A People for Praise

All right, well, good morning, church family. Y’all go ahead and start finding your seats. Good morning, guys. Good to see everybody here today. Special thanks to the kitchen crew that got here without that hour of sleep to start making some scrambled eggs and flipping pancakes and everything else. Man, if you weren’t here for this morning, every month, Second Sunday, we do breakfast in addition to the weekly Wednesday night meal. It’s a great time just to spend some time with some folks and get to catch up. And for our family this morning, I think it was a great resource to be able to just bring the kids and let Buck and Diane and Wes and Miss Julie take care of that for us.

So yeah, we have come to our part of the service where we do spend a little bit of time in congregational prayer. Again, not just wanting to be a church that prays, but being a Praying Church. If you don’t know, the month of March is the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. Yeah, I get it, Easter is not actually until April, but you know, we’re just kind of falling in line with the rest of the Baptist denomination, and that’s totally fine. So that’s why we have been doing the videos pre-service the past couple weeks. We’ll continue to do that. This morning’s video, it featured a couple church planters. Those are folks that start new churches, Leo and Miosa Robinson. They started Good Church in Flint, Michigan, and they found a really cool mission or resource to their community of starting that laundromat. So we’re going to be praying for them as well as the national Southern Baptist Convention goal for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering of $78 million. So as we go into this time of prayer, I just ask for you to grab a neighbor, buddy up, and pray either for the national goal, $78 million that we’re going to be able to contribute to here as a church, or pray for Leo and Miosa Robinson of Good Church in Flint, Michigan. Y’all take it away, and I’ll put a bow on it here in a moment.

Thank you, guys. Heavenly Father, I want to say thank you. Thank You, Lord, for the legacy of Annie Armstrong, Lord, a woman that stood tall for You and for the sake of the Gospel, who helped coordinate a lot of churches not just to pray about the lost, but also to engage the lost through evangelism. And even more than that, God, to begin to raise funds, Lord, a legacy that continues today and into next year and honestly into eternity. Lord, I pray that You would help us here at Sauldam to continue to be generous toward funds like the Annie Armstrong goal, and Lord, that as a denomination, that we would far surpass that goal of $78 million. God, we’ll see it in the book of Ephesians in a few months that You are able to do above and beyond anything that we could ever ask or imagine. So God, we’re asking that You help us to raise what to You is just a little bit of money. God, You don’t need our money, Lord, You want our hearts, and we get to display our hearts through how we use our financial resources. So I pray that we would treasure the kingdom. I pray that we would treasure the Gospel. I pray that we would treasure Heaven by how we steward our money.

Now, Lord, I pray for Leo and Miosa. God, I bet that they are gathering as a church right now as well. Father, I pray that You will bless His preaching. I pray that You will bless their worship. I pray that You will bless the prayers of that church, and ultimately, Lord, that a lot of people in Flint, Michigan, would come to know You as Savior and Lord because of them.

Please, Spirit, I pray that Your presence with us today would be felt, that You would get me out of the way, that Your Word would just be so clear to us. I pray, starting with me and everybody in the room, God, that You would speak to us like Pete prayed earlier, that we would walk out of here a little bit more transformed into the image of the Son that You love. Father, we do love You. We want to love You more. Lord, for the person in the room today that isn’t so sure about You and life with You, I pray You would convince them. I pray that You would show them that nothing in this world can satisfy the desires of their heart, but that You make known to us the path of life. In Your right hand our forevermore. In Your presence there is fullness of joy. God, usher us into Your presence. Hold us in Your right hand today. God, we love You, and it’s in Your name we pray. Amen.

Romans 1:16 says that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to the Jew first and to the Gentile, and I’ve got good news. The good news of the gospel, the good news of God’s grace for us in Jesus, is still the power of salvation, and it is still the [inaudible] of life transformation today. Like what Carter was able to brag on the Holy Spirit across the last 72 hours with what’s happened amongst the youth, we are still seeing here at this church, and it is still happening in Charleston and in the world that people are still being saved by God in the gospel.

We have been taking a very slow walk through the book of Ephesians over the past month and a half or so, and we’re going to—news alert—we’re going to continue to do that over the next few months as well. We just kind of take it bite by bite because we don’t want to overlook anything. We want to be able to take every rock of this book and pull it up and look on the underside to see what all God has for us. So if you have your copy of God’s Word, I want you to go ahead and open up to the book of Ephesians.

We’ve been walking through just chapter one, and we’ve been seeing what it means to have life in Christ. That’s what the title of this series is, “In Christ.” That phrase, “in Christ,” it occurs over the six chapters of Ephesians close to 20 times. It’s only 155 verses, and over—I think it’s over a quarter of them have that phrase, “in Christ.” We’ve been seeing what it means and how God transforms us, and then how He can use us for His mission.

The very first sermon of this series, I said the point of Ephesians is this: that being in Christ changes everything in us. You see, Jesus did not just come to the world to create an eternal security plan for our souls. He did not just come so that we can live however we want to, but pray a deathbed prayer and not have to go to hell. No, Jesus came to this world to live the perfect life in our place and to die a sacrificial death for us and have a victorious resurrection, so that God would be able to transform us, so that our hope that one day we will spend eternity with Him, we can live in right now and be a new creation in that.

So this chapter one of Ephesians, Paul has been talking about our spiritual blessings in Christ. It’s not enough that God would save us, but God is just gushing over us, and He’s just blessing us with Himself. The last three—or the first three blessings that we looked at were this: the blessing of adoption, that means that we have been made children of God. And then we looked at the blessing of redemption. It’s not just that we’re adopted by God, but we are redeemed by God, and to be redeemed means that we are totally ransomed by Him. And it’s not just that we’ve been adopted by Him and we’ve been redeemed by Him, but we’ve also been given the blessing of the revelation, the revelation of mystery. We are part of God’s plan.

This morning we’re going to just look at the next blessing. It is the blessing of inheritance. The blessing of inheritance. So what I’m going to do, I’m going to read Ephesians chapter 1, verse 3. That’s just kind of the summary verse for this section, and then we’ll jump down to verses 11 and 12. If you have your copy of God’s Word, please follow along with me.

It says this: “Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ. In Him, or in Christ, we have also received an inheritance, because we were predestined according to the plan of the One who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of His will, so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to His glory.”

The main thing that Paul wants to communicate to us this morning is this: in Christ we become God’s people for God’s praise. In Christ we become God’s people for God’s praise. I want to take that first. It, our passage this morning, verse 11, starts with this phrase, “in Him.” That’s how we have broken up this chapter. That’s how we understand each of those blessings, because every time Paul kind of restarts, “in Him, in Him, in Him,” and now for the fourth time, “in Him.” See, Jesus Christ is central. He is critical for life to be blessed. He is central for God’s blessings on us. For you to have a life that is blessed by God, you must have a personal relationship with His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus can’t just be an artifact of your family heritage. He cannot just have or be said to have had some conservative values that we agree with. He can’t even just be a focal point of a ceremony you’ve done, like baptism. No, Jesus must be someone you know personally. You must have an intentional and sacrificial embrace of Jesus as your Master and your Savior. If you want a blessed life, if you want a happy life, if you want a fulfilled life, a joyful life, whatever positive attribute you want to put there, it’s all encompassed in this word, “blessed.” If you want that, Jesus has got to be inside of you.

In Christ, you become God’s person for God’s praise. God wants you to have a blessed life. News flash: God wants you to be happy. He wants you to be happy. The question is not, “Does God love me?” The question is not, “Does God like me?” The question is not, “Does God want me to be happy?” The question is, where are you finding your life, joy, and peace? Where are you trying to find your life, your joy, and your peace? I think for the men in the room, it’s so easy for us to try to find those things in our work. Man, if I do a really good job at my job, if I put in good hours, if I clock in well, if I clock out well, if that’s still a thing, are punch cards still a thing? Yep. Okay, I got a yep. All right. If I do my job well, if I climb the ladder well, that will satisfy me. That will bring some peace to my soul. But man, jobs could be taken away in an instant, right? Or even our health. Man, men, we like really pride ourselves on our physical strength or our ability to stand through things, and that can be taken away in an instant.

Carer just hung out with the middle and high schoolers this weekend, so I’m thinking about myself as a teenager. I’m thinking about the things I tried to find life in when I was 14 through 18, and I’m thinking about love and success. I’m thinking about the romantic relationships that I tried to find some peace and some joy in. And here’s the deal: boyfriends, girlfriends, they come and go. Spouses can come and go. People can’t be what we find our life and our joy and our peace in. Even in good, healthy marriages, the other person you’re married to cannot be your God, or else that marriage becomes a prison. Or even for myself as a teen, I thought about, man, if I’m just successful, I don’t know what I need to be successful at. Maybe it’s B-team football in middle school, that was me. Whatever it is for you, if it’s some sort of STEM activity or a hobby, like any type of success, that can’t actually satisfy us. Or I think about the person in the room who might be suffering. You might have some medical situation going on, and you’re like, man, where’s the peace that I can anchor my life to? It can’t be in a doctor or a procedure or a prescription. Like I said, man, our health can be taken away from us. Nothing in this world can satisfy your God-given desire for joy and peace other than God, the one that gave you the desire.

The Spirit brought Psalm 16:11 to my memory when I was praying a few minutes ago. God tells us exactly where to find life and joy and peace, and it is in His presence. See, God wants you to have the blessed life. He wants that for you, but so often we trade the blessed life for the okay life. If you will humor me for a moment, I believe that our hearts, our souls, they have hands like this, and it’s all a matter of what your heart is holding. And let’s say this water bottle…

Is something I’m holding on to for life and joy and peace. I—I’m curious if we could pry open the door to your soul this morning, what the—the hands of your soul would be holding. It might be a relationship, the idea of family, it might be an accomplishment, or anything really. Our souls grab on to things and we think that they will satisfy us. I’m a little thirsty. I’m talking a lot. This has—it says eight fluid ounces of water. It’ll satisfy my thirst for a couple sips, but eventually I’m going to drink this dry, and the soul of my heart or the—the hands of my heart are beginning to hold something else. Our hands, our hearts can only actually hold on to one thing at a time. So if you’ll humor me, please, let’s take this metaphor a little further. We need something for our souls to hold on to that satisfy us infinitely and totally and completely, and that’s why Jesus said that He came to put rivers of Living Water in our soul—not little 8 oz. bottles of water that satisfy for a moment but run dry, but a river of water that pours and gushes and flows without end, without measure. That’s what God has made you for. He’s made you have a blessed life in Him. He sees your insatiable desire for life and joy and peace, and He takes the hands of your heart into His own, and—and that’s why Paul says this in verse 11. Look at it again with me: “In Christ we have also received an inheritance.” Man, the blessing of the inheritance is so much better than what those words just captured. If I could be so audacious as to say this, most likely the translation that you just read in your copy of God’s Word does not get the heart of those words completely. I think we’ve got it on the screen for you. That blue line gives you the ordering of what the Greek says. It does not say necessarily that we have received an inheritance in God. It says we were chosen, having been predestined. Get this: you do not just receive an inheritance; you have been made God’s inheritance. I want that to sit on you. It’s not just that in Christ you have been given some sort of spiritual estate for you to spend at will. It is the—it is this: that when God made you His son, when He redeemed you, when He started showing us what He’s doing all along, part of that plan was for God to claim you as His own. God wants you to have a blessed life. God wants you to become His people. In Christ we become God’s people. This isn’t new for Paul. This is an idea that’s been carried out. Exodus 19:5, one of the first books of the Bible, says this: “If you will carefully listen to me”—that’s God speaking—“and keep my covenant, you’ll be my own possession out of all the peoples, although the entire earth is mine.” Or Deuteronomy 32, God picks it up again: “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance and divided the human race, he set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the people of Israel. But the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his own inheritance.” It didn’t just stop with the ethnic people of Israel, though, because in First Peter, way in the New Testament, First Peter drawing upon the promises of the Old Testament, says this: “You, O Christian, you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, so that what you may proclaim the praises of the One who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” God’s plan all along has been to create a people for Himself that would span the entire globe and spread His glory throughout it. A core theme of the book of Ephesians is that anybody, regardless of their past, their family, their mistakes, or their accomplishments, anybody can become a member of God’s family. It is not reserved for a family line. It is not reserved for an ethnic distinction. It is not reserved for a preference in local church. If you are here today and Jesus sounds appealing but your past seems too confusing or your present seems too—or your future seems too dark, I’m here to tell you that God will have you, and Sauldam will too. In Christ, anyone can become part of God’s people. Anybody can become a member of God’s family. Any man, woman, and child can become a ch—can become a child.

of the Heavenly Father. God does not ask us to clean ourselves up and then present our goodness to Him. What He asks us to do is to recognize our bad, give everything to Him, and then invite Him to clean us up from the inside out. That’s what God does. God is in the business of saving and transforming. We are in the business of recognizing and submitting. So how does someone become a child of God? How do we become God’s people? Paul tells us, “In Him we’ve also received an inheritance, because of this we were predestined according to the plan of the one who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of His will.”

Let’s define some terms. That word “predestined”—it’s crazy. It only actually occurs six times in the New Testament, and no, John Calvin didn’t invent it. John Calvin and Reformed theologians—they didn’t come up with this idea of predestination. It’s been part of the Bible for 2,000 years. It’s actually been part of how God’s operated since before time. You see, to predestine something simply means to determine before it happens, or to put it in simple language, predestination—that’s what God decides. Then you look at that word “plan” or “purpose.” Naturally, what God decides to happen, there need to be some steps to accomplish it. God’s plan is determined steps to accomplish. That’s what God does. You have what God decides, then what God does. Then you have this word “will.” “God predestined according to the purpose of His will.” Those are God’s feelings and inclinations about what He’s planned. That’s what God desires. So in this verse, you see what God decides, what God does, and what God desires.

All of this means that God has freely chosen beforehand to make us His people because He wanted to, because He so loved the world He would send His only begotten Son, so that anybody who would believe in Him and put their faith and trust in Him would become a child of God. Man, we like to get caught up in the specifics. Does God predestine some for hell and some for heaven? Sorry, I forgot the opposite of hell there. Does God choose to send some people to eternal damnation or not? Man, those aren’t the questions that Paul’s even asking. What Paul is saying is, how does anybody get in? Because later in Ephesians chapter 2, we’re going to learn that everybody is born dead in sin.

Thank you, Fields. I appreciate it. Man, somebody gave me an amen, and it came from the baby. Okay, thank you. Somebody had to break up the tension of me saying predestination so much. Here’s how this works in your life. We go to the same restaurant every Saturday for lunch as a family, okay? We go to Chick-fil-A pretty much every Saturday. The kids usually think it’s their idea. Thank you. So one of the kids will say, “Chicken fries today.” The other one will say, “Can we go to Chick-fil-A today?” And I’ll let you assign which language is to which child. Honor doesn’t say a whole lot right now; it kind of sounds like Fields. The thing is, there’s a couple things that me and Becca appreciate about Chick-fil-A. We appreciate that relatively it’s low cost. What we really appreciate is that there’s a playground, so that me and Becca can talk while the kids come and go from the table. They have a couple nuggets, have a couple fries, and they scamper off back to the playground. You see, me and Becca, we design our Saturday mornings so that we’ll end up at Chick-fil-A. We’ve already decided we’re going to eat there for lunch. The kids think it’s their idea. I call that a win-win, baby.

But we do this all the time. We set up our day, or like if you’re a boss, you set up your workplace or something like that, or like a vacation. We do this. We decide things ahead of time, we make plans, we assign a couple steps to make that plan happen, and then usually, unless you’re a masochist, it’s stuff that you like to do anyways. See, in Christ, God has made a plan to make some people His own for His praise, and we don’t have to worry about the specifics. We don’t have to navigate that. We don’t have to debate all that stuff. I’ve got my own positions, you’ve got your own positions, and none of that matters at the end of the day. What we need to recognize is that God created everything. He’s the Master, He’s the Ruler, which means that He’s free.

To use anything to accomplish anything He wants to do. If I can use my low country Johnny Mathis verbiage, God tell me if I’m right: God is the tall hog at the trough. Did I use that right? Okay, thank you. All right, I tried to learn some of the lingo from the middle and high school students yesterday, and they said, “No, you can’t say that. You can’t say that.” God, He’s the boss, He’s the ruler, He’s the master. He works everything together to accomplish His plan, and part of working out that plan is to make us His people. Why would God do that? Why would God make us His people? It’s so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to His glory. Paul’s already told us, verse 12, that we who put our hope in Christ might bring praise to Him.

Everything in the universe is created for the glory of God. Everything that God has ever made exists for one great purpose: to bring praise back to the one that made it. You see, praise is not just something we do for a few songs before me or Al or Carter preaches. Praise is supposed to be a way that we do everything. We are supposed to be a people that, whether we eat or drink, whether we sleep or we rise, everything we do is for God’s glory and for God’s praise. Everything we do ought to be fueled by our hope in life after death—not an empty hope like, “I hope I have a good year, I hope I win the lottery,” but a sure and a fast hope like, “God so loved me that He made me His child, and because of that I will not spend eternity separated from Him, starting now and going forever and ever.” And the recognition of that truth—to sit by yourself for a moment and just remember, “God, God loves me, and God made me His child”—that ought to fuel a lifestyle that others would look at and say, “That’s different and interesting, and I want some of it.”

The question is, are you living for God’s praise? If you’ve received this, if you are His child, if you have placed your hope in Jesus, if God has made you His own, are you living for Him? The book of Ephesians cuts right in half: chapters 1 through 3, very theological, very deeply tied to the gospel and how God has saved us in Him, how God has made us a unified people in Him. Chapters 4, 5, and 6, very practical, very much so highlights, “Hey, if this is true of you, you so then do these things.” I’m just going to draw out three of them from chapters 4 and 5. Here are three ways that Paul tells us we live for God’s praise.

The first comes out of chapter 4, verses 1-6. I’ll read it here: “Therefore I, a prisoner for Paul, or a prisoner in the Lord, I urge you to walk according to the calling you’ve received, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There’s one body, one Spirit, just as you are called to one hope at your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.” People that live for God’s praise prioritize unity. They protect the unity of the church. So the question is, if you are God’s child, do your words and your actions, do they protect our oneness or do they harm it? Paul would say those that call on the Lord as Savior, they protect oneness in the local church.

But not just oneness together; there would be purity inwardly. Paul goes on to say this in chapter 4, verses 20-24: “That’s not how you came to know Christ, assuming you heard about Him and were taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus, to take off your former way of life, the old self that’s corrupted by deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, to put on the new self, the one created according to God’s likeness in righteousness and purity and truth.” If you have given yourself to Jesus, if you have embraced the gospel of God’s salvation, then you would live in purity. It’s as simple as putting off your old desires and putting on the new ones that God has given us, which is incredibly difficult. It’s as simple as looking in the mirror and saying, “I’m…”

going to be less Jeremy and More Jesus today so there’s Unity there is Purity and then finally there’s love chapter 5 verses 1-5 therefore be imitators of God as dearly loved children and walk in love as Christ also loved us and gave gave himself for us a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God but sexual immorality any impurity or greed they should not even be heard of among you as is proper for Saints obscene and foolish talking or crude joking that is not suitable but rather giving thanks for know and recognize this that every sexually immoral or impure or greedy person who is an idolator does not have an inherit in the Kingdom of Christ and of God man God loves you so much and He’s done everything necessary if you’d become His child how could we not respond in love for Him and for others and a love that is marked by Purity and unity this is just a sampling the list goes on and on but the standard is the same God did not send Jesus to secure forgiveness for people who wouldn’t change God did not send Jesus to secure forgiveness so that we can do whatever we want He sent Jesus to rescue us from ourselves to create a universal church that is bound in love Purity and unity to transform us more and more into the image of the beloved Son all for God’s praise for those of us in the room that call ourselves followers of Jesus and how are we walking in unity Purity and love how are we walking in unity and Purity and love the world is fractured the world some would say is just assess and the world is like totally oriented around self God’s intention His design is that we would live together marked by some some Purity and love for Him and for others that’s expressed in how we carry ourselves so if you are a Christian are you living in un Purity and love and if you’re not yet if you’re not a Christian yet is what I mean what are you waiting for I think we’ve already seen nothing in this world can satisfy the deepest longing of your heart nothing in this world can give you the type of drink the type of water that your soul thirsts for only Christ does that man if you if that’s you today if you came in here because you got invited here or maybe this just a habit you’ve developed over years then something I’d like to say to you is that you can step in your soul from this side of the room of I do not know Christ I know about Him I don’t know Him personally to this side a position that says I am still trying but I know Him and I love Him and I give myself to Him it is so simple you would recognize you’re a sinner that you would request God’s forgiveness and you would Release Yourself to Him and please do that please recognize that you need a savior you need forgiveness request that God would do that for you and then you would release your life to Him and say You take the keys I’m done living it I’m done driving the car of my life I need You to get the water bottle out of my hands I need You to pour rivers of Living Water Into My Soul because my job and my health and my relationships and my world are all crumbling and they cannot sustain me I want to invite you to everybody to take a moment just be still before the Lord if everybody you would just close your eyes you would just ask God help me understand if you know that you have a relationship with Christ then ask God God how can I grow in unity Purity and love and if you don’t yet know Jesus as master and rescuer as Lord and Savior you ask the Holy Spirit God please save me I’m a sinner that needs to be saved I want satisfaction action and joy give you a moment to be alone with the Lord