Fundamentals of a Faithful Life

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Paul’s Thanksgiving and the Basics of a Faithful Christian Life

In your copy of God's Word, I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 15. Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 15. Today I have the esteemed privilege of preaching on verses 15 and 16 as we turn our study from the every spiritual blessing that the Christian has in Christ to now the theme of Paul's thanksgiving and prayer in this magnificent book that is the letter to the Ephesians.

In some ways, when we have a smaller group, I almost feel emboldened to preach it more carefully, more personably. And may the Lord give me help to do that. So with our attention turned to verse 15, let's read this passage together.

And I remind us, this is the word of the living God. And let he who has ears to hear, let him hear. Verse 15. For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

Today as we begin our study in God's word, our text takes us back to the very basics of what it means to be a community of individual Christians before the living God. As the apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians, we see him here.

He's a picture of a plane taxiing away from the gate and to the runway. He is spooling up his engines to begin prayer on their behalf or at least to recount his prayer on their behalf. And here he begins with this prayer of thanksgiving.

A prayer of thanksgiving that we would all do well to take heed to. Because, and this is why, because Paul here in this prayer identifies the bare essentials of what it means to be a Christian and a church that is worthy of rejoicing over, that is worthy of giving thanks to God for.

And to frame our time together, I want to take us back a few centuries to demonstrate why it is important, as often as we can, to get back down to the very basics of our Christianity. You are going to think at various times in this sermon, Shane, this is so basic, this is elementary, this is Sunday school material, give me meat.

But there are times when even those of us who are healthy, who are robust, who have an appetite for solid food, there is a time when we need to get back to the very basics of our Christianity. And let me demonstrate to you why that is.

At the beginning of the 16th century, especially the first half of the 16th century, the first generation of Protestant Reformed Christians found themselves in a bit of an unprecedented situation or at least it was unprecedented for about a thousand years before their time.

As local churches began to emerge out of the Reformation, under leaders like Calvin and Knox and Melanchthon and Luther, to name only a few, the broader Christian community started to run into a whole host of new hurdles.

Think about all of these brand new churches out of the gate and what they discovered is that they could not, they had a great deal of difficulty deciding, determining, who belonged and who did not belong to the true universal church.

You see, while the Roman Catholic Church was simultaneously denying the gospel and persecuting these true Christians on the one side, on the other side of this, on the other side of the spectrum, there was a group of radical Christians who belonged to, amongst some, the Anabaptist movement and other similar assemblies who promoted erroneous views that upset whole cities.

You might have heard of Munster and thus invited even greater persecution. And somewhere there in the middle between the Roman Catholic Church denying the gospel and persecuting Christians and this zealous, overzealous perhaps, and error-ridden church, there were these true churches who endured great persecution simply for being faithful, as they simply sought to reform their lives and their communities according to the standards of God's word.

And so as they were doing this and as they were experiencing persecution and wondering, what do we make of this group? They begin asking the questions, what churches can we associate with? Can we in good conscience associate with churches that deny the gospel and that persecute us?

Are they part of the true church? Can we associate with those who preach the true gospel but who get almost everything else wrong? And so they asked the question, what are the basic ingredients of a true local church?

And in this landscape that was littered with true churches and false churches and confused churches, how are they to identify the genuine from the counterfeit? Well, eventually in 1561, a group of Christians in the Netherlands formed a confession that became known as the Belgic Confession, which amongst other things, sought to answer this question once and for all.

And so from a painstaking study of scripture, in the crucible of persecution, being refined in that crucible, they concluded that the church at its most basic form had three marks that determined, that identified them as a true church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And some of you know these three marks, I'm sure. The first mark, they said, was that that church must be marked by the pure preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And then number two, that church must be characterized by the pure administration of the ordinances as instituted by Christ, that is, baptism in the Lord's Supper.

And then number three, they said that church must demonstrate the faithful exercise of church discipline as taught by Christ. And so they concluded, I would suggest rightly, that the true church should consist of certainly more than these things, but could never consist of less than these three basic elements.

So looking at scripture and not church tradition, looking at God's word and not culture, they stripped it down to the very studs of scripture and concluded these are the absolute basics, the non-negotiable minimums of what it meant and what it means even today to be a true biblical church.

The preaching of the gospel, the pure administration of the ordinances, and church discipline. Now I bring this up because it demonstrates something remarkable. Nearly 500 years ago, as the early Reformation church was just in its infancy, it rediscovered something that was so foundational and so basic to the existence of the church that the church universal should have never lost sight of it again.

That generation of faithful and long-suffering Christians found a baseline, a benchmark by which they could determine, distinguish true churches from false churches. And this should have been remembered for decades and then for centuries, up until today, and I would suggest into the future until the return of Christ.

But it wasn't even a few years later, a few hundred years, even now we look at it today, less than 500 years ago or later, most Christians and most Christian leaders, for that matter, know nothing of the basics, the basic ingredients of a true church.

Even though they are written, as it were, in bold ink in our Bibles and highlighted by the witness of the history of the church. This has been almost altogether forgotten. And this is evidenced by the fact that if we were to go to most evangelical churches today, we would find that most churches, sadly, possess maybe only one or two of these true marks of a true church.

Some preach the gospel, we would find, but they have a loose and unbiblical view of the ordinances. Some would preach the gospel and practice the ordinances faithfully, but would altogether reject, even cast away the practice of church discipline.

And some, we must lament, call themselves churches, but do not practice any of these things at all. Now, why is this? It is because, as fallen human beings, we become so enamored with the trappings and the accessories of the Christian life that we all have a propensity to lose sight of the fundamentals.

And before long, we can no longer see the forest for the trees. And the same can be said for ordinary Christianity. Ordinary Christian experience. What it means to live an ordinary and faithful life. Let me ask you, do you know this?

What are the essential ingredients of a God-pleasing Christian life? Just like the Belgic Confession, if we were to strip it down to the bare bones, how can we distinguish a Christian, a genuine Christian, from a counterfeit one?

And where do we get the answers for these questions? Do we get them from the culture? Do we get them from the Christian subculture? Do we get them from John Calvin? No, but we shall get them in our Bibles.

And we get them here in Ephesians 1, verses 15 and 16. Today, as Paul begins to detail his prayer of thanksgiving for the Ephesians, we see him answer this fundamental question, what constitutes a Christian?

As we see the opening lines in this record of his prayers, he provides us with a benchmark. He shows us the fundamentals of a faithful Christian life. The kind of Christian life that you can rejoice in when you see it in others and when you see it in yourself.

The kind of Christian life that we can all be thankful for to God. The kind of Christian life that we can all emulate. So turning our attention to the substance of verses 15 and 16, let's quickly orient ourselves in the passage.

And we've done a number of reviews, I'm not going to go too far in depth, but what Paul has just done is he's concluded a detailed list of the spiritual blessings that the Christian has received in Christ.

And now building on that list, he's going to turn his attention to describing his own prayer life for the Ephesians. And in true Pauline fashion, he describes his prayers for them with a sentence of truly biblical proportions.

If ever you have complained that someone's speech, they speak in too long of sentences, that their words maybe we sometimes make fun, speaking of reading an old John Owen book, if you've ever thought, boy, that person is really verbose.

Well, Paul almost certainly has them beat. In verses 3 -14, what we looked at previously, that is the longest sentence in the Bible. And then perhaps the only sentence second to it is in verses 15 -23.

All nine verses, if we were to go back to the original language, all nine verses are one single sentence from the Apostle Paul. And as I looked at this, I thought, how do I break this up so that I can preach it in a way that is faithful to the fact that this is one sentence, one thought, and at the same time not drown you in a flood of commas, in a flood of clauses.

And then I discovered as I was doing my reading and my study and my exegesis of this passage, that this prayer, this single sentence is actually broken up into two components.

Thank the Lord.

And what that means is that the first component, in verses 15 -16, Paul describes, and we can see it for ourselves, his prayers of praise for the Ephesians. There's a prayer happening here, but there are two kinds of prayers.

We see it in the pastoral prayer often. In our prayer meetings, we pray prayers of praise, prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of confession, prayers of supplication. And so in verses 15 -16, we see prayers of praise.

But then in verses 17 -23, we see Paul introduce a second section, that is, prayers of petition for each of the Ephesians. And so despite the daunting length of the sentence, there's actually a very natural break at the end of verse 16.

And so that's what we're going to go up to, verses 15 -16, as we consider Paul's prayers of thanksgiving for the Ephesians. And as is often the case in the epistles, Paul begins this section in verse 15 with a conjunction.

Now, if you've not been studying language at all, a conjunction is something that joins two words together, or two ideas together, a conjoining. And so often in our English language, we see conjunctions like for, therefore, since, because.

And we see the apostles often do this. And when the apostles do this oftentimes, and we see the for or the therefore, they're usually writing this to build upon what they have just said. So they have laid a foundation, that the previous truth is that foundation, and then with this because or the therefore, they place that idea on top, it becomes contingent on that foundational truth.

But Paul is up to something a little bit different here. What he's actually doing is he is moving with his for this reason, with his because, he's moving in a forward direction. And that might not mean anything to you, let me explain it a bit more.

What Paul is saying here, I'm just going to get down to the very basics of it, is that he has not ceased to give thanks for the church in Ephesus. He has remembered them in his constant prayers to God, for this reason, because, and then here we see the meat and potatoes of verse 15.

Because he has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And he has heard of their love toward all the saints. Paul begins this section by expressing that he is profoundly thankful to God for the Ephesians.

And the primary reason for this is because they have demonstrated a fundamental, but praiseworthy or the fundamental but praiseworthy attributes of true Christian faith and true Christian love. And while these attributes are far from groundbreaking, they are not at all revolutionary, they are the main things.

Hear me on this. He is praising them because they are the main things that Christians are to attend ourselves to. Oh, if every Christian, if only every Christian could understand this one concept, that there are main things that we are to attend to, and they are these, faith and love, it might transform the world.

But it can be so difficult to keep these main things in their proper place. As I was thinking about it this week, the main things are often the slipperiest, the most easily lost, the easiest to drift from.

And this is why, when some of the men and myself included, some of the best pieces of practical advice that the beginner preachers have received, whether it's from books, there's one book I have in mind on this, or classes, or from experienced preachers.

One of the best pieces of advice that most preachers get is this. And the men who have preached and who have read some of these books will smile as they hear this. You'll know exactly what it is. The main thing, remember, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

Remember, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And why that is, is because, as Haddon Robinson put it, a mist in the pulpit becomes a fog in the pew. That if I have a thousand streams going out of the pulpit, by the time it gets to you, it's no longer a stream, it is a mist.

It's a fog. And you can't see through it. But if I have one laser-focused idea, the main thing that goes before you, then you can capture that, ah, he is talking about that. A sermon has many constituent parts, and a myriad of ideas are conveyed, but ultimately a good sermon is only about one thing, and that one thing is the main thing.

And Paul writes, Praise be to God, that the Ephesians are excelling at the main things in the Christian life. Rather than a mist, it is a stream, a solid stream of the important things, the non-negotiable things in the Christian life.

They are excelling at what every Christian must excel at. What are those things? Faith and love. So Paul erupts in thanksgiving to God for them. And we should seek to emulate them then by concerning ourselves with the main things as well.

As I was preparing this sermon this week, for those of you who have done any kind of in-depth Bible study where you have a bunch of commentaries in front of you, sometimes it can be really frustrating when you're trying to get down to the main thing.

Because this commentator says one thing, and this commentator contradicts him, and then this commentator says another thing. And I was blessed to come to my commentaries. I see Sam nodding his head. I was blessed to come to my commentaries this week and to hear all of the commentators singing the same refrain on the main thing.

And the words are so forceful, I want to read just some of them to you. And you can hear where I'm getting some of my commentaries as well. Charles Hodge said, the leading graces of the Christian character, the leading graces are faith in Christ and love to the brethren.

John Calvin said, in this verse we find the whole excellence of the Christian character. One commentator wrote, here Paul sets before us the two things which must characterize every true church and believer, loyalty to Christ and love to men.

John MacArthur said, these are the two cardinal marks of a true Christian. These two fundamentals are what ultimately make a faithful Christian life. How many of us want to come before the throne of grace at the end of days, when the trumpet sounds and we enter into the very presence of Almighty God, how many of us want to hear those words, well done, my good and faithful servant.

You might get a whole host of ideas about how you will hear those words. But what I am bringing us back to, the very basics of the Christian life is this, certainly more than this, but never less than these things.

It must start, brethren, and we need this reminder, with faith and then with love. So let's look at them one at a time. I have a two-point sermon. What a wonderful thing. You'll know that I'm being faithful to the text and not just trying to preach three-point sermons.

Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ

The first thing that I want to draw our attention to is faith in the Lord Jesus. Paul has been away from the Ephesians now for some time. Most agree that it's been about four or five years since Paul first planted the church in Ephesus.

And now, years later, despite being under house arrest somewhere in Rome, he had heard a great deal about this young, growing church. And whether through Tychicus, who we read about in chapter 6, or through other written letters, Paul has heard about the church's faith in the Lord Jesus.

Every single word in that sentence is important. Faith in the Lord Jesus. Many of you have been members of this church, looking out here today, some of you almost since the beginning. But even for those of you who have belonged here for only a short time, if you were to leave our church next month and remain away, picture this, we would miss you for four or five years, and then receive a verbal report of how the church was doing.

What would you want to hear by way of an update? You've been away for four or five years in a faraway land, and someone says, Grace Fellowship Church, I will tell you how they're doing. You want to hear it?

What would your heart's desire and prayer to God be for the saints of this church? Would you want to hear that the church was growing? Yes, I think you would. Would you want to hear that this church was as committed as ever to expository preaching?

Yes, I think without a doubt. Otherwise you wouldn't be here, I don't think. But what would the best news in all of the world be? I will tell you what I would want to hear if I was away for four or five years.

For someone to come back and say, Oh, that church is growing in her faith and in her faithfulness. That that church, she trusts in Christ more. Those people, they are more convinced of the veracity of the Gospel than ever.

They're more assured of their justification by faith alone in Christ. That church treasures Christ above all things. That church is increasingly submitted to His Lordship. Oh, that church is a faithful church.

Oh, would that that would be true of this church. It would be truly good news. Now let me ask you, does that describe us today? Does that describe you today? Treasuring Christ more assured than ever before.

Submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. As obedient children. Is that our current trajectory? Is the church at large heading in that direction? When I look at the church at large, I think that fewer and fewer professing Christians truly know what saving faith actually is.

Now it can be, I want to, this is a little, an aside for a second. Churches sometimes, teachers and false teachers especially, sometimes will cast shade on other churches so that they can increase and establish their dominance and their control over the people.

It is a manipulation technique. I'm not seeking to do that. Not seeking to be in competition with other churches. But I just mean at a basic level, from an honest perspective. It seems that fewer and fewer professing Christians truly know what saving faith actually is today.

Many professing Christians, when asked how the Lord saved them, and you've heard this, you're familiar with this language. They will tell you that they had some kind of experience that led them to believe in God.

And that is it. And when you probe a little bit further, and what about Jesus? What about Jesus? That is it. I believe in God. And if I believe in Jesus at all, He is a mere window dressing. This Christianity consists of a shallow faith in a vague God-like being who they once had an encounter with at a youth rally, or amongst a friend, or even in old age at a good local church.

But theirs is a religion of moral therapeutic deism. Now what is moral therapeutic deism? It is essentially a description of the greater western church. A view that God wants little more than for His people to be nice, to do good, and to avoid bad language.

Such is the faith of millions. And it is no faith at all. It makes me want to cry out. Like James, you believe that God is one,.

You do well,.

But even the demons believe that, and they shudder. But there are others still who speak of faith as if faith were an end in and of itself. That it seems almost as if the point of the Christian life is to have faith in your own faith.

That I possess faith. Just like I possess a wallet. I possess faith. But there is nothing in the wallet. There is nothing in the faith. And others still have a faith that God will come through, yes. But He is going to come through in that big game.

He is going to come through when I apply to that big job. He is the God who exists to make my dreams come true and to protect me from every mild inconvenience. Nicole and I once met with a young couple at a wedding.

We had met at a wedding and it was the middle of the night. And you know those situations where someone is in your home and the only thing you want to do is sleep and yet you are too polite to ask them, I think it is time to go because we need to go to bed.

And I remember it was 3 or 4 in the morning and we had young children. We were going to be up again at 7 in the morning. It was set. This was coming. We were going to get 3 hours of sleep. And I remember speaking to this couple and they were so enthusiastic about their faith.

And when we asked them about the object of that faith, they did not say that they believed that God would forgive them of their sins through faith in Jesus Christ. But they said that they had finally discovered, they had unearthed the faith that allowed them to be healthy and happy and no joke, one day own an island off the coast of Florida and to buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis but not to be materialistic because we will drive them for a time and then we will give them away.

That was the subject, the object of their saving faith. Saving from what I do not know. I don't say this to judge other people's professions of faith but to point out that there is an imposter in the camp and each one of us, to some degree, has been affected by that imposter.

Much of what professing believers call Christian faith today is little more than an adult belief in some cosmic Santa Claus. But we cannot simply allow this to persist so long as God puts breath in our lungs and the true gospel in our hearts.

The stakes are too great. Hebrews 11, 6 says, and without faith it is impossible to please God. That there is a potential for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, people in this room who they will find it will be impossible to please God with their lives.

Why?

Because they do not have the kind of faith that pleases God, the kind of faith that Paul is speaking about in verse 15. What then is the true nature? The nature of true faith? Our brother read from Hebrews chapter 11.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for. The conviction of things not seen. Does that mean that anything that I am assured of, that I am convicted of, is faith? What is true biblical faith? I once heard a brother say, reading from this passage in Hebrews 11, that it is not this.

It is not that I can climb to the highest point of Capilano Christian Assembly where we meet and standing at the pinnacle of the building, I can say, I have the assurance that I can fly. Unaided, without an airplane, without a parachute, without anything else, I am going to step off this building because I have faith, I have conviction of things not seen.

No one has ever seen this and I will fly today. Now is that true biblical faith? This brother who shared the story, he said, he said, that is a leap into philosophical darkness and faith is not a leap, not a leap into whatever it is that I am convicted of, that I am assured of, that God will give me an island tomorrow,.

When I name it.

Then what is faith? We don't have to go there. Our brother read it in Hebrews 11, but what we see in Hebrews chapter 11 again and again and again is this. It is Abraham believing the promises of God. It is Noah believing what God has said and doing something about it.

It is all of these men and women throughout all of Scripture who have stood on that which God has said. And so the first thing we need to understand about the true nature of faith is this. True faith is standing upon the Word of God.

Standing upon the promises of Almighty God. True Christian faith is taking all that God has given to us in this book and believing it and staking our lives on it. Every promise, every word, every gift.

Is ours,.

Is yes and amen in Jesus Christ and we cling to that truth. Deuteronomy 29 .29 is often quoted as speaking to the secret will of God versus the revealed will of God. But I want to take it a bit further that it also speaks to what it is that we are to have faith in.

There, Moses says, the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and our children forever that we may do all the words of this law or if I might add that we might believe all the words of this book.

There's an image, a picture of this, a man named George Smith who in the 1730s left his home and went to South Africa and he endured tremendous persecution all the while believing what God's Word said that if he went out and brought God's Word to unknown tribes, to godless people, God's Word would never return void.

He had a promise that he clung to and he was so intensely persecuted that eventually it drove him right out of South Africa. He spent seven years there tormented by these people believing that God's Word would not return void.

And by all accounts his mission was a failure. While other missionaries were coming back speaking of stories of tens of thousands of people coming to faith in Christ, George Smith came back to his homeland and said, in my seven years of preaching the Gospel one poor woman professed faith in Christ.

He was,.

If there was a Missions magazine in the 1740s, he was not going to be on the cover of Missions magazine. He was going to be somebody else. But fascinatingly, amazingly, about a hundred years later when the South Africans, there was a group of South African Christians who looked back at the founding of the mission that reached them.

They looked at the history of it and they sought to sum up all of this brief work and calculate how many believers had come to faith through George Smith's ministry. Well, George Smith shared the Gospel with countless people.

One person believed and then through her a whole host of other people believed so that at the end of that 100 years there were 13 ,000 believers in South Africa who could say, praise be to God for George Smith coming with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

That is biblical faith. To see what God has written and to believe it. But there's more than just that. There is the object of true faith. We've looked at the nature, let's look at the object of true faith.

We are not to have faith in our faith. We are not even to have faith in God in a generic sense. That even in and of itself is not enough to please God. Now that might sound crazy to you perhaps, but I will catechize my children on this all the time and say to them, how must we be saved?

Actually, I love it that my children come to me now and say, Dad, ask me the questions. Ask me the questions. I know exactly what questions they're wanting me to ask. Okay, who made you? God made me. Have you sinned against God?

Yes, I have sinned against God. What is our punishment for sin? Well, our punishment for sin is hell. It's an eternal separation from that God. And then how can we be saved?

And they know.

That if they say, I need to believe in God, they're going to get gently corrected. Believe in God who? Believe in God the Son, Jesus Christ, who is the propitiation for my sins. I love what one Bible dictionary says.

It says, faith is the attitude whereby a man abandons all reliance in his own efforts to obtain salvation. Be it his deeds of piety, of ethical goodness, or anything else, it is the attitude of complete trust in Christ.

Of reliance on Him alone for all that salvation means. Now Shane, you might ask, is this true? Can this be true? Let me show you what Paul says in verse 15. I heard of your faith, but does he stop there?

I heard of your faith, period. But he says, but I have heard, because I have heard of your faith, in the Lord, Jesus Christ. If any of us are to have a pleasing, praiseworthy,.

True,.

Faithful faith in Jesus Christ, or faith at all, it must be a faith in Jesus Christ. And a faith that acknowledges the lordship of Jesus Christ. It is not a mere faith in the details of the gospel, even.

But it is a faith in the person of the gospel, and a faith that submits to the person of that gospel. This might surprise you, but in our Bibles, if we were to go through our New Testaments and look for the word Savior, as it describes Jesus, as it is attributed to Jesus, how many instances would we find?

If we were to look through the whole of the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as Savior, just over 20 times. But if we were to look for that same equation, but instead of Savior, we were to look at Lord.

I did this this week. Jesus is called Lord, in the New Testament, over 600 times. For every one time that he is Savior, he is 20 times Lord. He is both Savior and Lord, and we must come to him for our saving, and we must come to him for his mastering over us.

That.

Is faith that pleases God. And let me talk about then how we see an increase still to this true faith. There's a story about an old man that I believe it was George Whitfield had communed with, and there was this group of Christian men who were around, and one of the young men remarked, it was actually Whitfield, to the older man, he said, you are the oldest man among us.

Do you not rejoice to think that your time is so near at hand when you will be called home? And the old man replied, I love this. May this be our spirit, whether we are 20 or.

89.

What a.

Random number. My business is to live as long as I can, and as well as I can, and to serve my master as faithfully as I can, until he shall think proper to call me home. Resolved to be more faithful still.

What a peculiar wisdom that is seen in this comment, and how few there are who think this way. Many people view faith, faith in God, and faith in Jesus Christ, faith in the promises of God, and submission to the Lordship of Christ as one-dimensional.

As if it were a dichotomy, it's a toggle switch, it's on or it's off. I have faith or I don't have faith. But that is not at all the way Scripture views faith. But in fact, faith can be qualified and quantified.

That people can have a strong faith and they can have a weak faith. Romans 14 .1, Paul says, As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him not to quarrel over opinions.

Meanwhile,.

On the strong side of the equation, Proverbs 3 and verse 5, trust in the Lord, and then it qualifies it, with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In 1 Corinthians 16 and verse 13, Be watchful, stand firm in the faith.

Act like men, be strong, let all that you do be done in love. Here we see faith and love paired. We are commanded in Scripture to seek a more firm, established, resolute faith. And brethren, let me just give us a couple of quick pointers on how we can find that increase in our faith.