Our father, this morning we've been singing and praying about wanting to see you. And yet it's always a distressing thing to have a personal encounter with God because you reveal to us the cracks in our foundation, you reveal to us our hypocrisies, you reveal to us those petty jealousies and those ways that we are unworthy to be in your presence. Yet in your mercy, you heal us by that presence and you make us strong. I want to pray now that you would speak your word to us in a fresh way so that we experience the power of your grace that enables us to stand close to you and know your love and know your purposes. So I'm praying that you would override the faults of the teacher and override the inability to understand the people and by the great working of your Holy Spirit, build us up. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. We're looking at Ephesians chapter 2 and let me just remind you that last week we were looking at this text before this, we read a great well-known beloved set of verses that tell us that salvation is a gift of God, that it is by his grace that anyone is saved, and then actually God's work of coming into your life and saving you, God's work of bringing Christ into your life is in fact his work of art. We talked about God's masterpiece, it's his work of art to come into our lives. Now this is the connection to these next verses, so that's why we begin with this word therefore. In other words, you work God's work of art by grace, therefore. Remember that formerly you who were Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who called themselves the circumcision, that done in the body by the hands of men, remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world, but now in Christ, in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those of you who were near for through him. We both have access to the Father by one spirit. This is the word of the Lord. Because of the mission of ministry of entanglement, I've been able to travel to Turkey a number of times over the last five years and most of those trips I've gotten to visit the city of Ephesus, which is the city that is associated with this letter. When you go to Ephesus, the thing that all the tourists go there for is it was a place of absolute architectural masterpieces all over the place, they are the height of Roman architecture. At the center of it all is something that was known as the Temple of Artemis. Now you can't see it anymore because the Temple of Artemis which was the center of worship in the city of Ephesus was so magnificent that as the Roman Empire began to grow in power and influence, they actually dismantled the Temple because it was so fabulous and they put it all over the place. So now you have to go to Istanbul actually to the Church of the Holy Wisdom, the Iosophia, to see the columns that used to be the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, but you can see them. So if you go to Istanbul to see what was in Ephesus, you go and you see these massive columns. The tour guides said they were 18 meters high. I don't know how that height is because I haven't done the conversion yet, but anyway 18 meters is high. They're very high, they're 18 meters high, they're massive, massive columns. And if you had gone to Ephesus 2,000 years ago, you would have seen this coastal city of a fabulous, beautiful, a G&B with beautiful Roman architecture everywhere about you. And at the very heart of the city was the Temple of Artemis or Diana as she's also known. And this is the same way that you get a Salt Lake city now and the Mormon Temple kind of drives everything that's going on in town. The worship of Artemis drove everything going on in Ephesus. There was a sense in which the whole economy rotated around the kind of religious superstition that grew out of the worship of Artemis. In fact, in Acts 19, you read about a famous riot that happened when Paul came and started preaching the resurrection because people started realizing they didn't need to buy the amulets and the trinkets and the magical documents anymore. In fact, they had a bonfire and were told they burned about a million dollars worth of stuff. Not because it wasn't a book burning. It was just people saying, we don't need this jump anymore, and so they got rid of it. And the people who sold the stuff had a riot. Now, to understand what we've just read about what God is doing in the church, bringing people together who would otherwise not be together, imagine a day in Ephesus, there is, in the same day, there are literally thousands of people going to the Temple of Artemis. You can smell the incense all the way down the street. You can see temple prostitutes walking up and down the street, selling their wares. There are people who maybe they want political influence, so there are important people coming in to get the favor of Artemis. There are people who want to win battles, and so you see famous generals coming in to make sacrifices to Artemis. There's a very intense spiritual business going on there. Now, down the street, when it gets dark, there's a house. And in this house, there may be maybe 20 people, 20 or 30 people gathering that night. And it's a really unimpressive, very unlikely group of people who have come together there in Ephesus. Now, there are probably two or three rich people. In fact, probably one of the rich people hosts the meeting because they've got the room after all. And so they're meeting in the home and the rich person's home. And when you get there, you realize that there's a few working-class couples. They're really tired from their hard day of work, but they're there. They're trying to get their life started. But there's also a couple of wealthy people, and these are all Gentiles. There's a couple of Roman soldiers of all people. And in addition to the soldiers, there are a few people who are actually slaves who've been let go. They've been able to get away that evening because even slaves need to worship. And so on this Sunday evening, the slaves have been allowed to gather here. And what's ironic is, who knows, but that one of these soldiers were part of the regiment that forced these people into labor and made slaves of them. But yeah, now here they are gathered in the same place for a study of the Bible and a common meal together that they call the Thanksgiving or the Eucharist. So there are slaves, and there are Roman oppressors. And if this is not interesting enough, there's maybe a woman who was one of those temple prostitutes who was at the end of a rope and somebody carried it up about her, and they've taken her in. There are probably a lot of children around the place because in a society where children unwanted are just abandoned, the Christians have decided to take them in. So it's kind of a random bunch of service. And then if that's not weird enough, there are several orthodox, observant Jews still wearing their distinctive Jewish dress, and nonetheless, have become believers in Jesus, and have somehow, by that transforming relationship, decided that this little group of people is their family. Now the Apostle Paul looks at this and says, let me tell you something. You want to see the power of God. You want to see the temple of Artemis as one of the seven wonders of the world. Paul says, nothing. It's nothing compared to what's going on in this living room of this house. Because the tear down the walls that separate people, the walls of race, the walls of culture, the walls of economics, the walls of ideology, and actually bring people together in a deep way. That's something only God can do, and that's what he in fact has done in Jesus. Now this is what I want us to do this morning. I want to look at these verses. I know sometimes you read the Bible and the verses are very easy to understand, and other times they're a little more dense. These are a little on the dense side. What I want us to do is try to understand this new reality and then talk about how to experience it. What is this new reality? Now as you read here, the new reality is access to God. That Christ has created such a new spiritual reality that he literally says in verse 15, God's purpose is to create a new humanity. There's an entirely new human thing now because of access to God because of the new spiritual reality made possible by Jesus. How do you understand the new intimacy? How do you want to experience the new intimacy? Intimacy. All right. Now understanding it, you've got to break it down, and there are a few things I want you to see in the text. First of all there's the problem of hostility between us. There's the problem of identity, how we build a self for ourselves which leads to hostilities between us, and then there's the provision of peace that brings the walls down. Let me lay that out for you. The problem of hostility. He began here in verse 11 by using the word remember. He says in verse 11, remember, and then he says it again in verse 12, remember, in other words this is something you need to do. And he's speaking here to Gentiles, to people who are not part of the historic people of God, the Jewish people, the chosen people. He's saying now remember. We used to be called, and again, this is derisive, isn't it uncircumcised, uncircumcised dog. It's a way of calling somebody unclean, unfit for God. They used to call you that, but then he goes on to say, okay, now we know that's racism, we know that's bigotry, but he uses the word again, but remember, you really were. By the way, you really were, you worked part of the people of God. You weren't part of the promises of the true one God. You were, actually, he uses the word when he says without God, he uses the word atheists. In other words, you may have been very religious, but you were practically atheists, and that the real God wasn't really plugged into your life, and you didn't know him personally, and it wasn't changing your life, and therefore you didn't have a vote. He doesn't now remember this, and what he's painting is a picture of religious people who were at each other's throats, Gentiles dislike Jews, because they've created this holier than thou culture. And let's face it, have you ever met a holier than thou insider who didn't rub you the wrong way? And by this time in history, by the time of Paul, the holier in thou attitude had really, I mean, it was really, it was exponential. They found an inscription doing archeological digs around the temple in Jerusalem. They found an inscription on a stone that was just outside what would have been the intercord of the temple, what they believed would have been the intercord of the temple. On this stone, it found this in 1935, and it said this, no Gentiles may enter here. Trespassers will be executed. So that's a nice little friendly warning sign, isn't it? Trespassers will be executed, and now you could have been a prosely, in other words, you could have done everything they said, everything possible. But if you were one of those, if you were part of that other race or there's other people, they'll kill you if you even think about getting this close to our God. We'll kill you. Part of the traditions that were passed around that time, just to get a sense of the hostility between the Jews and the Gentiles in the first century, one of the traditions passed around where it was said, you know, if you see a Gentile woman in pain, which would have meant and prevail of childbirth, do not help her, lest you bring another Gentile into the world. Now, one day not go deeply into the struggles between the Jews and the Gentiles of the first century, because frankly, we got enough hostility as it is, don't we? We don't have to pick on any group and blame them for hostility because the fact is, if you look at race in America, if you look at the house and have nots in America, if you look at the dysfunctional breakdown of our culture trying to wrestle with what gender is, how men and women are supposed to relate, there's a profound sense in which hostility exists between all kinds of different groups, and we come up with commercials and slogans and songs, and they're not even penetrating the armor of hostility. The hostility grows and it seems to be multiplying. Now, that's the problem of hostility. Now, what underlies that problem is the problem of how you get yourself an identity. And you're separated from God. What we do is we get ourselves a self. You get yourself an identity, and the way human beings do this and their sin invariably leads to building walls of hostility with other people. Now, how does this work? Look, we all know, as surely you know, that in your heart there is a deep, there is a profound longing for acceptance from other people. There's a profound longing in your heart to be significant, to matter. To be someone that people either like or respect or take seriously, to live the kind of life that people will remember you made your mark. That longing in the human heart is profound because you were made for a relationship with God, and at the very least, that means you were created to matter. Now, if you don't have that relationship with God, what you will do is you will take something, you will take anything in your life, and you will load it with the spiritual freight that it cannot bear, the spiritual freight of alternate significance. So you might do that, you might do that as a woman. You may say that I am a woman, and I'm going to define my life by the way women are not given their due, and I will crush anybody to get some of my way. Or you might do that with your race. You may say my race is the greatest race there is. My race is not guidance to you, and therefore everything about my life, all the things about my ego and my personality are going to reflect the fact that I'm here to make sure you know what my race is. Or you may do this with your culture. I'm a southerner. Look at my bow time. I am a southerner. Let me tell you about my grandfather. You know, whatever it is, you know, human beings, you will do this. You will get yourself a self. And you will take a lot of truth. There will be a lot of real truth, a lot of real issues, maybe justice issues, or who knows things that are really great things about your story, but what you do is you load a spiritual freight onto that identity that frankly, it simply can't bear because you try to give it alternate significance. And what it will do is create walls, which when you and other people, because if your self image is completely loaded onto that, onto that, whatever that is, I'm a Republican. I'm a Democrat. I'm an environmentalist. Whatever it is, you find your identity there and anybody who doesn't completely accept you. Maybe you do it with your sexuality. I mean, listen, they're married options. What you do is somebody who doesn't see it the way you do actually threatens you. It's not just, oh, we don't vote the same way. No, you oppose me. Therefore, there's a wall of hostility because of the way you've got a worked identity. I was part of a reading group when I was freshly ordained living in New York City. There's a group of people who said, we want to read, we're going to get together and be really smart. And so, we decided we were going to meet, and there was this wonderful little trendy place on the upper west side called the Hungarian pastry shop. And I thought of that part. We would meet at the Hungarian pastry shop for coffee and decadent pastries, and we decided we were going to read through all the works of Soren Kirgergaard. He was a Danish philosopher, the melancholy day. Now, the problem is his books are unbearably difficult to understand. We got through three, and then decided we would be a movie group. Film. We discussed film. It was a lot easier. We just ordered pastries in. But the one book that really, really resonated with everybody was a very important book, my Kirgergaard called, The Sickness on the Death. The Sickness on the Death. And he described the human condition this way. He described sin this way. Sin is trying to become a self without God, becoming like a king without a country, or one whose subjects can desert you at any moment. If it's when the self wants itself to be grounded transparently in God. And what Kirgergaard is saying is this, he's saying, listen, the only real identity that will ultimately not fail you is an identity that is rooted in God himself and his love for you. If you reach your identity, if you treat any good as God, it will ultimately fail you because it won't be able to bear your weight, he said, it will be like being a king who subjects desert you. At some point, it will desert you, it will fail you. It will crumble under the weight of your own glory and your own longing. In other words, it's the difference between enjoyment and addiction. You see, if you find your true self in God in Christ, that becomes your primary identity, your part of what Paul calls this new humanity. There's a new spiritual reality in your life, a new spiritual intimacy with God. If that becomes the center of your personality, then those distinctive things about your severeness or your blackness or your whiteness or your far-easternness or whatever, your ethnic or racial or cultural identity, your distinctive perspective as a woman, your distinctive perspective as a man, whatever those things are, those become gifts that can be enjoyed rather than addictions cut off from the life of God that will never truly fill you. Do you see the difference? And when you build your identity on those things alone, apart from God, you're like a king without a country who's subject or like a king who subjects will fail him ultimately. Now, what Paul says, if you want to understand this, he says, you have to see the provision. How do you get a self-rooted in God? How do you get there to where you load the spiritual freight in and it doesn't fall apart on you? He says, you have to understand that Jesus is your peace. Jesus is your peace. You want to have an identity that doesn't necessarily create hostilities with other people because you're threatened by them? You need to say Jesus is your peace. Now, look at verse 15. I'm going to try to open this up for you. Look at what he says. He says that by abolishing in his flesh, trying to have Jesus' body on the cross, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two thus making peace. Now, let me try to make sense out of that. This is not mean that he took the law where it says, you know, you shall not commit adultery, and all of a sudden made it okay. He didn't get rid of the law of God. But there were certain regulations in the law, particularly about the people of God, the Jews, and how they were related to other people. They weren't supposed to be in community with Gentiles. They were going to remain separate. There were regulations about their worship. And what he's saying is that when the body of Jesus was put on the cross, all of the things that were regulated because of God's holiness to say, you can't come into the Holy of Holies on the temple, and Gentiles can't come into the inner court. All of those things were done away with because the blood of Jesus, his life, poured out for sinners, covers the sin both of Jews and Gentiles, and those things are no longer necessary. And so what he's saying here is that that brings peace. The word peace means wholeness. It's the word shalom, wholeness, life that's supposed to be, and for a relationship to bring peace, it means the intimacy that you long for and know that you're built for with God. He's saying he brings that kind of relationship between different kinds of people who share this new access and intimacy with God. He does that, whether you were one of those who were near, the Jewish people who were God's people, or whether you were far, one of the Gentile pagans, doesn't matter whether you're near or far, there's now something brand new in Jesus. And in him, his intimacy becomes your intimacy. It is a shocking intimacy that is our peace. Next week, I'm very excited because I'm going to be spending some time with my buddy Craig. Craig has been my best friend for 22 years. Our first night in college that we met, we were across the hall from each other. He's also a pastor. We both talk way too much. And our first night, we argued to five o'clock in the morning. And that's the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And sure enough, he's been my best friend for 25 years, but I want to tell you something about my friendship with Craig. We never, ever, ever snuggle. We don't. My wife's not in the service, she'll be relieved to hear this, I doubt she ever suspected it. We never snuggle. All right. He never gives me little raspberries on my belly. Okay, that never, ever happens, though we're very close, okay? But now my children, my children, I have four little boys. We snuggle. Now they think they're getting too old of them, some of them, but they're not. We're going to change their mind about that. We snuggle. Okay. We give each other raspberries, okay? We do these things that are gestures of incredible intimacy. And what the Bible says about, if you want to understand the relationship that Jesus Christ had with his father, that he brings to us, we're told in John 1, that Jesus was forever, the old King James Version gets it right in the bosom of the Father. He was eternally snuggled with his father. There was an intimacy and a closeness that you're embarrassed to look at, it's too close. And yet what the Bible is telling you is that by the cross, by the blood of Jesus, Jesus is saying, I tear this wall down so that no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, this is my relationship with my father, is the relationship I want to give to you. You see, it's access, it's intimacy, being in the bosom of the Father. I think it's very interesting that in Jesus' very first miracle, it was at what? It was at a wedding. And if you want to talk about being chosen by somebody, loved by somebody, totally desired by somebody, what better to talk about than a wedding? That's when you ultimately are chosen, right? It's at a wedding that when the wine runs out, Jesus' mother comes to him and says, look, there's no more wine. What are we going to do? And Jesus says, why are you involving me in this? My time has not yet come. What time is he talking about? He's talking about the time of his death, what will happen on the cross, what the new humanity he's going to create, what he's saying is, listen, the real wedding. The real marriage is the marriage I'm going to have to my people. The relationship between my people and their Father that will come when I go to the cross and when I emerge on Easter day, that is what I long for. And my question to you, friends, is that beginning to you understand this kind of intimacy? Do you understand that in Christ you have that kind of access to God? Do you understand this is what it's all about? And if you're experiencing hostilities with other people, an inability to work through and see with other people who are different than you, at some level, it's because you haven't completely believed and known that in spite of all your sins and defects, God welcomes you and accepts you because if you begin to have that intimacy with him, you'll be able to care about people who may be very different than you who have that same intimacy with him. All right, look, that's understanding the intimacy. Let me close by talking about the experiencing the intimacy. You need to see the problem of hostility between us, the problem of identity and how that feeds us hostilities and you need to see the provision of peace. Jesus tears down those walls by tearing down the ultimate wall. We're told, by the way, that on the day Jesus Christ died the temple in the Holy of Holies, the curtain that separated the Holy of Holies was ripped into and it was ripped into from the top down. That means it was God Himself saying, come in. All right, you need to understand it, but then how do you experience it quickly? How do you experience it? I'm going to make a couple of practical applications. Look at verse 17. I bet this flew right by you, but this is one of the most odd and interesting verses in the whole New Testament, I think, because Paul says this. He's talking about Jesus and he says to these people, he came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near for through him we have access to the Father by one spirit. In other words, he's saying, because in Jesus you have access to the Father by His Holy Spirit within all of us, it's going to bring peace into all your relationships. Now, what does he mean when he said Jesus came and preached peace to you? Do you remember that part of the Gospels where Jesus went to Turkey? It never happened, did it? Not in the United Gospels we have, when did Jesus ever go to Ephesus? When did he ever go to Turkey? He never went to Turkey. What Paul is saying is, listen. When I came and preached the Gospel to you, when the other church planners came into these cities and were preaching the Gospel to you, who was coming to you? Jesus was coming to you. When I pray to preach, do you think I can change your life people, please? No, I can't, but Jesus can and he can use, you know, Valem's S, open your mouth one more time and it happens and that's what he's saying is it was Jesus who came to you and Jesus preached peace and what he began to show you, the miracle of what's going on in your church is that he can tear down these walls because of this amazing new reality of who you become, the new identity you share despite your differences and frankly, the lighting in your differences because of Jesus. Paul will write about this in Colossians chapter 3, verse 15, when he writes to him and he says, listen in your relationships with one another, I want you to be kind, I want you to be gentle. I want you to be patient. I want you to forbear with one another's difficulties and then he says this, let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. If you understand that Jesus is their peace, Jesus is the one who creates this new reality with the Father and therefore between us, it means that they're supposed to be a sort of metaconsciousness that comes into your life through the Holy Spirit that begins to affect the way you see people who are different than you. Different from you racially, culturally, politically, all right, temperamentally, the people who like sports, the people who don't, all right, whatever it is, there's a new, and when he says, let it rule in your heart, that word rule was, that's an athletic metaphor for an empire, and it's the idea of an empire giving a decision in favor of the other person. He says, if you understand Jesus, what you actually be under realized is the peace of Christ rules on their behalf, it always rules for them, you see that? It always accepts them, it always loves them, it always for bears them, it always chooses to go the extra mile. He says, let the, listen, if you want to experience intimacy with God that will never happen until you understand that it's in the church, Jesus is preaching and bringing this new reality about, and it's in this community problematic though it is, that you can begin to experience that intimacy with God and with other Christians, let me close by giving you a couple of applications, all right, if you want to listen, I think I understand what you're talking about, I don't know that I'm experiencing it very much, I kind of feel like I live in a bubble, what do you do? What can you do? Let me just give you two practical suggestions, first of all try caring, try being intentional about caring about somebody who's different than you. Just try that, try making some time to relate to, care about, make a friendship with someone in this community who's very different than you. And you're going to have an opportunity, in a couple of months you're going to be hearing about some discussions about becoming a more welcoming church, and we have some of the ethnic minorities in our church who are working to help us talk about what their experience is like at Intel and how we can be more welcoming and accepting of them, all right, maybe you want to be a part of that to say listen, how can I really understand, I can't care about that which I do not understand. If you really believe the walls are coming down, then say listen, I don't want to assume I'm okay, maybe I need to get close enough to find out and see if there's some problems, all right, get close to somebody who's different than you, and watch God work to show you that there's a new oneness, and then the last thing is this, be willing to let others care about you. If this new intimacy is a reality, not only do you need to be willing to care about somebody who's different than you, but you need to be willing to let somebody care about you. Can I tell you something that I have observed this now for 16 years as a pastor, and it makes me deeply sad, but I see it happen consistently and it's this. People come into church and they get all cleaned up, all right, and they become Christians and they think their life is together and what happens is this, they'll blow it. You may blow it, you're single and you're dating somebody, and this is the third time you've done somebody, all right, and now people are starting to look at you a funny way, and so what do you do? In North America you've got the mega church, and so what do you do? I'm going to go to the 10,000 member church, why, I can go hide and this flow won't follow me there, or you have a series problem with your marriage and guess what, other people know about it, so what do you do? I'm going to leave this church, we can't be in this church, or you're having a problem with your kids, and other people know about it, and what happens, we're not comfortable here anymore, why? Listen, if you want to know access to God, you've got to be willing to say I want to be in a community where I'm willing to let people know who I am, not everybody, but are you in a community group? Are you in any kind of a fellowship where there are some people who know what's really going on in your life, and you're not running away? Paul says that is when Jesus will come, and show you this piece, and show you that the walls are down, that something new is being done.