God The Son Series

We are still at the beginning of working our way through one of the most amazing books of the Bible, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. It presents the most beautiful picture of the church and the Christian life, a picture that really stretches your mind.

The last two weeks we have been working through verses 3-14 of the first chapter. In those verses, Paul says that the Christians in Ephesus have been blessed by God with “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”.

He said, “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” It’s not ‘will bless us, some day.’ It’s not, might bless us. Every blessing in the heavenly blessing is here now, for us. Is that worth looking for? Have you tasted that yet?

Read into the passage a bit and you start to see what he means. And it takes some work because the grammar is very difficult. But the rest of the passage lists off things that God has done for us. And it soon becomes clear that when he says “every blessing in heaven,” Paul means our relationship with God himself. God is the blessing. And Paul lays out the blessings in order of blessings from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Last week we looked a bit at the Trinitarian nature of God, one God in three persons. The different persons of the trinity work in different ways, so they are different, but they are so incredibly united. God, in Himself, is pure love, perfect unity, in diversity.

In our last Wednesday night Bible study, we went a bit deeper into the Trinity, working from the Apostles’ Creed. I pulled out a list of verses from John’s Gospel in which Jesus told us what his relationship with God the Father was like. John’s gospel gives us a peek right into the Trinity, and it was just the most beautiful picture of love, with God the Father and God the Son honoring each other, totally transparent with each other, yielding to each other. I’m still glowing a bit inside from the discussion we had. God invites us into that relationship. He calls the church to live like that together. Since we are created in his image, we find our destiny when we learn to live together like that. And that is one big blessing. We can learn to build that kind of love together.

If you were here for the Italian night last night, you had a taste of it. I don’t mean the mostachiolli, although that was good. I mean that you could feel that the room had all these different people in it, some of us very different, but there was love flowing through them and we were one family of God. Did anyone get a taste of that last night? What a blessing.

But we can go farther. It is so important for us as God’s people to sit down in small groups and unite our hearts by studying God’s word together. That gives us a united foundation, one heart and one mind, for serving God effectively. It provides a chance to build the trust to risk coming closer and going deeper. We should all be in some kind of a small group where those connections are made. And if that sounds like a commercial for our Wednesday night Bible Study, it is. I want us to build a solid, united foundation in faith.

Well, Paul goes through the three persons of the Trinity in our passage. Two weeks ago we looked at the blessings that come to us from God the Father. Nobody can list them all, but Paul picked out the way that God has planned good for us from the creation of the world, has been working steadily and with complete wisdom to bring his plans to fruition, never settling for second best, always, like a good father, wanting the best for his children. That’s a great blessing and I hope we all get to know God as Father and learn to submit to the wisdom of his plan for our lives. That’s a blessing. Paul focuses on God the Father in verses 3-6 of our text.

Today we move on to God the Son, but something different happens now. The next section of our passage is verses 7-12, but Paul has God, the Son, in the middle of every action of God in the entire passage in a way that the others aren’t. His primary section is verses 7-12. But the whole passage, in fact the whole book of Ephesians, is permeated with statements that the blessings of the Trinity come to us “in Christ.”

And if you’re thinking, “Oh man, I’ll never figure this Trinity thing out,” let me make it clear right now. You are right. You will never figure God out. There will always be something more and something wonderful ahead. But the Bible tells us real things about the Trinity and today I want you to understand that all these blessings, including the blessings of God the Father’s wise planning and determination to bless us, actually come into our lives “in Christ.” Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity, is the one who has bridged the gap between a holy God and sinful humans, who makes it possible for all those blessings to come into the lives of fallen sinners like us. It is “in Christ,” in relationship with Jesus Christ, that it all works.