Well, I want you to turn with me, if you will,
to Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and to open your Bible or your artificial Bible at
Ephesians chapters 1 and 2. I don't plan to expound these chapters. It's not going to be quite that long, but
I do want to refer to a strand of teaching that runs through this passage. And while I do that, I probably ought also
to clarify that the condensed Bible that is being given away is not a condensation of
the Bible; it's the notes to the Bible that are condensed. The whole Bible is in that condensed Bible. So if you are the next one to get the prize,
do not be disconsolate that Ligonier is going to give you half a Bible; it will give you
the whole Bible. Well, where are we in our conference? We began yesterday evening with Derek Thomas
and thinking about the darkness, that there was darkness in a very real sense covering
the earth, although there were stars shining in the firmament before the Reformation. Burk Parsons led us, in a sense, through the
need that there is in man's heart, not only at the time of the Reformation, but in our
own times, to hear the gospel, and the burden that was placed on the Reformers to bring
that gospel to men and women throughout the world, and the burden that's placed on our
hearts as we become conscious of the needs of men and women. It's as we understand that we must all appear
before the judgment seat of Christ, that we become constrained by the love of Christ to
bring Christ to the nations. And we've been thinking this morning with
Dr. Reeves about the marvelous breakthrough that there was in the life of Martin Luther,
the way in which he discovers this glorious truth that a righteous God justifies the ungodly,
because of, in, and through our Savior Jesus Christ, and the relief and release and obviously,
the empowerment that this brings. And our topic for this session is "The Reformation
of the Heart." And it would be a platitude, although a true
platitude to say that the heart of the Reformation did turn out to be a reformation of the heart. Luther's own experience, hating the righteousness
of God in Romans 1:16 and 17, and then having this great breakthrough created in his heart
by the understanding of the gospel that the righteousness of God he hated was now the
righteousness of God that justified him as a sinner and therefore led him to love God. Although he moved from an Augustinian understanding
of justification from Romans 5, he did move into an understanding of Romans 5, being justified
by faith, having peace with God, being able to glory in his sufferings. And then, ultimately in Romans 5:11, being
able to glory and to rejoice in God Himself. So that the God he hated by nature, he came
to love by grace. And the doors of paradise swing open for him,
and his heart is set free by the gospel. And, of course, John Calvin, very different
personality, very different academic background, a totally different experience, a Frenchman
and not a German, experiences the same reality, put in different terms. "God," he said, "subdued me. I, who was so addicted to the teachings of
the papacy, God subdued me, by this sudden or unexpected conversion." So much so, that as you know his motto becomes,
"Lord I offer my heart to You promptly and without duplicity, sincerely." And so in these different ways, through different
passages of Scripture, although probably both from Paul's letter to the Romans, these very
different individuals discover that the gospel that brings justification is the gospel that
transforms the heart. That there is no justification without heart
transformation, that there is no forgiveness of sins without the Christ to whom we are
united for the forgiveness of sins, effecting in us by the Holy Spirit the transformation
of life that comes through the gospel. And I want us to think about that transformation
in a number of different ways. Let's, for a moment, go back to what the Reformers
encountered in the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Sometimes we have to help Protestant believers
understand that the Roman Catholic Church taught that salvation was by grace, salvation
was by grace. But, what the Reformers were probing was the
question, "How do you spell 'grace'?" And the answer to that question was that you
are given grace at baptism, but you lapsed from that grace with which you were called
to cooperate until your life was justifiable. And since you lapsed from that grace, through
the Church there are instruments placed into your life, into your ears, before your eyes,
occasionally into your mouth, that will restore you to that grace and enable you to cooperate
with that grace. So that as your life is flanked by these seven,
as they eventually decided, these seven sacraments, as you cooperate with internal grace infused
into your heart, you may, although it is extremely unlikely, you may reach the point where those
sacraments have wrought such grace in your heart that at the end of the day you become
justifiable because your heart is suffused with perfect love for God. And therefore, on the basis of what grace
does in you, you become justifiable, and if you become justifiable because your faith
is suffused with perfect love, then at that point, God justifies you. Truth to tell, you may know that by supernatural
revelation and a few may have done. We count some so to have thus been justifiable
on the basis of that grace-wrought transformation in their lives that we count them as saints. But apart from those few individuals, among
whom you are certainly not included, it is harmful for you to think that it is possible
to have the assurance of salvation. I've never forgotten reading in the writings
of Robert Bellarmine, who was a massive Roman Catholic figure in the wake of the Reformation,
a Counter-Reformation figure -- there are schools named after Robert Bellarmine. He is one of the doctors of the Roman Catholic
Church. And in his work on justification, beginning
of the third book, he says that the greatest of all Protestant heresies is, and I guess
99.9% of us would say it must be justification by faith alone, the greatest of all Protestant
heresies is assurance. Because of course, if the gospel gives me
assurance, the entire structure of this theology that has been worked out over an entire millennium
falls to the ground. The power of the church decays, the significance
of the sacraments is diminished. The role of the priesthood as the mediators
of grace is abandoned. And what happens is that consciences are released,
hearts are filled with joy, and we are able to say that we know nothing can separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus. We are able to rejoice in our justification. We are able to rejoice in the assurance of
our salvation. We are able to rejoice in God, the heart is
set free. Glory begins to fill our souls. Lives are transformed. The gospel begins to run to the ends of the
earth through the testimony of ordinary Christians. This is the gospel that delivers. Then according to the promises of the Old
Testament God, in His mercy, regenerates us and gives us new hearts and sprinkles us clean,
and the result is that we delight in the law of God, and we are careful to keep His commandments. The very things that the Reformers had to
defend the gospel about are the very effects of the gospel itself. And it is not surprising, therefore, that
the gospel was such a glorious experience for those who were believers. And in a sense, in terms of the transformation
of the heart this, this, in a sense, could be brought down to two basic principles that
you need to understand the depravity of the heart, and you need to understand the wonder
of grace in Jesus Christ. You need to grasp your sinfulness on the one
hand, and you need to grasp the wonder of the love and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. And the Reformers understood that in both
of these respects, for all the architecture of medieval theology, the Roman church had
produced a superficial view of sin and a substantial, that is, substance like, rather than personal
view of grace. The Council of Trent which met in the wake
of the Reformation, 1545 to 1563, has in its fifth session one of the most amazing statements
you will ever find in a theological document. "Concupiscence," this is the desire to sin,
the waywardness of the human heart, which the Apostle Paul calls sin, "the Church has
never really understood to be sin." "What the Apostle Paul calls sin, the Church
has never really understood to be sin." What was that an indication of? That was an indication of a, to use a well-worn
illustration, that was an indication of the Church's view that man was sick, but alive. That by exercise of free choice, he could
progress to justification by cooperating with grace. This is where the expression "Heaven helps
those who help themselves" comes from. And lest anyone think this was a medieval
idea, I grew up in Protestant Scotland in the 1950s, in which that was standard Protestantism. And my guess is it was also standard Protestantism
in Northern Ireland. So if you said to somebody, "Are you going
to heaven?" They would say, "I'm trying my best. I hope so." And if you were 17 and somehow let slip that
you were sure you were going to heaven that was regarded as the highest form of arrogance. How could you possibly have done enough at
the age of 17 to have this assurance? So what was medieval Catholicism also, because
unlike that domestic cleaner that reached where other domestic cleaners never reached,
the Reformation never reached to the heart of our country. That's actually to tell you the truth, you
need to get this out of the video recording. That's a kind of American myth that Scotland
was a land where everyone believed the gospel, that Northern Ireland was aflame with the
gospel. So we can well understand the existential
situation of those early Reformers and the ordinary people they taught and the glorious
radical transformation not only of the understanding that took place through the preaching of the
gospel, but the transformation and liberation of the heart because interestingly, because
they were taught a deeper view of sin. And that's still true, isn't it? So long as people think that they are sick
and simply need a physician and don't understand that they are spiritually dead and need a
resurrection, so long as they have a superficial view of sin, they will correspondingly have
a superficial view of grace. And we are awash, we are awash in the, in
the pseudo-evangelical culture with that superficial view of grace in which grace tops up who I
already am to give me a better style of life, to give me more happiness. And contrary to what Dr. Reeves was speaking
about at the end, offering Jesus Christ is the very thing of which he was critical that
is on offer today. And now it's free on your television set in
the United Kingdom. What's on offer is a better style of life
and health, wealth, and happiness. People are thrilled that the gospel is being
preached on television and don't understand that there is a veil over our eyes, if we
think that what we need is a physician because we are sick, rather than a Savior who is able
to resurrect us from the dead. And these two things always go together, a
superficial view of sin and a superficial view of grace. But when the gospel breaks in, as we've been
hearing, it broke into the life of Luther as it broke into the life of Calvin, then
there is a very simple principle that is understood, that is not well understood, and it's this,
you and I can never be more justified than we were the moment we came to faith in Jesus
Christ. You can never be more justified than you were
the moment you came to faith in Jesus Christ. Or to put it another way, the holiest saint
in this room is no more justified than the newest baby Christian. It is as radical as that. It isn't just a matter, as we've been hearing,
that we're put back to square one. That actually, amazingly, is a kind of Roman
Catholic teaching. You are put back to square one, but now you've
got to cooperate with grace in order that you may, you may keep the justifiability going. And, we all recognize how many Christian believers
we have known and perhaps have even been, who have long been held captive to the notion
that they must do something to top up their justification, who fall foul of Roman Catholic
teaching that if you teach anything else, people will live anyway they want. You understand that when we are in Jesus Christ
we can never be more justified, because we are justified not with our justification,
but with His justification. From one point of view, as we stand before
the holy throne of the righteous God and the devil accuses us, we are able to say to him,
"I have exactly the same right to stand here as He, the Son of God, does because the justification
with which I am justified is actually His righteousness, His justification. Not my own, but His." And you see, what is objective there, I mean
that justification, is ours in Him. It's not ours down here; it's ours in heaven. "When Satan tells me to despair and points
me to the sin within, upward I look and see him there, who made an end of all my sin." That's, that's what Luther was preaching. That's what Calvin understood, because they
understood that what transforms the heart is what is ours in Jesus Christ. And when the New Testament expounds this and
in a very interesting way, when you look through the New Testament, you see that the New Testament
writers can come to these truths from two apparently different positions. They can bring you to the glory of the gospel
by first of all showing you your depravity and then offering you Christ. Or they can bring you to the glory of the
gospel by showing you the glory of Christ, who He is and what He has done, and in the
light of that, as it were, revealing, manifesting, the sinfulness that needs such a Savior. Sometimes people say that Paul does the first,
he uses the first approach in Romans, Romans 1:18 to 3:20, the exposition, exposé, of
the depravity of the heart. And then, in with the message of Christ and
justification. Whereas it is sometimes said, he uses the
opposite method in Ephesians. In Ephesians, he begins with everything that
is ours in Christ. Now in a sense, that's true. But in another sense, because I asked you
to turn to Ephesians, and you've been wondering the last twenty minutes why I asked you to
turn to Ephesians, in Ephesians he uses a kind of pincer method. In chapter 1, he's setting before us everything
that is ours in Christ, that we've been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world,
and then he goes on to expound everything that is ours in Christ. And then in chapter 2 he moves, as it were,
to the other polarity, and he speaks about the depravity of the heart, the sinfulness
of sin. And the very interesting, even striking thing
he does is in the middle, as it were, holding these two things together, he prays that our
understanding will be illumined to this glorious gospel that is ours in Jesus Christ. And I want us, as it were, just to reflect
on that approach that the Apostle Paul uses, to see that the gospel is made manifest by
the riches of grace that are ours in Jesus Christ, and the gospel is also manifested
by the way in which the depravity of our sinfulness is met, not only objectively, but subjectively
by the power of Jesus Christ. That the Christ in whom all the riches of
grace are ours is the Christ who, in bestowing His riches upon us, also works within us to
transform us. And I think the expression that Mike Reeves
used, that the Reformers used, this, this glorious, joyful, wonderful exchange, they
have several different adjectives that they preface the idea of exchange by, is such a
key to helping us understand the riches of the gospel. And it's a key that our children can understand. He gives me what's His, He takes from me what
is mine, and the great exchange is made. Now in Ephesians 1, Paul comes at this from
the privileges that are ours in Jesus Christ. And you'll notice how he works with it. For example, he says that in Jesus Christ,
there is the forgiveness of our sins. And the implication of that is that in Jesus
Christ this wonderful exchange is made, my sins for His righteousness, His righteousness
for my sins. But this is not the only dimension to the
gospel of Jesus Christ. Indeed, it would be inadequate to say that
is in totality the gospel, because one of the things that I think Paul wants us to see
is that there is an integration between the multifaceted character of our sinfulness and
the multivalent character of Jesus Christ, as Calvin would say, "clothed in His gospel." And this is such a help to us when we ask
ourselves, "What does it mean to offer Christ?" And what Paul is doing in Ephesians chapter
1 is saying, "Let's put under the microscope what has been offered to us and given to us
in Jesus Christ." And when we, when we, as it were, put Jesus
under the microscope here, we begin to see the multivalent character of all that He is
for us as our Mediator and all that He has done for us as our blessed Redeemer and Savior. And so, clearly there is in Jesus Christ forgiveness
that we need, because we are sinners. But not only does Christ deal with our guilt,
He is given to us to deal with our guilt, He is also given to us to deal with our disinheritance. And you notice Paul uses this language that
in Jesus Christ, we are adopted into God's family and we receive the inheritance that
is ours in Jesus Christ. Now there's a sense in which that tells you
the whole story of the Bible. The whole story of the Bible is that God creates
His children as His image to extend the garden that He has given them to the ends of the
earth, to take pleasure in Him, to glorify Him and enjoy Him forever, and because of
their sinfulness, they are disinherited. They not only lose their fellowship with God,
they lose the whole creation. But now in Jesus Christ, who is the Son of
God, who in a sense, bearing in His own body to the tree our alienation, experiencing,
as it were, disinheritance, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" is the one who through being
disinherited, who through coming to the far country of our sin and being made sin for
us, having that sense of alienation, not addressing His Father on the tree as, "My Father, why
have you forsaken me," but in faith, clinging to the Lord, "My God, My God, My covenant
God, I am disinherited. Why?" And the answer is, of course, in order that
we might be adopted. In order that we might enter into the inheritance
that was, in a sense, our destiny in Adam but lost in him and now has become again in
Jesus Christ our destiny. And you remember how Paul follows this through
in various places. Indeed, he follows it through here in Ephesians
chapter 1, because he hints also in Ephesians chapter 1 that part of the result of our sinfulness
is disintegration. And not just that we are, as it were, disinherited
but that we become part of a cosmic disintegration. So that the whole creation is groaning even
until now, longing for the day when our being disinherited will be finally reversed, and
we will experience the glory of the liberty of the children of God in the resurrection
of our bodies and in the final resurrection and reconstitution of all things. We, who were made to have dominion over the
earth, become part of the earth. We, who were made to have dominion over the
animals, are trodden underfoot by the animals. The creation groans. We have no fellowship with that part of our
family that remains unfallen in heaven's glory. The very cosmic family of God has been fractured
by our sinfulness. But do you notice what he says here in Ephesians
chapter 1, that God has shown us that according to His purpose, verse 9, which He set forth
in Christ, He has a plan for the fullness of time to unite, to reintegrate all things
in Christ, things in heaven and on earth. That is to say, those strange creatures of
whom we read in Isaiah chapter 6 and throughout the book of Revelation, who are at least our
cousins in glory, created, and indeed exercising dominion as ministers of God from whom we
are alienated. To think that those two branches of the family
that have been fractured by our sinfulness are reintegrated in Jesus Christ so that it
is true. You have all experienced this, that He gives
His angels charge over you. Now many of you in this room those angels
have protected, unseen, invisible. You may even have entertained some of them
unawares, because they usually don't look like angels. And this is the glory of the gospel. Incidentally, this is why when people today
come into a living church, even if, as most of them are, completely ignorant of what the
Christian gospel is, or antagonistic to what the Christian gospel says, if they come into
a living church, one of the first things that they should experience and indeed, by God's
grace, do experience is, "However much I am antagonistic to what these people believe,
I cannot deny that that there is something about the way these people are with one another
that reminds me of my sense of what life really ought to be that we have lost." And in chapter 1, Paul is therefore opening
out to us the riches of our privileges in Jesus Christ. And as we, as we kind of, as we kind of do
what we should never do with our pullovers, as we as we pull on those loose threads a
little, we discover that they unravel us and reveal the totality of our depravity, the
reality of our need. And indeed, they help us to see behind the
surface. You know, if you read this Saturday glossy
magazine and the quality newspaper that you all read, whichever that is politically, I
wonder if you have ever noticed the number of asterisks that appear in the interviews
with the beautiful people. It's, it's really astonishing. That have foul hearts, beautiful faces and
that's, that's what our youngsters are encouraged to aspire to, to be beautiful outward, but
foul inward. And you see, what does it tell us? It tells us that you can gain the whole world
and lose your own soul, because the whole world will never transform what you are inwardly. But the gospel of Jesus Christ, to whom we
are united for justification, and in whom we are simultaneously brought to share in
His death to sin and resurrection to new life, brings about this glorious gospel restoration. And one day we will see it. You remember how Paul speaks about this in
1 Corinthians 15, when he portrays Jesus as the second man and the last Adam, bringing
about this restoration? And that little section in the middle of 1
Corinthians 15 ends with some of the most challenging words in the whole of the New
Testament, when he tells us at the end our Lord Jesus as the second man and last Adam,
having subdued everything to Himself, that is to say brought together all the disintegration,
all the disunity, under the unity of His own headship, will then present it all, as our
Mediator, in His capacity as the second man and the last Adam, and then He Himself will
be subject to the Father. That doesn't mean that the second Person of
the Trinity is subjecting Himself to the first Person of the Trinity. That means that the Son of God as the second
man and the last Adam, that is as your Representative and Savior is, as it were, leading the whole
host of the redeemed to the throne of God and saying, and this is the significance of
the cry from the cross, "I have done it, and now I do what Adam was called to do, having
brought everything under My dominion. I do that which he was created to do, when
he had done it. I bring it back to You, and say, 'Father,
You gave me the garden, and now it's all garden, and it's our love gift to You." And instead of bowing before the tree, as
you remember, Milton has Eve do as she leaves the tree in Paradise Lost, the whole created
order with Christ as its Head will do obeisance to God, and He will be all in all. The gospel brings us back to where we were
created to be. And this is what he's expounding here. And he also hints in this context, we need
our eyes open to be able to see this. You'll notice how he puts this. He speaks about God lavishing grace upon us
in all wisdom and insight in verse 8, making known to us the mystery of His will. That's the difference between being a Christian
and not being a Christian. The mystery's been solved. It's then that you notice how the greatest
of our scientists who, in a sense, are at pursuing what we were created to do, the dominion
over all creation, not understanding that they are seeking a dominion over a fractured
creation. You notice one of the things that drives them,
at the, at the bottom of things, is to find a principle of unity in the cosmos, while
at the same time denying the existence of God. That's not true of all of them; it's true
of some of them. They are driven to explain the cosmos without
explaining it in theistic terms. And they are driven by it, and it's very evident. And here is this great truth of the gospel
that the humblest believer, who knows no scientific formula, who failed his O Grade or GCSE algebra,
is given the clue, the key to the mystery and to the only way in which mankind will
ever discover the unification of all things in Jesus Christ. And then Paul prays that our eyes will be
open to see this. And he does a very interesting thing, having
done that, he says, "Now in order that our eyes may be opened, let's look at this from
the other direction." And in chapter 6, in chapter 2, he comes to
the wonder of the gospel in Jesus Christ from the perspective of our sinfulness. In chapter 1, from the perspective of the
riches of God's grace to us in Jesus Christ, in the first section in chapter 2, from the
perspective of our sinfulness. And he begins to explore what the fall has
done to us. We are not just sick, but we are dead in our
trespasses and sins, for all it looked to us that we were completely alive. And he has this marvelous expression. You know G.K. Chesterton said that one of the great things
about the gospel, which of course he didn't fully understand is, it seems to go quirky
exactly where things go quirky. We were dead in our trespasses and sins in
which we once walked. Is that a contradiction? The dead do not walk, but these dead do walk. We were the -- when I went to the United States
first of all I used to run into these, not literally, but behind these bashed up cars
with signs on the back "Grateful Dead." And I thought it was a Roman Catholic prayer
society until I was enlightened that I was just a generation too late, and these were
deadheads. And I thought, "You know, maybe I should put
a bumper on the, a bumper sticker on mine that says "Living Dead," living dead, because
we have all the appearance of living and walking, but when we are walking in our trespasses
and sins, we are in fact spiritually dead. And this is why we, and this is why Paul is
praying that our eyes will be open to see that this life is actually a living death. I remember sitting outside on one of the two
sunny days there were in Scotland a number of years ago, and just out of the corner of
my eye, I saw a robin. For some reason or another, ever since childhood,
I have liked rabbits and robins. Seagulls are after your fish and chips, you
know, in Pittenweem, or Portstewart, and blackbirds, pigeons, they are all the result of the fall,
somehow or another. Robins, and, just as I was reading a bit,
out of the corner of my eye, I just caught the redness, and it was near to me, and it
just seemed so beautiful, my heart was, my heart actually leapt at the thought, that,
you know, here is tenderhearted Sinclair Ferguson, and this robin knows it, and, you know, he
knows I'm safe. And then, I realized the robin wasn't moving,
and as a lover of robins, when I realized the truth, my heart sank. The robin was beautiful, but it was motionless. It was dead. That's what Paul is saying here. No matter how beautiful, this is why the billions
that are now being poured into schools and other organizations by governments all over
the Western world to help youngsters have a better self-image are bound to fail because
they keep saying to the dead, "Live," but they have no gospel that will bring the life. And Paul is saying, "You see, if you're going
to understand." This is surely one of the reasons why God
put Luther through the mill all these years, because when he discovered the depravity of
his best works, then he was shaped providentially to be the instrument to teach men and women
raised up by God that there is salvation for the most depraved, including Martin Luther. So we are dead in our trespasses and sins,
and in which we have walked, and we're not only dead in our trespasses and sins, but
think of how relevant this is, the result of that, says Paul, is that we walk in a certain
way. That's not, that's not kind of language that's
become so common, and sometimes in our translations, actually, the Greek is kind of shaded "to
live" but it means "walked." And isn't it interesting? Yet, it must have crossed your mind that there
are two things you can do instantaneously for which you have no explanation. You pick up the phone, you hear one word,
and you know exactly who it is. And the other is, you're walking down the
street and you see somebody, and you are just looking at the bottom half, and you know exactly
who they are by the way they walk. And Paul is saying, "When your eyes are opened,
you understand that what you're looking at is the walk of death." And the evidence of the walk of death is that
if you are one of the great rebels, actually you turned out to be a conformist. We're awash with that, aren't we? How do I conform to these other people who
are the living dead? And we are, we are prisoners. We are following the course of this age. We are following the prince of the power of
the air. We think we are walking to our destiny when
we are walking to the pit, and we don't know it. But when the gospel comes, we begin to see
it. And the marvel of this is there is an integration
in the mind and then in the affections and therefore, grabbing the heart when we understand
this counterpoint of sin and grace. It is not possible to find God's grace in
Jesus Christ, that is as we have been reminded Jesus Christ Himself. It's not possible to see Him as a wonderful
Savior, unless you see the depravity from which He has saved you. Superficial views of sin inevitably are connected
to superficial views of grace, and superficial views of grace in Jesus Christ are inevitably
connected to superficial views of sin. And the two are inevitably connected to a
superficial view of the Christian life. But Paul is saying when you realize all the
that is yours in Christ, and when correspondingly God, as it were, opens up to you the depravity
of your heart and the depravity of your lifestyle, then the glory of the gospel, not only in
this aspect of what Christ has done for us, but what Christ does in us, becomes truly
a wonderful exchange. And the dead are made to live, and those who
walked as prisoners walk as Christ's free men. You would almost think that Paul was able
to see that the Reformation would take place, because you notice where he says in that context. It's as though he says, "I know what you're
thinking." If you preach this gospel of free grace, then
the response is going to be "free grace, free lifestyle." Teach people that they are justified in Jesus
Christ by grace through faith, and they will live anyway they want. And Paul deals with that in several places. You notice the way he deals with it in this
context. He says, "Far from it, because those who are
united to Christ, for whom all this is true -- justification, redemption, adoption, inheritance,
reintegration in Christ, life from the dead in Christ, they are God's workmanship created
in Christ Jesus for the good works that He who chose them in Christ before the foundation
of the world has destined them to walk in." I mean the thing about the gospel is its utter
rightness as a glorious way of salvation. And this, as we have been hearing, is what
the Reformers discovered, what by God's grace we too have discovered, that fills our hearts
with praise and joy. And you'll notice what is the most obvious
thing in Ephesians chapter 1, that Paul says all of this brings us back to our created
destiny. Remember, I put, it said in Romans 1, he says
the problem is we have exchanged the glory of God for our sinfulness and idolatry. And when he describes sin in Romans chapter
3 verse 23, which you all memorized within two weeks of your conversion, "all have sinned." And as if I were finishing the sentence, I
would say, "All have sinned and have broken the law of God," he does not actually say
that. It's true, but it's not the truth that he
teaches in that verse. He says the real tragedy is that all have
sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you'll notice the refrain that runs through
Ephesians chapter 1. All this is to the praise of the glory of
His grace. All this is to the praise of the glory of
His grace. All this is to the praise of His glory. It's sola Scriptura, as we've been hearing. It's sola gratia, as we've been hearing. It's sola fide, as we've been hearing. It's sola Christus, as we've been hearing,
and it's soli Deo gloria as well. What a gospel! What a gospel! And what a privilege to be a Christian. Are you a Christian? Let's pray together: Lord, we thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the riches of the gospel. We thank You for giving us attentiveness this
morning. We've listened to more this morning than we
usually do in an entire week, and we've learned more history than we usually do in an entire
year. We thank You that we belong to the company
of those who are justified and are being sanctified and one day will be finally glorified in our
Savior Jesus Christ. Oh, keep with us, we pray today, and help
us to taste and see that You truly are good. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
