After 13 years, I feel it’s time to come clean, to be vulnerable, to share some deep secrets with this congregation. So here goes:
• My first childhood crush was Agent 99.
• The first time I was on a TV game show was when I was in 6th grade—but it wasn’t the last.
• My nickname in high school was “Bunny”.
• I loved wearing disco shirts and my puka shell necklace.
• I was All-City at 2nd base in junior high in Roanoke.
• I failed twice to make the college soccer team.
• A friend of mine used to refer to me as “the tightest man on earth” (he quit doing that once he had kids).
• I’ve shaken hands with Little Debbie, Mean Joe Greene, Chuck Woolery, and a U.S. Senator.
All of these things, and much more, play some small role in my identity as an individual—but none of them matter a whole lot, frankly. There are, however, some very important truths in Ephesians 1 as to my true identity—and yours. Let’s look at them!
I. A Question of Identity
a. The Ephesian Identity Crisis
Ephesians was written by Paul to the believers in the church at Ephesus, but the letter didn’t stop there; it was sent further, making its way to other churches of Asia Minor, such as Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, and perhaps others. This region, as you can see on the map, is modern-day Turkey, by the way. But for a moment, try to place yourself in the shoes of these Gentile believers, and perhaps you’ll begin to understand just why Paul says some of the things that he does in Ephesians 1:
• Received Christ through ministry of Paul; churches established
• Gentiles, not Jews
• At least to a significant degree, unfamiliar with Jewish culture and religious practices
• Rich history/lineage of national Israel was not theirs
• Jews could call readily to mind God’s wonderful works through the patriarchs/prophets; Gentiles couldn’t
• Further, one heresy Paul fought hard against—but which had made the rounds among much of Asia Minor—involved those who taught that Gentiles had to “become Jews” first, submitting to all sorts of Jewish rituals from the odd to the painful, in order to be right with God in Christ.
• Feelings of inferiority among Gentile believers? Outside looking in? 3rd wheel? Last one picked? “Inside joke”?
We can appreciate the identity crisis that might have been operating among some in the churches of Asia Minor, can’t we? Against this backdrop, Paul writes, from a Roman prison cell, of the riches we have in Christ, of the identity that characterizes Ephesian believers. In fact, the key verse for our summer study is Ephesians 1:3, a summary verse that gives advance notice of what is to come:
Scripture Memory verse for the summer:
“How we praise God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we belong to Christ.”
The believers of Asia Minor are in no way second-class citizens or outsiders looking in on the party; they have received everything that God has to offer them—and Paul spends the next few paragraphs detailing exactly these things. But the question is, of what value is this to us? How do Paul’s words to people halfway around the world two millennia ago have bearing on our lives? To answer that, let’s consider
b. Our Contemporary Identity Crisis
Sociologists suggest, as I’ve alluded to before, that there are three big questions that every person wants an answer to, and the first of these is a question of basic identity: “who am I?” Now, chances are that most of us don’t sit around for hours on end pondering this question, but chances also are that every one of us has sat and thought about our place in the cosmos at one time or another, wondering about life and meaning and purpose and identity. And the fact is that so many people—professing Christ-followers included—take their queues and find their answers to these questions from a whole host of sources, many damaging:
• Parents – “you’ll never amount to anything”
• Spouse – how many believe the lies that their spouses tell them?
• Peers – judged by what you own, your status, your ability, your looks. We have to keep up with the Joneses, don’t we, because so many of us care a whole lot more than we ought what the Joneses think!
• Society – you are a “consumer”; your identity lies in what you do; this is the exact opposite of a Christian understanding, which says that you do because of who you are, instead of being who you are because of what you do.
• Science – you are a product of evolutionary processes
• Church – even the church gets it wrong sometimes; you are not a “sinner” saved by grace, in the sense that the Bible doesn’t identify you by your sin, but by your salvation/sanctification.
My question for you this morning, my challenge to you for the next couple of minutes, is to consider soberly this question:
What are the sources of your identity?
What, beyond the Bible, are the sources of your identity? Who are the people that shape who you are? They might be good sources or bad sources; even the best of sources has likely instilled in you one or two things that do not measure up to God’s truth about you. To whom do you have to measure up? About whose opinion are you most concerned? Take a few moments right now, quietly, to consider how you would answer that question…
It is vital that we understand our identity as Christ-followers.
II. Paul’s Identity
Paul begins this letter by identifying himself, which if you think about it, makes more sense than the way we write letters. Ever gotten a letter from someone and begun reading, not even knowing who it was that was writing? That’s happened to me on occasion, not just people who will write the occasional anonymous letter (and by the way, never do that, okay? Anonymous letters belong in the trash bin…). On occasion, I’ve gotten a letter and begun reading, not knowing who it was that wrote it, and the way we find out for sure is to jump over to the end and read the closing. As was customary in Paul’s day, the letter began by Paul identifying himself, but note how he chooses to do this:
a. Chosen by God
In Philippians 3, Paul enumerates the prestigious advantages that had accrued to him as a result of his lineage and devotion to God, but he says that all of those things which comprised his identity prior to Christ amount to nothing in comparison with his relationship to Jesus. Paul grounds his own identity in his relationship to God in Christ; he says that he has been “chosen by God”, specifically for a task, to which we’ll turn in a moment. This is key; we are who we are because of God and in relation to God. All human relationships and commitments pale in comparison to my relationship to God in Christ when it comes to answering the question, “who am I?” Sociologists debate the respective roles of nature versus nurture, of heredity versus environment when considering the development of personality; Paul says that the key is one’s relationship to God in Christ. And God has chosen Paul, he says, for a specific task:
b. An apostle of Jesus Christ
The word “apostle” means “sent one”, and it denotes, as an office, those who formed the very foundation of the church, the direct receivers, and in some cases recorders, of God’s revelation of Himself in Christ. Now there are those today who use the term “apostle” to describe themselves; I think they are mistaken. To hold the office of “apostle”, one had to have seen Christ personally, as did Paul on the Damascus Road (recorded in Acts 9). I have come to believe, though, that the function of an apostle, not the office, is likely a way God gifts people to this day, those who can enter a new situation, as a “pioneer”, if you will, and begin a work for God. Regardless, the point is that Paul didn’t become an apostle by answering a want ad in the Jerusalem Times, nor by filling out an application, but because God directly chose him for this task. Here’s my question for us:
Do you do what you do because it is what God has created you to do? I believe that you have been called and chosen by God to play a role in the building up of His kingdom, whether you draw a paycheck from that or not. We have drawn this subChristian division between “clergy” and “laity”, and I’m here to tell you that that is not a Bible distinction, but rather a carryover from Roman Catholicism. This idea that pastors and missionaries are “called” in some way that the average Joe is not is, in my understanding, bogus. Why do you do what you do?
13+ years ago, a pulpit committee from FCC met with me in Charleston, WV, for the first time. Now, what if they’d asked me, “why are you in ministry”, and my response had been, “well, gotta put bread on the table! I need the money! It’s a living!” What would they have rightfully said? “Take a hike, Harv!” But let me ask you this question—and you’ll know the answer if you’ve been paying attention lately—are you a minister? If you think the answer is “no”, would you read and re-read Ephesians 4:12 until you understand that you are a minister? So I ask, do you do what you do—whatever you do—in order to serve God, or for some lesser reason like the need to get a paycheck? Paul took his identity from his relationship to God, and the work that God had called him to do. Would you take a moment right now to consider—and to fill in the blanks in your note sheet—this question:
“_______, chosen by God to be _________
____________________________________.”
Now we turn to consider what Paul says is true of the Ephesians and, by extension, true of us as Christ-followers two millennia later:
III. The Ephesians’ Identity
a. God’s holy people
The first element in Paul’s description of our identity is that we are God’s holy people. We belong to Him, and as we belong to God, we are holy. Now let’s dispel one idea quickly: Paul doesn’t mean to say here that he is writing to “God’s holy people” as opposed to “God’s unholy people”. God doesn’t have unholy people! God doesn’t have two groups, one that He considers holy and another whom He considers to be something less; Paul is describing all of us who know Christ as Savior!
In some of your translations, the word “saint” is there; that’s a description of you, not a description of some dead guy who the Roman Catholic church decided to lift up, attach “Saint” to the front of his name, and put on a statue in Rome.
“Wait a minute, Pastor; I really don’t feel very holy at all”, you say, and I understand that—but as we spoke of recently, the issue here is our position before God; positionally, when God looks at us, He sees us as holy. How? Remember the passage we referred to earlier, where Paul says that he counts all of his credentials to be worthless in comparison with knowing Jesus? Later in that same passage, in verse 9, he says this (and I’m using the NASB for this one), “not having a righteousness of my own derived from {the} Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which {comes} from God on the basis of faith”. God sees me as holy, not because of who I am or what I do, but because of Who Jesus is and what Jesus has done, and because by faith, I am inextricably united with Jesus. His goodness and holiness accrues to my account! If goodness were $100 million, it’d be like me driving up to Sky Bank and finding out that Jesus $100 million worth of goodness were right there in my checking account. That’s a crude and incomplete analogy, but perhaps it gives you the idea of how it is that God sees us as holy: He sees Christ’s holiness, and not our unworthiness! Now, how should I respond to this?
Responses to God’s declaring me “holy”:
• Gratitude
What are the practical implications of this holiness? Ponder these for a moment, and thank God that He sees you as holy.
• Relief
If God sees me as holy, He isn’t standing there, licking His chops, waiting for me to fail so that He can zap me. That’s a relief! Since the righteousness I have isn’t mine, but Christ’s, there’s no chink in the armor of that righteousness; nothing will change God’s view of Christ’s righteousness—and that’s a relief!
But wait a minute…doesn’t this produce in me an attitude that says, “Haha! I’m holy! Now, I can just live as I please!” Well, perhaps if I’m fooling myself—because the grace that saves me and gives me that righteousness in the first place is also the grace that changes me! When God declares me holy, it leads me to
• Obedience
And this points us to our final point for today:
b. Faithful followers of Jesus
If my main identity before God is that of “saint” or a “holy person”, my main identity before man is that of a “faithful follower of Jesus”. That is how the world ought to see us: people who are striving to live like Jesus because we are playing follow the Leader in everything we do. Some of us are more practically faithful, and some less so; all of us have our warts—as did, interestingly enough, most of the Bible’s characters other than Jesus, of course! But it is faithfulness to Jesus’ teaching, faithfulness to Jesus’ mission, faithfulness to Jesus’ Lordship, that characterizes the true follower of Jesus. “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’”, Jesus asked, “and then you don’t do the things that I say?” Why, indeed!
We begin today a study on the topic of our identity in Christ, particularly pertinent because Satan offers the tempting lie that “you’ll never amount to much”, or “who are you to be teaching or leading in ministry”, or “you’re no good”, or…and Paul says, “you’re holy, a faithful follower of Jesus”—and then goes on to tell us more about how rich we are, beyond imagination, as followers of Jesus.
The “Hetty Green Tragedy”
Do you know Hetty Green? Let me tell you about dear Hetty. According to Wikipedia:
She never turned on the heat nor used hot water. She wore one old black dress and undergarments that she changed only after they had been worn out. She did not wash her hands and rode an old carriage. She ate mostly pies that cost fifteen cents. One tale claims that she spent a night looking for a lost stamp worth two cents. Her son Ned broke his leg as a child, but Hetty took him away from the hospital when she was recognized. She tried to treat him at home, but the leg contracted gangrene and had to be amputated — he ended up with a cork prosthesis. When her children left home, Green moved repeatedly among small apartments in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, mainly to avoid establishing a residence permanent enough to attract the attention of tax officials in any state. In her old age she began to suffer from a bad hernia but refused to have an operation because it cost $150. Hetty Green died in New York City on July 3, 1916, at the age of 81. Oh…there’s one other thing you should know about dear Hetty: at the time of her death, an estimate of her net worth was between $100 – $200 million, making her the richest woman in the world at the time.
A rich woman indeed—determined to live life like a beggarly miser, afraid to enjoy the fruits of her wealth, her miserly ways earning her the title “Witch of Wall Street”. She was born into extravagant wealth, and accumulated much more through strategic investing and incredible stinginess—but she lived like a pauper. And the parallel to us is simple: we are rich beyond imagination through Christ—my urging to you now is that you come to understand that truth, and then, to live like it!
