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Ephesians 4:6
All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to the book of Ephesians. And we will be continuing on in our series through Paul's letter to the churches in Ephesus. Ephesians, specifically chapter four, verse six.
Ephesians chapter four, verse six. And if you don't have a Bible, there should be a hardback black one near you. And if you don't have one, that's our gift to you. Now, when you are ready, please stand for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible and all sufficient word.
As I said, we will be looking at Ephesians chapter four, verse six, but I will begin in verse one so we can pick back up in Paul's argument. And so this is the word of the Lord. Therefore, I, the prisoner in the Lord, exhort you to walk worthy of the calling with which you have been called.
With all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, being diligent to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling.
One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen. Amen, go ahead and have a seat.
As we examine today's text, we are going to be confronted with the center of the Bible. And what I mean by that is, if you survey the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, you might be shocked to realize that the Bible is not merely about you.
It's not about humanity. It's not even about sin. It's not even about how God ultimately deals with the problem of sin in humanity, but rather the story of the Bible, the center of the Bible is God himself.
Now I know that that is a revolutionary concept for many people in today's church, but Christianity is about God. Salvation is about God. That's why John Piper has famously said, God is the gospel, but salvation is about God.
And really our unity, as we have explored already is about God. And today we are going to look at verse six, which is really going to be the climax of the argument that Paul is making. He's ending with the biggest first, that is God, the father, the source of where everything else comes from.
He's the planner. He's the one who pushes forth his plan and he is the one who governs all things. And so we might ask then, well, why in the world is Paul ending here? Well, one, because it makes for good poetry, right?
It's the crescendo of the entire thing. Like we want to build to an argument. We don't just want to state truths disconnected from reality. But more than that, as it pertains to the flow of Paul's argument, he's starting of course, as we have looked at this creedal statement that grounds us in the Godhead, as our roots, as it were, as our ground and foundation of unity, he is moving from logically the effect to the cause.
The effect to the cause. And what I mean by that is he's moving from the experiential, or as the Puritans would call it, experimental, to the biggest reality that exists behind even your own experience.
And more than that, what we are going to see as we look at our text is that God, specifically God the Father, is both transcendent and otherworldly, unassailable. A bigger than you think he could ever be, and yet nearer than you could ever comprehend.
He is God. And that will shatter your brain and your heart.
And he is Father.
And that will cause your affections to swell as you lean in, trust, and seek your care from him. In this way, he's kind of, if we want to use an analogy that of course is going to break down for you children specifically, is it's kind of pointing to the reality that God is like, although in many ways he's not like, so don't carry this too far, but like the sun.
The sun is big, it's transcendent, you can't see it, it burns bright. And if you get too close to it, you will burn and disintegrate. And yet, that same sun, that same exact sun that is vibrant with power, untouchable is the same sun that warms us when we are cold, that gives us a vitamin D to grow.
And so it is with God, and so it is with the Father. I'm reminded of this truth when I look at, for example, Isaiah chapter 57, verse 15. In Isaiah chapter seven, verse 15, the prophet Isaiah says, for thus says the one on high and lifted up, who dwells forever, whose name is holy.
I dwell on high and a holy place, but also with the crushed and lowly of spirit. In order to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the crushed, God is so far above you, and yet he is so, so very near to you.
And so as we look at our text, Ephesians chapter four, verse six, there are a few truths that we want to consider in relationship to this. We've already seen, of course, that there is one spirit that we are unified in, as we have examined this creedal statement.
There is one body that we are baptized into. There is one gospel that calls us, and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, the righteous. There is one faith, that is, there is one doctrine that governs our belief system, and there is one baptism, not multiple.
Today, we are looking at the reality that there is one God. If you look with me at verse six, Paul begins this crescendo, this ending of his creedal statement by asserting there is one God and Father.
There is a singular God and a singular Father. Now, as we look at this, I want you to be governed by this first point, which is our God is the only God. Our God is the only God. So when Paul says here that there is one God, we're gonna pause there, he's essentially catching everyone on fire, who's listening, okay?
And the reason that he's doing that is because this church that he was writing to, if you remember, the churches in Ephesus, these churches were insanely infiltrated by the world, the flesh, and the devil, as we saw in Ephesians chapter two.
They were products of the Roman Empire. In fact, Ephesus was culturally considered the religious hub, even the artistic hub of the Roman Empire. It had everything that the Roman Empire had to offer, especially by way of a multiplicity of gods and vile debauchery.
And so to assert to the Ephesians, at least in the culture, and somewhat even to the Ephesian church, though many of these people were most certainly converted, but obviously still maybe a little confused because all of their friends and their families were worshiping these idols.
But here's the thing, he said this and he knew that he was going to be controversial and that he was gonna be grotesquely scandalous, as it were. There is one God, there is not a multiplicity of gods.
This would have been mind-blowing, right? It would have been mind-blowing because that's all they would have known, is a multiplicity of God. As a matter of fact, Christians, as I said this before, were considered by the Roman Empire atheists.
We were the first atheists because we said, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's one God, his name is Yahweh. There's one Lord, his name is Jesus. And they were dissatisfied with that reality. They were fine with a pantheon of gods, but they were not okay with the assertion that there is one God, but there is only one God.
And Paul wants the Ephesians to understand this and he wants you to understand this. Ephesus was so eaten up by this reality that there was in fact a temple that still stands today. It's called the Temple of Artemis.
It houses a statue of the goddess of fertility, of course, named Artemis, and it was filled with false worship and temple prostitutes. And now it's considered one of the great wonders of the ancient world.
This was so embedded in their culture that when Paul preached the gospel in Ephesus, there were many who were outraged that he was beginning to turn people's hearts toward God and away from false idols because, and I quote, Acts 19 .26, he's convincing people that idols made with hands are not gods at all.
Wow, revolutionary, beautiful. What it looked like to be a church that put a dent in our city so much so that people who made their money off of idols, false worship, and debauchery would be flabbergasted.
Now, you're sitting there thinking the obvious, which is okay, cool, but how does this apply to me, right? I don't have carved images in my home. Maybe the Ephesians didn't have it carved out out of their backyard from their stone and placed on their mantel place.
So what does this have to do with me, right? Because we think, when we think about idol worship, that it's simply a bunch of savages in the middle of nowhere, right, gathered around a totem pole, running around, doing lots of weird things, praying to weird gods.
And quite frankly, that's barbaric and foreign and far too unsophisticated for the likes of us. The problem with that is that false gods, false worship, and idols are simply products of the heart. So for some people in some ages, it is carved images, and for some people, it is simply gods that we have erected in our hearts that we bow in allegiance to.
And of course, we find the idea of idol worship as it pertains to images shocking, but that's just engaging in what C .S. Lewis has called chronological snobbery, right? For some reason, we think people before us were stupid and didn't understand anything, and yet, how did we get here?
The reality is we are all enslaved to false gods before we come to know the Lord Jesus Christ by the power of God, by the grace of God, which is why when Paul is addressing the Galatians for their false worship, he says to them in Galatians chapter four, verse eight, however, at that time, what time?
When you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. You see, as John Calvin has famously said, our hearts are perpetual idol factories, or if you read it in the old English, forgers of idols.
And so you may not fashion or carve idols out of stone, but you manufacture them in your heart, and you must slay them because there is one God. Whether it's another God, the God of the Jehovah Witnesses, the God of Mormonism, or whether it's the God of pride, whether it's the God of envy, whether it's the God of family, right?
Because they don't have to be bad things. You can just turn good things into God things and worship them, and I could go on, and the list does go on, but we must move on. This is the promotion of what is commonly referred to as monotheism.
This is the backbone of the entire Pentateuch. This is the backbone of really our entire Bible. There is one God. Of course, this comes from many places in the Bible, particularly Deuteronomy 6 .4, which says, "'Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is one God, Yahweh is one.'".
Very pointedly, Paul says elsewhere in 1 Corinthians 8 .4,.
Just simply, "'There's no God but one.'".
And in 1 Timothy 2 .5, Paul says, "'For there is one God and one mediator "'between God and men, and that is the man Christ Jesus.'". There is one God and one mediator between Him. Well, this means that we ought to give our entire lives to this God.
He is one God. He is the only God. He is the true God. He is the only God that exists. He's the only God that's real. He's the only God who can save, and in light of our text, He's the only God who can provide unity, sustain unity, because He is supremely sovereign.
He is pervasively powerful, and He is completely, utterly present. Children, would you look at me for just a second? When you think about the reality that there's one God, that should teach us not only that we should just worship that one God, but that we should also listen to that one God.
If there's one God, right, and He's got one law, He's got one gospel, we ought to give all of our attention and all of our ear to Him. Have you ever been in a situation where you were a little bit alone or scared and frightened?
Maybe you were in a crowd of people and you got lost. Maybe you were at the store. Maybe you were at a park. Maybe you were somewhere else and you could not find your parents, and you started to freak out, and there was a lot of different noises happening around you, a lot of different things vying for your attention.
In that moment, you might've cried out, but it was likely that your parents cried out and they said, children, whatever your specific name is, come, come to me. And then what happened in that moment? You didn't listen to any strangers.
You weren't distracted by the crowds. You weren't scared anymore because you heard the voice of your parents because you knew that your parent was there. And your parents then are acting in that moment as they should, because they care for you and they love you, and God cares for you and God loves you, and He wants you to listen to His voice.
And He's the only voice worth listening to in terms of all of the other crazy ideas that are out there in the world. The second thing that I want you to note, and this will go by a little bit quicker than that first point, but nonetheless, I think it's important.
As a matter of fact, I think this might be the thing Paul's trying to drill down on in this specific section. Though it is true there is only one God, and though I think this text is teaching that, it makes more sense in light of this Trinitarian progression, this three sets of three governed by the seven time usage of the word one, is that, and this is my second point, our God is one.
So there's only one God, but our God is one. Now, as we look at this Trinitarian formation, it's easy to assume that maybe there is three gods and maybe if we're not going to fall prey to thinking that, then we might think that there's three types of gods, or there's three little gods under the umbrella of a big God, or maybe the Father is completely and utterly God, and then there's these other little gods, whatever the case may be.
But what Paul is wanting us to understand as he's looking at this foundation, as he's looking at the thing that binds us together in unity, is that this Trinitarian God, this Father, Son, and Spirit is not just the only God, He is one.
He is singular. And this is the backbone in many ways of Christianity. There was a time in which many people believed in the early church, for example, that to misunderstand the Trinity is to be the first step in misunderstanding the gospel itself.
And so this is a truth that must be stamped on every single one of our eyeballs. And it must govern the thoughts and intentions of our hearts as it pertains to how to dissect the Word of God and salvation itself.
You see here we have the Spirit, we have the Son, and we have the Father that we will speak about momentarily. But what you need to understand is that every member of the Trinity is fully God. And as confusing as it might be, is the one God, the one God.
Christians have believed and the Bible teaches that God in His trinity is singular in nature. Each one of these members in the Bible, though has distinct roles within the economy of redemption, is each said to have engaged in the divine works of God.
Each of them is called God because there is one God. And this God is made up of three persons who share one divine essence. They are co-eternal. That is that they have always been. There is never a time when the Father was not the Father, the Son was not the Son of the Father, and never a time where the Spirit did not spirate or proceed from the Father and the Son.
They are co-equal. There is no hierarchy or no subordination within the Godhead itself.
Why?
Because they don't have three wills because they are one God. They are three persons and it does not logically follow that just because there are three persons that there has to be three wills. Because the Bible makes clear, there's one God.
They're co-existent and they share the same divine attributes and they are inseparably linked in their operations. That means that when one member of the Trinity acts,.
God acts.
Now, if any of this is confusing to you, I would commend you to a sermon series that we just recently went over on the Trinity. It's our app, it's on the website, and it is filled with more information about this reality.
But all right here in this moment is wanting us to understand that we ought not be confused about the triune nature of God because to assert that the God of the Bible is both three and one is not a contradiction.
That is, it's not illogical.
It's not a paradox.
It is in fact what the Bible calls a mystery, the secret revealed to the people of God. The secret revealed to the people of God. This is made clear, for example, in Matthew 28, when Jesus baptizes, for example, in the name, or Jesus commands rather his disciples to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Not in the names of, right? The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The same thing that's true in Revelation at the end is the same thing that's true of Genesis chapter one, verse one, that there is one God, right?
God created the heavens and the earth and God saved a people for himself through the person and work of Jesus Christ. The righteous, as a matter of fact, it is God whom we are brought to in salvation anyway.
It is God whom we are brought to in salvation anyway. First Peter chapter three, verse 18 says,. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, so that, what? He might bring us to this very God, the only God, the true God, who is one.
Who is one.
The next thing that I want you to see, now that we have seen that there's only one God and this God is one, is that our God is our only God.
Our Father.
Our God is our Father. In verse six of chapter four, if we look down here again, he continues on and he says, there is one God and Father of all. Now, what's happening here is this transition between the transcendent to the eminent, from the otherworldly to the near, from the you cannot ascertain to the he is giving you of his very self.
The one who is dwelling in unapproachable light has made himself known. And he has made himself known in a myriad of different ways. There are many titles that God possesses and uses throughout the canon of scripture, but this one is, dare I say it, the most beautiful.
The most beautiful. It's equally as true as everything else. It may not be as all inspiring and draw-jopping as some of the other titles in moniker, but in many ways, it is the most beautiful. And it's honestly what separates Christianity from literally every other religion in the world.
There's the truth of the gospel, which is that our God comes to us as opposed to us coming to God. That's one thing that separates us from every other religion in the world. But the other one is that he is not a distant deity divorced from reality, like a watchmaker, who just gets the gears turning and backs away.
No, he is a God who comes near. He's a God who gets messy. He's a God who, for instance, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, did not throw him into immediate judgment, though judgment was on him, made for him clothes to cover his shame and helped.
That's our God, and he is our father. Before we can bask in that beauty, however, we have to ask and answer one simple question.
And that simple question is this.
Why do I, in every single point that I'm making thus far,.
Use the word our?
What does it mean that God is our father? There's a lot of people sitting in this room right now. There's a lot of people in the world. Some of us believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and some of us do not.
Some of us worship false Jesus Christ, and some of us do not. And some of us love God, others hate God, even in this room, maybe. Can't say for certainty, but good chance. So who is he the father of? Why do I keep using what is called, if you're a syntax nerd, a possessive determiner, or a possessive adjective, claiming God as our own?
Well, the answer can be found, yes, in the context, which we need to take notice of, right? Who is Paul speaking to in this part of the letter, and in the letter in general, right? He's speaking to the church of God.
He's not speaking to the world. He's speaking also about the church, right? The entire book of Ephesians starts with, of course, God, because God is the center, the heartbeat of everything. But how God specifically makes a Christian, starting in eternity past and into the present, so that he could take those Christians and make them into one new body, the church.
And then now, he's stepped into a new section, and he's trying to help us understand what? How we are to live like those whom he has made Christians and brought into the church. So who is he the father of?
Just by context alone, those who are in the church. He's the father of those who are in the church, the new body made up of the Jews and the Gentiles, the one new man. But we can see it even more clearly if we look at this modifying phrase after father more intently, this of all, of all.
Kind of already let the cat out of the bag,.
But who does the all refer to?
Well, there's two options.
Now, I started that as the only option because I believe it's the only option, but there are two options. And there are many liberal theologians and many liberal scholars and liberal pastors who will assert one and deny the other.
And of course, there are the ones who are right,.
Namely us.
Who take the second option. So the first option is when it is saying that God is the father of all, it's speaking of everyone or all people that have a pulse. That is all people who live without exception.
The problem with that interpretation is it leads to what is often called the universality of the fatherhood of God. God is only the father of those who believe. We will look at those scriptures here in just a moment.
So when it's saying here that he's the father of all, he's not saying that he is the father of everyone who has ever breathed a breath on this earth. God is everyone's creator, but he is only some people's father.
So the second option and the option that you should adopt is that it means not all people who have breath, not all people without exception, but rather all people with distinction. All people with distinction, that is all those who have been saved by God through the work of Jesus Christ, who have been adopted into his family and who are diligently seeking to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
Now, it's also true that of all is modifying God. Now, of course, God is the only God, but there's something beautiful that the Bible continually teaches over and over as it pertains to the word God here, namely that when he saves the people for himself, it's not just that he is God, but that he's our God, that he's our God, right?
Second Corinthians chapter six, Paul is laying out the reality that we shouldn't be unevenly yoked. That's not necessarily meaning you shouldn't marry someone who is not a Christian. It's saying that we shouldn't partner with evil, right?
Not in the church, special. And he's teaching there that there is fulfilled prophecy being fulfilled in their midst. Barring from the Old Testament, he says, God promised to walk with you hand in hand as with a father, him being your God and he being your people, and you being his people, right?
God wants us to be his God, and he's made it so, and he wants us to be his people. But here, this father language is phenomenal. Then it goes deeper. God is the father of all who have believed and are adopted.
We see this in Ephesians chapter one, right? Verse five, he predestined us as adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. So we are children through the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ and his redeeming.
Work, adoption is simply being brought, adoption rather is brought about by not physical birth, but rebirth, being regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit. The reason that this is so important is because we are, according to Ephesians chapter two, if you haven't been convinced already, no, we were not naturally born children of God.
We were born with a congenital spiritual disease. We were born with cardiac sclerosis. We were born in sin and we were born sinning. We were under the headship of Adam and we need a new headship, namely in Jesus Christ.
Christ, it is God who makes us children. So it is him who is the father of only those who are in fact children. One more verse for you to consider, John chapter one, verse 12, it says, but as many as received him, speaking of Jesus, to them he gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in his name, who were born, what, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, wasn't their idea, nor of the will of man.
They didn't do it. They didn't make it happen, but of God. God goes after men and women who are rebellious against him, dead in their sins and transgressions and makes them, causes them to be children by rebirthing them and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
So that's why we believe the second option. Also, Jesus says to the Pharisees at one point in John chapter eight, verse 44, that those who were preaching against what he was doing were actually under their father, the devil, and they did the desires of the devil.
So your father determines your behavior, because he governs you, trains you, sustains you, moves you. So as you think about this, I want you to think that God is the father, not simply of the breathing, but the believing.
Those who trust by faith in him and his work and the Lord Jesus Christ. So let's look at this word father. This word father here comes from the Greek word pater, which is where we get the word in our language, patriarch.
It carries with it, yes, authority,.
But more than that, it carries with it the meaning of a deep and heartfelt relationship. It stands opposed to the deistic understanding of God. When the Bible speaks of God as our father, it's speaking of the reality that God, our God, the God and father is not checked out, but he's close and he's caring and he's very, very present.
Now, a lot could be said about the father. A lot can be said about his fatherhood and in fact, I would love to do an entire sermon that focuses directly on the fatherhood of God. However, there are only a few that I think bear repeating in light of this text and I want to utilize our time together to speak about these.
When the Bible teaches that God is our father, it firstly is teaching us that God being our father means that we have a new family and that we've been brought into it by virtue of the blood of Jesus Christ and that we are tied together by that very blood.
This has been the argument that has been made. Yes, God's church is his body. God's church is his church. God's church is his assembly, but God's church is also his family filled with sons and daughters who are bound together with our elder brother, Jesus Christ, the righteous.
That means look around, look around. These people that you are sitting here with, these are not just people that are enjoying the same performance or something together. These aren't even just people that you are doing church with.
These are not just people that come and say hi and say they'll pray for you and they're awesome in terms of being acquaintances. These are people that you are supposed to be living in the trenches with.
These are the people that you should be completely and utterly dependent upon. These are the people that ought to forgive you when you sin against them. These are the people that ought to be forgiven when they sin against you.
And these are the people, and this is what Paul's aiming at here, right? That have been saved by the one God. And friends, what he's trying to get us to understand is if we wanna preserve unity in the bond of peace, start here.
Start with the understanding that God is our father collectively and corporately and even individually, and that we are all bound together by the blood of Jesus Christ that was spilled on the cross because we couldn't measure up without his acting.
Man, if we understood that, that would change everything about the way we interact with one another, the way we seek to serve and love his church and the people in it. How can you be divided when God is one?
How can you be divided when you're saved by that one God and that one God is your father? Many people in today's church are more loyal to their family units, some of them not even knowing Christ, than they are to their church family who have been purchased by the blood of the son.
But the reality is this blood, Jesus' blood, it runs deeper and connects more fully than even the physical womb. And so when we say that God is our father, what we're saying is we are underneath his fatherhood.
We are in his family. The second thing is that believing God to be our father or God actually just being our father means that there are glorious, glorious gospel riches, glorious gospel riches that await us.
Now, you can find a run-on kind of play-by-play. If you look at Romans 8, verses 14 through 17, you can skip to Romans 8, verses 29 and following, but you don't even have to do that. You can literally just go back to Ephesians 1.
And you can see here that we have been made an inheritance and we've been given the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as it were, as a pledge of the inheritance that's going to come. This one God has many children, but since he's God, he's got enough inheritance laying around.
He's got more love to give and it will never run out. He's got more rooms in his mansions. He will never run out. He has a hand to wipe the tear from everyone's eyes. He will never run out of thumbs. This God is our father and he fathers us now and he will give us, as his children, a future inheritance and he is making us an inheritance, Ephesians chapter 111, for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Also, when we say that God is father, it means that we are, and I won't cover this exhaustively because we covered this last Sunday night, but God being your father means that you will be disciplined.
He doesn't leave you alone in your sin. He's working and will continue to work to conform you to the image of his son. And he's doing it for your good so that you might share in his holiness. That you might be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.
He trains you in righteousness for his name's sake. And lastly, and like I said, more could be said, but the last thing that I want you to see is that God being your father means that you will be eternally cared for, kept, and comforted.
Comforted.
You will be eternally cared for, kept, and cared for. There are many scriptures that point to this reality. One of which is found in Psalm 103, verse 13, when the psalmist says, as a father has compassion on his children, so Yahweh has compassion on those who fear him.
God's fatherhood is one of compassion. Except for he's better than any earthly father.
He's the God and father.
This is why Peter says in his first epistle in chapter five, verse seven, that we are to cast all our anxieties on him, speaking of God, because he cares for you. One of the things that's beautiful about reformed and Calvinistic soteriology is that God is promoted as God.
He's seen as big, he's seen as beautiful, transcendent, but oftentimes we can miss the very important reality of his nearness. We can miss that we can come to him, each one of us individually, and give him and cast our anxieties upon him because he will, in fact, care for it.
I was just listening to a sermon by Paul Washer that had nothing to do with this, but he was talking about how so many things have plagued him over the course of his life, especially as it pertains to things that were going on in his missionary work.
There were people dying, there was children starving to death, there was wars going on, there was all of these things happening, and he was like, do you wanna know how I was able to be sustained in those times?
And then he started reaping and crying, which I wish I was better at. So you could just see the emotion written on his face and how much he believed in what he was about to say. He said, I just prayed one prayer over and over and over and over.
And then he said the prayer, and then he ended it in a way that only Paul Washer can. But he said this, he said, my prayer was just simply this. You know, you know. And if you know, then I can go to sleep.
Did you catch that?
If he knows you can go to sleep because you don't need to worry about it, you can cast your anxieties and your fears on him because if he is your father, he is not going to let you go, he's not going to let you down, and he has promised in Romans chapter eight, verse 28 and following, that he will work all things for the good of those who love him.
And who loves him? Those who he has caused to love him by virtue of the fact that he has gone after them in his gracious effort to redeem. And so what? You have not fear, you have nothing to fear. This is why Jesus says in Matthew six, chapter six, verse 30, but if God so closed the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you?
Go a little further in Matthew chapter 10. You see, we get too reformed over here. We always talk about Romans. I forget there's other places in the Bible sometimes. I'm kidding, it was a joke. Matthew chapter 10, verse 29 and 31 essentially say the same thing using a different analogy.
It's using sparrows. He says there are not two sparrows sold for a sum of money. I would tell you what it is, but it's rendered as something you won't understand. An Assyrian, that's just an insignificant amount of money.
And then he goes on and yet not one of them, not one of those sparrows who is not made in the image of God, who does not fall underneath the fatherhood of God, not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your father.
And then he continues on. If you're not understanding it or if his disciples weren't understanding it, do not fear. So do not fear. You, Jesus says, are more valuable than many sparrows. You see, your God is your father, Christian.
Your God is your father and he loves you. He delights in you. The Psalms say that he sings over you. He rejoices when you put sin to death. He can't wait to commune with you and he wants you in his house, in his courts forever.
And he has moved heaven and earth to do it. And that is what he is trying to get us to understand in this book of Ephesians, right? He's done everything he can possibly do to love you and the loveliness, regardless of the fact that you are completely unlovable and rebellious in all your pursuits.
This God is too good to be true. Children, would you look at me for just a second? I have just a few more things to say to you. And this one is this, that most of you in this church that I know have really good fathers, godly fathers who lead you well, love you, discipline you, do all the things that I'm saying here.
And yet what I want you to understand is this, that your father is just a man, a good man, a godly man, a man after God's heart as he is trying to love you as he is called to do and to engage you in family worship.
But he is just a man and he will and has failed you. But our father in heaven, God, the one that your father follows is perfect in every way. He will never let you down and he will always be there for you to comfort you even into and throughout all eternity.
That's a father worth following. And so as we begin our slow climb, our dissension as it were, onto the tarmac, I wanna just sum up what these three points are really aiming at. At this juncture, when we are looking at verse six, we ought to be asking the question, how in the world does this serve the bottom line?
And what is the bottom line? That we are to be keeping the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace with tenacity, with grit, if you remember me talking about that, right? And we need to do so by walking worthy.
And we walk worthy by being humble, gentle, patient, and bearing with one another in love. And so why does this, what we're looking at now, and even the last two verses, this creedal statement, serve that bottom line?
How does thinking about the triune God, again, after we have transitioned from doctrine to duty, how is that to help us? Well, I'm going to tell you why. There is one, I believe, colossal implication that Paul has been pointing at this entire time, though he has done it by looking at the specific members of the Trinity, he's done it speaking of the one God.
And he wants you to understand, he wants me to understand, he wants heritage to understand, and of course, he wrote to the Ephesians, so he wanted them to understand that what? Because God is one, that is, because God is unified, though diverse, in being and in purpose, it then logically follows that his children would also be one, undivided, unified in their very purpose.
Or you could even say it another way, because God is one, the church is one, we are one. Remember we said that this unity is brought about not by our effort, but by the Holy Spirit. This means that unity is native to the church.
It's secure, our unity is secure, our unity is indestructible, because it's from, purchased by, and applied by God, the one true God, the God who is one himself. And because we are in him, the church, no doubt, is one.
Here's what this means, we can't mess this thing up, guys. Well, that's not true. We can mess it up, but not because we destroy the unity. That's already there. The church is already unified. It's been purchased by the blood of Jesus, and it's rooted in the very Godhead, but you can, and this is what I mean by we could mess it up.
You can't destroy it, you can't obliterate it, you can't get rid of it, but you can mask and mar it. You can neglect it, you can ignore it, you can spit on it, you can even diminish in your heart its importance, but you will never destroy it.
The only thing that you do when you don't live according to the unity that has already been purchased for us by the power of the spirit, is you're just calling God a liar with your life. You're just calling God a liar with your life.
You guys hear me rage against people who take shots at the church all the time, and they don't properly nuance between false churches and real churches. They don't nuance between God's remnant and those who would just profess Christ.
And the reason for that is because God does not cease to be God, he doesn't cease to be father, he doesn't cease to be unified, doesn't cease working in and through us, which is where we're going next, but I want you to read how John Stott puts this.
Before we leave.
John Stott sums up everything I'm saying like this, there can only be one Christian family, only one Christian faith, hope, and baptism, and only one Christian body, because there is only one God, who is father, son, and spirit.
You can no more multiply churches than you can multiply gods. Is there only one God? Then he has only one church. Is the unity of God intrinsic to him? Then so the unity of the churches is. It is no more possible to split the church than it is possible to split the Godhead.
It's powerful, powerful stuff. That is powerful stuff, friends. So if we want to, as Heritage Church, do what Paul is saying here, guard the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace, we ought to soak our minds and our hearts in these very realities, that God is God, that there is one spirit, there is one body, that there is one calling, one baptism, one God and father, who is, and this brings me to our next point.
Our next point is our God is transcendently near. And I'm gonna try to knock this out quickly, so pay attention. Our God is transcendently near. So of course, we've already said that in the father, but we have three prepositions that are going to be used to help us further understand how he does that.
He is, according to our text here, if you look with me, verse six, he is this father who is a father of all who believe, not breathe, is over all and through all and in all. Now, this is a formulation that you will see all over the Bible because it's true and it's helpful.
But what it's trying to communicate quite pointedly is that God is supremely, as I said before,.
Sovereign.
But he is pervasively powerful and penetratingly pervasive. Say these one at a time, very quickly. It says, first of all, that he is over all. He is over all. Now, theologians and pastors have translated what's happening here in primarily two different ways.
And they do so because, well, one, they don't necessarily take the Greek into consideration, but also are not following the flow of Paul's thought. One way that this is taken is to mean things. And so what's happening at the end of this, whether you know it or not, is there's something happening with these prepositions.
They're either in the masculine or the neuter. And most definitely the one at the end is in the masculine, which designates people as opposed to things. Neuter is things. Now, if that's confusing to you, all I'm trying to say is that some people take this next part to be saying this, that he is over all of creation and he's through all of creation and he is in all of creation.
Now, there's some truth that overlaps there, but also our God is not the God of pantheism, which states that God is in everything. No, no, this is actually, I believe, all in the masculine, pointing to the reality that this is speaking about people.
So he is over all people and what people? Well, his church, those who believe, not just those people who breathe. He's over all, he stands above everyone in the church, morally, in his perfections and attributes, transcendently, he has unassailable power.
No one is and no one can ever be his superior, no one has ever taught him anything, he gets to tell us what to do. He sits on his throne, in his sovereign position, where he rains down edicts for the church, where he acts as its head and where we are under his jurisdiction.
Psalm 103, verse 19, makes this irrefutably clear. Yahweh, it says, has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all. Yes, he rules the creations, but if you, the creation, but if you remember at the end of chapter one of the book of Ephesians, it says that God put all things in subjection under Jesus' feet in verse 22 and gave him as head over all things.
Now that is speaking of creation, to the church. And remember we said that Christ here was given dominion over the cosmos for the sake of his beautiful bride, the church, his body. Jesus, the God-man, God himself is over all.
This is why Psalm 15, verse three says, our God is in the heavens and he does whatever he pleases. If we understand God to be over all, to be supremely sovereign over all in the church and over our lives, that's going to really fix a lot of potential disunity, a lot of spitting on the reality that God has purchased for us and made available to us.
Not only that, but it will pour into us joy and contentment and so on and so forth. Children, the truth of this particular text is that God gets to tell you what to do. God gets to tell you how to live your life.
God gets to tell you who to date, how to date. He gets to tell you what it is that you in fact need to be doing between when you were born and your death. He gets to tell us how to worship him, tell us how to interact with our brothers and sisters.
The second thing is it says here that he is through all. He is through all. This is pointing to his pervasive power that's in absolutely everything. Many commentators of old would point to the reality that this is speaking of his, not only sovereignty, but his providential arm that works out his sovereignty in a real life.
Sovereignty is just power, but providence is him using that power for your good, working in you and through you to bring about his intended purpose. Because the father has a plan for his children, he is always sustaining them.
He is always pervading with action toward them. He is upholding and governing us, our families and this church. He is overall, he rules it all. He is through all and he is working through all and he is working for all of those who are in fact his children.
There is nothing apart from his will that his hand does not lovingly direct as it pertains to his children because he holds all things together. That's what Colossians chapter one, verse 17 says. In him, all things hold together and they hold together because he is through everything.
He is providentially present in every single situation that might ail the individual and the church and the world as well. But Paul is really wanting you to look at the church. You can think about Genesis chapter 50, for example, with Joseph and his brothers and I won't go into the whole story, but he says to them after being betrayed by them that I know you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good.
Because he loves his children. He's for his children. He's overall, he is through all and lastly, he is in all. That is speaking, of course, of his indwelling spirit. Up to this point, we have talked about the spirit's work in regenerating us and even bringing us together as the church, as the body of Christ, as he stands above as head.
And we have seen that the spirit is building us into a dwelling of God. You see this in chapter two, verse 22. It says that we, the church, the building of God are being built together into a dwelling of God in the spirit.
It's the speaking of corporate indwelling, but here he's wanting to point to the reality that each individual member of the church, each individual member of the family is in fact indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
See this in places like 1 Corinthians chapter two, verse 12 or 1 Corinthians chapter 316, where Paul is essentially drawing out the same conclusion. Did you not know, right, that you are the temple of God and the spirit dwells within you?
Now, sometimes it's speaking of the corporate church, but oftentimes it's speaking of the individual. Our God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit lives in us. We've already seen when we looked at chapter three of Ephesians that Jesus has come to make a home in our hearts.
And so because we have the spirit, we are continually protected, sustained, and propelled to a life of Christ likeness, right? Because he is over all, he works through all, and he is in all. It's a beautiful God.
It's a big God who is very near. And so in closing, I want to just say that this to you Christians first, every drop of ink that has been spilt by the apostle Paul writing this letter to the church that's in Ephesus was an extension and an intention of the Holy Spirit in that it was spilt for you.
And it was designed to pierce your heart as if it were a warrior's arrow. Because our hearts oftentimes are completely cold and complacent, it's prone to wander. It needs comforted oftentimes more than we would like to admit.
And it's often tempted to run back to false idols over and over and over and worship false gods. But what was it meaning to do when it pierced your heart? I'll tell you. It was to enable you to quit looking to self.
And as it pertains to church unity, to quit looking around and to cause you to look up, to behold your God, to raise your gaze to heaven so that you might be enthralled with him there. Colossians chapter three tells us to look to Christ in the heavenly places, not to the things that are below, because when we look at Christ, we look at God, when we look at his oneness, it governs our perspective, it governs our gaze, and it helps us to discern what in the world is going on.
In other words, as we look at what's happening here in the Bible, we're engaging in what we would call Paul's pedagogical method. He's not just telling us what to do, he's telling us to behold our God so that we might believe by faith our God and what he has done in the personal work of Jesus Christ, and then we will be able to have a behavior that looks like someone who has beheld and believed.
So this entire letter has been riddled with buckshot to remind every believer here that you're God. And I'm gonna do a little bit of rehearsing, and I know we're getting to the end of our time here, but the reality is, you need to hear this.
The entire point of the book of Ephesians, up to this point, before he starts talking about how to live as a church, is to remind you that you are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, chapter one, verse three, that you were chosen before the foundation of the world for salvation, Ephesians chapter one, verse four, that you were made and are being made holy, chapter one, verse four, that you have been adopted into God's family, chapter one, verse five, and obviously the text that sits before us, that you have been forgiven of your transgressions and your sins by the covering of Christ's redeeming blood.
We see that in Ephesians chapter one, verse seven, that he has opened by the power of his spirit, your deaf ears and your blind eyes to revive or to cause you to respond to spiritual stimuli. We see that in verses one, 13, but also in 117 and 18.
And he has also, if you are unaware, Christian, which you shouldn't be at this point, raised you from that same spiritual darkness, but specifically death. And he has made you alive in Christ Jesus. And he has caused you to walk faithfully in his statutes and give you a heart that beats red with blood for the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he has also brought you into the church, into his body, reconciling you both to man and to God. In God's church, there is no haves and have nots.
There is no black and there is no white.
There is no Jew and there is no Gentile. That's the point of what's being said here. And we have all been brought where there once was hostility into the same place for the glory of God and our good. And it has been purchased by the Lord Jesus Christ.
And we have been also reconciled to God because we didn't just need saved because we were sinning. We needed saved because God hates sinners. And he has done just that. He has done just that. He has brought us into God's people and he has brought us by he, I mean Jesus Christ, to himself.
And he is, according to Ephesians chapter one, verse 11, and many other places, fashioning us by the power of his spirit into Christ's treasure. That is that we are being fashioned into Christ's treasuring, Christ obeying people.
And it is the same God who did all of this who is the one God, who binds us together in unity and that is sustaining that unity that has been purchased by his son and is protected by his spirit and is permanently rooted in his God-ness.
And so worship in light of that reality, live in light of that reality, but to the Christian or to, I mean, to the skeptic, I'm sorry, to the unconvinced, to the unconverted. And I'm not so naive to think that there aren't people pretending among us.
I wanna speak to you. I wanna speak to what the Bible or what Ephesians would call the rebellious God-hating zombies, the ones who are walking around dead and their transgressions and sins. I wanna remind you the truth of these last three verses, that there is but one God and you are not him and he is not on your shelf.
And you owe a debt to this God that you cannot pay because you have transgressed against him and he is an infinite God and you are a finite being. You don't even understand the depths of sin. And so whether you reject that reality or not, there is but one God and you must reckon with that reality.
But secondly, there is one sovereign Lord. There is one sovereign Lord. And here's the thing about that, friends. If you have not bowed your knee to King Jesus, you will. You will either, as I have said many times, yield now to his Lordship or you will be made to on the last day with regret in your heart and tears flowing from your eyes because at that point, God will have removed his hand of mercy and he will not call you son and you will be underneath the wrath of almighty Jesus in hell for eternity.
And friends, his name is Jesus and you must confess that name. You must believe on that name. That is that he has done what it is that he said he has done because there's no other name. No other name because there's no other God by whom we must be saved.
There's but one faith and there's but one gospel. Friends, that means that there is one way and one way only to be reconciled to this God and to the people sitting around you. And it's through the way, the truth, and the life.
It's through Jesus Christ the righteous. It's through faith in what he has accomplished on our behalf. You cannot become a Christian by trying harder and doing better. You cannot become a Christian by doing good works.
You cannot become a Christian by checking all the boxes and showing up here every single Sunday. No, you must behold God. You must believe God. And it's only then that you will then behave like a godly man and woman.
That is Paul's pedagogy. That is the Bible's pedagogy. And so today I plead with you as Paul would plead with his hearers to repent and to believe what has been taught in the weeks thus far and that you would throw down your manmade crown and that you would believe essentially Ephesians 1 chapter three all the way through 4 -6.
Believe that that's speaking about those who would bow to him in this moment, would believe his beautiful gospel and would trust him to care for you for eternity. Friends, that is your call. Repent and believe.
It's my job to tell you the truth. As I have said before, it's your job to make a decision. So remember, friends, as we move into next week, there is one God, which means there is only one God and the God is one, that he is our father and that he is transcendentally near to all those whom he loves.
And I pray that he is very near in this moment right now to encourage you to live a life that is worthy, Christian. And for the non-Christian, I pray he is very near, wooing and winning you to Christ because he is the only way and he's the gift.
Because in the gospel, you get God. Would you pray with me? Father, we thank you, we thank you for today. We thank you for the many blessings that you have extended to us and we thank you that you have given us a family to call our own.
Lord, we thank you that you are a father and that you care for us and that you love us. And we thank you that you are our God and that you not only channel your power toward us as you have said that you are doing in the first chapter of Ephesians, but that you are channeling your affection toward us.
And so I ask, Lord, that you would continue to impress these truths upon our hearts and that you would make us a church that walks worthy and who is rooted in the unity found in the Godhead itself. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.