Good morning. Today's reading is from the book of Ephesians, chapters 3 through 14. 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.
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. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us, who belonged 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. 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, everything in heaven and on 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. 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 this, so we would praise and glorify him. This word is true and can be trusted. This is that time of the year when no matter what we read, we look at it, it might be the conversations we're having, we're on a table with people, we begin to hear what people's favorite things from the last year are. You see, we're the top five movies of 2021 or the top five things you read.
It's one of my favorite parts about this time of year, seeing how people begin collecting together the things they loved about the previous year they learned from. But it's also a time where many of us begin to look at what are we going to do, what are we going to change, what do we want to be different. We see the beginning of the new year is it's a time of beginning, but the funny thing is, and I thought about that a lot, and I read some things in the last couple of weeks that talked about this. The real funny thing is, physically and biologically and mentally, all those sorts of things, you guys, we're the exact same person on December 31st that we are on January 1st.
We sometimes draw out these lines where we say these massive things are going to change, but really truly that ball dropping is a rather intangible moment in our life. That's going to be something that if we want things to be different or to change, it's going to take us making some very specific actions, but also thinking about where do I have the gumption or the power or the ability to move forward with that. We all want a new years. We look forward to it.
We make decisions, we think about the power of things, and we make promises to ourselves about what we're going to do. And we're going to celebrate the decisions that we made to get to these places. But what does it mean to actually see tangible change versus intangible change in our lives? Intangible change might be something we speak, but we don't really ever do anything about it.
It just kind of falls aside. Tangible change is something that's real, that's active, that we can be measured, that we know this is who I was, this is what I once had to find me, and this is who I am now. The last time we were all here together on Christmas Eve, and I talked about how I think we all love Christmas movies so much because inside of that repeated pattern and that story is just something that sits deep inside of our hearts. And I think New Year's in a lot of ways can resonate just the same.
We all want fresh starts and we all need fresh starts. But those powerful fresh starts aren't those that pretend the past doesn't exist, but instead they realize where the places of ineffectiveness I've had in my life, but also where the places of brokenness that I have in my life. And where do these things exist and then how do I move through them? We started off this morning with our teaching text from the Apostle Paul that Adrian read.
He's writing the church in Ephesus and Paul spent years in Ephesus. If we look at Paul's whole ministry, we look at the guy who wrote a third of the New Testament, half of the book of Acts is about him. We might think that Paul had this multiple long decades career in ministry, but really and truly every single thing that Paul did that we have in scripture took place in about 10 years. And he spent around three of those years in Ephesus.
A third of his ministry that we know about was in the same town. In many ways we can say that Ephesus was Paul's city. That time he spent there was the culmination of every single thing he had learned. And it was one of those spaces where he had a unique skill set and he managed to fall into a space that needed his exact skill set.
We see so much things just develop in the story of him being an Ephesus. And now he's here at the end of his life in prison. That's one of the last things that Paul wrote. He's writing back to the church that he loved so much, encouraging them and talking about what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
The thing is Ephesus and we look in the book of Acts and we read about the story of Ephesians and what happened and how Paul ended up being able to run out of town after a handful of perfect years there. The story of Ephesians and Ephesians and Paul being there, it is a story of broken promises. It is a story of doubt. It is a story of wanting to be able to do things that we can't do.
It's an honest real story. It's not perfect. But Paul finds himself holding fast. He uses the letters.
He finds himself holding fast in realizing the power, not just of hope in waiting. But hope in waiting while he's keeping something in tension. And the thing that Paul knew about, the thing that Paul allowed to keep these things in tension was what Adrian read for us earlier. It's the fact that God had a plan.
It wasn't just a plan for Paul and it wasn't just a plan for the whole world. But it was a plan for how Paul fit inside of God's plan for the whole world. Paul speaks about this massive story of God that's been unfolding for generations and for thousands of years before time began. And he knew that part of that plan was what he was doing.
And he knew that to be able to do these things, he had to keep them in tension. Paul is in prison for the story of Jesus. We see him continuing to appeal to get to go to Caesar, to get to go to Caesar. We read the book of Acts and we realize that Paul's not trying to go to Caesar because he thinks Caesar can vindicate him.
Paul says, I'm going to go to Caesar because I'm going to talk about Jesus in front of Caesar. It's the thing I've been called to do. Paul was focused on purpose and what God was doing. We think about the plan thing, how that fits into us trying to find tangible change or intangible change.
What does it mean for us to sift that out and discern that in a realistic way that we know about? It's the only way that we can really talk about what matters in our life. And it all goes back really, it begins in this really, really weird situation hundreds and hundreds of years ago with a man named Abram. And now he had a vision from God and this vision from God.
He was told to cut a bunch of animals and walk in between them. That's not what he thought we were going, was it? Let's go to Genesis chapter 15. What's the read about this?
This is going to apply to what we have going on today. So Genesis chapter 15. The Lord told him, I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land as a possession. But Abram replied, oh sovereign Lord, how can I be sure that I will actually possess it?
So Abram thinks this is an intangible thing at the moment. He believed it exists in theory but not in practice and that's where he's worried and concerned. The Lord told him, bring me a three-year-old heifer, a three-year-old female goat, a three-year-old ram, a turtle dove and a young pigeon. So Abram presented all these to him and killed them.
Then he cut each animal down the middle and laid the half side by side. He did not, however, cut the birds in half. Some vultures swooped down to eat the carcasses, but Abram chased them away. After the sun went down to darkness fell, Abram saw a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch pass between the halves of the carcasses.
So the word made a covenant with Abram that day and said, I've given this land to your descendants all the way from the border of Egypt to the great Euphrates River. Abram was in a moment of doubt. He was a moment of intangible worry. He had ideas but had no action.
He knew that he was called to something by God, but he didn't know what any of it looked like. And then we have this really, really wild ceremony. That's kind of different, isn't it? Like what would you do if you felt God said, okay, let's once you get the dog, cut it out and put it outside and we're going to do some business together.
It doesn't really make sense to us, does it? But Abram is encountering God inside of his context. You see, we're not used to the language of covenant. When I think of the language of covenant, I think about my homeowner's association.
Has anybody ever had a good experience with a homeowner's association? Okay, I think my homeowner's association right now exists to find lost dogs. The language of covenant does not mean that much to us now. In Abram's world thousands of years ago, the language of covenant meant everything.
To make a covenant with someone was to make a binding promise where you get a better deal. And if that promise was broken, then it wasn't just a broken promise and some hurt and some heartache and some frustration and disappointment, it meant blood would have to be shed. So when covenants were made, blood was shed as a sacrifice to represent what would have happened if this covenant was broken by both parties and covenants to their normal thing in the ancient world, is when one person would extend their power and their care to another. But usually the person on the bottom end of the covenant, things really wouldn't work out well for them.
They got the bad end of the deal. They had to sacrifice a lot, normally to get protection. But they had to sacrifice so much they wondered, is this ever even actually worth it? What we see in scripture is God coming to Abram and saying, I'm going to make a covenant with you.
He comes to him in context in a way that he would understand. We don't get the weird animals in half smoking fire pot, that sort of thing. But Abraham would realize, okay, a covenant is being made between me and this God now, a covenant where the penalty of breaking this will be bloodshed, but God is doing this in a way where you're saying, hey, I'm on top of this, I'm making a covenant with you, but I'm getting you the benefit of the covenant. We're flipping over how the world normally does these things.
I'm using this language, you understand, but I'm making you part of my family. I'm not just extending protection to you, but I'm extending presence. I'm going to make you a son, I'm going to make your daughters, my daughters, and you're going to have the benefits of a family relationship with me. It's not about protection, it's about presence.
So now we can jump back into things that Paul was talking about. Paul says in this passage, we can now boldly and confidently come into God's presence. The biggest benefit that we have with God is not protection. It's presence.
When we think that all God is going to be doing is protecting us, that's when we live in the world of intangible things. What God offers to us is presence, real presence, the presence of a living God and the presence that comes and the power that comes behind that. It says to come in boldly, and this doesn't mean brash or arrogant. This means we can come into God with our hair lit down.
We can be honest to Him. We can be honest with where we are. We can be honest with what we need because we know that we are in that little relationship. Are you willing to tell someone that you're in an intimate relationship with different things and you're willing to tell a stranger?
Are you willing to tell something like this? If you're willing to tell someone that you're intimate with what you really, really need, or how do you talk to someone who you feel like is an authority over you and can decide to break protection or safety at any moment? You think about the times you might have maybe you've never been pulled over when they're in crisis. We kind of hope that bearing our hearts will get us out of the ticket.
How well does that work normally? So this is about us having a relationship of intimacy with God and we can come to Him boldly as far as that's concerned. And also we can do this with confidence, we can do this with certainty that we know what God is doing and we know what He wants to do with us and what He wants to do through us. We're brought into a covenant with Him.
We're brought into a binding deal. And while this all sounds weird and complicated and out there in the far distance, if we look across the story of God with His people, it's actually really simple. We can sum up this idea of covenant of tangible presence into two simple things. The first thing is this.
We're faithful. So we find all throughout Scripture is the power of faithfulness of God is always faithful to us. And what happens when we make decisions to be faithful people? If the sign of pressure or the sign of tension, we don't cut the rope and get out.
We instead realize that inside of this pressure, inside of this tension, something is being formed. That this pressure, that this feeling, that this actions of causing us to intentionally have to make decisions and faithfulness, even though they momentarily might be really troublesome, is a thing that forms us into the image of God. It also is a thing that forms us into strong people. It's the first part of covenant living is that we are faithful and we are faithful because God is faithful.
The second part of this is this, is that we get the benefit of favor and presence. Now, it first sounds kind of weird, right? Like we get the benefit of favor. I'm not a TV preacher, y'all.
This isn't health and wealth. Okay? I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that.
You'd be nice. You'd be nice. You'd get all that you want. We get this presence.
And this makes us begin to reorient exactly what God's favor is because if we are focused on being in God's presence, if we believe that God's presence is a real thing, is a tangible thing, we believe that God's presence is the kingdom of God come to earth as we pray in the Word's prayer on earth as it is in heaven. If we believe that in a real way right in front of us, if God's presence is among us right now, then we believe that God's presence will be causing different things to happen. Different things that are not of this world. We think back in Revelation chapter 7 and chapter 21, when God says there will be no more crying or pain or tears for the things of this earth or past the way.
God's presence in our life now causes those things to happen in small momentary glimpses of life for us. And that's what favor looks like. It looks like us allowing God's kingdom to live in as much power and existence as it can in this moment where we are now favored. That comes as a result of the indwelling presence of God favored as worked out in faithfulness, favor that's worked out in holiness.
Two things to live as covenant people to be faithful and understand the benefit of favor and presence. So this is where we find ourselves at the beginning of the year. And if we call ourselves followers of Jesus, then all of the hoping and all of the dreaming that we might want to be doing in this new year, it needs to be happening inside of this context of covenant relationships. If we've been living for intangible change in our life, friends are going to continue to be disappointed.
Intangible change is easy change because it doesn't change anything. Tangible change is the change of God, the change that requires focus, the change that requires honesty, the change that requires healing, openness. Intangible change doesn't require other people. Tangible change requires commitment to relationships inside.
It requires real community, real honesty among each other. So we can either treat this like an intangible thing with no real benefits. Or we can realize this life that God has promised us is absolutely real. The realest thing in the world.
And if we want to set ourselves up for this, if we want to experience all that God really has to offer us, then we do it inside of our covenant relationship with him. With him saying, I'm making a deal with you and you're getting the best into that deal. The only thing that requires your faithfulness is for you to experience the benefit of that faithfulness. So around your chair, you probably have one of these cards I left mine down here.
There's a bunch of these in the seat. This is a historic traditional prayer of the people in the Methodist movement. They used to have all night long prayer services on New Year's Eve. Did anybody want to be at the church all night long on New Year's Eve?
Did anybody else go to bed at 930 on New Year's Eve? I was the second one out of like eight to go to bed, crash early. But this prayer was used for what was called watch night services. And these were hours long services on New Year's Eve.
They were designed to be about commitment. It was designed for people taking on a level of personal awareness. These were times of healing. These were huge significant times.
And this prayer has been part of that. And we use this and we do this and this prayer, I love this about 11 or 12 years ago. I really came across this prayer. And this prayer kind of resurfaced during that time.
People realizing, hey, not just to use it on one Sunday a year. But to use this as a time of daily reflection because it does all these things that we need to do about covenant making that we've talked about today. These things for us to have and do this in a real way. If we look at this prayer, we realize that we have to acknowledge who we are.
That we're not our own. That we belong absolutely and totally to Jesus. And the thing is this, when we realize we don't belong to ourselves, we begin to declare that Jesus is Lord, not just over the world. That's a very easy thing for us to do.
But for us to say Jesus is Lord of my life, then we begin that process of healing. Of healing ourselves totally to him, of offering ourselves to him, but also allowing Jesus to define us for his will to begin changing and working in our hearts. For Jesus to begin correcting us, does anybody here enjoy correction? Does anybody here realize though that correction?
Can be a healthy thing. For Jesus to focus us. To begin us building up just that spiritual power and that discipline to be a rising power of our own yeses and our nose and our own personal life. For Jesus to be convicting us but for Jesus to be changing us and transforming us for Jesus to begin remaking us in his image.
And since that process that we begin to discover, but then also live into this best image of ourselves. But this prayer also causes us to personalize this covenant. We pray for Jesus to make this real in us and to make this real in heaven. That we do our own walk through our own things of life to realize the things that have to be divided.
The things that have to be offered up to him. But also what does it mean when we meet him in the journey? And so what we're going to do is we're going to say this prayer together as a congregation as we step into a time of communion today. This is John Wesley's prayer of the covenant renewal.
It's about to be on the screen. If you did not get one of these cards with a bunch of them in the back table, I encourage you to take this home. Put this in your Bible. Why don't we just like to pray this in the morning?
Why don't we just like to begin living a practice of yielding and of covenant and trust and faithfulness and experiencing his favor? So let's pray this together today. I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will place me with whom you will.
Put me to doing. Put me to suffering. Let me be put to work for you or set aside for you. Praise for you or criticize for you.
Let me be full. Let me be empty. Let me have all things. Let me have nothing.
I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service. And now a wonderful and holy God, creator, redeemer and sustainer. You are mine and I am yours. So be it in the covenant which I have made on earth.
Let it be made in heaven. Amen. And on the night in which Jesus died for us, we talk about the old.