Our Love for One Another
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. 8 To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, 9 and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, 12 in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. 13 So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:14–21)
So last week, in Revelation 5 and Philippians 1, we looked at the glory of Jesus and our souls: Jesus should be the supreme satisfaction of our souls because he’s worthy. He deserves it. And what does it look like when he is our supreme satisfaction? It looks like to live is Christ and to die is gain — it looks like humble joy. That was last week.
And well this week, in Ephesians 3, we see this theme again. The book of Ephesians has a lot to say about the glory of Jesus, but also, Ephesians has a lot to say about the church and about our love for one another. So there’s the glory of Jesus, the church, and our love one another — and all three of these are connected, and my goal in this sermon is to show you how.
I want to show you three things:
The cosmic centrality of Jesus
The radical reality of the church
The epic effect of our love
And all three of these really do go like this. I wanna show you that. Let’s pray and get started:
Father in heaven, thank you for your Word, and for what you have revealed to the apostles. Thank you that when we read what they have written we can perceive their insight into the mystery of Christ. By the power of your Spirit, speak to us today, we pray, in Jesus’s name, amen.
#1. The cosmic centrality of Jesus.
I want us to zoom out for a minute and I want to show you what Paul says about Jesus in Chapter 1:
Now the home-run statement in Chapter 1 is verses 9 and 10, but even before we get there, notice what Paul says in verse 4. Paul tells us that God the Father has chosen us — all those who believe in Jesus — God the Father has chosen us in Jesus before the foundation of the world. Before we were ever born and done nothing either good or bad, God purposed that he would have us as his people through his Son, by the shedding of his Son’s blood (also see Revelation 13:8). This was all because of the riches of God’s grace, to the praise of God’s grace, according to God’s purpose which he set forth in Christ.
And this is verse 9. God’s purpose, or his plan in verse 10, is a plan for the fullness of time — which means it goes back as far as you can go and it looks forward as far as you can go. And this plan is to unite all things in Jesus, things in heaven and things on earth.
That word for “unite” means to sum up. It means to be the main point, or the focus, or the center. Jesus is that for everything that exists. Paul tells us this in the book of Colossians. He says that all things were created through Jesus and for Jesus, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Every las thing there is (see Colossians 1:16). It has to do with Jesus.
The problem, though, is the curse of sin.
Now when it comes to sin, we tend to be pretty acquainted with the curse of sin in our own experience. We get that this world is fallen; we see its evidence all around us; we see it in us. But one thing we might not appreciate is how the curse of sin has affected the entire cosmos — so all the things in heaven and on earth. The seen, tangible realm of earth, and the unseen, spiritual realm — both have been thrown out of whack because of sin.
But, that will not always be.
God’s purpose is for all creation to be in harmony, for all things to be put right. In the end, there will not be a single thing that is out of line: God’s enemies will be judged; his people will be saved; and the perfection of his glory will shine in the new heavens and new earth. And the way that happens is in Jesus. Jesus is the emphasis of God’s plan. He’s not just an instrument; Jesus is the focus. Jesus is the one the Father has chosen to sum up the cosmos. Jesus is central.
Just like with our window up there.
The Christ symbol in that stained-glass window is directly central, and everything around the circle comes through him and is for him. And so when we look at that window our eyes are meant to travel back to the center over and over again. Which is why I love that window. It’s like the universe. Jesus is the focus.
And there’s at least one person in my life who gets this, at least in theory. It’s my four-year-old son, Nathaniel. Every time after dinner, when I read the Bible to my family, I usually have one question for the kids. I keep this really short, but it’s just one question, and I give them each a minute to answer, and Nathaniel always has something to say. Always. It doesn’t matter what the question is. He raises his hand, Yes, Nathaniel, and he says, no matter the question: “Jesus wubs us.”
And that’s all he says. That’s his answer every time. And every time I have to go: Well, yeah.
It’s really all about Jesus.
Step it back, see it all, sum it up: Jesus is the focus. Jesus has cosmic centrality.
And he wubs us.
Which brings me to the second thing I want to show you:
#2. The radical reality of the church.
So if Jesus is to sum up all things, if he’s to bring it all together and restore harmony to the cosmos, the biggest obstacle is that humans, God’s image-bearers — because of sin — are hostile to God and to one another.
See we can’t keep talking about Jesus and the universe while we have Cain out in the field, getting angry with God and killing Abel (see Genesis 4:8). That’s a problem! Humans are dead in their trespasses and sins. They follow the course of the world; they are dominated by the power of Satan; they carry out their own desires, and they are rightly deserving of God’s wrath.
So what is God going to do about that with Jesus as the focus?
Well … God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and [he] raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:4–7)
God does that.
God reconciles sinful humans to himself by the death of Jesus in our place. And he also reconciles sinful humans to one another. The good news of Jesus is not mainly good news for individual persons, but it’s good news for a people, and that people is called the church.
Starting in Ephesians Chapter 2, verse 11, Paul takes up this theme of the church. The church is the corporate identity of all these individuals who were once dead in sin but have now been made alive in Jesus.
And there are two different ways to think about the church, and there are a handful of ways to talk about these two different ways. One way to talk is to say that the church is invisible and visible. Another way is it talk is about the church as universal and local.
The church universal is the heavenly perspective of all Christians over all time and space. If you want to imagine how the church universal looks, think ahead to the Last Day, at the Resurrection, all who are raised from the dead and glorified and ushered into the presence of Jesus as his Bride, that’s the church universal. In Chapter 1 verse 22, when Paul says that Jesus, who is the head over all things, is given to “the church which is his body,” the church universal is what Paul means. This is all the saints.
But then there’s the church local — and this is the more normative way the church is talked about in the New Testament. These are the local congregations of believers in this world, here and now, who make visible (imperfectly) the church universal. Now how do they make it visible? By their gathering together for worship, to hear the Word preached and to administer the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Hey, it’s what we’re doing this morning! This is what makes us the church local. We are one concrete expression of the church universal.
So there’s church universal and the church local.
Well, in Ephesians, every time Paul uses the word “church” he’s talking about the church universal. He’s talking about the church in its grand, ultimate sense — but here’s the thing: although he’s talking about the church universal, but he’s talking to the church local.
And there are at least three things he wants us to know as a local church about the church universal.
The church is the creation of a new humanity.
This is Ephesians 2:11–22. In God’s reality, which is the reality that matters most, humans are born into one of two categories: either you are of the Jewish people or of the Gentile nations.
And the Jewish people are God’s covenant people, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and through them, according to the flesh, Jesus the Messiah has come (see Romans 9:4–5).
But we who have been born of the nations were separated from all of this. Paul says in verse 12 that we were strangers to the covenant of promise and without hope in the world.
But now, in Christ Jesus, we Gentiles who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. In Christ the old categories of Jewish people and Gentiles has been transcended by a new category of believing Jewish people and believing Gentiles and they are called the church. And the church is a new kind of humanity — we are one new man that Jesus has created in himself — Ephesians 2:15. This is reality. This is what Jesus has done, which means, that you, Christian, are more united to a Christian from the Peruvian Amazon than you are to your unbelieving co-worker who enjoys the same things you do.
This is the church universal. We are a trans-historical, trans-cultural people who by any other metric would have nothing to do with one another. Jesus has brought us together — we are filled with one Spirit, with access to one Father. The church is the creation of a new humanity.
The church is the revelation of God’s mystery.
This is Chapter 3. For most of us, the fact that Gentile nations through faith in Jesus become part of the people of God — that doesn’t exactly blow us away like it should. Because it’s what we’re used to. Thanks to the missionary efforts of the apostle Paul, by the end of the First Century, majority Gentile churches had become a thing, and for most of us, it’s probably all we know. Which is one reason it’s important for us to read the Bible.
A lot of times we can try to take bits of the Bible and fit them into our situation, and we try to assess the Bible from our perspective, but that’s backwards. Instead, we should look at our situation from the Bible’s whole storyline, and we should assess our own day through what the Bible says.
And when we do that, when we think that way, when we see through the lens of Scripture, this is insane. … right now we are a long ways from Jerusalem. You ever think about that?
Recently I was playing around on Google Earth, because Melissa and I were announcing our summer vacation plans to the kids. We’re going to a beach in North Carolina. And I wanted to show the kids where that is on the globe. This is the edge of the continent; this is the Atlantic Ocean. And the way it works with Google Earth is that you start in one place, and then you plug in where you want to go, and it kind of zooms out and turns and then zooms in at your destination. And that’s how we told the kids, which was super cool.
Could you imagine if Moses had Google Earth?
What if you could can time-travel, and you drop in on Moses during one of his conversations with Pharaoh, and what if you dropped in, and you brought Google Earth? Use your imagination here:
Hey, Moses, Pharaoh — I gotta interrupt y’all for a minute because I gotta show you this. First, it’s good this is happening. This is super important. But I wanna let you know that one day both of your people, the Hebrews and the nations, through their faith in the Messiah, they are going to be “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (Ephesians 3:6). There are some glimpses of this now (see Exodus 12:36), but it’s mainly a mystery. One day, though, it’s gonna be clear.
The Messiah — the One who Moses is pointing to — he is going to create one new humanity, called the church, and they’re going to be all over the world. Let me show you this — [and this is where you pull out Google Earth] — and you type in 1524 Summit Avenue. It zooms out, and turns … big time … and it zooms in.
And they say, Where is that?
And you say: It’s the middle of nowhere; it’s this strange continent; and it’s really cold.
But right there, thousands of years from now, right there is going to be a local expression of this new people made by the Messiah, called the church … in a city named Saint Paul.
And Moses says, Who is Saint Paul?
And you say, He comes later in the story.
We are a mystery! The church is the mystery of God that has now been revealed, and we can read about it, and we are part of it.
The church is the manifestation of God’s manifold wisdom.
This is Ephesians 3, verse 10. Paul’s calling is to preach Jesus to the nations and reveal the mystery of the church “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (3:10).
So this new kind of humanity — the church, which is now a revealed mystery — this is made plain and visible to show something about God. And to show who? To show spiritual forces in the heavenly realm. And based upon how Paul talks about spiritual forces in Ephesians, these are hostile beings (see Ephesians 6:12). And the church, just by her existence, just because the church is, the church shows these demons the manifold wisdom of God … That his thinking, his judgments, his ways are unsearchable and inscrutable. That you can’t know his mind! You can’t be his counselor! You can’t give him a gift in order to be repaid, because from him and through him and to him are all things. And his eternal purpose in the church has been realized in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Remember the plan is that Jesus is going to sum up the cosmos! He’s the focus of all things in heaven and on earth — and on earth, the church has been realized, the radical reality of the church is active, which means, spiritual forces, now he’s coming for you!
When demons read Ephesians about the church, or when they look in on the local expressions of the church, they tremble in fear because they know their day is coming. The God of manifold wisdom who has done this in Jesus … it’s just a matter of time.
The church is a radical reality.
One more thing I want to show you, #3 …
#3. The epic effect of our love
Okay, so the spiritual forces of evil are getting the message, but that does not mean they’re passive. They fight against the church, and so we are called to stand against them (that’s the end of Ephesians; see Ephesians 6:10–20). But also there’s something more fundamental we do as a local church. This is what Paul prays in Chapter 3:14–19.
And now I want us to change gears for a minute because we’re gonna look closely here.
Paul prays this for us. The “you’s” here are plural. Paul is saying “y’all.”
Verse 14: For this reason — because of God’s eternal purpose realized in Jesus, because Jesus has created the church — Paul bows before God the Father, who is sovereign over all, and he says, This is what I’m asking God to do:
Verse 16: that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that — verse 17 — Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
Verses 16 and 17 are the first order of Paul’s prayer, and they’re basically repeating the same idea. To be strengthened through the Spirit in our inner being and to have Christ dwell in our hearts is the same thing. The idea is that Jesus, by his Spirit, is in the driver’s seat of our lives. Jesus by his Spirit indwells us, and he settles in with his continued presence at the center of who he are. Jesus is central to the cosmos, and Jesus is central to you and me.
Paul prays for this first, and the purpose for this is in verse 18: it’s so that we would have strength to comprehend the greatness of the love of Christ, so that, verse 19, we may be filled with all the fullness of God.
And that means to be spiritually mature, corporately. It means that we become all that God intends for us to be as his people together. We become mature like God intends by comprehending the greatness of the love of Christ, which is the result of Christ by his Spirit dwelling in our hearts — and then there’s one more thing in verse 17.
This is a little sentence that Paul puts in there, but it’s an important step between Christ dwelling in our hearts and then our comprehending the love of Christ and becoming mature. Paul says at the end of verse 17: “you, being rooted and grounded in love.”
That’s the link between Christ dwelling in us and then our comprehending his love and becoming mature. The way we get there is that we are rooted and grounded in love. Okay, whose love?
Is Paul talking about God’s love for us, or our love for one another?
It’s our love for one another.
Now that’s love that comes from God. We’re not just mustering this up on our own. This love comes from Christ dwelling our hearts, but this is our love, from Christ, for one another. And it’s essential to our growth. Paul says this in Chapter 4.
By verse 13 of Chapter 4, the topic again is the maturity of the church. The church is on the path toward maturity, verse 13, toward “mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” The “fullness of Christ” in 4:13 and the “fullness of God” in 3:19 are the same idea. This is maturity. And how do we get there? Well, we’re not swept away by bad doctrine, but rather — Chapter 4, verse 15,
speaking the truth in love we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
This is our love, for one another, that comes from Christ. Do you see the epic effect of our love for one another?
We, as a church — we cannot become all that God intends for us to be without loving each other. Our love for one another is what makes us grow. That’s why Paul commands us in Chapter 5, verse 2: “Walk in love as Christ loved us.” Church, loving one another is not jargon, and it’s not optional. Loving one another is absolutely essential to who we are.
I want us to be a healthy church increasing in maturity. I want us to be filled with all the fullness of God.
And when I think about that and imagine that, I imagine a church of men and women, and boys and girls, who are multiplied and matured as worshipers, servants, and missionaries of Jesus, who live as faithful witnesses to his power and goodness in every sphere of life — within our homes and workplaces, and our neighborhoods and groups — wherever we find ourselves. We speak Jesus to people and we watch him raise the dead.
And we experience an enriched understanding of his truth, and increased joy in his fellowship, and intensified zeal for his glory. Our marriages are good, and our children are encouraged — as they look to the examples of lionhearted men and glorious women who have the highways of Zion deep in our bones, the compassion of Jericho Road ready at our hands, and the biblical fluency of Berea on the tip of our tongues. We abound in good works and we overflow in generosity. We are young and old, and rich and poor — brown, red, yellow, black, and white —bound together by the cross that crushed our sinful hostilities and has created a new humanity — one that desires a better country, that is, a heavenly one. And so we out-rejoice everybody of this world, and we suffer in hope, like the worst thing is never the last thing, because Jesus has defeated death and Jesus is coming again. Because Jesus is real.
We will get there, Cities Church. It will happen. And it will happen by our being rooted and grounded and built up in our love for one another.
Do you see? The cosmic centrality of Jesus is expressed in the radical reality of the church, and that expression is seen and felt and known, when we love one another, here, locally, Cities Church.
Love one another. Jesus said that, didn’t he? In John 13:35 he said all people will know that we are his disciples— how? By our love for one another. That’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
At this Table, the bread represents the broken body of Jesus, and the cup represents his shed blood, and when we eat and drink, we give him thanks for his cross and we rejoice in the fellowship we have in him. But Jesus’s cross didn’t just accomplish our fellowship with him; it also accomplished our fellowship with one another.
There’s an important horizontal dimension to this Table. We eat and drink it together, and so this morning, as you take the bread and cup, look around for a minute. Look at this church local. Look at one another. Let us love one another.
His body is the true bread. His blood is the true drink. Let us serve you.
