St Michael's Fulwell
Being God's people: united
The following talk is from St Michael's Fowell, a Gospel-centered community for Fowell, Tennington and beyond. Our passion is to see every life following Jesus. For more information visit our website, St Michael's Fowell.co.uk We're going to turn to God's worth now. So do pick up a Bible. We're in Ephesians chapter 1, page 1173, Ephesians chapter 1. Simon's going to come and preach in a few moments time. Imogen first is going to come and read from Ephesians 1. So that's page 1173, next to 1172. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. To God's holy people and Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus. Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 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. 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 for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ. In accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of his glorious grace which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding he may known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfilment to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth unto Christ. Thank you very much for reading and thanks everyone for coming to my birthday. It's very lovely. It's nice to met for us on a Sunday. So many people come. It's great. Under your chairs there are in the middle rows some handouts. I saw some of them being moved around by children. So do pass them along rows and if anyone is struggling to get hold of one try and wave and if you've got a pile next to you look out for people waving so they might be able to hand over to you. That will be great. We are not here for my birthday. We are here to deeply listen to the Lord in these verses and to heartedly respond to all that he said. So let's ask for his help. Let's bow heads and pray. God our Father thank you for the riches that you have already lavished on us in so many ways. Thank you Lord for pouring out your blessings on us through the Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you for the way these verses have been pointing to that extraordinary love and lavish blessing you have shown us. Help us Lord as we reach the end of this opening section of Ephesians, pray Lord that you would grant us a deep attention and open hearts in Jesus name. Amen. Do you think of yourself as someone who likes to plan for the future? I don't know if you're a sort of forward thinker. Years ago I had a colleague who would just sort of in regular conversation randomly announce his sort of five-year plan for his life or his ten-year plan for his life. And I always used to think gosh you sound incredibly confident about what's going to come up and the wisdom of the decisions you've made at this point. And then as I got to know him I realized his plan changed every other day. And he was basically announcing his new thinking every other day about his future. He wasn't confident that the future at all he just wanted to sort of sound that way. We're talking about the future this morning but not just five years or ten years. We're talking about the very, very, very distant future. What will you be doing in let's say a hundred years time or a thousand or a million? Some people would say aspect silly talking about such timescales. We have our physical human lifetimes. That's all we can plan for isn't it? If you're talking about life beyond that isn't that just sort of guesswork? Some would say we die then we rot. Maybe we'll be reincarnated. Maybe we'll live on somehow in some kind of spiritual realm. Isn't the only thing we can really be sure of the things that we can see here and now in this life? We can't know anything beyond so you know just put your eggs in the basket of this life, live it as much as you can because maybe that's all we've got. Well in our first few weeks in Ephesians we've seen a much, much bigger story for our lives than that. A story of God's love, an eternal story. It's a timeline in verses one to ten but started in eternity past two weeks ago we're in verses four and five looking at God loving us before the foundation of the world choosing us, pretending us to belong to him. Then last week we saw the kind of middle section in history looking at God's love expressed in human history in Jesus coming and dying for us on the cross. In verses six and seven. Then this week today as we finish this incredible timeline in verses one to ten. The last few verses, verses eight to ten take us all the way to the other end to eternity future. It's described in verse ten as when the times reach their fulfillment, in other words when history reaches its destination. This is what the universe was always here for. This was God's plan. This was his intention from the moment it began. And there's fantastic news in these verses. God has a plan and it's a brilliant one. I think it's very easy in 2024 to feel a bit of a sense of panic about the future. You sort of pick up that vibe in the news and on social media. There's a lot of anxiety sometimes rightly about the future. What's going to happen to the climate? Are we going to be able to bring that under control or are things going to get really bad? What's going to happen if the conflicts around the world escalate? Will they calm down or are we in for some terrible times ahead? What about food supplies? What about financial meltdowns? What about pandemics? Are we done with that for a generation or is another one going to come along? That's just on the global scale and we will have our individual concerns as well. Things on our own lives that might cause us to fear or to feel very uncertain about the future in different ways. We do seem to be living in a particularly panicky time and there are some reasons for that if the news or the dialogue on social media is anything to go by. One reaction is to do what Buddha suggested. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. But why it's good to live in the present, it's good to be, to not have sort of distractions that prevent you from living in the moment. It doesn't seem healthy to have ostrich syndrome about the past or the future. I see a lot of advice online to people panicking about the future with just seems like ostrich syndrome ultimately. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world, press mute, press unfollow, press unsubscribe, forget the big picture, just focus on the things that are within your control. Now some of that's excellent advice. There is good wisdom in unplugging and chilling out when those voices of panic just get a little bit mad. But in the end, it is not healthy for us to deal with big questions and big uncertainties by burying them and hoping they go away. So into all of that kind of generational angst and uncertainty about the future, these verses just lower fantastic breath of fresh air. This world belongs to the Lord and he has a plan. He has a purpose. It is going somewhere and that is in his hands. He has a plan for you and for me, he has a plan for everything according to these verses, which is not just for five or ten years and subject to change or constantly being revised like my friend's five-year plan. This has always been God's plan for the universe and it will happen. So let's have a look at this. So ready two things about God's plan. First we see that it is a mystery revealed. So if you look at verses eight and nine, we're picking up halfway through verse eight. Paul writes, "With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ." So God made known to us the mystery of his will. So the situation is we can't know God's plan, we can't know this destiny for the universe and the last God tells us about it. Now that is generally true, isn't it, of sort of knowing people's plans, I think. There's some things in the world that we can have a good go at predicting in all sorts of ways. You know, scientifically we've seen the sunrise and set every 24 hours for as far back as anyone can remember. So we're pretty confident it's going to carry on doing that. We've learned to predict the weather to some extent, although yesterday we spent quite a bit of time hovering on the question of, "Do we go for a walk? Do we not go for a walk?" The forecast kept changing. But God is a person. When a person has plans, you can only know them if they tell you. Do you guys know what I'm planning to do tomorrow on the bank holiday? One or two people do because I've told them, but the rest of you don't. I can tell you, we're driving up to a little village near Bedford. We're going to see a load of extended family, uncles and cousins on my dad's side. That's going to be fun. I can pretend it's for my birthday as well. Now a few of you knew that, but it's not because you had some special power of prediction. It's because we chatted during the week and I told you about it. If you didn't know my plans, how could you find out? You could guess. You'd probably get it wrong. There's a really simple way to find out my plans and that's for me to tell you. It's the same with God. He's a person. He's not an impersonal thing or just a scientific phenomenon. We can't scientifically analyze God to discover his plans. We can try to speculate, we can try to guess, but there's going to be no certainty in that because we'll probably get it wrong. There's one and only one, but one very simple way to know God's plans and that is for him to tell us, to reveal the mystery of his will. When you think about it, that's how God operates all the way through the Bible. Think of all the promises and the prophecies in Scripture, all of the times throughout the whole of the Old Testament where God told us his plans ahead of time, all the promises that Jesus would come, that he would die, that he would rise, for example. It's how God has always done things. He's announced his big plans and purposes in advance and then they've been fulfilled. They've come about. So if we want to know where this universe, where our lives are ultimately heading, where history's going, what the end goal is, don't expect to just be able to figure that out philosophically, scientifically. Science is great, but it can't read God's mind. He's a person. So don't expect to be able to speculate and get it right. The wonderful thing is we can know because God has told us. He's chosen to tell us what a privilege that is. So verse 8 says, "He tells us with all wisdom and understanding." God knows what he's talking about. God knows everything. He understands everything. He's the source of all wisdom. He's the only one in a position to reveal these ultimate things and his plans and purposes to us. We can't see a person's will or their mind to see the pleasure they take in their plans, but God tells us here, this is according to his good pleasure. He's delighted with this plan and he wants us to know about it. So I think again about my plan to visit cousins and uncles and aunts tomorrow. Imagine you're on who wants to be a millionaire and you've got all the questions correct until the last one. And your million dollar question is, what is Simon Peddley doing tomorrow for the bank holiday? And you scratch your head and you think, what a weird question to ask. It's weirdly specific in person. It doesn't feel like a general knowledge kind of question. You're a bit annoyed. So you try the three lifetimes. You ask the audience. None of them know because I haven't told anybody. You try 50/50. Two answers are taken away. Am I going to get a chessington and my visiting cousins? Still, you've got no idea. Last lifeline is phone a friend. What is your one chance? If you've got my number, I can be your friend and I can make you that million. Because I'm the only one who knows the mystery of my will. We're saying that the whole of the Christian faith is like this and it's really worth recognizing that. We can figure out some of God's nature and character from the world around us. The Bible says you can look at the world around us and figure out that he exists, that he has eternal power, that he has a divine nature, that he's generous and kind, that he's good. You can figure out from our consciences something about God's justice. But we can't just look out the window at nature and think, ah, I conclude from this beautiful scene outside my window that Jesus is the son of God who came into the world to die on the cross for my sins. We need that to be revealed to us by God. So the gospel, the whole of it, is something God revealed to us. And it's the same about the future. We need God to reveal his mystery to us. So here we go. What is the mystery? What has God revealed about the future? And this is our second and last point and the destination for this talk and the destination for the whole of these verses. And it's all to do with Jesus. It's the end of verse nine that says this was purposed in Christ. What is the plan? In verse 10, let's read. What is it that will be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment? God's plan too. Can you see it in verse 10? This is, this is where everything's going to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. So God's plan is all things united in him. That is our big last point from these three weeks. That is God's plan. All things united in Christ. Everything united. Everything placed under Jesus. It's another way of saying Jesus is the king of kings and he will rule over everything. Not just some things, but all things. All things in verse 10 includes both heaven and earth. So everything physical, everything spiritual, all things. That is the plan. That is where history is going. That is what God has made the universe for. That's what he chose us for in verses 4 and 5. That's what he saved us for by sending Jesus in verses 6 and 7. That we might be united with all things under Christ. And you might immediately scratch your head and think, is that a good plan? I mean, we're Christians. We believe God is good and only does what is good. We love Jesus. We follow him. But it is possible that we might read this verse and it either comes across as a bit of an anti-climax or even we might have a bit of a negative response to it. Is it or could it ever be a good thing for a person to be appointed ruler over all things, for everything, for everyone and then for everything else to be under their ruling authority? Let's be honest, there's plenty in the world to make us jittery about that, isn't it? We see the Putin's and the Kim Jong-un's of the world and it's easy to think, yeah, it's a good thing not to have a supreme ruler. Authoritarian dictatorships in this world do not have a good track record. And as we said, the church itself has often very poorly depicted this in the way the church has existed and sought to influence the world. It's often looked imperialistic, enforced, power-seeking rather than humble, even occasionally horribly brutal. Sometimes the way people calling themselves Christians have acted has been much too similar for comfort to the brutal dictatorships of the world. What does that say about Jesus? What does that say about his coming to rule over all things as the goal of history? Some of you know that during the Easter holiday, my parents and all very, very kindly took us to China for a tour, which was amazing. The first thing I should say is that we loved it. There's so much to love and eat in China. It was absolutely fantastic. But of course, China is known as a country with a very authoritarian and communist government. In fact, there are aspects of Chinese government and history that at first glance bear a striking resemblance to God's plan in verse 10. Because the dominant theme in Chinese history, as I was kind of listening to podcasts and all sorts of things while I was there and listening to the things our guides were telling us, the dominant theme of China's history and its view of itself is unity at all costs, the one China policy, and unity under a government that must not be opposed. So you compare that with Europe and we look at our history and we think, okay, our history is one of many nations kind of jostling and relating to each other in different ways. The story of China, which is kind of at least as big as Europe in terms of land mass, is one of unity for more than 2,000 years. It tends to begin the story with the first uniting of China in 221 BC by this guy with a statue of him, Emperor Qin Shi Huang. The name China comes from Emperor Qin and the Qin dynasty. So he celebrated as the great uniter of China more than 2,000 years ago. Do you remember the film Hero? It was all about him and how all of the attempts to assassinate him were defeated. But you'll be aware, I'm sure there's a dark side to all of this. If you know anything else about Emperor Qin, the great celebrated unifier of China, he's incredibly celebrated. You might also know he was utterly, utterly brutal. In order to maintain his rule, he burned Confucian books, buried hundreds of scholars alive. He built the Great Wall and other huge public projects, but deliberately at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives. And we know from what he wrote and what people around him wrote that that was a deliberate policy to exhaust the population and stop them from rising up. Brutality, it seems, was necessary for unity. Every ruler of China since then has seen themselves as in some way inheriting his rule. Disunity is the greatest threat. So every threat to Chinese unity from inside or from outside is combated with brutal force if necessary. You see that in more recent history, 20 a century, Chairman Mao apparently boasted Qin buried 460 scholars alive. We have buried 46,000 scholars alive. When you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree. Gosh. And I guess you see it today in various ways, the suppression of the Uighurs, the eradication of democracy in Hong Kong and so on. Now, China is just one example. We have seen this kind of thing throughout history, haven't we? And all around the world, we might easily feel not 100% positive about God's plan in verse 10 to unite everything under Christ. Does anyone feel a bit like that? Does anyone sort of just a little bit of an instinctive reaction against it? Most of us believe in democracy for good reasons because we don't have confidence in unchallenged authoritarian rule. As Christians, we know the reason for that. The human heart is sinful. And given power, the temptations of power can often corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And maybe we feel it's a bit worrying that some of the younger generation in the West seem a bit less convinced, maybe, of the need for democracy than previous generations have been. And they might look at the power and economic miracles in places like China and think, well, maybe there is a better way. I mean, there is a good side to it. In China, we did see what an all-powerful government can do when it's unopposed. In good ways, there are amazing things that have been done to improve people's lives and some incredible achievements. Every form of leadership by sinful human beings has its problems. Democracy included. Was it Mr Churchill that said democracy was the worst form of government apart from all the others? Was that him or someone that kind of? I remember during the 2017 general election in the UK, I was chatting to another dad outside the school we were at at the time, and he was incredibly fed up with that election. He was really, really annoyed that out of all the people that could have stood, he was having to choose between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, and he just thought, "I can't do this." And as we're chatting, he sort of half jokingly said, "Sometimes I think the best form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship." And thankfully, I had the presence of mine to say, "You know, that's kind of my line of work because that is what Jesus came to bring about. The kingdom of God, when he reigns as king of kings." Do you remember when we were in the book of Daniel before Christmas? We saw all sorts of images of that. The kingdom of God as a small stone that comes and smashes the kind of ugly statues of human kingdoms and then grows to fill the earth. Or the kingdom of men, kingdoms of men depicted like beasts who sort of dangerously rampaged around, until one like a son of man, Jesus, comes to take away their misused power and reign with an everlasting dominion that will never pass away, as Daniel 7 says, where he's given authority and glory and sovereign power, where all nations and peoples of every language worship him. That's Ephesians 1-10. That is God's plan for Jesus to reign and be worshiped and for everyone to live delightfully under his authority. Now, why is that different to Emperor Chin or Kim Jong-un or any number of other leaders that have ruled unchallenged and sought total devotion from people? I hope you already know the answer. I hope you already know who Jesus is and what he's like. But let's remind ourselves, Jesus is not the jumped up merely human dictator who kills people to get power. He is the opposite of that. He is already God. All things already belong to him. But what did he do? Remember it last week, verse 7? He came into the world as a human being and gave his life for us. He allowed us to kill him, brutally, horribly. Isn't that a complete reversal of how dictators normally seek and maintain their power? In the process of coming to be our king, Jesus died for us, for our sins and invites us to receive his forgiveness and his love forever. Read the Gospels, read of Jesus' character. You will see perfect love on display, perfect compassion, perfect justice. There is no one like him. No one else can be trusted to take the throne of the universe. No one else can have absolute power without being corrupted in some way by that power. Every nation has had some bad rulers, some better rulers. None of them compare with Jesus. So, whatever you have seen in your life, whether it is on the political scene or companies or schools or anything, whatever you have seen of abusive leadership or bad leadership, evening churches, whatever you have seen of bad human leadership, put that aside when you think of Jesus. He is not like that. He never has been and he never will be. We are going to learn as we go deeper into Ephesians how the church should be the place where Jesus' rule can be seen today in all of its love and grace and goodness, completely unlike the historic abuses of the church. And the unity that Jesus will bring in verse 10 is not some sort of alien unity being forced on us. It is not as if we are here about to be taken over by some other invading alien authority. That is not how it is. Belonging to Jesus is who we truly are, really. It is where we belong. It is where our story began as we saw with God loving us before the beginning of time. He made us and loved for us and died for us. We are the ones who walked away from that rule of God. We are the ones who messed everything up by trying to push him away, trying to selfishly wear our own crowns and doing such a bad job of it. So being invited back into this glorious unity that Jesus is the right for rule of it, it is not a new thing or an imposed thing or an alien thing. It is coming back to love. It is coming back to our father and to our family. It is coming back home. This is where we truly find our identity and our belonging. It is the way back from all of our problems to come under Jesus' rule and be united with him. This is glorious. This is our future if we are following Jesus. If you are still thinking things through you, if maybe you have been reluctant to come to Jesus as you think it through, because you are worried about handing authority to him, giving him rulership over your life and whether that is a good thing, can you begin to see how wonderful verse 10 is when you really, really think about it when you realize who Jesus is? Why would you want to stay away from this, from him? In all of the worries and uncertainties about our future in this world, the rule of Jesus, the prospect of him sitting on that throne forever and everything becoming influenced and changed and made perfect by his wonderful, perfect rule and character, is something to embrace with utter joy and relief and delight. Our future is so wonderfully safe and joyful with him, whatever happens in the meantime. So let's finish there. Over these last three weeks in verses one to ten, we have seen this timeline of our lives. God's love from eternity past to his grace on the cross through to a eternity future. We are going to pick up the pace as we get deeper into our future and studying next week. But the rest of the book is going to tell us how all this works. What does this look like? What does it look like to be heading towards this glorious future today within the church and within our lives? What does this mean? But let's respond. I'm going to pray. And then if the band come up, we're going to sing a wonderful song that speaks of Jesus and his coming reign that we look forward to so much. Let's pray. For the help us, please, never to feel negative about the prospect of Jesus being our King and being the King of the universe because of the way human beings, including ourselves, because of our sin, misuse power, help us never to be nervous of giving ourselves to Jesus completely. Thank you so much that he is so utterly trustworthy that we can throw all that we are, every bit of our lives, everything we care about, all of our hopes and dreams and fears. Thank you that we can just throw ourselves into the merciful and glorious and gracious and loving reign of King Jesus and know that he will not only catch us and save us, but that he will be a delight as our ruler for all eternity. For the fill our vision with this, please, help us to see beyond all of our worries to this great promise and pray that we'd see it as the best of all possible outcomes and to long for that day. In Jesus' name, Amen. [Music]