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The Rev. Dr. Dennis E. Morey, Pastor
Scripture: Ephesians 2:11-22
God lives here
A doctor was examining a little girl, listening to her heart with his stethoscope. He said, “Let’s see if I can hear Dora the Explorer inside you.”
She replied, “Dora the Explorer is on my underwear. Jesus is in my heart.”
We learn in the scriptures that when the Messiah came he would be called “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” God the Son willingly gave himself to the freedom of God’s plan. Jesus left the presence of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, to come to earth and live in a human body with human limitations so he would be “with us.”
Since the first sin of the human race, there has been a dividing wall between God and the human race. We know God is there on the other side of the wall and we try our best to scale the wall. Somehow we know we have to get to where God is. We know we need God and long for God’s presence. We try jumping over it, with our great good deeds. We try tunneling under it, with our deep study of God’s word probing for some secret passage. We try knocking a hole in it, with our railing about the terrible injustices in the world. All in an effort to find God and find out the answer to “Why are things the way they are?” But it is bigger and stronger than we are.
That barrier is beyond our ability to cope. The more we try to overcome it, the more we seem to be overcome by it.
God on the other side longs to know us, longs to have contact with us, and God knows we don’t have the strength to deal with it. We go about it all wrong. We struggle to become fit spiritually, we struggle for personal purity, we struggle to do the right thing and to be moral and upright in dealing with others, but all those struggles only prove to us time and time again the magnitude of the problem.
Nothing we do seems to scale that barrier, deal adequately with our sin so we can get to God. That’s the whole problem. We can’t do anything to get rid of our sin. The solution to the problem is not up to us. We have to give up our independent nature of trying to get it done for ourselves, as if we somehow must find a way to get to God. While it is true that we are responsible for our sin, for our determination to do life our own way by our own rules, which puts us further from God, we cannot be responsible for our own salvation. We can’t save ourselves.
We need someone in the boat to throw the life preserver. We need someone to love us enough to save us from the sin in which we are drowning.
The person in the water realizes the sea is too much and calls out for help. The key is to declare our failure and give up our independent, “I can do this myself” attitude. Only God can break down that which stands between us and God.
It is a personal matter between each of us and God. We read in the Ephesians reading today that the barrier between us and God, called our sin, is broken down only by what God has done in Christ Jesus.
When we call out to God for help, the life preserver he throws out is the payment Jesus made on the cross. God has done God’s part. God has come to earth in the form of Jesus himself giving his life as they payment for our sin.
It is up to us to reach out and accept that life preserver, to grab hold of what God has arranged.
God has not only broken down the barrier between us and God, God can also break the barrier that separates us from one another.
Those feelings of competition, those feelings of being cheated, those feelings of jealousy, those feelings of resentment and the lack of trust between us, are all broken down when we declare our dependence on God’s mercy and the unfailing grace extended to us.
When our relationship to God is mended, we also see the possibilities of treating each other with that same kind of mercy and grace as God has extended to us.
Now we sometimes aren’t so good at declaring our dependence on God. We want to achieve, earn, find, and acquire it as a trophy. We pretend we are succeeding and we may claim that our failures are strictly circumstantial and not our own doing.
Our faith grows watered down, and our commitment drifts toward that of just enough religion to get us by. We grow lukewarm in our commitment and our desire to know God.
When Jesus talks to the seven churches, in Revelation chapter 3 he is talking to the lukewarm church, Laodicea. Because they are lukewarm, neither burning with passion for the Kingdom of God, nor totally turned off by it, Jesus said he didn’t know what to do with them. He could better understand being hot or cold, but lukewarm only makes him sick.
It was to that church that he said in verse 20, “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if anyone will hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and that person and I will establish a relationship.” (my paraphrase)
It is possible that we are members of the church for so many years that we drift toward relying on our record of good deeds and godly living for our salvation. We claim that it is because of our ability to swim that we haven’t drowned and forgotten that day when we took hold of the life preserver God threw out to us.
We have been reading The Shack by William Paul Young, and in chapter 9 Mack the main character is invited to work in the garden with the Holy Spirit, only to find that the garden represents his heart. Although it was a mass of blooming plants and lovely green, in reality it was a tangled mess that represented his life.
At first glance Mack is a Christian who had a deep faith, but when we look into his soul we find that he is confused, frustrated, angry, hurt, and very far away from believing that God loves him.
Mack gets the chance to work on the garden to dig deep into the roots of what he believed and pull up and get rid of many of his old resentments and confusion.
Each of us on the surface may seem like we have it all together so far as our faith goes, our garden in order with all the edges neatly trimmed. But in reality we all have those questions Mack has in the book, and we too are invited to listen and learn and untangle some of those misconceived notions that have grown so deep into the garden of our life and choked out the marvelous light of God’s grace.
It is easy to think that we are part of God’s family because we have chosen to be good people and live good moral lives, and that our salvation has come by our own effort—and we drift toward that lukewarm commitment. “Yes, I love God, and I know God loves me, but what’s not to love? Look at the way I live, and I’m even in church on a beautiful summer Sunday morning when I could be at the lake, or having fun on the golf course, or riding bikes with my friends.
And we slowly drift, from a faith that is real and vibrant in which we depend on the grace of God reaching out to us through the sacrifice of Jesus as the payment for our sins, into being lukewarm in our commitment to him.
This passage of Ephesians we read a few moments ago reminds us that the barrier of our sin is no longer there, and that has happened not by the fact that we are part of the chosen people of God, but by God’s grace. We are no longer strangers with God. There is no longer a barrier between us and God. God is not somewhere out there, but God is near to us every moment of every day and we are a part of the place where God lives.
So then you are no longer strangers and
aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the
household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him
the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in
the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into the
dwelling place for God.
Together we are being built into a dwelling place for God. Where is God? Not on the other side of the wall separated by some barrier of our sin. God is here living inside us.
Amen.
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Ephesians 2:11-22 For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (From the
New Revised Standard Version of the
Bible) |
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