Blessed With Every Blessing
By
Rev. Todd W. Allen
Villa Rica 1/9/05
Ephesians 1:1-6
Today I want to talk about the grace of God
that bestows redemption and blesses us with every spiritual blessing in
heavenly places in Christ.
Grace is the fountain of blessings.
Please notice that grace is the opening word to those whom Paul is
addressing.
{2}Grace and
peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
The most difficult of all doctrines
is implied in this opening benediction. No. It isn’t grace. Grace is
certainly not the most difficult of all doctrines. What is the most
difficult of all doctrines is the utter inability of any man to deliver
himself from his fallen and ruined condition as a sinful creature. As
the nursery rhyme says:
Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's
men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
The word grace is a very positive
term. Grace alone can reverse and transform a sinner into a saint. Only
grace can accomplish man’s redemption and put him together again.
The apostle explains our condition that
necessitated grace in chapter 2.
Eph 2:1-3
1And
you were dead in your trespasses and sins, 2in which you
formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the
prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the
sons of disobedience.
3Among
them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the
desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of
wrath, even as the rest. Eph. 2:1 through Eph. 2:3 (NASB)
Paul is simply telling the awful truth
about our sinful condition. He states two reasons why grace is essential
if any man, woman or child is to be saved.
The first reason why grace is essential
is because every person is born with a sinful nature that is depraved
and corrupt. That nature has sinful desires and cravings. It cannot go
against its nature.
A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer,
asked a turtle to carry him on its back across the river. "Are you
mad?" exclaimed the turtle. "You'll sting me while I'm swimming and I'll
drown." "My dear turtle," laughed the scorpion, "If I were to sting
you, you would drown and I'd go down with you. Now where is the logic
in that?" "You're right," cried the turtle. "Hop on." The scorpion
climbed aboard and halfway across the river gave the turtle a mighty
sting. As they both sank to the bottom, the turtle, resignedly, said,
"Do you mind if I ask you something? You said there is no logic in your
stinging me. Why did you do it?" "It has nothing to do with logic,"
the drowning scorpion replied. "It's just my nature."
The second reason why grace is
essential is because that sinful nature is dead and is totally incapable
of changing itself. A dead man cannot revive himself. He cannot breathe
life back into his dead soul. The body has life but the soul does not.
It is dead in trespasses and sins. For any change to take place in the
sinful heart and soul there must be an activity of God. We call that
activity the new birth or regeneration.
Grace is the word employed to tell
us what moved God to save a sinner. The best-known hymn of our day is
Amazing Grace. Grace truly is amazing because there is nothing good
or foreseen as good in any person to warrant it.
We usually refer to grace as the
unmerited favor of God to sinners. It is grace that is not only
unmerited and undeserved, it is mercy bestowed on those who actually are
enemies of God and haters of God. Man is a rebel without a cause against
God. In his fallen nature man is so opposed to God that he wants to get
rid of God, remove the very thought of God, expunge God and His Word
from his own life and from society at large.
We live in a fallen world and our
society is secular. The word secular means -- not concerned with the
sacred or spiritual, concerned only with the present temporal, worldly
life. Even though men know enough without the Bible to know that there
is a God they suppress the truth. The apostle Paul explains this sinful
suppression of the truth in his letter to the Romans:
(See Rom 1:18-32)
Man is not only in a state of enmity
against God. He is also in a state of enmity against himself. He is not
only engaged in warfare against a God who is outside of him; but he is
also fighting a war within himself. As the scripture says,
(Isa 57:20-21
20
But the
wicked are like the tossing sea,
For it
cannot be quiet,
And its
waters toss up refuse and mud. 21 “There is no peace,” says
my God, “for the wicked.”
Man
was made in such a way that he could only be at peace within himself
when he is at peace with his Creator. Man in sin wants to be independent
of God. He wants to set up his own rules, his own laws for his life. But
as this passage in Isaiah notes, he can never be satisfied. He is
restless, in turmoil, basically unhappy and angry, angry at God, angry
at himself, angry with others. The sinner without Christ sits on the
throne of self and all he knows is discord and strife, misery and
wretchedness. It will only be grace that will take away this enmity and
hatred toward God.
It is truly significant that in 18 books
of the New Testament the apostolic writers use this same sort of
introductory benediction that speaks grace and peace to those in Jesus
Christ. These are twin blessings: grace and peace.
Our Lord’s parting word to His disciples
was John 14:27
“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives
do I give to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be
fearful.
When he appeared among them following his
resurrection the first words he spoke to them were,
“Peace be with you.”
20And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His
side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21So
Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you; as the Father has
sent Me, I also send you.” --John 20:19-21
Peace! Blessed and holy peace between a
sinner and His Maker. Man must be at peace with God before he can be at
peace with himself and with his fellow man. Grace establishes peace.
This is the first blessing of grace. As Paul wrote the Roman Christians,
(Rom 5:1-2
1Therefore,
having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord
Jesus Christ, 2through whom also we have obtained our
introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand; and we exult in
hope of the glory of God. Rom. 5:1-2
Not until I am in a state of grace can I
know true peace. Peace is not simply the cessation of armed conflict
when there is war between nation and nation, or peace restored after a
disturbance caused by fighting or rioting. Nor is it merely peace after
disagreement, conflict or strife between neighbors. The peace spoken of
by Christ and His apostles is more than any of these things. It is that
deep personal and abiding peace within one’s soul when one knows he is
right with His Maker. This is the first benefit of grace.
The grace of
God also effects a transformation in a person’s thinking and outlook.
First of all, my whole attitude toward God is changed. God is not some
unknowable, distant philosophical force or energy, some abstract deity
to discuss and opine about in cleverly written books or lectures. The
grace of God comes to us from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now we can say from the heart,
Blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Every blessing we have comes in and
through the Lord Jesus Christ. God is not an abstract deity. He is a God
of absolutely perfect intelligence and holy love. We now know Him as
Father, a caring and loving father. This can only be because the Holy
Spirit, the third Person in the blessed Trinity has applied grace to
your heart and called you to faith in Jesus Christ as your Savior and
Lorld.
All blessings come by grace through the
blessed Son of God. There is no blessing apart from Him. And He
manifests and proclaims and shows us the Father. He told his disciples,
If you have seen me you have
seen the Father.
What a blessing. We who were rebels, we
who were alienated and hostile toward God, we who were at enmity with
God, we who desired to live the secular life, the unholy life, the
profane life, who took the name of God in vain, who wanted to believe
there really isn’t any God with whom we have to do, that all that is
came about by chance. Fallen men concoct their own gods out of their
vain and foolish imagination. But now we are blessed in the beloved Son.
Grace brings to light the Son and His marvelous work of redemption
purposed by God before He made the world.
We are blessed with every blessing
in heavenly places in Christ.
Martyn Lloyd Jones says this:
In many ways the expression ‘in heavenly places’ is the key to this
particular Epistle, where it occurs no less than five times. –
God’s Ultimate Purpose, An
Exposition of Ephesians 1:1 to 23, D. M. Lloyd-Jones, Baker Book House,
Grand Rapids, Michigan, p. 69.
The Christian faith is frankly and
openly otherworldly. We are brought into a heavenly kingdom that is
spiritual and eternal. We are in this world but not of it. We are
strangers and pilgrims merely traveling for a short time here below. As
Paul says in Ephesians 2:4 --
4But
God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved
us, 5even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us
alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
6and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the ages
to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness
toward us in Christ Jesus.
The point is, we are spiritually alive
in Christ Jesus. By the grace of God we are raised up together with
Jesus Christ. We are already in the first resurrection. We have been
made to sit in heavenly places. What a stupendous thing to know and
appreciate. We already have a spiritual transformation that actually
seats us in heavenly places. We are in an entirely new and sacred realm.
We already enjoy every spiritual blessing in the present life here
below. We are not physically in heaven because we are still in these
bodies of flesh and blood. These flesh and blood bodies cannot be seated
in heavenly places but our spirit and soul by the new birth are already
seated there where Christ is seated. We are left on this earth to be
salt and light and to take the message of salvation to others.
Jesus said, "Peace be with you! As
the Father has sent me, I am sending you."
Already the first stage of resurrection
has occurred for those in Jesus Christ. There is a second stage to come
when our body will also be resurrected to be with our soul part in the
heavenly places.
We are
different from all who are outside of Christ. They think us strange and
peculiar and possibly dangerous. The natural man cannot understand these
spiritual things. He is without the Spirit of God and therefore cannot
understand spiritual things. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that
the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they
are foolishness to him, because they are spiritually discerned.
When you start talking about being
seated in the heavenlies the natural man is totally confounded. It is
gobble-de-gook to him. Where is this heavenly place? he will ask. All he
can see is this world and the atmospheric clouds and sky above, and
above and beyond that a stellar heaven where the moon, the sun and the
stars are located. The natural man, the unconverted man outside of
Christ sees no way that this can have any significance or meaning for
him or for others.
Just because one cannot see this
heavenly realm with the naked eye doesn’t mean it does not exist. We
who are in Christ know that this realm does exist and that we are seated
there right now together with Christ, because the Spirit of Christ
indwells every Christian.
As God brought the Lord Jesus Christ out
of the tomb and raised him from the dead to sit at His own right hand in
the heavenly places, so the Apostle teaches that the change we undergo
in our rebirth and regeneration leads to this corresponding change in us
Because of our limited capacities, as
the result of our finite condition and the sin that still prevails in
that old nature and cleaves to us, we may find it very difficult to take
hold of these things. But the whole business of this Epistle to the
Ephesians is to urge us to strive to get hold of them. It is by
understanding these precious truths that we recognize our victory over
death and hell and all the evil of this world.
All Christ’s enemies are being made a
footstool for His feet. He is now reigning and even the bad things we
see happening are within the scope of His providential governing to the
glory of God. We may not understand it all, but we do not give up. We
know there is a sovereign, loving and just Lord who is over all and who
reigns in supreme majesty over every principality and power on earth and
that a day of judgment is coming when He will right every wrong and
render perfect justice to every soul.
He is our light and He is our shield and
our Defender. He gives grace and He will also give glory. He promises to
withhold nothing from those whose walk is blameless. We have been
blessed with every blessing in the heavenly places. We can see things in
a right perspective when we know him and realize that we are seated in
the heavenlies with Him who has all power, all dominion and all
authority.
In the heavenlies all is calm and
serene. Though the winds of adversity blow and the secularists seem to
have us in retreat, God will most certainly triumph, and in the meantime
He blesses us with every spiritual blessing in Christ, now and forever.
No matter how the storms may rage
Upon the sea of life,
No matter how the waves may beat,
No matter what the strife,
The Lord is just the same today
As when He walked the sea,
And He can conquer every storm
That life may send to thee.
The waves are raging everywhere
And men are sore distressed,
But all they need is found in Him
Who giveth perfect rest;
So cast your care upon the Lord,
He calms the waves for your frail bark,
His power will e’er prevail.
--Selected
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The paper and sermon manuscripts from
Pastor
Todd W. Allen
are made freely available for review and
distribution. We only request that proper
web page attribution be provided if
distributed for any reason. Please be
gracious to forgive typos and errors of
expression. These notes are faithful
approximations of what has been preached.
May God be glorified in the preaching of
His Word.