Ephesians: The Calling of the Saints

We turn now to The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, one of the greatest letters of the New Testament. We will study Chapters 1 through 3, thus completing the exposition of this book begun several years ago with Chapters 4 through 6 -- messages which are already available in print. I hope that, as we begin this doctrinal portion of Ephesians, your heart will be anticipating tremendous truth. I would like to urge you to read this letter through once a week during the time that we are engaged in studying these first three chapters. Read it through in various versions, and in different ways. Read it through at one sitting the first week, and then the next week take a chapter a day. Other weeks read it in some of the paraphrases. Let this truth come to you afresh in new and different language. I can guarantee that if you will do this faithfully until we finish our study you will never be the same person again. This truth has the power to change you, and it will!

In the epistle to the Ephesians we are still working together today with the great statement in Chapter 1 in which Paul is setting forth for us the great, fundamental facts of our faith in Jesus Christ. This letter to the Ephesians is really nothing more than a description of the riches that we have in Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul emphasized these riches a great deal. As he traveled about the Roman empire he came to colonies and to cities where people were spiritually and materially impoverished -- they were poverty-stricken people. Many of them were slaves. They had nothing of this world's goods. They were depressed, discouraged, beset with fears and anxieties, jealousies and hostilities. They were under the grip of superstition and filled with the dread of the future. They had no hope of life beyond death. And it was the apostle's great joy to unfold to them the riches available to them in Jesus Christ -- riches which, if accepted as facts, would free them, would transform them and make them over into wholly different people, would bring them into a sense of joy and love and faith and radiant experience. That happened again and again. So the apostle gloried in these exceeding great riches in Jesus Christ.

In this first chapter of Ephesians we are trying to understand thoroughly the basic, foundational facts which underlie our faith and, therefore, underlie the experience of our lives. After all, what we are examining here is not mere theological doctrine; it is a revelation of things as they really are. It is the way God runs his universe. And to believe it and to act upon it is to return to reality, to become realistic once again.

Today, in the first chapter of Ephesians, we will be examining a great question with which men continually wrestle in our day, as they have all through history: The question of whether or not there is a purpose in the universe. Do the events of history make any sense? Is the record of human events -- with its concatenation of tragedy and happiness and misery and heartache and joy -- to any real effect, is it moving toward any one goal?

As we return to Ephesians this morning, we are still occupied with the great summary of this letter which Paul gives us in Verses 3 through 14 of Chapter 1. This is one unbroken sentence in the original language, gathering up in one vast statement all the tremendous themes of this letter to which Paul will return again and again. This is the way with these apostolic letters. They usually begin with a summary and then are broken down into detail, enabling us to focus very carefully upon the truth presented, to see it in its broad sweep and then to come back and work our way through it, and thus to grasp it and understand it.

With Verse 15 of Ephesians 1 we leave the great doctrinal passage in which the Apostle Paul has been teaching the great facts underlying the Christian faith, and we turn now to his prayer. This study will be a helpful revelation of the place of prayer in the Christian experience, especially in believers who are maturing, and in relationship to the study of Scripture. This brings prayer and the Scriptures together. The apostle, having finished the great passage in which he has set forth what the three-fold God is doing for us, now adds these words addressed to the Ephesian Christians:

I wonder how many of you are remembering my exhortation at the beginning of this series that you read through the book of Ephesians once a week until we have finished these studies. I'm sure that some of you have been faithful in doing this. Now, the rest of you repent, and begin again, will you? You will find that your life will never be the same again if you keep reading through this text thoughtfully and understandingly every week.

I hope that you have already noted, in your reading of the book of Ephesians, this tremendous letter which so helpfully unfolds to us what life is all about, that its great theme is the unifying work of Jesus Christ, the restoring work of Jesus, how he has come to smash every barrier among men, to span every chasm, to break down every obstacle which divides and fragments humanity, and to unite all things together in him. (And he has already begun. This is not something he is going to do in one blinding flash at the end of time. The good news of the gospel is that he has already begun.) To do that requires, as Paul says in Verse 19 of Chapter l, "what is the immeasurable greatness of his power".

The title of our study this morning consists of two little words: But God... These open the fourth verse of Ephesians 2, the chapter in which the Apostle Paul is setting forth the greatness of our salvation and is helping us to understand what has happened to us in Jesus Christ. Nothing is more important than that we grasp these great words:

In the second chapter of Ephesians, we are examining the great facts the Apostle Paul sets forth for us which explain who we are in Jesus Christ. Any psychologist will tell you that the basic solution to any mental problem is one of identity. The basic crisis of our day is an identity crisis. If we are going to solve the problems of our lives, we must know who we are. So the apostle is very careful to set forth exactly who we are in Christ. One of the worst struggles most of us have with our Christian faith is that we try to work out our problems without beginning at this foundation, without realizing who we are in Jesus Christ.

In Paul's great letter to the Ephesians, we are attempting to understand the underlying realities of life and of faith. In the opening words of the second chapter we looked at the condition which lies behind all the difficulties and problems we have in life the state into which mankind has fallen, and how desperately hopeless it is apart from the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

In the second chapter of Ephesians, we are looking together with the Apostle Paul at mighty truths, fantastic statements, which make us aware of what it means to be a Christian. If we ever really grasp what it means to be a Christian, we will never again be envious of anyone who is not a Christian, will never wish we were back in the world, nor in any way be drawn toward its outlook or its pattern of life.

In Ephesians 2, we come now to a section in which the Apostle Paul deals with Christ's role as the great peacemaker among men. Here we will see him in fulfillment of that prophecy in Isaiah 9:

In Chapter 2 of Ephesians, we have been working through the great revelation of the Apostle Paul concerning the nature of the church. The title of this study, The Third Race, is not a reference to an event at Bay Meadows race track, but is an actual description of early Christians by a pagan contemporary in the 1st century. He called them "the third race." Every nationality tends to divide the world into two parts -- "them" and "us." The Jews always have looked upon the world of their day as made up of Jews and Gentiles. Anyone not a Jew is a Gentile in the eyes of the Jewish people. The Greeks did the same. There were the Greeks, the "civilized" people, and all the rest were "barbarians." They based that word on the verb barbar which means "to stammer." Anyone who didn't speak Greek, the civilized language, sounded to the Greeks like a stuttering child. When the Romans took over the Greek civilization, they adopted the same terminology. Everyone within the Roman Empire was Roman; all others were "barbarians." The Chinese did the same thing. China is derived from their word for "middle," for they saw themselves as the center of the earth, the Middle Kingdom. Everyone else lived out on the periphery of the earth.

The first paragraph in Chapter 3 is, in many ways, the key to this great letter of Paul to the Ephesian Christians. Here he begins to describe in full detail the great mystery which he had devoted his life to propagating around the world. We all love mysteries. There is something about human beings which causes us to be fascinated by something hidden, secret, by cryptic truth which needs to be discovered and revealed. God understands us so thoroughly that he has hidden mystery in everything in life. We do not know anything fully. There is always an element we don't understand. Even terms we commonly use, such as love and joy and life itself, are basically mysterious to us. We know they are absolutely essential to our existence, but we don't know what they are. We struggle constantly trying to understand what are the great realities they represent.

We are dealing again with the great mystery which the Apostle Paul glories in, a mystery which began at Bethlehem with the song of the angels to the shepherds, and the beauty of a huge star shedding its silver glory upon the waiting earth below, and all the marvel of that first Christmas Day when the wonder which had been secret for ages began to be unfolded -- the glory of what God had in mind for man.

As we come to the end of an old year and the beginning of a new, most of us are engaged in an evaluation of what has happened through the past year. And we struggle with a sense of need for motivation. We are aware of certain failures which have occurred in the past year, even though we began the year with the best of intentions. Somehow things have not gone quite as we expected. We haven't been able to do just what we determined to do. So, as we face the new year, we are asking ourselves, "How can I do better? How can I motivate myself really to do what I know I ought to do?" Last week I received a note asking a question which puts this rather graphically:

We have been considering the defense of the Christian in the midst of a highly confused and darkened world. Now it is important that we take up the equally valid matter of the place of the church, i.e., the corporate body of Christians, in the world and the specific character of its ministry and its power.

In this present series, we are concerned with the great questions the Apostle Paul is answering in Ephesians 4 about the fundamental nature and purpose of the church, and its relationships to the world in which it must live. You will recognize these as pertinent questions of the present hour as well. We are being told today that the church is irrelevant (I wonder if there was ever a more overworked word than that), that it is a useless appendage to a society which has long outgrown the need for the church. Well, let us be perfectly honest and admit there are churches that justify a view like that.

We are examining now Paul's great message to the church to be faithful to its calling. Today the church seems to have lost its sense of identity. Like someone suffering from amnesia, the church is asking, "Who am I, and what am I here for?" The apostle is calling us back to those great purposes of God for which the church was established and still exists. The church has never any right to determine its own goals; it is here because its Lord has put it here. The church is not here primarily to correct the evils of society, but it is here to declare and demonstrate the power of God in Jesus Christ. That will be the most effective thing it can do to correct the evils of society.

I have a sense of quickening anticipation and of enthusiasm in approaching this passage of Scripture again. It is somewhat akin to the feeling I had when I watched a surgical operation for the first time. It was with a mingled sense of awe and uneasiness that I stood behind the surgeon in an operating room and watched him preparing to do a surgical appendectomy. I watched him draw the scalpel and lay the wound open, and saw his assistants catch the blood vessels to tie them and stop the flow of blood. I watched him open the abdomen and expose the inner organs of the body to my gaze. As I saw them throbbing and pulsating I realized this was a living body being opened before me. I cannot describe the mixed feelings of wonder and excitement, and a bit of sickness, I felt. So in this text of Scripture the Apostle Paul is exposing to us the inner workings of the body of Christ.

Recently I listened to two radio programs, both religious. One was a panel of pastors and laymen discussing the subject, "Religion in the Space Age." The members of this panel were obviously educated men, suave, cultured. They spoke, with obvious understanding of the times in which we live, about the effects of technology on daily lives, the appeal and challenge of the exploration of the frontiers of science to young people particularly, and the need in this kind of world for faith and morals. But during the entire program of half an hour there was not one mention of Jesus Christ or of the good news of God's plan to give man a new start in life by wiping out the past and beginning with a fresh page. When the program ended I found myself thoroughly angry -- angry that there could be a presentation on religion in the space age and nothing be said about the most revolutionary message the world has ever heard and which the church is to proclaim in this day.

In our studies of Ephesians 4, we have learned that the church is not to be a pressure group to influence legislatures, or some kind of religious club intended to comfort and assuage the feelings of people in trouble. The unique character of the church is that it is the body of Christ. Its calling, therefore, is to declare and demonstrate the life that inhabits it. That is the life of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the church is a body whose purpose is to demonstrate and to declare the power of Christ in today's world.

Our subject is the building and maintenance service of the church. If you are a bit surprised by that title, let me reassure you: We shall not be talking about the janitorial service. The odd title is an attempt to focus your attention on the words of Ephesians 4, Verse 11, which mark the divine program for coordinating, developing and articulating the gifts and activities of the members of the body of Christ to make it an effective instrument in human society. The church can never be any more than a rather pious, harmless group of religious people until it returns to this divine program and becomes what God intended it to be. When it does, it will become a disturbing element in society, a revolutionary ferment that will make the most powerful impact that can be made upon any community. In Verse 11, the Apostle Paul says concerning Jesus Christ,

This week the eyes of the whole world were fastened upon an event of historic significance in the meeting of the Roman Catholic Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. We were told that this was the first official meeting of these two heads of churches for four hundred years, since the time of the Reformation, when Henry VIII split off the English church from the Roman Catholic Church. It was a very newsworthy event. But when that event is measured against the letter to the Ephesians, it is seen to be a relatively insignificant thing and of no real importance in the life and power of the church.

We have been examining the church, trying to learn from the words of the great apostle why the church is here on earth. We saw that it is not here to do what other groups can do; it is here to do what no other group can possibly do. It is here to manifest the life and power of Jesus Christ in this 20th century hour. This is the ministry of Christ exactly as it was detailed by the prophet Isaiah in his 61st chapter, which our Lord quoted in the synagogue of Nazareth, "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me...to bring good tidings...to bind up the brokenhearted.. to proclaim liberty..."

What a baffling and confusing world we live in today. So many conflicting ideas and concepts are thrust upon us from every direction and many of them seem directly contradictory. Authorities of equal repute tell us one thing and then another and what they say clashes violently. It is hard to know what to believe today. In the last few weeks people have said to me:

One way or another, put in their own way, Christians everywhere are asking the same question. They do not ask, "How can we be sure that when we die we will go to heaven?" Those who are newly introduced to Christian life are concerned in these areas, and quite properly so. But for the most part Christians are everywhere increasingly aware that there is far more to Christianity than a promise that when we die we will go to heaven. They are not even asking the question, "How can I know that the sins of my past are forgiven?" Again, this is an area of proper concern to those first entering the Christian faith. But the question I find Christians asking, arising from a deep concern evident almost everywhere, is this question: "If Jesus Christ can really live and love through me, then how do I let him do this? What is the process, what must I actually do, to have this happening in my life?"

The question we are facing in the present series, centering on Paul's letter to the Ephesians in Chapter 4, is, How to live a Christian life in the midst of a confused world. That was the problem in the 1st century and that is the problem in the 20th century. It is the same kind of a world, demanding the same kind of a life. Perhaps we could put it very well in the words of the title of one of Dr. Tournier's books, A Whole Person In A Broken World. That is a very expressive way of facing the question that is before us in this present series.

A number of years ago at Stanford University, Arnold Toynbee, the prominent historian, said that most people today have rejected Christianity on the basis of a caricature. What did he mean? He meant that most people have never seen the real thing. They have never seen real Christianity. What they have seen was a blurred, distorted and twisted picture of Christianity, and they turned away disappointed and indifferent to the claims of Christ. Well, what were they looking for? Perhaps more than we professing Christians may realize, men and women in the world today expect to see in Christians some likeness to Christ. If you listen carefully to the protest movements that are so vocal today, and which have captured the ear of the press and the nation, you will see that the heart of their complaint is that they do not see in Christians, and the church, that likeness to Christ which they have been led to expect. That is why they turn away so disappointed, often bitter in their antagonism.

There is an oft-quoted prayer of an anonymous child who prayed, "Lord, make the bad people good and the good people nice." I think we all empathize with that prayer. So often it seems that being religious has a souring effect. We all know people who are undeniably "good" in the sense that they are moral, honest, upright, and truthful, but so often they are cold, rigid and unpleasant to be with, not nice at all. These are the kind who moved that child to pray that way.

The task of Christianity is not primarily to get us ready for heaven. Though this has been the emphasis in past generations, it is, in itself, a relatively simple task as far as God is concerned. He gets us ready for heaven by an act of faith in Jesus Christ. The major task of Christian faith, however, is to equip us for life, to live life.

One of the burning issues of our day is sexual morality. A college coach in a Christian school told me not long ago of a young man in his school who said, "I'll follow the school rules in almost everything, but nobody is going to tell me what to do with my sex life." Once that kind of an attitude would have been an exception, but today it is almost universal. Even churches today are advocating what is called the "New Morality," the idea that what formerly was regarded as misconduct be tolerated, and even, in some cases, be directly approved of by religious authorities.

In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, we are considering the section where the apostle relates the great principles of life to the thoughts and practice of a pagan world. He tells us how to live a Christian life in the midst of a blinded, confused and sick society. You cannot read this section of Paul's letter without seeing that the world has not changed essentially since the apostle's day. Oh, I know we can send messages around the world in two seconds. We can view events that happen anywhere in our world today by means of satellite television, and we are able to put men on the moon. These seem to be impressive capabilities, but there is not one whit of difference between the moral problems we face in this 20th century and those faced in the 1st century. We confront the same issues in society that they confronted; we struggle against the same forces they struggled with, and react in exactly the same way. Human nature has not changed one bit in twenty centuries. You only need read this ancient account to see how true that is, and also, therefore, to see how up-to-date, relevant, and pertinent the Scriptures are to our own time.

We have been looking together at the great passage in Ephesians where the Apostle Paul is dealing with the preparation of the Christian for living in a sick society. We have seen that the problems the 1st century Christians faced were the same problems we face today, and the world in which they lived was essentially the world in which we live. We now come to the summary passage on this subject, found in Ephesians 5:15-20:

The most common charge leveled against the Christian church in our times is that it is irrelevant to people's real problems, and does not help people where they live. The church is accused of avoiding the blood and tears and guts of life. One of the most frequently heard charges is that the church is interested only in preserving the status quo. As someone has put it, "Come weal or come woe, our status is quo."

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. (Ephesians 5:21 RSV)

In our series in Ephesians we are coming to another of the great relationships of life, that of parents and children. It is rather obvious that in our present world something has gone drastically wrong with this relationship. This is a day when juvenile delinquency and juvenile crime is skyrocketing to heights never before known. A conscientious policeman, not long ago, told me how heartsick he was to find that some of the most brutal crimes in his area were being committed by children -- not teenagers, children! -- children of ten years of age or even eight, and this is becoming more and more frequent.

It is a remarkable coincidence -- not at all planned -- that in our study of the relationships of the Christian the consideration of employers and employees has fallen on Labor Day. I have experienced this phenomenon at other times when the Holy Spirit has led in such a way that the study of an appropriate text has fallen on a very appropriate day.

This passage introduces to us a subject which is so often treated as unworthy of any intelligent consideration that I feel it necessary to remind us, at the beginning of this series, that the whole Scripture has been given to us in order to enable us to face life in a realistic, practical manner. To put it another way, God is not interested in religion, but he is tremendously interested in life. You cannot read the New Testament without realizing that the Lord Jesus did not care a whit for the Sabbath regulations of his day when they were set against the need of a broken man for healing. In that, he revealed the heart of God, for certainly God is not interested in stained glass windows, organ solos, congregational hymns, or even pastoral prayers half so much as he is in producing love-filled homes, generous hearts, and brave men and women who can live right in the midst of the world and keep their heads and hearts undefiled.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. (Ephesians 6:10-13 RSV)

In this present series we are seeking to understand the evident bafflement of the world leaders today who are trying to grasp and solve the problems of our human situation. We have already noted that the clearest thinkers among the world leaders acknowledge abject defeat when it comes to really grasping the problems we face. The statesmen of the world have long ago abandoned any attempt to formulate long-range policies. They are content now to grapple with each problem as it arises. The policy of the nations is to play each situation by ear and to do the best they can under the circumstances, for the problems of the world have long since grown so complex and so difficult that no one can anticipate what is coming.