Good morning. We are beginning a new series on the book of Ephesians called The Church in Christ and the Church in Culture. In case you are not familiar with the book of Ephesians, it is actually a letter that the apostle Paul wrote to the church that he founded in the ancient city of Ephesus. It is more of a letter than a book. I am very excited to cover this series because as you will see, if you are familiar with the book, you know that book has a lot of really deep, theological insights, but it also has some very practical insights that allow you to live out your faith within the world. As a side note, I think some of you might be participating in the study of Ephesians on Monday night. If you are doing that, that is very good. Hopefully, what I give today will actually reinforce and complement some of the things that you are learning there. My aim was originally to give a background about the city of Ephesus, but I had never been there. So I thought instead of boring you with a bunch of facts and figures that I would draw out of some commentaries or glean from the internet, I thought I would show you a brief video about the ancient city of Ephesus that is narrated by a guy on public television by the name of Rick Steves. (Video shown here.)
Hopefully, you enjoyed that little video. It was a very good background. Hopefully, you can kind of imagine the city of Ephesus that we learned through this video. But we really learn about Ephesus and really Paul’s connection to Ephesus in the book of Acts. In the book of Acts, Paul had three missionary journeys. It was actually on the second missionary journey, as outlined by this map, where he first entered into the city of Ephesus. We see the city of Ephesus right about here. It is kind of modern-day Turkey. On his second mission, he visited Ephesus for the first time, but for some reason he didn’t stay long. He left his associates, Priscilla and Aquila, to stay there and minister to the people in his absence. It was on the third missionary journey where Paul spent the most amount of time, up to three years, and really where he began to make the biggest amount of impact amongst the locals. So much so that we read in the book of Acts that “Many of those who believed now came and openly confessed their evil deeds. A number who had practiced sorcery brought their magic scrolls together and burned them publicly.” So Paul was beginning to make an impact in this pagan city. A city that is known for its Greek worship of gods and goddesses, including the goddess Artemis. In a city that drives its economy by selling these little statues and things of the gods and goddesses, when Paul began to preach like he was, he was becoming a threat to the local merchants because he was cutting into their profits. As Rick alluded to, they began to riot. One person incited a riot. Before you know it, Paul was forced to leave the town in kind of a hurry. The good news is after he left town, the church didn’t just fold up. It continued to grow and expand. It continued to reach new converts and having them baptized in the faith. But because they had come out of a pagan society, a society known for its astrology, sorcery, witchcraft, and that sort of stuff, they had to know what it meant to be grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because they had come from those pagan religions, a lot of them were very fearful of what was going to happen. They were afraid that the gods or goddesses would somehow punish them because of their newfound faith. They had to be educated not simply on the power of the gods and goddesses, but they had to be educated on the power that comes through Jesus Christ. Because they were living in a pagan culture, they were also living in a very immoral culture. Pretty much everything that wanted to happen did. People were just raised up in this immorality, sexual immorality, drunkenness, and all sorts of different vices. They had to be trained on how to cultivate a lifestyle that is consistent with the gospel. The bottom line is that they had to learn how to be the church that is in Christ and also the church that is in the culture. We have the apostle Paul writing to the Ephesians from a Roman prison cell in Rome.
What I wanted to do is just unpack the first two verses of this passage. I thought it would be good to read it together starting with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints in Bellevue, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” I think you guys got a little tripped up by the insertion of Bellevue. That was my intent. I wanted to trip you up a little bit. But more than that, I wanted to trip up your mind. What I wanted to do was knock you out of this idea that these stories in the Bible are simply things that happened a long time ago in a faraway place. Specifically, I wanted you to realize that just because this letter to the Ephesians was written over 2000 years ago in a remote part of Turkey, it doesn’t really matter. Everything that Paul says in the letter applies to pretty much any church anytime in history, including Bellevue Christian Church on October 2, 2016. It is applicable to us. I could even make a pretty good case for substituting words because if you have your Bibles open, you may notice that next to the word Ephesus there is a footnote reference. If you look at the footnote, some of the Bibles say something like some of the ancient manuscripts do not contain the words “in Ephesus”. Before you get panicky about that and you have some sort of a corrupt Bible, what you have to realize is all that is saying is this letter was not simply dedicated or written to the Ephesians but to many churches in the area. It is what is known as a circular letter. A letter that was circulated amongst the various churches throughout Asia. Sometimes the church name was basically left blank. Scholars seem to try to confirm this by suggesting that if you look at the style of Paul’s writing in Ephesians and you compare it to the style in Corinthians or Philemon, you see that Paul doesn’t call out specific people or specific instances and events. It is more of a general type reading. But that is okay because the content is so good and applicable to so many churches, including us today. So I feel justified in inserting Bellevue here.
What I would like to do now in the remaining minutes is just spend some time unpacking really the first two verses so you can get an idea of who Paul is in relation to the churches and you can see where he is going with the letter. The letter begins with “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” If you are familiar with modern letter writing, you know that most modern letters start addressed to the recipient. Dear Mr. Jones or something like that. If you notice here in the ancient letters, they actually started with the name of the sender. In this case the sender being Paul. Although some of us might not be familiar with the apostle Paul, the people in the church of Ephesus definitely knew him. They knew back in the seventh chapter or so in the book of Acts that it was Paul, who at that time was known as Saul, who was actually the one who held the cloaks of the Roman soldiers as they stoned the first martyr, the deacon known as Stephen. As a side note, we have a deacon called Stephen, who is a good guy too and hopefully you will never feel the need to stone him for anything he does. They knew him as a bad guy. As a guy who persecuted the Christians. But they also knew his story. One night on the road to Damascus where he was going to go up and persecute the Christians, God got ahold of him and threw him on the ground. It was actually the Lord Jesus Christ that said “Saul, Saul, why is it that you persecute me?” From that moment on, Saul went from being the biggest persecutor of the church to really the biggest advocate of the church. So much so that he really felt he earned the name apostle. The title apostle is a word that we have different understandings of. Really in the New Testament it has at least three different meanings. The first is simply that an apostle is just somebody sent out like a messenger. But it also could be somebody who is sent out like a missionary on some sort of a mission. But it also can be associated with the original 11 apostles who saw the risen Christ. We don’t know exactly what Paul would base his claim on, but we do know that when he was challenged as to whether or not he really was an apostle, he wasn’t short on words in setting it straight. In 1 Corinthians, he says “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are you not the result of my work in the Lord? Even though I may not be an apostle to others, surely I am to you. For you are the seal of my apostleship in the Lord.” Paul was an apostle. He wasn’t just an apostle by the will of man. He was an apostle by the will of God. “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God.” The will of God is a phrase that Paul loves using all throughout the New Testament. In this particular situation, what he is saying is it wasn’t the will of man, it wasn’t my own will that I became an apostle. I became an apostle by the will of God. Because God wanted me to be. God wanted me to be an apostle. So what we have in this very first line of the letter in Ephesians, we have Paul laying out his authority, laying out his credentials to be able to write this particular letter. That is important because they had to know by what authority is he going to say the things that he is about to say.
Then he proceeds on to addressing the recipients of the letter. He says “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.” By a show of hands, how many of you are saints? A few. But most of you are not sure. Saints is kind of a weird word. If you were raised Catholic, you normally associate it with the Catholic Church like I do. It is kind of like the Catholics have the corner on the market when it comes to sainthoods. Really, they should because they have a nice process for becoming a saint. A very complicated process actually that involves at least ten different steps. Some of you may still be qualified for sainthood according to the Catholic Church. First of all, you have to be Catholic. I still have my Catholic baptism certificate, so I think I could qualify for that. My dad always said once a Catholic, always a Catholic. But the second one is you have to die. Some of you may be qualified for that part already. The third one is when you die you have to have a legacy. You have to have a following. You have to have people who are going to follow you, people that are going to pray to you, people that are going to be devoted to you. The fourth one gets a little more tricky. Then the local bishop has to come out and make sure that you are someone that is worthy of sainthood. If the bishop finds that you are worthy of sainthood and you have a good following, he makes the recommendation to the Vatican. At that point, things get a little bit more difficult. At that point, you have to be associated with a miracle. I used to think that the miracle had to happen while you were alive. It is actually a miracle that has to happen after you have died. It is a miracle in a sense that it has to involve some sort of a miraculous healing. Keep in mind, most Catholics would suggest that when you pray to the saint or the priest saint for this miracle, they are not suggesting that the saint actually performs the miracle. The saint doesn’t perform the miracle. God performs the miracle, but the idea is that the saint is so closely connected with God that the saint can speak to God on your behalf. Assuming that there is a bona fide miracle attached to you like somebody is praying to you, then they send out a group of non-Catholic scientists who go back through the records and make sure that it was a real illness and there really was an unexplainable healing. At that point, you earn a title, but you don’t earn the title saint. You just earn a title blessed. You are blessed because it means you are in heaven, as if you didn’t already know that by this time, but you know that this person is in heaven. But in order for you to gain the title of sainthood, you have to have a second miracle associated with your name. Assuming that that has been able to be bona fide, then you are officially declared a saint and canonized in the Catholic Church. By the way, this entire process, by recent estimates, costs $829,000. It is an expensive process. It is a long process. I think it took Mother Theresa 15 years to become a saint. Some of you are thinking if it took Mother Theresa 15 years, I really don’t stand a chance to getting sainthood. The bad news is you don’t according to the Catholic standard, but the good news according to Paul’s standards is you are already a saint. You already carry the title saint. It is not about how holy you are. It is that connectivity to God that has to do with your relationship with Jesus Christ that has broken down the barrier between you and God. In other words, you don’t have to have a miracle. Just having a miracle doesn’t automatically make you a saint any more than having done bad things in your life excludes you from sainthood. It has to do with the fact that you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. You are following Christ. By virtue of that, God has set you apart, which is really the idea of a saint, of someone being set apart, for worship and service of God. I know it is easy to just pass over this word saint in the Bible, but if you are somebody who struggles with self-worth, reading these opening passages are really helpful. It can be actually a little bit of a boost to your self-worth. It has been said you become what you think you are. If you think you are a loser, you are going to become a loser. If you think you are a saint, maybe you will start acting like a saint.
Having said all that, what I want to make clear, those four people who were just baptized were not only baptized. They were canonized as saints. You were applauding their sainthood. They have become saints or as Paul goes on to say “The faithful in Christ Jesus.” The word faithful being something that means proven faith or just a believer. What gets a little bit harder to understand is the idea of the faithful “in Christ Jesus.” That is a phrase again that Paul loves using, but he never really explains it. It is one of the most complicated phrases in the Bible, but it is the most commonly used phrase for Paul. In fact, in the 13 letters that he has written, there are 164 references to either “in Christ” or “in Him” or “in the Lord” and that sort of thing. Although we will talk about it more next week what it means to be in Christ, for right now just think of it as kind of a union of your identity with Christ’s identity. An immersion into his identity. In other words, if you were listening to my words when we baptized the people, we see that that immersion into Christ pretty much coincides the immersion into the water. Paul says “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus was baptized into his death?” The idea of baptism or baptizo means to be immersed. Not only are you immersed into the water, you are immersed into Christ. Not only are you immersed into water, you are immersed into the death of Christ. In other words, the death of Christ for your sins becomes your repentance of your sins for Christ. Your death to your sins. As it goes on to say “If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection.” At a minimum, what you have is an immersion into his death, but you also have an immersion into his life. You are fully immersed with Christ. Not only that, as we will talk about next week, the next verse, verse 3, suggests that not only are you experiencing this total immersion into his death and resurrection, you are receiving access to an abundance of spiritual blessings. He says in verse 3 “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” What Christ has, you have. That is an amazing thing to reflect on. We will talk more about that next week. It talks about the position that we have in Christ and all the spiritual blessings. The graces that come our way.
Anyway, he closes this little opening section by saying “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Grace and peace are words that Paul just loves to use in a variety of ways. He loves associating the word grace with your salvation. As we read later in Ephesians 2:8-9, he talks about “For grace you have been saved, through faith – not by yourselves – not by your works, so that nobody can boast about it.” In other words, grace is unmerited favor. You did nothing to deserve the salvation through Jesus Christ. It is all God’s work. And peace. Peace isn’t simply the absence of external conflict. It is absence of internal conflict. It is a sense of wholeness. It is a sense of harmony. It is a sense of peace that ideally happens inside of you and then it would ultimately spill out as you go into the world.
I want to wind this sermon up, but I just wanted to touch on these two verses so you can actually begin to see the authority of Paul but really the value of the believers. We have to sometimes use these spiritual words like apostle, in Christ, grace, and peace, and all these types of words. We have to use those words. Rather than just simply tossing out those words, I think Paul wants to help us begin to understand them. The more you are willing to take the time to understand some of these words, the better your understanding of God. In other words, the more you understand these words, the broader your vision is of God. More than that, the broader your vision is of yourself. You need that. We need that in the world. We need that in the culture we are going into. As you know, the world is pretty much an upside-down messed up place. It is not getting any better. I don’t know if any of us think it is getting any better. It is not. It is getting worse. Like the Ephesian church, we have to be thoroughly grounded in the gospel. We have to understand the implications of the gospel on our life. We have to understand the implications of the gospel. What it means to be in Christ. The abundance of the spiritual blessings that have been made available to us through Christ. We need to understand it on an individual basis, but we also need to understand it on a collective basis. We need to understand it as the church or what the apostle Paul would call the body of Christ on earth. The collective body that is in Christ. Then we take that knowledge and we take the understanding of God and we take the understanding of ourselves and we take the power that is associated with being in Christ and we go into culture. We begin to adjust our lifestyle. We begin to cultivate a lifestyle that is consistent not with the world but what it means to live in Christ. We go into the world to be able to be the light of Christ into the world. We go into the world in Christ and we go in Christ together. The bottom line is we are the church in Christ and to be the church in culture. In close, Paul’s words “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Amen. Let us pray.
