A Double Blessing
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Ephesians 6:23-24
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Peace be to the brothers, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible.
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Message begins at approx. the 26:30 minute mark.
I’d like to begin this morning with a question. The question is this: did you know that God wants to bless you? Better yet, do you know how much God wants to bless you?
Now, some of you might think, “When did Matt go all health and wealth gospel on us?” That’s the kind of thing you would expect out of some TV preacher. But don’t get me wrong and don’t tune me out. While some weirdos out there have a wrong sense of it, you should not mistake the fact that God earnestly desires to bless his people.
If you are one of his people, you should know that God’s disposition towards you is one of profuse blessing.
As we come to our passage this morning, we have the concluding words to this epistle. And they are nothing less than words of blessing. Techniqually this is called a benediction. And a benediction is merely a blessing or a good word (Bene - good; diction - word, like dictionary is a book of words). Paul here is speaking a benediction or a good word over the Ephesians
And this is part of his work as an apostle in the church. The ministers of God are supposed to pronounce blessings upon the people of God. That’s what you find in the OT. Aaron, the priest, was commanded by God to pronounce the famous blessing of Numbers 6. “The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you.”
From time to time you’ll hear me offer that at the conclusion of our services. That’s because part of my job, as a minister of Christ, is to speak the good word over you. I am to pronounce the benediction. And, in doing so, I am to set God’s blessing upon you.
You might not realize it, but the last part of our service is not just a formality. It is not just the way we end church. It is a very special moment; a very meaningful moment. As you walk out the doors, you go with God’s blessing. And you understand why this is part of my job. You understand what Paul was required to speak these words: It’s because God wants to bless us.
Well, as we come to our passage today, we have opportunity to think about the kind of blessing God wants to bestow. We can even tell he is eager to bless us because, what we have here is a double benediction. Paul actually pronounces two benedictions.
The first one is in verse 23 where he says, “Peace be to the brothers, and love, with faith from God our Father and our Lord Jesus christ.” Then, immediately after that, he offers another good word. He says, “Grace be with all who love the Lord with a love incorruptible.”
So there is, here in Ephesians, a twofold blessing. Sort of symbolic of how eager God is to bless you. And this morning I want to walk through these blessings, so that we can see the kind of blessing that the Lord wishes to give us.
I. Blessing #1
In the first blessing that he offers (which is found in verse 23), you’ll notice that it is a three fold blessing. It is something of a triune blessing because within this one benediction there are three particular blessings that he pronounces.
First, he prays that God would give us peace.
A. God would give us peace
Now, it is always a little interesting talking about Biblical peace because it is such a pregnant word.
Also, when we think of peace, we often have the wrong sense. As Americans we think of peace as that lovely feeling we get when nobody else is around. There’s no one demanding our attention. There’s no one breathing down our necks. It’s just peaceful.
Some of you might be old enough to remember the old Calgon bath soap commercials. For those of you who are younger, the comercials started with a frazzled lady. She would be battling traffic. Her boss would be hounding her about a deadline. The children would be screaming. And even the dog got in on it. The dog would be barking and making demands just like everyone else. Having come to the end of her nerves she cries out, “Calgon, take me away!” And she’s immediately whisked into a relaxing, candle lit bubble bath. Soft music plays in the background and she is all alone, away from the troubles of life. She supposedly has “peace.”
Well, all the mothers here today probably would love to have this kind of spa like treatment. So if you forgot to pick up that card and think of a way to honor your mother, well, there’s still time. Give her the Calgon treatment.
While it sounds very nice and it does have a peaceful ring to it, that is not what the Bible means when it talks about peace. Peace, in the Jewish sense of the term, is really synonymous with prosperity. A better way to translate it is to think of it as “wholeness.”
It is a redemptive term. It indicates a life which has been restored from the ravages of the fall. Everything that sin has broken, may it be brought back. There’s wholeness: Wholeness of relationships. There was a breach in the relationship and there was no peace between you. Now there is. There’s peace with God. There is wholeness in your finances. Maybe you were not responsible with your money or your work ethic, now there is a financial peace that you are starting to enjoy.
So, unlike Calgon, this peace is not a running away from the misery and pains of life. It is a conquering of them. A restoration that comes by God’s working in and through your lives to be in line with his original intents.
Along with this peace, Paul prays that God would fill us with love.
B. God would fill us with love
Now, this should be no surprise to us. After all, the word love has occurred at least 17 times in this epistle. It has certainly been one of the themes that has run through the book.
- You remember that it was in love that God predestined us.
- There was the great love with which he loved us which led to his saving us from our trespasses and sins.
- We were to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.
And these expressions of God’s love were to pour over into our own lives. So that we would “walk in love.” That we would be rooted and grounded in love. That we would bear with one another in love. And, of course, we are to speak the truth in love.
There are many passages that deal with the concept of love. And it should be no surprise that Paul’s final benediction would be that we would grow in love.
I cannot help but think that he’s praying that the concepts of love that we found in this book would be multiplied in our lives. That we would know the love of God in Christ more and more, and that we would manifest the love he has called us to in ever increasing ways.
Maybe this is a good time to ask you this: Are you a different person today than you were two years ago when we started this study? Can you say that you show more love now than you did then. Is there a measurable difference in your ability to love?
Let me give you just a couple check boxes, if you will. Some examples by way of review: Where do you score on a scale of 1-10 in the following areas?
I am more patient and forbearing.
I am less easily angered and more apt to forgive.
I have a greater ability to speak truth with love.
I react less strongly to difficulty and adversity because I am more loving.
I love God more today than I did 2 years ago. (How does that love express itself?)
I certainly hope that these last two years in the book of Ephesians given you a dose of love. I hope that you have learned new ways of showing love. I hope that you have been encouraged to, at least in some small way, to get a little better at showing love.
But understand that this is Paul’s prayer for you. God wants to bless you and one of the things that he wants to bless you with is an incredible increase in love. God’s blessing in your life is that hatred and jealousy melt away because your heart is being filled with love. He blesses you with love, and then more love.
I suppose, that if you want to talk about a health and wealth gospel, this would be it. Paul prays that God’s blessing would come to you and it is one of health and wealth. The idea of peace and wholeness to your person, and a wealth of love.
Here in this first blessing Paul prays that God would grant us peace, that God would fill us with love. And he also prays that God would impart faith.
C. God would impart to us faith
Paul says, “Peace be to the brothers, and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Now, here again, as we’ve seen several times in this study, we see that faith is something that does not come by our own doing. Faith is always something that is soveriegnly imparted. It comes from God and is developed by God. It is, as we saw back in chapter 2, a gift that he gives by his grace.
And, Paul says, just as you got faith from God at the beginning (when you were first saved), so now he prays that God may give you more faith. Your faith must grow. And that will only happen if God sees fit to bestow it.
To put it another way, the opposite of faith is unbelief. The chief sin of mankind is his failure to believe. And we must be saved from this lack of belief. That means he must grant us in his grace the gift of faith.
How is it that we will trust God more? It is only if he gives us greater faith. How can we depend more on him and less on our own understanding? It is only if he strengthens our faith and increases it.
I like that Paul ends this way because faith really is the key to peace and love. How is it that we come to have the wholeness of relationships or wholeness in our health? That peace will only be in proportion to our faith in Christ. If we are not trusting in His Word, then we will never gain the kind of salvation we need that is holding us back from this wholeness.
The same with love. The measure of our love will only be in proportion to our faith in Christ. If we are not putting our trust in God, how is it that a woman can lovingly submit to her husband? If she is trusting in her husband, she’s not very likely to submit to him. He is a very faulty fellow and can make a lot of bad decisions. But if she is trusting in God, she can demonstrate the sweetest spirit of submission and walk through all kinds of hardship.
There’s no doubt that faith is the means to peace and the most vital ingredient in creating a loving person. So there’s no wonder that Paul prays that we might have peace and love with faith.
Well, that is the sum and substance of the first benediction that Paul pronounces here at the end of Ephesians. But, as we said, there is another. In verse 24 Paul offers a second. He says, “Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible.”
Well, let’s dive into this.
II. Blessing #2: Grace
The best way to break this verse down is to ask two questions. We may ask, first, what is it that we get in this blessing? And secondly, we may inquire, who will receive this blessing? There’s a sense in which this blessing is limited; it is not given to all. It comes only to a particular people.
So let’s look at each part. First, what is bestowed in this blessing? What is it that we get?
A. What do we get?
The answer to that is grace. “Grace be with all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love uncorruptable.”
Grace is, as they say, God’s “unmerited favor.” Which is really a redundancy. Favor, by its very nature, is unmerited. Grace is when we get something that we do not deserve. It assumes that we have forfieted the rights to it because we’ve sinned and done wrong.
So, again, we see the idea of a gift. That was really the essence of the first blessing. Paul prayed that God would give us peace, love, and faith. Here we see that Paul is asking that we would be given the grace that is necessary to make that transaction possible.
I appreciate the fact that Paul ends on the note of grace. The last note that sounds from this book is a reminder that we are all nothing more than beggars.
Sometimes we lose sight of this. It is easy to do. And it is always necessary to go back to the very basics of the faith. When we boil it all down, christianity admits two things: God is good, and we are not.
And we should never forget that all we have and all that we may be is solely by God’s grace.
But, as I mentioned just a moment ago, we should not miss that Paul specifies that this blessing will only be applied to a certain group of people. Paul says it comes to “those who love our Lord Jesus Christ with love incorruptible.”
B. Who will get this blessing?
Now, this should at first sound like a contradiction. Grace is unmerited favor. But it sounds like it only is given to those who merit it. It only goes to those who love with love incorruptible. It sounds like you have to do something in order to get this grace. Not only do you have to do something, but you have to do something that seems rather impossible. It’s not just that you love, but you have to have the highest quality of love. It has to be an incorruptible love.
Now, what do we say to this?
Well, we should first reiterate that grace is grace. It is not something you earn. And we know that from all of Scripture we cannot earn anything from God. There’s not one thing we can do to make him turn our way and say, “Oh, wow. You did such a good job. Now I will love you.”
That’s not possible in any way.
So how are we to take this? It is better to read it this way, “A true Christian is one who is seeking to love Christ. You can tell you are a Christian if you are setting Christ apart as the primary thing in your life and making it your greatest goal to love him sincerely.” And, if you are one who genuinely loves Christ, then you will be given grace.
Maybe it would be better to think of it in the negative. There are many who profess to love Christ, but they do not. Their love is not what you would call an incorruptible love. It is by no means genuine. While they may say they love Christ, their actions show something different. Their lives reveal that they really don’t love him at all.
These people should not expect God to give them grace. They would only cheapen grace and deny the real purpose of grace in our lives.
So Paul is recognizing that there may be hypocrites in the church. And he maybe offers a sobering warning: Hypocrites do not are not to expect to receive grace in this life or the next.
But to those of you who do love Christ and show that grace has already been active in your life, then you may expect more grace. For you it will be grace upon grace.
And that is the story of the Christian life. It is grace upon grace.
And that is where we end our study in Ephesians. The curtian closes with the Lordships of Jesus and the multiplicity of his grace. He is to be our greatest love, and he will continually supply us with the gift of his unmerited favor.
Conclusion
I hope that as our services end each week, you will understand why we end the way we do. I hope you see that the way we end is not just a fancy, churchy way of concluding our time together. When I have you stand at the end of our service, I hope that you find that this is a substantial time. Before you start cleaning up the Cheerios and gathering up your belongings, God wants to show his disposition of favor towards you. You are getting ready to go out and live life again. And as you go, God’s last word to you is not, “Buck up, kids. Get your acts together!”
When I lift my hands and pronounce the benediction, I hope you realize that God at that moment is sending his blessing. He wants you to walk out that door understanding his disposition towards you is one of blessing. He loves you and wants you to be filled with his love. He desires that your life would be made whole and you would experience the peace that he offers. He wants you faith to be as strong as steel.