Different Peoples Unified by the Blood of Christ

Turn with me please in your Bibles to Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 2.

Ephesians chapter 2, somewhat of a departure, we're not in the p45 sermon series this morning, and somewhat of a departure from the normal approach that we have, but I think it is important that as a congregation, you're certainly welcome here as visitors, but I'm going to be addressing primarily our congregation this morning.

I do not want you in your conversations outside of our our fellowship to encounter others who would say, well one of your elders has said

X, Y, or Z, what does he say about that in church? And you go, well I've never heard him say a word about it. I think it would be good to address some of the issues that are pressing upon us in these days, and to do so the way we do things around here from the the text of Scripture itself.

Many of you might be, well some of you might be aware of the fact that less than two weeks ago on September 4th, a statement was released called the

Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel. This statement was published online, as of yesterday

I looked, and there have been over 8 ,000 signatories on that particular document since it was,

I guess, promulgated on the 4th of September. I am one of the initial signers, and I am one of the framers of the document.

I was not one of those who did the initial writing, but I was in that small group of people who did edits.

There are certain sections, or at least sentences, that came from my pen directly.

And if you've taken a look at it, there is an article attached to it that describes some of its genesis.

It came out of a meeting that took place in mid to late

June in Dallas, and it was a fairly small meeting, a small number of people.

It was difficult to find a time when some of the primary people that we wanted to have present could be present, but some of the names that you might know of those who were there, aside from myself, would be

Dr. Josh Bice, who heads up the G3 conference in Georgia, one of the major large

Reformed Baptist -type conferences in the United States. One of my dear friends,

Tom Buck, he is a pastor in Lindale, Texas. Likewise, someone who visits here every

Christmas. You get to see Michael Fallon and his wife, Saw, here. Mike was important in getting this to happen.

Likewise, in the group was Phil Johnson, who is the head of Grace to You, John MacArthur's ministry.

Dr. MacArthur, likewise, was there. We actually had his birthday cake that day because it was his birthday, and it was a really good birthday cake, too.

It was, they didn't skimp on that one. It was a, none of that fluffy, fluffy frosting.

It was the real stuff. That's, if you're gonna eat cake, eat cake. That's what I say. But we had his birthday cake that day, and sitting directly across from me was a gentleman that I had already had fairly extensive discussions with only about ten days earlier in his living room in Lusaka, Zambia, while I was lecturing in the

Visiting Scholars Series at African Christian College, Dr. Vody Balcom. And we met together in Dallas because all of us,

Dr. Balcom a few years before all the rest of us, obviously, but all of us had become very concerned about some of the things that we were hearing going on in the church and especially amongst

Reformed people in the church. This had come to a head, basically, in the

MLK 50 conference that had been held under the auspices of the ERLC of the

Southern Baptist Convention, and then about a week later the T4G conference, and then afterwards there was simply, it was like the door had been kicked open and we started seeing people within the

Reformed community saying all sorts of things that most of us had assumed we would never be dealing with within our fellowships.

Things about gender roles, things about gender, things about homosexuality, the

Revoice Conference took place, if you haven't heard of that, that took place in a

Presbyterian church in the weeks after that particular period of time, and it just seemed like a veritable flood of very troubling positions were being taken.

And I, at least I can speak for me, and I think I speak for many others, I had basically assumed that we wouldn't necessarily be dealing with a lot of this stuff within the

Reformed community because to present something within the Reformed community, at least for me, would require you to present an in -depth, consistent, historically grounded exegetical defense of whatever it was you were presenting, whatever it was you wanted to promote in the hearing of others.

And I just did not expect that something like that could be done, and I was wrong about that,

I was naive about that, and so we do see this taking place.

Well, I can assure you the responses to the document have been very, very enlightening and interesting.

The vast certainly the the wild -eyed leftists outside of the

Reformed community have let themselves be known plainly. There was one response from the progressive

Asian Americans group that talked about God's self, and there was another from the

Union Theological Seminary, which I've known for decades is far, far, far out in left field someplace, but we began our statement with a confession of the authority of Scripture, the inspiration and errancy of Scripture.

Well, many of the responses have begun their responses with a confession of the errancy of Scripture, the human nature of Scripture, the contradictory nature of Scripture.

So you can tell immediately when someone starts there, we're not going to end up on the same page.

If you believe that the Bible is contradictory, if you believe that it is mired in its own historical context, it does not allow it to have any transcendent value, and hence it only becomes a storybook that we then fit into a modern narrative, then it can be used to promote anything and is in what we've classically called liberalism.

I don't, I wouldn't even call it liberalism anymore, because I certainly learned going to a fairly liberal seminary that, you know, a liberal allows for other views other than their own.

Liberals don't allow for that. They have their own views, and they're very dogmatic about it, so I'm not sure what term to use other than leftist.

I don't like progressive either, because what do you progress? I don't personally find progressing toward the edge of a cliff that all that positive of a thing, so maybe regressive would be the proper term to use for those folks.

But I'm not surprised at the responses that we got from from those individuals, but obviously my concern has been much more for those that we would consider our brothers and sisters in Christ who would confess with us the authority and inspiration of Scripture.

And as I have since the MLK 50 conference, and I had addressed this issue briefly in times past over the years,

I had Dr. Baucom, Vody Baucom, on my program a couple of times. We've talked about things such as his category of ethnic

Gnosticism and things like that. We've talked about it over the years. It's not been something that I have been primarily focused upon, but I do see it as having a major impact upon the

Church, and upon the peace of the Church, and upon the proclamation of the Gospel. And so I think it is something that we should think about and be aware of, even if we don't have the idea that, well, this is going to be coming through our doors.

I hate to tell you this, but it will be coming through our doors, and I will tell you why.

There are forces in our world that have a lot of money, and theological seminaries need money.

And when you can find someone who calls himself a Christian, who has access to very large sums of money, who will donate said sums of money to certain schools, if they will but fund a chair to study this, or bring in a professor such as this,

I have watched and now can see with much more clarity than I have ever before, as major seminaries that when

I was young were absolute bulwarks for biblical truth, are no longer today.

How did it happen? Is it just a natural thing that happens to every seminary? Well, you could argue that.

The history of seminaries is always a history of downgrade and degradation, there's no question about it.

But in this particular instance, the old saying, follow the money, really is the saying that sadly expresses many things.

And the problem is that the next generation of those who will be standing behind pulpits are being taught in a way that has fundamental foundational differences from only a generation before.

And that is going to, no matter what we do or say, end up having an impact upon us.

These walls are not impervious to worldview changes and social changes and everything else.

We might want to pretend they are, but they're not. Now we are unusual. This is an unusual congregation, there's no question about it.

When you come to this place, I remember in 1989 as a fresh -faced, about -to -graduate -with -my - master's degree from Fuller Seminary young guy, that there was no pursuing me by anyone in this church.

When Kelly and I joined this church, all I knew is that I was going to sit and learn and worship.

It wasn't until we made the commitment to be members that the issue of teaching Bible study class came up, and probably within a month and a half,

I probably taught my first Bible study class in the adult Sunday school, but that was never dangled out there as a carrot.

We do not go out and have an idea of the kind of people we want to get.

We know that we're, let's face it, a little weird. Okay, in the spectrum of churches today, there is a narrow group of people that we recognize are going to find this service to meet their need, and they are the people who want to see an absolute centrality of emphasis upon the teaching and preaching of the

Word of God consistently week in, week out. That's what brings this group together.

Then you add to that all the beautiful banners we don't have, and all the beautiful color we don't have, and the fancy pews we don't have, and our slowly disappearing organ.

And for those who are listening to this, because people will listen to this, we have an organ over here. There was more to it when

I first came, but slowly the children, who are now adults in the congregation, are slowly picking away at the keys as they disappear over time, and eventually there'll just be some sawdust over there,

I guess. But I have never heard a note from it. I don't think it can produce a note. It just sits there to funnel traffic around the corner.

That's the only reason it's there. So we have a piano. It is there.

It's not normally overly in tune, but we have a piano. In other words, we don't have all the attractive musical programs, and light shows, and fog machines, and anything else.

You have to want to be focused upon the centrality of the teaching and preaching in the context of an almost

Puritan form of worship to be drawn to this church. And we are dependent, for our membership, upon there being enough people that want that, that find that to be something that is important, where you don't have all the distractions.

And I'm not saying there's something wrong with... I love music. I love... I'll confess from the pulpit that I still regularly listen to Keith Green, and I love

Keith Green, and that's beautiful music, but we didn't sing any

Keith Green songs this morning. And I can live with that, because the primary area from which division comes in a church,

I've discovered, is the music department. So anyways, we avoid all of that. We stay focused upon the gospel.

And so we don't have some type of a, we want to get this number of this people, and this number of that people, and when we look around, we have a lot of different ethnicities presented here, because there are people that God draws from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds that want to have the

Word of God handled in a proper way, in a consistent way, week in and week out.

So with that, you might say, well why even bother talking about it? Well, because we interact with other

Christians, and we cannot avoid what is going on around us. And so for certain, this experience for me has forced me to consider even more so the unity that we are to have in Christ Jesus, and what the theological foundation for it is.

And that's what I want to talk with you about today. We have the Lord's Supper tonight, and I hope you'll spend some time in preparation for the

Lord's Supper this evening. But when you think about what the Lord's Supper is, we will gather as a body, and if you understand the theology of the

Lord's Supper, we're not resacrificing Jesus. This is not a perpetuatory sacrifice.

This is a recognition that the Lord established this particular ordinance for his church to remind us.

It is a remembrance, not of our sins, but of a Savior. And when we come to the table this evening, when we come to the table this evening, we come as one body.

We will ask everybody over here to move over there, so it's easier to serve.

But other than that, we're all gonna sit together. There's not gonna be certain people we're gonna ask to sit in the back.

We're not gonna divide things up by ethnicities. We're not gonna have some elements for some people and other elements for other people.

There is not going to be anything that is supposed to be in between us, because we are not the focus of the

Lord's Supper. All of us should be focused upon the one who gave himself for us.

The elements have no connection to ethnicity. The elements are given for every tribe, tongue, people, and nation, because the death of Christ was for every tribe, tongue, people, and nation.

And so in that Supper is a symbol, is a picture of the unity of the body of Christ, because we exclude no believer on the basis of anything.

Well, the only reason we'd exclude an unbeliever, or a person, is because of church discipline.

But if you're a believer in Jesus Christ, it does not matter what your ethnic background is.

It does not matter what your great -grandpappy did to my great -grandpappy. All of that is put aside as we come to one table, one cup, one bread, one loaf.

That's the unity of the body. Now what is the theological basis of that?

Well, there are a number of places you can go, but certainly just thinking about the situation in which the

Apostle Paul found himself, in which all the Apostles found themselves in the early church, gives us,

I think, very, very clear, useful, workable framework in which to understand how we who have been forgiven in the same fashion, indwelt by the same

Spirit, must therefore accept one another, and see that the relationship that we have to one another because of what

Christ Jesus has done, must supersede any other human relationship.

Now we all know Jesus' words, lest you hate father and mother, and so on, so you're not worthy of me.

And we listen to that, we go, that means our relationship with Christ is, that doesn't mean that we are to not honor our father and mother, but it is to be supreme.

Exactly. It is. But how does that work out for the Apostle Paul, who very often is planting churches in places where, because of the

Roman Empire, you have all sorts of different ethnicities that have been crammed together into one place.

And before Rome came along, those different tribes may have been killing each other in gruesome ways, but now that Rome's come along, you're not allowed to do that anymore, because the

Roman soldiers have better weapons than you do, and they will wipe you out. And so now you sort of have to live in the same area, even if you still hate those people.

But now you hear the gospel, and you come to this house, because they didn't have church buildings back then, and you walk in, and you are at the first Lord's Supper, and it's explained to you what it means, but you look around this room, there's rich, there's poor, there's everybody in between, there's even some

Roman soldiers, but they've put their swords away. There are slaves, and they're sitting next to masters, and there's artisans, and what's worse is there are some people at this table that are a part of the tribe that you have been raised to hate your entire life.

Worse than the Jews and the Samaritans. But you see, it's been explained to you.

They have had their sins forgiven in the exact same way you have had your sins forgiven, and you're standing before God.

The peace you now have with God is the very same peace they have with God, and they're indwelt by the very same spirit you're indwelt in, and that means your relationship to them now as a

Christian supersedes anything in the past, period. End of discussion, or there will not be unity at the table.

It's a theological reality. So it's one thing to say,

I want to know I have peace with God. Great. The peace you have with God creates peace between you and every other person in the body.

You can't have the one without the other. You can't have the one without the other.

Let's see how this works out. Ephesians chapter 2. He's talking about the

Jews and the Gentiles. You want to talk about a division? You want to talk about... Look at how God has to send a vision to Peter three times.

This is after Peter has walked with Jesus for years. It is so ingrained to just be, oh

I can't be around those people. I can't be in the house. I can't eat food with my tradition, my ethnicity, my background, my religion.

It's in that context, but now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off, you were separated, as verse 12 says, separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel.

Strangers to the covenant. No hope without God in the world. Man, we could preach on that one for a while.

Without God in the world. Don't tell me about how God's just in every little tree and everything else and makes you feel good.

No, they were separated from having a relationship with the living God, but now in Christ Jesus, you who formerly, you were once far away, you have been made near how?

By the adoption of a particular social construct and political concepts and social theory.

What's fascinating to me is throughout this text, it is a distinctly soteriological, salvation -based reality that Paul refers to over and over again.

You have been brought near by the blood of Christ, by his self -sacrifice.

Don't tell me this isn't a gospel issue. When Paul is talking about what brings people near, what makes one new man, it's the cross of Christ, it's the shed blood, nothing else.

And if we try to substitute anything else, we will never create the one man that's a true unity.

You who are far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Why? For he himself is our peace.

Why is there unity? Because we are focused upon the same Savior. We don't have black

Jesuses, we don't have white Jesuses. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew.

He would have been the same color that people in the Middle East were back then, that's all.

He wasn't white, he wasn't black, he was sort of in between someplace like most people are.

But he is our peace. You don't have one Jesus for one group, and another

Jesus for another group. That's why recently when Dr. James Cone passed away, did a whole program about how dangerous the man was, because he talked much about the white

Jesus versus the black Jesus, and the black Jesus, the real Jesus, and the white Jesus. There is no white or black

Jesus. It doesn't exist, and if you try to create one, you are creating division and denying the gospel in the process.

He himself is our peace. If you want to have peace with God, there's only one way.

There's only one way. He himself is our peace, and he made both

Jews and Gentiles one. How'd he do that? He broke down the barrier of the dividing wall.

There was that wall. You went in the temple, Gentiles could only go so far. We've even found, you've probably heard me say this a million times before, we've even found historically, archaeologically, we found the sign that said no

Gentiles passed this point. There was a dividing wall, and just as he had broken down the wall between all of mankind and God in the holy place, the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom, he has broken down the dividing wall amongst the peoples by abolishing in his flesh this thing called this entity, that law of commandments and ordinances, that law that created the distinction, that law which condemns all of mankind, but that law which also divided people, the

Jew boasting in it wrongfully, the Gentile feeling excluded by it. He takes that away so that in himself, what might he do?

Make the two into one new man.

The biggest division they could think of, the biggest division they could think of back then had nothing to do with the color of skin.

We know that the Ethiopian who comes to worship in Jerusalem would not have been distinguishable in the sense of being being fought against simply because he was black.

There was such a wide range of skin tones in that place that that wasn't an issue.

We as Americans have a huge history that informs us on that, and that has become unfortunately the parameters, and that's one of my great fears.

One of the reasons I have chosen, it's not like I wanted to, but I have chosen to address this, is because of how much time

I've been spending in South Africa, a nation that is on the edge of civil war, a nation had apartheid only a while ago, and a nation that I have so rejoiced in going into the churches and seeing the peace and the unity from,

I mean, South Africa is a mixing bowl. You've got your white Afrikaners, you've got a tremendous number of Indians, especially down in Durban, and then you've got all different types of tribes.

Sadly, there's tremendous violence between the various ethnicities and tribes, even amongst the blacks, but in the churches you have tremendous peace.

When I talked the last time I was down there with some of the brothers, especially with black brothers, I asked them about some of the terminology that is becoming so common right now here in the

United States, they're like, what? What are you, what? Never heard of it. And I realize once it gets exported by our people from the

United States, we export all our garbage to the rest of the world, and once it gets exported, the kind of damage it will do in places like South Africa is untold.

It's untold. That's why one of the churches down there asked me to preach a very similar sermon to this, there in South Africa.

So I was to try to say, we don't want this here, keep it out. It's a very

American thing in many of the ways it manifests itself. So that in Himself He might make the two into one new man, the body of Christ, thus establishing peace.

He does this in Himself. He does this by His shed blood, by His sacrifice.

If all of the elect of God are united to Jesus Christ, then

His death is the same death for all men and women, no matter what their ethnicity, no matter what their background.

There is only one death, and hence there is only one righteousness that is imputed to any individual, and it's the righteousness of Christ.

There is not one righteousness for one ethnicity and another righteousness for another ethnicity. We stand at level ground at the foot of the cross.

He establishes peace and might reconcile them both in one body to God, how?

Through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity.

Now it may sound trite or simplistic, but it wasn't trite or simplistic in Ephesus or Colossae or Rome or Thessalonica or Laodicea or any of the other churches that we know about from the

New Testament to insist that there is one table, one church, one body, not a

Gentile church, not a Jewish church, not a church for this tribe versus that tribe.

There must be one church, because there's one Savior.

It was not a trite thing, and when you gathered around that table and celebrated that one death, that one sacrificial self -giving, you did so fully recognizing that this was bringing to the same table men and women who outside of the

Christian fellowship could never be at the same table, realized there would have been situations.

Read 1st Timothy chapter 6. Slaves, serve your master as well, especially if they happen to be

Christians. Oh, really? Yeah, because you see at the

Lord's table you're gonna be sitting next to that master, and they are described as believers and brothers.

Believers and brothers. So serve him as you would serve Christ. Paul! That's what he said.

Why? Because if he didn't say that, you're not gonna have the Lord's Supper. You're not gonna have unity in the body.

Now, I can't see how you could sit next to another person who is approaching the throne of God in the same way you are, on the exact same basis as you are, and not recognize that makes you both equals in God's sight.

And so the reality is, the lived -out application of a deep recognition of the nature of the gospel is highly corrosive to any kind of social situation that encourages one group to think of themselves as better than another group.

It can't happen in the church. It can't happen in the church.

You have to think through the fact that master, sitting next to the slave, has to recognize in the very participation in the

Lord's Supper the equal access that that person has that he has to God.

That's why Paul can say, the masters, remember, you have a master in heaven. So you treat your servants with the recognition that you will be judged by your master in heaven.

That's pretty corrosive to any kind of political situation, as you had in both

Greece and Rome, that allows slavery to exist.

And eventually, as we know, that was the very impetus that broke those things down.

But think about this for a moment. There are people would say, no way, no way,

I will not allow that type of a text, I can't see it, that's the

Word of God. Paul should have said, masters, free all your slaves right here, right now.

You know what that does? That turns Christianity into a counter Roman revolutionary political movement, rather than a gospel for the whole world.

That's what you're saying. Yep, should have been that right then and there. You don't understand how God changes hearts and minds, do you?

Think about that. You think Rome reacted negatively to Christianity in the first, up until 313

AD? Yeah. See what happens when you're doing the Spartacus thing.

If you don't know who Spartacus was, he was a slave that led a slave rebellion. Rome brought its entire military might to bear upon that.

One body, presented to God, reconciled. Now you see, it's real easy for us to say, well yeah, you know, the cross of Christ reconciles us to God the

Father, in the sense that our sins have been forgiven, and so we can have right standing with God.

What things divide you from other human beings? Sinful things.

Wrongs that have been committed, sins that have been committed, crimes that have been committed. And then we like to think about those things, and we like to dwell upon those things, and we like to talk about how our ancestors were influenced by these things, and how our ancestors were wronged, right?

So instead of looking forward, looking back at reconciliation, and then looking forward to unity in the kingdom, there are some who want to look back and look past reconciliation, and say, that's just with God, there's all this stuff back here, that we've still got to sift through, you see.

And we'll never actually get done doing it in this life, and that's going to divide us. It necessarily has to divide us.

Well I'm not sure that means you understand reconciliation. If you've been reconciled in a relationship that we have with another believer, if there has been forgiveness, if there is a recognition that there were sinful attitudes and things done on both sides, and we say,

I'm sorry, I was wrong, I've brought this before Christ, will you forgive me,

I did the same thing, will you forgive me, yes, we stand forgiven before Christ.

And if they're back three weeks later, dogging you about the same thing, do you really think reconciliation took place?

Do you really think that that sin has been forgiven? See there's a difference between repentance and penance.

We believe in repentance. You repent of your sins, you turn away from those sins.

But Rome believes in penance, where you repent, but you keep doing it, because it never, it's never really done.

And you're not really sure if you've gotten forgiveness, and you have to keep doing stuff, and you sort of hope you've gotten there, but you're really not sure, and it's this treadmill constantly going over and over and over again, because there's no finished work.

We can't have a situation in the church where we divide along historical lines, ethnic lines, political lines, anything else, we divide up in the body and say, well you guys over there, you all need to be in a perpetual state of penance toward us because of what we think your ancestors did.

It would have been absolute destruction to the church in Ephesus, Rome, or anywhere else in that day.

Reconciled, put to death the enmity, and he came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near, quotes from the

Old Testament. While the passages would be a prophecy of the fact the gospel is going to go out to Jew and Gentile together, but notice it's peace far away, those who were near, the same language he's using in regards to the covenant, so on so forth.

For through him we both have our access in one spirit to the

Father. Do you see the Trinitarian nature of this reconciliation?

Christ by his blood presented to God the Father, we have access to the Father by one spirit, this is what the gospel is.

So through him, through Christ, we both have our access in one spirit to the Father. It's a Trinitarian text, but what does it mean?

It may sound wonderful to talk about this, but here is real unity, because the religions of that day had all sorts of different layers, and so if you had the power and the money, you could have greater access than someone who had less than you.

If you could offer the better sacrifice, if you had the more powerful priest, if you were at a higher level of Amway Gnosticism, you were emerald versus, or a diamond versus an emerald, or whatever else,

I've forgotten, but anyways, whatever the situation might be, you had more access to God, your prayers had more power, you could expect more attention from the local deity.

Christianity has none of that. For through him we both have our access in one spirit to the

Father. The spirit that brings the prayers of the person being uttered next to me during the

Lord's Supper is the same spirit that brings my prayers. How could there be anything more unifying than that recognition?

How could there be anything more destructive to the attitudes that bring division than that?

Because you see, when Peter withdraws from table fellowship, the

Gentiles in Antioch, he won't eat with them anymore.

What is he implicitly saying by that? You are not up to my standard.

There is another level of relationship to God that comes from my

Jewishness that you don't have, and so by not eating together, a division is introduced that puts people on different levels.

But Paul says, no, no, if you understand that there is only one righteousness that's going to avail before God the

Father, and that's the righteousness of Christ imputed to you as a believer, if you recognize that there is only one spirit that has been given to his people, then there is no basis to be found in anything else to cause division in the body.

It doesn't matter what your background is, it doesn't matter your wealth, doesn't matter your social status, it doesn't matter what tribe you were raised to hate or love, you have a new radically defined relationship to God through Christ and therefore a radically defined relationship to every other person in that body that transcends anything else.

Now oddly, when I've made that statement over the past number of months, a lot of people have criticized me saying, well

I don't agree with that because you see God gave me my ethnicity and I find that beautiful.

And you're saying that that has nothing, I have to leave that at the church door, I have to just sort of be, we all have to become the same sort of beige with no ethnic history at all.

It's not what I'm saying. In fact, in the statement that I mentioned at the line, it's there because I wrote it, there's a line that talks about everything that is true and honest and just and pure and lovely in God's created order of your ethnicity flows from God's grace and therefore can be celebrated and we can all celebrate it.

That means if I show up one Sunday wearing one of my kilts, you all can celebrate with me. Josh will be hiding in the corner shaking going on,

I can't believe we did that, but everyone else can celebrate with me. But anything that comes from sin and rebellion and depravity, which would be all the things that divide, all the things that would put one group above another group, what one group did to another group.

I mean I've used the example before but it's the one that works for me, you know, I watch Braveheart and I want to go punch an Englishman in the face.

Then I do my genetic thing, find out I'm about one -third that too, so I hit myself in the face. We can't do that.

We can't bring those sins of the past into our relationship within the body because they've been forgiven.

They've been forgiven. So if it's true, honest, just, pure, yes, we can rejoice in it.

But if it then gets turned to where I start using that as a reason for boasting, thinking

I have a better relationship to God, that's where it becomes a problem. Rejoice in God's creation?

Sure. But what's the greater danger? That we're going to fail to rejoice in something like that or we're gonna allow those type of things to divide us?

We're gonna use them as weapons? That's really where the danger lies. And so, through him we both have our access in one spirit to the

Father. That is something we will illustrate this evening.

In just a matter of hours, we'll gather in this room and we will illustrate exactly what that means.

And we'll also make further application through the rest of this text as our text for the

Lord's Supper this evening. So I would invite you to be prepared and to be here this evening as well as one body as we partake of the

Lord's Supper. Let's pray together. Our Grace Heavenly Father, we do ask that you would help us to understand the great work that was accomplished in Christ, this great

Trinitarian work, that we by the work of Christ have access by one spirit to you.

Lord, there are many forces in our world today that would seek to divide us, distract us, that have just missed the point.

May we stand firm yet with graciousness, may we speak the truth, may you bless your people with a true understanding of what unites us together.