Encounter the Truth

Jonathan Griffiths: How has God made us rich? How has he blessed us? What has he given us? Well, Paul is going to tell us and he's going to show us. He's going to demonstrate to us that God has lavished spiritual riches upon us in the heavenly realms in three key respects.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. Jonathan, as we begin a new series today taking a look at the unsearchable riches of Christ, you're drilling down on three key respects today. What are those three key things we're going to be looking at?

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, Paul wants to convince us and show us that those who belong to Jesus have been made immensely rich in spiritual terms and in these three ways: through adoption, through redemption, and through revelation, which we're going to cover in the next program.

But he wants to show us that in Christ, God has been gracious enough to adopt people who were his enemies and make them part of his family as dearly loved children. It's just an amazing thought. I mean, adoption is a beautiful thing in our own social context to see a child who needs a family brought into a loving family and given a home, and to think that God's done that for us in his kindness.

And then in redemption, knowing the wrong that we've done and the debt that we have before God, to think that he's given his son to pay the price of our wrongdoing, to cleanse us from our guilt, to make us his own. In that, there is unsearchable spiritual riches for the people of God.

Steve Hiller: What a thing for us to be taking a look at today. If you can, grab your Bible and join us in Ephesians chapter one as we begin the message, God's Great Generosity in His Great Plan. Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: I don't know if you view yourself as a rich person or if, by contrast, today you actually feel a little bit hard up. Most of us actually, whatever our situation, end up feeling much of the time like we could do with just a little bit more. I wonder if you know that feeling.

Of course, it all depends on perspective. Just recently we spent some time in the Muskoka region just north of Toronto. I was speaking at a Bible conference there. If you know the area, you'll know it's the kind of crown jewel in Ontario's cottage country. When I'm up in that area from time to time, and I hadn't been there for some time, I always like keeping an eye out for the very fabulous cottages when we're going round the lakes, and I like glancing through the real estate adverts as well.

This was my very favorite write-up for a cottage currently for sale this summer: 18,000 square foot lake house with 14 bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, soaring great room with 35-foot ceilings, media room made with reclaimed timbers from a 19th-century shipwreck, saloon, movie theater, fitness center, sauna and massage studio, 40 acres of land and 550 feet of prime shoreline, all coming in at just a shave under $15 million. I can get you the name of the listing agent if you're interested.

Now, the striking thing about Muskoka is that pretty much anyone can go there and feel relatively hard done by. Pretty much whoever you are, whatever means you have at your disposal, you can easily find someone on one of those lakes who's better off than you are, who has a nicer cottage, who has a faster boat. Whatever our life situation today, we all know that Muskoka feeling, don't we? The feeling of having less, of being the poor neighbor.

We all know what it is to feel a little bit sorry for ourselves, to be convinced that one way or another, we are missing out on good things. Of course, that feeling is not only confined to material possessions. Some here today will have a profound sense of missing out in other respects, perhaps relationally. You'd love to be married, but that's never quite worked out for you as you had hoped.

Perhaps you feel you're missing out in terms of career. The opportunities for advancement that have come to others have never come to you. Perhaps in terms of health and well-being, you've never had the vitality that others around you have had, or illness has impacted your life and it's limited you in ways that others haven't had to cope with. We could go on and we could go on.

But we all know that feeling. We all resonate with it on some level. And if we've come here this morning feeling in any way hard done by, if we view ourselves as missing out in some way, if we feel poor in any respect this morning, if that's you and that's me, the words of the passage before us will be very good medicine for the soul.

They'll be good medicine for us because they teach us that if we are Christian people, if we are followers of Christ, children of God, we are the most privileged people in all the world. If we are in Christ this morning, we are rich beyond measure.

Now, Paul's wider purpose in Ephesians is to give us a proper perspective on our situation and on our identity in Christ. He wants to help us see things from a heavenly and from an eternal perspective. That's his aim. And the core reality he wants to drive home for us in these verses this morning is simply this: we are a very rich people. That's what he wants to teach us. You and I, if we are in Christ, are fabulously blessed, immensely rich.

Just notice what Paul says to us in verse 3: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ." Verse 7: "He has redeemed us in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us." In Christ, God has lavished us with riches. That's the truth. That's the reality.

But why is that so? How is that so? What does Paul mean? How has God made us rich? How has he blessed us? What has he given us? Well, Paul is going to tell us and he's going to show us. In these few verses, he's going to demonstrate to us that God has lavished spiritual riches upon us in the heavenly realms in three key respects.

He has lavished his riches upon us in adoption, in redemption, and in revelation. Those are the three ways in which God has made us rich in Christ, and we're going to look at each one of them in turn this morning. God has made us rich, first of all, through adoption. Verse 3 again: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who's blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will."

It's hard to imagine a more generous act than the act of adoption. Parents take a child with no family able to care for them, no finances at their disposal, and a very uncertain future stretching before them. And those parents freely give that child a family, an inheritance, and a future.

The child does nothing to solicit or to merit that adoption. It is simply something that the parents do for the child. Presumably, the parents are going to enjoy relationship with the child and take delight in that over time, but at its foundation, at its core, the act of adoption is very much a one-way thing. It is all give. It is all generosity. And it's a beautiful thing.

At the outset of this great letter, Paul wants the Ephesians to know, and he wants us here today to know, that all we have and all we enjoy in Christ has come to us through God's initiative, through God's kindness, through an action that God has taken and an intention that he has conceived and he has fulfilled.

Now, it's worth acknowledging that when we get into this kind of territory in Scripture, when we start talking about God's sovereign plans in salvation and God's gracious initiative, we enter territory that many find difficult to process and a little hard to understand. These are very rich and very profound truths in these verses this morning, but they do take a little bit of processing. I think we can all agree on that.

So like always, when we encounter some harder themes in the Bible, we're going to try our best this morning to allow Scripture to speak on its own terms, and we're going to try and grapple with its plain and its obvious meaning as we receive it. Now, that's always our aim. That's our commitment together as a church, and it's especially important when we enter territory where we're going to feel a little bit stretched.

So let's follow the text closely here. Verse 4: God chose us, says Paul, in Christ before the foundation of the world. Right away, that idea sounds strange and sounds unnatural to us. It sounds strange and unnatural because from our perspective, it feels very much as though we chose God. That's especially true if you come to Christ later on in life, or indeed if you're still in the process of deciding whether you'll follow Christ, and I hope there are a number here in that place this morning. You're deciding whether you will ultimately choose him.

After all, there are plenty of options out there on the religious and the philosophical marketplace today. And if you are a thinking person, if you're a reflective person, you'll certainly evaluate different truth claims and come to your own conclusion. And that's right; that's important. And many of us here in this room will remember going through a thought process and coming to a determination: yes, I think I will follow Jesus. Yes, I'm going to set aside other gods in my life, other idols, and I am going to bow the knee to Jesus.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths and a message called God's Great Generosity and His Great Plan. Now, we're going to pause here, but we'll get back to the message in just a moment, so I hope you'll stay with us.

Our message has been one of the most listened to of the past year. We went back and we looked at what have been the most listened to broadcasts of the past 12 months, and we put those together in a series called Listener Favorites. That's what's currently airing right now on the radio. In addition to that, we've also put together a study guide to help you go a little bit deeper. The study guide is free and you can access that at our website. Just come to encounterthetruth.org.

And whether you've connected with us on the radio, online, or through our app, we're glad that you're listening. It's only made possible through your generosity. And as you give a financial gift of any amount this month, we want to say thank you by sending you a book that Jonathan has chosen called The Final Lap. It's all about navigating through the transitions of later life. Find out more or give online at encounterthetruth.org or call us at 1-833-99-TRUTH. We'll have more information about this a little bit later in the broadcast, so stay with us. Right now, back to the message. Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: Paul says whatever processes we go through to come to faith in Christ, there is at the same time a larger reality to recognize and acknowledge. There's a bigger story going on behind this. Before ever you or I were born or conceived, before ever our parents were born or conceived, before this very world was created, before we were in a position to take any initiative of any kind, here is what God did: God chose us in Christ to be holy and blameless in his sight. He chose us to be his holy, his redeemed people. He chose us for salvation.

In love, says Paul, with the boundless love that overflows from God's loving heart, God, middle of verse 4, predestined us to be adopted as his sons and daughters through Jesus Christ. Out of love, God made a decision before the foundation of the world, in eternity past, to save each one who would become his child.

That is a very wonderful and a very awe-inspiring truth. But we need to be honest: it can be a little hard to understand, a little hard to internalize, sometimes a little hard to accept. That was certainly the case for me personally. I remember our pastor preaching on this truth when I was a teenager. I don't recall what New Testament passage he was speaking on; it may have been this very passage, actually. But it was on this idea of election, of predestination. As I listened to his sermon, I remember thinking that this poor guy had kind of lost his way here. He was getting things a little bit out of kilter.

How could this possibly be so? What about freedom of choice and so on, I was thinking to myself. So I remember going up to him at the end of the service and giving him the benefit of my theological reflections on the matter, just to help him find his way again. I was sure it would be a great deal of help to him if I was able to redirect him to a more balanced view. Well, I was sure I was insufferable as a teenager anyway. He was very gracious about it.

But he didn't give me the satisfaction of changing his position. And it would be a few years more until I came round to seeing that what he was saying was actually what Scripture was saying on this particular theme. And of course, when we take a passage like this passage at face value, we need to accept that God takes the initiative in our salvation and not us. We need to admit that as the sovereign God and the Lord of history, he is in the driver's seat.

One of the questions I like to ask of any Bible passage when I come to study it, and that I need to ask when I come to preach it, is simply this: what is the author's purpose in telling us what he is telling us? If there is a big truth at the heart of a passage, why is it that Paul or whoever wants me, wants all of us, to know this truth? That's an important question to answer.

Well, if we look even fairly briefly at this passage, we get a pretty good steer on the answer to that question. It emerges from the text very quickly. Just notice what Paul is wanting to achieve here, how he wants us to respond to the things that he's telling us. Verse 3: "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Verse 6: he did all these wonderful things "to the praise of his glorious grace." Looking on a little bit, he's predestined us and so on. Verse 12: "In order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory." His great plan, verse 14, is all "to the praise of his glory."

What's Paul's interest here? What is his concern? It's obvious, isn't it? His purpose is that God should be praised. His purpose is that God should be magnified. His purpose is that God should be glorified. He wants us to see and he wants us to understand that God has done something for us that we could never do for ourselves. He's adopted us. He's chosen us. He's set his love upon us in immense grace and overwhelming kindness. He's adopted us, he's chosen us, and we're to respond to that truth simply with praise and with adoration. We're to respond to these things simply by saying, "To God be the glory, great things he has done."

So here is a passage where Paul is driving home the reality of God's initiative, God's choice, God's grace in adopting us all for God's glory. That's the plain message of the text, and we have to do some real acrobatics of interpretation to get round that in any way. But at the same time, how do we place this passage within our wider biblical understanding?

How do we deal with other passages of Scripture that highlight our need to respond, the responsibility of response to the gospel, that highlight human culpability for failing to respond to the gospel? I think we can all see and recognize the tensions here. I think we can all see that it's not easy to tie everything together in a neat and a simple way.

We went out for brunch the other day and the restaurant gave us some coloring sheets for the kids to do while we waited for the food. And as is standard on these things, they had some connect-the-dots pictures, you know those? You start at number one and then you find number two, and then when you finally get there, it's an elephant with a basketball or something. Anyway, you try and complete the picture before the breakfast arrives.

Now, if you just hold that image in your mind for a second, I want to suggest that it is not always helpful for us to play connect-the-dots when it comes to big Bible doctrines, Bible truths, and particularly when it comes to truths like the ones we're speaking of today. If I take a doctrine, a truth like the doctrine of the sovereignty of God in adoption, and then try to draw a straight line to the Bible's insistence that human beings have a responsibility to respond to the gospel, well, I find it difficult to draw a straight line there. And I may well find that I can't connect the dots very well and make a coherent picture.

And the danger is that I might end up saying that one of the dots doesn't fit within the picture. It needs actually to be left out. One of the dots, dot number seven, I need to exclude that one if my picture is going to be tidy. I might say, well, I'll drop the dot that speaks of the sovereignty of God and make a nice coherent picture all focused on human choice and human responsibility. Or I might drop out the responsibility dots and make a nice tidy picture all focused on the sovereignty of God.

But we need to allow for the fact, don't we, that these truths are big truths? They stretch our thinking beyond what we can fully comprehend. The Bible will make affirmations, all kinds of affirmations, that we can't always tidily reconcile and knit together in our own limited rational capacities. And I'd like to suggest this morning that that is okay. That's actually okay.

In fact, I'd like to suggest that that is exactly what we might expect when it comes to big truths about the eternal God who is infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, and infinitely great. If we could put everything into a nice tidy box, well, we might well wonder if we had reduced the infinite God down to our very finite size.

And actually, we'll go in some very unhelpful directions if we try to play connect-the-dots here without following the contours of Scripture very carefully. We can draw all kinds of incorrect conclusions from this truth if we're not careful—the truth that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. For instance, if we're not listening carefully to Scripture but just connecting our own dots, we might end up concluding that evangelism is unimportant or a waste of time. After all, God is God; he's chosen his people from eternity past, so maybe we should just stand back and leave him to it.

If the outcome of missions or of personal evangelism is kind of already determined, why bother? Sounds logical, right? That dot connects in our thinking. Well, not so fast. The Bible never allows us to reach that kind of conclusion. Our thinking might lead us there, but the Scriptures don't lead us there.

The Bible calls us, doesn't it, to make Christ known? The Bible implores us to proclaim the gospel, to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within us. The Bible teaches us very clearly that God's appointed way for men and women, boys and girls to come to salvation is through the proclamation of the gospel.

In the book of Romans in chapter 10, Paul really drives this point home. Having dealt with the doctrine of election pretty thoroughly in some ways in chapter 9 of Romans, he goes on to insist that the proclamation of the gospel is God's appointed means of bringing salvation to the world. It's a famous passage as you may remember it, Romans 10 and verse 14: "How then can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?" God is sovereign, yes. But he involves his people, his church, in his plans for salvation.

Steve Hiller: We do have to pause right here, but we'll continue this message next time on Encounter the Truth. If you ever miss a broadcast, come and listen at encounterthetruth.org. What Encounter the Truth is able to be on this station because of your financial generosity. Being listener-supported, we do depend on hearing from you to keep Jonathan's teaching on this station. And as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a book called The Final Lap, written by John Wyatt. Jonathan, why do you think that this book is going to be useful or helpful?

Jonathan Griffiths: Well, John is really trying to encourage Christian people to think carefully about the final stages of life and the retirement years as well, and to be prepared for navigating that season of life as believers. You know, retirement and old age will come upon us eventually if the Lord gives us those years, and not many of us give a whole lot of thought to what it looks like to live well through those seasons of life and to trust the Lord through the ups and downs of those years and those decades.

And John's book is designed to help us think through those things well. And for some listeners, that will be while you are retired or you are living through old age and the Lord's given you the blessing of those years. And I think this book will be a real encouragement to think through what it looks like to be a faithful believer in that season of life. Then other listeners will be caring for perhaps elderly parents and seeking to encourage elderly parents or grandparents, and I think this book will be a resource and an encouragement to think Christianly about how to do that and how to be an encouragement. I think there's tremendous value here actually for all of us as believers to get hold of this book and to take in the lessons that John has for us from the word of God.

Steve Hiller: It is called The Final Lap: Navigating the Transitions of Later Life, written by John Wyatt. Our thank you gift to you as you financially support Encounter the Truth this month. You can call and give over the phone at 1-833-99-TRUTH or go online to encounterthetruth.org. Again, our phone number is 1-833-998-7884 or encounterthetruth.org.

You can also write to us at Encounter the Truth, PO Box 5513, Ottawa, Ontario, K2C 3M1. Or in the US, Encounter the Truth, 215 North Arlington Heights Road, Suite 102, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 60004. For Jonathan Griffiths and our producer, Mark Brodrecht, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us next time.