"just The Way We Are"

“Just the Way We Are”

Ephesians 1:3-14

Is there anyone here that struggles with shame?

Do you ever feel as if you have let God down, to the point where you find it hard to believe that God could possibly love you?

If this is the case, you probably also struggle with despair, which is the absence of hope.

I think a lot of us deal with this junk, if not all the time, at least some of the time.

And it can be destructive, and it’s no fun.

In college I got in with a group of Christians who were very focused on works righteousness.

In other words, to stay in God’s good graces you had to do everything correctly or perfectly.

One of the many problems with this type of theology is that no matter how sincerely we try, we always fall short of fulfilling the requirements of the law, as in the law of the Ten Commandments and other laws found in the Bible.

There are always things we have done that we should not have done and things we should have done that we didn’t do.

The effort to be perfect leaves us isolated, focused on self, torn with feelings of guilt and shame, self-hatred…and oftentimes hopelessness.

I think this might be why many people give up on the church.

They might be in with a fundamentalist group that teaches a strict morality and an angry God Who is impossible to please.

And when they can’t live up to the demands of following this god they give up trying.

One day I was walking across my college campus feeling especially down and out about myself.

I believed that I had missed the mark

I had tried and tried to please God and it wasn’t working.

I even got to the point where I believed I had lost my salvation.

As I was walking and feeling bad about myself—feeling as if God couldn’t possibly love me—I happened into a record store…***Put up Screen of Record Store***

…for those under a certain age, there used to be stores that sold music on vinyl records, CDs, and tapes.

They were called record stores.

I walked into this campus record store, and the song playing on the speakers in the store was Billy Joel’s “I love you just the way you are.”***Put up Screen of Picture of Billy Joel***

At that moment, because of what I was wrestling with, it felt as if God were speaking to me through that song.

And God was saying, “Stop being so hard on yourself.

I love you just the way you are.

I created you.

I know you better than you know yourself.

I know you are not perfect.

I know your every weakness.

I know your every battle.

And I love you just the way you are.

Now, I don’t want you to stay where you are.

You and I have a long journey ahead, but I want you to know that I love you just the way you are.”

That was a real moment of epiphany for me.

It brought me peace and a huge sigh of relief.

It also enabled me to start loving myself again, and that’s because I became convinced that God loved me—no matter what!!!

(pause)

The Church in Ephesus had a hard time believing that they were loved by God.

Therefore, Paul talked to them a lot about God’s grace and love for them.

He told them that before the world began, God chose them, and that they were so special to God that God had adopted them to be God’s children and that it was God’s pleasure and will to do this.

And this adoption had not come cheaply.

They have been adopted and redeemed by the blood of Christ, shed on the Cross of torture and shame so that God could claim them as God’s own.

That is a lot of love.

And God has the same love for you and for me.

Before the foundation of the world, God knew you.

God had already planned to create you, and decided to have this amazing relationship with you.

It’s an wonderful and freeing truth, when we come to believe it and embrace it.

God chose us in Christ, and even when our plans don’t work out…

…Even when we fall short…

…Even when we don’t feel that we measure up and even when the world treats us badly or our friends or family abandon us we can fall back on this knowledge—that God has chosen us—God has saved us by grace through faith in Christ—and the choice to do this was not ours and it is not ours to take away.

Paul, the author of our Scripture Lesson for this morning, grew up reading the Old Testament. ***Put up Picture of the Old Testament***