Our scripture reading tonight comes from Ephesians 1, verses 3-14. Ephesians 1, verses 3-14. 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 to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in 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. 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 a guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire a possession of it, to the praise of His glory. This is God's Word. Well, it is good to be with you on this Lord's Day. Before we jump into our text for this evening, some context might be beneficial since we're beginning a new book. Paul's letter to the Ephesians was likely written sometime in the early 60s while Paul is in prison in Rome, waiting for the trial that would eventually lead to his execution. Within the letter, Paul mentions his imprisonment in chapter 3, verse 1, chapter 4, verse 1, and in chapter 6, verse 20, where he refers to himself as an ambassador in chains. During the end of his life, Paul is writing to this church at Ephesus, a church that Acts 19 tells us he had labored in for nearly two years. And he writes to them that they might be reminded of the wonder of their salvation, the deep mystery of Christ's relationship to the church and the day-to-day requirements of what it looks like to be a believer. The book as a whole can roughly to be divided into two sections with chapters one through three providing a doctrinal foundation for the ethical and practical exhortations that come in chapters three to six. Our passage this evening begins that initial doctrinal section and is what will be one of the longest sentences in the New Testament. Paul in the Greek goes for all 11 verses without a period, and in doing so, weaves together praise to God and meditation on the history of salvation and theological teachings. Many of the themes that will later dominate the letter are introduced here, at least implicitly. And as such, we're reminded that things like Christian speech, marriage, child rearing, are all really part of a cosmic war between our God and the powers and principalities of this age. Such practical issues that are addressed in the latter part of the book can only be done so properly when seen in relationship with the first half. And that, as we will see this evening, should be of great comfort to us as believers. It is because of the difficulties, that is because of the difficulties that you struggle with day by day, that you feel sometimes are insurmountable. That sin that you just can't seem to cast off, that peer or coworker that you struggle to love well, the child that wanders from the faith. These profound difficulties of living as a Christian in a fallen world are met by even more profound truths about who God is and the salvation that he has given us. and the hope that we have as a result of that. It's with that in mind that we turn now to our passage. In reading this text, some of you may be sitting there thinking, I'm not sure what a lot of this means. And that might be understandable. Because of how long the passage is, it's carried on by prepositional phrases and weird grammar, and sometimes you're just not really sure how it all fits together. And so to help with that, this evening we're actually gonna work through our passage in three phases. And so we're going to work through the entire text in three different passes so that we can get an idea of the different emphases that Paul is bringing forward. So to give a roadmap for the evening, we'll be first looking at who the God is that Paul blesses. More specifically, we'll be looking at the way in which for Paul, all praise and understanding of our salvation, and in turn, of understanding of what it means to be a Christian is first grounded in the fact that our God is triune, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Secondly, we'll be looking at the wonder of our salvation that we have in Christ and meditate on the fact that we are really and truly united to Christ as our Savior. Finally, we'll see that the Spirit confirms and guarantees that salvation as he comes to dwell within us. giving us assurance of that salvation, and that it has its ultimate end in the praise of God's glory. We will see who our God is, we will see how we have been saved, and we will see the goal of that salvation. Let's first start with who our God is. Look down with me at verse three, where Paul writes, 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. Paul begins by offering blessing back to God, and in doing so, immediately takes us to the Trinity. We bless God as Father, but not only as Father, he is also the one who has blessed us in Christ, his Son and our Lord. And we bless him as the one who blessed us in the Spirit. In the very first passage, very first verse of this passage, Paul envisions all three persons of the Trinity. And this will be true throughout the entire passage, to the extent that the very logic of Paul's praise and the structure of this passage is Trinitarian. The father is seen to be especially at work in verses three to six, as he chooses us and predestines us for adoption. The son then comes to the forefront in verses seven to 12, redeeming us by his sacrificial blood and making known to us the will of the father as he brings the history of salvation to a climax. Finally, Paul turns his attention namely to the spirit in verses 12 to 14 as the one who communicates to us the benefits of salvation, sealing us for a future day and acting as a down payment of that final salvation. Paul reminds us that our salvation and our worship is Trinitarian from first to last. The Trinity is not something that is incidental or impractical to your daily lives, but rather, Who our God is and the implications of that are the very things that we need to be daily reminded of. As one writer puts it, the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief. The truth that shapes and beautifies all other. Before Paul can talk about the unity of the church, the mystery of the gospel, the profundity of Christian marriage and ethics, he first sets the stage with exactly who God is. And it is that God that makes it all possible. If we're honest though, this isn't necessarily how we always think of things. We ask, how does this apply to me today? We ask practical questions early on and we are driven to that end of the text. Rather than the identity of our God being the driving force of all the things that we think and do, it takes a backseat as if doctrine is something that's affirmed but that is incidental to our lives, something that only pastors or academics talk about and speak time or make sense of. Ligonier Ministries, in a survey on the state of theology in the church, found in a poll last year that 42% of confessing evangelicals believe that God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. That is to say that 42% of American evangelicals believe that it's okay to have fundamentally different views of who God is. We think that it's something that isn't practical for our daily lives and we dismiss it. This is a travesty and a chronic disease in our churches that rears its ugly head, both in faulty doctrine and also in faulty practice. Who our God is determines how we live before him. Now, we have said that for Paul and for all Christians, our salvation and praise is Trinitarian through and through. And we have seen that not only the first verse of this passage, but also its very structure is Trinitarian. As a reminder, we see the father highlighted in verses three to six, the son in verses seven to 12, and the spirit in verses 13 to 14. But if we're not careful, such a formulaic macro level reading of the text can lead us astray. And we might be tempted to begin to think that salvation in world history is a series of stages in which one person in the Trinity is a key actor, that the Father works, and then the Son, and then the Spirit. You might be tempted to think that the Father is active in creation and the Old Testament, and then he takes a break while the Son comes to work in the incarnation, and then he takes a break while the Spirit works in our lives today. This cannot be so, and we must say by no means. For, as Matthew Barrett reminds us, the three persons of the Trinity are undivided in their external works because they're undivided in their internal nature. That is, because our God is fundamentally one, one in essence and one in will, the work of our God is one as well. God therefore acts singularly in our salvation. When we speak of the three, we should think of the one. When we think of the one, we should remind ourselves of the threeness. Now, let's look at our passage to affirm this. First, let's look at verses four and five together, verses which, as we've said, are namely looking at the work of the Father. And yet they read, even as He, the Father, chose us in Him, the Son, before the foundation of the world. And the beginning of verse five reads, He predestined us for adoption through Jesus Christ. Or what about verses seven, eight, and nine, where Paul, in reflecting primarily on the Son, Jesus is the one in whom we have redemption and forgiveness, but it is according to the riches of the Father's grace, in verse seven. And the Father made known the mystery of his will to us in verse nine. Whatever the Son does, he does in perfect step with the will and plan of the Father. Finally, let's look at one more example as we see that this is indeed true of the Holy Spirit as well. We see that it is fronted in verses 13 and 14, that while the Spirit is the one who seals us and gives us a guarantee of our salvation, it all starts with Christ, for it is in him that this all is done. This truth, this reminder that our salvation is inextricably Trinitarian, is one that we can never move away from. It is often in vogue in today's day and age to speak of Jesus as the loving, caring one, the one that is our savior and who maybe protects us from the father in some way. And as we do so, we diminish the father. We see him as judgmental, as angry, as one that we don't want to relate with. We would rather relate with the son. However, this is in no way the case. For the Son is the perfect image of the Father, and he delights to do the Father's will by the anointing of the Spirit. That our salvation is triune and that our God is one means that we have perfect fellowship, not just with the Son, but with all three persons of the Trinity. Barrett again helps us here, writing that the daily cultivation of communion with Christ is impossible apart from the consolation of the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son is the Spirit who can bring us into communion with the love of the Father and the Son. The love which the Father shows to us through the grace of his Son is communicated by the Spirit of his Son. This is our first point in our founding observation. This is also a point that gives Christians great assurance, the fact that We, by the Spirit, have been united to Christ, have objective assurance. Westminster Confession of Faith will remind us that assurance is not necessarily of the essence of faith. There are times where we will struggle to be convicted and assured that we have salvation. There will be times where we doubt that the Lord loves us. There may be some of you here tonight that are struggling with that. And yet, before assurance is ever something that is a felt experience, before we ever feel that, it is first objective. We have objectively been united to the Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Father through the Son. God will in no way cast you off, for he has sealed you by himself. We see this even in the first verse of our passage where The Father blesses us in Christ with spiritual blessings in the heavenly places. These are blessings by the Spirit, which are enumerated later on in the passage. They are blessings of election, of predestination, of adoption. These are blessings that we experience today, day in and day out, as we partake in the ordinary means of grace, as we interact with other believers in Christian life. And yet, they are stored up for us in the heavenly places. These are not blessings that can be compromised by the rot of this world. They are set aside and will not be taken away from us. And so they are ours in Christ. We see this particularly in verses 13 and 14, where we see that one of the primary roles of the Spirit's ministry in us today is that he is the seal and the guarantee of an inheritance. By sealed, he protects us from sin, Satan, and the evil one. He will hold us fast. We cannot fall away when the spirit has sealed us. And as a guarantee of an inheritance, he allows us to participate in the benefits that will be ours fully one day. We partake now in some measure in that inheritance, which will be ours in the latter days. And so the fact that the operations of God, the fact that the Trinity in saving us is indivisible, is not only an object of worship and praise, but is also something of great assurance that we should hold on to dearly. Now, this is our first pass. This is our first run through of the passage. And with that in mind, let's move to our second point, our second layer, as we see that While each person of the Trinity operates inseparably, giving perfect unity to our salvation, Paul is still able to speak of our salvation as being something that is namely in Christ, namely through our union with Christ. But what do we mean by union with Christ? Union with Christ is an umbrella term that has been used to refer to a broad framework in which New Testament, and especially Paul, views our salvation. It is a category in which other doctrines like election, predestination, doctrine, doctrines that we find in our text, are connected and rightly understood. This truth is most often communicated in the New Testament by a mere preposition, in. Often it's found us in Christ. And it is one of those things that once you start to see it, you won't be able to stop. It's like if you were looking to buy a car and you find one that really catches your eye, that maybe you even end up buying, and then the next thing you know, you see it everywhere on the street. That's kind of what in Christ is in the New Testament. Once you see that, it shows up everywhere. And the same is true in Ephesians. In our passage alone, Just in Ephesians 1, 3 to 14, the phrase in Christ or in him or other parallels occur 11 times as Paul meditates on this aspect of our salvation. This is the second great insight that the undivided triune God has accomplished our salvation and has done so namely by uniting us to Christ. Now, before we continue any further, let's see this in our passage. First, let's look back again at verse three, where Paul is blessing God the Father, who blessed us in Christ Jesus. This continues in verse four, which reads partially, even as he who chose us in him before the foundation of the world. That is, even the Father's choosing of us is done only in the Son. Our election is in Christ, or as one commentator puts it, the choice was done through Christ for believers to be in Christ. But not only that, verse five tells us that he predestined us for adoption through Christ. And what about verse seven, where it treats, in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace. Not only is our election in Christ, but also our redemption and the forgiveness of our sins. The language of in Christ absolutely pervades our passage, and it is the very core of our salvation. For we see that God's solution to sin's entrance into the world, his sovereign and perfect plan from before all time was that he would unite humanity to his son, who being both God and man, would redeem mankind through his perfect life and sinless death. Jesus Christ is the only one who has merited salvation and the blessings that pertain to it. And we only receive these by receiving Christ himself. The chief gift of salvation then is a person, not a thing or a status. It is only through that person, our Lord Jesus Christ, that we attain to the other blessings. To this end, Calvin helpfully wrote, John Calvin helpfully wrote, that we must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us and we are separated from him, that all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value to us. This is a wonderful comfort though, for it means that the blessings of the Christian life are not granted in a cold, uninterested manner from far off. This is not deism, but rather they are granted through the oneness with Christ. And our justification, while indeed being legal and declarative in nature, is all the more rich when understood in light of our union with Christ. For the judge has not only declared us innocent, but has also made us so through the blood of his son by uniting us to him by the spirit. This is wondrous and full of comfort, but that is not all. There's more. One more facet of union with Christ that is in our passage is that union with Christ is not just about our salvation, not just about us as individuals, but it encompasses everything in all creation. It goes from mammals to mountains, grasshoppers to galaxies, ants to angels. For as verses 9 and 10 tell us, 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. This in many ways is the summation and climax of the passage. And it is here where we see why Paul is just so enthralled with God and the majesty of his plan. Verse 10 tells us that the realities that Paul has been meditating on, that we've been looking at this evening. The realities of election, of predestination, of sanctification are all precursors and are preparing us for an ultimate and final unity that the whole created order will enjoy. As one commentator writes, redemption in Christ's blood points to a future when all things are reconciled in Christ. That is the life that you experience now in Christ is of such a unique kind that it is in continuity with eternity and the redemption of all creation. Christian, as you grow in Christ's likeness, day by day, struggling to mortify sin, to labor in monotony with joy and grace, as you suffer in doubt, you are increasingly taking part of a life that will be yours for all eternity, perfected. where the results of the fall will be no more. There will be a day when all is perfectly united to Christ. This means that creation itself will be united to Christ. We see the yearnings for that around us as natural disasters occur, as we grieve the loss of life at this. Creation itself longs to be reunited with its creator, and you partaking in the benefits of Christ long for that as well. There will be a day when all is perfectly united to Christ, where the thorns and thistles of this world will hamper you no more, and where sin and death will have been defeated. With this wonderful vision, the hope for latter days, we come to our final layer, our final pass through the text. We have seen the perfect unity of the Trinity at work in our salvation. which we now experience namely through union with Christ. And now we will see that all of this, all the wonders of our God and our salvation are done, are put on display for us here by Paul, because Paul knows and reminds us that all of this is for the praise of his glory. Three times throughout the passage, Paul reminds us of this ordained end. First in verse six, the work of the father in blessing us and choosing us, adopting us is said to be to the praise of his glorious grace and the work of the son in redeeming us, in forgiving us and in revealing the father's will to us. All of this in verse 12 is said to be to the praise of his glory. And finally, the work of the spirit as he seals us and offers assurance as a guarantee of our salvation. This too in verse 14 is said to be to the praise of his glory. Now we might ask, how do we praise his glory? Well, first of all, we respond to like Paul. Paul begins the passage by blessing the God who first blessed him. This is done as we meditate on the truths of our life, the truths of our salvation, the truths of our God, but it is also given an end when, in verse four, we're said that we should be holy and blameless before him in love. We bless God, we live lives to the praise of his glory and his glorious grace, when by the Spirit's empowering, we live out the salvation that is before us. This does not rest on you. You cannot do this alone, but you have been brought into a kingdom and into a family in which God, by his spirit, empowers you to the praise of his glorious grace. This glory, this glorious grace, this is what we've been speaking of, the mystery and majesty of our God and the wisdom and lavish nature of his plan, the depth and breadth of our salvation, the riches of the life that we now have in Christ. It's to this that drew Paul to praise, to, like a young, rambling child, burst into a run-on sentence that nears 200 words. It is this that we meditate on, and it is this that now compels us as we bless God who first blessed us. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do indeed bless you. We bless you for the blessings. that you have given us in Christ, our salvation, and the assurance that it gives us. We pray tonight that as we go from this place, having fellowshiped with you, having been strengthened by this table, that we might be assured that by your spirit, we might have confidence of this salvation, and that we might this week live in light of who you are as our God, as an outworking of our union with Christ, to the praise of your glory. Amen.