Christ” for “him” as a means for clarifying that the pronoun always refers back to Christ.

 

In vv. 7-10, Paul affirms that in Christ we have redemption. We have forgiveness. We have access to an amazing grace that is beyond our comprehension. We are all guilty of sin, guilty of rebellion against God’s way, guilty of living for self with little thought for others. At some point, most of us have been guilty of lying, cheating, lusting, and worse. 

 

And yet Paul says, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us” (vv. 7-8a). We could never make up for our wrongdoings on our own, but Christ has declared us forgiven. In some marvelous way far beyond our comprehension, we can experience redemption through his blood – the forgiveness of our sins. 

 

The word Paul uses for “forgiveness” (aphesis) is the technical Greek term that refers to a legal pardon. It is a mystery to us that God would love us so and take pleasure in redeeming us – and no wonder that Paul would celebrate it. 

 

 

 

Paul goes on to make the remarkable claim that God not only loves us enough to save us and adopt us as children, but also has set aside a surprising inheritance for those who set their hope in Christ: that we “might live for the praise of his glory” (vv. 11-12).

 

Paul was born into a Jewish family. He would have grown up hearing or reading about the inheritance of the land that God had promised to Israel, but through Christ he had learned of a greater inheritance, an eternal one, offered to those who trust in God. This inheritance doesn’t come when someone else dies, in the normal order of events. The inheritance belongs to us even now, and we experience it in full when we die. [DD]

 

Paul makes a point of saying that this is one reason God has planned such a glorious future for us – that we might be motivated to live our lives in praise to God: “so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory” (v. 12). 

 

Paul believed the first generation of Christian believers had a notable privilege and a special responsibility. They were the first to set their hopes on Christ, and their lives of praise would set a pattern for others to follow as they called them to lives of faith. Many generations of believers later, we share the same hope and the same calling to bear witness through our own grateful living. 

 

If you’ve ever helped to put shingles on a house, you learned that every row of shingles is a guide for those that come after. The man who first instructed me in the art of roofing first cut a piece of scrap shingle to the proper length so I could check that each succeeding row was just the right distance above the one below: he called the handy guide a “preacher.” 

 

In a similar fashion, every generation of Christians provides a pattern for the next to follow, and sometimes we need a good “preacher” to keep us straight. If we would lead those who come after us rightly, then we will lead them to offer praise to God, not just with their words, but with their actions. 

 

We don’t praise God through Sunday worship alone, but when we show love to a child on Monday, when we feed the hungry on Tuesday, when we listen to a hurting friend on Wednesday. We praise God with our lives when we visit the sick on Thursday, when we repair a toilet on Friday, even when we enjoy wholesome family recreation on Saturday. Because Jesus Christ has filled our hearts with amazing grace, we fill our lives with days of praise. [DD]

 

 

 

All of this sounds good, but we know that there are days when we don’t feel so full of praise. Some days, we may question how real this eternal inheritance might be. Paul’s response was to insist that God offers a taste of heaven on earth as we open our hearts and lives to the presence of the Holy Spirit that marks us like an indelible seal. 

 

The Spirit is the “pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people,” Paul said, “to the praise of his glory” (vv. 13-14).

 

Jesus no longer walks with us as he walked with Mary and Martha and Peter and John. Even in Paul’s day, Jesus was no longer present in that physical way. But Paul believed Christ’s promise to be present through the Spirit. Paul had experienced the touch of God’s Spirit, and he believed that the Spirit’s touch today is the guarantee of God’s embrace tomorrow. 

 

The Spirit of Christ in our lives works not only as an internal guide to direct our living, but also as a reminder of our hope that God can continue to sustain us even in difficult days. 

 

In Jesus Christ we have redemption from our sins. We have an inheritance in eternity. We have a present comforter and guide, and we have hope that no matter what comes, we can trust that the God who loves us has good things in store, an inheritance beyond our imagining.