Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Morning, everybody.
[00:00:08] I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here. You're joining us for part three of our trip through the Book of Ephesians. And just as a quick recap, Paul has spent. The Apostle Paul, who's writing this letter, has spent the first part of it, the first chapter, we would call it, giving us this huge, soaring overview of the beauty of grace. And now how because of the death and the resurrection of Jesus, we have all, Jew and Gentile, all of us from all backgrounds are now invited into receiving this grace that Jesus has created for us through his work on the cross.
[00:00:41] And so that is kind of the easiest, funnest piece to stomach. And now starting here in Ephesians 2, verse 11, the work begins as a result of that grace. The. The. The takeaway that we're supposed to have and then live together in community begins in this moment. And so Paul takes that first huge, soaring overview, and then he gets into the work of the church as a community. And then the final section, which we'll get to in the coming weeks, refers to Paul doing some really specific pastoring work with those people in those churches at that time.
[00:01:17] And so this is where we find ourselves today. So let's jump into it. The unifying of the church, or the unifying of all people within the church. It says in Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 11.
[00:01:26] Therefore, remember that formerly you are you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the Circumcision, which sounds like a really terrible band name.
[00:01:44] Well, here you are. Who are you guys? Were the Circum.
[00:01:48] Sorry.
[00:01:53] 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 Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
[00:02:08] For He Himself is our peace. He who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.
[00:02:20] His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
[00:02:33] He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. And for. Though. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
[00:02:45] Consequently you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household. Built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.
[00:02:57] In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him. You two are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.
[00:03:10] So the work of being a unified people is what takes place here in chapter two, verse 11. Let's pray. Father God, we thank you that you are with us in this unified moment. Lord, we believe that you speak to us. So build us up. Press us together as the stones of the temple, Lord Jesus, that we may look and sound and be who you have called us to be in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:03:35] I was in college longer ago than I would care to admit.
[00:03:40] But when I was there, I stayed in the dorms. Now, I've noticed in speaking with some young people that have been to college recently or are currently attending.
[00:03:50] When I say dorms, you do not think of what I think of.
[00:03:56] You guys have like condos and apartment complexes and we had shared showers and concrete blocks of rooms. That's what we had.
[00:04:09] So my neighbor has a kid that just spent his freshman year last year at the University of Arizona, and his experience at the University of Arizona was not mine at Oregon Tech and Klamath Falls, which will shock you to know.
[00:04:24] So I was lucky enough that I had my best friend from high school. We were roommates in college, and we were great roommates. It was perfect, went great the whole time. We did have a neighbor my freshman year named Shane, who was not one of my favorite people of all time. Somehow Shane, in the first three months of our existence together in these dorms, him right across the hall, I think he must have broken up with his girlfriend six, seven times. And he let us know every time that it happened. And, you know, I'm pretty empathetic the first couple times. And then after a little while, especially 18 year old me, did not have the emotional capacity to care for this person.
[00:04:58] And so instead I would react by trying to avoid him at all costs, right? And so Shane was that guy that was kind of like Kramer from Seinfeld, you know, he would just kind of be in the room, he would just appear all of a sudden out of nowhere, be like, Shane, I'm trying to go to sleep, Shane, I just want to be left alone. Shane, I don't like you.
[00:05:15] You know? And he would kind of ignore all that and go, really? You don't like me. That's great. Let me tell you what happened to Shana and I this week.
[00:05:24] You know, and so eventually I'm coming up from class and I'm walking through the stairwells, and I'm kind of looking to see if he's in his room and is it safe to walk by. And then I look and I kind of would put my head in the door and see that he was in there with my roommate. And I'd be like, well, great. I gotta find somewhere else to spend the next four or five hours. Cause I can't do it here.
[00:05:43] It was like, it took this one place that was home. And by the way, I acknowledge that I'm very immature and not nice at the that point. I'm just being honest with you. Okay?
[00:05:53] And I would love to just tell you that story and say, a long time ago, I had some of these feelings about people way back in college. But I still get this same feeling sometimes now when my wife goes, hey, we're gonna go to so and so's house. There's gonna be some people there. It's gonna be great. Food, drinks, all this stuff. And I go, great. Who else is gonna be there? And she goes, you know, why don't you just, like, find out when you get there? And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
[00:06:18] Cause you can have great drinks and great food and great live music and great atmosphere. And if someone is there that I don't wanna be with, it ruins the whole thing for me. Cause we might have to, like, talk.
[00:06:32] And then, like, I'd have to pretend. Any of you guys ever done this. One of my tells is that my lip gets real high, you know, and talking. Oh, good, good. Yes. Wonderful. Yeah. I haven't seen you. It's been a long time. On purpose. It's been on purpose for me.
[00:06:50] And it can ruin the whole thing. I just want. Being with my people is kind of the most important thing to us often, right? And we get into those groups of people where the sense of humor matches some of the experience. We can share stories and all those things that make sense. It creates a sense of ease and community.
[00:07:06] And what Paul is doing is he's actually making community really, really hard for the new church that's now gathered under the grace of Jesus. Jesus. He is saying, you guys, all of the best drinks and the best food and the best atmosphere is going to be at this place called Grace. It's all gathered together underneath the name of Jesus. It is going to be great. And it is for you. Grace is for you individually. And everyone's going Jew and Gentile is like, this is awesome and exciting because the Jewish people are feeling persecuted and pressed under by this law that they've been trying to follow to the detail for so long. And the Gentiles are finally welcomed into the kingdom of God when they were considered outsiders and disgusting even by the Jews for so long. And now Paul is saying, you all have received grace. This is awesome. It's wonderful. Come to the party. And Paul says, also, your least favorite people are going to be there.
[00:07:56] Oh, man, this sounded so good a second ago. But we have to participate in this together. And Paul is saying, it's not the finished, the completed work of the church, Right? The Gospel is its own creat. Complete work. But because of that complete work now we are compelled as a community of believers to gather together in unity as the church.
[00:08:21] This is tough stuff because unity is incredibly inefficient.
[00:08:29] It's far easier for us to remain rivals or enemies with other people than it is to do the hard work of, of overcoming sometimes hundreds or thousands of years of trauma and disagreement and frustration. The way more difficult work is to actually try to figure it out and be able to live this life together in unity. And the way easier work is to create a rivalry and stay to our guns.
[00:08:54] And if you look at throughout the course of history, right, you think about the Roman Empire. What did the Roman Empire do in their conquest? Did they look at the world and they say, and in this world, we are going to create such violence and rule with an iron fist? No, they didn't say that. They said, we're going to bring peace to the world.
[00:09:13] Nazi Germany did the same thing.
[00:09:15] They say, we're going to usher in an era of violence into this world that it's never seen. No, they said, we are actually going to unify the world with our violence in our monoculture.
[00:09:29] And anybody that disagrees with us, even on the slightest detail is going to go ahead and be crushed by the steamroller that is our empire.
[00:09:36] And so Paul is also saying in this, through Jesus, we have to have peace and unity among each other. But Paul is indicating to the people who find themselves on opposite sides, he's saying, but we have to do this actually together.
[00:09:51] We're not talking about the peace and unity that only comes from the quiet that you experience after violence, but instead we're talking about the peace and unity that comes from the greatness of Jesus.
[00:10:02] They lived in this state, as Paul says of A dividing wall of hostility between each other.
[00:10:07] The Jews despised the Gentiles unclean, and the Gentiles resented the Jews for how they had been treated for so long.
[00:10:16] So it's not just bringing people from different parts of the railroad track, so to speak, it's bringing in people that have this incredible and unbelievable and often violent and racist history together and saying, jesus loves both of you.
[00:10:31] In Ephesians 2 again in verse 13 it says, but now in Christ 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 on the cross. Jesus fulfilled the law that had separated the groups and abolished this barrier, creating one new man out of the two. But notice it says that he himself is our peace.
[00:10:55] So before, especially for the Jews, the peace was brought in through adherence to the law. It made it easy to see who is in and who is out.
[00:11:03] Do you adhere to the rules and regulations? Do we have. What's your relationship like with shrimp and pork, by the way? My relationship with shrimp and pork is fantastic.
[00:11:12] We get along so good.
[00:11:15] I'm a little hungry actually at this service because this would have been easy. So even like let's say the most open minded of Jews, right? It would have been crazy to say, well, okay, like we can welcome in a lot of these Gentiles, but they really need to go ahead and get the rules down first.
[00:11:34] Okay, fine, they can come in, but they need to be circumcised like us, they need to eat like us, they need to talk like us and sound like us.
[00:11:39] And then we'll go ahead and we'll welcome them in to the party.
[00:11:44] A lot of times we do that even in the current church. Today we say we want to welcome everybody, everybody has the opportunity to experience Jesus. But a lot of times the subtext is the underlying behavior modification that we believe needs to happen in order for them to truly be included and involved and find belonging at church.
[00:12:04] We were even having a conversation, one of our teaching team meetings where someone said, we were asking the question, well, what does unity look like within the church? And one response was, well, we agree on these main things, these primary tenets of faith. And then we have conversation around all the difficult subjects, but stay in community together and that's unity. And I said, that's great, that's awesome. That feels good to me. It creates some lines and some understanding. But then I remember that Jesus allowed a group of 12 disciples to follow after him. He welcomed them and loved them and created belonging well before they ever confessed him to be the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
[00:12:44] He welcomed them in knowing that one would betray him at the end.
[00:12:48] He welcomed them in knowing that they were deeply flawed and they would have reservations and questions and frustrations about following Him.
[00:12:56] He let them in while they were still sinners, unbelievers, not realizing who he was. And yet they belonged in this family.
[00:13:07] In my mind, I hope that Westside can be a place that truly allows that belonging to happen. Not just for those of us who have been here for more than five years. Not just those of us who look or sound or talk or dress the right way, but instead, everyone who would find even a moment's curiosity of Jesus would find themselves walking and belonging in this place and in our homes and of course, in our hearts.
[00:13:34] But in order to do this again, the heart, we actually have to have a real change of heart.
[00:13:39] That's the hard part. You can drag me out to the party where I'm spending time with people that I'd rather not spend time with, and I can fake my way through it just fine.
[00:13:48] It hurts my soul, but I can pretend for a while.
[00:13:54] And what happens is I get into the car, and all of a sudden all that tension in my body is just kind of like, oh, okay, we can go home, we can go to bed, we can sleep and forget that these conversations ever happen.
[00:14:07] The work is way deeper than that, I think. Fake it till you make it can work for a certain amount of time. But what Jesus is after is actually like this. Something that is more like a heart surgery on all of us.
[00:14:22] It's not that we just tolerate things that we don't understand or that we disagree with, but we actually see to understand them.
[00:14:29] We seek to empathize and not just sympathize.
[00:14:34] We seek curiosity and not just straight judgment.
[00:14:37] That's the work that God wants to do and transform our hearts.
[00:14:43] The gospel is such an incredible and powerful thing, and it does that depth of work on us. And how it does it is first, it humbles us. The gospel humbles us.
[00:14:53] Everyone referenced last weekend, which, by the way, if you haven't heard his message from last week, it's one of my favorite teachings on grace ever. You should 100% go listen to that.
[00:15:02] In it, he refers back to one of the most pivotal sections of all of scripture, and that's Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, where there's things like theology and poetry, but then Jesus addresses the law and he talks to the Jewish people about the law, who they just feel so much oppression about. There's so many rules and little things to follow along, and they're doing the best. And Jesus does something horrible and he makes the law harder.
[00:15:26] He says, I know you guys think murdering is bad, but thinking bad about somebody in your heart, that's just as bad as murder. And the whole crowd is like, who is this loser?
[00:15:35] And why are we here listening to him? Because he's the worst.
[00:15:40] Life's already hard enough. We don't need it to be harder.
[00:15:44] The story continues on until one of my favorite things is this whole section that ends in Matthew, chapter 11, where Jesus says, are you tired? Are you weary?
[00:15:55] Are you exhausted?
[00:15:57] Are you heavy laden by this burden? Come and I will give you rest.
[00:16:01] The message translation says, are you tired and worn out on religion?
[00:16:06] And I'll give you a real rest of your soul.
[00:16:09] Because what Jesus is trying to do through this passage is he's allowing the gospel to do that. He's allowing the gospel to humble us, to remind this entire community of believers. And he's speaking specifically to the Gentiles and the Jews, saying, if you guys think you're exempt from this, if you've been successful and wealthy enough, if you've been smart and handsome enough, if you feel like you have cracked the code culturally in order to avoid all these things that you actually find yourself above other people, I've got news for you. I will make the law impossible for any of us to escape, so that we all might arrive at this low and humble moment to say, I too am a sinner.
[00:16:47] I too don't deserve the kingdom of God.
[00:16:52] And the people under the sound of his voice at the Sermon on the Mount would have been like, this is awful. All of us have failed. And Jesus would go, yes, finally, that's the answer.
[00:17:03] So come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, I'll give you rest.
[00:17:07] The humility that comes from the power of the gospel is something that is for all of us. We should be humble in how we approach other people. We should be humble in how we approach and understand our own story. We should be humble as we approach the church and humble as we approach Scripture, understanding that we may not have all of the answers to every little cultural detail.
[00:17:31] We might not understand exactly the voice of God for every moment. And we're humble enough to allow God to continue to speak to us Himself and through others.
[00:17:43] What can happen when we don't especially read Scripture humbly is we can find ourselves far away from the nature of Jesus Christ and serving our own ambitions.
[00:17:55] Paul's going to talk about slavery here in a couple of chapters, and he does not say that it's a bad thing.
[00:18:02] And what has happened is we then saw thousands of years where people were actually using Scripture to justify the existence of slavery and actually using Scripture to justify the expansion of it.
[00:18:14] This is an arrogant and not so humble translation that led to the destruction of so many lives.
[00:18:23] But we will be a different kind of people, humble and open handed, not relying on pride in what we believe to be our own intelligence or, or simply our own experiences.
[00:18:36] But instead we will find our leaning simply on Jesus.
[00:18:41] So it humbles us, it then lifts us up by grace, enabling former enemies to love each other.
[00:18:48] We realize that we're all equal sinners saved by that same mercy. So there's no basis for boasting or barriers.
[00:18:55] God creates in himself one new humanity by changing our prideful hearts into grateful and loving hearts.
[00:19:07] You know what I was. I had a conversation with my therapist recently where she actually told me about the mental and spiritual benefits of gratitude.
[00:19:18] Did you know that by and large that people who are spending regular time in gratitude every day are far less anxious than the rest of us?
[00:19:29] The practice of gratitude enables us to find that humble place in our hearts, to be lifted up by grace, and then to find ourselves in unity together. We have to be grateful for each other and for grace.
[00:19:44] And finally, the Gospel transforms us, so it humbles us, it lifts us up and it transforms us.
[00:19:50] Only the cross, by the way, has the power to do this kind of heart surgery.
[00:19:57] External rules and social programs can't erase the centuries of hate between the Jew and the Gentile. But Jesus blood finally brought them to one another.
[00:20:09] Reconciliation required both the legal barrier, the Old Testament law to be fulfilled and set aside, and the inner hostility to be crucified in the individual.
[00:20:19] Something that only Christ could do. In this context, Christian unity is built on humility, a transformed heart, and not simply on each of us trying harder.
[00:20:33] And then Paul goes into this series of metaphors that again highlight the difficulty of this process of unity.
[00:20:41] He says in Ephesians 2:19 he says, Consequently, you're no longer foreigners and aliens. That is where I would love to keep people in my life. As strangers and foreigners and aliens.
[00:20:53] Just like being in an airport. Gosh you guys, I love being in airports. Cause I can sit all by myself. AirPods in and I can judge everyone around me.
[00:21:06] Oh, I have no connection with you. I don't need your flights to work out in order for me to feel good.
[00:21:13] I'm just sitting here in my own world, watching everybody else go by. What a wonderful way to live life.
[00:21:19] And by the way, again, I promise you, I'm not a bad person. I'm just. Again, I'm being honest.
[00:21:26] If I was gonna interact with church and I didn't work here, I would sit back in this corner, I would knock out one of the lights so it was even darker, and I would leave four minutes early so I didn't have to talk to any of you.
[00:21:38] That would be the best for me.
[00:21:40] I can get exactly what I want out of church. I can curate it so that it's not messy for me. And then I can get in and out, and I can go to a fantastic brunch just around the corner. What a Sunday.
[00:21:52] Yeah, somebody's with me. Yeah, yeah. There's a guy over there elbowing his wife, being like, see, this is the way of Jesus.
[00:22:01] Okay, you gotta wait for the second part of the statement.
[00:22:07] Says, they're foreigners and aliens. He said, but now your fellow citizens with God's people, okay, we're getting a little bit closer.
[00:22:15] You know, we can live in a nation together. We're doing that right now. We're living in a nation with people that largely, you know, the other half, we don't like very naturally, but we're doing it. We're making it work.
[00:22:27] And then he says, and you're members now of his household.
[00:22:31] All right, that's too much. Same roof.
[00:22:37] The relationship gets closer and closer and a little bit more intimate and a little bit more difficult. And then it says in him, you are now a whole building. You're joined together to become a holy temple in the Lord. He's talking about the brick and mortar process of how the temple is built and how the stones, through force, are pushed onto each other.
[00:22:58] When I was in high school, at homecoming, we did a competition between classes to see how many people we could stuff inside of a Volkswagen Beetle, right? And so the first people that couple people that go in, you go. You kind of sit down. And then by the time we're getting. We got so many people in this car. I'm really impressed with us still to this day. But that first person that's in, all of a sudden, their own knee is in their nose.
[00:23:19] Lord only knows what's happened to the back of their neck. They're pushed onto each other. We literally had people on the outside of the windows pushing more people inside, using every little bit of oxygen in space. Somehow nobody died.
[00:23:34] And that's what Paul's talking about with these stones. He's saying you're so pushed and joined together, not just set near each other or on top, but instead what the Holy Spirit does is he moves us together with all of our experiences and past and difficulties and traumas and hopes and dreams and visions. And he pushes us together so that we then together will look like the temple and the place that Jesus is trying to build.
[00:23:59] Which leads me to this question. Are you willing to be uncomfortable for the sake of unity?
[00:24:07] Because this kind of interaction with church, that's not just going and sitting in the back corner in the darkest room and leaving early. That thing that actually pushes us together, those conversations, those sharing of story and disagreeing on theology, those things are the things that actually drive us together. Not in and of themselves, but because there is a power called the Gospel and the Holy Spirit moving us together. Tim Keller says this. The more powerful the force that shapes you again, which is the gospel, the more fitted you are to others shaped by the same force.
[00:24:39] If we are to be the unified church that God is calling us to be, then we need to allow God to push us together.
[00:24:51] What a challenge. But I believe worthy of our time and thought.
[00:25:01] Now I want to say this not as a caveat to ruin the whole thing, but because every time I talk about this I feel like it's worthy.
[00:25:07] I'm not suggesting that you enter back into abusive relationships, that you spend time intentionally with people that are out to hurt you or to get you or anything like that.
[00:25:22] But we do have to hold ourselves accountable to the fact that not every discomfort, not every hard conversation is an attack on us.
[00:25:33] Now both sides have to be humble and approach each other open handedly. Right? But there is a way to exist together that isn't agree with everything that I think about or else I'm leaving right now.
[00:25:48] I think there's something better for us than that. There's something deeper.
[00:25:52] So let's not settle for shallow involvement in church or in these segregated cliques.
[00:26:01] Rather allow the Gospel to call us deep into deep and near and almost family like relationships with fellow believers.
[00:26:10] This leads us to an element of transparency. Yikes. Accountability. Scary.
[00:26:17] But it leads to this whole life hospitality that we can create then for each other in this community.
[00:26:23] And that is what God is calling us to.
[00:26:30] I have of course found this most deeply in my marriage.
[00:26:39] Now Rebecca and I have been married for 14 years. We'll be 15 in July.
[00:26:44] And we have never been more opposite in our entire lives than we are now.
[00:26:51] We just think about the world differently.
[00:26:54] You know, I think Sundays are for sitting, and she thinks they're for vacuuming.
[00:27:00] And I.
[00:27:02] I just don't get it, you guys. I just can't.
[00:27:07] And I was talking with a couple recently who their. Their story resonated with ours, with Rebecca and I's, and they were saying, well, we just kind of disagree on this. We go about this differently. And I kind of think about the world like this, and she thinks about the world.
[00:27:27] And I know that there was kind of this unspoken question of like, so, so who needs to change or how far do we. How much do we change?
[00:27:36] And I was like, I don't know if it's good news or bad news, but neither one of you is really going to change.
[00:27:45] Rebecca and I fight about the same things that we always have. We do it less and we do it with a lot more grace.
[00:27:54] But I've noticed that the unity of our marriage doesn't come down to our personalities matching. Right? How awful would it be if Rebecca and I's whole marriage was based around how much exactly alike can we be?
[00:28:07] But instead we found this way to be truly ourselves in each other's presence, and that's actually become more of the work. How can we be even more of ourselves?
[00:28:18] And then how can we continue to extend more grace and mercy and love to each other as we become our fullest selves?
[00:28:27] So there is some changing, there is some movement, but it's not because she's any less busy, always trying to make the house just right and concerned with the kids calendars.
[00:28:43] And it's not because I'm any more motivated to help with all those things naturally, but it's because of this bond that we have together.
[00:28:53] It is so far beyond convenience and perfect people spending time together. And instead it's a couple people that approach each other with humility, saying, I don't know.
[00:29:05] Everything that you see and you understand, you've experienced and out of love, I want to come and see your way of being and living again. The church is not a group of perfect people that have this all right. It's not a gathering of people that you would love to spend two hours with at a fire pit or at a park party.
[00:29:25] But it is a people that are gathered around this one truth that we believe that is, Jesus loves all of us. He died on the cross for all of us, and he rose again for all of us. Amen.
