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Ephesians 2:17-18
MAIN IDEA:
One question that plagues many Christians and many denominations, as it were, is this question, how do I hear from God? How do I know what Jesus is saying to me personally? Of course, we are in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and so there are many churches throughout this land who proclaim the reality that, well, we hear from God because we get fuzzy feelings or because he brings a special word to us or whatever the case may be.
Other people, in their naivete, think maybe they hear from God when they see things that happen out in the world, happenstance, as it were. They might see something that we would commonly call a coincidence, and they would say, well, there is no such thing as a coincidence, which, of course, there's not, but that's not God speaking to us inasmuch as it is his providential arm working in and through things.
And so us in the Reformed camp, we come and we ask, how do we hear from God? Well, many in our camp, though they wouldn't say it with their mouth, would oftentimes say, well, of course, we hear from him in the commentaries written by old dead men.
And as helpful as those things are, it's still equally as untrue to a degree. What our text is going to teach us today is that we hear from God by the preaching of God's word. We hear from Christ through the preaching of Christ.
This is why, for instance, you have heard me say on multiple occasions that when we decided to plant Heritage Church, we decided that the first dollar that we would spend would be on this pulpit being made.
And the reason for that is not because we wanted to have the best pulpit that existed in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's not even because we have a preference for aesthetics, per se. The reason that I wanted to allocate funds to a pulpit, knowing that we were likely going to be meeting in a living room, of this size and stature, was to put on display this very reality, that when the word is proclaimed, Christ speaks.
This was so essential to the Reformers that Martin Luther once said that the pulpit is the throne for the word of Almighty God. So this then, this preaching of the word, walking book by book, verse by verse, through the Bible, which is called exegetical, expositional preaching, is not mere preference.
It's not something that Pastor Corey and I got together and thought, this might be a cool way to do church. No, it is a deeply held theological conviction rooted in the very word of God itself. At Heritage, we believe that the preaching of God's word, primarily exegetically and expositionally, though it's not necessarily the only way to do preaching, I just think it's the best way to do preaching, is the primary means by which God woos, wids, instructs, and sanctifies His people.
In other words, the preaching of God's word, correctly interpreted and applied, and that's important, by the way, correctly interpreted and applied. Just because somebody stands behind the pulpit and claims to speak on behalf of God does not mean he's speaking on behalf of God.
This is another reason why we think exegetical, expositional preaching is the best mode of preaching for the people of God. Because you're using God's truth to proclaim and not some weird idea that I had throughout the week.
The preaching of God's word, correctly interpreted and applied, is the vehicle that God uses to pour His grace into the lives of this congregation and every other congregation throughout the planet that is a biblical church.
And that means that healthy churches have healthy pulpits and healthy people prioritize the preaching of God's holy and fallible word. This is why we don't have, for instance, lots of programs here at Heritage.
Well, one is because we're a new church and you have to have money and people to have programs. But another reason is because we believe that this is what is most important and most needed.
But why?
Why do we hold this deeply held theological conviction that the word of God must be proclaimed and is the best way to disciple and help sanctify God's people? Why do we believe that the preaching of God's word is critically essential to the spiritual vitality of the Christian and of the church?
Well, I've said it a little bit already, but let me make it plainer, if you will. When God's word is proclaimed, when God's Christ is proclaimed, his gospel is heralded, Christ speaks and applies that truth to the people of God, to his people, to his sheep, to those whom he has brought to the Father.
Now, this brings up a myriad of different theological questions. For instance, one of the questions might be, well, you're not God. Well, good job, that is true. I am not God. When I speak, I am not speaking on my own authority, nor should I be treated as God.
You should only care about the truth that I say so long as it accords with Holy Scripture and makes much of Jesus Christ. Everything else ought to fall to the ground. But there's something about preaching, and the word of God makes this clear, that God delights in, even though it oftentimes is imperfectly done.
What do I mean by that? I mean that Jesus, through the preached word, proclaims his infallible truth and applies his infallible benefits through very fallible men, and the Holy Spirit intercedes, and there is something that happens in this exchange that, of course, Paul calls foolishness in 1 Corinthians, but puts on display the power of Almighty God.
And as we look at Ephesians, we are caught up in a flow of an argument. If we go all the way back to chapter one, it tells us about the power, the divine power that the Godhead, the triune God of the Bible, exercises to save sinners for himself.
God the Father plans salvation, the Son accomplishes that salvation by virtue of his cross, his atoning work, as it were, his sacrificial death, and that the Spirit applies that in promises and inheritance to come.
But then Paul transitions, at the beginning of verse 17, to a prayer that he prays for the Ephesians, and by extension, all of us who would bear the name of Christ. And in that prayer, he prays.
That not only would we know.
That God has divine power to save,.
But that we would see it,.
That we would taste it, that we would have a deepening of it in our heart and with our eyes, having new, as it were, eyeballs installed into us. Heaven-wrought eyeballs that see the beauties and glories of Jesus Christ and what he has done.
This divine power is exercised, according to verse 19 and following, by raising Jesus Christ from the dead. And it's that same power that is aimed at you, who, in verse 2, is painted as a dead man walking, as someone who is dead in their transgressions and sins, and by nature and choice, rebellious in all their pursuits, throwing their middle fingers at God.
And God steps in, which is why we have this beautiful phrase in verse 4, but God. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, did not let us wallow in our own sin, but caused us to love Jesus, escaping those things that hinder us, namely the world, the flesh, and the devil.
And he does this, of course, through the instrument of faith, wherein he begins to work on us like an art project, bringing us to not only salvation, but sanctification, causing us to grow in holiness and Christ-likeness.
And then he goes on to talk more about this great divine power. And we know this because he goes on speaking about the power that God exercised in the cross of Christ in bringing together two people, two people groups, namely the Jews and the Gentiles.
And now he continues on speaking about more divine power that is still aimed at the believer. So as we look at this text and as we think about preaching, we must think about it in the context of the argument being made, namely that it is another way that God demonstrates his power towards those who believe.
And we know that because it begins with the word and in verse 17, which is where we will begin looking this morning. And so if you would please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible, and all-sufficient word.
This is the word of God. I will begin reading actually in verse 13. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who made both groups one and broke down the dividing wall of partition by abolishing in his flesh the enmity, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in himself he might create the two into one new man making peace.
And he might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, having in himself put to death the enmity. And he came and preached the good news of peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near, for through him we both have our access in one spirit to the Father.
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen?
Amen.
As we look at our theme verse, verse 17, we are instantly confronted with the reality that this is about preaching. And it's about Christ being preached and it's about Christ being preached in the preaching of the apostle Paul and others as we will begin to look at here momentarily.
John Calvin once said, every time the gospel is preached, it is as if God himself comes in person solemnly to summon us to himself. So here, the first thing that I want you to see is the preacher of peace.
The preacher of peace. Paul begins by saying, and he came and preached the good news of peace. The first question we obviously have to ask is, who is the he that is being talked about in this verse? Now, of course, the antecedent, that thing that we've just gotten done talking about is Christ, this is an easy answer.
But it's more deep than that. It's deeper than just Jesus. It is Jesus who now is preaching peace, who was the accomplisher of that peace. What you will notice if you are using a legacy standard Bible or maybe a new American standard is that this entire verse almost in its entirety is in all capital letters.
And the reason for that is because it is an exact, exact's probably too strong, but it is a quotation of Isaiah 57, 19. So Paul is pulling from his Old Testament once again to show us that in Christ, all of God's promises have been fulfilled.
They are all yes, they are all amen, they are all right now working for their good. In Isaiah 57, there is this talk of sinners, sinning, rebelling against God as if they were like waves of the sea being tossed to and fro, having nothing to anchor them down because they are rebellious.
And God promises in Isaiah 57, 19 that he will create praise on the lips of those sinners. And he says, peace, peace to him who is far and to him who is near. And then he says, I will heal him, this rebellious one.
And how will he do it? He will do it as we have seen by the sinning of the peacemaker, the one who has abolished these commands and ordinances, the one who has brought two people together into one. Now, this is an interesting passage to pull from because when the Israelites would have read this passage in Isaiah, they would have thought more about proximity than person.
And what I mean by that is they would have thought that God was in fact going to bring peace, but not between Jews and Gentiles and not necessarily between them and God, but peace to those who were near and far away from God's tabernacle, God's temple, God's people.
And so in some ways, they might've saw this Gentile thing happening to some degree, but they certainly were convinced that they had the right relationship with God. In other words, it was more like people needed to be brought to them than they needed to be brought to God.
But Paul is exploding everybody's minds when he's applying this passage that would kind of indicate that God is talking about Israel to Jesus Christ. And not only that, but he's the Jesus Christ who has done away with a dividing wall of hostility between the Jewish people, the Gentiles, those who were quote unquote near to God and those who were far from him, those who experienced his blessing, had his covenants.
Remember we saw in verse 12 of chapter two, they were the ones who held the citizenship of God's chosen people. They are the ones who had the covenants of promise. They were the ones that had the hope.
They were the ones that were with God in the world, this Christ. This Christ is he that has come making peace, having made peace. Friends, stop for just a moment and consider this Christ who was foretold in the Old Testament, foreshadowed, figured, prefigured, and has now come in the flesh and died as a substitute to reconcile two people groups who otherwise would not be reconciled.
But it doesn't stop there.
You see, not only is Jesus the accomplisher of peace as it were, not only did he accomplish peace on his people's behalf, he also preaches peace. I find it very interesting that God had one son and he made him a preacher.
He could have made him anything. But for instance, he could have been the king that the Jewish people anticipated and wanted. He could have been a political figure that would come in and turn the entire Roman Empire upside down and completely usher in God's kingdom.
But he didn't. He didn't come as a social media influencer. He didn't come as a blogger. He didn't come as an author. He didn't come as a very influential man with inside the church. He didn't have a very great upbringing.
He wasn't silver-tongued necessarily, although he was the best preacher that ever existed. But there's a very interesting situation in the Gospels where Jesus goes out beginning to preach that he is the Messiah and his family all gather around and say, we gotta do something about Jesus because everybody's getting really upset about what he's saying and we have to go pull him back in, make sure that he doesn't get into trouble.
Now, I mean, why would you think that?
I don't know.
To this day, I've never been able to make sense of that except for our sin just makes us so stupid that we forget absolutely everything. I mean, the Holy Spirit comes to Mary, he says, you're going to have a son.
I know you've never had that thing that you have to have in order to have a kid, but you're gonna have a kid anyway. It's gonna be the Holy Spirit. And he's going to be God with us. He's going to be the Messiah.
She sings a song. She's very convinced by this whole reality. He grows up. He then says, now's my time. I'm gonna go preach. And she goes, oh, wait a minute. And Jesus stood his ground and he kept preaching and he kept preaching and he kept preaching.
And most people did not like it, which is why the famous mantra is often said of preachers that there's no honor for anyone who preaches in their own hometown. I don't know if that's true or not. You can ask Pastor Corey.
I moved from Indiana. But even people thought that about Jesus. He was met with all sorts of opposition and he preached. He didn't give a TED Talk. He preached repentance. He preached faith in him. He said strange things like those who would come to me must hate their own lives.
They must be willing to be crucified. They must drink my own blood, he says. And he stood on the word of God and the word of God alone. He proclaimed. He wasn't a life coach trying to help people hand in hand walk through their trials and tribulations, though Hebrews chapter two tells us that he experienced what we experienced and became such as we are, assuming our own nature so that he might be able to identify with us and become our mediator and high priest who can sympathize with us.
So don't hear me trying to take away from that. But here's the deal. Jesus was a preacher. Jesus was first and foremostly a preacher while he was on the earth. And he came and he had a message to preach.
Not only that, but Jesus had a ministry team that he gathered together, we know as the 12 disciples. Though there were more than that. But he had 12 men that he invested in in a way that he didn't invest in other people's lives.
And what he did is he sent them out primarily to preach. He sent them to city, to city, to city, to city, proclaiming the good news of who Jesus was and what has come. What's interesting is the book of Acts really should be called the preaching of the apostles, not the acts of the apostles.
And the reason for that is because one out of every five verses in the book of Acts is either part of a sermon or a verbal cry or a verbal witness of what God has done in Christ. There are so many people around the world.
We need to get back to a New Testament church. We need to get back to the New Testament church. Yes and amen. Preaching was at the center of the New Testament church in the book of Acts. And the reason for it, although I can't say this for every church that exists in the world, is not just because pastors like to preach, although they do.
And it's not just because it's a fun way to do church, but it's because it is the primary means of grace. It is the way that God has decided in eternity past to apply the balm of Christ to his people.
And so Jesus prioritizes the preaching of peace though he is the accomplisher of peace, but because he is also a preacher. And so we all must follow in the footsteps of Jesus, his apostles and the church throughout history.
As a matter of fact, this is one of the things that the Protestant Reformation saw as an error in the Roman Catholic church, that they had sidestepped the pulpit as it were, and they started implementing other things and causing it to rise to a level of importance that it should not have been.
They had moved the Eucharist and the table to the front. They had moved the pulpit to the side. They had turned them into prepackaged homilies by that. I mean, the sermons, they had taken the sermons and moved them to prepackaged homilies.
They weren't dictated by those who were in church leadership at the top. And one of the first things that the reformers did followed by the Puritans, when they broke away from the Roman Catholic churches, they defaced the church of all of its godlessness, all of its idolatry and images.
But then they built huge pulpits and stuck them in the middle of the worship sanctuary. Not because they were full of themselves, not because they thought they were the best preachers in the world, but because they knew something that everybody else seemingly forgot.
That the power is in this.
It's in this.
God does not talk to his people by giving them fuzzy feelings. He does not talk to his people by giving them dreams and visions. He doesn't talk to his people by any of these other silly ways. He does it by preaching to his people.
Through the word of God.
And he came and preached. Preaching was the Lord Jesus' mission on the earth as well as now. There's an interesting part of this verse here. It says, and he came and preached the good news of peace to you.
Now, if we move past this too quickly, we don't even notice what's being said. Who is the you? Children, who is the you in this passage? If you've been paying attention, it's who? The churches in Ephesus.
And what we know to be true, even at a cursory glance, is that Jesus never went to Ephesus to preach. Jesus really was confined to one geographic location that was really and ridiculously small. He lived there, he died there, was crucified there, rose there, and went to heaven.
So what's being said here is that Jesus Christ is somehow or has somehow preached to the people in Ephesus though he is most assuredly not on earth. And he never, as far as we know, in his earthly ministry, went to Ephesus, modern day Turkey.
Now, there are two views on this verse that have been littered throughout church history. I will tell you both of them and I will tell you which one is the right one. The first one is this. The first view is that while Jesus was making peace, because he's the peacemaker, he was preaching with his acts.
He was preaching with his works. He was preaching with his life and his death and his resurrection. So in other words, Jesus was preaching through his ministry. Now, of course, you have heard the saying, preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.
That's what this is getting at. Jesus was preaching with his life and his mission. But I think Jesus would agree with me that that is a ridiculous statement. The gospel is always preached with words and oftentimes our lives jack up our witness.
It's our lives that at times tarnish the gospel the gospel in our lives does not do any justice to the objective reality of the gospel of peace. Now, this view, though popular, has really been the minority view throughout church history.
The primary view, which is the view that I hold to, which is largely confessional and helpful, which is that Jesus is preaching from heaven. That is, he is preaching after his sufferings and his earthly ministry.
So, and he came to the Ephesians to preach the good news of peace through the preached word, through the apostles, through the witness of the church. And we know this not only because it seems to be somewhat self-evident as we read the verse, but also in context.
We've just been talking about who Jesus is, what he has done to unite people to himself, having accomplished peace and tearing down this wall of hostility between one another. And now we're entering into a new space and time, right?
Because it was the blood of his cross that he made one new man, one new humanity, as it were, in verse 15. So it must be after Christ's crucifixion, for that served as the basis of the peace proclaimed.
In other words, Jesus came to proclaim after his ascension, the peace that he accomplished for his people. It cannot be at the time of his earthly ministry, before and after his death and resurrection, because in the present verse, it states that he preached this message of peace to both the Jews and the Gentiles.
Which we know, again, like I said, he did not do in his earthly ministry. And there's no record that he preached anywhere to any Gentiles on the earth. Martin Lloyd-Jones says of this passage, it was necessary that the work should be finished, that he should have risen again, that the spirit should have been given before this could happen.
In other words, there was no peace to proclaim before Jesus accomplished that peace that he would proclaim. Does that make sense? So the way that we must view this passage is that Jesus is, has been, and will continue to preach his self through people who preach the word of God.
From the pulpit down to you men in your homes, Christ speaks as he is preached. Now let's take a more in-depth look as we're looking at the preacher of peace at what he came to do. He came to preach.
Now this word here that is used for preach, the good news of peace, is used 54 times in the New Testament. It is used 21 times by Paul, and it is used two times in the book of Ephesians. Once here, obviously, and another in 3 .8, which we will get to in a year and a half.
In Ephesians 3 .8, Paul says to me, the very least of all the saints, this grace was given.
What grace?
To proclaim to the Gentiles the good news of the unfathomable riches of Christ. So whatever preaching is, it's important to the New Testament, it's important to the Apostle Paul, and the Apostle Paul counts it as a grace that has been given to him that he would proclaim the truth of Christ.
Fathers, look at me. Do you believe that when you open up the Bible for people in your household, for your children, for your wife, that it is grace given to you? Because there are people near and far who are not hearing it.
There are people who do not love Jesus. There are children growing up without being trained in the fear and admonition of the Lord. There are children growing up, there are wives who are not seeing the unfathomable riches of Christ.
And so when you proclaim, you may not be in a pulpit, but your couch might be a pulpit. Your fireplace might be a pulpit. Do you echo these sentiments with Paul? He preached, Jesus preached, his apostles preached, and his servants now preach.
Looking at this word more in depth, we actually can see that this verb carries with it the idea of being gospeled or evangelized. It's where we get the word evangelize or evangelist or evangelical. And the idea here is that it is one who is heralding or announcing the good news.
It is one that is bringing forth a proclamation of objective reality. Not ideas that they've had, not ways that they're trying to spend. Like here's the thing. You know, we live in a day and age where everybody who preaches a sermon is put on display.
What I mean by that is everybody wants an app, everybody wants a website, everybody wants recordings, all of this sorts of stuff. It's almost like if you don't have that, you're not a real church. And I hate that for preachers rising up.
I hate that even for myself because I would love to preach for another 30 more years before they start putting it on camera, like all of these great preachers that they have out now. But what that does is, not only does it work in the negative, it also works in the positive.
In one way, it's really good because we get to hear the best of the best of the best preachers. But in some ways that's bad because then we weigh our own local congregation and our own pastor. We look at John Piper or John MacArthur, all these great guys who preach so amazingly.
And then we say, well, our pastor doesn't preach like that. Well, no duh. There's like five dudes in the world that do, and that's why you know their names. God has shown them a supernatural amount of grace.
The question is not, does this person wow me? Does this person make everything sound cool? Does he wear really cool clothing? And so many people go to churches because it feels right, or because the person in the front is very charismatic.
But really the only litmus test, according to the Bible, and whether or not the preacher standing in front of you is faithful, is, is he faithful to the message that needs to be proclaimed? Does he have a silver tongue?
Doesn't really matter.
The question is, is what he is saying true? If you read the New Testament, you will actually find that a majority of the issues that, for instance, the Corinthians church had with Paul and other people had with Paul, Paul brings it up, is that they didn't think Paul was a good preacher because at that time there was this rhetoric that was being made popular by the secular philosophical movement of the day in Greek and Roman thought.
And they would go and they would literally learn how to spin things to be the most hearable, the art of persuasion. This is why Paul says, for instance, in 1 Corinthians, I did not come to you with a flattering words of wisdom.
Not that I was an idiot. He's not meaning that, but he didn't come with all of these bags and these tricks and squirt guns and t-shirts.
He didn't, he didn't come.
Having these really awesome turns of phrases. He, he did not come to woo and to wow. He came to proclaim the gospel, Christ crucified. And he even goes as far as to say, if I would show up and I would really sound awesome, I actually would do a disservice to the gospel itself.
If I made it about me and not this book and this Christ, it's all for not. Which interestingly enough, he also follows up with, if other people are preaching Christ, which this should be a lesson for us reformed people at times, especially if we're on the internet a lot.
You know, they're asking like, hey, they're preaching the gospel, but they seem to be doing it out of selfish motives. Paul goes, hey, so long as they're preaching Christ, I consider that a win. He's not concerned about the internal motives of those who he is not directly involved with.
That's not to say that we shouldn't be concerned about our own or even the people that we know and care about. But what matters is the objective heralding of the word of God primarily as it's found in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is the proclamation of good news. And this is the hallmark of every biblical sermon, friends.
It is good news.
If there is no good news to be found in it, it's not a Christian sermon. Do better, try harder. That's not good news. You stink, you can't follow Jesus. Here's the law, do it. That's not good news, that's bad news.
I can't follow the law.
Paul says that.
The law exists to show me I can't measure up. That's bad news. The good news is, is that Jesus put on flesh the second member of the Trinity sought, seeking out to save the lost. He lived a life we could not live.
He died the death that we all deserve to die, conquering Satan, sin, death, and hell. And he ascended to the right hand of the Father where he mediates, having made propitiation for us.
That is good news.
That is the best news. It is the unfathomable riches of Christ that we will begin to unpack over and over and over throughout the course of our lives. And it's a specific good news. It says, the good news of peace.
That means that there is a specific good news that must be contained in the preaching of Christ, namely Christ. This is why the prosperity gospel for example is so damning. You know, and some people might think, oh, well, we're just railing on other churches and other denominations and so on and so forth.
No, I'm not.
There are plenty of biblical churches who do things differently than I do, that I would love to visit, that I would love to pray for, that I would love to, you know, help them in any way that we can. But it's the message that's the problem.
It's good news if you wake up tomorrow and you have $500 million in your bank account that you did not have yesterday.
That's good news.
If I wake up tomorrow and I won a lottery that I did not participate in because I don't play the lottery because I'm not silly, I would, that would be good news. I would not be upset about that. I would not be upset if there was a new car in my driveway when I got home.
I would not be upset if this jacket fit a little bit better. You know, I would not be upset if there was a myriad of different things in my life that were added to it. But that is not the gospel. That is not the truth of God's word.
That is not what needs to be proclaimed. If you trust and love Jesus, you'll get good stuff. No, Jesus is the good stuff. So to preach is to herald an objective reality of truth, namely found in the good news of the peace that Jesus has accomplished for his people.
And friends, when you preach Christ, and this is the thing I wanna keep hammering over and over and over. When you preach Christ, Christ speaks to you. So when I, or Pastor Corey, or anybody else who stands up in this pulpit, or when you even proclaim this truth to your family members, men of your, you know, of your homes, Christ is speaking, wooing, winning, instructing, and loving on his people.
You're not Christ, but Christ is working through you. This is a huge spiritual reality. And you might have trouble with this, but remember, we've just gotten off the tail end of how we've been, in Christ, caught up with him in heaven.
We're ruling and reigning with him. Like, this is something that we can easily kind of attach ourselves to. Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, a favorite of mine, says this. It is not only man preaching. As Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 2 .13, you listened and you realized it was not merely the word of man, but it was indeed what it actually is, the word of God.
This is preaching, friends. And it's true of preaching that when God's word, mind correctly interpreted and applied,.
Is God speaking to you.
It's not Pastor Brandon speaking to you.
It's God.
This is why I have had multiple times in my pastoral ministry, and I'm sure it's not going to slow down, somebody coming up to me and being like, how did you know that about my life? You must have talked to my wife, you must have talked to my best friends.
My kids told you something, didn't they? No, I, no. But when you said this, I don't remember saying that. My friends, that's the Holy Spirit. Or I can remember one time when I first began preaching, I had a guy come up to me, and he was a new Christian.
He's like, what do I do? And I was like, you need to read the Bible. You need to listen to preaching and you read the Bible. Listen to more preaching, read the Bible. Listen to more preaching, read the Bible.
And you keep doing it. So I didn't see him for a little while outside of church, and he finally comes back to me and he says, I think I'm gonna stop reading the Bible and listening to sermons. And I'm like, why would you do that?
That's the opposite move of somebody who has just come to Christ. And they said, because when I read it, all I do is I feel bad about myself, and it's telling me about things I shouldn't be doing, and how I don't love Jesus as I'm supposed to love, and it's making me feel dirty.
And I said, no, that's working. I can't say, it's doing its job.
Right?
It's showing us where we don't measure up, and then it's showing us the beauties and glories of Jesus Christ and how he does away with all of that. For there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
But of course you have to understand the bad news before you can understand the good news. But preaching is God speaking to his people. Do you believe that? So when your pastors, for example, want you to come to church, it's not just so that you could hear us preach.
It's not so that you could just be a part of this community that we love you. It's not just so that we can add another number to the roll sheet. It's because you would be cutting out a vital part of the way that God has designed to sanctify you,.
To grow you. And for those of you who aren't saved, to save you.
So what Paul is saying here in verse 17, and he came and preached to the good news of peace to you. He's essentially saying, as I have been preaching to your ear, Christ has been preaching to your heart.
As I have been preaching to your ear, Christ has been preaching it to your very heart. First Corinthians 9, 16, Paul says, for if I proclaim the gospel, I have nothing to boast, for I am under compulsion, for woe is me if I do not proclaim the gospel.
Paul found it of necessity to preach the gospel because he believed that Christ preached to the hearts of his people when he preached the gospel. It's so important to the Christian life to sit under preaching, because as Romans 10, 14 says, which Pastor Corey read before the sermon began, how then will they call on him in whom they have not believed?
In other words, how will people call on the Lord Jesus? How will they know to believe in him? How do they know who they believe in? For I am under compulsion, or rather, how will they believe in him whom they have not heard?
And how will they hear without a preacher? Now, I don't wanna diminish the word of God. You need to be in the word of God, 100%. It is important to study the word of God on your own. But God has ordained preaching to bind his promises.
To his people, to enliven them.
Why?
I don't know. I could take some guesses. I don't know, children, what do you think?
Look at me.
Why might Jesus value preaching in growing us into maturity in Christ? Well, one way might be, or one reason, rather, might be that he wants to show that he can accomplish what he has to accomplish even through people who can't do it very well.
He might do it because there's something that happens when those who are in Christ are together, experiencing preaching from his word. Remember, we are all in him. He is the vine, we are the branches.
And he uses people who proclaim the word to grow us like a tree. Now, the specific thing that is being preached here, or has been being preached to these Gentiles, is that of peace. So we've seen the one who preaches, the preacher of peace.
We've dabbled in looking at the preaching of peace, but let's look at peace itself, peace itself. So the very message being preached here is the good news, or the gospel, a heralded objective truth, and that objective truth is that of peace.
Now, here it's important to pause. And it's important to pause because it's not just the gospel, it's the gospel of peace. And what you might find absolutely mind-blowing, irritating, or unbelievable is that your biggest need is to be at peace with God, at peace with God.
With God.
Friends, what this shows us is that we are, apart from Christ, at war with God. We're not just disgruntled, we're not just ignorant, we're not just, I mean, there's so many things we're not. The thing that we are is hostile to God.
But one of the things that we often forget is that there is no such thing as a human being, apart from Christ, who just merely exists, or is indifferent to the things of God. People who quote-unquote don't believe in God differ in saying that they are either atheists or they are agnostic.
Atheist being a firm belief, based in no objective truth or reality, that God is not real. Whereas agnostic is more like, well, I'm indifferent to the whole thing, I don't see evidence for it, but I don't see evidence against it, and so therefore I'm kind of indifferent about the matter.
No, the Bible teaches, according to, if you remember, Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three, that we are hostile to God. We hate God, but Jesus Christ, the one flowing with unfathomable riches, the one coming to us in grace, makes a way where there is peace, not just between Jews and Gentiles, but everyone else.
Look with me, he continues on by saying, he preached good news of peace to you who were far away, speaking to you Gentiles, and peace to those who are near. So this is a gospel of peace that is not like the peace that we talked about last week.
Namely, it's not peace bringing two people groups together, it is peace that has been enacted and helped and achieved by Christ to God for both people groups. Now, this Isaiah passage here that is being referenced, Isaiah 57, 19, becomes more and more and more astonishing to the Jewish reader, although the Jewish reader is not really reading the book of Ephesians.
But the Ephesians here have just been confronted with the reality that everyone needs peace with God. It is man's fundamental need, because God cannot dwell with, approve of, or allow those who are hostile in nature towards them.
But what Paul is saying here, both to the Jewish reader and to the Ephesians and us Gentiles by extension, is that no one measures up, no one is closer to God than anyone else, just because they are closer to God's temple, just because they are closer to his word, just because they are closer to any of those benefits that happened because of Israel's connection and covenant with him.
By the way, when you look at the Gospels, you can see actually why the Pharisees so hated our Lord Jesus, because Jesus' preaching made the Pharisees feel like even they were sinners.
Who, me?
And the scandalous truth of the Gospel of peace, friends, is that we are all on the same playing field. No matter if we grew up hearing the Gospel, no matter if we grew up in a well-to-do family, no matter any of that, we are all the same.
I want you to think about, for instance, Paul. Paul, and there was a scenario where he was arrested in Philippi, and you have this Philippian jailer who becomes converted. And what Paul is trying to get them to understand is Paul and the jailer, as it were, have the same access to God and have the same damning problem.
You see, Paul grew up Hebrew of Hebrews, as it says in the book of Philippians. He was circumcised on the eighth day. He learned under the feet of a very prestigious Jewish scholar. He was advancing beyond people of his own years.
His contemporaries were not looked about with favor as much as he was. And he was going throughout when Jesus kicked him off a horse, his high horse as well, from town to town, persecuting those who dishonored God.
The jailer, on the other hand, was likely not a very good person. He didn't grow up a Hebrew. He didn't know God. When things were about to get bad, you remember he was going to kill himself. He was a coward.
Paul's saying, none of us, none of us had the upper hand because we all need the same Christ for the same reason. Other people might be nice, quiet, respectable, never doing any outward evil things, hating them, trying to do good, striving morally, trying to uplift everyone else, full of good works and deeds and actions, full of intellectual interests and pursuits, interested in things of the mind and so on, attending to the place of worship, coming to members meetings, which hopefully you'll be at this one this afternoon.
And at first, on the surface, the two positions seemed diametrically opposed. The people who grew up in the gutters and the people who grew up in church down the street. You might think that there's nothing in common with those people, and yet the whole purpose of the proclamation of the gospel is to say that before God, both of those people are absolutely identical.
I remember when I was in seminary, a lot of people grew up in the church who were there to learn. They were Presbyterian, and their family had just basically taken them from diaper to the diploma, and they had them march the Presbyterian steps, and now here they were.
They didn't even know what they wanted to do. They just knew because they were a Presbyterian or they were a part of a Presbyterian family that they needed to get theologically trained, and they hopefully maybe could be in ministry someday, though they didn't know what it was, and they would always lament the fact that that's their story,.
And I would talk to me,.
And I would be like, yeah, man, I'm covered in tattoos. I'm playing these rock bands when I was younger. I had all these crazy experiences. God radically saved me while I was overseas in a deployment for the military, and they would just be like, this is insane.
Like, you have this radical story. Like, you have this, you were so far off from God, you know? It's like, I don't remember. No, what you don't understand is, though the writing of ink might be different in our stories, our heart disposition was exactly the same if you know Jesus.
Children, would you look at me for just a second? I wanna say something very clearly, and I hope it comes across in a way that you can understand. What your parents are doing for you by bringing you here to church is so good.
Listening to sermons, so very good. But one of the things that this text also teaches us, because he goes on to say, and those who were near, speaking of the Israelites, it teaches us that sometimes the nearer we are, the harder it is for us to hear Jesus.
And the reason for that is because we're checking all the boxes, we're doing all the right things, and we forget that our hearts are the problem, and that we are hostile to God. And even if we're doing things for God in our minds so that we can feel better about ourselves, that's still hostility to God.
And so when you come to these type of things, when you come to church, when you sit in family worship, don't just listen with your ears so that you can do something with your hands, that is, don't just listen so that you can say you did it or so that you can go do something, but listen with your heart eyeballs, as it were, your spiritual given ears.
But God in Christ abolishes this hostility and hatred between us. Romans 5 .1, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. As I said earlier, Romans 8 .1, we have no condemnation if we are in Christ Jesus.
And this is the work of Christ, this is the good news, this is the objective preaching that is being talked about here. As it says in Colossians 1, 19 through 20, as Paul begins to dive more deeply into what this looks like, he says, for in him, that is Jesus, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him to reconcile all things to himself, having made peace with the blood of his cross, through him, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
Friends, as Jesus has removed our hostility and brought all of us who were near and far or far and near to himself and reconciled us, yes, to one another, but also, and most importantly, to himself. And let us not be people who disregard the preached word, because the preached word produces privileges, which is my third point here, the privileges of peace preaching.
He goes on and says, for, he's continuing the argument, Jesus came from heaven through the preached word to preach the good news to the Ephesians, now to you and me who are far away and those who are near, to the Jews and the Gentiles.
There is a new humanity, a new covenant with a new mediator and it's through him, through Jesus Christ, the one who we are hearing in the preaching of him preaching through the preached word that we both, that is Jew and Gentile, have our access in one spirit to the father.
How do we know that this is true? Well, the Bible tells us, but also the fruit of people becoming Christians and gaining access to the father through the preached word is evidence that God uses the preached word to effect change in his people.
And here you can see there is this summing up, as it were, of the entire book of Ephesians thus far. It starts out with this Trinitarian proclamation of who God is and how he saves, the father, the son, and the spirit, and now he's summing up, even in the preached word, that it is also Trinitarian.
There is a Trinitarian access that we have as the preached word becomes effectual to the father. And so the fruit of having been preached to with the word of Christ, by the power of Christ, is that we get God.
We get to come to him, we have access to him, we are taught by him, we are instructed by him, we are loved for him, we are loved by him, we are cared for him, and we can come to him and make requests, we can come to him without fear.
Remember, because we were at war with God, and if you are at war with God, you cannot expect for there to be a cordial kind of interchange between the two of you. This is why now, because of Jesus, the author of Ruby says we can now come to him.
We can run to the throne of grace without hesitation. Children, you know when your father, when he comes back from a trip, or he comes back from work, or whatever the case may be, and you can lovingly run to him and throw yourself in his arms because you feel comfortable.
Jesus did that for all of us. We can now have access to this father, where this access did not used to exist because of Christ's work of achieving peace, and because of the preaching peace that the Holy Spirit applies to those who are not living peacefully toward him.
So in closing, how might we apply this text? More specifically, there's a lot I could say, there's a lot more I had planned to say, but alas, time often fails us. The Baptist Catechism in question 97 asks this.
How is the word to be read and heard that it may become effectual to salvation? That is, how is the word to become effectual to salvation in our own lives? And the answer it gives is, that the word may become effectual to salvation, we must attend thereunto with diligence, preparation in prayer, receive it in faith and love, and lay it up in our hearts and practice it in our lives.
So as we look at this special pericope here, as this part of our sermon series, I want you to think about the word being preached, Christ being preached. And I want you to think about this. If we want to hear the preacher, namely Jesus, preach through the preached word, we must firstly prayerfully prepare our hearts to receive the word.
If you have not heard thus far, as we've preached through the book of Ephesians, our hearts are hard and our eyes are dim. We don't like to hear the preached word. There's a lot of things that we could be doing.
It takes time to sit, and now we have our phones and everything we get is in a minute, and we have to come to church, we have to do things, we have to talk to people, we gotta be here for an hour while I yell.
Pray that your hard heart would be softened and that you would come to love the word of God more and more and more and more and more as it is preached in as much as you read it. Now this is interesting, the Puritans would say, if you had one hour to spend either reading your Bible or hearing the preached word by someone who has spent a lot of time in that word, what would be more beneficial to your soul?
This is not to undo the work of the Bible, you need to read the Bible, but they would say most certainly the preached word. So make time for the preached word. Secondly, painstakingly listen to the word and expect to hear it from Christ.
Christ is the message and he is ultimately the messenger. And so God's word is always going to do what it intends to do. And so painstakingly listen and expect to hear from Christ. Well, I just don't hear him.
Well, keep listening. I really still don't hear him. Well, after you get done listening, repeat back what you heard to yourself. Christ has promised to speak through the preached word. Thirdly, diligently pray that the word would work.
We must pray that the word would work in our hearts, that it would crack the stony heart as it were. Although if you are in Christ, you have a new heart, but that heart just wants to bring back the stone.
Pray that it would saturate and actually cause you to love Jesus more and walk unto him more faithfully. Four, receive it as God's word. Too often we combat things that we hear or we ignore it because it wasn't said in a way that we would say it, or maybe we were confused by it, but didn't want to ask the question.
Well, if God's word is preached and it's preached according to the scriptures, it's God's word and so we must lean in and receive it as such. And if we need clarification to seek that clarification. These are not my opinions that I get up here and say, or at least I hope not.
And if there is, we're allowed to have different ones. But what we're not allowed to do is push back on the truth of scripture and the truth of who Jesus Christ is and what he has done.
Fifthly, do the word preached. Do the word preached. Oftentimes you don't have a preaching problem or you don't have an issue with actually hearing what's being said. You have a traveling problem. You don't move it from here to here.
It's not moving five inches south like it should. And oftentimes we must do that which we hear in order for it to be applied to our own life. Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, The Cost of Discipleship, drew out this very helpful pastoral piece of advice where he said, if you have someone sitting in front of you and you can apply this to yourself, I apply it to myself all the time.
If I'm having trouble doing something, it's probably not because I don't know how to do it. And it's probably not because I don't want to do it. It's because I'm having trouble believing something about that thing I'm supposed to do.
Namely, if I'm not putting this certain sin to death in my life, it's because I'm not actually believing what God says about that thing, like that it's not good for me, or that he has better promises for me, or that Christ has died to cover that, or whatever the case may be.
In the reverse, if I'm having trouble believing something, it's probably because I'm not putting any of it into practice. I hear it, and I just don't do anything with it. And my life begins to erode, so we must do the preached word.
James says, don't be hearers of the word only, but be doers of it. Just like there is a spiritual reality and link, as it were, to the preached word and Jesus speaking, there is also between believing and doing.
And sixthly, and lastly, look to the risen and ascended incarnate word, Jesus. Every sermon preached should be about Jesus. Charles Spurgeon has famously said that if it is, if Jesus is not made much of in the sermon, it's not a Christian sermon.
And so everything that we are doing here is to put forth, to preach the good news of the one who made peace, and to proclaim the objective reality that he has made peace in himself. He bled the blood, he died the death, and he achieved reconciliation for us and the Father.
And he has done away with the hostility, first and foremostly vertically, between him and us, and between us and others. And we look to him, to him, to him. And if you don't know Jesus, keep listening.
Keep listening, keep listening. Preached word, the preached Christ,.
Is a wonderful, beautiful thing.
And as Pastor Corey wonderfully said before we got here, we get to sit underneath the preached word. And I say that when I sit under it, when Pastor Corey preaches, I mean, I would much rather preach because I feel called to preach, but there's nothing like sitting under the preached word, because God has ordained it to be the mechanism by which he grows and sanctifies his people.
Will you love the word by loving the incarnate word that way?
