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United With Christ – Ephesians 2:4-7

This passage starts with two beautiful words after the last few verses about how we are dead in our sins: “but God.”

Because of God’s matchless grace, we are united with him spiritually, and in the hereafter, we will be united physically.

This is the basis of all of Christianity. We are defined, not by particular doctrine or even by particular moral standards, but by being united with Christ.

But what does it mean to be seated with Christ in the heavenly places? It is easy to let our imaginations run wild, but what does scripture say?

Seated with Christ means we are no longer under threat by Satan. ItWe have been plucked out of a kingdom of darkness and placed in a kingdom of light. We are no longer under the dominion of Satan, but citizens of a fast better country. We have a dim picture of this cosmic struggle, enough to understand that there is much that we do not see. We have an adversary, a bully who tries to scare and intimidate us. But we have an “older brother” who protects us, and if we keep that in mind, we have nothing to fear.

It also means we have passed from spiritual death to spiritual life. In Hebrews, the author writes:

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.

Hebrews 10:19-22

How does all this matter in our day to day lives? What does it mean to us while we are trying to install a water heater that won’t turn on? It means that we can’t go about assuming that what we see is all that there is. There is more happening than we realize. We need to believe what we read in scripture, because the information we get from the outside world is imperfect and limited.

When we walk around in the world, we are very focused on what we see around us. But we need to know that God is doing things we cannot see. “The Lord is my shepherd, I will not want.” The sheep can’t see where the shepherd leads them, don’t know his plan for keeping them safe and fed. But they trust him – just as we can trust our Good Shepherd.

This is what it means to be seated with Christ, at his right hand, a vassal under His protection, protection from threats we cannot even set, through methods we do not see and often cannot understand.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, August 30, 2020

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Dead in Our Sins – Ephesians 2:1-3

At the close of chapter 1, we saw that the job of the Church is to do the will of Christ – we are the body of Christ and he in turn is the Head of the church. And we are to seek that will in prayer and the study of the scriptures, and to pray for opportunities and boldness to share God’s love and Christ’s message of hope.

That followed the opening of the epistle, when Paul erupted with the praise of God for his gifts, in particular, salvation. Then he moved on to a prayer for the Ephesians, of both thanks and for the further refinement of their faith.

At the beginning of chapter 2, Paul zeroes in on “you,” dead in your sins. We are not on our deathbed and needing to accept medicine, we are dead and decaying. We are not drowning and needing to grab a life preserver, we are dead, bloated and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. We need the Father to do for us what he did for the Son – to raise us from the dead. We have no part in our justification – we were helpless to accomplish any part of it.

He uses the death metaphor, and then slavery. We are enslaved to three things – the course of the world, the ‘prince of the power of the air’, and the desires of our flesh.

The world of full of ideas and philosophies that are contrary to the truth of God, and we much be aware and on our guard against them. Likewise, the devil, the prince of the lower atmosphere, also at work in the “sons of disobedience” – not something we talk about a lot as a church, but maybe we should? Jesus did, and Paul will even more as we go through Ephesians.

So we have these outside influences, but ultimately we all have lived in our own passions and fulfilling our own desires. We have all broken faith with God and are “children of wrath.”

We must understand the hopelessness and despair that surround the status that God saved us out of, so that we are properly grateful for the greatness of our salvation.

This should also guide how we see others. Those around us are dead in their sins, and we have the secret of life.

-Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, August 23, 2020

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Knowing God – Ephesians 1:15-19

Paul here is just coming down from the high of describing our relationship with God, 180 words straight of praise to God for “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.” He moves directly off of that and into 160 words straight of prayer.

Perhaps we should be more like that. What would it be like if, the moment needs came up in our minds or in conversation, we brought it to God in prayer immediately?

He begins this section be calling back to all that he said about salvation, as well as citing all the great things he has heard about the faith of the Ephesian church.

Because of all this, he prays for them constantly, both with thanks for them and prayers that they would receive the Holy Spirit.

How do we know that the term Paul uses here, the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation” means the Holy Spirit, rather than a spirit of adventure or the spirit of Christmas? It goes back to what Jesus told his disciples about the Holy Spirit when he promised he would come. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would “teach you all things” andconvict the world “of sin, and righteousness and judgement,” – ultimately, to know God. And that is what Paul is praying for here.

It can be easy to think we know God sufficiently – even though we know that God is eternal, and that if we spent a hundred years learning one new thing about God every century, we would still never got to the end of Him.

So that’s the journey Paul is praying the Ephesians for, that the “eyes of your hearts” would be opened. The Jews saw the heart as being the seat of a person’s life, will and very breath. The Greeks saw the heart as the center of our perspective and bias. We know both of these are naturally set against the will of God. That is why the “heart’s eyes” must be enlightened, showing it more and more of the things of God, so that we can know God more.

This passage about hearts having eyes, combined with passages elsewhere that talk about our “heart of stone” together bring to mind the blank eyes of ancient statues. Our hearts need to be given life like Pygmalion, so that their eyes can be opened and we can see God.

And not just God, but also the hope that he called us to in eternity past. That hope is confidence in the inheritance God promises us. Jesus tells us what that inheritance is like in the story of the prodigal son.

And Paul describes it in verse 19, using four different words for power to talk about what God does for us.

And God answers this prayer – what Paul prayed for the Ephesians and what we pray for each other – by speaking to us. He speaks through his word, he speaks through the spirit, he speaks through others, through circumstances and so much more. We must check all that against what the scriptures say and who Jesus is, but God has many ways of enabling us to know Him more and more and more.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, August 9, 2020

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Introducing the Holy Spirit – Ephesians 1:13-14

Sometimes when we think about God, we think of Him as being distant and in the past. But the Holy Spirit is here and currently working and present in us.

Verse 11 can be ready two ways, and both are true. We are being obtained as Christ’s inheritance, and in Him we are also obtaining Christ as our own inheritance.

We are going through the longest sentence in the bible, as Paul excitedly walks through the very nature of salvation. The Holy Spirit seals that salvation.

Paul uses the phrase “in Him” over 160 times in his letters. Why do you suppose? Paul knew a lot about God. He knew the whole Old Testament backwards and forwards and was zealous for what he saw as God’s truth. But until that moment on the road to Damascus, he was not “in Him.” For the rest of his life, he lived to show others what it meant to be “in Him.” You can know all there is to know, you can have all the theological training in the world, but none of it matters unless we are in Christ.

And when we are in Him, we are sealed by the Holy Spirit – like a luggage tag marking us as the property and family of God Almighty. It’s a mark of security that let’s us rest easy, and a mark of authenticity that keeps us pointed at what is true.

Let’s go into more about who the Holy Spirit is. First, the Holy Spirit is God – see 2 Corinthians 3:17-18. “Now the Lord is the Spirit.” We see the Holy Spirit before creation, “hovering over the waters.” We see the Holy Spirit enabling the Incarnation. We see the Holy Spirit actually visible at Christ’s baptism. We see the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost on believers.

The Holy Spirit is active in appointing leaders in the church, as it describes in Ephesians 4, and active in supporting them. George Mueller wrote, “The anointing of the Holy Spirit helps me greatly when I preach. I would never attempt to teach the truth of God by my own power.”

The Holy Spirit is a person – not an impersonal force, not just a method of God interacting with us, but a person who can be lied to and grieved and more.

The Holy Spirit is not an optional feature for the believer. He dwells in all believers and binds all of us as believers together. He fills us with praise and with boldness.

The Holy Spirit is there for us to cry out to. When we need more goodness, or faithfulness, or patience, or self-control, those are the fruit of the Holy Spirit within us.

The Holy Spirit is a communicator, and the Holy Spirit is powerful. He has been given to us as a down payment on the future God offers us in eternity, and gives us assurance that we are God’s. He does this through His presence and through His fruit.

-Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, August 2, 2020

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Before the Foundation of the World – Ephesians 1:4-6

Today we’re going to talk about salvation. What is it, and how do you get it? Spurgeon said,

Salvation is, in short, deliverance from sin, deliverance from the guilt of it, from the punishment of it, from the power of it.

Sin is like going to war with God. And God’s response, somewhat bafflingly, is adoption. God has chosen you, not because you earned it, but because he loves you.

JI Packer wrote that a “a Christian is someone who has God as father.”

Not only did He adopt us, but Paul writes that he predestined that adoption “before the foundation of the world.”

Predestination is a difficult topic, because it’s rubs up against our free will. We make choices every day, and get offended when those choices are taken away. But our few will is subject to, even a slave to our nature. Think about a lion – lions can, to some degree, make choices. But a lion won’t ever choose salad over meat, no matter how well we make the case.

And our nature is to sin. Calvin writes

…all of us tend to evil, and we are not only inclined to it, but we are, as it were, boiling hot with it.

It often doesn’t seem like we are totally depraved. We all know atheists who do good and love people – this also comes from God, a result of Common Grace. “The rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous.”

But ultimately, we cannot make it to even a decision for God on our own. Calvin writes that the faith that brings us to salvation itself is the fruit of the election, the choice of God. And that faith itself is the evidence of that election.

And that election was in place before the foundation of the world – just as Christ is called the “lamb who was slain before the foundation of the world.” And God didn’t look ahead and see that we would choose Him.

Why does God choose some and not others? Why does God not choose everyone? These things have not been revealed. These are among the “secret things” described in Deuteronomy 29:29.

Another thing revealed in this passage is that we have been chosen for a purpose – to be holy and blameless in love. The verse in Ephesians mirrors 1 Thessalonians 3:12-13. How are these concepts of being holy and blameless and of love connected? In God, they are inseparable. Too often we try to pry them apart, loving without seeking holiness or seeking holiness without love. But in reality at cannot separate them in ourselves or we will fail at both.

So we are saved in and for holiness and love, for and in “the Beloved” – Christ Himself. We are made to be monuments to the glorious grace of God in, for and through Christ.

So how do we respond? “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the patterns of your former ignorance,” writes Peter. We must look at how we act, speak and think. What in there mars our role as monuments to the grace of God? We should seek towards the holiness that God has already declared in us. God Himself will keep us from stumbling.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, July 19, 2020

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Beginnings – Ephesians 1:1-3

Why start with Ephesians? First, it’s a familiar book, with key verses about being saved through faith, about the armor of God and other topics. Second, it’s a book that focuses closely on salvation and on Christ. Third, it focuses on relationships, building a diverse group of people into a unified fellowship – very relevant. So is the focus on spiritual warfare, and the practical

The theme verse for this series is Ephesians 4:23 — “be renewed in the spirit of your minds.” For the believer, the word of God reframes our perspective on life. We need to see things differently in the light of the gospel.

Paul starts by calling himself an Apostle, a messenger of God. The message that he brings is greater than him, than his ability to understand or sustain it.

So that’s who’s writing. Who is he writing to? Possibly just the Ephesians, though that reference is not in all the manuscripts – out could be a circular letter that went to a large number of churches in Asia Minor. Ephesus was the hub of Christianity in that region. The message of John the Baptist reached the area early, and Paul met a group of his disciples there. Lots of other things happen in Ephesus in the book of Acts, and in fact that book is one of the main sources of any information about the city in ancient literature. The Ephesians also receive a letter from Christ himself in Revelation, where they are praised for their faithfulness, but called back to the live they had at first, but had lost.

So, Paul, to the Ephesians. As a greeting, he conveys grace and peace through Jesus Christ.

Grace is the unmerited favor of God, a gift to the unworthy, and we only truly understand it when we understand the truth of our unworthiness. Peace is Shalom, not just a lack of violence, but wholeness and completeness – creation as it was intended to be.

This is a common greeting across Paul’s epistles, but it is most suitable here, where he packs the most concentrated discussion of grace in all the Bible.

Then he goes on to discuss the spiritual blessings God gives us. Calvin writes about Ephesians,

Paul tells us that the benefits which are brought us by our Lord Jesus Christ and of which we are made partakers by means of his gospel are so excellent that we must surely be extremely unthankful if we scurry to and fro like people who are never at rest or contented.

These blessings have been interpreted many different ways – often badly, as wealth or prosperity. In reality the blessings are fast better, far more than mere material stuff or even health.

The blessings of Christ are far more, and they are secure. Calvin goes on to say,

And then he shows us also what we have in Christ in order that we should so cleave to him as not to presume to seek help anywhere else, but assure ourselves that he has procured everything for us

We can struggle with the security of salvation, especially if we focus too much on ourselves. But it isn’t about us. We aren’t enough, and we have never been enough. But Christ is enough and the security He offers should give us the utmost confidence.

Are you in Christ today? If so, you are blessed beyond anything you can imagine. If not, listen to the writer of Hebrews, quoting Psalms: today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.

– Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, July 12, 2020

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Not Greek or Jew – Galatians 3

The book of Galatians largely revolves around how gentiles can be saved, addressing specific issues around circumcision, food, etc. The church was rapidly becoming significantly more diverse as it spread through Asia and into Southern Europe.

In chapter 3, Paul is explaining the role of the law, in that it reveals sin, versus the role of Christ, who redeems is from sin. That redemption is offered to all, no matter their ethnic background, and the gentiles baptized into Christ are just as saved and sanctified as the Jews.

The term used here is “put on Christ,” using the metaphors of a piece of clothing, for as we take the person of Christ as our savior, we both wrap him around us as our warmth and protection, and show and demonstrate him to those around us.

The church of Galatia would have been primarily gentiles, which is why he emphasizes so strongly the unimportance of that particular distinction. But Paul goes above and beyond that – not only is the distinction that most of the Galatians are thinking about unimportant, but so are other distinctions that they may have taken more seriously. Slaves and free – that distinction also goes by the wayside. Even the very basic, biological, social and political division between men and women – that, too, is meaningless when looked at from the perspective of salvation.

This is in some ways a radical statement, but in other ways it calls back to the oldest Jewish teaching. All are created by God, and all who God saves are children of Abraham.

There is a clear way that we as Christians are called to live this out today in America. The Black Lives Matter movement presents us with the undeniable fact that there is a group of people in our country whose lives are treated as less important than others. Briona Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmad Arbury, Philando Castile, Elijah McClain – all of these people should still be alive. That they are not presents a stark challenge to the church.

Overt racism, belief that one race is superior to another, is clearly evil and against Paul’s teaching here. But the more subtle racism that nags at so many of us is also evil, and systemic racism is as well. As Conservative Christian writer David French writes:

This is how we live in a world where a white person can say of racism, “Where is it?” and a black person can say, “How can you not see?”

So now I sit in a different place. But where do I stand? I believe the following things to be true:

  1. Slavery was legal and defended morally and (ultimately) militarily from 1619 to 1865.
  2. After slavery, racial discrimination was lawful and defended morally (and often violently) from 1865 to 1964.
  3. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not end illegal discrimination or racism, it mainly gave black Americans the legal tools to fight back against legal injustices.
  4. It is unreasonable to believe that social structures and cultural attitudes that were constructed over a period of 345 years will disappear in 56.
  5. Moreover, the consequences of 345 years of legal and cultural discrimination, are going to be dire, deep-seated, complex, and extraordinarily difficult to comprehensively ameliorate. 

But there is an important point to understand – the solution to any form of racism, whether overt or subtle, whether individual or corporate, whether personal or systemic is the unity that Christ offers.

So where do we start? As ever, we must start with repentance, both for ourselves and for the groups and organizations we are a part of, for our actions, words and thoughts that have minimized, discriminated against otherwise made life more difficult for people of color. Second, we must listen openly and honestly, without putting up the guards that we so easily put up. We can put political pressure on our leaders and representatives to take on this issue, whatever ideological methods we see as the best way to address our. We can protest, we can consume media and art from minority perspectives.

– Sermon Notes, Dave Lester, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, July 5, 2020

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Pebbles in the Shoe – 1 Thessalonians 5:12-15

“It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe.” At the end of his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses many of the pebbles in in the shoe of the Church. These exhortations also apply to us at Seed Church as we set out on the exciting process of bringing on a new pastor and ministering with him.

Paul starts out taking about the leaders in the church, not just those who stand in front, but those who labor and those who care. This does not mean those who are put in place because they are wealthy, but because they work and teach.

We are to care for, love and esteem these people – and the best way to make life easy for church leaders is to live at peace with each other.

Leaders are like bus drivers, with a dozen things to be paying attention to at the same time and a bunch of unruly people in the back. It’s easy to be a backseat driver, easy to second guess decisions, easy to squabble amongst ourselves. But don’t – instead, love, defend, appreciate and support.

Then Paul goes on to our corporate responsibility to not just our leaders, but the idle, faint-hearted, the weak. Paul walked through much of these issues earlier in the epistle. Some had stopped working to just wait fit Christ’s return. Others were hurt and mourning, others were simply weak, whether spiritually or physically.

There are different ways to address each of these, but we are always called to be patient with them (and we are all of them, at some point). Patient here means long-suffering, with a long fuse. We should be able to endure much, partly because others ensure much from us.

Then comes a difficult passage – “do not repay evil with evil.” Much evil was being done to the church, and even within the church at times. But we are called to do good, not just ourselves but to all. Many of the issues in society today, racism in particular, have been exacerbated because the church did not do good to all.

The church is called to be a family, a circle of love. We can’t exclude the leaders from our circle of love. We can’t exclude the weak and struggling from our circle of love. We can’t even exclude those who do evil to us from that circle!

Love is the proper response when we have a pebble in our shoe as we walk the Way following Christ. We’re at a new stage of our journey at Seed, so let’s be sure we are supporting our leaders, old and new, loving the weak and even our enemies as we move forward.

-Sermon Notes, Mahlon Friesen, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, June 28, 2020

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The Unstoppable Church – Philippians 2:1-5

“Your attitude determines your altitude.” It’s a pithy catch phrase, but this passage provides a particularly challenging directive right along these lines. It’s one of the most difficult commands in scripture, because it is about how we think, not just what we say and do. Our attitude must be like Christ’s, because as Christians we are “little Christs”.

Verses 1 to 3 are a great map of what a healthy church looks like, and a great prayer for parents to pray over their children. We are to unify, as churches, families, married couples, on knowing Christ and making him known.

This is counter cultural – our culture tells us that we should live for our own truth, to center ourselves, our opinions, our preferences. But we are called to humility. As CS Lewis wrote, “humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.” We are to put others first and to see others as more important. As Jesus said in Mark 9, “if anyone would be first, he must be last and be the servant of all.” Peter writes in 1 Peter 5, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Is we manage this humility, unify around the service of Christ, and live together with charity and affection, the outcomes would be amazing. Very few people struggle with too much humility – some are more ostentatious about their humility, but that is so frequently a firm of pride.

We live in a very divisive time, and so many areas are polarized. It’s getting harder and harder for pastors in particular. But we are called as churches to be a place of unity and grace.

This is, ultimately, an impossible passage, because salvation is impossible apart from the miraculous work of God. But that’s exactly what we are offered and exactly what we should always be striving for. And a church that is unified in Christ is unstoppable.

– Sermon Notes, Mahlon Friesen, Seed Church, Lynnwood WA, June 21, 2020

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Give Thanks to the Lord for He is Good – Psalm 107

Psalm 107 is an answer to the call in psalm 106 for God to save His people. We meet four groups along the way – wanderers in the desert, prisoners in chains, fools who got themselves in a mess, and sailors at sea.

Each one calls to God, and each one God saves. We are shown by this Psalm. God is good. God is faithful. We celebrate this weekly by observing communion.

God is a God who saves. Paul tells us that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, just as we see in this Psalm. There is foreshadowing of Christ’s salvation even in this passage. The wanderers in the desert seek water, and we know that Christ is the eternal source of living water.

As Augustine wrote, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”

Note, though, that each of these groups is in trouble because of their own choices. The wanderers went out perhaps unprepared, the prisoners rebelled, the fools were foolish, the sailors went out into the chaotic sea. Each of them was responsible for their own predicament – it would be easy to let each of them endure the consequences of their action. But each of us is ultimately the same in that way – we all make choices that put us into trouble and distress, and God offers His help to all of us.

We have a God who saves, and a God who listens. We can take all our anxieties and fears before the King of the Universe and leave them there. We don’t carry it anymore, but give it to the Lord who is good, whose love endures forever.

Charles Spurgeon wrote many years ago, “In all your troubles through this year, look to God and be saved.” We have many troubles through this year – but we can look to God.

We should also be thankful for the many times God has brought us through our troubles. Our gratitude should erupt our is us in humble worship – give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. We have a reason to sing and worship and tell the stories of God’s faithfulness.

-Sermon Notes, Bart Hodgson, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA, June 7, 2020