All right, my friends, if you have a Bible, please grab it and open me with me to Ephesians chapter two. If you are able to not only rely on the words that come on the screen, on the fireplace behind me, but if you're able to have a Bible in your lap, I think that's really helpful. As we study God's word, you can see the words, you can read it yourself.

You can see and follow the argument that Paul has in this portion of his letter to the Ephesians. You may remember in our series in Ephesians that Paul didn't write the book of Ephesians because there is a scandal to be addressed or a crisis to be solved, or a letter to respond to. He wrote it to show us that the church is a beautiful mess.

It is this amazing spirit filled community. Bound together by Christ's blood who are shaped and molded by Jesus. It is mysteriously beautiful because it is rooted in the life of the triune God, and yet it's messy because it's led by people though redeemed who are still sinners like you and like me.

It's full of a room. If you look around and you're new to the church and you think this room is full of hypocrites, well that's exactly. Why we are growing more and more like Jesus through time progressively and sometimes ever so slowly. But we're doing it not just alone, but we're doing it together. And so with the text in front of you, would you stand with me as we read from Ephesians chapter two verses a 19 down through uh, 22, this is God's word and it's given to you in love.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets Christ Jesus himself, being the cornerstone and whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord.

In him. You also are being built together into a dwelling place for God. By the Spirit, the grass withers and the flowers fade, but God's word stands forever. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Please, father, would you take these words on the page and by your spirit, would you change us?

We pray in the moments we have together before we come to the table in Jesus' name. Amen. Honest question. Have you ever walked into a room and felt like you didn't belong? Like everybody knew what to do, knew one another, that they were the members and you were on the outside looking in students. Have you ever felt like that at school wanted to be in a group that you weren't in?

Maybe you wanted to be in a community, maybe even looking at Trinity from the outside in wanting to be in. We all experience that social psychologists say that that is a normal human fear to be on the outside and long to be in. And then Ephesus in 60 ad remember the people of Ephesus lived in the shadow of one of the seven wonders of the world, the Temple of Artemis, of Diana.

And they cut their teeth and they grew up on a religion that said, you must appease the Greek God of Artemis in order to receive blessing in your life. Hunters and sailors were especially blessed by Artemis in the Greek pantheon, and so all of their life, they grew up with this idea of wanting to be good.

With the God whose temple overshadowed their homes, the whole of their life. And so when Paul says what he says in verses 19 through 22 of Ephesians chapter two, friends, it is a radical statement for the first century church that you were no longer on the outside, but you are in. And he talks about it in three movements.

He says, not only are you not on the outside, you are once strangers. Now your citizen. You were once orphans, he says, but now you're family. Your life was once chaos. But now by the spirit, it's being constructed into something beautiful for God, from strangers to citizens, orphans to family and chaos to construction.

And if we could sum up the whole argument of verses 19 through 22, up in one sentence, it would be this. The gospel doesn't just reconcile us to God. It brings us into a new community, a new identity, and a new home. In other words, the gospel brings you all the way in. Do you know that intimacy? Do you know that?

Let's look first at what it means to be brought in as strangers who become citizens. In the Roman Empire, to be a stranger, to be a xenos in Greek means to be in the presence of a place that you don't belong. To be a perico, uh, an alien means that you have no rights in that Roman empire. You are there as a guest.

Uh, one New Testament scholar named Harold Hoener says that it might be akin in this analogy to saying that there is somebody who is in the United States illegally. And there is somebody who is here with a visa. They don't have the rights of an American citizen because they aren't American citizens.

They are either a foreigner in our midst or they are here as a guest. And Paul is saying that you were once strangers, you were once aliens, you were once on the outside of God's covenant, but he has brought you in to become a citizen of what it means. To be called a part of his church. Now, there's a lot of people in this room and there's a lot of diversity in the stories in this room, and I've heard a lot of your stories and we can all relate to the fact that we know what it's like to be on the outside looking in.

We know what it's like to be a stranger. We've been in those social situations before, haven't we? And there is a deep ache in our heart to want to always be in, in the inside group. And no matter where you are, whether it's trying to get into grad school, you want in. This is the purpose for my life, or whether you're trying to get into a college, or whether you're trying to get a promotion.

One of the most memorable essays that CS Lewis ever wrote, he wrote in 1944, and it's called The Inner Ring. You ever heard this essay? He talks, he starts quoting, uh uh, war and Peace. And he goes into the argument that even the people who are most famous in the world, they're still an inner ring that they're not in, and they want to be inside another group, even when it feels as though the people who are most inside find themselves still, like they're on the outside.

And Lewis writes, I believe that in all men's lives, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside. The local ring, however you wanna define that for you. And there is a terror of being left on the outside and listen. To be inside the inner ring is not necessarily in itself wrong. There are people who have to lead the country.

There are people who have to lead the church or the company. One Timothy three, one says, he who desires to be an overseer desires a noble thing. Desiring to be a leader is not wrong in and of itself, but Lewis says it is the over desire which draws us into the inner ring, and that is another matter altogether.

And unless you set up measures to prevent it, this desire is gonna be one of the chief motives of your life, and you will face small crossroads you'll face. Small opportunities to cut corners at work. Some of you who are up for promotions, you hear about some method to get ahead that might be outside the, the ethics of your industry, and yet you find that so tempting in order for you to get in the inner ring in the eyes of your boss.

I once, uh, knew a man, a friend of our family who he sold some cattle one time illegally and he made a lot of money. Hmm. And then he did it again, and he did it again, and he did it again. And then he found himself years later in prison looking back on his life and thought it started out so small. This is exactly how affairs happened in marriages too.

Don't you know little flirtations, small little moments, sharing intimacy with somebody who's not your spouse. And then again and again, listen, nobody set out to be unfaithful, but it is in those small 1000 little decisions that you make. And what CS Lewis is saying is when you have this desire to be in on the inner ring, then you will begin to make small and subtle choices bit by bit and day by day.

He goes on to say that once you get in, you even find it then that it is unsatisfying. He says, as long as you're governed by the desire to be in, you will never get what you want. You're trying to peel an onion, and if you succeed in getting in the inner ring, you'll find that there's actually nothing left until you conquer the fear of being an outsider and outsider.

You will always remain. And so what are we to do? Well, Paul says that in the gospel, you who are once strangers and aliens now have been brought in. The glorious good news of the gospel is it not only changes your relationship with God vertically, but it restores you. It reminds you that you are in the most inner ring there possibly could be because it is by the blood of Christ that he has laid down his life for you to bring you who were once an outsider to the covenant in.

Do you hear me? There's no more inner ring you could be. And the upshot of this is that though, Jesus, it says in Hebrews chapter 12, Jesus, he was the one who was crucified outside of the gate, outside of the city, so that we could be brought in. And be part of his Covenant family. We could be brought in and we could share in the joy of the Holy Trinity for all eternity.

Father, son, and Holy Spirit mystery of mysteries. Is there any other inner ring that you could possibly want to be in? He's given it to you. Oh, Christian. Live like it. And what does it allow you to do? It allows you, once you know you are once a stranger in an alien and you've. Been brought in that you've been made a citizen of the kingdom, then it allows you, with an incredible sense of contentment to enjoy where God has put you because the grass isn't greener anywhere else.

He has put you. He has bound you. He sets the habitations and the boundaries of our lives. He gives us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons to satisfy us with food or gladness. And he asks us, oh, Christian. To be content and to not run over relationships. In order for you to climb some ladder, to get into some inner ring, but to be the presence, the aroma, the blessing of his Holy Spirit to others content

resting satisfied in who he is for you.

I hope that we as a church, if we're marked by anything, I hope that we are remarked by a tremendous sense of contentment, spiritual contentment, and deep gratitude so that when people are with us, they feel like they could be with us all day long, that your house. Is a house of rest for people, a haven for them.

And it's hard to be a place of refuge when you're constantly trying to get in some inner ring that you haven't quite yet achieved. But in the gospel, Jesus has achieved it for us, and so we can lay down our strivings. You don't have to chase it any longer. You can rest in his finished work for us. And not only has he made us strangers and brought us in as citizens, he uses this political language of being brought in as citizens.

It says, you're fellow citizens in the text. Lower your eyes and see what it says. Sin, politico and Greek. Together, you've been brought in together. That means what you do. What you do in the privacy of your own home affects all of us. Because we're knit together. You are fellow citizens. You're not independent citizens.

We're in this thing together and so our corporate relationships together matter.

But not only have we been strangers and aliens, but made citizens. Now Paul takes it even deeper. He says that we were once orphans. Secondly, and we have become family. To be a fellow citizen gives you rights, but to be part of the family. Look at verse the second half of verse 19. To be part of the family gives you closeness.

Paul is saying something very intimate here at the end of chapter 19, uh, verse 19. In Christ, you have not just been granted legal status. You've been given a place at the table. You're not just part of the kingdom, you're part of the family. You're not just a subject. Now you are a child. Sinclair Ferguson points out that this is one of the most neglected doctrines in the church today.

That God not only justifies us, but he adopts us. He doesn't just forgive us from a distance. He brings us close as a father loves a child. He doesn't just make us safe. He makes us sons and daughter. He gives us his name, Christian. His love extends to us, his home, his welcome. But let's be honest, it can be hard to believe that that's true.

Some of us carry around deep scars from when we were young and our home may have been very functional, but it perhaps wasn't very warm. And so to hear the idea that God is a father who embraces us seems foreign to some of us. But the good news of the gospel is the father is a father, perhaps unlike you've ever seen or experienced.

He's a father who gives self sacrificially his greatest treasure, namely his son for you, who rose again on the third day to give you victory over sin and death to give you a righteousness that you did not earn. Just like this robe covers me from head to toe. So your righteousness covers. You reminding you that you operate off of the merit of another.

Jesus earned your salvation for you because he lived the perfect life and he died. The death that you deserve to die so that you might know what it's like not only to be ara once a stranger, now a citizen, but a orphan who now has become part of a family. I read this, uh, week about this organization that some of you may have heard of.

It's called My Bag, my Story. It's an organization, uh, that helps foster children who are in foster homes. And it, the story as told of a boy named Travis who had bounced around from home to home to home, he never stayed very long. He never felt safe. And even in his new home, even when he was secure, even when he had all of the provision he needed.

He didn't trust it yet, and he kept his backpack packed every night, just in case the next day he would have to move again. He wouldn't decorate his room. He wouldn't call the couple mom or dad. He was technically in the house, but emotionally he was still living like a stranger. And then one day something remarkable happened in Travis' life, the couple who had fostered him sat down with Travis and said, Travis, we are not fostering you anymore.

We are adopting you as our son. You're our son forever. And the next morning for the first time, Travis took his backpack and he put it away and he unpacked it and he wrote his name on his door. This is Travis's room, because he knew he wasn't going anywhere. He had a home. And oh dear, brothers and sisters.

I, as your pastor, struggle with this so much because there's so much in us that wants to earn. We are raised in a culture that says, earn, earn, earn. And some of us are so good at it. We go to the right schools, we pass the right tests. We subtly brag on LinkedIn. I'm humbled to announce that I, you know, this is, this is the world we live in.

And there is an orphan child exercise that we often talk about in a discipleship or in Bible studies. If you've ever been with me in these, and it says that the orphan mindset, it asks us, do we feel insecure and do we lack peace like an orphan, or do we rest in the father's love and provision because we are secure?

I have to ask myself all the time, Blake, do I feel abandoned and unloved and unworthy? Or do I know that I am loved, that I am chosen, that I, that I'm accepted? Do you know that an orphan is someone who strives for acceptance and a son is someone who operates? A daughter operates from a place of already being accepted, an orphan distrusts, or he resents authority, but a son or a daughter trusts and submits to the authority as God given.

An orphan is motivated by fear and guilt and the need to earn love, but a son or a daughter is full of love and gratitude for the father's grace. Oh, they are grateful people. The prayer life of an orphan is mechanical. It's duty driven, but the prayer life of a child is relational. Intimate and joy filled.

The future for an orphan is uncertain and is anxious, but the future for a child is hopeful and secure in the father's promises. In Christ, you are no longer an orphan, but it says that you have been brought into the household of God, that you are made fellow. Citizens with the saints in Greek, it literally says, and the household of God membership is assumed in that household.

You are brought in, the house is yours, and if you belong to Jesus, you're not just accepted, but you are adopted. Do you know that? You don't just have a future, you have a father, and in this house you don't perform. In order to stay, you can rest because you are finally. Home. Paul wants to challenge the way you think about the church.

The church is not a place that we consume. It is a people that we commit to because we have all been made citizens, we've all been made family together. It's not a service we watch. It is a family we serve. It's not about finding the people just like you. It's about becoming family with people who are wildly unlike you because we all share the same father, stranger to citizen.

Orphaned a family. And thirdly, look in verse 20 and see what he says. From chaos to construction, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself, being the cornerstone. Paul finishes this section with a metaphor that pulls everything together. He moves from political language of citizens to familial language of being now called children, being members of a household now to architectural language.

A temple, a building, and Paul says, this building is not made of bricks and mortar. This building is made of hearts of stone that have become hearts of flesh. This building is made of people. When Trinity, when we in the service, Trinity leaves the building. This building is at Trinity. You are the building.

You are the church. And we are being built brick by brick. Just as the uniqueness of every stone in this building is shaped and molded and carved. So also, the Lord has shaped and molded, and carved and put us together to be a beautiful edifice for the world to see. Look at the way that they love one another.

Look at the way that those men come, look at the way they rally around tornado victims and come and make sandwiches on the spot to pass them around town. Look at the way that they give sacrificially. Look at the way that they continue, Lord, to distribute from their deacons fund for the sake of the poor and the needy.

Those who go through difficult times in our midst. Look at the way, what would the city be like if this church disappeared tomorrow? Would it make any difference?

Are you able to see yourself as a citizen, as family, as a temple who's being built into something beautiful? This isn't just poetic language of architecture. This is revolutionary. In the Old Testament, the temple was the physical location of God's presence. Behind the veil stood the Holy of Holies, where the high priest would go in one time a year at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

There is blood and ritual cleansing. The presence of God was holy and dangerous. But now Paul says the presence is here by his spirit among you in the church, because Christ has torn the veil from top to bottom. When he died for you on the cross, Christ entered in perfectly holy into the most dangerous space in the world to span the gap that separated God from humanity and Jesus.

Took the punishment that we deserved so that we might be brought back in. This is why Sinclair Ferguson calls the church God's New Creation Project because you are a picture of what it looks like when God returns to make everything new. You are a snapshot of the future in the way that you understand yourselves in light of the world, the foundation hear it.

It's the teaching of the apostles and the prophets upon which we stand in God's word. The cornerstone is Christ himself. Everything aligns with his finished work. All of scripture points to him, old Testament points to him, new Testament points back to him. His spirit equips us. The outcome is that we are a temple, a holy dwelling, a place of beauty and unity and glory.

Are we. Are there ways that you can help make that temple more beautiful? And I'm not talking about serving in the church. I'm talking about the way that you love your brothers and sisters. Invite them into your home. Share a meal with them. Let them borrow your washer and dryer, help to you students. Amen.

Help them feel like they have a home away from home. Those of us who have kiddos outta the house who don't live near our children anymore, share your children with them. Let them help you raise your kids, moms and dads who come to worship and sometimes you're stressed out because of your kiddos. Let people in the church help you raise your kid.

This is what we coveted to do and our vows together. That's the beauty of the church. This is not someplace to come just to be entertained. It is a people to be together. And construction is messy. It takes time, but man, it's worth it. So what does it mean for us? It means at least three things. Number one, you can't be these things alone.

You have to be them together. Notice he says in the text that your fellow citizens and he later says that you're being built together. Why does he emphasize the corporate nature of it? Because we need each other in a world that is so highly individualized. Oh, you need each other? Oh, please. Would you pray that the Lord might allow you to be more vulnerable with people than you are?

We need one another. It means that you're under construction and that's okay. God is patient. He is actively at work in you. So be patient with yourself and keep running to repentance and faith. And thirdly, it means that the spirit of God is here. He isn't just up in heaven. He is here and he indwells you and he unites us together in our gritty relationships into unity.

And so let me close by asking you this question. Is there an inner ring that you are still striving to enter? Would you be so willing to rest and contentment where the Lord has put you right now? We wait and hope for the Lord. He is our help and our shield. He has not deprived you of anything good in this moment.

He has made you once a stranger, now a citizen once, an orphan, now a family, once a life full of chaos. Now he has purposefully with great blueprints through Christ by his spirit, making you together into something beautiful. So let's not just attend church. Let's become the church. Let's just not consume community.

Let's create it for others. Let's not just receive grace. Let's extend it to others who may still be searching to find the rest that you have experienced. And if you haven't yet experienced it, today's the day of salvation for you. He holds it out for you to come in repentance and faith to this table with joy.

Amen. Let's pray. Father, would you strengthen us? We ask to see the beauty of your son who brings us all the way in. Would you help us to rest in his status as those who are adopted into his family and see him as our cornerstone and Father, would you remind us again and again that you say to us through Christ by your Spirit, that we are not just welcome here, but you are calling us to rest in you.

And to find ourselves home until you come again to make all things new. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. 

Sermon transcript is computer generated.