Blessed Be...
Ephesians 1:3
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Sermon Summary In this introductory verse, we get a glimpse of Paul's excitement to reveal to us the wonderful blessings God has bestowed on us. Why was Paul so ecstatic, and how can we experience this same joy in our own lives? |
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Ephesians 1:3
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,”
The night before Elizabeth and I were to be married, I couldn’t sleep. It was a Friday night, and we were to be married the next morning around 11 am. We had done the whole wedding rehearsal with the minister and all the wedding party. We had had a wonderful little dinner together afterwards, at which I probably had drunk a sweet tea, and you know what caffeine does to me. Now combine that with the fact that I was getting married the next morning. I couldn’t wait. I was so excited. I tried lying in my bed and convincing myself that I should be still and rest. While I might have dozed a bit here and there, I remember not being able to calm down. I was just so excited. I was getting married.
So finally, about 4 am, I couldn’t take it anymore. I just could not lie there. I decided to get up. And you know what I did? I did what any guy would do. I went over to Elizabeth’s house. I threw some rocks at her window, just like they do in the movies. Let me just say, she was not as excited as I was because it took a lot of rocks to wake her up. Finally, she came to the window. She obviously didn’t see the incredible romance of it all, and she must not have watched the same movies as I did because the first thing she said to me was, “What in the world are you doing?!”
I told her I couldn’t sleep. I was just too excited. So she came down and unlocked the door and we got to spend some time together for a little while before the big day began.
Have you ever been excited like that? Have you ever had something that you just couldn’t sit still over? You just couldn’t contain yourself because you were filled with exhilaration.
A few weeks ago, I talked about how you have to get excited about the book of Ephesians. Some of you had that kind of giddy spirit when I announced this book. I saw a number of you dancing in your seats.
I’m glad. That’s the way you should feel. You should be animated. And I want you to know that if you feel that way, you have the same kind of feeling that the Apostle Paul had over this book.
There’s a sense in which Paul cannot contain himself. When it comes to what the Holy Spirit is stirring him up to write, Paul seems to become overridden with giddiness. You can sense it in every drop of his pen. One of the primary ways you see it is in what we read here this morning.
Some of you might not know this, so it bears mentioning: Verses 3-14 compose one long sentence. The editors of our Bibles will put punctuation in there in order to help our brains digest what is being said. Most versions add commas, colons, and an occasional period in different places. They break it up and make new sentences. But you should understand that in the original language, those are not there. The original manuscripts did not have punctuation. These 10-11 verses string together a long line of qualifying phrases and modifiers.
As a matter of fact, one famous Bible commentator has said that this is “the most monstrous sentence conglomeration he has encountered in the Greek language.” You know what I call it? Paul’s euphoric gleefulness. He’s just excited. And some people, when they get excited, just ramble on and on.
I think that’s what has happened to the Apostle Paul. He’s started thinking about the Gospel and he can’t calm down. As he thinks about God, his mind starts to ramble. One glorious thought leads to another, and he goes on and on because he’s just so incredibly electrified over the nature of God and his Gospel.
What’s even funnier to think about is that Paul was dictating this letter to his secretary. Imagine being that guy and trying to record everything Paul was saying.
So you see, he’s just in high spirits as he writes this letter. He bursts into praise. He blesses God because of how much God has blessed us.
And that’s what I want us to break down this morning. I want us to get some of the thrill. I want us to understand why Paul is so animated. I want us to look at the exuberance of his apostolic adoration and gain some of the great blessings of the great doctrines he rejoiced in.
We’ll start by considering the priority of Paul’s praise.
I. The priority of Paul’s praise
Now, when you look at our passage, you see that it begins by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That composes the main thought of this very long sentence. And it can’t be missed that Paul’s first words are words of admiration. The first thing he has written are words of blessing.
You can sense the excitement all that much more when you see where he writes this. Most of you know that epistles have a general structure. The opening words of a letter had a particular order that they followed in the ancient world. You start by introducing yourself as the author, then you identify your audience, then there is a short prayer or benediction you pronounce over your audience. That is then followed by a thanksgiving, something like, “I thank my God always for you, mentioning you in my prayers…”
But you notice that Paul’s thanksgiving doesn’t come until you get all the way down to verses 15, 16, and 17. Do you see what happens? Paul is so overwhelmed; he’s got so much excitement that he launches into this elongated praise of his God. The praise of God becomes the priority.
But there’s something else you should know. You have to know where Paul is right at this moment. The book of Ephesians is known as one of the four “prison epistles.” He’s writing this from jail. Flip over to chapter 3. Look at the first verse there. It says, “I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus.” Skip over to chapter 4 and you’ll find something of the same thing. He says in verse one of chapter 4, “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you.”
Most people think that this letter was written when he was under house arrest, while he was awaiting trial in Rome. Guards are watching him, and he’s lost most of his freedom to move about the world. He’s confined to this home and is likely at the mercy of friends who would provide for him.
And yet, despite his circumstances, what is it that we find him doing? He’s praising God. He’s lifting up the Lord and reveling in all the manifold blessings of God’s mercy and grace towards him.
Paul does not write to the Ephesians and say, “Oh man. Life is so hard for me. You’ll never know what happened to me today. Things are just so rough as an apostle. These Roman guards are so inhospitable.” Paul’s priority is not a pity party; it’s praise.
I think we are to take a lesson from that. We as Christians could find many reasons to gripe or whine. There’s always something miserable. There’s always something to get us down. But we also have something tremendous. We have our God and we have the flood of his gracious work which he has manifested towards us in Christ.
So we have a choice. When it comes to what our priority is, we have a choice: We can do a lot of navel-gazing and say, “Woe is me.” Or in the situations where things may not be quite the way we like it, we can have a greater concern, a greater enthusiasm - to bless God and dwell on the all the immense blessings he has afforded us.
You know what will happen when you choose that route? I am betting that things will actually look a lot better. I bet you’ll find that this kind of focus does a lot to change your situation. I bet, like Paul, you’ll become a greater encouragement to the people around you. When you respond like this, it’s going to be different.
II. The object of Paul's praise
I would bet that a lot of Paul’s excitement is due to who exactly it is he praises. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
You’ll notice that Paul doesn’t have just any generic idea about God. He doesn’t go for the lowest common denominator of some bland deity that any old person would be happy with. Paul bursts forth in jubilant adoration with a very precise formulation of the Triune God.
Notice how he expresses it. He is the “God and Father of Jesus Christ.” Now we know that Jesus is God because he calls him the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is God because he is the Lord. The word “Lord” testifies to this divinity. But Paul says that the God of Jesus is God the Father.
A similar thing is said by Jesus in the gospel of John. Jesus has just risen from the dead and he says to Mary Magdalene, “I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” What does that mean? How can Jesus talk about having a God if he is God?
It is simply recognizing the personal property of the Father. The Father has a preeminence within the Godhead. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, and he is in a role of submission to the Father. The same is true for the Spirit. The Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, and he is in a role of submission to the Father and the Son. Scripture elsewhere talks about how the Father and the Son send the Spirit and the Spirit submits to the will of the Father and the Son.
You can tell Paul is just infatuated with the interplay of the Godhead because this whole passage is chock full of references to the Trinity.
We began by looking at the opening words of this epistle. What did we find there? “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the will of God. To the saints in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” There you have the Trinity. He’s an apostle of Christ. It was by God the Father’s will. And it’s implied that he’s bringing the Word to the people whom the Spirit has made to be saints.
Then he says, “Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” implying that this grace and peace comes to us by means of the Holy Spirit.
This whole blessing is very much triune. The first few verses talk about predestination and what God the Father has planned. Then, verses 7-12 talk about the redemption Christ has purchased. And then, verses 13-14 are all about the work of the Holy Spirit and how we are sealed by the Spirit until we gain our ultimate inheritance.
Now, why do I spend this time spelling this out? There are two reasons: First, it’s important that we know who is worthy of our worship. If we are blessing God, we need to know what God we are supposed to be blessing. And if we make a mistake in the nature of God and we misunderstand what constitutes the Godhead, then we are not blessing the one and only true and living God. We’ve just made up our own God.
This is why the early church had so many councils and battles. They met at Nicaea and Constantinople to hash this out. They were setting forth what the Scripture said about the being of the Christian God. They said there is only one God, but this one God exists eternally in three distinct and personal individuals: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the Christian God. That’s the God we worship.
But there’s another reason why I point this out. It’s so that we can revel in this God. There’s something enchanting about the Trinity, isn’t there? Paul seems to be mesmerized by the nature of the Godhead. You can see it in how he lifts up each of the three persons. And we’ll see later how he continues to do so throughout this epistle.
But there’s something about this great mystery. Even though we can’t comprehend it fully, we recognize the wonder of it and glorify him because of what he has revealed concerning himself.
There’s a third thing to note in our passage, though. We’ve seen the priority of Paul’s praise and the object of it. In verse 3, we can also see the basis for his praise.
III. The basis of Paul’s praise
It is clear from the passage that Paul’s blessing of God is based upon God’s blessing of us. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”
You notice, of course, that the sentence does not end there. In verses 4 and following, Paul goes on to explain some of what those spiritual blessings are. We are going to talk about all those things in the coming weeks in-depth, and we are going to find that they are some of the most profound blessings we can ever fathom: things like having been predestined, forgiveness, redemption, and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
But what I want you to notice is what Paul says about these blessings in verse three. Paul gives us a little preview of these blessings. He describes them in a unique way. As a matter of fact, he says four things about these blessings. They are…
Over the next several weeks, we are going to get to take a close-up look at many of them.
I don’t doubt that the whole book of Ephesians is going to be spelling out for us many of these blessings. We’ll have opportunity to look at blessing after blessing and realize that each and every one has been poured out upon us.
But at least for now, I know this: We can praise God that he has not held anything back.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,”
The night before Elizabeth and I were to be married, I couldn’t sleep. It was a Friday night, and we were to be married the next morning around 11 am. We had done the whole wedding rehearsal with the minister and all the wedding party. We had had a wonderful little dinner together afterwards, at which I probably had drunk a sweet tea, and you know what caffeine does to me. Now combine that with the fact that I was getting married the next morning. I couldn’t wait. I was so excited. I tried lying in my bed and convincing myself that I should be still and rest. While I might have dozed a bit here and there, I remember not being able to calm down. I was just so excited. I was getting married.
So finally, about 4 am, I couldn’t take it anymore. I just could not lie there. I decided to get up. And you know what I did? I did what any guy would do. I went over to Elizabeth’s house. I threw some rocks at her window, just like they do in the movies. Let me just say, she was not as excited as I was because it took a lot of rocks to wake her up. Finally, she came to the window. She obviously didn’t see the incredible romance of it all, and she must not have watched the same movies as I did because the first thing she said to me was, “What in the world are you doing?!”
I told her I couldn’t sleep. I was just too excited. So she came down and unlocked the door and we got to spend some time together for a little while before the big day began.
Have you ever been excited like that? Have you ever had something that you just couldn’t sit still over? You just couldn’t contain yourself because you were filled with exhilaration.
A few weeks ago, I talked about how you have to get excited about the book of Ephesians. Some of you had that kind of giddy spirit when I announced this book. I saw a number of you dancing in your seats.
I’m glad. That’s the way you should feel. You should be animated. And I want you to know that if you feel that way, you have the same kind of feeling that the Apostle Paul had over this book.
There’s a sense in which Paul cannot contain himself. When it comes to what the Holy Spirit is stirring him up to write, Paul seems to become overridden with giddiness. You can sense it in every drop of his pen. One of the primary ways you see it is in what we read here this morning.
Some of you might not know this, so it bears mentioning: Verses 3-14 compose one long sentence. The editors of our Bibles will put punctuation in there in order to help our brains digest what is being said. Most versions add commas, colons, and an occasional period in different places. They break it up and make new sentences. But you should understand that in the original language, those are not there. The original manuscripts did not have punctuation. These 10-11 verses string together a long line of qualifying phrases and modifiers.
As a matter of fact, one famous Bible commentator has said that this is “the most monstrous sentence conglomeration he has encountered in the Greek language.” You know what I call it? Paul’s euphoric gleefulness. He’s just excited. And some people, when they get excited, just ramble on and on.
I think that’s what has happened to the Apostle Paul. He’s started thinking about the Gospel and he can’t calm down. As he thinks about God, his mind starts to ramble. One glorious thought leads to another, and he goes on and on because he’s just so incredibly electrified over the nature of God and his Gospel.
What’s even funnier to think about is that Paul was dictating this letter to his secretary. Imagine being that guy and trying to record everything Paul was saying.
So you see, he’s just in high spirits as he writes this letter. He bursts into praise. He blesses God because of how much God has blessed us.
And that’s what I want us to break down this morning. I want us to get some of the thrill. I want us to understand why Paul is so animated. I want us to look at the exuberance of his apostolic adoration and gain some of the great blessings of the great doctrines he rejoiced in.
We’ll start by considering the priority of Paul’s praise.
I. The priority of Paul’s praise
Now, when you look at our passage, you see that it begins by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” That composes the main thought of this very long sentence. And it can’t be missed that Paul’s first words are words of admiration. The first thing he has written are words of blessing.
You can sense the excitement all that much more when you see where he writes this. Most of you know that epistles have a general structure. The opening words of a letter had a particular order that they followed in the ancient world. You start by introducing yourself as the author, then you identify your audience, then there is a short prayer or benediction you pronounce over your audience. That is then followed by a thanksgiving, something like, “I thank my God always for you, mentioning you in my prayers…”
But you notice that Paul’s thanksgiving doesn’t come until you get all the way down to verses 15, 16, and 17. Do you see what happens? Paul is so overwhelmed; he’s got so much excitement that he launches into this elongated praise of his God. The praise of God becomes the priority.
But there’s something else you should know. You have to know where Paul is right at this moment. The book of Ephesians is known as one of the four “prison epistles.” He’s writing this from jail. Flip over to chapter 3. Look at the first verse there. It says, “I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus.” Skip over to chapter 4 and you’ll find something of the same thing. He says in verse one of chapter 4, “I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you.”
Most people think that this letter was written when he was under house arrest, while he was awaiting trial in Rome. Guards are watching him, and he’s lost most of his freedom to move about the world. He’s confined to this home and is likely at the mercy of friends who would provide for him.
And yet, despite his circumstances, what is it that we find him doing? He’s praising God. He’s lifting up the Lord and reveling in all the manifold blessings of God’s mercy and grace towards him.
Paul does not write to the Ephesians and say, “Oh man. Life is so hard for me. You’ll never know what happened to me today. Things are just so rough as an apostle. These Roman guards are so inhospitable.” Paul’s priority is not a pity party; it’s praise.
I think we are to take a lesson from that. We as Christians could find many reasons to gripe or whine. There’s always something miserable. There’s always something to get us down. But we also have something tremendous. We have our God and we have the flood of his gracious work which he has manifested towards us in Christ.
So we have a choice. When it comes to what our priority is, we have a choice: We can do a lot of navel-gazing and say, “Woe is me.” Or in the situations where things may not be quite the way we like it, we can have a greater concern, a greater enthusiasm - to bless God and dwell on the all the immense blessings he has afforded us.
You know what will happen when you choose that route? I am betting that things will actually look a lot better. I bet you’ll find that this kind of focus does a lot to change your situation. I bet, like Paul, you’ll become a greater encouragement to the people around you. When you respond like this, it’s going to be different.
II. The object of Paul's praise
I would bet that a lot of Paul’s excitement is due to who exactly it is he praises. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
You’ll notice that Paul doesn’t have just any generic idea about God. He doesn’t go for the lowest common denominator of some bland deity that any old person would be happy with. Paul bursts forth in jubilant adoration with a very precise formulation of the Triune God.
Notice how he expresses it. He is the “God and Father of Jesus Christ.” Now we know that Jesus is God because he calls him the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus is God because he is the Lord. The word “Lord” testifies to this divinity. But Paul says that the God of Jesus is God the Father.
A similar thing is said by Jesus in the gospel of John. Jesus has just risen from the dead and he says to Mary Magdalene, “I go to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” What does that mean? How can Jesus talk about having a God if he is God?
It is simply recognizing the personal property of the Father. The Father has a preeminence within the Godhead. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, and he is in a role of submission to the Father. The same is true for the Spirit. The Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, and he is in a role of submission to the Father and the Son. Scripture elsewhere talks about how the Father and the Son send the Spirit and the Spirit submits to the will of the Father and the Son.
You can tell Paul is just infatuated with the interplay of the Godhead because this whole passage is chock full of references to the Trinity.
We began by looking at the opening words of this epistle. What did we find there? “Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ, by the will of God. To the saints in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.” There you have the Trinity. He’s an apostle of Christ. It was by God the Father’s will. And it’s implied that he’s bringing the Word to the people whom the Spirit has made to be saints.
Then he says, “Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” implying that this grace and peace comes to us by means of the Holy Spirit.
This whole blessing is very much triune. The first few verses talk about predestination and what God the Father has planned. Then, verses 7-12 talk about the redemption Christ has purchased. And then, verses 13-14 are all about the work of the Holy Spirit and how we are sealed by the Spirit until we gain our ultimate inheritance.
Now, why do I spend this time spelling this out? There are two reasons: First, it’s important that we know who is worthy of our worship. If we are blessing God, we need to know what God we are supposed to be blessing. And if we make a mistake in the nature of God and we misunderstand what constitutes the Godhead, then we are not blessing the one and only true and living God. We’ve just made up our own God.
This is why the early church had so many councils and battles. They met at Nicaea and Constantinople to hash this out. They were setting forth what the Scripture said about the being of the Christian God. They said there is only one God, but this one God exists eternally in three distinct and personal individuals: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the Christian God. That’s the God we worship.
But there’s another reason why I point this out. It’s so that we can revel in this God. There’s something enchanting about the Trinity, isn’t there? Paul seems to be mesmerized by the nature of the Godhead. You can see it in how he lifts up each of the three persons. And we’ll see later how he continues to do so throughout this epistle.
But there’s something about this great mystery. Even though we can’t comprehend it fully, we recognize the wonder of it and glorify him because of what he has revealed concerning himself.
There’s a third thing to note in our passage, though. We’ve seen the priority of Paul’s praise and the object of it. In verse 3, we can also see the basis for his praise.
III. The basis of Paul’s praise
It is clear from the passage that Paul’s blessing of God is based upon God’s blessing of us. He says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”
You notice, of course, that the sentence does not end there. In verses 4 and following, Paul goes on to explain some of what those spiritual blessings are. We are going to talk about all those things in the coming weeks in-depth, and we are going to find that they are some of the most profound blessings we can ever fathom: things like having been predestined, forgiveness, redemption, and the presence of the Holy Spirit.
But what I want you to notice is what Paul says about these blessings in verse three. Paul gives us a little preview of these blessings. He describes them in a unique way. As a matter of fact, he says four things about these blessings. They are…
- Christological - They are not for everyone. These are blessings only God’s people have. Only if you have come to Christ and are united to him will you enjoy these blessings. God is not a jolly Santa who gives to every little boy and girl the blessings he has. He reserves these blessings for a specific people. They are only for those who have entered into a relationship with Christ.
- Spiritual - They are not something we can hold with our hands. They are invisible. They are not imaginary, by any means. They are real. They just aren’t tangible. Some people might be disappointed that God doesn’t give them the house they want or he doesn’t bless them with the girl of their dreams. But let me tell you that these blessings transcend the blessings of this world. They are supernatural and therefore they are exceedingly more satisfying. The blessing of forgiveness might not be able to be put in your pocket, but when you have it, you can’t be happier to have received it.
- Eternal - They last forever. They are heavenly in their orientation. They come from heaven, they pertain to heaven, and as such, they are not going to peter out. They are going to last for all eternity. You are going to be in heaven with these blessings that the Lord has bestowed upon you, and you are going to enjoy them forever and ever.
- Plentiful - He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. I like what Steve Lawson says here. Someone may ask you, “Have you received the second blessing?” Lawson replies, “Absolutely! As a matter of fact, I’ve received them all!”
Over the next several weeks, we are going to get to take a close-up look at many of them.
I don’t doubt that the whole book of Ephesians is going to be spelling out for us many of these blessings. We’ll have opportunity to look at blessing after blessing and realize that each and every one has been poured out upon us.
But at least for now, I know this: We can praise God that he has not held anything back.