Summary of Ephesians 1:1-14: In Christ

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you take the Bible please, and look at Ephesians? We need to summarize again what is a
wonderful benediction in these twelve verses of the first half of the first chapter in Ephesians and
it begins with “Blessed be the God and Father.” And they talk about that in the next twelve verses
as the benediction. It is possibly the most remarkable sentence in the English language, because it
covers from infinity-to-infinity. Really, God himself – we dare not say where he fits in, or where
is his beginning, but if you take a timeline and divide it even into three areas, and you talk about
that as in some way the beginning (indicating a section of a line drawn on a white board) and you
talk about this as in some way the beginning of the earth, and then this of course as in some way
the beginning of life, the life for which we were made. And then you talk about this more or less
as Genesis 1, however many years ago that was, the creation of the earth. And then you begin to
look at this time, this infinite time before then and though it’s silly to talk about the beginning
of eternity, yet if you think of what God did away at the beginning, and you think of him begetting
his own Son Christ, and at that same moment in Christ creating mankind, and then at that same moment
foreseeing the fall of man, and at that same moment seeing the crucifixion that was necessary of his
son, and at that same moment the resurrection, and the new creation of man. Then in fact, right
through, if that is 29 AD, and right through the cross, these twelve verses stretch right from there
to there.

It’s an amazing sentence and it’s very compact and you yourself know the complexity of it as we
studied it, and you’d know even more the complexity of the Greek if you read it in the Greek, but
they are a remarkable twelve verses. They are a remarkable series of sentences that cover not just
time, which would be between there and there, but eternity from the beginning to the end. And so
there are probably no set of sentences like it in English and better than any other twelve verses in
the Bible that I know as it outlines the whole account of reality right from beginning to end. And
in a sense you can think of verses three to six in a way being the past.

This isn’t quite true literally, but in a sense you can think of those as being the past and then
seven to ten as being the present, and then the other verses eleven to fourteen as being the future.
But these are my suggestions, and you can see that in a sense it breaks down, because in a sense
it’s all concerned with the past. And that’s I think, one of the big reliefs that came to me. I
used to read this verse “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,” and I’d think, “Yes, God is so
good, he has given us everything and now in Jesus, now that I’m a Christian, I have been given, in
Christ, everything. And I am so grateful to you Lord, for that.” If Satan ever got in and made me
wonder if I was a Christian or not, then of course, suddenly everything fell apart. “All hell done
broke loose” because if I wasn’t a Christian than this hadn’t happened. Then of course, I have not
been blessed in Christ with every spiritual blessing.

In other words, there was a time when I certainly would have taken these past tenses as a personal
statement of what had happened to me when I made my decision for Christ. So, “Blessed be the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has now blessed me in Christ, with every spiritual
blessing. Now that I’ve become a Christian I’m blessed with that. Now if I’m not a Christian of
course, that isn’t so.” And so it was a wonderful revelation when I saw that this past is objective
reality; this is not an expression just of my own subjective experience, this is an objective
reality. This has happened. Whether I believe it or not, this has happened. So this is a fact of

reality and that was a great relief and revelation to me. And obviously it brings home to you too,
as it does to me, what many people say, “Karl Barth is the messenger of grace.” It brings home to
you God’s infinite grace. “You mean, in here where we were crucified with Christ in the lamb slain
from before the foundation of the world Hitler was there?” And of course, while we’re interested in
Hitler it comes home to you, “You mean I was there and each one of us was there? That we were
crucified with Christ, that we were resurrected with him that we have been made a new creation and
that God regards us as his own child?”

That suddenly brings home to you, where does grace stop if God does that kind of thing? If he has
that attitude and bears all of us inside his son Jesus, and all our wretched irritability, and our
stupid pride, and at times our cruelty and savagery, if he has borne all that for all of us, and
then not only that but sees it worked out moment-by-moment, second-by-second, drop of blood from the
cross, by drop of blood. And then by the persecutions of Nero through all the little children and
the mothers, and husbands that were killed in lion arenas, and then through the persecutions of the
middle ages, and then on, and on and on and he endures all that in his own son, all the agony and
the torture, not only of the Roman soldier that killed the Christian, but of the Christian that was
killed. And he bears all that and still says, “Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy
laden.” And then says, “Him that cometh to me, I will in no wise cast out.” That he does that kind
of thing and he’s doing that now and will do it right up until we begin that new life, that’s what
these verses are saying. And that of course is grace that is so overwhelming that what can an
ordinary sane person do but fall down prostrate on the ground and say, “Father whatever you want,
whatever you want here I am.”

So that’s loved ones, what is the heart of these verses and they all light up when you see it like
that, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” At three o’clock this morning I
wakened saying that, because I realized that’s all our life should be. Our lives should be
constantly, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ
with every spiritual gift, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” That’s what our
life should be like. We should be walking along day-by-day, crying out, “Blessed be the God and
Father of our Lord.” We should, there’s nothing else to do. There’s nothing else for us to do but
to do that, to rejoice everyday and to be saying that, “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,”
because all of that has already taken place. He has done that. He has blessed us in Christ with
every spiritual blessing; love, joy, peace he has put in our hearts, he has formed them in us in
Christ, he has imparted to us Christ himself with all his joy and love and peace, his spiritual
blessings are ours. All we have to do is let them out, they’re there.

We have little inklings that they’re there; sometimes you have a little joy, sometimes you have a
little surprising love for someone, you find sympathy and a pity rising up in your heart that
surprises you, that’s Christ that is inside you that is trying to get out. And so that’s what it
means, “Has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” The heavenly
places are these pre-creation moments maybe billions of years ago and of course when we get to
heaven we’ll find they were just a second ago, but it’s those, in heavenly places. “Even as he
chose us in him before the foundation of the world,” and that’s the wonder of it. The formation of
the world is there, but he chose us even before the foundation of the world. He chose us in Christ.
He said, “You will be mine in my son. You will be part of my son. I have chosen you in my son to
be part of me and my family even before the foundation of the world.”

“That we should be holy and blameless before him,” because the only way we could be holy and

blameless is if we had Christ around us and in us and we were drowned in Christ. “He destined us in
love to be his sons through Jesus Christ.” That’s it back there. He destined us back there in love
and in sheer grace. He destined, he planned, he predestined, he projected, and he arranged that we
would be his sons through Jesus. There’s no other way to be his sons, you see. Can’t be a son out
here and be adopted into Christ, you can only be adopted in Christ into the family, but it’s in
Christ that you are adopted. So it’s in him that you’re his sons.

“He destined us in love to be his son through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to
the praise of his glorious grace.” Again, just sheer grace which he freely bestowed on us in the
beloved. And see loved ones that was before you and I were ever born, before we did anything.
That’s why it says in other parts of scripture, “Even while we were yet sinners, Christ died for
us.” Before we were ever born, God bestowed his love upon us in the beloved. That’s back there, he
did it then.

“In him,” in verse 7 and then this kind of comes to the present, but in a sense you can see it also
looks forward to the future. “In him we have redemption through his blood.” In other words we are
brought back to what we are originally created in him. We were created in Christ as part of
mankind, and we were made to be like him, but then we fell, and then he destroyed us in Christ,
raised us up in Christ, made us a new creation, redeemed us back to what were. And so in him we
have redemption now through, “The forgiveness of our trespassers according,” again, “according to
the riches of his grace.”

It may be important to say that again to you; you have the forgiveness of your sins not because you
have been conscientious in your repentances. You have the manifestation of the new birth because of
your repentance, but you don’t win the forgiveness of your sins by your good repentance. We have
the forgiveness of our sins back here. Back here God saw Marty, he saw Ernest O’Neil back here, and
he saw us for what we were, and he saw the miserable little creatures that we became and back there
he forgave us our sins, and he put us in Christ and he resurrected us. So the forgiveness of sins
is based on that objective reality. Now our experience of that is based on our faith, on our
acceptance of it.

“According to the riches of his grace that he lavished upon us. For he has made known to us in all
wisdom.” Now he has made known to us in that wisdom and insight, the mystery of his will. The
mystery of his will was this whole plan here you see, to make man in Christ, to bear man’s sin in
his son, and then to destroy man in Christ, and in the process of course, to destroy the Savior, and
then to resurrect him, and resurrect man in Christ, and make the new creation. That’s the purpose
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 heaven and things on earth.” Because his plan was that this dear
Christ would unite everything in himself. He would bring all this over here, and he would unite it
all in himself in the new heaven, in the new earth.

And then the verse 11 looks to the future, “In him, according to the purpose of him who accomplishes
all things according to the counsel of his will.” So through these years he’s accomplishing all
things according to the counsel of his will. That’s why for us there is no worry or no concern or
anxiety about the way the world is going because we know God is accomplishing the purpose of his
will in it all. He foresaw all this, and he knows the ways it’s all going, and he is accomplishing
what he planned. “Accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will, we who first hoped
in Christ have been destined and appointed to live for the praise of his glory. In him you also,
who have heard the word of truth,” this explanation of reality, “The gospel of your,” deliverance

the good news of your deliverance, “of your salvation, and have believed in him, were sealed with
the promised Holy Spirit, which is now the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession
of it, to the praise of his glory.” And so we find ourselves somewhere here. We don’t know how
close to that point in the timeline, but somewhere here we are. And there we are destined to live
to the praise of his glory, and we have here the Holy Spirit as a guarantee that all this is going
to come real for us in just a very few seconds really, just a few seconds. Let’s pray.