Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you this morning. It's good to be back with you. We were grateful that you were able to share your pastor with us a few months back, as we needed someone to fill the pulpit. And Hank came and spoke for us, and it was very well received and a real blessing to us. I do bring you greetings from Redeemer Baptist Church at your sister church in Macon. We very much appreciate. you guys and what the Lord is doing here with you all. I want to preach to you this morning from Ephesians chapter 2. Ephesians chapter 2. Our scripture reading, we read the whole chapter. I just want to read a few verses in the middle of the chapter, and then we'll use the whole chapter. But we'll take our text beginning in verse 11. Thank you, brother. Ephesians chapter 2 beginning in verse 11. Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision made in the flesh by hands, Remember that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus, you, who once were far off, have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation, or maybe your translation says the middle wall of hostility, having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in himself one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that he might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity, or putting to death the hostility. Let's pray once more. Our Father, as we open the word, we do pray for your spirit. We recognize that apart from your spirit, we cannot profit from your word. We cannot learn what we ought to learn. We cannot sense you as we ought to sense you. We cannot know you as you ought to be known. So we pray, God, that in amazing and marvelous grace you would condescend to us to open our eyes, open our hearts to the word of God and open the word of God to our hearts. We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Well, there are few things in life as disturbing and disruptive and unsettling as conflict with other people. When those that we love are separated from us through conflict, it creates all manner of anxiety. We oftentimes lose sleep over it, our thoughts. are hardly ever free from that conflict. We often are rehearsing in our mind the discussions and the way we should have responded, and we're wrapped up with the conflict that we are entangled with. It seemingly takes over our thought life. We can hardly even control our mind from returning again to the conflict around us. Conflict and disunity is an awful thing. We're right to be disturbed and we're right to be concerned when there's conflict in our life. The Bible tells us as much as is possible and as much as depends upon you, live at peace with all men. And yet there's a greater conflict. There's a greater conflict that very few people give much thought or attention to. And that is the conflict that we have with God prior to our conversion. Very few people ever give attention to the war that the non-Christian is raging against God with. A few people give thought to just what a dreadful situation we were in prior to our conversion. To be sure, this war that the non-Christian has with God doesn't always take the form of open hostility. Sometimes it's in the form of a cold war, isn't it? It's not always persecution and blasphemy and all manner of sin. And yet, the reality is, no matter how morally upright the unbeliever is, no matter how much charity they contribute to, no matter how many good things they may do in their life, the non-Christian is at war with God. There's a dreadful war between the unbeliever and God so long as they remain in that state. However good or however bad you may have been, when salvation comes to you, it is salvation from the very depths of hell. It is salvation from a war that you could never have won. It is salvation from a dreadful state of existence. And salvation is an incomprehensible condescending on God's part to come to us. At the very moment that we are lifting our hands in war against God, he comes to us with love and mercy and grace. It is salvation, I said, from a war that we cannot win. and the purpose of this passage in Ephesians is to call us as Christians to remember, to consider, to think deeply about the condition that we were in, the condition that God has saved us from. It is a call for us to love Him all the more for what He has done. Remember the text says twice, remember what you once were. And in remembering what you once were and remembering what God has done to bring you out of the depths of hell, Love him more and love him in very specific ways. And so it has something to teach us as we consider what God has done. It has something to teach the non-believer here. If you are not a believer in Christ, there's a description here of what you are and your relationship to God. It shows you your current relationship with God and it shows you how to resolve that current relationship with God. And so this morning, my first point is simply remember. Remember, that's what Paul tells us in verse 11, therefore remember what you once were. You were called uncircumcision by the circumcision and at that time you were without Christ. Paul is calling us here to consider what we once were. Consider what you were. Consider the life that you led. Consider your relationship with God. This is the thrust of Paul's exhortation in this section. Here is a call for us Christians this morning to stop, to pause, to meditate, and to think deeply about what we were outside of the Lord Jesus Christ, and what our state, and what our condition, and relationship to God was. And if you're a non-believer, what your relationship to God is. I say most people give very little attention to this particular conflict that they have or had with God. Certainly the unbeliever lives his life without much thought about the conflict that he has with God. It is assumed that God could never be against us, that God could never be against anyone and would never do anything to cause them discomfort. The non-Christian does not consider the grave danger that they are in outside of Christ as they wage war against God. And yet, Even many Christians only consider the change that has taken place as a small thing, as almost a step in natural maturity, so that there's been only a change of opinion or a slight modification to their behavior, so that whereas they once did some bad things, they now do good things, and whereas they once thought little of God, now they think more of God. And yet here Paul tells us, I want you to consider more deeply. It's a greater change than that that has taken place in the life of a believer. Consider, he says, remember what you once were. Remember that you were uncircumcised, far off from the Lord Jesus Christ. Think carefully, he says, about the degree of danger that you were within before your conversion. And what is the condition of a person before he or she becomes a believer, becomes a Christian? Well, when Paul wants to press the severity and the awfulness of the state of the non-Christian, when he wants to press these Christians with the awfulness of their relationship to God before their conversion, he puts it in these terms. Without Christ and without God in the world, without hope, This is the worst thing that could be said of a man or a woman, that he's without Christ, that he's without God in the world. They are without Christ and without God and therefore they can have no true hope at all. When Paul wants to put it in the darkest terms, in the worst light he could possibly frame it, he says, remember, think about it, consider for a moment, you were without Christ. you were without God in the world. Sure, there are other things that Paul would have us to consider, things he lists for us in this chapter, but the pinnacle The height of our awful state before our conversion was, we were without Christ. God was against us. We did not have God in the world, and we had no hope in the world. And you see, it was just because we were without Christ that Paul will say, you were dead in your trespasses and sins. What were you before you were a believer? You were dead. You were eternally dead. There was no spiritual life in you at all. You did not have Christ. You did not have God in the world. You were dead and lifeless as to spiritual things. You were dead spiritually. You were dead eternally. And you know, for all our supposed wisdom and rational behavior, all our maturity we think, all of our business acumen, We were not actually driven by reason at all, he tells us. You think you were so reasonable and rational as a non-believer. He says, Paul says to us, you were not rational at all, but you were driven along by the lust of the flesh. You weren't driven by thinking about Oh, this is the right thing. This is the best thing. I'll choose that thing. He says, in fact, you were driven along by your base passions, moved by the lust of the flesh and the lust of the mind. You weren't thinking. You weren't rational. The idea that we're rational and civilized, he says, is nothing but a delusion and a fantasy. You act upon the lust of the flesh. And every single thing you did, Every act you made, every action you took before you were a believer was nothing but the fulfilling of the lusts of the flesh. In our unconverted state, he says essentially you are You are hardly any better than a brute beast, an animal who just acts upon your passions and lust, doing what feels right at the moment, often rejecting what you know to be right, rejecting what you know to be the best thing, choosing often the wrong thing, because all you were moved by was the passion and lust of the flesh. Oh no, brother, you say, we're civilized. We have our ties and our skirts on this morning and we're civilized and we live in a civilized society. But are we? Are we a civilized people? Are we a civilized society? Why is it that civilization seems to be crumbling all around us? Is it not just because people are moved merely by the lust of the flesh and the lust of the mind? It may be offensive for some of you for me to say that before you became a Christian, you were moved by nothing but your bodily appetites, not much different than a wild animal, just choosing what fed your lusts, the mere animal part of you, controlled by it. And you see, it doesn't matter how much good you've done or did. It doesn't matter the charities you contributed to. It didn't matter how well you'd done in your career. It didn't matter how well you suppressed those things at certain times. Paul tells us that even all of those things that the world would consider good, all of those good deeds and good actions that we did before our conversion, he says you did it for one reason, that you might fulfill your lusts. You gave to that charity that others might look on you favorably. You succeeded in your job and you put down lesser desires to excel in your career, that you might excel other people, that you might be over other people. All the good even that you did as non-believers was merely for self, for lust, that other people might put you on a pedestal and make something of you. Paul goes on. to tell us that this pattern of life was nothing more than the following of the pattern set for us by Satan himself. It was a satanic life. Have you ever thought of your pre-conversion life in those terms? Many of you, no doubt, were morally good people before your conversion, and yet Paul can say all that you did and all of your morality was nothing more than to follow the pattern of Satan. You did those things for ungodly reasons, for ungodly motives. You walked, he says, you lived, you ordered your life and you ordered your conduct, all that you were about according to the course of this world, according to the prince and power of the air. You see, you patterned your life according to the example of the sons of disobedience. It's not a very flattering picture that Paul paints of us prior to our conversion. And you may very well recoil at it. You may be thinking to yourself now, you may be arguing with me in your mind saying, well, I may not have been converted, but I wasn't an animal. I may not have been converted, but I didn't do everything for myself. I may not have been converted, but I was generally moving and doing the right things and moving in the right direction. But it is true. It may take different forms and different personalities. It may take the form of morality in some and wild, extravagant living in others. But the reality is, prior to our conversions, we did nothing but follow the pattern of Satan. We did nothing but fulfill the lust of the flesh. All that we did came from the same root of unbelief. You know, this fleshly lust, it very often takes the form of religious garb. It very often clothes itself with religion. We considered Jacob some in Sunday school this morning. Consider Jacob again. He not only stole Esau's birthright, his inheritance, his financial portion of his father's goods, but he wanted that religious blessing, didn't he? He wanted to have that religious blessing from his father. Why? Because he was a religious man? Because he loved God? Most people would have said, in some sense, this was a good thing, right? He wanted this religious blessing. but he wanted it that he might consume it upon his lust. He wanted it because he treated God like a genie in a bottle, that if I rub it and he pops out, I'll get three wishes. And if I can be a religious man, and if I can have Esau's religious blessing, surely more of the world's goods will come to me. I'll be respectable in the world's eyes, and therefore they'll give me the things I want. Very often, Our pursuing the lust of the flesh follows the paths and channels of religious observance, just like Esau. There's this contradiction in him so that he desires these religious blessings, but only as a means of fulfilling the lust of the flesh, so that through religion and through the respectability that comes from it, he may have more of this world's goods. That is, Jacob is willing to pursue religious matters and to be religious so long as he can fulfill his cravings and lust. Now, did not many of you use God in that way prior to your conversion? Am I very far off the mark in saying that we're just like Jacob? that we're willing to be religious as well, just as long as God will continue to bless us with the goods of this world, that we may have more and more and more and more, and it's never satisfied. And the moment that God takes those things away, we have harsh and evil thoughts of God, as if he's wronged us in some way. Did not many of you use God this way before your conversion? Are some of you using God this way this morning? That you will love Him if only He will give to you the things that you want? Oh, it's an awful thing. You remember what James says. Many of you pray But you have not because you ask amiss. You pray that you might consume it, he says, upon your lusts to pursue God and religion for lustful Fleshly reasons. That's the awfulness of our condition before God. We can't even see it most of the time. Most of us didn't realize we were doing it. I'm not sure Jacob realized he was doing it. That's the darkness of our minds prior to conversion. That all we do is use others and use God for ourselves. This is Paul's indictment of mankind without Christ. And as such, he says, every last one of you were children of wrath. That's what he tells the Ephesians. Just like everyone else, you were children of wrath. You see, There is no peace between God and the man who lives in this way. And that's the condition that he's calling us to remember. You are at war. You are children of wrath. There is a war between you and God without Christ. This is just what he means when he describes in this passage the Gentiles as a far off. A far off is not a reference of distance or location. It's not as if God were in Jerusalem and the Gentiles were thousands of miles removed. It's a matter of relationship. You had no relationship with God. You see, you were far away from God. It's an alienation from God. It's a description of a broken relationship. It's alienation from God so that because God is holy, he must be against us as long as we live in this condition, in this state. Is this not a very dangerous condition to be in, to have been in? Consider, you were at war with the one who created you. You were at war with the one who sustains you. You were at war with the one who gives your lungs the capacity to fill with air. It is a war that is unwinnable. You could never have won this war. Is it safe to have been at war with such a God, with such a being? Oh, listen, don't flatter yourself that because you are religious or because you are a morally upright person that somehow in the day of judgment this God will reduce your sentence, that He will somehow commute your sentence. No, he's a holy and a just God. He's not like the unjust judges that we hear about in the news who free the politically connected or the wealthy. He's a just judge. He'll not lighten the sentence. He will demand justice of us. This was the God that you were at war with. Again, consider Jacob pursuing religious attainments, but all for himself and his well-being. His religion, his pursuit of religious things would not have spared him. Consider the Athenians, always sitting around discussing new religious ideas. They love to discuss the various religions and philosophies of the day. And for all of that, Paul says, you will die without Christ. Paul himself describes them as very religious. Or consider the Jews. The Jews were certainly a religious people, a people of the book. They kept the sacrifices. They went to synagogue and they went to the temple and they did all of these things. And yet, what does Jesus Christ himself say to them? You are like your father, the devil. How could that be? That in the pursuit of religious aims, They could be following the pattern of Satan. That is our condition. This is what Paul is calling us to remember in this passage. Remember that even all of your religion was nothing but a pursuit of the ways and patterns set for you by your Father Satan. And a person that is at war with God will inevitably be at war with others. will inevitably be at war with fellow church members, will inevitably be at war with family members. Again, we come back to the life of Jacob. What an example Jacob is of this very thing. Jacob loved himself supremely, he pursued religious things for himself, and his lust brought him into great conflict with Esau. He couldn't dwell in the same place with Esau unless he had what belonged to Esau. Pursue religion, sure, but give me Esau's portion. And so there was conflict. This is the inevitable result of being at war with God. This grasping after personal gain or personal reputation inevitably led to conflict with Esau. It tore the family apart. It separated brothers. It alienated Esau from his mother. It destroyed the peace of a dying father. It created in Esau a desire for murder. Why? Because they lived for self. They pursued the lust of the flesh. Isn't this exactly what the Apostle James tells us in the book of James? Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and you war. Why? Because without God, we will inevitably live this way in the world. We will always be in conflict. This, he says, is to follow Satan. This wisdom, James says, it doesn't come from above. It's not a heavenly wisdom. It's not a heavenly way of life. It is earthly, sensual, demonic, he says. That's what James labels it as, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. Division, separation must inevitably follow from a lack of peace with God. When there is no peace with God, there can be no peace with our fellow men. Another example is right in our passage, is the relationship between the Jew and the Gentile. That's the example that Paul gives us. And what does he say? He says that because they were lawbreakers, there was this wall of separation, this enmity between the two groups. And it resulted in this division between the Jew and the Gentile, a middle wall of separation. They were aliens from one another. It's nothing else but the result of sin in the world. Because we were lawbreakers, the law was against us, we were at war with God, and therefore we were at war with everyone else. Man separated from man, and so it always will be where there is separation from God. So then what is the answer? What is the answer to this problem of conflict? Have you ever experienced this conflict? with fellow men, maybe brothers or sisters in Christ? You know, it's possible for believers to live as if they were separated from God, and it creates conflict. Has there ever been conflict between you and the church? What is the answer? Well, first of all, I want to state it negatively. We might begin to reason that if the cause of division among men and war with God is that we're lawbreakers, that the answer to our problems is to be law keepers. But nothing could be further from the truth. The Jews were law keepers. They kept the law, fervently kept the law. The scripture said they would travel land and sea to make a convert to the law. They tied to the nth degree. They did all the things that the law required. And yet it was their very law keeping that caused them to look down upon everyone else. to put themselves above others. It's what led that Pharisee and that great story that Christ gave to look down on the public and say, oh God. I thank you that I'm not like this sinner. You see, I'm better than him. And so what did he do? What was the cause of that law keeping and that pride in his life was that he alienated himself from that sinner. Here's a man pouring out his heart to God. Oh God, forgive me, I'm a sinner. And the law keeper said, I'm gonna stand at a great distance from him. You see, when we're at war with God and all we do is become law keepers, there's inevitably that separation. He couldn't draw near to that man. It was not possible for him to do so because he wasn't near to God. He wasn't justified by God. He didn't have peace with God. A religious man, sure, he's praying, he's tithing, he's fasting, he lists off for us all the religious duties that he does. I thank you, I fast so many times and I pray so often. But he had no peace with God in all of his religion. The poor sinner comes and beats upon his chest and says, God, be merciful to me. And he has peace with God. You see, to keep the law, if we think that The solution to our problem is merely to begin keeping the law. We have not done what Paul's called us to. We have not remembered the depth of our condition. That somehow we can, like a leopard, or like the scripture says, can a leopard change his spots or an Ethiopian the color of his skin? That somehow we could just go from being lawbreakers to law keepers and everything will work out in life. No, that's not gonna help us at all. his law-keeping, this Pharisee's law-keeping. And in our text, these Jews' law-keeping did nothing to give them peace with God and nothing to bring them into peace with fellow men. So what then is the answer? Paul will tell us in Philippians 3 that the answer is to be found in Christ. Not having our own righteousness, which is from the law, but the righteousness which is through faith in Jesus Christ. That's what he says in our text in verse 14. For he himself, Jesus Christ, is our peace. It's not law keeping, it's not good works, it's not charitable deeds, it's not even primarily seeking peace with others, it's nothing else but Christ himself. It's when we come to Jesus Christ with all of our sins that we are free from the bondage of sin, given new life in him, we have peace with God and it flows out in peace with our fellow men and women. You see, Jesus is not merely an add-on to our goodness, but he is alone and only the sacrifice that gives us peace with God. Jesus Christ by himself has secured our peace with God by his death on the cross. He has paid for all of our transgressions, all that we've been remembering, all that awful stuff we've been talking about, all that we've thought of what we were, all the times we He's used God for ourselves. He's paid for all of that. He's done away with it. He's nailed it to the cross. He's taken it away from us. The law can now no longer make any demands for justice against us. It has all been paid. There is peace now between you and God if you are a believer. Do you realize that Satan can now never make a true accusation against you? Before our conversion, certainly he could come to God and say, this man has done such and such and he deserves to die. And it would be a true accusation. But now he has no true accusation to make. We are clothed in Christ himself. All is removed. All is paid for. You see, God has not merely overlooked your sins. He has not turned a blind eye to them. As we said, he is a just judge. He has paid for them all by the death of his only son. Justice has been served. Peace is a reality between the believer and God. God, the just judge, is unable to justify the ungodly. Consider then how great a warfare it was. Consider how great an enmity, how great a hostility there was between you and God that nothing less than the death of his son could pay the price. Not one thing less than Jesus himself could do the deed for us. We were his mortal enemies. And while we were in the process of waging war, he sent his son, the son of his love, to come as a sacrifice that there might be peace between us. When we weren't looking for peace, we didn't want peace, we had no interest in peace. And God in his love sends his son that we might have it. Now doesn't this move us to a greater love for him? to higher views of what sort of a being could do such a thing that while we hated him so, he loved us in this way. That while we would have killed him and drug him off of his throne, he came down that we might sit on thrones with him. This is the love of God for you. That though you followed Satan, Through and through in everything you did, he pursued you with Jesus Christ and said, come and be a follower of me. Now can you live one moment without Christ? Can you go on without Christ? Is He of little consequence in your life? That He has paid the price for you? That He has suffered so for you? Oh, could you receive such a wonderful gift from God and then move on with very little thought or very little service to Him? Paul says that having received such a wonderful gift, He said, I now pursue one thing, forgetting all that I had done in the ways of religion. I've put all those things aside as worthless. Count them as dumb. And all I want to do now is know Him that died for me. I want to love Him. I want to know Him more. I want to pursue Him. I want to strain all of my being that I might have Christ, that I might know Him more in the power of His resurrection. Is this your desire this morning? is your desire to know Him more, to love Him more, to pursue Him more, to serve Him more. That's what it is to be alive to God. That's what it is to have peace with God, to love Him above all else. How do you make use of the gift of Christ? Now, the peace that we have with God He says, for he himself is our peace, who has made both one. The peace that we have with God always bears at least these two primary fruits that we see in our text. First of all, we have free, full access to God the Father through Jesus Christ. Verse 18 tells us, for through him we both have access by one spirit to the Father. Now this is an inestimable blessing. There's nothing like it in all the world. No one's ever offered you a gift like this before. We have free access to the great and glorious God. But I don't think we're to understand this merely as access, so that I can go to him when I need him. I can go to him if I want to, or the door's always open kind of a policy. That is, that we can go to him and he hears us. Sure, we know that, we understand that. There's more included in this idea that we now have access by one spirit to the Father. It means that there's a great boldness to go into his presence. There's a freedom in his presence. He's not like the boss who says to us, you know, listen, if you run into trouble on the job or the project that I've given you, you know, call me or stop by the office. I'm here, I can help you. through the problem. It's much, much, much more than that. It's that he actually desires us to come into his presence. He actually desires us. Sometimes I tell my guys that work for me, I'll say, you know, if you need me, call me, but try not to need me. God's not like me, you see. He doesn't treat us that way. Oh, I'm here if you need me. No, he's longing in some sense that we would come into his presence. We have such freedom of access. His door is not merely open, but He's standing, beckoning us. Come. Come and talk to me. Come. Commune with me. You have access. You can come. Come tell me all your troubles. Come tell me all your successes. Come tell me how things are with you. Come. Come in to the throne room. Spend time with me. He desires us to come there. all the time, not just with our troubles, with our joys, with our successes, with all that we are. He longs for our presence with him. He doesn't begrudge us coming as if we took up his valuable time. We come to him with full assurance and full confidence that this God would have us into his presence. And you know, we come into his presence. We come into his presence spotted by sin, don't we? We feel the guilt, and so we draw back. But there is no unforgiving sin. Our guilt is removed in the Lord Jesus Christ. From his perspective, we come in as white as the driven snow, just like his only son, Jesus Christ. That guilt is only felt from our side. From his side, he's saying, come with all that you are. You're clothed in Christ. I see no unrighteousness in you. You have access into my presence. Satan makes no accusations there. My point is this. When God says we have full and free access to us and he invites us in, he's not sitting across the desk from us looking at us with a suspicious eye as if we might do something wrong, as if we might fumble the ball so that he can drop the hammer. He not only receives us, He rejoices in us. Now, I can't understand that. You can't understand that. But the Bible tells us that. It's a truth. Jesus Christ, God the Father rejoices in us coming into his presence. There's no suspicion there. We were once without hope, but now we have every hope in the world in the Lord Jesus Christ. He hears us and he loves us. Your creator and judge is now your father. And He delights to take you up in His arms and set you on His knee and bless you with all that He is. Now the second fruit that comes from this, from being at such peace with God, it inevitably creates peace among men. The very thing that separated the Jew and the Gentile, that is their law-keeping, is done away with in Jesus Christ. As Paul said, I count all that as done. It's done for in my life. The legal righteousness that caused the Pharisee to look down on the publican? Done in Christ. You see, he's humble. He must be humble just like every other sinner. The self-seeking that drove Jacob to cheat his brother? Crucified with Christ. Notice what the text teaches us. The same message of peace through Jesus is needed for the religious Jew as it is for the pagan Gentile. The access that we both have is through the same means. In fact, the access that we have is not, it's not me, I have access to God and you have access to God and the Gentiles have access to God and the Jews have access to God. We together, There's peace, when there's peace with God, there will inevitably flow peace among men so that you and I together, not at war, not at conflict, together have access to God. The two separate entities, the text tells us, are now one. Look at verse 14. For he himself is our peace. And what has he done in giving peace with God? He has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in his flesh the enmity. That hostility that existed is done away with in the death and sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. In fact, now we're no longer separate. We're fellow citizens, members of the same household and the same body, built on the same foundation, knitted together, he says. We're woven together. We're not individuals with God. We're being knit into a family, into a household, into the dwelling place of God. You see, redemption in Jesus Christ is not only individual. There's a corporate aspect to it. It's not merely something put off for the future so that at judgment day we'll be acquitted, but there's peace now, there's hope now, today, and it must exist between us. Now let me make a couple quick applications as I conclude. Be careful of living far off from the privileges that you have in Jesus Christ. I said earlier, it's possible for Christians who have peace with God to live as if we were at war with God. It's possible for those of us who have been cleansed from all our sin and guilt to relate to God as if we still carry that guilt. It's possible to live as if we were without God when, in fact, we are never without God. But we can function that way. We're complex creatures. Part of that functioning without God is that we begin to live separated from the privileges of God. We don't take advantage of the access that we have. We sin and we should run to God because we have free, full access. There's full forgiveness in Jesus Christ. But what do we do? We run from God. We hide our sins, we cover them, we are ashamed of them, and so we don't go into God's presence. And the same is true in our interpersonal relationships, isn't it? You see, one of the privileges of God's love and peace is that we're no longer strangers and aliens and separated from the household of God as we once were. Remember, he says, you once were aliens, separated, but not now. Now do you take full advantage of your privileges of God? What is your relationship to the church of Jesus Christ? What is your relationship with your brothers and sisters in the church? Has the gospel worked itself out in this way in your life so that you are in reality knit together with your brothers and sisters so that there's no conflict between you, no separation between you and the church? Do you live at a distance, far off from the people of God? Maybe it's helpful to put it this way. Is the church an optional add-on to your life? It wasn't an optional add-on to the redemption that Paul tells us about. It's part and parcel of the redemption and peace that we have is that we are made fellow citizens together. Let me ask you, are you a member of a local church? What hinders you from really uniting, knitting yourself together, being intimately involved with one another. What hinders you from clearing up any conflict and dislike that may have existed between you and another brother or another sister? Certainly, it is not the Lord Jesus Christ. He has died that we might be a part of His family. So be careful. Don't despise the grace of God. When you refrain from living as a functional, vital, living part of the church of Jesus Christ, when you refuse to be reconciled with those you have conflict with, you in some measure are despising the very grace of Christ. He purchased it for you. When you only sporadically participate in the public worship of God, you're despising the grace of God. He has purchased it for you. Today, if you listen to the Christian radio programs, they make an awful lot of our being citizens of the U.S., and Christians need to show up at the polls, and we should cast our votes, and we need to be involved because we are, after all, citizens of the United States, and that's good. I'm not dismissing that in any way, but I want to ask the question, do we make as much of our citizenship in the household of faith? God has purchased for us peace with his people. Do we take advantage of it? The gospel, when rightly understood, draws us into vital union with, you think I'm gonna say Christ, and that's true. It draws us into vital union with the church, his body. Isn't that what he tells us at the end? You're no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God being built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets. Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple. Grows, there's that vital union with the building, the body of Christ. we're brought into vital union with the Church of Jesus Christ. Then lastly, I want you to consider, I want you to think deeply about the cost of your citizenship in the household of faith. Remember, Jesus died not just to take you to heaven, but to enfold you into his body, to bring you into these relationships so that we are the family of God, that that body, through you, might grow, and you, through it, might grow, being fitted, knitted together. You see, from this point on in Ephesians, the Apostle Paul turns to this very truth, and he fleshes out for the next three chapters, life in the body of Christ. that through the death of Christ we are now, he says in 3.6, fellow heirs of the same body and partakers of his promise through the gospel. Therefore, he says in 4.1, worthy, live worthy of that calling, endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit and the bond of peace. Why? He says because there is only one body. You see, in Paul's understanding, the death of Christ is the very thing that forms the church into the living temple of God. Do you live at peace? Do you live as a vital member of that body? Consider what it costs for you to be enfolded into that body. Don't despise that. Be careful and join yourself to her. Unite with her. Serve her. Love her. Love your fellow brothers and sisters in the church of Jesus Christ. It is in the church, after all, that the grace of God flows to us. It's in that connection that we grow and thrive and mature. So in closing, consider what you were. Consider your life pre-conversion. Consider the price paid that you might have peace with God. and be stirred to a deeper, greater love and worship of God in Christ. And let that love, let that flow out in your love for and participation in the life of the church. And by a fierce, I choose that word carefully, a fierce commitment and participation in her well-being and live at peace with others. You have peace with God. How could we be at war with anyone else? God has paid the price for your sins. Amen. Let's pray. Our fathers, we think of what we were. It's appalling. And it's painful to rehearse again what we were. But what a joy it is to consider that you are so full of love and grace and mercy and compassion that your son himself would be our peace. And so we come waving the white flag of surrender, which is Jesus Christ himself. We would cease to be at war with you and we would cease to be at war with our fellow men. And we ask God that you would indeed cause us to be a vital part of the life of the church and fulfillment of all that Christ has done for us. In his name we pray, amen.