The Lavish Grace Of God

July 14, 2024 Message for Outdoor Service - The Lavish Grace of God

There are a lot of really stunning passages of scripture in the Bible. There are so many, that I probably could not choose if I had to which is my favorite. But today’s passage does come very close.

There are many ways to read the Bible, and no matter how you read a passage like this, whether it’s as a work of art, a work of prose or poetry,

or if you read it as a text to analyze, or if you read it as the lyrics of a song that you allow to penetrate your heart, it is remarkable and powerful and, I find, deeply moving.

In fact I was first drawn to read this passage by a person who was not a believer as i understood at the time, but was someone who appreciated beautiful writing.

Someone who appreciated writing as an art form, someone who was familiar with what we might call the classics - like Shapespeare and Dante and C.S. Lewis or JR Tolkien who wrote the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

So no matter where you are in your journey, I believe that there is something for you in this passage that was just read so well by __________.

I want to point out that the entire passage that ________ just read, while mercifully punctuated in English is actually all one long sentence in Greek, if you can imagine.

This section is sometimes called a “doxology” because it recites what God has done and is an expression of worship to honor him.

Paul speaks first of the blessings we have through the Father (vv. 3–6), then of those that come through the Son (vv. 7–12) and finally of those through the Holy Spirit (vv. 13–14).

The first part of this passage that I want to highlight is something that touches on a profound, but challenging to grasp, spiritual truth.

We are blessed the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in the heavenly realms (the realm beyond what we can see and touch and feel).

You like me can probably most easily relate to things that you can see and touch and feel. These are all of the very tangible things in life.

They include material things, like this microphone, like that guitar, like that picnic table. It also includes things that we can see like the sky, the clouds, the rain, lightning.

That would also include our own emotions, our own feelings about ourselves, about things that matter to us.

But this passage is saying that there is something beyond all these things. There is something above all these things.

There is a spiritual realm, there is an aspect to life that is less obvious, less concrete, less touchable.

And although it can stretch our thinking, there is something outside of what is obvious to reach for, something to seek, that we will find if we are open and sincerely looking.

So the Apostle Paul 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.

Paul writes this beautiful statement of the blessing knowing full well the difficulties that we face in life. He wrote this and other very similar things while in a dark, dank prison.

So he wasn’t speaking of his external life. He was speaking of his internal life.

And what he’s about to do is gush. He’s going to talk about what God sees and feels and knows about Jesus, and also about what God sees and feels and knows about us, each of us who are followers of Jesus.

A few things to point out: he talks about “every spiritual blessing in Christ“. The truth is, there are no true spiritual blessings outside of Jesus.

There are emotional highs, there are better days than others, there are joyful moments perhaps that can exist outside of Jesus.

But the spiritual blessings he speaks of have to do with knowing Jesus. With loving Jesus, and growing in our understanding of how profoundly we are loved by God.

It is deeply personal, between you as a person and God as a person. Someone I know who chose to walk away from Jesus said that they had come to believe that the universe is God.

The cold, impersonal, vacuous, seemingly endless space of the universe - that is God?!?

Are there any science fiction fans here? Star Wars. Star Trek. William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series went into space for real a few years back on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021.

Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space, but he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience.