Grace and Peace

All right, good morning, guys. We will go ahead and start finding those elusive seats. Man, great to see everybody here today. I, for one, am so grateful for all the sunshine, Caroline. I love all the warm weather. We have been trying to soak that up and take full advantage of that. That’s been—it’s been a lot of fun.

We have come to our time of the service of congregational prayer. We’ll go and put a slide up on the screen. We’re going to pray for the things that Caroline had just mentioned a few moments ago. You know, all those things—the parent equip and child dedication, the George Newton scholarship, and the youth Spring retreat. You know, all those have to deal with the Next Generation. You know, some of those Next Generation we got to see join the choir this morning. Ellis was holding one of them. You know, we’re going to have some of the families come together in a few weeks for Alan and Beth to share some of their wisdom of what they’ve learned as parents and trained them up. You know, we want to invest in the next generation at Charleston Southern. This is where Becka and I met. She was the very first girl I met on campus, and we want to be able to help pay forward what Pastor Newton did for us for so many years years ago as well. The youth, as they get together next month, we want to be able to invest in them not just monetarily but also with our prayers. So we’re going to spend a few minutes praying over the next generation, and because it’s a bullet list, you have the opportunity to pray for whichever one strikes a chord with you.

I just got really good news, though, that I would like to celebrate with all this. We might be able to take a name off of our prayer list. Is that what I’m hearing? Man, well, we’ll keep it up. But I was just told that Mr. Fred Benton and his CT scans came back clear recently. So, man, praise the Lord. Man, I’m so grateful to hear that, and I’m sure you are fully prepared to have your name mentioned in church and everything. So, yeah, awesome. So obviously, if one of those prayer requests that’s in the bulletin insert—if one of those is so near and dear and you want to pray for that, man, feel free to do that. Otherwise, you can pray for one of those. I’ll put a bow on it here in a moment, and we’ll continue with our service. Y’all take it away.

Thank you, Father. Thank you so much, Father. Thank you, Lord. Thank you for the good news that was shared with us this morning about my friend and Lord, how You’ve met him in the midst of his medical journey. Lord, thank You for that. I pray for more of that, Lord God, that we would get to celebrate more of those stories soon. Please, God, please, Father. I pray for the children that are being born, Lord. I thank You for them. Thank You for providing babies and the noises that babies bring with our services, which we love to hear, Lord. I pray that You would come alongside them and their parents, that You would help those children walk with You deeply for a long time, God, that they would grow to be students, Father, that get to be part of a youth Spring retreat like the one that Carter’s got for us in a month or so. God, I pray for the middle and high schoolers, God, that they would go into that just hungry for You, and they would come out of it having a more deeply rooted sense of who they are because of what You’ve done for them, and a passion to take the gospel to their classmates. Lord, I thank You for Charleston Southern, God. I thank You for the investment that this church made into me without ever knowing me, God, by just contributing to our Baptist funds which find their way to universities like CSU. Lord, I want to thank You for the student that You’ve already picked to receive the George Newton scholarship, and God, I want to thank You for the hard work that they’re doing. God, I ask that You would set them apart for a lifetime of ministry. Lord, thank You for this morning. Thank You for bringing us to church today, God. I pray that You would make Your presence tangible and known, Father, as we begin a new series in the book of Ephesians, that You Would you just reveal Yourself to us in some unique ways, Lord. We love You, and it’s in Your great name that we pray. Amen.

Well, you can go ahead and open up your Bible to the book of Ephesians. If you’re still navigating the road map of your scriptures, you just open it halfway, you probably land it in the Psalms. Hang a right, you eventually you’ll hit Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Keep going a few more books, and you’ll get to Ephesians.

As you’re turning there, I want to tell you a story about a missionary. This missionary had received a pretty unique assignment from his organization, that the job that he was told to do is just go. He wasn’t given a whole lot of direction. He just knew that his job was to just go, just find some people that don’t know about Jesus and tell them about Jesus, and maybe God will give you some fruit there, and you’ll be able to do a little something. Just go, just keep going, keep working, keep trying.

He lands in this city, and he starts noticing some of the local culture, and he’s thinking about, okay, what are ways that the gospel might make sense to these people? And he just starts sharing the gospel. The crazy thing is, I guess it shouldn’t be crazy for us as believers in the Bible and in God, God starts to give this man incredible fruit as a missionary, so much so that so many people are coming to faith in Jesus that it’s actually disrupting the local economy.

This missionary, his intention was never to bring any harm to this group of people, but what’s happening is there’s this whole trade of workers that are out of a job because folks who were buying all these little idols and these trinkets to their gods stopped buying those things. They didn’t need them anymore because they knew the true God, Jesus Christ. So they take this missionary, and they take the people that are with him, and they drag him into the like a local gathering place for him to be tried by all the people.

You can imagine the scene where this guy, he just came wanting to bring good news, but what instead is happening is as more and more people are coming to trust in it, he is being actively persecuted. Now this didn’t happen in some far-flung corner of South America. This did not happen in the country that Becca and I served at either. This happened in a city called Ephesus, and that missionary, his name was the Apostle Paul.

You, I have a little thing on the screen, the theater where Paul and some of his companions would be dragged into is a theater that would have sat about 30 or 40,000 people. When Paul arrives in the city of Ephesus, he is preaching the gospel, and there’s this temple to this false god, we’ll get into that in a minute. So many people believe in the gospel that the local silversmiths get so upset that they drag some of Paul’s chief followers, his chief disciples, people that had just themselves placed their faith in Jesus, they dragged them onto that little stage in the very middle, and you can imagine the seats are packed. Some spectators who just want to see a good show, some are angry about what’s happening to their local town, and some are there just because they got riled up, and Paul’s sitting there thinking, what in the world have I done?

He stays in the city of Ephesus, the Bible tells us, for about three years, ministering to that church that in its inception had created so much havoc. And we’re going to sit in the book of Ephesians for not three years, it’ll be a few months, though I will spare you guys that. Has anybody in the room ever taken like a deep dive through the book of Ephesians before? Maybe, maybe not. There’s a lot of reasons why we should do this, though, such as have you ever wondered why Jesus had to die? Like if you’re being honest, or you ever wondered, man, is all this church stuff, or does the Bible, does it really matter? Like I know I’m supposed to be here because it’s good for me to be here, but like why am I here? Or even why do we worship? How should we pray? Who are we as Christians? Why should churches be integrated? How can we have unity? What’s the meaning of marriage? How can you be a good parent or an employee or a boss?

Ephesians touches on all of this and more. The book of Ephesians is wild. It’s only six chapters, 155 verses. It can only take you maybe 20 minutes to read it by yourself, but it has this marriage of incredibly high theology with incredibly high practicality. It’s not every Sunday I get to see that, by the way. That’s—I could preach through most things, but that was pretty cool. Okay, incredibly high theology. We’re going to cover some words over the next few weeks. If you just gloss down through the book of Ephesians, we’re going to cover words like in verse four, holy and blameless. Verse five, the Bible says we’re predestined. Verse seven, the word redemption. Verse nine, there’s a mystery of God’s will. Verse 11, that predestined word comes up again. Verse 13, we’re sealed with the Holy Spirit. What in the world does that mean? Incredibly high theology, but also incredibly high practicality. Whenever we make our turn at chapter four, we’re going to be looking at things like what is marriage meant for. There’s this whole thing about like spiritual and Christian warfare. There’s workplace relationships. We’re going to get into all these things over the next few months as we study the book of Ephesians.

There’s going to be one main thing that I want you to take away, and it’s the main point of today’s sermon. If you’re a note taker, you go ahead and write this down: being in Christ changes everything in us. Being in Christ changes everything in us. Read Ephesians 1:1-2 with me: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by God’s will, to the faithful saints in Christ Jesus at Ephesus: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Not a whole lot of content to work from, but it’s a perfect springboard for us to jump into this book. Immediately we get the author, Paul. Paul says he is an apostle of Jesus Christ. Now, if you don’t know too much of the history around this time, I give it to you. Paul would have written the book of Ephesians at about A.D. 65 or just before A.D. 65 when he died in imprisonment in Rome under the administration of Nero. So next time you’re at a dinner party, if you want to make yourself feel pretty good about yourself, you say, “Hey, you know when Paul wrote the book of Ephesians?” and they’ll give you some answer, you be like, “I think I know the answer. I heard it recently.” Verses—or chapter three and chapter four tell us that Paul was writing from prison. Acts chapter 28, it’s the history of the early church. Acts chapter 28 has Paul in prison, so we think at some time in that chapter of Acts, that’s when Paul wrote this letter.

Now, this is a letter. It’s what some people call an epistle. A letter was already a genre of writing at the time that Paul lived. He didn’t invent a new style of writing, but what Paul did do was he wrote a letter that was about five times as long as any other letters would have been in that time. Paper and ink, even the ability to write, well, those were rarities. So for Paul to take the time, even to write what for us is pretty short—this is a memo for Paul—to take the time and do this would come at extreme cost to him. Let alone he’s in prison, and it’s a different prison system. He’s having to support himself. Friends and family are bringing him meals. It’s a totally different time. So he is the author. He’s writing to the faithful saints in Christ Jesus at Ephesus. Now, what’s interesting, at least interesting to guys like me, is that the book of Ephesians has a highly impersonal feel to it. Here’s what I mean: the book of Philippians, if you were to turn your Bible just one book over, probably three pages in your lap right there, you’d get to the book of Philippians. In the book of Philippians, Paul is mentioning specific people by name in the church at Philippi. He goes so far as to say, “Hey, you two folks, you two ladies, y’all just go ahead and work out your differences, be done with this.” In the book of Romans, it’s to the left of Ephesians, in the book of Romans, Paul references 24 people by name in the last chapter itself. Paul’s writing is usually extremely personal. He’s mentioning people, he’s drawing upon his own relationships with people, but Ephesians doesn’t have very much of that at all. So a lot of people think that the The book of Ephesians was actually meant for a lot of churches around the city and around the region. It would be the difference between a group email versus a private phone call. The book of Ephesians is like a group email, and we are going to read Paul’s email. Let’s get a little background information on the city of Ephesus. Ephesus was the capital of Asia Minor under the Roman Empire. You see, the Roman Empire was so expansive they had to set up small sub-capitals around the Empire to be able to rule the whole thing. They didn’t have high-speed communication or transportation, so this was the best way to do it. It would have been on the southwest corner of modern-day Turkey. We’ve got that for you; that’s where Ephesus would have been. Might be a little difficult for you to see, but the city of Ephesus actually sat in a port, much like Charleston.

The city of Ephesus at the time of this writing had the third-highest population in the Roman Empire. Can anybody else imagine what it’s like to live in an overpopulated port city? There’s an estimated 250,000 people, which at that time was massive for them. That meant they had wild wealth as all that port money was flowing into the local economy, wild diversity because all that port was drawing in people from around the world, and that diversity was showing up in the local church, and Paul would have to address that.

Now, it’s not just a rich port city; it’s also the home to the Temple of Diana or Artemis, depending on if you are of Roman background or Greek background. I’ll get more into that in the weeks to come. This temple, which we only have the ruins of today, is one of the ancient wonders of the world. Artemis was the Greek goddess of fertility, so families or singles would bring animal sacrifices to this temple to be slaughtered for God to bless them with children, to even make them attractive to others, or to give them power in their romantic relationships. Now, this is a huge temple, so this is happening all the time, and people are buying these little silver idols dedicated to that goddess.

Not only did it have this temple; it had another one. It had an imperial temple. Now, we don’t do this here in America, but under the Roman Empire, the Romans, part of the way they spread their influence, they set up these temples in major cities where people would come and bring animal sacrifices to Caesar, the king. Now, here’s where we have a rub with, or is this a disconnect for us as 2025 Americans? The people in this time at the writing, they believed that Caesar was God in the flesh. So we talk about Jesus being our Savior and being our Lord. When Paul is going to write that Jesus is Lord, the word that he’s using is Jesus is Caesar. He’s the king; he’s the ruler. It’s a highly political statement. The people that Paul was ministering to in the city of Ephesus, they would have had to deal with: is Caesar God and Jesus is like him, or is Jesus God and Caesar is not? They’re having to wrestle with those two things.

Not only was there this huge temple to a false god, Artemis; not only was there another temple to the king, but the city of Ephesus was also home to a bunch of what we just might just call witchcraft—just local witch voodoo doctors that you might take a small offering or a sacrifice to for them to give you financial success, for you to get back at somebody, for you to get some sort of favor from the gods.

Imagine being a new Christian in the city of Ephesus, and you weren’t raised in a Christian home because there’s no such thing as that. Your parents didn’t go to a parent equip where they could learn biblical truths for parenting. You weren’t dedicated at a church because there’s no churches for you to be dedicated at when you were born. There was no youth group for you to go and have a spring retreat with for you to learn more about your identity in Jesus Christ, and there certainly was no Christian university for you to attend and you get a good education with a Christian influence. That’s not what’s happening. You are a brand-new believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, probably a couple weeks or a couple months, or at best, two years ago. There’s religious zeal everywhere; people are consumed with fertility. Imagine the sexual influences that would bring on your city.

People everywhere are also consumed with political zeal for the Caesar, for King, and there’s this pressure to conform to worshiping the government. There’s also this witchcraft zeal all around you because people are superstitious and they are trying to get a handle on how in the world do you influence the spirits in your favor. On top of that, you may have a spouse that you occasionally disagree with. Okay, you might have some kids that occasionally don’t obey. Thank—okay, gosh, okay, come on, thank you. You might have a boss that occasionally disrespects you, and all the other difficulties of living in a life—living a life in a world marked by sin. Plus, you don’t have a Bible to read for daily encouragement. The Bible’s not a thing; it’s being written. You don’t have a Scripture to soak in to deepen your faith. You would need some encouragement and some direction. Amen. That’s what Paul’s going to provide.

Paul hears about this church that he had spent three years pastoring and working with. He’s in prison, and he’s hearing about them, and he writes them this letter, and he’s just trying to ground them once again. This is the gospel. This is who Jesus Christ is. This is how you flesh all that out. As we cover the book of Ephesians, it cuts in half. There’s basically two parts to the book. If you’re a notetaker, this is on your little handout as well. Chapters 1 through 3 describe what God has done to create a new people in Christ. I’ll simplify that for you in a minute. Chapters 4 through 6 describe what God is doing to change those new people to look more like Christ. In other words, chapters 1 through 3, that is your identity in Christ. It’s all about your identity in Christ. Chapters 4 through 6 is your activity in Christ. You got identity flows naturally to activity. Remember, being in Christ changes everything in us. If you are in Christ, your life is different. It just flat out is. But if you call Jesus your Lord and Savior and you don’t live differently than the world that you are surrounded by, then there’s serious question about if you are in Christ or if He is your Lord and Savior or not.

Being in Christ, it changed everything for Paul and the Ephesians. Look at—look again at verse 1. Paul, what does he have the audacity to call himself? An apostle of Christ Jesus. Do you remember how Paul began? Way back in the book of Acts, Paul began as an extremely zealous Pharisee who is actively persecuting Christians. The first time Paul comes up in Scripture is in chapter—was it 6 where Stephen—7, I guess, where Stephen is being stoned and martyred, and everybody is laying their cloaks at the feet of a young man named Saul who approved of the whole thing. Saul continues on in this—Paul continues on. He’s no longer just approving of persecution; he’s committing to persecution. Paul goes on to hunting Christians down in their homes, ripping them out of their homes, taking them to prison for them to suffer for their newfound faith in Jesus Christ. He’s on his way to a city called Damascus when God shows up out of the blue, literally, and says, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And he’s got the wherewithal to say, “Okay, Lord,” and he understands I’m messing with something here. God uses that to call—call him to Himself, to save him.

That word, apostle, it’s fascinating. You know, on its surface, an apostle is just a political ambassador. There were plenty of apostles running around the Roman Empire at that time. But Jesus, when He calls His 12 disciples after He dies and is resurrected, He’s in front of them, and He calls them something else. He doesn’t call them disciples; He calls them apostles. Jesus changes them from mere followers of Him, and He gives that special group a role of authority. For Paul to be an apostle of Jesus means that Paul is God’s called-out ambassador, a man of special authority and assignment for the local church. We don’t have those anymore. We don’t have apostles anymore. But because of God, Paul, who once was a hater and a persecutor of Christ and of Christians, Paul became a new man with a new mission. As I was reading this week, it made me think of a question: What mission do I live for? And I’m curious, what mission do you live for? You know, if you’re going to listen to what the world tells you is the ideal life, you might live for the mission of Your ideal relationships, man. All you need is a good spouse and one or two kids that you cart around to ball practice, ice and swim practice, and school, and flute lessons, and all the other things that culture is telling parents they need to be able to give their kids these days. If you’re going to listen to the world, sometimes they’re going to tell you that the mission of raising a good family is all that matters. Forsake everything else, even forsake your own self, forsake your own marriage for the sake of those kids, or do whatever you can just to get in a romantic relationship with somebody because that’s the mission that some people live for.

Some people live for a mission of just success. You know them, the hard-driving type, the ones that are always trying to strive and achieve. If you share an accomplishment with them, they’re going to one-up you, say, “Oh, that’s cool, but I did this.” You see them at the front of races, you know, where they’re just striving and just working to just try to have some sort of success.

Some people live for the mission of just financial security. Man, there is something great about being financially secure. There’s something great about having a nest egg and some investments and a little bit of comfort. Don’t get me wrong, but if money is your God, if making money is the mission of your life, one day you’re going to get to the end of it, you’re not going to be able to enjoy it, and you’re going to have built up a kingdom or having had it taken away from you because, man, at the end of the day, money just doesn’t last.

Some folks live for a mission of comfort. It’s like, man, whatever it takes for me to just be comfortable and to rest, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to work just hard enough to buy the toys that I want, to be able to do the things that I want. I’m going to work just hard enough to have the conveniences and the luxuries I want. What mission do you live for?

Being in Christ changed everything for Paul. It changed his identity, it changed his mission. It also changed everything for the Ephesians. Remember who they were, what I shared with you a minute ago. As a group, as a people, the Ephesians were idol worshippers who loved Caesar and were highly superstitious. They would have done anything to appease the gods, to appease the spirits, and to appease their empire. They were daily bringing sacrifices to these temples, daily spending money on the things that might protect them from some sort of harm from the spiritual realm. That’s who they were, but Paul now calls them the faithful saints in Christ.

Saint—that’s a fascinating word because we like to toss it around sometimes in church culture. Saint here is talking about sacred ones, people dedicated for a purpose. You know, in the Old Testament, Old Testament sacrificial system, there were only some people out of the entire nation of Israel that got to actually conduct the sacrifices. The rest of the nation of Israel just kind of relied on them to do their worship for them, in a way. But when Jesus comes and He opens up the temple and He says, “I am actually the temple,” Jesus then makes all of us, every believer in Jesus, we are all now sacred ones. You see, not all Christians are apostles, but all Christians are saints, which means all Christians have a transformed purpose and are meant to live sacred lives. And I’ll tell you, this world needs sacred followers of Jesus who live for His purpose and are sanctified for Him more now than it ever has.

I got into a conversation yesterday at the Y of all places, and man, just like hearing how some of the other guys in the room talked about their families, and I just like, my skin’s crawling. And I speak up at one point and I just offer my little comment, and one of them comes back to me afterwards and says, “Huh, I’ve never thought about it the way you just said.” The only thing that was different about me in that moment was the fact that I didn’t agree with what they were saying about their families. Man, that’s not a story that’s meant to make much of me because that’s not my nature. That was the Holy Spirit at work in me, and it was the Holy Spirit at work in the life of the guy that came back to me.

But what this world needs, what this world needs, are followers of Jesus who live differently. It’s what it needs. It’s dying for that. You know, the the most important thing to know about Paul and the Ephesian Christians is that they were in Christ. That’s a crazy phrase in the book of Ephesians. 155 verses, six chapters, 17 times Paul will say we are in Christ. What’s it mean? It means that we are incorporated into Him. We are united with Him. We’ve become partakers of His life because we have faith in Christ. We are all united in Christ. What this means is that we are made a family of saints, a living temple, temple that worships Him, a body that is unified and connected to Him. To be in Christ means that all of your prior affections, all of your devotions, give way to your new love and devotion for Jesus Christ. In other words, you can’t be in Christ and in anything else. To be in Christ is to be vitally connected with Him. It’s to be like a branch that is connected to a vine.

So how do you get there? What happened? What happened for Paul? What happened for the Ephesians? What happens for us? How do you get to be in Christ? Man, that’s through God’s grace and peace. Paul writes that in verse two: grace to you, peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Obviously, that’s a that’s a short greeting. It’s a dear, but it’s not just a dear. It’s got this deep meaning. We all know that God’s grace is, but I’ll remind you, God’s grace is His good will and His favor. It is a free gift of love that you can never work for, you can never earn, and because God is so full and rich in grace, once He starts pouring it on to you, you can’t even resist it. It’s not just God’s grace, but it’s also His peace. Verse two says, peace from God our Father, peace that is harmony, freedom from dispute. Grace and peace in the truest sense is only possible in Jesus Christ. Nothing else can provide the peace that you crave. Nothing else can give you the grace that you need. God’s grace and His peace are the only fuel for life transformation and change. God’s identity and His work is a giver of grace and a God and a king of peace. This book is so totally wrapped around God and what He does, His sorry, His grace, His peace, that’s what changes us. Nothing else can raise dead people to life than God’s grace. Nothing else can unify this church in Ephesus with such different backgrounds and desires other than God’s grace and peace. Nothing can secure us from the hatred of Satan other than God’s grace and peace, and nothing else provides grace and peace that you need other than God.

There is eight there are eight billion people in this world, all of us striving from for some sort of meaning, some sort of joy and happiness, all of us dealing with lives that are totally empty of peace, going from conflict to conflict or situation to situation, and we see the issues of the world all around us, and we’re just wondering what can bring peace to this place? Will peace ever actually reign in my home, let alone over there? And about grace, we’re all yearning for some sort of free gift, some sort of transforming love that can do something inside of us, and we’re naturally hardwired to want a relationship with God, but we because we’re sinners and because we have disobeyed Him, we think that we’ve got to earn God’s forgiveness. The Bible says you can’t earn God’s grace. It is a free gift of His, and let alone every time you try to earn God’s grace, you just make your situation worse. God had totally transformed Paul, He totally transformed the Ephesians, and He totally transforms us, and it’s all by the same thing: His grace and His peace.

As I start to close, I want to ask you a question: has God’s grace and peace changed you? Have you stopped religiously striving for forgiveness from God through your own works and your own effort, and you just accepted the grace of God for you? Do you live with peace, a peace that even surpasses understanding, despite your circumstances? And I’m not trying to invite tons of doubt into you right now, but what I want to do is open the door for a conversation. If you’re not so sure that you’ve ever truly embraced God’s peace for your life, if you’re not So sure that God’s Grace has had its way with you and has made you new. Myself, Al, Beth, Donna, Becca, Carter—there’s a million people in this church that would love to begin that conversation, and my my invitation to you just be to begin it. As we March through this book, we’re going to see God’s grace and His peace at work for your good and what it can do for you as well.

Let me close our time in prayer. Lord, You’re good, God. Your grace and Your peace, they’re powerful. Nothing else can wash away our sin. Nothing else can make us unified with You. Nothing else can make us one with You and with others other than Your grace and Your peace. You’re the one that changes us. You’re the one that transforms us. And I pray, Father, for anybody in this room who’s not met You that way yet, that You would open their eyes to see You in a new way. Lord, may we all walk out of here marveling a little bit more at You. It’s in Your name we pray. Amen.