God Authors Salvation

Ephesians 1 and the Sovereignty of God in Salvation

If you'll turn in your Bibles with me to the first chapter of Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1. Before we look to the Word of God, let us ask Him to bless our time. Our gracious Heavenly Father, once again, as we have but a few moments together this evening to consider your truth, we ask that you would bless this time.

You would open our hearts and our minds and you would bless the ministry of the Word. You would bless the hymn singing that follows and the fellowship. May it all be to your honor and glory. We pray in Christ's name.

I tried as best I could to convince myself to press on in Deuteronomy this evening. I just couldn't do it. The section is just too difficult and generally on the Sunday evening of hymn singing, we try to be a little bit sensitive to the fact that most of us have work in the morning.

I know that Kelly and I both have to be up between 3 and 3 .30, so it's just not a good idea to try to tackle a big block of text and the section in Deuteronomy just is frightening. So I decided this evening instead to do something a little bit more on the practical side.

I was reminded of the fact that very often we engage in conversation with our fellow Christians about controversial subjects of theology. Not because we sat down with the specific intention of saying I'm going to raise the subject of the doctrines of grace with this person, but because something else was being discussed and as you were discussing it, you discovered you had a difference of viewpoint and you recognized that it was because of the different starting place from which you examine the text of scripture because of a different commitment in regards to the sovereignty of God.

For example, very often the conversation of the doctrines of grace will come up because you have a conversation with someone about whether salvation is something that can be truly possessed and then lost.

Now, of course the world utilizes phrases like, once saved always saved or eternal security. And you'll find a lot of people who will say they believe that doctrine. But then when you push just a little bit harder, when you when you seek for a level of consistency, you discover that they actually believe that God has no sovereign decree at all and that they of their own free autonomous will, maybe with some prevenient grace, whatever that is, it's certainly not a biblical concept, but with some prevenient grace came to believe in Jesus, but they still really want to emphasize the necessity of man's autonomous will, that free will.

Man is not dead in sin, but he's able to do good things like believe and repent and things like that. And so when you ask them, well, but why do you believe in eternal security? Well, he's dead. He won't lose any of his sheep and so on and so forth.

It's like, do you not see the contradiction? Do you not see that if it was by your free will you got into this, then by your own free will you can get out of it? Did you lose your free will once you became a Christian?

Exactly, how does this work? And so that particular subject, I remember very clearly in my senior year in high school, Kelly and I were reminiscing over lunch, we keep forgetting it, but March 17th, this past March 17th, was the 35th anniversary of our first date.

35 years, not too bad. And it was sometime, or I think it was before that, it might have been, I know it's my senior year, and that was my senior year in high school, I had gotten up and walked out of a Bible study class in my church.

Now, I don't normally do things like that, and it's got to be pretty bad for me to get up and walk out of a Bible study class and protest what was being preached or taught. And what had happened was a husband and his wife were teachers and they had become convinced that you could lose your salvation.

Now, they knew that that wasn't the position of the church. They knew that wasn't the position of the preacher of the church. And so they decided on the same day, she was a teacher of the girls and he was a teacher of the guys, and you'd have this sort of central presentation and you'd break up into these small groups, that they were going to present this at the same time the same day, because they didn't figure they might get more than one shot at it, and that's exactly what happened.

Well, it turned out this was my small group leader, and it only took me a few moments to realize where he was going. He actually went to Galatians chapter 5, and was talking about falling from grace, and I was going, well, wait a minute, you mean that this way, right?

Well, no, no, I actually, and I asked the right questions, and once I had a clear understanding of what he was saying, I said, you do realize that that's not what this church teaches. He says, ah, but it's what the Word of God says.

And so I stood up and I said, I'm not going to sit here for that, and I walked out and made sure that the leadership of the church was aware of what had taken place, and I believe it was the next Sunday evening.

The entire Sunday evening service was dedicated to this one particular topic of whether a person could lose their salvation or not, and yeah, that couple ended up at a different church fairly quickly after that took place.

But it didn't result in a discussion of the only doctrines that can give a foundation to a meaningful answer concerning whether or not a person can lose their salvation. And that points to a danger. It's a danger that you and I, I think, understand, but it's a danger that you need to be able to explain to other people when they ask you certain questions about why you believe what you believe.

What do I mean by that? Well, there are a lot of people who will hold a doctrine over here, and they'll say, I affirm that Jesus is a perfect Savior. He cannot fail as Savior. Wonderful. Good. Now, does that doctrine just sort of exist out here as a nebulous entity without connection to anything else?

Well, no. How is it that Jesus is the perfect Savior? What did he do to save? Well, he gave his life. And so you believe that the giving of his life somehow makes him a perfect Savior, and he'll lose none of those that are in him.

Right. Okay, do you believe he gave his life in a universalistic sense? Without any particular intention of saving any particular person? Oh, no, no. He gave his life to save everybody. Ah. And so is everyone going to be saved?

Well, no, no, no, no. You have to accept it. So he gave his life to accomplish one thing, but he doesn't actually accomplish that. Right? He's only going to save a certain number of people that allow him to save them by their act of free will.

Right? So he wanted to save the people in hell. He gave them everything they needed to be saved, but they will not be saved. So his intention was unfulfilled in them, but in you it will be fulfilled because you allowed it to be fulfilled.

Right? Now here what you've done is you've made people uncomfortable. And in fact, you might have even offended somebody. And we know today that the greatest sin in our society is offense. And if you hurt someone's feelings, you're a bad, bad person.

And any theology that would make you hurt someone's feelings must be a bad, bad theology, too. I wish I could give you a way around that way of thinking. I'll be perfectly honest with you. Unless the Holy Spirit of God presses a desire for truth upon someone's heart, I don't know how you get around that.

Because that's not actually mature adult thinking. But that's where our society is. And in fact, in many churches, we're at the same level. But what you've done is you've forced them to realize there has to be a connection between this, my belief about whether Jesus can fail as a Savior, and this, my understanding of what Jesus did upon the cross.

And that means there's a connection. And if there's a connection between these two, there's a connection between everything else. And hence, there needs to be a consistency in these connections between what it is we believe.

And you and I both know, I'm not telling you anything that you're not familiar with, if you dare start pushing people to be consistent in what they're saying, well, the results are sometimes somewhat unpleasant.

I remember very clearly at that very same large church that I was teaching a systematic theology class, Christian doctrines, we called it. We got toward the end, and I had come to understand certain things about the doctrines of grace, and so I read Romans chapter 9.

Notice I didn't say I commented on it. I simply read Romans chapter 9. And I remember I got down to about verse 20, and I had a lady stand up in the class and stalk out of the room. I had not commented yet.

I hadn't even given an introduction. I was just reading Romans chapter 9. I remember talking to another fellow later about it, and he said, you know, I had read that chapter before. It sounded like it was teaching something about predestination, but I knew he didn't believe that, so it couldn't be that.

But it's right there in the Bible. Well, again, once you start asking folks, you know, we need to actually believe everything that's here. Many people will hold to certain truths, but they won't see the foundation upon which that truth is based.

So, for example, if we look at Ephesians chapter 1, verse 13, In him you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who has given us a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession of the praise of his glory.

Now, here's a beautiful text. It talks about how the Holy Spirit is the arabone, the down payment, the payment that indebts the one who gives it the finishing of the transaction. So it's a picture of God saying, I am putting myself on the line.

I am putting my character and integrity on the line. I'm giving you the Holy Spirit and this is my pledge that I am going to finish the work that I have begun. Wow. And it's a given as a pledge of our inheritance with a view to the redemption of God's own possession of the praise of his glory.

It's all about God. It's all focused on him. And that's one of the main problems that you have to deal with when talking with anybody, is the vast majority of the folks you're going to be talking to think that salvation is about man.

It's about a fire escape from hell. It's not. It's about what the triune God has done to glorify himself. It's God-centered, not man-centered. And so when you keep that in mind, you and I see it. Redemption of God's own possession to the praise of his glory.

It's not the praise of our glory. It's not the praise of how we enabled him to save us or anything like that. It's all about God. Well, we see that. But unfortunately, man's traditions very often function as a lens that they put on and it sort of filters out all that God-centered language.

But still, most people can see that verses 13 and 14 are a pretty strong section on the fact that salvation is not some temporary thing. It is something that God does. It is something that God accomplishes.

And there would be many people who would recognize, yeah, this would definitely teach that true salvation is something that's not just temporary or passing. It is something that God has accomplished. And so it's not going to be undone by man.

But you and I both know that Ephesians 1, 13 -14 comes after what? Ephesians 1, 3 -12. And what's Ephesians 1 all about? It's all about God's eternal purpose. And yes, even the word predestination. Yeah, it's right there in the text.

Oh, no. It's the foundation that gives a a floor upon which this promise that we experience in our lives makes sense. How is it that simply giving us the Holy Spirit of promise is relevant to the permanence of our salvation?

Well, because it is the fulfillment of what God chose to do from eternity past. There is a foundation. There is a basis there. So many people have beliefs, but they have never been challenged to think about, well, what's the foundation of that?

What's the basis of that? Why do you believe that? How is it related to the rest of the Christian faith? It's been my experience that when you speak to someone and you emphasize the completeness, sufficiency, and authority of the Word of God to answer these questions, the heart that is sensitive to the Spirit's leading, that regenerate heart, responds to the presentation of the authority of the Word of God to answer the question about these things and is willing to subject even their own tradition to that Word.

When someone rebels against that, I'm concerned. I've told the story many times of a woman who contacted us through what was called our chat channel. We started a chat channel back in 1996. Yeah, so it's been around for a long, long time.

And in those early years, this woman came in the channel, and she was from a Church of Christ background. Now, if you know anything about the Church of Christ, they're not exactly Calvinists, okay? In fact, they're about as opposite Calvinism as you can possibly be.

And she started asking us some questions why we believed things that we did, and we went to John chapter 6. And we started working through John chapter 6. And in fact, if you'd like, I'd like to look at that, in fact, because it's relevant to our point here.

But she would go away, and she would come back, and first she talked to her elders, and we'd respond to what the elders said. And then they'd given her some commentaries, and so we went through what the commentaries said.

And over the course of a number of weeks, she would come back, and we would answer, and she would come back, and we would answer. We invested a fair amount of time in this conversation with this woman, and then she sort of disappeared for a while.

And then she came back, and said, I'm just going to tell you something. You've ruined my life. I can't sleep. I can't teach any longer at the church, because I've come to realize that they don't have answers.

And I'm really, this is ruining my life. And so we'd go back through it again, make a long story short. She came to understand these things. She came to accept what the Word of God had to say, and for many years has been secretary to a very well-known Reformed writer back in the Midwest, and their whole family came into that church, and so on and so forth.

And it was an early, it was a clear testimony to me of seeing someone who really was subject to the Word of God, despite all the traditions, had to believe what the Word of God had to say, was committed to that.

And because of that being committed, had to follow through and say, I've got to believe what it says. And you have answered every objection. I've raised every objection I can think of, and I've asked other people to help me find objections, and you've answered all those.

That's what took place. We all know how powerful this section is, but just as another illustration, notice what Jesus says in John chapter 6, beginning in verse 37, All the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out.

For I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. This is the will of him who sent me, that of all that he has given me, I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.

Now, here's Jesus' own word, and he is telling us that he has come down from heaven not to do his own will, but the will of the Father, and automatically we stop and we go, to any Christian person, could you ever imagine the Son not doing the will of the Father?

Can you ever imagine a situation where there is a division between the Father and the Son, or the Son fails to do the will of the Father? And if anyone can ever say, well, yeah, I could see that. I've got an immediate problem with this person's entire orthodoxy.

Okay, I've got an immediate problem with their entire view of who Jesus is or anything else. The vast majority, those who are regenerate, will say, no, no, no, of course not. Jesus himself said he always does what is pleasing to the Father.

There's no possibility of him failing in doing what the Father asks him to do. Well, then what is the will of the Father? This is the will of him who sent me, that of all that he has given me, I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.

Now you just simply have to ask a question. Can Jesus fulfill the will of the Father here or not? And if you embrace some kind of synergistic system where the Father tries and the Son tries and the Spirit tries, but all of their trying is dependent upon whether man will cooperate, then I don't know what you do with this text.

I don't know how you explain this text. You have to come up with some wild, extra contextual thing to say, well, this only had to do with Jewish disciples in the first century. It has nothing to do with us and all the rest of this stuff.

And throw out all the promises of the Gospel of John and come up with stuff like that. And there are people who do that because they recognize there's no other way around it. But if you recognize, as Christians have always recognized, that Jesus is talking about salvation as a whole of all of his people, then it's very clear that for Jesus' words to be true, he has to have the ability to lose none of those that are given to him.

Notice not those who allow him, those who are given to him by whom? The Father. Now I realize the way around that. Well, the Father only gives those that he foresees are going to believe in him. Well, that was sort of blown away in verse 37 when it says, all the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will certainly not cast out.

The giving by the Father to the Son is what results in someone coming to the Son, not the other way around. It is reversing and making backwards the very words of Jesus to say, well, by my coming I then permit the Father to give me to the Son.

It's the other way around. It's the exact opposite in Jesus' own words. So the point is, Jesus has to be able to do the will of the Father, and that is, he has to have the capacity to lose none that have been given to him, but instead raise it, and it's interesting there the neuter is used because it's viewing the whole group as one, the entire elect, raise it up on the last day.

He has the power to give eternal life, and it is in perfect harmony with the Father. He fulfills the Father's will, and if you believe that salvation is something God does, not a cooperative effort, but it is something that God does.

If you have a God-centered understanding of scripture in the Bible, the message of what is being communicated is very, very clear. Now, obviously what this demonstrates to us is that when you get into one of these conversations, you need to recognize that if someone has a problem out here with the concept of, like, eternal security, the perseverance of the saints, a better description.

There is probably a foundational reason that they may not even recognize, and that arguing about a bunch of verses up here is not going to accomplish it. What you need to be doing is thinking presuppositionally.

You need to be hearing what the person is saying and start down the ladder to the foundational issues to see where the problem is. It may be right down at the bottom. They may really have a view of God that is just completely unbiblical, and they may just think that God is just this, you know, the grandfather in the sky who is just sort of running around responding to us, and so you're going to have to start a very basic level.

But they may not have the problem there. It may be misunderstanding somewhere along the lines, and you have to just keep backing down, but that requires you to understand the relationship between these divine truths yourself.

You have to have a clear understanding to be able to clarify muddled thinking in someone else's thought if you really want to be useful to them. We're not talking about winning a debate here, you know, pulling out your theological sword, and, aha, Calvinist, you're dead.

We're not talking about that. If you really want to help someone to understand, then you have to have a clarity of thought in your own mind so that you can help them find where the problem is in their understanding.

And you also need to be very careful not to use some of the verses that unfortunately in our laziness sometimes we do use. You might say, well, what do you mean? Well, sometimes there are certain verses that might sort of be relevant, but they just don't carry the kind of weight that we think that they do.

Let me give you an example. It was one that popped into my mind, but if you look at Philippians chapter 1, Philippians chapter 1, I've heard a lot of people use this one. Paul here says, for I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.

Well, isn't that a clear statement of confidence in God's keeping of his people and the completion of his work and an individual's life? Isn't that eternal security? I bet you I could find half a dozen books pretty easy that would cite this as a text for eternal security.

Well, it certainly is relevant in the sense that it affirms the fact that it was God who began a good work. There's no question about that. God is the one who began a good work. It wasn't that he's trying to begin a good work everywhere and you just allowed him to do it.

No, this was God's initiative. He's the one who began a good work. But here's the problem. Our language is not as specific as the original language is. And it's very easy for you and I to look at this and look at the word you and assume what?

That it's individualistic. It's not. It's plural. It's addressed to the church in Philippi. And the primary application of Philippians 1 -6 is that God is going to be continuing a work amongst the people there in Philippi.

But that work in an extended understanding would have to include the work of salvation. So you could make an application, but it's just not the primary application. And I don't know if there has been a continuous church in Philippi since the days of the Apostle Paul, but we know that there are other places where churches have disappeared who were once there.

So the primary application, we need to be fair with texts like Philippians 1 -6 and recognize when it's talking about a group thing or an individual thing. But yes, by extension in a secondary application, we can have confidence that if God has begun a good work in the church, that it's a good work that is involved in individuals and that he will continue that.

He will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. But we have much clearer text. We have much clearer text. And sometimes we end up going back and forth with people because we really haven't laid the best foundation and aren't necessarily using the best text for something like this.

Now for me, there are two things to avoid. One, I have discovered that many Christians are more comfortable with a testimony from Jesus. Now, they shouldn't be. There are a lot of Christians that suffer from hyper red letterism.

It's a terrible disease that thinks that if it's printed in red ink, it's more inspired than if it's printed in black ink. This was not something Jesus believed in. It certainly wasn't something the apostles believed in.

I remember meeting with a man years ago. Kelly was with me. Well, he was her boss. And we were discussing this very issue over lunch, as I recall it was. And when he asked me why I believed what I believed about the perseverance of the saints, I started off in Ephesians chapter 1.

And Kelly may remember his response was, well, if you can't show it to me in Jesus's words, don't bother showing it to me at all. That's not how even Jesus viewed things. And that's not how we should view things.

But there is a friendliness, I guess you might say, to texts like John 6 and John 10 and John 17, where you have these things laid out so clearly, or Matthew 11 is another that you can go to. Because there is those red letters, and I don't want to give into hyper red letterism, but I have seen texts like John 6 just have an incredible impact upon people because of the forcefulness of Jesus's teaching.

So we have to make sure we choose the right texts. And even when we choose the right texts, we have to ask the question, if I'm dealing up here with this subject, do I know this is where the misunderstanding is?

Or is it three or four steps down here? And if I talk up here, we could be sitting here all day long. We're never going to get anywhere. Because they don't have a foundation. They don't have a peg they can hang the divine truth of this matter on.

Because down here, they have a misunderstanding of the cross. Or down here, here's a real big one, they have a misunderstanding of the nature of man in sin. Almost everybody has that problem. Almost every synergistic system has that problem.

And so you have to be wise. You have to do some thinking. You can't, don't let yourself get in that mindset that says, I've got to win this point. Don't worry about that point, if that's not the point that's actually going to help them.

Why waste the time? Find out what the real issue is. Back it down to that basic level of where the real misunderstanding is. And you can find out fairly quickly, once you've offered a meaningful biblical discussion, whether this individual is truly serious about knowing what the truth of these things is, or if it's much more of a emotional attachment to traditions and things like that, that there may not be anything you can do about at that particular point in time.

God has his own way of forcing people to recognize that they need to handle the Word of God in an appropriate fashion that is honoring and glorifying. And so just some practical thoughts as we seek to be used of God to speak to others, used of God to present his truth to others.

And there are times people say, well, why do you go to that little church down there? I heard you all believe some weird things. Well, you know, it'd be nice to be able to say, well, actually we just try to believe everything that the Word of God has to say, and here's what it says about this subject of God's sovereign grace.

If we can be used in that way, then may we be used. Let's pray together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we do thank you for your Word. We thank you that you have given it to us, and we do thank you for its message.

A message of your sovereignty, a message of your self-glorification. We ask that as we do have opportunities to interact with others, that you would help us to avoid that temptation, that temptation to win battles rather than actually accomplishing something that's honoring and glorifying to you.

May you bring to mind by your Spirit, your Word in those situations, that we might be instruments in your hand to be useful to you, glorifying to you, and helpful to you. We do ask that you would be with us now as we sing hymns to your praise, and as we gather together for fellowship.

May it all be to your honor and glory. We pray in Christ's name.