Living Hope

Pastor Philip Miller: To be called the uncircumcision, that's not a compliment. That's a diss, it's a slur. It means you guys are estranged from the covenant. It means you guys are excluded from the people of God. It means you guys are unsavable.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy and Pastor Miller, we just heard you say that the Gentiles were on the outs, that persona non grata. So our question then is how does this ethnic division reveal the need for reconciliation with God?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, so Paul is in Ephesians. He's talking about these two groups of people who were once totally estranged. You have the Jews who were members of the covenant, they know God, they have sacrifices, they're in the covenant with God. And then you have the Gentiles, the pagans, who are on the outs. They're outside. They worship pagan gods. They live however they want.

And now, in Jesus Christ, these two groups are being reconciled, brought together. So Paul's talking about here in Ephesians. He's talking about these groups used to be at animosity with one another. They didn't like each other. They didn't want to hang out together. And this is a problem that God is resolving through Jesus Christ.

He's going to bring these two very different groups together. So he's reversing all the animosity, all the hostility, all the disintegration that typified this relationship. He's going to now bring it all together. But again, like we saw with dead and alive, we've got to start with the bad news. We've got to talk about the separation between the Jews and Gentiles before we can talk about the reconciliation that's to come.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Well let's do that now. We go to the pulpit of the Moody Church.

Pastor Philip Miller: Earlier this year I had the chance to ski at Whistler Blackcomb mountain in British Columbia for the very first time. I'll never forget when we went up the chairlift and they dropped us at the very top of the mountain. It was just stunning. Mountain range after mountain range, snowcapped peaks going out as far as the eye could see. Peak after peak, ridge after ridge, vista after vista, grandeur after grandeur. And it was just enchanting.

We're in Ephesians and Ephesians feels a little bit like that to me. It's like with each paragraph, each successive section of the book, we've got grace upon grace and wonder upon wonder and grandeur upon grandeur. It just keeps getting better and it's enchanting. Last week we saw in Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 10 how God has made us alive in Jesus Christ by his grace.

When we trust and give our lives to Jesus as our savior and Lord, when we trust in his life, death, resurrection and ascension on our behalf, in his mercy, love and grace, God makes us alive with Christ forever. God has saved us and made us right with him forevermore. Amen. That's glorious.

And now today we come to the back half of Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11 down to 22, and we're going to see the glorious truth of what that salvation that God has wrought in our lives means for our relationships with one another. Because salvation works not just vertically in our relationship with God, salvation has a horizontal dimension as well.

In salvation we're made right with God, reconciled to him, and we are reconciled with one another in the body of Christ. There's a vertical and horizontal dimension. It's shaped, salvation is shaped like a cross. You see, it's shaped like a cross. Salvation makes us right with God and with one another. Salvation is not just about I and me, it's about us and we.

First John 4 verses 19 to 21 says this, "We love because he first loved us. If anyone says I love God and hates his brother, he's a liar. For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this is the commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother." You see the vertical horizontal cruciform cross-shaped salvation that is ours. Love God and love people.

The first half of Ephesians chapter 2 is all about our relationship with God. The second half is all about our relationship with one another. So salvation works both ways. Grab your Bibles. We're going to be in Ephesians chapter 2 verses 11 to 22. If you'll listen as I read, this is the word of the Lord.

"Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision which is made in the flesh by hands, remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one spirit to the Father. So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit."

Thanks be to the Lord for the reading of his word. I want to sort our thoughts into three buckets this morning. We're going to see alienation, reconciliation, and incorporation. Lots of shun words, alienation, reconciliation, incorporation. Let's use that as our outline. Would you bow your heads? Let's pray and let's ask the Lord to be our teacher.

Father, I pray that you would break down some walls today. Walls that we erect in our hearts and in our minds and in our culture, in our city, in our neighborhoods. Father, would you show us who this family is that you've made us a part of by grace? You are doing something amazing in your church. Help us to live into it and discover the unity we have that defies all earthly bounds. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.

All right, first, alienation. Alienation. Chapter 2 verse 11, "Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands." Pause for a second. We need to orient ourselves. What on earth is going on here? You will recall that the Ephesian church was made up of two primary groups.

You had Jewish believers in Messiah Jesus who were following Jesus. So they had moved from the old covenant, a Jewish faith, to the fulfillment that was found in Messiah, the Jewish Messiah Jesus. They were following him. And then you had another group which was the Gentiles. These people used to worship the Greco-Roman gods in the temple.

They live very pagan sort of lives. They were not followers of the Old Testament. So now you have these Gentiles who are very worldly. You have Jewish people, very religious. And now they both are following Jesus and they've been merged together into this new thing called the church, the church in Ephesus. So the Jews, their lives before Christ were very different.

The Jews were following the Old Testament. They were circumcised if they were male. They were part of the covenant of Abraham going all the way back in the Old Testament. They observed the Jewish feasts. They followed the Ten Commandments. They ate kosher diets. They tried to be ritually clean all the time. They took holiness very seriously. That's the Jewish subset.

And then you have the Gentiles. The Gentiles are living in the Greco-Roman world and they worship the deities and they follow the immoral customs of the land. They eat meat sacrificed to idols. They don't care so much about Hebrew rituals of cleanliness. They just want to have fun in life. They take pleasure very seriously. So they sinned a lot.

It's hard for us to understand just how much animosity and hatred there was between these two groups. The Jews hated the Gentiles because not only were they unclean uncircumcised dogs, that's what they would have called them, the Gentiles had been their oppressors for hundreds of years. And the Gentiles hated the Jews because they stubbornly refused to be assimilated to Greco-Roman culture.

And they were always going on about how they were God's chosen people, which meant the Gentiles were second-class citizens. And so after centuries of wars and sedition and simmering hatred, the prejudice between these two groups between the Jews and the Gentiles was pretty much entrenched, intractable. Paul says, "I want you to remember, Gentiles, I want you to remember how it once was before Christ."

You Gentiles were called the uncircumcision by the ones who were called the circumcision, the Jews. To be circumcised was to be a part of the Abrahamic covenant. It was to be a part of God's chosen people. It was to have access to the saving work of God in his covenant promises. And to be called the uncircumcision, that's not a compliment. That's a diss, it's a slur.

It means you guys are estranged from the covenant. It means you guys are excluded from the people of God. It means you guys are unsavable before God. At one time you Gentiles were on the outs and we Jews made sure you knew it. That's what Paul's saying. In fact, he points out that the Gentiles had five huge deficiencies spiritually speaking.

Verse 12, "Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world." Let's look at those each in turn. Number one, they were separated from Christ. The word for Christ here is the Greek word for the translation of the concept of Messiah.

So he's saying you didn't have a Messiah. You were Gentiles. The Jewish Messiah was not something you were looking forward to. He meant nothing to you. Secondly, you were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. God had chosen Israel as his own people, his prized possession, and he had given them the promised land, a place to live. And the Gentiles had no rights to any of that.

Number three, they were strangers to the covenants of promise. So God had worked these covenant blessings with his people, the promises made to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Moses and David, the covenants that God had entered into in his mercy and grace with his people. The Gentiles weren't party to any of that.

The only way the Gentiles could gain access to the covenant blessings of God was if they proselytized. In other words, they had to stop being Gentiles and become Jews if they wanted to have access to the covenant blessings of God. So if you were male, that meant you had to be circumcised as an adult, you had to start obeying the law, you had to observe all the feasts, you had to do all the sacrifices.

So you were functionally no longer a Gentile, you became Jewish to get access to God. That's how it worked in the Old Testament. Otherwise, Gentiles were covenant outsiders. The fourth thing he says here is that you had no hope. No hope. Because without the covenant promises of God, what hope do you have? Life is just what you make of it and then you're done.

No hope without God. And then fifth, without God in the world. Without God in the world. These were idol worshippers. They didn't worship the one true God. They didn't know him. And so they lived like orphans in the wide world. So this is a pretty awful fate. The point is that the Gentiles were strangers to God's covenant blessings and were despised by God's covenant people.

The Gentiles were strangers to God's covenant blessings and were despised by God's covenant people. So here's how it used to be. You had two groups, Jews and Gentiles. Jews were in, Gentiles out. And Paul says, at one time those fleshly distinctions, you notice he modifies everything is by the flesh, Gentiles in the flesh, Jews in the flesh, those fleshly distinctions mattered but no more. No more, because of what Jesus has done.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy. Pastor, your sermon begs us to consider, to remember who we were. That without Christ we didn't have any hope. And you're implying that should tenderize our hearts for the lost. Do I have that right?

Pastor Philip Miller: Yeah, I think it's so important. Paul wants us, there's a whole bunch of the Gentiles that are reading this letter, and he wants them to see you once were far away, you once were under the curse of death, you once were part of the world. You once were strangers and aliens. You didn't belong to the covenant promises of God. You were once without God, without hope in the world.

It was a sad reality. And even though you've now been made alive in Christ and you have all these spiritual blessings and you've been brought in and you're near and you're included, don't forget where you came from. And I think that's a really good lesson for us as well. Because what can happen is sometimes when we're walking with Christ for a long time we can start to think, well, what's wrong with those people out there that are messing everything up?

They are just following the desires of their hearts and are making a mess in the world. Why can't they be better? Why can't they be good? Why can't they live in a righteous way?

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Because they're dead.

Pastor Philip Miller: Well that's true, right? And we were once like that. And I think what happens, there's a danger in our souls, which is we can get a little critical and judgmental and a little self-righteous where we start to say, well why can't the world be like me or be like Christ or whatever.

The reality is we need to recognize we have more in common with those dead, lost, misdirected, falling into sin and living in misery. We have a lot in common with that. We need to remember where we came from. Remember that we were without God, we were without hope, and then God in his grace reached all the way down, bridged the gap and reconciled us to himself.

That's an incredible mercy. And that's the move that we're called to make. We're called to go and reach out to people who are far from Jesus but near to us where we live, work, learn and play. People that may never show up at church because they don't feel wanted, they don't feel like they might be judged.

Our job is to go to them, to reach out to them and say, "You're not a lost cause. I once was like you. I was lost. I was miserable. I didn't know the way. I had no God in my life. I know what this is like. I lived there. And I can tell you, I found hope in Jesus Christ and that's changed my life."

So I'm just one beggar telling another beggar how to find bread, right? I'm not coming in arrogant. I'm not coming in as if I've got it all figured out because I know I'm a trophy of grace. I only am saved because Jesus reached down to me when I was miserable.

And so now I come humbly to another broken sinner and I say, "Let me show you how to come home through Jesus Christ." So it's a posture shift when we remember who we were. It helps us come with humility as we reach out to those who are lost around us. I think that posture matters.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Yes, it definitely does. But our listeners are saying, "Okay, but how?" I need some practical steps here. How do I do this? You said my neighbors, my friends, the people who aren't going to come to church. How do I get started with this?

Pastor Philip Miller: Well, the first thing I think we've got to do is build relationships. We've got to know people. We've got to know their stories. We've got to know where they're coming from. I think the first move is always relational. We try to build a bridge into people's lives and we know how to do that. It's creating enough margin to have a conversation. It's remembering people's names.

It's being curious about their lives, asking them their story. "Where are you from? How'd you grow up?" You can ask all kinds of questions and then you ask the religious question. "Do you have any faith? Do you have a way of thinking? Do you think you have a soul?" I love that question. "Do you think you have a soul?"

Because that immediately gets you to spiritual things. And one of the things I will do with people is I'll ask them, "What's your favorite movie?" And they tell me, and then I say, "Is there a character in that movie you really identify with?" And usually there is one. And there's a reason they love the story is because something in that story arc relates to their history, their story, their past, their wounds, something their aspirations.

There's something in that story that is deeply moving to them. I want to know what that is. Because I believe that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of our hearts' longings. He's the solution we're really looking for. And so if I can get some insights into people's souls, where they're stuck, the pains they've experienced, the hopes and dreams that they have, it's not that hard to then start to connect those dots with questions.

"Well, have you ever experienced fulfillment? Have you ever sensed love beyond your wildest dreams?" And then it's not a hard bridge then to connect to the gospel. And once you know someone's story, then you've sort of created the opportunity to share your own story, right? If you've had a chance to get to know someone, they'll want to know you, and that creates an opportunity to share your story and to show that Jesus is the hero of your story.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Wow, that's really practical. Be curious about people. Ask questions. So our listeners still would be saying, the Bible's a big book and I don't have it memorized from Genesis to Revelation. Do you have any practical tips that you could offer in terms of how, so I've gotten to that point. I've been curious, they've answered questions, and now they want to know, "Well, tell me about your faith." How can I do that in a concise way?

Pastor Philip Miller: So my favorite one-verse evangelism is Romans 6:23. "The wages of sin is death." That's where we are. "But the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." So the wages of sin is death. That's the bad news. We're all sinners. But the free gift of God is eternal life. And if you want that eternal life, how do you get it? In Jesus Christ our Lord.

And then I always like to say, coming to Jesus is not easy but it's simple. It's as simple as ABC. A: admit we're sinners. B: believe that Jesus has done everything to make us right with God. And C: commit our lives to him. Be my savior, be my Lord, be my king. And as we surrender to him, he comes and he gives us that eternal life.

Pastor Larry McCarthy: Wow, thank you, Pastor Philip. Next time we get to explore how the gospel reconciles all people in Christ and to give us a deeper understanding of really what does it mean to be alive in Christ. We all want to experience spiritual fullness, but let's be honest. In the day-to-day walk of faith, many of us wrestle with the question: "Am I really saved?"

That doubt, that uncertainty can be paralyzing, keeping us from living with freedom and joy in Christ. If you're looking to move past nagging doubt to a biblical basis of assurance, there's no better guide than Dr. George Sweeting's book, *How to Begin the Christian Life*. This resource covers essentials like the Holy Spirit's role, Bible study, and yes, how to be sure of your salvation.

Building your faith on the solid foundation of truth rather than shifting doubts or opinions. For a limited time, we're offering *How to Begin the Christian Life* for a donation of any amount. To request your copy, simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us at 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001.

You can also write us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle, Chicago, 60614. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.