Living for the Praise of His Glory, a sermon preached by the Rev. Robert Lee
Nichols, Jr. at the Fox Chapel Presbyterian Church Traditional Service on January
5, 2014, using as the text, Ephesians 1:1-14
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I am a cooking show junkie. I like to cook and I like to learn and I enjoy watching the
personalities of all those television chefs. Rachel Ray, Nigella Lawson, Tyler Florence,
the Barefoot Contessa, they’re all great. But my favorite by far is Emeril Lagasse. I not
only like what he cooks but the way he goes about it. He has a certain flair. A joy of life.
I love when he throws the garlic in the pan with a hearty, Bam! Bam! The audience
responds. Not halfheartedly, but fully – Bam! They say with great gusto.
I think it’d be great to do this at church. Whenever Chris is preaching and he says grace!
They you say, Bam! Or love. Or truth. Or righteousness. Or peace. Bam! Bam! Bam!
Bam! We can together celebrate (indeed relish) what really matters.
That’s a little bit of what this text does. It’s a great text for Christmastide because it
describes all the ways we are different because of what happened at Christmas. What has
changed? And it’s great for the first Sunday in January because it points us toward how
we ought to live into the coming year.
The setting is Ephesus. The third largest city in Asia Minor, site of the famous Temple of
Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. An important, metropolitan,
commercial center with a sophisticated, educated population that was diverse in
demographics and lifestyle and religion. A city filled with, shall we say gentle
understatement, a city filled with people who were somewhat confused about such
important concepts as identity and meaning in life and direction and purpose. This was
the secular world at its best and worst. And along comes Paul to tell them about the
Christian hope, the work of Jesus Christ, the new life we have been called to and what
this means to a people searching for meaning and focus and direction in their lives.
The overall purpose of the letter is to instruct this Gentile audience in what it means to be
a Christian. John Coakley says,
The opening verses state that meaning very grandly. Through the medium of Jesus
Christ, the author tells his readers, they were chosen as children of God since
before the creation itself, as part of God’s very plan . . . So the passage places
their Christian identity, and by extension our own, in context of the whole of
God’s working.
Kenneth Sehested continues,
Attention to this letter from Paul is among the most needed antidotes to the
nihilism and moral confusion so evident in the world generally, and in our culture
specifically – from the inaugural line about blessing “the “God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ” to the admonition to holiness to the emphasis on Christ’s
saving blood atonement and the confirming presence of the Holy Spirit. In Christ
and Christ alone do we find our salvation. By grace and grace alone are we
redeemed.
It uses interesting literary devices. In our English Translation we break up verses 3
through 14 into a number of smaller sentences but in the original Greek all of this is one
long sentence. One subordinate clause piled upon another, as if the apostle has learned
his rhetorical style from William Faulkner, or vice versa. (David Bartlett) It is a string of
thoughts thrown together in great excitement and the ideas build upon each other like a
fast-flowing stream, following one upon the other with a hurried delight. It’s hard to take
it all in. You are left breathless at the end. It’s breathtaking – both what is said and how it
is expressed.
There is something else about it. And this makes it similar to the Gettysburg Address,
Lincoln’s famous speech which we celebrated the 150th anniversary way back in 2013 in
November. It’s a worthy digression.
Lincoln was not overly enamored with organized religion, but during the course of his
presidency he attended from time to time and came to attend more and more regularly the
New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. Back in November the PostGazette had a wonderful article by Peter Smith which described the theological
underpinnings of the speech and the Biblical allusions and style. Four score and seven
years ago is an allusion to Psalm 90. Our fathers brought forth is similar to the language
of the Christmas story. Conceived in liberty and dedicated carries the Christmas story on
to the dedication of Jesus in the temple. A new birth of liberty harkens to the language of
the gospels to describe the life of the redeemed. But it’s not just the language. Peter
Smith explains:
Although he never names the Bible, the whole of the speech is really suffused with
the Bible in terms of both content and the cadence. People familiar with the Bible
today use myriad modern translations. But in Lincoln’s day, almost every
Protestant who read the Bible used the archaic but subtle intonations of the 17thcentury King James Version, which by then had been shaping the English
language for more than two centuries. In fact, Lincoln referred to that version as
the “Saxon Bible,” a reference to its terse directness. More than two-thirds of the
words of the Gettysburg Address are one syllable, which made it especially supple
in the hands of a gifted speaker. But the plain words also served as a background
in which important concepts to Lincoln – “proposition,” “dedicate,”
consecrate,” “liberty,” stand out starkly.
Much the same can be said about the passage you heard today from Paul’s Letter to the
Ephesians. It uses this same literary device to draw our attention out of the trivial onto
and into the essential. In the midst of this long, breathtaking, sentence there are words
and phrases that pop out at us with a Bam! And it happens again and again.
It begins: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in
Christ with every spiritual blessing. Then we hear about these spiritual blessings. This is
how our lives are different because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And this
is what has been done. He chooses us. Adopts us as His beloved children. Forgives us.
Redeems us. Discloses mysteries to us. Gives us an inheritance. And marks us with the
Holy Spirit. Bam!
In one remarkable sentence Paul takes us from our own individual selves and what it
means for each of us to be saved by Christ – all the way out to the edge of the cosmos
and the purpose for all things – then back again to us and what it means in terms of how
we ought to live our lives right now.
1. God chooses us. Each one of us and all of us. From the beginning of time, from
the foundation of the world. From the very beginning has a plan for each of us
and walks with us throughout our life to bring that plan to fruition.
2. We are precious in His sight. We are the children of God. Each of us and all of us.
We are not just anyone. We are His precious children.
3. We are forgiven. Not by anything we’ve done or believe or deserve. It’s pure
grace, a grace that is lavished upon us.
4. We are redeemed. In Christ the gap of sin which separated us from God is
bridged. Our debts, our trespasses, our sins are washed away by the blood of
Christ in the water of baptism.
5. He makes known to us the mystery of his will, the plan for the fullness of time.
When all things will be gathered up into His arms in the Kingdom. Paul tells this
pagan audience in this cosmopolitan city that there is a plan beyond just them.
There is a God who is resolved to reorder the cosmos with righteousness and
peace and justice and goodness and this God will do so through the kingly rule of
our Lord Jesus Christ. God’s plan is unfailing and unlimited.
6. In Christ He gives us a precious inheritance – to live for the praise of His glory.
Faithful life is the life of praise. This is at the center of who we are in Christ.
So, sing out when we sing that last hymn! Actually, the words to that hymn pretty
well express the words of this sermon, but better!
7. And He has marked us with the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s sign and blessing
and power and strength.
Incredible. This wonderful passage is a hymn of praise. It moves us through the story of
salvation. We are washed. We are sanctified. We are justified in the name of the Lord
Jesus. But it is more than being just about us. This is about all things, all people. This is
our hope and this is why we live to the praise of His glory.