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Ephesians 1:1-14
1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful1 in Christ Jesus:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
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, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us2 for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, 8 which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight 9 making known3 to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
11 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, 12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. 13 In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, 14 who is the guarantee4 of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it,5 to the praise of his glory.
[1] 1:1
[2] 1:5
[3] 1:9
[4] 1:14
[5] 1:14
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
If you have a Bible, I invite you to open Ephesians chapter 1. Ephesians chapter 1. This morning, we begin a study of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. It's gonna take us into the new year. Any introduction to a letter is always an insurmountable task to a pastor.
Jeffrey Heine:You just where do you begin? How do you introduce? My only consolation has been that, next week, I get to speak on predestination. And so I'm, I'm really glad I have that in front of me. Ephesians 1 beginning in verse 1.
Jeffrey Heine:Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus, Grace to you and peace from God our father and the lord Jesus Christ. 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. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us and the beloved. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
Jeffrey Heine:In him, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. If you would, pray with me.
Jeffrey Heine:Our father, we ask that this morning you would press in us through your spirit what it means to be found in Christ. Lord, we want to hold to and believe with all of our hearts everything that that means and everything that that has in store for us. And so we ask that through your Spirit, you would write those things on our hearts. All to the praise of your glorious grace. And I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore.
Jeffrey Heine:Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. About a year ago, we opened up a time capsule here. For those of you who are here, you remember that.
Jeffrey Heine:But it was a time capsule we found in the cornerstone of this church that was put there 100 years earlier. And so it kind of became a big celebration for us that we would open up this time capsule and within it was a letter from the pastor at the time. And so we got to read that letter and and then we put in our own letter. I I wrote a letter to the church that would be meeting here 100 years from now, and it's to be open then. And I read part of that letter.
Jeffrey Heine:I read the whole letter to you guys, and and one of the things that, I heard a lot of feedback on was just when we described Avondale. Because Avondale, at that time, you know, it was pretty much about the size it is now. All those buildings were still there, but none of them have kept their original use. Not one of the buildings that was around this church has kept its original purpose. And so, you know, a post office becomes a post office pies, you know, a rose becomes no longer a gas station but a place to eat and you be you open up coffee shops and places to hear bands and the zoo becomes a park, and and everything changes.
Jeffrey Heine:The only thing that did not change was this building. God's people have always gathered here for the last 100 years. And then to write that that's our expectation a 100 years from now is for people to gather here and to continually worship Jesus. Now I did not expect the the reaction that I got, from that Sunday. It it really touched so many people.
Jeffrey Heine:It just it just struck some emotion deep within them and person after person came and talked to me about that. And even as I was reading the letter that that I was putting in that time capsule to be read in a 100 years, I got choked up. It was a hard hard for me to read through it. But what was happening there, the more I've reflected on it, is all of us wanna be a part of something. We all wanna be part of something that's greater than ourselves.
Jeffrey Heine:We wanna be part of something that was here way before us and something that's gonna endure way after us. And to realize that we actually are a part of something like that, it just it stirred up deep emotions within us. That's exactly what the entire letter to the Ephesians is about, not about this church building, but about the church and how the church has been around for millennia and it's gonna endure all the way to eternity. And that's what we are a part of this glorious thing called the church. That's why Paul wrote this letter.
Jeffrey Heine:This letter is different from all the other letters that Paul wrote. And the other letters Paul gets practical. At least at some part in his letter he gets very practical and he deals with certain problems that are within the church, but he doesn't do that here in Ephesus to this letter to them. Instead he takes a moment and he kind of takes a step back and he gets out of the weeds and he gives us this 10,000 foot view of the church. And he shows us this view is breathtaking.
Jeffrey Heine:What God is building in his church is glorious. In other words, this letter is the exact opposite of the letter we just studied in 1st Corinthians. If you remember 1st Corinthians was nothing but a laundry list of problems, then Paul had to tackle each one of those issues 1 by 1 and just kind of go through all of those things. You have none of that here in Ephesus. There's nothing he's dealing with.
Jeffrey Heine:Instead, he just gets to step back and say, do you have any idea about the glorious institution you're in here in the church? And so he paints this picture for us. Paul here answers the big questions, the questions of why. Why do we have a church? What is our purpose?
Jeffrey Heine:And perhaps you have some of those questions too. Why is it that we gather together here every Sunday? Why is it we meet in small groups? Why is it that we pray? Why do I read my Bible?
Jeffrey Heine:Why do I try to be a good person? If you have those questions, that's what Ephesians is about. If you don't have those questions, well, you still need to learn what Ephesians is about. This letter is for us. He Paul starts this letter with an explosion, really.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean, the first two verses are just kind of your traditional Paul greeting, and I think he wrote the first two verses, he he he maybe he had a little, you know, just block and he and so he went running, probably. This what I have in my mind. He went running and then he came back, drank a few Red Bulls, and then he just sat down and he exploded. Because verses 3 through verse 14 are one sentence in Greek. It is one really long, long sentence.
Jeffrey Heine:It's 202 words long. Alright? He just literally he just explodes with this machine gun fire, just praise after praise and deep thought after deep thought. You can land every few words and do an entire sermon on each of these few words. A few weeks back, I asked my younger girls if they had started learning how to diagram sentences yet in English.
Jeffrey Heine:And they're like, yeah. Yeah. We love diagramming. I was like, I have got a project for you. I mean, you try diagramming a sentence that has 202 words.
Jeffrey Heine:You try even finding what is the main verb to this. We're gonna look at that next week. But it really You can kinda get the flow. It doesn't take that hard to really figure out where Paul's going in this. All you have to do is take his first statement and his last statement and you get the gist of the entire sentence.
Jeffrey Heine:And it's this. Paul begins in verse 3 and he talks about being blessed in Christ. And then he concludes in verse 14 by saying to the praise of his glory. There is the flow of the entire sentence. We've been blessed in Christ to the praise of his glory.
Jeffrey Heine:That's actually the why for your existence. Everybody struggles what's the big why. Here's the big why, and here's the big answer to it. You were created in order to be blessed all for God's glory, to the praise of his glory. Alright.
Jeffrey Heine:So let's look at this blessing in verse 3. Verse 3 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. Now when Paul talks about us being blessed, you've gotta kinda remove any notion of what we mean when we say blessed. You know, when you're at Publix and you hear the cashier say, have a blessed day. Or Walmart, have a blessed day.
Jeffrey Heine:And you're like, it's it's I've been here an hour. It's not a blessed day. You know, it's just you you got to remove that notion of blessing. Blessing is this. It's it's the overflow of God's peace and his goodness towards you.
Jeffrey Heine:It's the overflow of God's peace and his goodness towards you. And God is not stingy about this blessing. Notice what it says here. Paul says that we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. I must have read that phrase there probably a 100 times in preparation for the sermon, and I have yet to fully comprehend it.
Jeffrey Heine:I mean let those words sink in. We have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. Have been blessed. This is not a future event. You right now sitting in your pews as a Christian, you have been blessed already.
Jeffrey Heine:Then it says, with every spiritual blessing. Man, honestly, I I don't know what to even add to that, but I'm going to. We got 25 minutes. As I read this, I'm I'm asking the question to myself. Am I taking advantage of that?
Jeffrey Heine:What will my life look like if I actually lived into that as a present reality that I, Joel Brooks, have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. What would your life look like? That's what I want us to probe into this morning. Now you might be thinking, well, you're being a little unfair because it says spiritual blessings and they're in the heavenly places, so So it's not really for the here and for the now. No.
Jeffrey Heine:When when Paul is saying that our blessings are in the heavenly places, he's saying they're in the heavenly places because that's where Jesus is. And our every blessing is in Christ. All of our blessing comes from Christ. And that phrase in Christ or in him becomes the dominant theme of all of these verses. So we are blessed in Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:Now in him, in Christ or through him or whatever variation of that, is the theme of these these one sentence, verses 3 through 14, and Paul uses in him 11 times in one sentence. Absolute f if he was in English class to just repeat himself over and over, but it's in him we have every blessing. In him, in Christ is how Paul would summarize the entire Christian life. What it means to be a Christian is that we would be found in Christ. And so, just in this one sentence, I won't go through them all, but verse 3, Paul says that we are blessed in Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:Verse 4, we are chosen in Him. Verse 5, we are adopted through him. Verse 6, we are blessed in the beloved. Verse 7, In him, we have redemption. Verse 10.
Jeffrey Heine:Unites all things in him. Verse 11. In him, we have obtained an inheritance. Verse 13. In him, we were sealed with the promise of the holy spirit.
Jeffrey Heine:And these in hymns are not just here, in Ephesians. They're they're all throughout the New Testament. They're literally on every page in in the New Testament. You're gonna find these in hymns and so when you go to, you know, Colossians 2, you're gonna see how we're to walk in him. We are to be built up in him.
Jeffrey Heine:We are to be filled in him. We just looked at 2nd Corinthians 5 where if anybody is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, the new has come. Or Philippians 4, the peace of God which surpasses all understanding shall guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. The only reason we have peace is because we are in Christ Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:Galatians 2 says, in Christ Jesus, you are sons of God through faith. We get to those really epic words of Paul when he gets to Romans 8 where he says that, I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor heights, nor depths, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. The only reason we can be assured of the love of Christ is because or love of God is because we are in Jesus. We are in his son. So every benefit we have as Christians comes from being found in Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:So what does it mean to be in Christ? It's a pretty important question. What does it mean to be in him? Well, it means this. We are now so united with Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:Everything Jesus has is ours. We are so united with Jesus that everything he has is ours. So God, the father, when he looks at us, he sees Jesus. He treats us just like he would his son, Jesus. That's what it means to be found in him.
Jeffrey Heine:Now, it's important to see that being found in Christ is either something you are or you aren't. Being a Christian is something you either are or you are not. There's not a transition. This isn't describing a process. There's not a middle ground here.
Jeffrey Heine:You're either born again or you're not born again. You're either alive or you're dead, but it's it's not a process here. Now years back, I used to lead college students. We would take trips to Northern Ireland, mission trips there. As a matter of fact, I was just just yes 2 days ago, I was looking at pictures, pictures from all of these trips and I was shocked for 1, how long young I looked, and 2, just how old, or how tired I looked in every one of those pictures.
Jeffrey Heine:It's a mistake to bring your entire family, little kids, to where you are traveling all the time, hanging out with college students, living in trailers, whatever it is. And then you get back and everybody asks how your vacation was. But I'm over that bitterness. But they I had the same conversations over and over and over when I was in Ireland. Every time I'd meet somebody, we'd talk for a little bit, and I'd ask, are you a Christian?
Jeffrey Heine:They'd say, I'm trying to be. I'm trying to be. Are you a Christian? I hope to be. Are you a Christian?
Jeffrey Heine:I'm working on it. I met a lot of CEO's. Christian Easter only, the Christian Easter only Christians. They were scattered all about there. They would go to church maybe just for those holidays and but yet the rest of their time, they still convinced themselves, like, maybe I'm following the Lord, maybe I'm not, But they they wanted to be a Christian.
Jeffrey Heine:And then when I came back, you know, to the states, actually, the conversations didn't change. I've had conversations with several of you in this room about Christianity and your response has been to me, I'm trying to be a Christian. I'm working on it. But you don't try. Jesus will not be tried.
Jeffrey Heine:Jesus will be trusted. You don't try Christianity like like you test drive a car. I'm just gonna try Jesus for a bit, and if it works out for me, then I'll commit. That's not Christianity. You're either bought in or you're not.
Jeffrey Heine:You're either saved or you're not. It's not a process. Now, that doesn't mean you have to remember the exact moment that you transitioned from death to life. Now all of us have that Damascus road experience, but there was a point there was a point that you once were dead, and you now are alive. You once were not in Christ, but now you are in Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:And, by far, the most important thing in the world is for you to know whether or not you are in Christ. By far. And so that's what I want us to look at. What does it mean to be in Christ? So we're gonna look at the blessings that come from being in Christ, and then we're gonna ask question, how exactly do we get in those blessings and become in Christ?
Jeffrey Heine:Alright. So let's look at the main blessing that we have, in Christ and then how we could go about getting that blessing. Now we've we've already looked at a number of these blessings, but really the main one can be summed up in one word. Adoption. The main blessing of being found in Christ is the word adoption.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at verse 5. Really, just a couple words before verse 5. When it says, in love, he predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ. According to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace. So one becomes a Christian when one is adopted by God through Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:So when we unite ourselves to Christ through faith, we are now in Christ. We are in Christ and now God looks at us the exact same way that he looks at his own child. That's adoption. We become his child. He becomes our father.
Jeffrey Heine:So when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he taught them to pray, our father who art in heaven. We all know that prayer but normally we just jump right over that part to get to the good stuff, you know, give us this day our daily bread and forgive us forgive us of our sins, but really it was those first two words, our father, that the disciples jaws would have dropped. Our father? She's talking to God. We we could pray, our father?
Jeffrey Heine:Only 14 times in the entire old testament is God ever referred to as father. And those weren't, like, usually done in any kind of intimate setting, more of a descriptive setting there, but here now you're saying we can actually call God, holy God? We could call him father, our father. It's the privilege of being a child. Jesus referred to God as father over 60 times, because he was the unique son of God, and so he could refer to him as father.
Jeffrey Heine:But now that we're in Christ, we get to call God father as well. And that's what we read up on the screen earlier when we started the service. Galatians 4. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba father.
Jeffrey Heine:You are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. That's the heart of the gospel. And every person who believes this, who has had the spirit of God inside of them, has felt this. The heart changed where your relationship with God has changed and out of the depths of your soul, God's no longer just God.
Jeffrey Heine:God is Father God. And you you relate to him as a child does to his father and you feel that. Now I I don't love to do quotes, but I really I can't talk about this and not do a a long quote from j I Packer in his book Knowing God because he summarizes this so beautifully. Packer says this, you sum up the whole of new testament religion, if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one's holy father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his father.
Jeffrey Heine:If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship, and his prayers, and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not yet understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely being Jewish is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God. Father is the Christian name for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. So understanding adoption, is how we understand the heart of Christianity.
Jeffrey Heine:What Christianity is at all. Father is the name we have been given for God. So what does adoption mean? I want us to look at what adoption means for us and what are the benefits of being adopted and being a child of god. And the first benefit is this, we are loved.
Jeffrey Heine:We are unconditionally loved. I've got 3 beautiful girls, but there were many times that, both Lauren and I, we would get up and we would have to deal with a screaming child after no night's sleep, and we would just be covered in spit up. And when you're holding that child as they're spitting up on you, screaming, the only thing that keeps you there is love. You love the child. Not because of anything they're doing, but you just love this child.
Jeffrey Heine:No matter what my children do, they cannot shake away the love that I have for them. There's literally nothing they could do to to where I would stop loving them. They cannot outrun my love. They cannot lose my love. They can't do any of those things because they've never done one thing to earn my love.
Jeffrey Heine:Love is just freely given. You see, you were adopted by God, not for anything that you had ever done. Your adoption was not based on your abilities, it was not based on your value or you know God's thinking, I think he could bring a lot to the table. You know, I think I'm gonna adopt that one. That's that's not how God adopted you.
Jeffrey Heine:You brought nothing. A father doesn't look at a child and think, you know what, if I were to adopt that child, I would get so much more money and more sleep and more time. So I'm just gonna go ahead and do that. You're denied those things. Adoption comes at a cost.
Jeffrey Heine:But when you love that child, you will do anything, Anything for that child. God simply loved you. He simply loved you, and you decided to make you his. That's what adoption is. And there's nothing that you can do to make him love you more, and there's nothing that you can do to make him love you any less.
Jeffrey Heine:You can rest secure in the love of God. So that's first. 2nd is this. We now have access to God. Unrestricted access to God.
Jeffrey Heine:Do y'all remember that YouTube clip? Probably came out a year ago. It's of that, that professor in South Korea, who's being interviewed by Skype on the BBC. Y'all remember that clip? I mean, he says, I I watched it again this morning.
Jeffrey Heine:It's already got 25,000,000 views. Alright? It's it's it is the best clip on YouTube today. Alright? And it's this it's a professor and he's there and he's in his suit and he looks all professional.
Jeffrey Heine:And he's giving this Skype interview to the BBC, and it's live. And as he is giving this, everything goes falls apart. And all of a sudden his child just burst into the room. That that little child is like this big who's wearing the yellow shirt, and she's got the glasses on. And she's just like, I mean, y'all remember that she's just stopping like that in there.
Jeffrey Heine:That's what it means to be a child and have access to your father. She didn't, like, crack open the door. Is this a good time? I mean, she doesn't even just walk in. I mean, she is strutting in.
Jeffrey Heine:Children have access. And tell let me tell you, God won't do this to you. You know, the the whole, like, acting like you're you're still giving an interview when you're really not. I mean, you're just God turns and he embraces. Whenever you think that you have access to God and that you can boldly approach the throne of grace, have that image in your mind.
Jeffrey Heine:You get to burst into the room and just stomp up to God, and he embraces you. Total access that only comes from being a child. Next, being adopted also means not only are we cared for in this life, which we are. I mean, I love how Jesus, he he told his disciples, if you then being evil know how to give good gifts your children, and that little throwaway line, you being evil, by the way, and know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your father give? So he takes care of us in this life, but also in the life to come, he gives us a glorious inheritance.
Jeffrey Heine:We have an inheritance. We become co heirs with Christ. In other words, everything that Jesus inherits, we inherit. Just let the let the penny drop on that. Everything that Jesus inherits, we inherit, And Jesus inherits the world.
Jeffrey Heine:Some of you women here might have been rubbed slightly the wrong way, that Paul likes to talk about we become sons. Sons of God and he doesn't use daughters of God. Well, first off, it's a metaphor. Okay? 2nd, if men are asked to be the bride of Christ, you can ask to be a son of God.
Jeffrey Heine:Alright? It works both ways here. But more importantly, calling daughters of God would not have worked in the 1st century because daughters did not receive an inheritance, and that's what this is about. It's an elevation of the women there. How all of us as God's children, all of us now receive an inheritance.
Jeffrey Heine:No one is excluded, And our inheritance, once again, is the world kept for us. Imperishable, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven for us. Alright. And the final benefit of adoption is this. And I gotta confess, I did not see this as a benefit.
Jeffrey Heine:Matter of fact, when I was kinda going through and I'm trying to narrow down how many benefits so I talk about, this did not make the top ten. It wasn't even on there. It wasn't till I was reading, Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology and had a little section on adoption. It came out there. I was like, why didn't I think about this?
Jeffrey Heine:But you'll know why. Discipline. Discipline is a benefit of adoption. We all receive discipline. A good, loving father disciplines his children.
Jeffrey Heine:Just doesn't let them do everything they'd want to do, but actually, in love comes in disciplines. Just as earthly children learn obedience through discipline, we grow in our holiness when we are disciplined by our heavenly father. And this gives us an entire new lens to see the suffering around us. It's not a punishment. That's different than discipline.
Jeffrey Heine:But the suffering around us, we can see as discipline. As God teaching us to lean more on him, to become more like his son, Jesus. Hebrews even tells us that Jesus learned obedience through his suffering. And if we are in Christ, how will we learn obedience? Through our suffering.
Jeffrey Heine:The Lord disciplines those that he loves. So how do we get this? How do we get in? How do we get this blessing? How do we become in Christ?
Jeffrey Heine:We'll look a little bit more this next week, but parents adopt their children, not the other way around. Children do not adopt parents. Adoption is God's choice. It's not ours. Paul says in verse 5 that we were predestined for adoption.
Jeffrey Heine:This was his decision, his choice, and it's always been a part of his plan. Henry, adoption was God's idea. God's the one who came up with this idea of adoption. It was not an afterthought, but it was rooted in his heart for all of eternity. And for those of you who have adopted children, or those of you who are going through the process of adopting children, know that this was God's idea for you to do that.
Jeffrey Heine:He's the one who came up with this notion of adoption, and you are beautifully demonstrating to us the gospel to us here in this room and to the entire world that God loved us, so he chose us and brought us into his family. What a beautiful picture. We see that in so many people here who have adopted. For those of you who have adopted or are currently in the process of doing this, I just wanna say thank you. Thank you for modeling this for us.
Jeffrey Heine:And I know that adoption comes at a cost. I mean, there's obviously the financial cost of it, but then there's the emotional cost of it. There's the the time cost of it. Adoption is costly. God's adoption of us was also costly.
Jeffrey Heine:So even the cost of the adoption, for those of you who are going through that, you're modeling something to us in the gospel, that adoption comes at a cost. Look at verse 7. We read, in him, we have redemption through his blood. Where in him, we have redemption, purchased by the blood of Jesus. That's that's how we were able to be adopted.
Jeffrey Heine:That was the cost of our adoption. It wasn't through easy things like gold or silver or diamonds. We had to be bought through the blood of Jesus. And now, I mentioned earlier, That's how we see this play out. I mentioned earlier that Jesus referred to God as his father over 60 times throughout the gospels.
Jeffrey Heine:Actually, every time Jesus talked to God, every time he referred to God as his father. It's remarkable as you go through the whole new testament. But Martin Luther, I was reading through him and he's the one who pointed this out to me, and I've never gotten over this. There's one exception. There's only one time when Jesus prays, and he does not refer to God as father.
Jeffrey Heine:And that's when Jesus is on the cross. When Jesus is on the cross, he doesn't pray, my father, my father. He prays, my God, my God. And the reason he does that, he doesn't refer to God as his father, is because he has lost every privilege that came with sonship. At that moment, Jesus was stripped of it all.
Jeffrey Heine:What access did he have? He didn't have access to that living water. He's crying out, I thirst. What love did he feel? He didn't feel love.
Jeffrey Heine:He felt utterly forsaken. What inheritance did he have? He didn't even have clothes on his back. It had been gambled away. Literally, every privilege that was due Jesus through his sonship was denied him in that moment and instead, it was given to us.
Jeffrey Heine:That's the beautiful, glorious exchange of the gospel. We are treated as Jesus deserved, and Jesus was treated as we deserved. That was the purchase price for our adoption. That's how we get this adoption is through the what Jesus paid. And once again, he didn't do this because he thought we were so beautiful, or we had so much to bring to the table.
Jeffrey Heine:We were literally enemies. His enemies, and yet he adopted us. Does that move you? As Christians, does that move you? If you don't believe, can can you can you be moved by that?
Jeffrey Heine:Are you living into every blessing that God has for you by being called his child? John, he says these words in 1st John 3. See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called the children of God. Pray with me. Lord, what love you have displayed on us.
Jeffrey Heine:It's beyond our ability to comprehend that we should be called children of God, but I ask that we begin pressing into that and really living the life that is due. Due to Christ. Due to Jesus. And how we can live out that life because we are united through him. That every benefit he has is now ours.
Jeffrey Heine:Every blessing he receives is now ours. And Jesus, thank you for the price that was paid for us to be so blessed. We pray this in your strong name, Jesus. Amen.