Discovering Our Riches in Christ - Ephesians 1:1-14

Well, a little over 15 years ago, I had the chance to go to Vietnam for a summer long mission trip, and I went with a team of college students. I was, I think, about 21 at the time, and we had this incredible guide named Jeff. Now, Jeff was born and raised in Vietnam. So he knew the culture, he knew the language. He had spent the first 40 years of his life living in Vietnam. But he was American, and his dad had grown up in Vietnam. He was kind of the Billy Graham of Vietnam, and so he had led these huge revivals back in the 70s. And so Jeff, being the son, wanted to lead this trip of believers to summer in Vietnam. And we had agreed, he had agreed to take our team back to his home country to guide us through it, the culture and the language. And I had started taking some Vietnamese classes. So I started learning the language a little bit. But I had never been to Southeast Asia before. I had never been anywhere like it. I had spent a lot of a few years throughout Europe. I studied abroad in Germany. I had taken a cruise, a Mediterranean cruise all throughout Europe before. So I'd been to probably a dozen countries throughout Europe, but never to Southeast Asia, never a country like this. And I was thrilled to be going. So when we landed in Hanoi, the capital city, our team stayed for a 1st couple of nights in a nice hotel in the old quarter, right in the tourist district where everything was just kind of laid out for us. In those first couple of days, I thought I was getting Vietnam. And we walked the streets around the hotel. We ate at all the places that the front desk recommended. We took pictures of the beautiful lake right there in the old quarter. We bought a few things from the market. It was nice. It was great. It was cool. And as I sat there in the hotel room, That 2nd night, I remember thinking, okay, so this is Vietnam. It's cool, I guess. Like, it's fine. We're doing good. But here's the thing. The old quarter exists in a vacuum. It's a bubble. They know that tourists are going to pretty much spend their time in this district. So laminated English menus that you can read, vendors that you can spot a tourist from a block away. They already know what you're going to order. You're not going to get the real authentic stuff. You're gonna get the stuff that's like gonna hit your stomach okay and hit your palate just right. It's a sanitized version of a place that's tidied up for tourists like me. But I didn't know that yet. And so I just thought, well, Vietnam Vietnam is fine, I guess. It's okay if you got like nothing better to do, right? Then a few days in, we had left our hotel and we moved in, all of our college student teams. We moved in with various host families. And so we went all of our separate ways. My host family lived about a 30 minute motorbike ride away from the university where we were kind of doing all of our work in for that time in that summer, way outside of the tourist court. And I'll never forget the 1st time that I climbed on the back of that motorbike. Has anyone been on the back of a motorbike before? Okay, just a couple of y'all. This is crazy, guys, because you're not the driver, and you're just zooming in and out. I had a helmet that he was like, put this on. And I'm like the only guy wearing a helmet out of 1000000s of Vietnamese people. It doesn't even fit right on my head. I'm like, I'm gonna die here today. I had no idea where I was going. My host brother took off and I'm like holding him as tight as I can. I'm like, this is really awkward, but you gotta do it. There's no seatbelt, right? And he just took off weaving through this river of motorbikes. Uh, and there were just 1000s of them everywhere. It's chaos. And there's like no rules on the road. If you've ever been to some of these places like Indonesia or Vietnam. There's just like no loss, right? There's police around, but there's no traffic lights. You don't stop at a red. You don't go at a green. You just try to make your way through it. So people are falling off their motorbikes like crazy. I kid you not. Every day is a normal occurrence to see like 6 people on a motorbike. You can ask me how that works later, but it's crazy. There's other times where I saw a guy carrying 2 mattresses on his back, like full twin sized mattresses strapped to him on a motorbike going 60 down the road. Like, what is happening here? And they'd have like babies strapped to them. Sometimes you'd have a woman who's driving her motorbike and she's just got a basket of fruit on her head at 70 miles an hour. It's not strapped down at all. You're like, is it glued? Like, I don't know how this is how this is working out. But it's crazy. It's insane. There's no rules. I thought the newspapers the next day would be like, and that was the last time we ever heard of Tyler Rosis. We just he just didn't make it from there. He disappeared that day. It was a really stressful moment. But about 10 minutes into that motorbike. ride, I realized, I'm not stressed anymore. I'm not hanging on tight. I'm actually grinning. I'm smiling. And for the 1st time, I realized I'm smiling because I'm actually in the city. Not above it in a hotel room, not in the tourist district. I was in Vietnam. And we pulled up to my host family's house, and these people just opened up their lives to us. They didn't speak, they spoke 0 English. I spoke a little bit of Vietnamese, but my host brother spoke both. So he was kind of the bridge between us each night, each day, my host mom would ask if I wanted more food, and my host brother would translate, or they'd ask about things in America, and then the host brother would translate for that. And somehow, through all the broken back and forth. They fed me, they laughed at my pronunciation of Vietnamese, they pulled me into everything they were doing. And then one night, our guide, Jeff, said, hey, have you had buncha yet? And, uh, I was like, I don't, I don't think so, maybe I have, but I don't think so. And he's like, let's go. So we got back on our motorbike. We hopped on, we rode to this place that was barely a place. A guy with like a little charcoal grill on the side of a road was grilling up some food, and we sat on these like tiny little stools that are big enough to like put a doll on, right? like in kindergarten classes. They're tiny, and so we sat down, knees up to our chins, and I had my first bite, a real boomcha. And my eyes lit up. Uh, this was food. This was the country. Now, for the first time, I was like, this is Vietnam. And then, uh, towards the end of the trip, we got to go to High Long Bay, does anyone ever heard of High Long Bay before? I think it's one of the current natural wonders of the world. beautiful place. We spent a whole day hiking along the massive limestone cliffs. We've got a few pictures of it. I think I've got 3 in there that I can show you guys. They rise up straight out of this emerald green water. It's beautiful. We swam in the bay, and we looked up at the giant rocks that are just covered in jungle. And I remember thinking, how did I almost miss all of this? Like, how did I almost go home thinking that I had seen Vietnam from a hotel window? And when most people in this country think of Vietnam, they don't think beauty. They think, oh, terrible war, communist country, a place that's hard and tragic and best just left alone, at a distance. But when I really got into Vietnam, I saw beauty everywhere. I saw God's beauty in the people, in their kindness to this clueless American. I saw God's beauty in the food, this guy with this charcoal fire on the side of the street with no possessions, would just shame all of our American restaurants. He would put them out of business. I saw God's beauty in the geography in those limestone cliffs and that emerald water. Now, I had been in Vietnam, technically, for the 1st few days, but I hadn't been in Vietnam, until I experienced the people, experienced the culture, experienced a few food, experienced the beauty of High Long Bay. And it filled me with joy. It filled me with praise. I remember being on that boat and swimming in those waters and thinking, God, this is amazing. Now, why am I telling you all this? Because for some of us, the tragedy is that Christianity is like, oh, you know, it's cool, it's all right, I guess. Like, it's fun, at times, we're in Christ, but we don't really celebrate. So many of us, we just live there. But the core of Christianity is actually celebration. It's rejoicing. It's being on fire. We've walled ourselves in sometimes to just mediocrity just getting by with the day to day. And what I'm hoping for is that as we journey through the book of Ephesians that we're going to be in for several months, for the next 5 months, that as we get into it, that we would discover the wild nature of what it is, the beautiful nature of what it is to be in Christ, to experience God and all of his beauty and his majesty. What it is to really know God and walk with him. So I want to be your guide. I want to be your Jeff this morning, at least for the next 2 weeks, because I'm preaching back to back, and then we'll hear from Dalton again. But I want to get you out of the tourist quarter of Christianity. And into the beauties of what it is to know Christ and to walk with him. So I want us to pray, and then we're gonna go through a high-level view of Ephesians one, one through 14 this week, and then we'll go into a deeper view of that same passage next week. So let's pray and we'll jump into Ephesians chapter one. Let's pray together. Lord, we thank you that you've brought us here. It's not an accident. You've brought us to this time and this place to praise you, to worship you, to celebrate you. And I know that for many of us, Walking with you, Christianity does not feel like a celebration. It does not feel like praise. And there are more hard days than there are good days. And so, Lord, I pray that you would speak to us this morning, that you would reveal the beauty, the majesty, the excitement of who you are, and how you've made us. Lord, speak to us this morning through your word, through the book of Ephesians, when we pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Or a friend of mine recently texted me a few weeks ago asking me like, hey, if I were to refer a friend, one of my friends is not a believer, and he's interested in reading the Bible. And so he's asking me, hey, what should I read first? And so I didn't really know, so I'm asking you now. My pastor, what do you think I should recommend to this guy to read? And so I said, hey, tell him to read the book of John first. Because reading the book of John is like walking with Jesus as he walked with his disciples. It's a beautiful view of what it is to walk with Jesus as he journeyed through life. And then, when you're done with that, I would tell you to read the book of Ephesians. Because Ephesians is the most concise and it's the most precise presentation of what God is doing in Christ. It's compact. It's only 6 chapters. You could actually fit the whole book of Ephesians on two, 8.5 by 11 sheets of paper. So it's short. It's compact. It's concise, it's precise, and yet it's complete. It takes you from eternity past to eternity future. It shows you the big picture. It takes you even into the micro into God's plan for your most intimate relationships, that of a husband and a wife, or a parent, and a child. And it's not just concise and complete, it's also really creative. It doesn't read like furniture instructions. It reads like poetry. It's beautiful. They call it the queen of the Epistles. Martin Lloyd Jones, the great preacher, preached through Ephesians in 262 sermons. We're not going to take that long. We're going to take about 20 sermons over the course of 5 months, but can you imagine? So we're not going to get that many, but we're going to dive into it because it shows us the beauties of Jesus. And how we live this life. Most of Paul's letters were written to address some specific issue, right? So heresy in Galatia or problems in Corinth or false teaching in Colossae, but Ephesians is different. There's no immediate issue that Paul points out. There doesn't seem to be like a core thing that the Ephesians are struggling with. Even though Paul lived in Ephesus, which I got the chance to go to back in 2006. Uh, he lived there for about 2.5 to 3 years. Uh, but the letter doesn't have that familiar, like, personal touch that his other letters have. There's no shout out section. There's no, like, name by name, greeting, hey, make sure you greet these guys. Most commentators believe that Paul wrote the book of Ephesians as kind of a circular letter. It's meant to just be sent out to all the churches in Asia. And some of the manuscripts that we have, the word in Ephesus, or that phrase in verse one, if you look at that, in Ephesus, it's actually not in the greeting in a lot of the manuscripts. So he sat down and he said, okay, I'm just going to write a treatise of what it means to be in Christ and how to live this Christian life. And this letter is gonna go everywhere. Like it's going to be sent out and passed around. So if you know much about the New Testament. Romans, that Paul wrote, is like that Mount Everest of what he's written. But Mount Everest is really hard to scale, right? Romans is like that. It's hard to climb it. But Ephesians, on the other hand, it's like a stick of dynamite. Here is what it means to know God and be in his family. Boom, there it is. So I want to dig deep into it. Dalton and I both. But here's the thing. Don't just listen to Dalton and I, as we go through it each week, get into it yourself over the next 5 months, as we preach through this book. And here's something that I love. There are 41 commands in the 6 chapters of Ephesians. But 40 of them are in chapters 4 through 6, the last 3 chapters. Only one command is in the 1st 3 chapters, and it's in chapter two. I think it's in verse 11, and it's to remember. He's like, hey, guys, I only want one thing for you, and it's to remember. And you're like, okay, what do I need to remember, God? And to remember all the things that he's done for you. All of chapters one, two, and three, it's not about what you do because Christianity at its base at its core is not about what you do. It's not. It's all about what God has done. It's all about him. And when you see what God has done, you become a worshiper. It leads you to praise, right? And if you are new to Christianity. If you are new to the Christian thing, you might say, hey, I've noticed that the church, you Christians, you guys sing a lot. And you might wonder, man, is that weird? Like, I thought Christianity, I thought religion is just about being a good person. Well, it's good to be a good person, but how much can you really sing about it, right? Like, it's good to pay your taxes, but none of us are singing about that. We sing about Christianity because it's at its base. It's not about what you do. We sing because it's all about what Christ has done, what God has accomplished for us. It's like when you love singing about that song that's a huge hit right now, that's been huge with you and your friends. You know, the ones where everyone in the car is like freaking out because the song just came on the radio. Maybe you still do this. A lot of college students, a lot of high school students, maybe middle school students do that. But if you listen to it alone, you're like, oh, it's a pretty good song. Like, I'll just jam out a little bit to it in my own car. But if you listen to it with your friends, you're screaming every word. You're like, oh, this is my jam. People are hanging out in the sunroof, right? Like all this excitement going on with this song. You're like, this white song. I love this song. Do you love this song? We love this song, right? And there's this all this momentum building of this song. The celebrating heightens the enjoyment. That's how it works because enjoying can happen alone. celebrating takes people coming together. And that's where Paul goes. That's where he goes with the book of Ephesians. As soon as he opens the letter, he says, Paul, an apostle of Jesus, apostle of Christ Jesus, by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus. and are faithful in Christ Jesus, graced you in peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And then verses 3 through 14, in the original language, coin a Greek, is just one long run on statement. He's like my kids on Christmas morning. They come out and they're like, oh, look at the presence, there's presence, there, there's presence, there, there's presence, there's presence for mom, there's presence for mom. There's a present for me. How can we open them now? Can we open them now? I want to open them now. And then, oh, dad, this is that one for Zeke. That's for me, that one's for Rosanna. I want to open Titus. No, you can't open that one. And there's just so much excitement. I'm like, guys, you're gonna blow a blood vessel. Slow down. Separate this into paragraphs, right? And you're actually meant to kind of laugh when you read this from Paul. You're meant to just be in awe of everything he said. The excitement makes it run on. But as you read it, you're also meant to be excited just like Paul, to the point that you're thinking, hey, Paul, your writing teacher would have been really upset with you. This is just too long. He would have flunked you, Paul. But Paul's getting the heartbeat right. When you really see what God has been doing, You can't help but praise. You can't help but celebrate. So what is Paul so fired up about? He tells us in verse three. 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. So this is the 1st thing of what it means to be in Christ. It's to be blessed. It's to be blessed. Blessed with what? Well, he said, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. I can tell you're all really excited by that news, right? It's kind of like someone's like, I have a gift for you, but it's invisible. You're like, oh, thanks, God. Like, this is awesome, right? I would have appreciated something. I can hold something more material, but that it sounds like God is like, okay, you just gotta take these invisible gifts. But notice the phrase that Paul attaches to it. He says, in Christ. So through the book of Ephesians, 38 times, Paul says, in Christ, in him, in Christ. And 14 of them are in this chapter alone. And of all the issues, I've seen Christians get wrong over 15 years, my 15 years of ministry, one that has the biggest impact on the rest of the Christian life is misunderstanding our identity in Christ. It's misunderstanding this piece. And I've asked a lot of people over the years. I've taught this passage in a lot of different contexts, small groups, one-on-one, sermons. And I've asked people, hey, what do you think it means to be in Christ? Like, that's kind of a Christianese word, if you grew up in church, you heard that, to be in Christ. What does that really mean? And I get all kinds of answers. Some say, hey, it means believing that Jesus died for you. Like, okay, that's good. Others say, uh, it means obeying Jesus every day. I'm in Christ when I obey him. Some say, hey, it's reading my Bible every day. If I'm going to be in Christ, I need to be in his word. And listen, guys, those are all great things. Those are all biblical things, but none of those captures what it actually means to be in Christ. Here's the thing. There is no other chapter. In all of scripture, That explains what it means to be in Christ as much as it does in Ephesians chapter one. And this morning, Paul is explaining it to us. Second thing, he says, after we're blessed, 1st thing to be in Christ is blessed. Second, it's chosen. He has chosen us. Verse 4 says, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world. Before the foundations were even built, it says God was choosing people. He's gathering a constituency to himself. He's gathering a people group. And it says that we should be holy and blameless before him. That means set apart. That means pure. That means in his presence. Now, I don't know about you. But when I was a kid, I was set apart. And when I say set apart, I don't mean chosen first. In fact, I mean chosen last. Like we all know that moment, like when you came to recess and the team captains are ready to pick their teams, right? And they're going through people, man, it always came down. It seemed like when I was a kid, it always came down to me and like a plant, right? And they're just like, well, the plant's really tempting right now. I was always last. I never grew up as a big kid. Kids were always taller than me, always bigger than me. And some of you know what that's like. To see all your friends get picked for things. Get picked for promotions, get picked for jobs, get picked for a better life, whatever it is. But Paul says, man, he chose you. He chose you. God is worth praising every day. Why? Because he's choosing people to himself. He's moving toward people, to bring them closer to him. God is moving toward us to make us holy and blameless before him. He chose us. That's our 2nd point. Third, he says he adopted us. He didn't choose us to be his lackeys. He uh, he chose us with a destiny in view. Look at verse five. It says he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. So over the years, I've had the chance to meet quite a few adults who were adopted later in life, not adopted as babies or as little kids, but adopted later. And so as I develop relationships with these people, I try to ask them, hey, what was that like? Like later in life, when you were 10 or 15, and you got adopted later in life, like what did that feel like? And they usually give pretty similar answers. They'll usually say something like, yeah, I was in, I was in a really difficult place. Some of them say I was in a dangerous place. Like, I was in some pretty sad places. And there was a moment when it dawned on me. I wasn't born in this house. I wasn't born to this family. I was somewhere else. I was abandoned, discarded alone. And then it fell on me. Who am I? I'm the discarded one. I'm the one who's not chosen. I'm the one who's poor and distant. No one wants me. And then they all say, in that moment, they tell me about the moment that their mom and dad leaned down to them and said, not anymore. You're mine now. And I crossed seas to come and get you, and I waited through crowds to get you. And I gave you my name, and I put you in my house, and I clothed you, and I fed you, and I made you my own. And when I leave this world, I'm leaving an inheritance to you. You're mine. You're chosen. You're adopted. You're not separate. You're not poor. You have everything that I have. He gave you a name. And he says, I'm binding you to myself forever. And I know many of us, we feel unloved at times. We feel alone at times. But man, God is worth praising because he's adopting people into his family. He's making us his own. So do you feel alone? God is building a family in Jesus. And that's worth praising. Fourth, he says, he's redeemed us. He's not just chosen and adopted us. He's redeemed us. Adoption is about the family that we're brought into, but redemption is about the situation that we're pulled out of. Jesus didn't come just to be like a motivational speaker, to make us feel good inside. He came to be a rescuer. He came to seek and save the lost, and being in a situation where you need rescuing means you're in a place that you're lost. That word to be redeemed means to be bought back, right? And so you've probably, Seeing the movie taken with Liam Neeson. I remember when that came out, big hit in the movie theater, and his daughter gets kidnapped, right? If you've seen it. And when he, when that news comes to Liam Neeson, as he's the dad, he's not like, oh, darn it, man. I guess we're just gonna have to find another daughter, you know, that one's lost. Bummer, right? No, he doesn't do that. He's got a particular set of skills that he's gonna put into motion. He's gonna put those to work. He's gonna move heaven and earth. He's gonna lose blood. He's gonna take blood. He's gonna tear down any wall that it takes to get his daughter back at great cost to himself. He says, I will get my beloved. She will return to me. And Jesus, at the very cost of his life, says, I will give everything because you're my beloved. I'm coming after you. Why to redeem you? To buy you back? Now, at the end of that movie, at the end of all that her dad has done. Do you think that her daughter, after being rescued and redeemed, would lay her head down on the pillow at the end of the day and ask, or say to herself, I just, I just don't think anyone loves me. I just don't think anyone cares about me. We'd be like, no, watch the movie. He was ready to set Europe on fire to come get you, right? The honesty is, many of us feel like that. We go through live feeling alone, feeling unloved and unlovable, because we are not reading the book and believing it. Verse 7, he says, in him, we have redemption. Through our blood? No, through his. He came for you. He gave everything for you. That word redeem, it means to buy back, like you're going to a, to a arcade, right? You redeem your tickets for a prize. That's what he's doing. He's giving up something to get us. The 5th thing that it means to be in Christ. He has forgiven us. Our own bad situation was our fault. Not his doing. We're less like the movie Taken, and we're more like the book of Hosea in the Old Testament, where the wife leaves her husband to go be a party girl, and she sells herself into prostitution. She lets her life just spiral until everything beautiful about her is gone. And she's on the chopping block, to be sold as a slave, and she can't even get the going rate for the cheapest slave. And her husband, Hosea, chases her down. And there in front of everybody, he says, I want her. And I'm paying full price to get her. And I don't care what anyone else says. I know what she did to me, and I want her anyway. She's mine. I want to wash her clean, and I want to make her my beloved. That's the book of Hosea. That's what God does. Some of us, our greatest weight in life is just guilt. We wake up each day with condemnation, our guilt and our condemnation. We wake up to it. It like sits on our chest like a weight, like a heavy blanket. And we just wake up to it every morning. And God says it's not meant to be that way. But in Christ, verse 7. He says, we have the forgiveness of our trespasses. According to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us. He wasn't like, I'm just giving you a little forgiveness. He's like, I'm lavishing you with forgiveness. In all wisdom and insight. He's pouring it out on you. The 6th thing that it means to be in Christ. He has made known to us the mystery of his will. If you had to put it in one word, the best word I can think of is enlightened. He's given you knowledge of him. The knowledge, the mystery of his will. I know for probably all of us at some point in our life, we've said, man, it would be so great to know God's will. What's God's will in this situation? Do I move here or do I move there? Do I buy this house or go buy that house? Do I take this job or that job? And he says, man, he's made known the mystery of his will. Verse nine. Paul says making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purposes, which he has set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time. to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth in him. So not only are we forgiven, but he has begun to tell you where history is going. Ultimately, what God is doing is he's uniting all things under Christ. He's bringing the world where it's supposed to be. He's saying death. I'm killing death. I will decay decay. I will make sickness terminally ill. I will violate violence. I will end all these things and I will bring the world back to what it's meant to be. The mystery that he's made known to us is that Christ fulfills all things. We are meant to exist in him and buy him, and for him, and through him. All things, he says, culminate in Jesus. It's all about him. The 7th thing. that he's done to make us in Christ. He has made us his inheritance. Look at verse 11. He says in him, we have obtained an inheritance. So what that means, really, is not so much that we are given an inheritance, although that's true, it means more so that we are his inheritance. It's like God is saying, hey, when I bring this whole universe under Christ, you will be my prized possession. Those in Christ will be my trophy. And we all put trophies up, right? Many of us, you might have awards, or trophies, or various things that you put up in your home, or your office, maybe your parents still do that, right? You moved out of the house and you go back home, and you're like, oh, mom, dad, put these trophies up, right? Some of you, I might walk into your house and I might see a buck on the wall. Yeah, that's the buck that I got, because I can slay a deer, right? I did it. Put it up on the wall. Uh, or you might have a trophy. And you're like, yeah, that's when I played soccer when I was 10, right? I can play soccer or basketball or baseball. And I conquered it. Some of you have degrees. You walk into my office and you see degrees on the wall, like, yeah, I worked really hard for that. Texas A&M. I conquered it. I crushed it. my degrees. You're displaying your glory for everyone to see. And he says in verse 12, so that we who were 1st to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory, says, man, when the clock runs out on time, We will be on God's mantlepiece, a display of his glory. Of his work, of his goodness. He'll take a broken, separate, disparate people and make us whole and holy before him. That's what he's doing. Not that he can show that he can dominate something. But that he can take dead humanity and make us alive in Christ. And an 8 thing, what it means to be in Christ. He has sealed us with his spirit. He sealed us with his Holy Spirit. Verse 13. It says 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. God took his very spirit, the 3rd person of the Trinity, and he put it in you as a seal, that moment that you trusted in him. The moment that you believed in him. So in those days, it was common for a king or a dignitary, that wanted to send a letter, they would write their letter on a piece of parchment, right? We just don't write letters anymore. We do all the email and text message. They would write their letter, handwritten. Can you believe it? on a piece of parchment, and they'd roll at that parchment. They wouldn't fold it like we do. They'd roll it up, and then they get some hot wax. They pour it on the seam. And then they take their signet ring that had the mark of their family, the mark of their authority, the mark of their power, and they press it into that hot wax until it solidified. And then everyone knew, wherever that letter goes, the one who's sending it out, the one who receives it, I know where that letter comes from. I know who that letter belongs to. It's sealed. It comes with power. It comes with authority. And that's what God has done. So when he seals us by his spirit, he says, you're mine now. You belong to me. In my office, if you were to come to my office, I would tell you, you'd see all the books and I would tell you, man, books used to disappear all the time. And so Abby got me an embosser. If you've ever seen, hopefully you've seen one of these before. It's like a stamp. And it sits on my shelf in my office because every time I get a new book, I make sure I emboss that title page. And it's got, it's a custom embosser, it says from the library of Tyler Rosas. And I get to that 1st page every time I get a new book, and I press it in, and when I release it, I see it written there. From the library of Tyler Rosis. And I went through every single book, and I was like, bam, you're mine. You're mine now. And you know what? Books don't disappear anymore. Because people come, they walk into my office, and they're all, they're like, oh, look at this book. Oh, that's nice. Oh, okay, I know where this book is going back to, right? I know who this book belongs to. And no matter where that book goes, I know it's coming back to me. And God says, hey, when you believe you're marked with the spirit, and it's a guarantee that when I bring all things to a close, you're coming back to me. You're mine. You can't get rid of the seal. You can't lose that embossment. It's mine. So all the blessings of heaven come to us in Jesus. So God the Father is planning from eternity past to save us. God, the sun, stepped into history to redeem us and rescue us. God, the spirit, entered into us, to be with us forever. Father, son, and spirit, mobilizing together, to gather a broken people, and make us his prized possession, on his mantelpiece, for all of time. That's history. That's the human story. That's his story that he's weaving together. So the question for us this morning. No command in this passage, just a question. Are you living in Christ? Are you living in him? Are you living in all that it means? Every blessing of the Father is mediated through the Son. The blessings of God. We're blessed, we're chosen, we're adopted, we're redeemed, we're forgiven. You're given the mystery revealed, the mystery of his will, made and given an inheritance, sealed by the Holy Spirit, are you living in light of that? They all come to us in Jesus. He wasn't just a good teacher. He's the hero of history. And when you're in him, you get every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, and it's better than all the Christmases, and all the anniversaries, and all the birthday gifts combined for all eternity in all humanity. And when you see what he's doing, when you actually see it, it brings out praise. Like when I was in Vietnam 15 years ago, But for the 1st couple of days, I wasn't really in Vietnam. When I got out of that vacuum, I saw God's beauty everywhere and it brought out joy. It brought me to worship. And many of us, man, we're in Christ. It's cool, I guess, but you may have never really seen it. And my prayer is that you would. My prayer is that you would reflect on all that God has done, that you'd see the blessing, you'd see the choosing, the adopting, the redeeming, the mystery of his will, the inheritance, the seal, and praise which is well out of you. That you just go through the mundane of your life and be like, God is good. No matter how bad the day gets. When you really understand who you are in Christ, and I don't just mean, like, mentally, oh, I understand that, but like, you feel it in your bones. When you let it sink down past your head and into your heart. When you let it sink down, when you do that, man, it turns to celebration. It turns to a life lived in the purposes of God. When you find yourself secure in Christ. Where we live in the light of our identity, where we're grounded. grounded in the foundation of who God is, and what he's done for us. All of it is in Christ. Praise be to God. Let's pray together. Lord, we love you. Help us to love you more.