SERMON FOR SUNDAY 12 July 2009

CHRISTIAN PILGRIMS ON THE ROAD 12 JULY 2009

Ephesians 1: 3 – 14 Mark 6: 14 – 29

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians begins with a glorious, sustained hymn of praise to God. It’s one of the great highlights of the New Testament. But it’s also (typically of Paul) highly compressed. In fact the entire passage we read this morning from verse 3 to verse 14 is (in Paul’s Greek) one continuous sentence, which almost seems to have no end. (To make it readable, let alone understandable, our English translation divides it up for us into sentences and two paragraphs.)

Its compass is immense. Paul looks back to a time before creation, when God made his plan for our world, for us, and our redemption. And he looks forward to the time when God will bring that plan to its fulfilment, which will mean that everything which is now divided, in a state of discord and in bondage to sin, will be redeemed and brought into a new order of reconciliation, freedom, harmony and beauty.

And Paul says that we Christians are already blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. We may not always realise it, but the Christian possesses already every blessing and gift which God can bestow. It is no doubt the case that we often leave those blessings idle in our spiritual bank account, and fail to draw them out, appreciate their value and put them to full use. But potentially, every blessing that God can give, is ours to experience and live out in daily life.

God has chosen us – yes, you and me – to be holy and blameless in his sight (verse 4). He has adopted us as his own children, with all the privileges that brings (verse 5). He has poured his love and grace upon each one of us freely in Christ and wants us to enjoy that knowledge of being loved, being free, being empowered to live lives to God’s glory. God has redeemed us from the power and bondage of sin, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (verse 7). God has filled us with hope, by giving us a real glimpse of his end-plan towards which we are travelling, when He will bring all things in heaven and earth together under one head, even Christ (verse 10). And God has given us the priceless gift of the Holy Spirit, which not only empowers us for our Christian life, but is the guarantee that you and I will one day inherit the full glory of God’s kingdom (verses 13,14).

Paul’s heart and mind simply burst with joy and praise when he considers just how blessed and privileged we are – and he wants our hearts and minds to burst with joy and praise too.

We may not always see it and appreciate it as we should – and sadly, sometimes, we are tempted to find the pull of sin and the glory of this world even more alluring than the joy of Christ. But God’s love and salvation remain secure and they must be the rock on which we build our lives, and live it out day by day.

So we are blessed to the point of overflowing. God has blessed us with every good gift. And yet – and yet....we do not live on cloud nine every day of the week.

Paul is writing this letter from the confines of prison (or at least house arrest) in Rome. He is soon to face martyrdom for his faith in the Lord who has won him all these wonderful blessings.

John the Baptist has been arrested and imprisoned for criticising his political masters – a fate experienced by countless thousands every day in this age as then. And now he is beheaded because a drunken, debauched ruler has made a rash, ridiculous promise to a manipulative girl and her mother, and then doesn’t want to lose face in front of his guests. A pathetic episode which nevertheless costs John his life – and God does not intervene to prevent it.

And as John has prepared the way for the announcement of the coming kingdom in Jesus, so now in a sense he is preparing the way for the death of Jesus, at the instigation of manipulative politicians who just don’t want anyone rocking the boat, and a governor to whom justice is less important than the inconvenience of a political row, and to whom the death of an innocent man is of no particular consequence and all in a day’s work.

Paul writes about how blessed he is by God, yet he writes too (as I mentioned the last time I preached), about his battles with suffering, depression, imprisonment, discouragement, attacks on his integrity, his preaching, and much else beside.

We too face trials of many kinds, and maybe you are wrestling with troubles of one kind and another today. Reactions will vary. John the Baptist, at one point at least, began to wonder if he had been wrong about Jesus, and sent a message from prison asking for reassurance whether Jesus was the promised Saviour or not. It was a natural doubt. Jesus in Gethsemane begged God to take the cup of suffering away, and yet was able to submit to God’s purpose for him. In Philippians 3: 10,11, Paul finds he can rejoice in his sufferings when he writes:
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection of the dead.”

We are all Christian pilgrims on the road to glory and the new creation. And it’s important that we don’t try to separate out the spiritual blessings from the earthly human troubles. Please remember that we hold them both together in our one human life. We don’t pretend that earthly suffering can be pushed under the surface, or always banished with a prayer. The spiritual blessings and the earthly pilgrimage are bound up together – intertwined - as every great Christian has discovered. Jesus himself found that the greatest blessing and glory the world has ever seen could only be achieved through suffering and death.

As Christian pilgrims we journey on day by day in fellowship with Christ who travelled the road before us, and although the road may be rough and rocky as well as smooth, God blesses us and redeems us and empowers us and can heal us too, in every situation, as we
keep our eyes fixed on the heavenly home and the new kingdom to which we travel. For (as I quoted last month), Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4: 16 – 18......”Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, ye inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”