Blessed to Call Him Father

You'll know that fatherhood wasn't necessarily high on the priority list. But the other night, something strange happened to me. Just before bed, I was scrolling through some photos on my phone. If you have an iPhone, I don't know if it happens with the other phones, but Siri decided to remind me of a photo of a six-month-old Alida that came up. And here was this little baby with a gummy little smile and two little teeth sticking out.

And an unexpected thing happened. I ached. My heart was sore. I felt such a strong sense of love for that little bub that something in me hurt, and it brought a whole new meaning to me that God's love in Scripture is described as a father's love. This morning, we have the great joy of meditating on that love and what it actually means for us.

In our Bible reading, we saw Paul beginning his letter to the church in Ephesus, and he begins in a typical fashion. Firstly, he establishes his authority to be writing in the first place to this Christian community. He says that he is an apostle, a sent one, directed by Jesus Christ Himself to preach and declare the good news of Christ. He addresses the Ephesians as saints, holy ones, people who have been made holy, who have been set apart by their faith in Christ. And then Paul bestows a characteristic blessing on them as he opens.

He says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the first opening verses, verses one and two. But now that he's greeted them in this way, he directs a kind of worship back towards God. First, they receive a blessing from God. Now he blesses God in return.

Verse three, have a look. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. In this sentence, three times the word bless is used, and yet they're used in three different ways. Firstly, God is to be blessed. God is to be blessed.

Secondly, because He has blessed us, and He has done this by giving us specific blessings. We bless God because He has blessed us by giving us specific blessings. When Paul says that God is to be blessed, that's simply a way of saying that God is to be praised, God is to be worshipped. He should be honoured. Why?

Because we have received things from Him that no one else can give us, spiritual blessings through Jesus Christ. Now famously, if you have a look at this paragraph that sort of starts in verse three, all the way through probably to verse 14, maybe even longer, it is one giant sentence in the Greek. We don't have full stops or commas in the Greek. It is just one sort of deposit of words that you get. So translators have to try and break it up and put it in paragraphs and sentences and so on.

But really, commentators will say, from verse three to verse 14, it is one single sentence. One blessing after the other. That's what Paul is doing. He is just listing all the spiritual blessings, all the good things that God has given us, God the Father. This morning, we're going to look at the blessings specifically related to His fatherhood, what the Father has done for us.

You'll see in the other sort of sections from, say, verse seven onwards, it talks about Jesus. So first is God the Father, then it's about Jesus. And then here in verses thirteen and fourteen, we see the Spirit being addressed. So the Trinity is in view here, but what we're focusing on this morning is God and His fatherhood. And so the overarching statement here is that we are to praise God who has loved us eternally, and He has loved us eternally by choosing us to become His sons and His daughters.

Let's have a look at those elements as they appear here. Firstly, we bless God for the spiritual blessing we have received of being chosen as His, as being chosen. That's our first point. In this, there we go. In this great list of all the spiritual or heavenly blessings, Paul goes back to the beginning of it all.

Blessed be God, our God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Verse four, even as He chose us in Him, in Christ, before the foundation of the world. In other words, before your mouth confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, before any of our hearts were elevated towards Him, God moved first. It is a mind-boggling thought because our minds, our entire existence is so tied to time and space.

But God, outside of time, has eternally and unilaterally decided to bring you, His chosen ones, also called the elect, into His family, into His kingdom, into union, eternal union with Him. Before we praise God, before we even have a positive thought about Him, Paul says, this is where it starts. He chose us. During high school, our school's volleyball coach yanked me out of basketball and put me into his team. Probably a good choice because I was getting absolutely smashed by very big brawny guys. But to my horror, he selected me to play in his district team as well with boys that were a year older than me.

A year nine KJ was an awkward creature. Just arms and legs. The only thing I contributed to the team was being an easy target to spike a ball at. After that first training, I whimpered to my coach something along the lines of, I think you've made a mistake. Why are you putting me on this team? And he said to me, trust me.

I know what I'm doing. After that conversation, I had a little bit more courage to return the next week where the ball was still spiked into my head, but now just a few times less. The knowledge of someone with greater authority, greater understanding, choosing you despite all the evidence that tells you you should doubt, that gives you incredible security. God chose you to be saved, and He chose you before the foundations of the earth. That does two things to your heart.

It gives you first the incredible security because if you did not choose Him, then you can't unchoose Him. Secondly, it humbles you. Before the first wave was put on the ocean, before the first bit of grass was laid in the Serengeti, before the first snowflake fell on Mount Everest, God set His heart on you. He did this way before you were born, way before you could think, dream, or feel. There was no way of you contributing to this eternal decision making.

It was and is sheer grace from beginning to the end. That in turn humbles us. We cannot be self-righteous Christians. We cannot be arrogant about how we live. God's election, His choosing us for salvation, causes us to feel both incredibly secure in that salvation, and we feel deeply humble about it.

So says Paul in his opening words to the Ephesians, we praise God the Father, bless the Father for choosing us. But then this choosing has a purpose, we're told. It is to make us better. The second reason for blessing or praising God the Father is that He is making us holy. We were chosen, says verse four, so that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

A cosmic transformation has taken place. God has chosen to take lost, weak, rebellious creatures and to turn them into beings that shine with moral perfection. Every year, there are thousands of lanky kids like 14-year-old KJ who are selected for teams where they spend weeks being spiked and spiked at and getting tangled in nets, but the coach never chooses those kids to remain those gangly uncoordinated kids. The coach selects them for a purpose. That purpose is development, growth, improvement.

There's a similar dynamic that happens in the Christian life. It's a dynamic I think as Reformed Christians, we might forget from time to time. We're meant to grow. We're meant to change. We're meant to be better Christians than we were last year.

You see, the fact is you and I will live such shallow, unfulfilled, and frankly discouraging Christian lives if we don't believe that our lives are actually about transformation. God gives us an insight into His endgame here. He's far more concerned about what you are becoming than what you are. God's eyes are set on your future glory, and so His hands right now are working on your character. God has chosen you for the purpose of making you holy. So that as Paul writes later in Ephesians in chapter 5 verse 27, He might present us to Himself in splendour.

God will so transform us that we will come before Him in a splendour of our own. If you go and look at your life and you start doubting all over again whether you have what it takes to be this splendid person because you look at yourself and you realise right now that you don't have any holiness, you're far from blameless, think again what God's word is saying to you right now. If God has chosen you without you offering anything to Him, and His purpose in doing that is to transform you into a person who is holy and righteous and pure.

God chose you without you. God is working in you to become holy and righteous and pure, and He's the one who will do that work of transformation. It doesn't depend on your willpower. That is mind-boggling. God never gives us perfect knowledge about how our life will shape up, but He's given us two of the most important pieces we need to know.

How it started, He chose us before the foundations of the earth, and how it finishes, we will be holy and blameless before Him. The sure knowledge of these two points in our lives, like anchors, causes outrageous confidence in Paul's heart, so that he can write in Philippians 1:6 to the Christians there. He says, I am sure of this. I am confident of this that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. That is what Paul is sure of.

We can have that same confident expectation that transformational construction development is happening in our lives. Will we need to work hard at our holiness, at our sanctification? Yes. We're absolutely not passive participants in this process. But should we feel anxious that our actions remain far from ideal, should that cause us to wonder whether God could really still love us?

No. Because God's steady, silent hand continues to mend us and mould us every day. And so on this side of the grave, we might not be finished products, but our assurance is grounded in this promise that the good work He begins in us, He is going to finish. So God chose us with the goal of perfecting us, and these are profound spiritual blessings, says Paul. But we haven't even gotten to the best part yet.

Because the third reason we seek to praise God the Father is the fact that we are adopted as His children. It's entirely possible to be chosen, but not loved. You can be improved upon, but not appreciated. That's where my analogy of the coach falls down. My coach was a good man, a kind man, but he didn't love me.

NBA coaches, the best coaches in the world, footy coaches, they can be really good people, but they don't love their players. Their players are meant to do things for the coach. They're meant to perform. You can be chosen to be a part of a team. You can have a coach working on bettering you, but in each case, your chosenness and your improvement can all happen without a single shred of love.

The thing that makes all the difference to the knowledge of your election and your sanctification as a Christian is that it has all resulted from God's fatherly love. Paul says that at the end of verse four, beginning of verse five. He says, in love He, who is God, predestined us for adoption. We're told that this took place through Jesus Christ, namely His work on the cross. And Paul concludes at the end of verse five that all of this was done according to the purpose of His will. A literal translation of that phrase "according to the purpose of His will" in the ESV here is "according to the eudokia of His will," which means the good pleasure of His will.

It pleased God to adopt you into His family. God has become our Father, firstly, because He loved us, and secondly, because it pleased Him that we should be His children. Why does God save you? Why is God working for your perfection? Why has God blessed you with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places?

Well, it's because God was deeply moved to do it. He thought of you and His heart ached. Although Paul has started saying in these verses, verses three and four, about the spiritual blessing, it all finds its peak in verse five's explanation of adoption. To be adopted is to be both chosen and changed. And that's all happened because God was pleased to do so.

You know, so many of our lingering anxieties, the things that make us feel worthless as Christians, the things we beat ourselves up about, our lingering sin, that is all transformed by letting these truths sink deep. It's one of the best gifts my wife, Desiree, gave me. As a pastor who is supposed to know all the wonderful truths of God, surprising how often I don't know it. It was Desi who brought a powerful yet simple prayer into my life. It was during a profoundly difficult time in her life when there were just so many opportunities to worry and be anxious that she would pray this simple prayer. Thank you for loving me, God.

I love you. Thank you for loving me, God. I love you. When she prayed this prayer, the situation she was facing was always reoriented, transformed, and life entered her circumstances just through those two truths. At first glance, it may not seem like much, but this prayer holds on to some powerful realities.

The prayer that begins with, thank you that you love me. It's a reminder of the truth that God already loves us. It's not dependent on whether I've performed well. In a moment, when you are tempted to think of yourselves in terms of what you should be, how far short you've fallen, what you still need to become, and so on, instead of dwelling on what you should be, you affirm to God and to your own heart the most significant truth of your life. You are eternally loved by a Father, the Father.

And you are loved whether you are acceptable in the eyes of the person you're trying to please here on earth. You are loved without having achieved your success spiritually or in business or in whatever. You're loved whether you've stumbled into that same old sin yet again. God, thank you that you love me. And then in return, you bring to God the only thing He's ever asked of you, which is to confirm your relationship with Him.

I love you. I love you. Now depending on how sentimental you are, and there's a few blokes here, we might feel a bit uncomfortable with that idea. I don't know how you feel about using the L word. Maybe you use it with your wife just in passing down the hall every now and then.

But I dare you to use it next time you're tempted towards thinking and feeling anything negative, when you're tempted to go down those old thought patterns, to pray this prayer. Thank you that you love me, God. I love you. It's been transformational, and I believe it can be for you too. We're told that God has chosen us to become His children through an eternal adoption. We know God not simply as the powerful Creator of all existence, but as the one who knows us and loves us completely.

He is the one who desires to hear from us, and He is tenderly working on us to become better human beings. So that's the third point. We praise God the Father for adopting us as His children. And then finally, the passage gives us a word to express that combination of God's love and His active saving will. God's love and His will, and that is called grace.

Paul says it's a thing that we will be thanking God for for the rest of our days. Fourthly, we praise God the Father for His glorious grace. Paul has started that explosion of praising God, listing the spiritual blessings in verse three. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing, and he now ends with this final reference to blessing when he says, God has blessed us with His glorious grace in the Beloved. In our passage, the Lord Jesus is mentioned five times.

This reference to the Beloved is one of them. In all of God's electing, sanctifying, adopting love, that has all taken place all throughout this passage with these statements of in Christ, in the Beloved, through Jesus. All of that has happened because of what Jesus has done. And this action is labelled glorious grace. Grace is receiving something that you haven't earned.

It sums up the undeserved nature of how these blessings come to us. Being chosen before the foundations of the earth, that's grace. To bring a broken people into His holy presence by transforming them into holiness itself, that's grace. To bring desperately lost spiritual orphans into a fatherly love, that is grace. And all of this grace has been magnified by a single action that made it possible, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

Like my heart ached when I looked at that photo of Alida. Like Jordan and Phoebe look at little Luke, and their hearts swell with love for him. So God looks on us and His great love, a love that is more infinite than ours. His great heart aches, and it caused Him to send His Beloved Son to die so that we might live. The Beloved Son was given for His beloved children.

What's there left to do then? If He's chosen us before we even knew Him, if He's transforming us without us ever being able to become holy ourselves, what's there left for us to do? Paul says, we will just praise Him eternally. We will praise specifically His glorious grace forever. It is to say to Him for the rest of our lives and with all our hearts, thank you, God, for loving me.

I love you. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this truth that grounds us and stabilises us, that completely unbinds our pride, that just rocks us back into humility, that satisfies longing hearts, hearts that think and desire and perhaps even envy for things to be different. And it causes us to have peace. You are the God who has known us forever.

You are the God who thought of us and who then desired out of your good pleasure in your love to work towards us becoming yours. And, Lord Jesus, we thank you that you were the one who said to the Father, I will go for them, and I will win them. And I will, through the work of the Spirit, transform them to the praise of your glorious grace. Help us, Lord, to be transformed by this truth. Help us, Lord, to be so courageous in this life because of it, Lord, and help us in even the harshest, deepest valleys to hold on to that hope because it is something that will never be taken away from us.

We praise you, Lord, as long as we live. In Jesus' name. Amen.