2001 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

11/21/04

Taking It Personally

11/21/04 Taking It Personally

About ten months ago

we took a break from our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians

so that I could take a few weeks to share with you

some of my life’s greatest surprises.

A few weeks turned into a few months,

and then, once I ran out of surprises,

we entered into a study

of the basic principles that govern our walk with Christ.

And now, nearly a year later,

we are going to once again return to our study of Ephesians.

But we’ve been out of the study for so long

that there are now some of you here

who weren’t even with us when we were last in it.

And the rest of us

have long ago lost track

of what was happening in this remarkable letter and why.

So, even though we left our study at the first few verses of chapter 4,

before we pick up where we left off

we’re going to need to take a little time

to reenter the book.

And I think the first step in that process

is for us to spend a few minutes

talking about the way our God uses His truth

to bring changes into our lives.

As we return to our study of Ephesians

we are going to hear Paul share with us

a tremendous wealth of knowledge -

knowledge about Christ,

knowledge about our own past and future,

knowledge about the Christian life.

But knowledge alone can never change our lives,

because knowledge is not what our spirits hunger for.

Here we all are this morning,

once again investing half a day of our lives in this gathering.

Why do we do that?

What is it we seek

that is important enough to us

for that kind of time investment?

Well, of course there isn’t just one answer to that question.

Some of what we come here for is friendship and a sense of community with one another.

Some of it certainly is a desire for added knowledge about our God.

Some of it may be the hunger for life principles

that will help us cope with the issues we face in our lives throughout the week.

But there is something else that draws us here, too,

something far more powerful than all the other reasons combined,

something that our spirits hunger for more than all the rest.

It is the longing deep within our spirits for peace with God

and for the personal understanding that He really does love us,

not US as a group,

not US as the human race,

not US as a part of all Christians,

but us personally,

individually,

all by ourselves.

And when I put it into words like that

some of you find it hard even to relate to the concept.

You may still be wrestling with whether or not God is even there,

or whether or not He is even aware of your existence.

To suggest that not only is He right here with you,

with His full attention focused on you,

but that He is, at this very instant reaching out to you personally in His love,

eagerly seeking a deep, daily, eternal friendship with you

hasn’t even entered your mind.

Do you have someone in your life

that you just simply like being with?

Someone whose presence in any situation

makes that situation better, richer, more enjoyable?

I hope you have several such people.

And if you’re married,

I would hope that, at the top of your list is your mate.

I have reached a time in my own life

when I am keenly aware of the wealth that comes to me each day

simply because I am able to share one more day of life with Sandee.

Her presence with me intensifies the good things in life a hundredfold,

and when I hurt,

or when I’m confused,

or frustrated,

or discouraged

her presence with me gives me strength, and encouragement, and hope.

I hope you have those in your life who affect you the same way

because those relationships will provide you

with the best mental model I could ever offer you

for the kind of relationship your Creator wants to share with you.

Let me ask you a question

that may help illustrate what I’m trying to say here.

When you woke up this morning,

when you sprang,

or fell,

or dragged yourself out of bed,

and began your preparations for yet another day of life,

did you realize that, as you slept,

God was waiting for you to wake up,

eagerly anticipating your return to the conscious world

so that He could have the joy of sharing the next 16 hours with you?

Well, to the degree that what I just said sounds weird to you,

to that degree you have not yet understood God’s true attitude toward you personally.

And knowing how strange what I just said sounds to some of you,

you’ll probably want to hear it

from someone who carries more authority than I do.

Well, how about God Himself

as He spoke to us about Himself through King David?

PSA 139:17-18 How precious also are Your thoughts concerning me, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand. When I awake, I am still with You.

Even as you slept

your God was thinking about you,

and when you woke up you were still with Him

because He never left you,

anticipating your conscious return to Him in the morning.

I don’t understand that, folks.

It is as foreign to my thinking as it is to yours.

I am far more comfortable

preaching about what our attitude toward God should be,

rather than what His attitude toward us is

because God’s attitude toward us

quite frankly makes no sense to me whatsoever.

And yet there it is,

imbedded at the very core of everything He says to us.

In fact,

He seems to be far more concerned

about our understanding what His attitude toward us is

than about our understanding

what our attitude toward Him should be.

I’ll show you what I mean in just a few minutes

as we move into our review of the first half of Ephesians,

but I’ll tell you right now

He doesn’t talk with us

about the things we would expect.

He seems far more concerned

about telling us in careful detail

the things He has done for us,

rather than telling us about the things we should do for Him.

And even though I make no claim at understanding why He feels about us as He does,

I do think I understand

why He takes the approach He takes.

Have you ever been at a point in your relationship with another person

where you realized that they loved you?

I’m not talking about realizing that you loved them,

but where you realized that they loved you,

not just generically,

but personally, deeply, honestly.

How did that realization affect you?

If it was a healthy relationship,

I think it created within you

a longing to please that person,

probably even a desire

to model yourself after them in some ways.

If it works that way in human relationships,

just imagine how it would work between us and our Creator.

It’s just that our ability to hear Him correctly

is so profoundly corrupted

that hearing His love for us personally

is the most difficult challenge any of us will ever face in this life.

And I mention all of this now

as we move back into our study of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians

because I want us know

that academic or intellectual knowledge alone about this book

or for that matter, about any book in the Bible

will never lead us into the kind of understanding of our God that He longs for us to know.

The knowledge does help,

and in fact is an essential ingredient in our growth,

but only when the Spirit of God is able to take that knowledge

and transform it into personal truth within the context of our individual relationship with God

will we find it beginning to bring about real change within us.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Paul begins his letter to the Ephesians with these words:

EPH 1:1-2 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, there are a number of ways we can approach this opening statement.

We can do what is so often done with such introductions,

and just choose to relate to these words

in the same way we would relate to the word “Dear...”

at the beginning of a letter.

When I see “Dear Larry” at the beginning of a letter

I don’t even think about it.

I certainly don’t assume that I am in any way truly “Dear”

to the person who has sent me the letter,

especially since most of the time the letter is from someone who doesn’t even know me.

“Dear Larry:

Congratulations! You are one of the few who have been selected to share in this remarkable offer. For just $69.95 you can be among the very first to receive...”

Most of the time

the only thing that’s really “dear” to those who write is my money.

And we could choose to relate to Paul’s introductory words in this letter

in very much the same way,

viewing them simply as a generic apostolic greeting.

But I’ll tell you honestly

that to do so would be a great tragedy

and a great loss to us personally.

There are no meaningless words in our God’s communication to us.

We could also choose to relate to the words

on a purely academic level.

We could look at the key words in the statement - saint, grace, peace,

and we could then work out nice academic definitions for each of those words,

based on their use in other passages

so that we could then gain a clear understanding of what they mean.

We could jot those definitions neatly in the margins of our Bibles

to remind us of what Paul was talking about

when we returned to this passage again in the future.

And let me say here

that gaining such knowledge

can be extremely helpful to us in our growing discovery of our God.

But if we stop there,

if we never move beyond the academic knowledge

there will be no real healing,

no transformation within us,

and certainly no discovery of the true nature of the love of our God for us.

It will touch our minds,

but it will not touch our spirits.

But there is a third alternative,

one that God’s Spirit will seek to lead each of His children into.

Simply stated,

it is learning to hear what is written

knowing it is directly, specifically, personally written to you by your Creator.

And there is nowhere in all of Scripture

where this approach is more critical

than in this section of the Bible that we call the New Testament Epistles.

This section begins with the book of Romans

and continues through the book of Jude.

It contains 21 letters written by six different men -

Paul,

Peter,

John,

James,

Jude,

and whoever wrote the book of Hebrews.

And every one of them are clearly addressed exclusively to Christians.

They are not open letters to the human race.

They are not tracts written by Christians to non-Christians

with the hope of converting them.

They are special letters

written by God through those 6 men

exclusively to those people who have heard the message about Jesus Christ,

understood that message,

and responded to it by reaching out in faith

and placing their lives into the hands of their Creator.

Of course that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t use these words at times in the lives of unbelievers.

In fact He often does just that as He seeks to draw them to Himself.

But my point here is simply this -

these words were written specifically and directly to Christians,

and as such He wants us to hear them

as His personal, individual communication to each of us.

Which means that,

when Paul begins his letter by saying,

God wants us to hear it

and to understand it personally.

And when we do so,

the words sound more like this:

“My precious holy one, my child whose spirit longs for faithfulness in Christ Jesus, everything I am about to share with you I do so in order to flood you with an awareness of my grace poured out on you and to fill you with an awareness of the peace that will forevermore exist between you and Me.”

What a way for our God to open His conversation with us, huh?

We are frightened children,

hiding in the shadows,

hoping very much that our God will not notice us as He passes by.

And not only does He notice us,

but we discover that we are the reason He has come.

But He has not come for the reasons we would have expected.

He has not come in order to find us,

and then shame us,

and humiliate us,

and scold us for being so much less than we could have been,

than we should have been.

For, when He finds us,

He places His almighty hands on our shoulders,

not in anger,

but with kindness and compassion,

and then He draws us to Himself,

and pulls us up onto His lap,

and the first words He speaks to us

are the last words we would ever have expected from the mouth of our God.

“You are my holy one, and I have come to talk with you

so that I can better pour out on you My grace,

and flood your spirit with My peace.”

And if anything that happens in the pages that follow

has any hope of accomplishing the purpose for which God wrote it,

we must hear it personally.

And as long as we’re doing this,

let me show you how this plays out in the verses that follow.

Having gotten our attention,

and then drawn us to Himself,

and quieted our fears of this encounter with our God,

He then goes on.

EPH 1:3-14 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation -- having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God's own possession, to the praise of His glory.

And when we hear it personally,

listen to what your God is actually saying to you.

Though I know you don’t realize it and don’t believe it yet, I have already blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Long before you were born, even before I brought this world into existence, I knew I was going to create you and I chose you for Myself, and then, through my Son, designed a way in which you would stand forever holy and blameless before Me. Because I love you so much, I predestined you, not just to be forgiven, but to be adopted by me as my child, an adoption made possible through Jesus Christ. It has been My intention from the very beginning to show you kindness, a kindness that, when you begin to see it, will cause your spirit to overflow with praise for my grace poured out on you, a grace which I freely bestowed on you in the Christ. Because you have placed your life into My hands, you now have redemption through the blood of Christ Jesus, and by that I mean that you have now received total and eternal forgiveness for all of your trespasses against Me. This forgiveness is the first of many great riches you will receive through my grace which I have lavished on you. In all wisdom and insight I have chosen to make known to you the mystery of My will, yet another expression of my kindness to you, a kindness that is in every way consistent with the purpose I had for My Son, Jesus Christ, the purpose of establishing on this earth an administrative system for the entire human race, a system that will ultimately result in the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him also you have become My special inheritance, the special gift that has come to Me as a result of the death of My Son. And this friendship that now exists between you and Me is no “Plan B”. It is what I have been planning and working for from the very beginning, predetermined by Me and then brought into reality as I have worked all things after the counsel of My will, to the end that you who are among the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. And because you are now in My Son, sharing in His death, because after you heard the message of truth - the good news of the salvation I was offering to you, you then chose to believe what I was telling you, I have now sealed you in Christ with my own Spirit. And this Spirit is given to you as My promise, My sure and certain pledge to you that you will one day inherit everything I have promised you. You are now My possession and I look forward to the time when My great redemptive work within you will be completed bringing about your praise of my glory.

Until we make it personal,

until we know His words are being spoken directly to us

they cannot and will not bring the healing in our lives

that we so desperately long for.

And with that to help us once again reenter Ephesians,

we’ll pick up our review here next week.