New Year Blessings

Ephesians 1:3-14

There is a hymn, which unfortunately is not in our hymnal, otherwise I would have had us sing it today. The refrain goes: “Count your blessings, name them one by one, Count your many blessings, see what God hath done!” The first Sunday of the New Year is a good time to do blessing counting. Today is Jude and my 40^th wedding anniversary, so I am especially grateful for the blessing of Jude in my life and for our marriage. That is #1 for me. When we count blessings probably at the top of all our lists is family and friends. I know that not all of us have perfect families, especially extended families, but I am so grateful for family and for friends. We will also likely think of material blessings. Even though we know it may sound materialistic to count material blessings, the blessing of a degree of financial security with adequate food, shelter, clothing, and things like that really is a blessing. Every one of us in this nation is blessed materially beyond imagining compared to many other nations and peoples, and especially when compared to the situation of most people in the history of the world.

Health also is a big blessing, even when we are having some health problems, the life expectancy we enjoy compared to past generations is amazing.  I know there has been a lot of hullabaloo about Healthcare this year with the roll out of Obamacare.  I know that we could do better in this area compared to other industrial countries, especially when you compare what we spend on our care in our country compared to other countries. But I am still very grateful for the medical care that we have in this time and place, compared to what people have had to deal with through most of the history of humankind and in so many places of the world today. I am also grateful for this town and state. I am so grateful for this nation. Again, I know we have problems as a country. But I am so thankful for the human rights and liberties that we enjoy in this country. I am grateful for those who served in the armed forces paid the ultimate price to win and preserve these freedoms. You get my point here. There are so many categories of blessings. We could go on and on about the blessings every one of us has. And it is a good exercise at the beginning of a new year.

Our epistle lesson for today speaks about spiritual blessings and so that is what I want to concentrate on this morning. Our scripture lesson starts off with the word: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.” I am going to be counting spiritual blessings this morning. I could go on and on with these also. But I am going to limit myself to three spiritual blessings mentioned by the apostle Paul in our lesson from Ephesians.

I. First are the blessings before we were born. Verses 3-6 of our lesson say: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

This is a truly amazing passage. And it is not talked about very much. It clearly says that we were blessed before the foundation of the world. The word translated world here is cosmos, a word we normally use for the entire universe. The earth is dated at about 4.5 billion. Scientists date the beginning of the universe at about 14 billion years, give or take a few million. Before the earth was formed, even before the universe was formed, we were blessed. It says God “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.”

This idea is very difficult to get our minds around. How could we be blessed before the creation of the universe – before we even existed? How could we be blessed before the human race existed, before planet earth existed? To be honest with you I am not sure what this means. I have studied what biblical scholars and theologians say this means, but I don’t think they know. I am not sure that the apostle Paul even knew what he meant when he penned those words by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But it says that we were “in Christ” before the foundation of the world. Ponder that. Wow! Again I don’t know what that means, but it clearly mean that my life is much bigger than I thought it was.

It says God “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world.” This passage is where theologians get the idea of predestination. It even uses the word in verse 5 “having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will.” People start arguing about election, fate and destiny and free will and all that. Most people outside of Baptist circles don’t know this, but the Southern Baptists are in a big controversy now between Calvinists and the more traditional Baptists in that denominations, and one of the issues is this doctrine of election or predestination. I don’t argue about such things. I think that here we are entering into an area of mystery. But at the very least it means that we are known by God from the very beginning, long before we were born. God says to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations."

The purely naturalistic understanding of human beings is that we are soulless animals, nothing more than self-conscious primates who accidently arose on this planet. We are born and die and that is it. This passage is saying we are much more than that. We are somehow in Christ, who is himself in God. Who we really and truly and eternally are is more than the brief time span of these human bodies and minds. This is a blessing of God which I don’t even understand. And it say we have been “blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.” Every blessing that Christ has, we have in him.

Many people go through their earthly lives without any sense of a larger meaning and purpose. They do not know why they were born and are not at all sure there will be anything of them that survives death. That is the legacy of the philosophical materialism that is the predominant worldview of our age. This statement of scripture, if it is true, and I trust it is, means that the blessing of our lives is greater than the brief span of our earthly lives.

II. Second we have the blessing of forgiveness. Verse 7-8 “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence….” The Christian gospel focuses on forgiveness. Different religions of the world focus on different aspects of human experience. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which is based on the Old and New Testaments, focuses on forgiveness. Some people do not like that emphasis. Some people accuse Christianity of being preoccupied with sin, guilt, shame, punishment, and judgment. So they reject Christianity outright, or they reinterpret Christianity to eliminate these uncomfortable aspects. They turn the gospel into a psychological self-help program designed to boost self-esteem.

The reality is that guilt is a part of human experience. It is not pathological. It is a natural response to doing something wrong. Guilt is found in every culture in some form. Every culture has a sense of right and wrong, a moral law that is understood as built into human nature. There is some form of the Ten Commandments in every culture, and most would say that morality is built into the fabric of the universe. We can’t just pretend that this feeling of right and wrong, good and evil does not exist. We have to deal with it.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ deals with it. The central purpose of the gospel is to free us from the consequences of sin. Christianity does not encourage feelings of sinfulness, guilt and shame. It accepts them and present and seeks to eliminates them. The good news of the gospel is that we no longer have to be bound by guilt. We no longer have to feel shame. We no longer have to worry about judgment or punishment. We can be set free from that! Sin is really negative soul-killing stuff. It knocks the life and heart out of you. Some distorted forms of Christianity seek to keep that negativity alive and use it for religious and moral manipulation. That is pathological! But that is not the gospel of Christ.

The gospel is complete freedom from that. It is liberation. Our passage here calls it redemption. “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us….”  The word redemption comes from the world of slavery. It refers to a slave being set free. Traditionally we call it salvation. A better translation is liberation or freedom. Those are concepts that we American care a lot about. We value political, social, economic and religious freedom. Christ gives us spiritual freedom. The apostle Paul goes on to say that how God accomplished this is a mystery. The next words in verse 9 are: “having made known to us the mystery of His will….” The heart of this mystery is the Cross. “In Him we have redemption through His blood….”  This reference to blood points to the death of Christ as the means and symbol of this liberation.

Theologians try to explain exactly how the death of the Son of God on the Cross accomplished this liberation. They propose theories of atonement. They try to explain this mystery with theological systems. Some of the theories are very complicated. Some are better than others. Some of them are pretty bizarre. None of them are satisfactory to me. I have never read a theory of atonement that holds up to serious scrutiny. Some of them seem to give God a split personality. Some describe God in such a way as to make him appear schizophrenic, sadistic or even masochistic. I understand why so many people are repelled by Christian preachers and their theology. Some interpretations of the Cross present such an angry vengeful Deity that any sensitive person would be repelled by it. I am repelled. Too many theories of the Cross compromise the essential nature of God as perfect unconditional love.

If you want an airtight theory on how we have forgiveness through the death of Christ you will not hear it from me. I am not saying there isn’t one. I just haven’t found one that seems faithful to the whole testimony of Scripture. I believe that at its heart the Cross is a mystery. But it is a divine mystery that is effective in setting us free. Somehow the perfect sacrificial love of God in Jesus Christ demonstrated on the Cross frees us.

If a surgeon saves us from heart disease through a heart transplant, it is not important that we understand exactly how the surgery was performed. It is not necessary that we have extensive medical knowledge of the heart, heart disease and open heart surgery. It is only important that the surgeon has this knowledge. And that we have faith in that doctor enough to be put out and laid open on an operating table. It is not important to me to know the details. What is important is that we are healed through the surgery and that we have new life because of the Great Physician. It is also good to be grateful to the organ donor who died that we might live. That is how I approach the Cross – by faith in the Great Physician and grateful to the one who died that I might live. This is a metaphor, but it is helpful metaphor to communicate the truth of the sacrifice of the Cross and the blessing of spiritual liberation that we have through the death of Christ.

III. The third blessing this passage speaks of is the Holy Spirit. 13 “In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; (that is what we were just talking about. Then he goes on) in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” The Holy Spirit is the everyday living proof which confirms the truth of the gospel. The Spirit confirms that what we have believed is true. The passage speaks of the Spirit as a guarantee.

It is nice to have some evidence that what we believe is really true. People can believe in any crazy thing they want to and there is often no way such beliefs can be proved or disproved. That is the way it is with religion. A lot of people believe a lot of weird things. People think that we Christians believe a lot of weird things. How to do we know we are not deceived? How do we know we are not off our rocker, deceived by a religion that has no basis in reality.

God gives us a guarantee. That electronic gadget you got for Christmas is guaranteed, at least for a while. It comes with 30, 60, day, maybe even a six month or one year guarantee. God gave us a lifetime guarantee. It is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God.  Not God far away in a distant heaven. Not God theorized in the mind. God experienced in our lives. The passage says that “having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” God is to be experienced. Not just in worship or in prayer, but every day, every moment of every day. Through faith in Christ God indwells us. We can live in daily relationship with God. We can walk in the Spirit, be led by the Spirit, live in the Spirit. This is the daily experience of eternal life. Eternal life is now. this present experience of divine life is a guarantee “until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.” That is talking about our death. At our death the promise of eternal life is fulfilled. It comes full circle. We were blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing before the foundation of the world. And that is fulfilled when we depart this world and return to Christ who is our eternal life… “to the praise of his glory.”