the Bible and turn to Ephesians chapter one. We'll begin reading at verse one and read through verse eight, Ephesians one and verse one. And before I read, the sermon last week was probably an encouragement to some of you and probably was a little scary and disheartening for others, speaking about the impact of fatherhood upon children and the fatherhood of God. Let me say this, I wish I had said this more clearly last week, if you suffered or are suffering the memory of a father who was not what he should have been and was not a picture of your Heavenly Father, I want you to know that there is hope in the gospel and there's hope in the love of God who is your Heavenly Father. And on the same way, if you have a, not just a father wound but maybe you have a mother wound, maybe your mother was not there or maybe your mother was taken from you in some way. There is hope and healing in the gospel for you as well. And if you are a father or a mother who has failed miserably, there is hope and healing in the gospel. So this is a time and occasion in which I think God calls on all of us to run to Jesus and to run to God our Heavenly Father for His strength and ask God to pour out His Holy Spirit upon us for us as husbands and fathers and wives and mothers and children. Now if you'll look at Ephesians chapter 1, let me also say, come on that subject, if you'd like to talk about any of that, Tom May and I would love to sit down and discuss the implications of that with you as well. Ephesians 1, verse 1, Paul and Apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus, grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ and accordance with his pleasure and will to the praise of his glorious grace which he has freely given us in the one that he loves. In him, in Jesus, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins and accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. Amen. The Book of Ephesians is one of the great doctrinal books of the New Testament, one of the great doctrinal books of the Bible. We live in a day in which doctrine is seen negatively by by many. You may hear churches say things like No Creed, but Christ, No Law, but Love. We don't care about doctrine. It's only about Jesus. Well, the Book of Ephesians is contrary to that. It's full of good theology, but lest you think that it's all abstract theology, please understand that the Book of Ephesians is also one of the most practical books in the New Testament. In fact, in my mind, it happens to be the most practical of all the Apostle Paul's epistles. That's because doctrine and practice always go together. God never intends the gospel, and the Bible to be a bunch of facts that you fill up your head with, but never filter into your heart and change your life. In fact, if the doctrines of the Bible don't move from your head to your heart and out into your life, it will swell your head with pride. It will make you most unpleasant to be around. It will make you a hindrance to the gospel of what God wants to do. Well, let me give you a snapshot of how doctrine and practice go together. One of the great themes of the Book of Ephesians has to do with the unity of the church, and that's because Ephesus was a melting pot. It was a seaport. It was a place of great commerce. It was second in size to Rome in that day, and there were many people who came to Ephesus because of business, and so in Ephesus there were Jewish Christians, and there were Gentile Christians. There was the mingling of cultures. This is why, for instance, in Ephesians 4, and this is looking ahead, Paul says, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling that you've received, be completely humble and gentle and patient, bearing with one another, making every effort to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Why the unity of the spirit? Because Jews and Gentiles naturally had a certain amount of conflict and antagonism for one another. Then he says, there's one body, there's one spirit, just as you were called in one hope when you were called, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all who is overall and through all and in all. There's this emphasis in Ephesians about the unity of the church. Now, what does all this unity talk based on? Frankly, it's not just a pep talk. It's not just let's all be united. It has a doctrinal base, and the doctrinal base, as we've already said, is the love of God. We have been chosen by the Father unto adoption as sons. We spent the last two weeks just on those two concepts. But keep in mind that the love of God is not just the work of the Father. It's the work of what the Bible calls the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so Paul is going to deal here in these verses. He deals with the work that God the Father had in salvation. He chose us from the foundation of the world. Now he's dealing with the role that Jesus played in our salvation, redemption through his blood, in verses 11 through 13, have to do with the work of the Holy Spirit. And so this is all about how Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all work together in order to save God's people. Now, one of the hallmarks of Presbyterians, and how Presbyterians view the Bible are the words covenant theology, covenant theology. That's at the heart of how we view the Bible. What is covenant theology? It's very simple. God made a promise. He made a covenant to save for himself a people. God made a covenant with himself from all eternity to save for himself a people. Now, when God made this covenant, who did God make this covenant with? There was only God. God made the covenant within the persons of the Trinity. The Father said in essence, I have chosen a people to be saved. The Son said, I am ready to suffer and die in order to fulfill your promises and save a people. And the Holy Spirit responded with those that the Father chooses and the Son redeems with His blood. I will call and regenerate and will grant faith and repentance. I will sanctify them. I will preserve them. I will perfect them and I will bring them safely home. Now, in a snapshot, in a nutshell, that's the covenant of grace. Who do the angels in heaven praise? Do they praise 99.9% God and 0.1% man? No. It is 100% God. Salvation is of the Lord. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Now, these verses, Paul says simply in him, that is, in Jesus, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. Let's ask three questions. The first question is this. What is this need of redemption? What is Paul talking about when he speaks of redemption? The Greek word for redemption is the word apolutrosus and it brings with that word a vivid picture. If you were in the first century church and you heard the word apolutrosus, your mind would immediately go somewhere. It would give you a vivid picture. Apolutrosus means the release from the state of servitude obtained by the payment of a ransom price. In the Roman world, slavery was everywhere. Slavery was everywhere. Slavery was the norm. You saw slaves every day. You saw slaves on the street. You saw slaves in people's homes. They worked in private homes. They worked in minds. They worked in factories. They worked on farms. They worked on public roads. They worked on the aqueducts that carried water through the Roman Empire. Slaves might be prisoners of war. They might be sailors captured. They might be someone who had been captured and sold by pirates. Slaves may have originated outside the Roman territory but apolutrosus pictures of slave market. So in your mind, picture a slave market. There stand the slaves. There stand the slaves. Handcuffed. In chains. Iron collar on their necks. Powerless. Naked. Standing there in the street. In all of their shame. Slaves had absolutely no rights. And so when Paul uses this word apolutrosus, redemption from slavery, that's the picture. It's a vivid picture of what sin does to us. It's a vivid picture of what sin does to you. It's a vivid picture of what sin does to me. Have you ever noticed? Sin always promises freedom. Sin promises happiness but sin always instead brings with it chains and bondage. Pick a sin. Think of any sin. Think of any sin you can think of. Think of any sin that you've fallen prey to. There is no sin that exists. If it's pursued doesn't result either in being out of control or being in addiction in some way. And this is how the nation of Israel saw itself but in the wrong way. They spoke of Jesus in Luke 24. We hope that he would be the one who would redeem Israel. And so as they thought of slavery, they thought, well, we're in subjection to Rome but it's more basic than that. It's true of individuals. Jesus said in John 8, I tell you the truth. Everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Romans 8, 14, we know that the law is spiritual but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. This is Paul speaking in the first person. He says the law is spiritual but I, Paul, am unspiritual. I am sold as a slave to sin. I don't even understand what I do for what I want to do. I do not do but I hate what I do. This is your natural condition before Holy God as a slave. Chains, bondage, powerless, shame, naked of any kind of righteousness of your own. But it's an essential part of understanding the gospel. You see, the good news of the gospel is not that God is a nice guy. He's going to let bygones be bygones. He's a God of the second chance. He's going to give you a second chance so you can do better because he really believes in you and he's hopeful that you're going to get your life straightened out because you were raised in a bad environment and he knows that you can become a better person. That's not the gospel. There's no good news in that. If God gives you a second chance or a third chance or a tenth chance or a hundredth chance, you're still going to fail miserably. The gospel is that God wants to set you free by means of redemption. Apolutosis, freedom of one who has been a slave. You may be familiar with the name Dorothy Sayers. She was an English poet, author, playwright, essayist, translator. She's known for a series of books that she wrote that were set in between World War I and World War II. Listen to what Dorothy Sayers wrote. This was just almost prophetic. She writes, one of the surprising things about, by the way, she died in 1953. One of the surprising things about the present bewilderment of humanity is that the Christian church now finds herself called upon to proclaim the old hated doctrine of sin as a gospel of cheer and encouragement. The final tendency of the modern philosophies hailed in their day as a release from the burden of sinfulness has been to bind man hard and fast in the chains of an iron determinism. The influence of heredity and environment of glandular makeup and the control exercised by the unconscious of economic necessity and the mechanics of biological development have all been invoked to ensure man that he's not responsible for his misfortune and therefore not to be held guilty. Evil has been represented as something imposed on us from without not made by us from within. The dreadful conflict falls inevitably that as he is not responsible for evil, he cannot alter it. I will remember how an ant of mine brought up in an old-fashioned liberalism protested angrily against having continuously to call herself a miserable sinner when reciting the litany. Today, if you could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners, that the trouble is not outside of us but inside us and that therefore by the grace of God we can do something to put it right, we should receive that message as the most helpful and this heartening thing that can be imagined. I don't know if you watch religious programming on TV or not but I would encourage you to watch it sometime. It can be very disheartening to hear about how God believes in you. He has confidence in you that you can do better. There's no good news in that. Dorothy Sayer wrote about it 60 years ago. What is this need of redemption? It is apolutrosis. Freedom from the state of servitude obtained by payment of a ransom price. Let's second talk about what is the price of redemption. Notice what Paul says here. In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, and accordance with the riches of God's grace, that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. Think about that word lavished. What does it make you think of? When Stacey and I were first married we moved to Montgomery, Alabama and went to the first covered dish supper on a Wednesday night at the first Presbyterian church. That church was full of little old ladies who would bring their dish to the covered dish supper and they would stand within a few feet of their dish. As you went through the line, they would watch to see what you took. Particularly, they were very competitive. They would watch to see if you took something that somebody else brought versus something that they brought. They would come up to you. This is the truth. They would say, here, have some of this. You didn't get any of my squash. You would go through the line and your plate would be about this high because they all were insisting that you take something of theirs that they brought. They were lavishing it. There was a little lady named Mrs. McCarty who had a sweet potato recipe, sweet potato, casserole, souffle, and in the sweet potato recipe was about a cup and a half of rebel yell. When she brought Mrs. McCarty was famous in the church for her sweet potatoes. I mean the whole fellowship hall reeked of rebel yell and she was always there lavishing it on whoever would come near. That's the word Paul uses here. That's the word Paul uses. The God hasn't just paid for your sins. He hasn't just extended to you a little grace and mercy. He has lavished it. There are Stan slaves in the marketplace. They don't just stand there. There's a guard or several guards, tyrants controlling them, taking pleasure in tightening their chains, experiencing a rush of power as they cry out because these slaves are under their control. But this is where the word picture ends in one sense because no one can pay the price of redemption. The slaves in the marketplace could be bought. They could be redeemed. But the Bible says in Psalm 49, no man can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for him. The ransom for a life is costly. No payment is ever enough that he should live on forever and not CDK. Let me ask you something.
Have you ever had kind of an epiphany in which God exposed more of your sinfulness and you thought, I know the Bible says that I'm a sinner and then I messed up, but I'm more messed up than I even thought. You haven't had an epiphany like that. What Paul is saying here is though that your sins may be excessive. The God of the Bible in redeeming you and ransoming you has lavished the blood of Christ on you. It's lavish. Remember the movie Amastad 15 years ago was set in 1839? True story, a story of slaves being brought illegally to the U.S. and there was a mutiny on the ship. Remember how angry the slaves were at the injustice and the whole legal system and here they are in their chains and there was an attorney who was trying to get them to cooperate with him. At first they don't cooperate with him. They just feel the injustice of it all and finally they begin to cooperate with him. Remember that dramatic scene when a slave stands up in the courtroom and he says, give us free. Give us free. As vivid as that was, even that isn't truly a picture of what Paul speaking of. Do you know why? Because their slavery was unjust. Their slavery was forced and your slavery and my slavery is deserved. We chose it. And the apolutosis, the freedom of people who are enslaved to sin that Paul speaks of here, this is not being freed by the legal gymnastics of some sharp attorney. When the Bible talks about redemption, the Bible always talks about redemption in terms of blood, of death. Remember in Exodus, children of Israel, they're going to be leaving in the Exodus and remember they were to sacrifice a lamb and they were not only to eat the lamb but they were to take the blood of the lamb and they were to smear it on the lintel, on the door and on the doorposts. And so the picture of the slave market that we see here in Ephesians pictured the son of the king who steps forward in the marketplace to purchase slaves. And as he sees these slaves and steps forward to purchase them, they see him and they hate him and they mock him and they begin to curse at him and they begin to spit at him. And still the son of the king steps forward to pay the price but but not with money. He offers his own hands. He stripped of his own clothing. He's bound with their chains. He's whipped into the blood flows and until he dies. This is what Paul is saying. This is the meaning of lavished, lavished under blood, lavished under death. I remember a conversation with a four-year-old little boy about, I don't know, 12 or 15 years ago. I love little four and five-year-old boys. They are so much fun. And I was talking to him and I looked at him and I said, he was looking really suspicious at me and I said, listen, can we be buddies? And without any hesitation, he said, nope, nope, can't. And I said, well, why? Why can't we be buddies? This is a quote. You know what he said? He said, because you talk about blood too much. Now that's a four-year-old that listens in church. And you know what? He was naturally repulsed at the thought of blood being shed because of sin. Listen, if you're four or 40, we don't like thinking about it. It makes us all a little bit uncomfortable because we all understand that there's our guilt in that, that there's life in the blood. And we understand that when Jesus said that, one word from the cross to Palestine, it's paid. He was talking about his own lifeblood and his own death. The third, let's ask this question, what is the result of redemption? What is the result of apolutrosis? Well, in broad terms, the result of it is a legacy and an inheritance. I'm sure you probably have never heard the name Stanley McKenna Walker. He was the son of a British wealthy British shipbuilder. And at the age of 50, he was the heir to what was then a four million dollar state, probably in today's currency, it would probably be something like four hundred million dollars. He was the heir to a four million dollar state, but he didn't know it. And after his father's death, the authorities searched for Stanley McKenna Walker throughout the skid row of Chicago for months. I mean, they went to all the homeless shelters and so forth. They searched for him through months, streets and alleys. And for years, he had barely survived on the streets of Chicago, eating leftover garbage, sleeping in the doorway of city hotels or flop houses. And finally, they located him. It was too late. True story, he died the night before in the doorway of a Chicago mission. And what a picture of the way that you and I frequently tend to live struggling as spiritual street people, all because we don't really comprehend all that the father is. And all that the father has, it's available to us. Listen, you know what an apolutrosis means? You've not only been freed from slavery. You've been forgiven. You've been adopted as God's own son. It means you are a joint heir of the unlimited inheritance of Jesus Christ. Did you hear that? It means that you are a joint heir of the unlimited inheritance of Jesus Christ. What are the things that that means? It means, first of all, joy and peace. Joy and peace is not something that you work up. It's not put, smile, put on, a happy face. It's not something that we manufacture. What Paul's been speaking of here is, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has given us every spiritual blessing in Christ. And what does he talk about? He talks about election. He talks about adoption. He talks about redemption. And notice what he says. He says, we have redemption. It's not wishful thinking. He says, we have it. We have joy and peace. It's not something theoretical, hoped for, made up. It's something that you've actually received. I want to ask you this this morning, have you received the joy and peace of having your sins forgiven of being released from bondage? The next thing he talks, the next thing I think that's indicated here is a sense of joy and forgiveness. That's part of your legacy, your inheritance, assurance and assurance of forgiveness. The woman in Luke 7 who had lived a simple life, she's weeping, she's washing Jesus feet with her tears, with her hair, with perfume. Why? You know why? You know what the tears were about because she felt the relief of being forgiven. Those were the tears of sadness. Those were the tears of joy because she had the assurance that her sins had been covered that she was forgiven. And the next is sanity and wholeness. This is a true statistic. Did you know that 75% of people who are considered mentally disturbed could be pronounced well if they could only be sure that they are forgiven? Truth, true statistic. 75% of mentally disturbed people could be pronounced well if they could only be sure that they are forgiven. And don't you see, this is the heart of redemption, forgiveness, peace with God. There was a conference some 20 or so years ago in Tampa, Florida. And at the end of this Christian conference, they had communion. The pastor who was on the stage asked a young life worker in the crowd if he would dismiss after communion with prayer. The pastor happened to know that this young man who was working with young life was himself suffering with terminal cancer. And he asked him to give the benediction. The young man stood up and said these words. Instead of giving the benediction, I want to sing it. And so he began to share his testimony about how he grew up on the streets, how he at an early age began to experiment with drugs, how he had begun shooting heroin and had been a heroin addict for six years, culminating in the selling of his body for homosexual acts. Until finally somebody told him the gospel, told him the good news that Jesus Christ came to redeem him, to free him, to buy him back from all that. And so he said, so now I want to sing the benediction and he sang these words. I'm so glad that our Father in heaven tells of his love and the book he has given wonderful things in the Bible I see. This is the dearest that Jesus loves me. Though I forget him in wander away, still he does love me wherever I stray back to his dear loving arms. Do I flee? What I remember that Jesus loves me. Only if there's only one song I can sing. When in his beauty I see the great king, this shall my song in eternity be. Oh, what a wonder that Jesus loves me. I am so glad that Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me. I am so glad that Jesus loves me. Jesus loves me.
And then there's freedom and service. That's part of the legacy, the inheritance that Jesus has given you. You know what that means? There's a foreign film filmed in Vietnam called Three Seasons. It's about the life, about life in Ho Chi Minh City Vietnam. One of the storylines in the movie, one of several involves a bicycle rickshaw driver named Hai who falls in love with a woman named Lan who was a high-priced prostitute. Hai is desperately and deeply in love with her, but he lives in poverty. She is high-priced. She is out of his league. They communicate some and it's clear that the land, the girl carries a silent secret resentment of her clients. She tells Hai that she won't do this for very long. Her dream is to be able to sleep in an air-conditioned room with nobody bothering her. She longs for the day when she has made enough money that she can escape from this work that enslaves her. And Hai is this bicycle rickshaw driver. He enters a bicycle race. He wins first prize. He wins $200. It's enough to pay for one night with Lan, but he tells her, I only want to watch you sleep. She doesn't believe him. She's sure. He wants to take advantage of her. She's sure. He wants to control her in some way. But finally, she is won over by his devotion and as she's won over by his love, she finds that she's unable to continue in her former life. It's a story about redemption. And you know what the real story is? It's not a story in Vietnam. It's that Jesus with all power and all authority saw you in your slavery. He saw you chained and shackled in irons and emptied himself, paid the cost for your sin with his own blood and purchased a place where you can rest in the Father's house. How does this word apolutrosis become yours? How does redemption become ours so that we know for sure joy and peace, assurance, forgiveness, sanity, wholeness, freedom, service? It becomes yours in Christ, in Christ. What do I mean by that? There was a wealthy man who collected paintings and sculptures from all over the world. He was very, very wealthy. He had an impressive collection of paintings and sculptures. As time passed his wife died, they had one child, a son, and a few months later his only son that he loved, the only thing that he really had left was tragically killed in a car accident. And within a year or two, the man himself died and there were no, there were no heirs. The reading of his will caused quite a stir among art curators all over the world who knew about this man's vast holdings and paintings and sculpture. They wanted to acquire his treasures for their galleries and on a certain date all the art in the state in the state was to be auctioned off with the proceeds going to charity. The day of the auction came and there were literally hundreds of eager bidders outside of this man's home. There were reporters and camera men and the first painting, the first work of art to be auctioned off was a portrait of the man's son who had died. Nobody even knew anything about it. Nobody even knew that it existed, but it was brought out first to be auctioned off. It wasn't a famous work of art at all. It was a painting of the man's son and when it was brought out everyone was surprised because they hadn't even seen this on the list and there was silence all over the room. There were no bids. There was just this long pause of quiet and this embarrassing silence until finally the housekeeper who had served the man his wife and the son for over 30 years and who loved the son wanted that painting to remind her of the boy and finally bid $20 and no one counted with a higher offer. $20 going, going, going, gone, sold. Then the auctioneer looked at the assembled crowd, closed the auction and thanked everybody for coming and the bidders were furious. They said, what are you talking about? There are all these works of art to be auctioned off. What are you doing? What about the rest of the artwork and the auctioneer said, it says in his will, he who takes the son gets it all. The entire estate now belongs to the one who loves the son and that's the gospel. The entire inheritance of Jesus belongs to the one who takes and receives the son. That's what Paul's talking about, freedom, released from bondage, peace with God, joy and peace, assurance of forgiveness, sanity, wholeness, freedom, service, all for free to the one who takes and receives the son. If you haven't before, I invite you to receive Jesus, to embrace him by faith, to turn from your sins, to become a new creation in Christ, to receive the Son of God, and receive the ransom that Jesus paid to free the captives. Let's pray.
Father in heaven, we thank you for this beautiful word redemption, which we can only partly understand because we don't speak Greek. But we thank you for this vivid picture of slaves in the marketplace and we thank you that Jesus saw us bound up with all of our sin and came and gave himself and took our chains and took our beating and suffered our death in order to ransom us, to redeem us, to free us from sin and misery. We thank you that the gospel is good news that's not about a second chance. It's about what the Son of God purchased and paid for, for all who received him. Lord, we pray for those here who have never really received Jesus. Will you not let them rest until they put their faith solidly in the Lamb of God? So we thank you for redemption by the blood of Christ, and we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.