Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us. Good morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming. I'm the other senior pastor here, and welcome to the first week of our Westside one series. Going through the book of Ephesians, these scriptures were not just written into the ether. They're not just philosophical. They're written to real people in real places that Jesus really, really loves. And birthed out of these churches and these places is the movement that we belong to today. The reason that Westside church exists today. You could trace all the way back to the work of Paul and the work of the church in Ephesus and other places. And that's a beautiful thing that lets us in on the greater story of God that we belong to and that we're trying to help tell as we go forward.
[00:00:47] In light of that, I started thinking about something that I believe is a little bit weird about myself, and that is I've been sitting in construction traffic here in Bend for the last decade or something like that.
[00:01:01] You know, you guys know road construction all over town for all kinds of different reasons. And while I'm sitting in it, I actually don't feel too bad about it. I kind of like that construction's happening, which is a weird thing, especially for me as someone that's not always the most patient person.
[00:01:21] And I began to ask myself, like, why do I kind of get excited about this construction and new things being built? And I think a lot of it goes back to the greater story of my life, and that as I grew up in a really small town, a mill town, lumber mill and a plywood mill, it was maybe at most six to 800 people when I was growing up. It's probably less than 400 now. The mills have shut down and all those things. But being in such a small town in the very southern part of Douglas county, whenever we had a problem or an issue, it wasn't like there was a whole army of people coming to our rescue to help fix whatever was wrong, whether it was a pothole or a water main or whatever it was. Glendale wasn't exactly on the highest part of the list for people to go ahead and come fix and repair. And so when something would happen, when somebody would come out to fix the pothole that was in the road, there was even a level of excitement in town, like, hey, did you see that? The. The paving? People are here today. They won't be back for several years, so pay close attention. You know, and that one pothole that was just crushing everybody's alignment on their cars. That one will be vanquished, leaving us with only the 12 more down on Main Street.
[00:02:30] And so I think there's a part of me that looks around here growing up in a town that kind of slowly got more depressed as we lost jobs and we lost mill workers and we lost teachers and everything. Kind of as a result of that, it just kind of has slowly. It's not totally gone away, but it's everything but a ghost town at this moment. When I'm in Bend and I'm experiencing things like construction and new building and all this, I get excited going, wow, people care about this. The first time I was watching a Giants game and there was a commercial that came on that was like, in Bend, Oregon, I was like, people want to come here.
[00:03:03] This did not happen to me growing up.
[00:03:06] And so if you really look at the greater trajectory in the history of my life and understood the history of my city and my town and where I came from, you might be able to pinpoint, oh, this is why Ben's feelings about road construction exist in the first place. Now, your history and story, those of you who've been around Ben maybe a little bit longer than the eight years that I have been, you might have a different perspective on a commercial popping up on a Bay Area channel about having people come visit. Ben, you might have a different opinion on the growth in population and interest and activity that's been going on here. And I bet if you pulled on the string of your life and your history, just like you would on mine, you would uncover all those things, too. Different influences, thoughts that you've come up with on your own, your view on politics and leadership and the direction of a city. All of these things exist inside the story of your life, and they help us understand the decisions and the thought processes that we have today.
[00:03:59] And this is what Paul is trying to communicate to the church in Ephesus. He's saying, your story matters, and it's only the beginning of your particular story here in Ephesus, but it belongs to this huge story that started way before you.
[00:04:15] And that's the reason that we need to understand it and then go forward with the gospel from there, understanding what God has done and how your current position in place fits into the greater story of God.
[00:04:29] Now, this story has to come in the context of community and church.
[00:04:33] It's tempting for all of us, especially in our pretty individualistic Western culture, to read scripture and hear the story of Jesus and simply try to apply that to How I can find forgiveness in my own life, how I can live well, how I can find success, how I can receive all these things, and then my particular life can be different. And of course, there are individuals that are referenced all over Scripture, but those individuals are always empowered in the context of a nation, a world, a community, a church, a group. There is no move of God that exists specifically to try to enrich the life of one individual person. Instead, it always pours out over the whole. It's always about a church and a community. And so it's important for us to do something that kind of like Pilot Butte does for those of us who live in Bend, that when you stand on top of Pilot Butte, you get a greater perspective of the city, not just your neighborhood and your house and your room in your house. It pulls the perspective all the way back so that we can see in greater depth what is happening around us. And that is Paul's letters to letter to the Ephesians. It is intended so that they would get a bird's eye view of our faith in our life. It helps us see ourselves, yes, and our community and church through the lens not just of our own brokenness and our own history and story, but instead it allows us to see individuals outside the church as well as those of us within it. It allows us to see all these things through the lens of grace and redemption that Jesus offers.
[00:06:06] Framing our personal stories within God's larger redemptive narrative gives us an immense amount of grace and love for the people around us. And it helps us walk forward with the gospel in our own context.
[00:06:21] So Paul opens this letter by praising God and reminding us of the blessings that we've received. There's spiritual insight, there's grace, and there's promised inheritance. And it begins right here in Ephesians chapter one and verse one. It says, this letter's from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. I'm writing to God's holy people in Ephesus who are faithful followers of Christ Jesus. May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. All praise to God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.
[00:07:04] God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to Himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do and it gave him great pleasure. And so we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of His Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding. He continues on in verse nine, he says, God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ, which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, even in heaven and earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for He chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan. God's purpose was that we Jews, who were the first to trust in Christ, would bring praise and glory to God. And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the good news that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit whom He promised long ago.
[00:08:11] So Paul lines out for us with a lot of audacity, actually, in this statement of verse three, he says, you've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. You have been blessed with every spiritual blessing. It's in the past tense. He means this has already happened through the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and now you making the decision to follow after his way. You. You've already received this incredible blessing. Now, blessing in this context means a little bit different than maybe what blessing means in our life. I feel like sometimes we talk about ourselves as a blessed people, and really it's in the context of I feel kind of lucky or I worked hard to get this result. And I don't know what to say to you now that you've complimented me. So I'm just gonna say that I'm blessed. I feel blessed, I feel good, I feel lucky.
[00:09:01] Or we say something like, you know, bless your heart, which means, I wish death upon you.
[00:09:07] That's what bless your heart means.
[00:09:10] Paul's not using either one of these translations.
[00:09:13] Blessing in this context means something that's a lot closer to shalom. This peace, this soulful peace. It means that every joy and benefit that your heart has ever needed and longed for belongs to you. Because Jesus, every joy and every benefit belongs to you.
[00:09:30] Now, that's a difficult phrase to me because I don't always feel like I've received every joy and benefit every day of my life from the Lord. You know what I mean? Have I received Every joy and benefit. No, sometimes I'm angry, I'm grouchy. I feel like this is against me and I'm frustrated. But what Paul is referencing is not that you're going to feel amazing at every moment of every day. It's never been the goal. But instead, he's saying, these are blessings that you have received. You received every blessing. And now we get to walk out the rest of our life realizing these blessings. As we follow after Jesus.
[00:10:03] These blessings are a huge investment in our lives. And as we continue forward, we begin to see them in all different kinds of ways and shapes and forms. And so Paul discusses these blessings in a succession of verses. He really lays it out, even like a lawyer in a courtroom, trying to convince us of these blessings. And he's also trying to convince us that we have been found in Christ and that's where we find the blessings. That's where we should live our life is in Christ. He says in verse three, says he's blessed us in the King. That's kind of the overarching umbrella statement before the next section of the list. He says, then He. He chose us in him, he preordained us through Him. He poured grace on us in Him. He gave us redemption in Him. He set out his plan and in him, intending to sum up everything in Him. We receive inheritance in him because we've set our hope in him and we are all brought into His Spirit.
[00:11:05] Paul is trying his best to make the argument, and in a way that's very valuable, especially in the context that being found in him is the same as being found as a son or a daughter of the King. And that should change how we exist and experience in church and how we should live our individual lives.
[00:11:24] Being a son and daughter was so meaningful in this context and even goes on to say, we have received sonship, we've received inheritance. Now, these are words that were specifically reserved for the sons of influential people. It meant something to be the son, the firstborn son of a family that had influence and resources. And when Paul says this, he's not saying, so I'm gonna talk to just the men for a moment, or just the boys for a moment. He's saying something really profound in this context. He's saying, I know this is a culture that values the male and its inheritance so much, but he's saying, I'm telling you, every boy and girl, every man and woman, every old and young, when you find yourself in Christ Jesus, you are now a receiver of the inheritance that Jesus brings. It's actually an incredibly progressive statement that would have blown the mind of these people to say, everyone now belongs in this inheritance, not just of a father or a mother, but instead the inheritance of a king and the king of the whole world. We all belong. Man, woman, Jew, gentile. Every context now belongs when they find themselves in Him.
[00:12:34] So what does it mean to be in Him?
[00:12:39] Well, when we make the decision, we come to this point in our lives where we say we want to follow after the way of Jesus. We find ourselves in him. I hate to tell you, for those of you who really like lists and checklists and working for something, that's not how coming to Christ actually works.
[00:12:55] What happens is we make a decision to follow after the way of Jesus and we become son or a daughter of God. It just happens.
[00:13:04] There's no process.
[00:13:07] You either are or you're not.
[00:13:11] And so sometimes people will come and talk to me after a service or something. They're very complimentary. And I love this, and I appreciate the compliments. Keep coming with the compliments. All the criticism can go to Evan and give me the compliments because he is more secure than me.
[00:13:27] But people will come to me and go, wow, what a great message. And I'll say, we're trying.
[00:13:32] That is code for, I don't really know what to say to that when you compliment me, but I appreciate it and I acknowledge it. It's gonna happen in the atrium immediately after this service.
[00:13:43] If I preach well, and we do this sometimes with our faith, it's like, well, you know, I'm trying to fall after it. I'm trying to be a good Christian. I'm trying to be a part of this. And that has nothing to do with it. It's. It's more of a relationship of a son or a daughter. When I look at my children, I don't go, hmm, feel like a Fleming today?
[00:14:06] Let me check if your bed's made first, and then we'll decide how that's going. No, they are my children. Their performance goes up and down. Neither one of them has still been able to pay rent at my house. And yet they are my children.
[00:14:21] They're not trying to be my children. They simply are.
[00:14:25] They are with me, and I am with them. And when we find ourselves in Christ, no matter who you are today, where you come from, how long you've been following Jesus, or if you decide to follow Jesus right now, today, you fully belong. Full adoption and inheritance into the blessings and the greatness of the King Jesus, that is today and now and then because we are children, we gain then access.
[00:14:54] We gain access.
[00:14:57] My children have a different level of access to me than you ever will.
[00:15:03] If you come to my home and wake me up at 3am telling me you are thirsty, I will hurt you.
[00:15:10] I mean my children there are. Sometimes they wake me up at 3am where I just, I gotta hold myself back, you know, they get access to me, they live in my home and you do not. They get to ask me for things that you don't get to ask because I can't fulfill those needs.
[00:15:27] But because they are my children, they can come to me and run to me and call me at any moment and I will pick up the phone and I will listen to them, I will see them and I will love them.
[00:15:38] This is the access that now, because of the grace of Jesus, we find with God. Now this is huge for the culture at the time. Especially the Jews are coming to this conversation saying there's a lot of rights and rituals and this has to be done at the temple. The sacrifice has to happen this way. And Paul is saying because of the sacrifice of Jesus, your access has completely changed. And to the Gentiles who have always felt like they were completely out of the conversation, that they could not know God because of where they came from and how they were born, he is saying, you are now all the way in to the living room with Jesus. You are a part of the family, a son and daughter. You've gained access, you gain security.
[00:16:20] I think about this inheritance, a knowing of what you have, of what's coming, this financial security, the security of resource that never runs out when it comes to the love of Jesus.
[00:16:33] We now find ourselves secure in this place, knowing that we don't have to go out and find love and community and coming out of isolation into something else and different. We don't have to seek out security any longer. Instead we can simply receive from the security that God has given us. Now by being sons and daughters of the King, we receive authority as sons and daughters of the King.
[00:16:58] We can now speak into our own lives, into our world in a way that God has intended us to. We can actually begin to shape the world around us and mold it and move mountains that God is calling us to because of the authority given to us as family members.
[00:17:14] And then we're also invited into a new discipline.
[00:17:18] This new discipline encourages us to see the world in a different way and then act from that place.
[00:17:26] Instead of engaging in the tribalism that is so prevalent in our culture and context today. We're where it's us versus them. It's the good guys versus the bad guys. Jesus then encourages us to see the world in a different way. And we're invited into this new area of discipline where it went instead of just giving ourselves over to our human nature that comes so naturally, instead we're given over to seeing the world the way that God has intended us to. For he so loved the whole world that he gave. That takes discipline.
[00:18:02] And then Paul goes on in verse 14, and he says, the Spirit is God's guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did so that we would praise and glorify him. And ever since I first heard of your strong faith in Lord Jesus and your love for God's people everywhere, I've not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so you might grow in your knowledge of God. And I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.
[00:18:51] My wife and I moved to Bend about eight years ago, and then we had our daughter fairly shortly after.
[00:18:58] My son was around three years old when my daughter was born. And everything that he had accomplished he reverted back to before that time, after my daughter was born, we had basically had him potty trained. And all of a sudden that was completely out the window. He was sleeping better than he ever had, and he's still sleeping horribly. And all of a sudden that went completely backward after she was born. What a jealous child.
[00:19:26] And I remember laying in his bed with him reading books.
[00:19:32] It got to the point where I couldn't read the kids books anymore because he and I were spending so much time in there, me trying to get him to sleep, that I began to read books that at least I felt like I would be more interested in.
[00:19:43] And so ever since then, I've read in succession the Chronicles of Narnia, the Lord of the Rings, and the Harry Potter series. I think I've lapped all three of them for three, three or four times now.
[00:19:56] And I would sit there and read, and he just wouldn't go to sleep.
[00:20:01] And at one point, his head was on the bed and his feet were climbing the wall.
[00:20:06] And I looked at him and I looked at the wa. And my watch, and I was like, he's never gonna go to sleep. I got one that won't sleep and he seems fine with it.
[00:20:21] And I begin to go down, like, this larger philosophical hole, you know, because I had all this time waiting for my son to fall asleep. And I began to think everything else that's been really hard in my life has kind of had this obvious end, or it's had an out, right? When I was a student and it was finals week, it was like, oh, my gosh, finals. And, you know, I came to understand that with finals, whether you got an A or you got an F, whether you showed up to class or whether you didn't, they were going to be done at a certain time. And eventually I stopped being a student, and I worked at a newspaper, and deadlines would come and go, and it was stressful. But eventually that was over, and I'm no longer writing for a newspaper. There's a world in which I am not a pastor at Westside Church. Someday that will have an end.
[00:21:10] Even my marriage. This commitment and covenant that Rebecca and I have made together, that we still completely plan on honoring, by the way, Although we're almost to the end of a construction project, and it's been touch and go, people are like, you make this incredible covenant at your wedding day, and I'm like, that's nothing. You make some promises, you eat some tacos, you go off on vacation. I've never felt more tied to my wife. Now that we are almost all the way through a construction project, that's the real test. If we make it through this, then we're together forever. Nothing can separate this. Those promises that we made at the beginning of this are nothing compared to drywall and plumbing and electricity.
[00:21:51] I digress.
[00:21:54] That could come to an end. We could no longer call each other husband and wife.
[00:21:59] But I realized as I'm sitting in this bed with this child that simply won't go to sleep is that this moment is indicative of the fact that no matter what, I will be Joel's dad forever.
[00:22:14] I could choose to be a good one or a bad one. Sometimes I'll do great, and sometimes I'll do poorly. But I'm his dad, and the Apostle Paul is speaking to this. He's saying, I want you to have this confident hope that you are now connected to someone that will never leave you or forsake you.
[00:22:34] So, sure enough, as time has gone on, this happened last night. My son FaceTimed me. We were in Portland this last week, and he's still there. They start a baseball game in about an hour and 15 minutes. But he played great yesterday, had fun. I had to go home. And then he FaceTimed me a little bit before bed, and we got on the call, and I was like, hey, buddy, how's it going? And we small talked for about three seconds, and then he pulled his hat down over his eyes, and he started crying.
[00:22:58] And I was like, whoa, what's going on? He said, dad, I'm so nervous.
[00:23:05] I want to play well tomorrow. And I'm kind of scared, and I'm nervous, and I'm all this. And he's just like. He's doing the kind of a thing with me. And he And I have been down this road a few times before. And so I'm thinking about the list of things that I always take him down that kind of helps him calm down. And I think about the fact that I'm going to tell him, hey, nervous is good. Nervous is great. Nervous means you care about something. At some point, I hope I don't come to a place in my life where I'm not nervous about anything, because that means I probably stop caring.
[00:23:33] So nervous is awesome. It's a privilege, it's an honor to feel nervous about something.
[00:23:39] And then I'm going to talk to him about his swing and how good of a ball player he is and all the time we've spent in the backyard, and I'm going to talk to him about all this stuff. But before any of that, I tell him to pull up his hat and look at me and I say, joel, I need you to remember before anything else that I love you.
[00:23:58] And you can strike out five times. You could hit five home runs tomorrow. And I'm going to call you on the same FaceTime. I'm going to tell you that it was so fun to watch you and that I'm so proud of you, and that's never going to change.
[00:24:13] I'm here for you, and I'm on your team. Your mom and I, we love you.
[00:24:17] You got us no matter what.
[00:24:21] And that foundational principle always slows his breathing down a little bit, calms his demeanor, and then from there, we build confidence.
[00:24:30] Paul is saying, you can have confidence because of this new thing, this Jesus Christ that came and he died on the cross for your sin. This is now the foundational premise of the rest of your life. That when everything goes wrong, that when anxiety comes and poor decision making happens, and we have regrets, and we wonder if we should have driven down the other road and taken the other corner and should have picked the other decision. When it comes to our life, whenever we face all these things, Paul is saying we can walk forward with this beautiful, confident hope in knowing that at the very least, the Creator of the world sees us, loves us, and his promise to never leave us. That his sacrifice on the cross is so great that no matter what you've done, no matter what you've walked into this room today saying, man, I wish I wouldn't have done that. I would take it back in a moment. He's saying the blood of Jesus even covers all of those.
[00:25:19] And so the sons and the daughters of God can walk forward not in blissful ignorance, but in confident hope knowing that the Creator of the universe, Jesus Christ, has seen them, has died and sacrificed for them and given everything and continues to love them to this day that then shapes everything that we see and we say from this point forward.
[00:25:42] Paul is so captivated by this sacrifice that Jesus has made and we're captivated by it. Today, the best stories are told about someone that gave their life for another person.
[00:25:54] I've been reading recently about Maximilian Colby who was a Polish Francisco and friar that was in concentration camps in World War II. And he threw himself in front of the Nazi guard that was getting ready to execute another man who had a family with him in captivity. And he insisted that they kill him instead.
[00:26:14] He was starved and made an example of by the Nazi army and eventually was considered a martyr of kindness and charity.
[00:26:24] We have it in fiction.
[00:26:26] One of the great wizards, Dumbledore.
[00:26:30] This is edgy for some of you who grew up in the church.
[00:26:33] You know, I know Gandalf's cool, and Dumbledore, not as much, but I'm gonna quote him anyway.
[00:26:39] He talks to Harry and Harry's saying, I don't understand. It seems like Voldemort can't quite kill me. And he says, your mother died to save you. If there's one thing Voldemort can't understand, it's love.
[00:26:52] He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. To have been loved so deeply even though the person who loved us is gone will give us some protection forever.
[00:27:03] He speaks this idea that this love, this sacrificial love is so great that the greatest of evil can't comprehend or understand it.
[00:27:12] And that we, when we come to these difficult moments in our lives where we tend to go dark and we tend to go inward and wrap ourselves up in the shame that we have created for ourselves the love of Jesus is even a protection from that. It overwhelms and it overcomes. It pulls us out of these shame filled spaces and into the light of grace and mercy and forgiveness. Which by the way, you cannot earn. My son will not earn his sonship with me based on how well he hits today. And when it comes to you and what you have done in your life, there is no earning and no process and no in order to be considered a son or a daughter of God. Instead, you simply belong right here and now. Today.
[00:27:50] There is no mistaking that it's for you, it's for me and it's for everyone. Amen.
