Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…
Show personal “artifacts” (at this point, I displayed a number of personal items that had great value to me, but which would have no value to anyone else); “the fair market value of these items is about 2 cents, give or take…"
To you? Worthless. To me? Priceless. They represent the heritage of my days here.
Sheds light on key part of the passage: “because of Christ, we have received an inheritance from God.”
God’s good creation:
• Heavens
• Stars/planets/moons
• Animals/birds/fish
• Angels in Heaven
• Man, in His image
His heritage, though? Believers!
God has chosen us as His heritage.
Let’s answer some questions about this choice of God this morning:
I. Why?
To “praise our glorious God”
Unifying purpose of history; theme song of eternity: Glory to God in the highest!
Many sub-themes of the Bible:
• Creation
• Covenant-relationship with Israel
• Justice
• Grace
• Future plan for this world/rule and reign of Jesus
Subsumed under the ultimate: God’s glory
His glory is the sum total of His attributes.
When I “give Him glory”, I do so in the sense of praising the glory that is already His…glory is His essence. He gets nothing from me that He doesn’t already have; in fact, His glory is what I am praising when I’m said to “give Him glory”. We went to Waldameer on Wednesday, and I got wet in as many ways as I possibly could—since it was about 95 degrees out! I experience water, but I don’t make it wet; I give Him glory in the same sense, not that I manufacture glory to give Him, but in that I recognizing God for Who He is.
He is to be glorified because He chose to save us. Jews made the mistake of thinking that it was about them—and sometimes we do the same thing, thinking that everything God does, He does for our benefit. No…what He does, He does for His glory; He would be an idolator if He esteemed anything of more worth or value than Himself—ever thought about that? He chose us; praise Him!
II. How?
God’s method in choosing us
a. Because? “Because of Christ”
Rather than sitting on the bank of Heaven with a happy lemonade in hand, God accomplished through His Son what I could not. When the Bible says that He chose us “because of Christ”, it was God’s anticipation of Christ’s redeeming work on the cross that caused Him to choose to save me; it was through Christ and His sacrifice that God made the way to choose me as His own.
I am who I am because of, and in relation to, Jesus. I was reading just this week about the fact that, for too many Christians, their chief identity is tied to their work, or to their earthly families, or to their nationality, or to something else. No…before I am anything else: husband, father, employee, American, I am a chosen child of God, redeemed in Jesus Christ. My identity in Christ, of which this chapter speaks volumes, my identity as a functioning member of His body here on earth, is first in my self-understanding. How? First, God chose me because of Christ.
b. When? “From the beginning”
The KJV says that God predestined us “according to the counsel of His will”; in other words, this wasn’t a hasty decision, but a reasoned, deliberate choice. Andrae Crouch wrote, “I don’t know why Jesus loved me…” Though it is unexplainable, it is not arbitrary. God has reasons that we will never understand on this earth, but will one day. “All things happen just as He decided long ago”, the Scripture says.
Consider the circumstances of your life. What if you’d been born in a Muslim country? What if you’d been born behind the Iron Curtain, or in a primitive culture such as Irian Jaya? Yet God, in His sovereign working, allowed you to be born in the most Christian nation in history, at least by certain standards. This is true of most all of us in this room; God in His eternal plan allowed you to be born to the situation and station in life that you were, and for most all of us, that played a major part in our eventual salvation…part of God’s plan from the beginning.
But if despite this, you are not yet a follower of Jesus Christ, would you consider this: if with all of the advantages you have, you still choose not to respond to God’s offer of salvation, how will you explain yourself to God when you face Him on the day of judgment?
Nothing that happens in your life is an accident. Nothing happens beyond the control of God. Nothing happens that a loving Father didn’t allow to happen; nothing catches Him off-guard. He is sovereign; He is in control. And a part of His sovereign plan was to decide to allow people to spend eternity enjoy Him and His blessings. And if you are a Christ-follower, you are part of that plan.
But if we do grasp the special blessing that God has given to us, how can we not be people filled with gratitude? And further, when we think of the great blessings God has given to us, if we are truly grateful, what ought that to cause us to do with our money? With our time? With the talents God has given us?
III. Who?
Who are we in His sight?
Paul says, “I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance (God) has given to His people” (v. 18). Much of what we’ve focused on for the last couple of months centers on what God has done for us already in Jesus, this truth today focuses on the present and future tenses of God’s work in and for us.
Present tense involves our identity—who are we in the sight of God?
Kenneth Wuest said, “Paul prays that we might know how precious the saints are in God’s eyes…He is glorified in His saints, and this glory is valuable. It is part of the wealth that God possesses, dearer to Him than all the splendors of creation.”
Do you ever struggle with who God is, and with what He thinks of when He thinks of you? No, the song we’ve sung a few times is a little bit wrong: Jesus didn’t “think of me above all”, but nonetheless, what the Father thinks of me is precious!
I try to regularly tell my kids I’m proud of them. I’m not proud of everything that they do, but I love them dearly, want them to know that, want them to know that I consider myself blessed to be their father, that I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
God the Father isn’t proud of everything I do, but I’m His child, and He looks on me with that same kind of fatherly “pride” and affection that I do my own kids, only perfected to the nth degree! Looked at objectively, my kids may not be the smartest kids in the world, or they may not excel all others—but I don’t look at things objectively! And I think that they’re the best! And I don’t care what you think about your kids—you’re wrong, okay? ‘Cause my kids are the best!
And of course, I fully expect that you’d happily proclaim the same for yours…why? Because they’re your kids! And you’re prejudiced, and so am I, and the point I’m driving at is that God feels the same way about us, only more so, because we’re His children! It’s not because we always deserve or earn His love; sometimes we do some spectacularly stupid things, but we’re His kids!
Feeling inadequate lately, feeling like maybe God doesn’t care, feeling doubtful, defeated, discouraged? Satan playing tricks with your mind and heart? Well, God views you as His trophy of His grace, displaying you with all due pride and joy, for His glory! And if Satan is messing with your mind, would you remind him of just who it is he’s messing with—a child of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the prized possession of a loving Father Who loves you better than you love anyone here on this earth!
Future tense:
“We have received an inheritance from God”, Paul says. Inheritances bring out the real truth about people sometimes, don’t they? Anna Nicole Smith, famous for being famous, made recent headlines because of her short marriage to an elderly man with insane money—and her insistence that she ought to reap the lion’s share of his estate.
After weeks of getting the cold shoulder from his wife, an unhappy husband finally confronted her.
"Admit it, Linda," he said, "The only reason you married me is because my grandfather left me $10 million."
"Don’t be ridiculous!" she shot back. "I don’t care who left it to you."
Yes, inheritances tend to prove the kind of people that we really are. We are heirs of God, and what that means is that there are privileges reserved for us in eternity. Paul said to the Colossians that God had enabled them to share in the inheritance that God promised to His people (1:12). There is something better coming for us, and news flash: it doesn’t involve playing a harp for thousands of years (that’s a picture out of some fantasy rather than the Bible). It involves life eternal in Christ, a life far better than any of us here have ever experienced or can even imagine. Listen to Paul, speaking of what God promises us (I Cor. 2:9) “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.”
The guarantee is only as good as the guarantor. I was speaking last week with a friend who told me that his father had lost most all of the family’s considerable savings through a misplaced investment in what turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. He had trusted the guarantee of an investment company, and the people running the show had been charlatans. God, though, is the guarantor of our inheritance; the Holy Spirit, as we’ll see in our final installment, is the pledge, the downpayment, of our inheritance.
One clear teaching explicit in all of Ephesians 1 continues to be the sovereign hand of God moving through history—and one clear implication of this is the truth that we can trust God, but as we see from this passage, we trust a God Who is not a distant deity, but a God Who is intimately connected with His children, intimately involved with His inheritance, intimately concerned about our lives, as a good father always is.
If this is the case, that inheritances bring out the truth about people, what ought the truth that you are the rich heritage of God, that you are His, and that He has reserved His riches for you, cause you to do? How ought this cause you to live?
Yeah, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose…these items on display are, certainly, of little value to you—yet to me, they hold real value, if only sentimental.
And so God looks at us—common, ordinary folk, not spectacular in any real sense of the word, and sinners by nature—and says, “yeah, that one there? Belongs to Me. My pride and joy.”
