Love First Love: Spiritual Blessings in the Heavenly Places / Ephesians 1:3-14
Amen. Well, it’s good to see you, my friends. I trust that you are doing well.
Just to humor me, if you have a Bible, would you just throw it up for me? If I had better rhythm, I’d have a rap song to that—just throw it up, something like that. I made the comment last week that you need a Bible. If you don’t have one, we have one at the iHub for you. We would love to get one into your hands. But you need one because we are going to downshift about seven gears and move slow and steady through the book of Ephesians.
I also made a comment last week that one of my favorite sounds in the world is the sound of Bible pages turning. Truthfully, it is music to my soul. A buddy of ours from Washington, who is one of our podcast subscribers and an audio guy, actually recorded the sound of Bible pages turning and sent it to me as a ringtone. So if any of you want the Bible page-turning ringtone, it is for sale!
Getting into the Word
The reason I say you need a Bible—and for those of you who are guests with us, I want to give you some insight into what we are trying to do—is that we are trying to train and equip you to know what this book says. If you interact with the text and learn your Bible, God is going to begin to mess with your life. For too long, in my opinion, the church has been feeding people little pastoral Twinkies: “Hey, feel good about yourself, feel good about yourself,” instead of training and equipping you.
When you teach the text verse by verse, some passages are wonderful to teach and some are challenging to teach. What you are going to find in our time together is a very challenging text. It is going to push on you a little bit, especially those of you who grew up with a church background, because it is going to challenge your notion of salvation right at its foundation.
We are going to start in verse 3 and cover through verse 14. In the original Greek text, verses 3 through 14 are one ginormous run-on sentence. It is a single thought where Paul just keeps stringing truths together until verse 14 brings it to a close. There is no argument here, no controversy, no rebuke.
All three persons of the Trinity are engaged in these spiritual blessings. In verses 4 through 6, these spiritual blessings are initiated by the Father. In verses 7 through 12, they are secured through the work of the Son. And in verses 13 and 14, they are guaranteed by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Spiritual Blessings in Heavenly Places
Paul opens this entire section with a declaration of praise.
Ephesians 1:3 (NASB)
Blessed [be] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly [places] in Christ,
Blessed be the Blesser who has blessed us! I remember when I first came to know Christ, I was praying with a group of guys, and one man kept saying, “Father, we bless You.” I was such a young Christian that I thought, I’ve never heard somebody bless God. I’m just looking for God to bless me! Isn’t that what this is about? But to “bless” means to speak well of. Paul begins by ensuring God is the focus of our praise, and then he lays out eight spiritual blessings.
Notice in verse 3 that he says God has blessed us. That is in the aorist tense in Greek, which means it happened at a specific point in time. It is a past-tense statement of what has already taken place. If you are in Christ, these spiritual blessings are already your reality.
Notice also that these are not physical or temporal blessings. What kind of blessings are they? They are spiritual blessings. Paul is making a significant contrast here. In the city of Ephesus, life revolved around the great temple of Artemis (or Diana), the goddess of fertility. Her temple was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. If you were a farmer and you needed rain, you went to Artemis’s temple. If you needed money, the banking system was centered at her temple. If you were married and wanted a child, you went to Artemis to pray for physical blessings.
A lot of people still pursue God merely in hopes of receiving physical blessings. But Paul is showing us that seeking God is not about chasing the temporary things of this world. God gives us something infinitely more important: eternal, spiritual blessings.
How many of these blessings does He promise you? Not just some spiritual blessings. He says every spiritual blessing. He lavishes upon you all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. That phrase “heavenly places” appears five times in the New Testament, and all five are right here in the book of Ephesians. Paul is saying to a culture obsessed with an earthly temple: lift your eyes. Raise your sights to Him, and He will give you every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
So what are these blessings? Paul lists eight of them. Let’s look at the first one.
1. You Are Chosen
The first spiritual blessing is found in verse 4.
Ephesians 1:4 (NASB)
just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
The first blessing is that we are chosen. To be chosen means to select or to prefer. It is in the Greek middle voice, meaning God chose for Himself. He did not choose based on the merit of the object; He chose for Himself based entirely on His good and gracious nature. It is the exact same word Jesus uses when speaking to His disciples.
John 15:16 (NASB)
’You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and [that] your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you.
There is an undeniable sense of God’s sovereign selection of us in Christ.
Now, I don’t know what your view of salvation is or what you have been taught. But for many people, if you press them on how they came to faith, their picture looks something like this: they were spiritually treading water, doing okay, but starting to get fatigued. They looked around, realized they were going to drown, and decided in that moment that they needed God. So they reached out a hand, and God—like a doting figure waiting on the edge—reached down and grabbed them, as if to say, “Oh, it’s about time!”
In that view, salvation is a cooperative effort: you did your part, and God did His part. That concept makes us feel good about the decision we think we made, but taken in isolation, it is entirely unbiblical.
Look at Ephesians chapter 2, verse 1. What does the Bible say your spiritual state was apart from Jesus Christ? You were dead.
Ephesians 2:1 (NASB)
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins,
The Bible does not present a picture of us morally treading water. The Bible presents a picture of us dead at the bottom of the lake. Unless God resuscitates the dead and brings life to a corpse, you and I have no spiritual hope at all. That is why Jesus told Nicodemus that we must be born again.
John 3:3 (NASB)
Jesus answered and said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.’
God made the first move. God initiated. God chose you. Consider these passages:
Titus 3:5 (NASB)
He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
Ephesians 2:5 (NASB)
even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
Colossians 1:13 (NASB)
For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son,
Romans 9:15-16 (NASB)
For He says to Moses, ‘I WILL HAVE MERCY ON WHOM I HAVE MERCY, AND I WILL HAVE COMPASSION ON WHOM I HAVE COMPASSION.’ So then it [does] not [depend] on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy.
We generally do not have a problem with God choosing Abraham in the Old Testament. We say, “That’s fine.” Then Abraham had Isaac, and God chose Isaac instead of Ishmael, and we are cool with that. Then Isaac had Jacob and Esau, and God said, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated,” and we say, “Well, bad deal for Esau, but I accept it.” Nobody complains about sovereign election in the Old Testament. But when it comes to you and me, we get uncomfortable. We take way too much pride in the decision we think we made. We are terrified of a God who is so sovereign that from eternity past He called us by name.
Yet Jesus said it plainly.
John 6:44 (NASB)
’No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
Acts 13:48 (NASB)
When the Gentiles heard this, they [began] rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.
I came to faith in Christ in college while attending a Baptist church, and they did not talk about this. Later, I attended a Bible study in Texas where a teacher started explaining God’s sovereign elective will, and I thought, What is he talking about?
All I knew was that on March 23rd, many years ago, I went to an event just to get free food. It was hosted by the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and in classic Christian bait-and-switch fashion, they told us we had to listen to the speaker before we could eat. I sat there, listened to the gospel, thought it sounded amazing, and made a decision to put my faith in Christ. I thought I chose God.
What I did not realize then was that God had completely set me up. Ring upon ring of His sovereignty had guided my steps to that exact moment so that He could call me. I remember walking outside during a break at that Bible study in Decatur, Texas, looking up at the sky, and thinking, Lord, my view of You was so tiny. My mind is completely blown.
Some people argue, “If God chooses, why would we ever share our faith?” What a mercy that God has not revealed to us who the elect are! If you knew for a fact that someone you loved would never come to faith, how would you sleep at night? That would torment you. Instead, God sends us into a sea of people with the gospel, calling us to be faithful to proclaim it, while He does the work in their hearts.
Would you really want someone’s eternal destiny resting on how articulate you are? Think about the last time you shared your faith—you were probably tripping over your words, bringing up random Sunday school stories. Do you really want their salvation depending entirely on your sales pitch? I would go crazy. If that were the case, I would lock the church doors and never let you leave until I talked you into the kingdom. The truth is: we share our faith as if it depends on us, but we sleep soundly at night knowing salvation belongs entirely to God. He awakens the dead.
Some might ask, “Does that mean God actively chose people for hell?” That concept is called double predestination, and it takes the Scriptures further than the text itself warrants.
Romans 9:22-23 (NASB)
What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And [He did so] to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory,
All of us are in the same lump of dough, deserving of wrath because of our sin. But God, in His mercy, held back His wrath to call vessels of mercy for glory. When you realize He chose you, the only question left to ask is: Why me?
If you ask “Why me?”, you are finally beginning to understand the gospel. There were better, more moral, more spiritual people than you. Why you? Because of His sovereign grace alone. People say, “That’s not fair!” But do you really want fair? Fair means we all go to hell. The gospel is not about fairness; it is about grace and mercy. Grace is getting what you don’t deserve; mercy is not getting what you do deserve.
When were we chosen? Verse 4 tells us: before the foundation of the world. Before Genesis 1 was ever spoken, He had you in mind. And why were we chosen? That we should be holy and blameless before Him—trophies of His grace, living to bring Him glory.
2. You Are Predestined
The second spiritual blessing is in verse 5.
Ephesians 1:5 (NASB)
He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
To predestine means to mark out beforehand. God did not simply look down the corridor of time, see that I would choose Him, and then reactively pick me. He predetermined the plan and set it in motion.
He brought a drinking buddy into my life who got saved and started talking to me about Jesus. He seated me on a football team plane next to a former stripper who had become a Christian and witnessed to me. He brought a girl into my life who told me, “You need to get right with the Lord,” and when I asked questions, she sent me to her dad—who happened to be a pastor! I was set up at every turn because God had predestined me.
Romans 8:29-30 (NASB)
For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined [to become] conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
What God started in you, He will finish. Those He predestined, He called; those He called, He justified; and those He justified, He glorified.
3. You Are Adopted
Verse 5 tells us we are predestined to adoption as sons. God takes people who were once enemies, strangers, and slaves, and He makes them family.
If you are adopted into a family, you are not a son or daughter with an asterisk. You are a full-fledged heir without condition. Based on the finished work of Jesus Christ, God has made you His son or His daughter. That status is already yours in the heavenly places.
4. You Are Redeemed
Look at verse 7.
Ephesians 1:7 (NASB)
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace
Verse 6 ends by saying this was bestowed on us in “the Beloved”—a title referring to Jesus. In Him, we have redemption. To redeem means to buy back, to liberate, to set free.
How were we redeemed? Through His blood. The principle throughout Scripture is that the wages of sin is death, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. It goes all the way back to Genesis 3. When Adam and Eve sinned, they hid and covered themselves with fig leaves—religion at its finest, trying to hide our true condition. But God rejected their self-made coverings and clothed them with animal skins, shedding innocent blood to cover their guilt.
Genesis 3:21 (NASB)
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them.
All through the Old Testament, the law revealed our sin and pointed us to the need for a substitute. Jesus is the ultimate Lamb of God who shed His blood to purchase our freedom.
5. You Are Forgiven
The fifth spiritual blessing is also in verse 7: the forgiveness of our trespasses.
You do not find forgiveness by attending church, jumping through religious hoops, giving to charity, or pursuing social justice. Forgiveness is found in only one place: in the innocent Savior who died in our place. Our sin was credited to His account, His righteousness was credited to ours, and the wrath of God was poured out upon Him. In Him, you are completely forgiven.
6. The Mystery of His Will Is Made Known
The sixth blessing is found in verses 9 and 10.
Ephesians 1:9-10 (NASB)
He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, [that is], the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him
People constantly ask, “How do I know the will of God for my life?” The Scriptures give us clear general principles, such as our sanctification.
1 Thessalonians 4:3 (NASB)
For this is the will of God, your sanctification; [that is], that you abstain from sexual immorality;
Yet people usually want God’s will for specific decisions: Which apartment should I rent? Which major should I choose? Which job should I take? Honestly, in those left-or-right decisions, God wants you to bloom where you are planted.
The overarching mystery of His will is the summing up of all things in Christ. In whatever apartment you rent, let Christ be supreme. In whatever job you work, let Christ be supreme. In whatever major you choose, let Christ be supreme. The mystery of His will is that Jesus Christ is preeminent over all creation.
7. You Have an Inheritance
In verses 11 and 12, Paul shifts his language from “us” to “we.”
Ephesians 1:11-12 (NASB)
also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory.
Paul, writing as a Jewish believer, speaks of the inheritance originally promised to Israel. Through Christ, Gentile believers have been grafted into the rich root of that promise.
Romans 11:17 (NASB)
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree,
We do not replace Israel, but through faith in Jesus the Messiah, we share in the inheritance of the people of God. The seventh spiritual blessing is that you have an eternal inheritance reserved for you.
8. You Are Sealed with the Holy Spirit
Finally, Paul turns to the Gentile believers in verse 13.
Ephesians 1:13-14 (NASB)
In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation– having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of [God’s own] possession, to the praise of His glory.
To be sealed means to be secured, authenticated, and marked as belonging to an owner. The moment you heard the message of truth and believed the gospel, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit. It was instantaneous.
A seal cannot be revoked. You did not earn it by your good behavior, and you cannot lose it because of your weakness. If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.
Paul describes the Holy Spirit as a “pledge” or a down payment. If you are selling something on Craigslist and someone leaves a deposit, they are guaranteeing they will return to complete the purchase. The Holy Spirit is God’s down payment in your life, guaranteeing that He will finish what He started.
John 14:2-3 (NASB)
’In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. ’If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, [there] you may be also.
God has placed His Spirit inside of you as an absolute guarantee that you belong to Him and that He is coming back to take you home.
Resting in Who You Are
All of this, verse 14 says, is “to the praise of His glory.”
If you skim verses 3 through 14, look at how many times the words He, Him, and His appear. Paul is relentlessly pulling our eyes away from ourselves and fixing them onto God.
I don’t know what the narrative in your head sounds like, but I know what happens in mine. Thoughts creep in: You’re a loser. If people knew what you really struggle with, they wouldn’t let you teach. How can you call yourself a pastor? I start believing those lies, feeling like I should just quit. Maybe you experience that same battle.
Paul writes this chapter to silence that false narrative. He wants you to remember what God says about you. You have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. You are chosen. You are predestined. You are adopted. You are redeemed. You are forgiven. You know the mystery of His will. You have an inheritance. And you are sealed with the Holy Spirit.
Notice that Paul does not give you a single command in these verses. There is nothing to go “do” yet—the action steps come in chapters 4 through 6. The first three chapters are purely about what you need to know.
So tonight, just rest in this truth. Stop striving, stop competing, and stop trying to earn what has already been freely given. Sit back and enjoy who you are in Jesus Christ.
Let’s pray together.
Father in heaven, we are so grateful for Your Word tonight. It reminds us of how big You are and how small we are. We often walk around as if our salvation were our own grand idea. Yet You loved us, called us, and blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ before the world was ever formed. Teach us to rest in Your finished work. May our eyes be lifted off temporal pursuits and fixed on the eternal riches we have in Jesus. We thank You for the privilege of being Your sons and daughters. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.