What Is God Really Like? | Ephesians 3:1–13

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

morning friends. Uh my name’s Alex. I’m one of the pastors here. If you’re visiting, would really love a chance to meet you, have a conversation with you, just give you some thoughts on some ideas about what we’re trying to do as a community here in Littleton, who we’re trying to be in this particular place, this particular time. We’re in a series in the book of Ephesians. And in fact, I was trying to sum up this letter written, you know, in 61 AD by a guy in prison to a church. What I’d sum it up is is this constant overriding message that the story he’s telling the who Jesus is part is too big for it to be a Sunday thing.

So somewhere that the over and over and over messages this this invite to allow it to infuse. You might even say in fact like every single part of your life. So, you get to live it out day after day That is the kind of community as he sketches it out that he imagines for us to become. So, if you’re someone who has jumped in and done that, maybe you’re new to faith, you you kind of recently started following Jesus or maybe you had a moment where it felt like you jumped back in after being away uh and and it just felt like the story was renewed.

In a few weeks, we’re doing baptisms. is we get a good old horse trough out on stage, a clean one, not used by a horse, and we fill it with water, also not used by a horse. And then we dunk people in it. And then we remember the most important part is to bring them back up because there’s horror stories all over the place about what happens if you don’t bring people back up from a baptism or tank. And so it’s this for us this kind of rockus celebration. I think there’s some people like, “Are you serious about this?” No, it’s not serious at all. uh when we jump into this next passage, I think overall that there’s this overarching theme here that I I hope we grasp today.

And to started, I’ I’d like to tell you a story. About a week ago, my wife asked me a question. She said, “Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?” And because of my pastor, I was like, “Maybe I’ll just say Jesus because that feels like it’s always the answer. I’ll just throw in I met Jesus.” And yeah, there we go. But I sense that wasn’t the answer she was looking for. And so I thought and and my problem is this. She’s moved in more celebrated circles than I have. She got to meet the prime minister of Great Britain.

She got to meet lords, ladies, members of the aristocracy. And I haven’t. So I thought for a while and then my my answer in the end was this. It was Jim Harour, once the beloved coach of the Michigan Wolverines, uh, and now the not so beloved coach of the San Die no LA Chargers, who will soon be 0 and5 after they play the Broncos this afternoon. I want you to know that is the first positive Broncos thing I’ve ever said. And that, friends, is called growth. I thought about just saying, you know, like suddenly there’ll be one and four cuz the Bronco.

No, I didn’t. I I’m I’m becoming part of you. But I say I I tell you the story about Jim Har, not because he’s incredibly famous. Uh I hope you’ve met someone more famous to be honest. People came up after the first service and told me some of the people they got to meet. But but it’s the circumstances that I met him in that that I want us to focus on. You see, I met Jim Harba, shook his hand, talked to him face to face, and didn’t know it was him. There was a good reason. I was in hospital. We just had our third kid.

And so, December 12th, 2007. And we were Huh. 17. 17. And everyone’s just helping today, aren’t they? 17. And And of course, like we’re about to go home. We’re waiting. And and I’m tired. I mean, I’m a guy who’s just been through a birth. That’s an exhausting thing to have to experience. And you guys out there, you know how hard this is. And so I’m tired. And in walks Santa Claus, Lobby Farana, Chris Kringle, Father Christmas. And yet there’s something strange about this Father Christmas, this this Mrs. Claus that comes with him.

She seems too young to be Mrs. Claus. And and he’s just too like this to be Santa. There’s some real muscle there underneath the costume. And so we chat, they give us some gifts for the babies that were dropping around the whole warden. And then I went home and it wasn’t until the next day that someone who found out that we were in the hospital said, “Did you see Jim Harbaugh? He was there giving out gifts.” I said, “No, I didn’t see him. I must have missed him.” And then I had this moment where I was like, “Oh, I did see Jim Harbaugh.

He just didn’t look like Jim Harbaugh.” Now, why do I tell you that story? Although you can’t compare Jim Harbaugh to God, I I think actually as people, we do this kind of thing with God a lot. He turns up and and and at times we miss him. Turns up in ways that we didn’t expect him to turn up. Turns up through people that we didn’t expect him to turn up through. And and at times it catches us off guard. One of the things I would say is this, that God is constantly surprising. When you think how big God is, how much bigger he is than than us, there’s always a surprise there.

It’s why when I get to pray for lots of you in the community, what what I pray for you is this. That God would surprise you. That he’d turn up in ways that you didn’t expect. That he’d catch you off guard. Because I think at times we think as followers of Jesus, which many of us in the room are, we got all of this stuff figured out. At times we think we have God figured out. We’ve got him in a box and he’s not going to escape from that. We’ve assumed that we’ve got every detail we need and now we know. And then at times I wonder if we also have the wrong impression.

Do we assume that he’s more like us perhaps than he is? And we got every detail that we need. And what we need is for God to break out of that box and and to do what he does, which is to surprise us again. The philosopher Voltater 18th century said this. In the beginning, God created man in his own image. And man has been trying to repay the favor ever since. We assume God thinks like us, operates like us. We put him into our own personal box. So the heartbeat of chap chapter 3, I think, is this. Paul, this writer in this first century, he wants us to know what God has done and how God sees us.

So, if you are someone that might say, “I have questions about that. There’s times where I feel like God doesn’t love me.” And and certainly there’s times where I feel he doesn’t like me. I think this next couple of weeks is Paul speaking straight to people like you and to me. We’re going to break it into two halves. Next week I’m preaching the second half. It’s a gift of a passage. It’s one of the the highlights of scripture. And this one is difficult, challenging. I got to like Wednesday with this passage and I’m like, I’m still in a fog of rhetoric.

I’m reading all these commentaries on Wednesday. I’m like, I have no clue what the heart of this passage is. And then as you work it in, as you push it in, I think in a beautiful way, it becomes clear. So, let’s pray. We’re going to invite God into this space because it’s him you need to hear from, not me. God, I pray in this moment, this space, that I can be just a little translucent, that people can see through me, to you. That the words of my heart, the words of my mouth and meditations of my heart will be pleasing to you.

That every person in the room who has questions about how you see them might start to get a sense of who you are and how you see them. Amen. Paul wants us to know what God has done and how God sees us. But he starts in this really strange place after finishing chapter 2 where he says that there’s a new humanity that God has shaped a new humanity that’s invited people together from all sorts of different backgrounds that the old rules don’t fit anymore. He says for this reason I Paul the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles.

Verse one. This is it in the New Testament for everyone. conversion. It’s because of all this, because of all that happened that I, Paul, the prisoner of Messiah Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles. It feels like, as things often do can do with Paul, it feels like a real tangent. And then you start to pick up on the fact that because he’s so brilliant, after all, the tangent isn’t really a tangent. It’s actually right spot on exactly what you need to [snorts] hear. Verse 13 at the end of this passage says this. I ask you therefore not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are for your glory.

Now, I know it’s counterintuitive to to look at the first verse and the last verse of a section, but I think they come together and show us exactly why he’s writing this, why this kind of aside, why this kind of by the way that he throws in there. You see, imagine yourself as a person in the first century. Somewhere in this story, God has done something he’s never done before. There are all these new communities. There’s Jewish people, there’s Gentile people, there’s slave people, there’s free people, there’s men, there’s women, and they’re all pulled together.

And you’re getting excited about this community you’ve jumped into. And everything feels like you’re part of this new lady’s thing. And then you find out that the person who’s been championing this in your particular area is in jail. Everything seems to have gone wrong for him. It seems like maybe you should get out of this thing. Maybe it’s not as true as you hoped it was. I I phrased it this way for you. I think they think like this. If it’s all gone wrong for Paul, was Paul all wrong about Jesus? That’s the question that comes up.

And and so what Paul’s doing in this first verse, this last verse is saying like, “No, no, it hasn’t gone all wrong.” This is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you start doing new things. When you start bringing together people that didn’t belong together before, there’s all sorts of people that don’t like that kind of thing. There’s people that had power before that maybe feel it’s slipping away from them. And then for Paul, this first century guy, he doesn’t see spiritual and physical as different. We we kind of have this sense that there’s a spiritual world maybe somewhere and there’s a physical world right here, but but Paul’s like, they’re together.

And so the spiritual world is like it’s here. It’s close. And he says, “Somewhere there’s a whole bunch of push back to this new invitation that God has made to us.” Paul says it’s no surprise that I’m in jail. Don’t feel like this is things gone wrong. This, friends, is things gone right. That’s his introduction. That’s his aside. And then he jumps into verse two. And this is where it gets dense. So, so track with me on this. I’m going to give you some other translations that are a bit easier to read than the NIV.

Surely you’ve heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you. That is the mystery made known to me by revelation as I have already written briefly. What does that mean? This is the message version. I take it that you’re familiar with the part I was given in God’s plan for including everybody. I got the inside story on this from God himself just as I wrote you. Paul’s a bit of an oddity. He he jumps into this story late. Maybe he was alive when Jesus was alive. Maybe he was on the Sanhedrin that sentenced Jesus to death.

But he’s a bit young for that. So he kind of just turns up, has this moment where he sees Jesus for himself. And then instead of going and meeting with other Christians, he he goes into the desert and has this moments these years where Jesus, he says, teaches him personally. This is Galatians, another letter to a church in Galatia. But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach amongst the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being.

I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Paul says, “All this stuff I’m telling you, this role I’m playing, wasn’t given to me because someone thought I was good at this. wasn’t given me to me cuz I applied for a job. It it was given to me by what you might call revelation. It was as though in those three years, the time Paul lost that the other followers of Jesus had with Jesus, God gave it to him in this spiritual way. And now he’s going telling everyone about this story.

Paul receives this by revelation says, “I’ve already written to you about this before.” Paul says things that I feel like I can never get away with saying. Imagine if I came to you on a Sunday and said, “Hey, by the way, just so you know, I was away in the mountains this week. I I was praying a lot and God told me some brand new stuff directly that we’re going to kind of move towards as a community.” You’re a pretty suspicious crowd. I think you’d be like, “I don’t like the sound of that. That sounds a little messy.” But Paul is living in a different place.

God is using him for a very specific purpose. This is where I want you to really track with him because I think this is the heartbeat of everything he’s saying. In reading this, then you’ll be able to understand my insights into the mystery of Christ. What does he mean by mystery? Doesn’t mean like puzzle. Doesn’t mean like a jigsaw that you’re trying to put together. He’s talking about the work that Jesus has done and our attempts to try and understand it kind of kind of get a clear picture of it. which was not made known to people in other generations as it has now been revealed by the spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets message translation again as you read over what I’ve written to you’ll be able to see for yourselves into the mystery of Christ none of our ancestors understood this only in our time has it been made clear by God’s spirit through his holy apostles and prophets of this new order essentially says this God has given us a glimpse of himself in the past.

Now God has revealed who he is in a new way. The brilliant professor Jaime Davis says this. God has acted shockingly, suddenly, and disruptively as he always said he would. All through the Old Testament are weaved these ideas that God’s going to do something new. Little phrases like, “I’m doing a new thing.” Little phrases like, “I’m going to give you a real heart, not one of stone.” little ideas that there’s going to be some new story coming out of the old story. One more verse. Verse six. This mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are hes together with Israel.

Members together of one body and sharers together in the promise of Christ Jesus. Outsiders and insiders, Paul says, are together in the way of Jesus. Whoever you are, whatever your background, whatever you look like. And now in this story, there is a new story that invites every single person who has ever lived in. Paul says, “God has revealed himself in a new way.” Which raises this question to get to the heartbeat of what Jesus has done. What did the old way look like? What was the the way before that? Who was God before then?

Maybe you’ve been in a conversation with someone outside of church and they said something like this. I don’t really get like the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament. In the Old Testament, he seems kind of angry all the time. Seems like he’s kind of grumpy. And in the New Testament, he seems happy all the time, and it seems like everyone’s good. Like, I don’t I don’t get that difference. Maybe you felt that difference yourself. You read sections of the Old Testament, you’re like, I I don’t see Jesus here.

I have all these questions that come up. I don’t know how to get answers to them. What did that old story look like? I would suggest the old story that Paul is talking about is closer to the new story than most of us have been led to believe. And we kind of start to see it emerge in one central passage that Tim Mackey at the Bible Project says is like the John 3:16 of the Old Testament. It’s the one that fires links to all sorts of other places, gets quoted over and over again. And so read this passage and then see who it reminds you of.

So in Exodus 34, God has just given Moses, the leader, the the law code, the Ten Commandments. He’s given them these rules. And Moses response has looked like this. Show me yourself. Don’t just give me rules. Give me a sense of who you are. Let me see behind the curtain. And God’s response to him has been, “Well, you can’t see me completely. It would kill you. It would destroy you, but I can show you just a glimpse.” And so, this is what he says. Verse 5, “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with him and proclaimed his name, the Lord.” And then he does something he’s never done up till this point.

He shows him just a bit of his character. And if we as people today in America would start to say, “Would tell me something about God.” Maybe we would say, “Well, he’s omnipotent. He’s all powerful. Can do anything he wants.” Maybe we say he’s omnisient. He knows everything. Sees you at every moment. Can’t hide anything from him. Don’t try and keep secrets. Or maybe we’d say he’s um present. He’s everywhere. No hiding. Can’t get away. Then look at how God describes himself in this next verse. 36. And he passed in front of Moses proclaiming the Lord the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.

The God of the universe in this moment where he’s going to describe to a human being for the first time what he’s actually like doesn’t describe any of the things he can do. He says, “I am the God who is compassionate. I am the God who is gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” He continues, “Maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. Yet, he does not leave the guilty and punished. He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” And maybe that’s the part where we’re like, “Wait, what’s that part?

I have questions about that. But to a person reading this 3,000 4,000 years ago, they don’t see this as a math thing. Do I have to worry about some kind of punishment for my kids or am I getting punished something? That’s just not how it comes across. He’s not talking about generational curses or something like this. He essentially says, if you boil it down, God forgiving an incredible amount and holding people to what they’ve done a little. It gives this perspective of just how gracious God is, how much these characteristics in the first few verses lead that God is compassionate and gracious and slow to anger and abounding in love and faithfulness.

In Exodus, we have this moment where just a little bit God pulls back the curtain. We get just a little glimpse. And so read these words with me again for a moment. Raccoon. Compassionate like a parent of a child. Same word that is in Hebrew for womb. Just say raccoon with me. Raccoon. You now know as much Hebrew as I do. Congratulations. And maybe you’ve had someone in your life that wasn’t able to love you like a parent might love you. And God says, “I’m not like that person. Compassionate like a parent to a child that they love.” Shaun, gracious, offering favor and generosity.

And maybe you’ve met people and been in relationship with people that are always playing the plus and minus card. Always, it’s always a battle. And God says, “I’m not like those people. I’m generous. Show favor without any expectation that anything is returned.” Ericapam, slow to anger. literally in Hebrew long of nose. But the best translation I could give you in English is like takes a deep breath before getting angry. And maybe you’ve been in a relationship with a father, mother, husband, wife, teacher, pastor who wasn’t slow to anger, but flew off the handle and you never quite knew where they were.

God says, “I’m not like those people. slow to anger. Chess said, “Overflowing with loyal love keeps his covenants, his promises.” Maybe you’ve been in a relationship with someone who couldn’t keep their promises or wouldn’t keep their promises. And in the midst of that, God says, “I’m not like that person. had met, faithful, reliable, trustworthy. Maybe you’re in a relationship with someone that couldn’t be trusted, that perhaps wanted to be but couldn’t rely on them. God says, “I’m not like those people.” See, Voltater is right to a degree.

We do take God and we base him on an image, but it’s usually not ours. It’s usually someone else. Maybe you had a relationship where there was this person and it sticks in your mind and you hold on to it and you say God must be like that and and God gives all these reasons I’m not like that person. When God is given a chance to describe himself to the first human be human being he’ll ever describe him to he doesn’t pick omnipotent omnipresent or these words that we might throw in. Says I’m the God who’s gracious. God is compassionate, slow to anger, overflowing in loyal love, and faithfulness.

But here’s the challenge part. Here’s the the part that sits in the text and we have to pay attention to for one group of people, one family, one ethnic group in this particular place, in this particular time, is how the story starts. But even within that Old Testament, suddenly there’s moments where it breaks and suddenly it’s like a dam that just seems like it’s about to burst. There’s little hints that the story is bigger than that. When you look at the story of Jonah, this beautiful book that you can teach in about 30 seconds, but you could spend weeks and weeks on, there is a moment where Jonah is told, “Go and tell this story of my faithful love to another group of people.

Invite them in.” And Jonah gets on a boat and he goes in the wrong direction because he can’t handle the fact that God might be gracious to someone he doesn’t care for. And God sends a whale, a fish, or whatever it is. and and Jonah is given a second chance. And in that moment, God Jonah loves that God is the God who is compassionate [sighs] and gracious and slow to anger and full of loyal love and faithfulness. And then he goes and preaches the worst message anyone has preached in the history of the world. Repent people.

And everyone does what he said. It’s supposed to be the other way round. You’re supposed to preach great messages and no one does what you say. But at least that’s what I feel happens some of the time. Maybe I’m a little whatever. [snorts] Preaches the worst message ever. And everyone responds. And then his reaction looks like this. Jonah 4:1 and2. But to Jonah this, their repentance, their forgiveness seemed very wrong. And he became angry. He prayed to the Lord. Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home?

This is why I tried to fortore by fleeing to Tarsus. Get this verse two and three exact quote right. I knew that you are gracious. I knew you are compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love, a God who relents sending calamity. Now Lord, take away my life for it is better for me to die than to live. Essentially, if you were to translate Jonah’s words, he says, I knew what you were like. I knew that you were able to forgive people. I knew that your passion was for more than just our people. knew this is how you would respond.

Jonah isn’t pleased that his enemies have chosen to turn to God. He’s angry because of how God responds. And while the people of Nineveh, the worst of all places, the most broken town, celebrate, Jonah sits sulking on a hill because he can’t believe that God can be passionate towards those that he hates. The mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are hes together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Jesus Christ. Stories for everyone now. And so here’s my question.

Am I wondering as I pondered over this text? If you ask me the Exodus story, it sounds a lot like our guy, right? It it sounds a lot like the guy we talk about all the time. It looks like Jesus. Despite all the questions about Old Testament versus New Testament, it looks like the same heartbeat. So, if God is the same in Paul’s new story, what has changed? What’s different? For a second, I want us to go back in time to the moment the first human being went into space. This is Yuri Gagarin person who was the first one to experience what it was to look at Earth while not stood on Earth to experience space and the beautiful richness of the green and the blue and the white the beauty there is.

And he said a lot of things about this experience. One of them was this. Looking at the earth from afar, you realize it’s too small for conflict, just big enough for cooperation. Sounds like something God might say about us. an invite he might have for all of us. But one of the things that he was said to have said that he didn’t was actually a quote by Kruev the Russian president at the time. He said Gagarin flew into space but didn’t see God there. Didn’t see God. Went to that level that you might expect to see something and he saw nothing.

And CS Lewis, the British philosopher thinker, wrote a response to this that looked like this. Shakespeare in one sense is present at every moment in every play he wrote. But he’s never present in the same way as false staff or Lady McBth. Nor is he diffused through the play like a gas. My point is that if God does exist, he is related to the universe more as an author is related to a play than as one object in the universe is related to another. CS Lewis said, “Of course you wouldn’t see God if you just went into space.

Doesn’t matter how far you go. Doesn’t matter how fast you go. You don’t encounter God that way.” He said, “Imagine it more like a story.” that if one of Shakespeare’s characters, pick Lady McBth because that’s his example, started wandering around the castle that she has in Scotland, looking behind every tapestry, looking inside every cupboard, looking inside all of the grounds to find Shakespeare, would she ever find him, no matter how much she looked? He says, “No, of course she wouldn’t. There’s only one way that she can find him.” And CS Lewis in Mere Christianity changes his example to Hamlet says Hamlet could initiate nothing.

It must be Shakespeare’s doing. To CS Lewis the answer was clear. If you wanted to see God face to face, the only way you could see him is if he were to write himself into the story. What’s different in Paul’s new story? the one he’s telling everyone he can possibly tell about Jesus. He’s saying that in Jesus, God stepped onto the stage that he lived our life to invite us into his story. In Jesus, there is a complete revelation. One of the things I like to remind myself when I’m trying to wrestle with the two different stories is this that somewhere this is true that the father is like Jesus.

He has always been like Jesus. He will always be like Jesus. When Paul writes to another church in around the same time, he says this, “The son Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created, things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things have been created. Through him and for him he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. The invisible God in Jesus leads a visible life.

We get to see him at work. And then he does something that would have been unfathomable for Paul to expect. He goes and dies for humanity so they can belong in a completely different way than they have ever belonged before. And who God is is summed up perhaps in this one verse in Luke 23:34 where he says Jesus father forgive them. Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.” And he says this in the moment he’s about to be crucified. And we might look at that story and say, “But they did know, right?

They did know what they were doing.” And we might imagine Jesus saying, “Not really. Not completely. [snorts] They could never fully understand what they were doing in that moment, what it cost. But what we see is that the the Jesus that lives life on earth, the one with power over his enemies, prays for his enemies, prays that they too might experience the forgiveness that is offered, be welcomed in to the story. That’s the difference. But here’s the challenge I experienced, and maybe you experience it, too. I would suggest I still live life like Jonah.

Maybe you do as well. Maybe there is an assumption. They still prefer justice for people I disagree with. People that have hurt me or hurt people that I love. It’s exactly where Jonah finds himself. The the people of Nineveh have been terrible to his nation. They have persecuted them and damaged them. He has every right to demand justice, doesn’t he? And so there’s a very good reason why he’s mad at them and doesn’t want God to forgive them. He wants compassion for him in the fish. He doesn’t want compassion for them ever.

There’s a reason for that. And so I have moments where I say, “I’ve experienced this or I don’t agree with how these people see this and I want God to do the justice thing for me.” But even there there’s a brokenness to how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we see God. Ann Lamont, the brilliant Ann Lamont says this, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people that you do.” When you have moments to look around and see people and say, “God must dislike them because I dislike them.

He must feel this about them because I feel this about them. That can be on a group level. Certain type of person, certain person that thinks a certain kind of way. You’re like, “Ah, darn them. Those people, God must hate them.” Maybe for you it’s personal. I’m not saying that the thing isn’t bad. I’m not saying that you should forget it. Not saying there might not be a lawsuit. Not saying that they have to move in. I’m not saying any of the things that you might assume from that have to happen. But I am saying somewhere what we take from this story is God steps onto the stage forgiving those that find themselves enemies doing everything he can even up until his death to make a way for that to happen and then invites us into that story.

We like to say living in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus. But the heart of Jesus is there for a reason. It’s so we can’t get out of it by saying we’re doing the thing and we’re doing it badly. When living in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus, know that God’s heart is for your enemies. No matter how you see them, no matter what you think of them, his heart is for them. Just like it was for the people of Nineveh and just like it was for us when we were outside of the story. I think the scandal of grace, the hard part is that times it just doesn’t feel fair.

There times where we want it to be fair, where we want to control it. God says that’s just not how it works. People get invited in no matter what they have done. And sometimes the hardest part is it’s easier for the person that’s done wrong to step into the story than it is for us when the wrong has been done to us. It’s easy for those that are most broken to see grace and put their hands up and say yes. And it’s harder for us if we felt we’ve been right most of the time to admit that at times we’ve been broken, wrong, and in need of grace as well.

There’s this moment at the end of the Count of Monte Cristo, the movie version. Let me say some of you know my deep passion for the book, The Count of Monte Cristo, and it’s it’s not in the book, it’s in the movie. But there’s this moment where the count has this opportunity to get back everything he’s lost to have a moment of a redemption arc that closes where everything is good. It finishes well. And there’s a moment in this story where he holds off. He backs off for a second. He’s about to jump in and something holds him back.

What he says in that moment is this. If you ever love me, don’t rob me of my hate. It’s all I have. [snorts] It’s all I have. Sometimes we might put our hands up and say, “Hate is the feeling we know best.” It’s the thing that reminds us that we’re better than everyone else. It’s the thing reminds us that those people are truly evil and perhaps don’t deserve God’s grace. And yet Paul is baffled that the gospel has the power to reconcile people who are far apart. He’s baffled that it’s brought everyone in from every different background and still does the same today. really quickly. 79 I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace given me through the working of his power.

Although I am less than the least of all God’s the Lord’s people. This grace was given to me. Watch this verse. To preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ. He pictures this grace that can go everywhere, pull anybody in and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery which for ages past was kept hidden in God who created all things. You picture Paul’s excitement that he gets to live at this moment in history, this time where he gets to share this brand new thing. Focus on this one more time.

His intent was that now through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. What does all that mean? He says, “We friends are witnesses.” to the earth, to the spiritual realm that it intersects with. That when we live this kind of life, this forgiving, gracious kind of life that is brought into being by the God who is compassionate, who is gracious, who slow to anger, who is full of faithful love.

When we live like that, we are witnesses to the story that when you are able to forgive an enemy, to love an enemy like Jesus loves them, it’s the greatest witness to the story that God has written in Jesus that we follow the one with power over his enemies, but also the one who prays over and for his enemies. witnesses to God’s goodness even when life doesn’t feel good because we’ve come to embrace a story that is over every other part of our lives. That’s what Paul is imagining in this passage. And he finishes with this one invite in him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.

And that’s where I want to finish last verse we’ll talk about. He makes this invite and says, “Now because of Jesus, you are invited in. Jesus has done something that enables anybody to come, no matter who they are. And you don’t get to come because you’re brilliant with theological terms. You don’t get to come because you’re good with words or you have a good description of who Jesus might be. Get to come because he invited you. Even when your theology is a mess, your understanding is all over the place. You don’t fix that and get to come.

You get to come because you are invited by the God of the universe. I’m a little obsessed with these Instagram moments of people painting uh each other. Not painting each other, painting pictures of each other. And there’s these husbands and wives that get together and they do a date night and the wife paints the husband on a piece of canvas and then the husband does the same. And it seems like in these the the guy is the girl is always brilliant at it. She creates these images that you’re like, “Oh, that looks exactly like him.” And then it seems like the guy is less good.

And it gets worse than that. But neither of those things signifies the closeness of the relationship. It’s not proving anything. What matters is what’s under the surface. How you in relationship together, what you promise to each other. It’s not your ability to paint the picture. It’s the invite, the relationship that matters. And that’s Paul’s new story. In this new story, anybody is welcome. In Jesus, God steps onto the stage and invites us in to play a part. Would you stand with me? And God, I pray for my friends.

Please speak to them and through them. May the goodness of this story grasp their hearts. It’s a story too good for just Sunday. I pray that you’d surprise them by showing up in their week, by helping them live out every part of who they are in the world around them at school, in the marketplace, on the golf course, wherever they find themselves. Help them to live out that way of Jesus. And help us to be full of gratitude for what you, God, have done. Amen.