The sermon emphasizes that when we “forget truth and it can take us low,” we must remember that “as low as you can get God’s blessings reach way down deeper”. Centered on Ephesians 1:3, which serves as the “headline the summary of this long sentence” spanning to verse 14, the message explores a “single breath doxology” that “encapsulates the entire plan of redemption”. This theological foundation reveals the “one central truth” that “The God who is supremely worthy of praise has already richly lavished upon his people every spiritual blessing in Christ”. Because God is the “sovereign blesser,” His blessing is a “completed action” that has “already been done” and is “not dependent on your experience of it” or your feelings.
Every believer is among the “blessed ones” who have received “every spiritual blessing,” described as “redemptive riches” such as “regeneration and conversion and justification and adoption”. These exist in the “heavenly places,” which is a “present reality” in the “spiritual realm,” meaning believers are “not lacking anything you need to deal with any problem you face spiritually”. Because “Christ is the fountain of blessing,” every spiritual blessing is “located in Christ Jesus,” and “outside of Christ we have no spiritual blessing”. The sermon concludes that “spiritual solutions that God has provided solve spiritual problems”. Therefore, for those who are downcast, these truths are “medicine for the mind” and “healing for the heart,” and believers are exhorted to “repent of believing falsehood” and read this catalog of blessings until “praise takes the place of your complaint”.
FULL TEXT:
“We can sometimes get into these places where we forget truth and it can take us low. And this morning’s message is a reminder to us that as low as you can get, God’s blessings reach way down deeper. Go ahead and turn in your copy of God’s word to Ephesians. We’ve only made it a couple of verses into this new series. Just as a reminder since we missed the last couple of weeks, we’ve covered two verses. We covered verse one in the first week. And we saw who is writing this letter: it’s Paul the apostle, the apostle of God, of Jesus Christ by God’s will, who is giving us God’s word for the saints—which is us—those who have been chosen by God for a specific purpose, that we have been set aside, set apart from the rest of the world as his people, the saints who are in Christ Jesus.”
“And then in verse two, we saw the twin blessings of grace, that is the help of God for us, and his peace that comes from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Those twin blessings that we need every single day. We need God’s grace, we need his help, we need his peace, we need peace with God, we need peace from God, we need peace with each other that is supplied by God. And I mentioned in that last sermon that these two words sort of summarize what we will look at in verses 3 through 14 over the next two or three months, maybe more. If you are a member of our church, you received a message from me last Sunday. Since we weren’t able to meet, I wanted to get you thinking, I wanted to get you into the text. I talked about the fact that verses three all the way through to 14 are one long sentence in the original language. I mean, when you read through it, that is a packed sentence. And you English teachers are like, ‘What are you doing, Paul?’ And that’s why in English we have it broken down into sentences because it’s just hard to read one long sentence like that.”
“But there’s so much wonderful truth to be found, to be seen, to be studied, to surround ourselves with, to cover ourselves with. One big long sentence covering all manner of rich theological insight to show us the grandness, the greatness, the awesomeness of our salvation and of the God of our salvation. Throughout these verses, you see three major breaks. You see, first of all, God saving us in the past—what he has done to save us. You see also what he is doing now as his people, continuing to save us in our sanctification to save us from the power of sin in our lives. And in the final section of those verses, we see a future saving, that there are future blessings in line waiting for us. But the first part of this sentence, verse three, as we break it down in our translation, is a sort of summarization again of all that is about to be revealed to us. It is introducing us to the fullness of God’s salvation of his people.”
“Ephesians chapter 1, beginning in verse one, it says: ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 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.’ Father, this morning let us see the riches of your blessing. Let us see you as the God who blesses, to see what these blessings are, to understand how we are the blessed ones all because of Christ. Lord, bless the reading, the expositing of your word. Teach us, reprove us, correct us, train us in righteousness through your word this morning, by your spirit this morning, and for your glory in Jesus’ name, Amen.”
“So this single verse here at verse three is sort of the headline, the summary of this long sentence. It’s wonderful to see following these first two verses. If you read some of the other letters of Paul, after those first couple of verses, he tends to jump into something—he tends to jump into either a prayer or some sort of personal update, or he gets right into a complaint that he has against them. But here I can just see Paul writing. He’s sitting there and he is transcribing this letter and he talks about grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And I can just imagine he’s overwhelmed already thinking about the grace and peace of God. And he breaks out into this doxology of theology in these sentences, or in this one sentence, in these verses that we will cover. This is doxological.”
“Listen, this right here is very, very practical. When you understand the goodness and the grace and the peace of God, it makes you cry out in worship. It’s doxological, meaning it causes you to want to praise God. That’s what he does here. That’s why this is all one long sentence. He just blurts it all out all at one time. He can’t hold it back. He says, ‘Blessed be the God and Father.’ And it just comes out in this wonderful single breath doxology which encapsulates the entire plan of redemption in those three phases. And we also see God, the full triune God at work all throughout: the Father and the Son and the Spirit. But all of this is structured around this one central truth: The God who is supremely worthy of praise has already richly lavished upon his people every spiritual blessing in Christ.”
“We need to have this truth planted in our hearts, written on our foreheads backwards so that every time we look in the mirror we remember. When we understand what God is telling us here in this verse, our only right response is to bless him back in the way that we live our life: in gratitude, in worship, and obedience. So let’s look at this one verse in six stages. First of all, notice the blessed God. It says, ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ This is a statement. This is not a wishful kind of thing. He is declaring: God is blessed. Blessed be God. Notice first of all that God is first. He gets the glory. He is the preeminent one. He is the first and most important.”
“It says that God is the blessed one. Blessed be God. Paul is blessing him. He is saying that God is blessed. He is worthy to be blessed. He is blessed. And notice in this one sentence we see three different words that fall into that category of blessing: Blessed, Blessing, Bless. Obviously, when you think of ‘blessed’ sometimes I go back to Matthew chapter 5 and the beatitudes. That is a different word there. The word there in Matthew chapter 5 that’s translated ‘blessed’ is the word that means ‘happy.’ ‘Oh the joys of the one who is poor in spirit.’ That’s what Matthew 5 that word is using there. This is a different word. It’s a different Greek word. Eulogia is the word translated bless here: it is to praise, it is to speak good of, it is to be described as good or to receive good.”
“It’s a little bit different than ‘be happy.’ ‘Happy is God’—that’s not the word here. He’s saying God is worthy to be called good. He deserves your praise. Praise be to God. God, you are good. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is blessing God with his words. He is saying that he is deserving of all praise. He is saying that God is good. And I would go so far as to say he’s the only one who is good. And Paul knows it. That’s why he doesn’t say ‘blessed be us who know the blessed God.’ He said, ‘Blessed be God.’ And he says specifically a similar phrase to what we already looked at back in those first two verses: ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ He is making sure right off the bat, before you get three verses into this thing, he wants you to make sure you understand who this God is that he is describing. This is the Christian God. This is the one true God. It is the God who is Father, Son, and as he will reveal here, Spirit as well.”
“Over and over again he uses this one phrase ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ Because Jesus himself has perfectly revealed who this one triune God is. All the praise goes through Jesus. He’s the one who has come into this world in the incarnation. He is the one who was crucified in our place. He was the one that was resurrected from the dead. He is the savior. He is the pinnacle. He is the superior one. Goodness belongs to God through Jesus Christ. Paul makes sure that we understand that all blessing that God has, that this blessed God is blessed and we know he is through our Lord Jesus Christ. The only way we know about this blessed God is through Jesus Christ. The only way we understand, the only access that we have to God is through Jesus Christ. Jesus himself said, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me.'”
“Blessed be God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ because of Jesus. You and I, Gentile believers who were once far off, who were once walking in darkness, who were once worshiping all manner of idols and different gods in our life—this is good news for us. There is one true God and we can know him perfectly through this one mediator, Jesus Christ. You see, Christian, all true worship—you’re truly living for God if we’re truly worshiping God the way he deserves it, it must be centered on Christ. Because God the Father and the Spirit both point us to Christ. We do not praise some vague vapor deity. We praise God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This makes it unique. We do not just bless some random God. We bless the one true God through Jesus Christ. He is the blessed God.”
“Second here, we see then the blessing God. The blessing God. It says, ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed.’ You see, God is not only worthy of our blessing because he is the blessed one, he is the one who is actively, who is sovereignly blessing. He’s the—as I put it here—the sovereign blesser. That’s who God is. Once again, just because the praise from Paul comes first in the sentence does not mean that because Paul blessed God, therefore then God blessed him. Don’t get it twisted. The initiative still comes from God. He is still the sovereign one. Every blessing flows from God, from his will, from his actions alone. He blesses us because he is blessed. He is good and therefore he does good to us, his people.”
“But notice it says that he is the one who has blessed us. It is a past tense, aorist participle. He has blessed us. It’s already been done. It’s completed action. It’s already happened. Paul is saying, ‘I’m blessing God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ because he’s already blessed me. He’s already blessed us.’ What has he done, how has he been good to us? Let’s highlight just the most obvious and biggest one from Paul’s writing here: the completed work of Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. Christ has already blessed us by coming, dying, raising from the dead and returning to the Father, by finishing the work of our salvation. If he did nothing else, he’s blessed you way more than you deserve. He has blessed us already. It had already been done for us. It’s also not dependent on your experience of it. It ain’t based on your feelings of it. He has blessed you whether you feel his blessings or not. They are already yours.”
“This is a present reality for every believer. Don’t forget that you are blessed, believer. God has blessed you, believer, already. It is yours, whether you feel it or not, whether you think you have it or not, whether you think you deserve it or not. God has blessed. Let me also say this: if God blesses—let’s go back to grace—if God helps, is he lacking in any of that? Is it just a little bit, is it just enough to get by? No. He’s poured it out on you. He has poured out goodness on you. And again, let’s just look back at Jesus: he has removed eternal death from you. You have eternity waiting for you. He has poured out blessings. He has already done so fully through the finished work of Jesus. You don’t get little blessings here and there. It’s not a trickling effect. It is already done.”
“He has blessed us. And that’s the next point, number three: the blessed ones—us. He has blessed us, believer. Who are these ‘uses’? It’s the saints, the faithful in Christ Jesus, Christians, every one of us. He didn’t single out anybody here. Every Christian who has ever existed has been blessed. Every single one individually, but also we have been blessed together corporately, fully as God’s body, as his people. He blesses all of us together and individually. We talked about being in Christ, that we have been united in him. That is one way that he has blessed us together. If you are in Christ, that means you belong to this kingdom of the blessed. There are no exceptions to this in the kingdom of God. There are no second-class Christians. There are no Christians that will receive only a bit of the blessings. There are no Christians that will receive more of these spiritual blessings than anybody else. Why? Because we have all of them. Every single individual of us. From the moment that he redeems us, we have them all. He has blessed us. No exceptions.”
“Notice fourth here, the blessings themselves. Let’s go straight to ‘with every spiritual blessing.’ He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. ‘Every’ means every—got it? It’s not only that we have received everything that he would give to everyone, but we all have all of them. We all have all of the spiritual blessings. There aren’t any of them that are withheld from us. Listen to me: if you’ve been in the Sunday night class, we’ve just finished up the soteriology section. When we were walking through the moment of salvation—what takes place: regeneration and conversion and justification and adoption. We talk about how God could have just regenerated us and then just left us there. Well, that’s a spiritual blessing. We’re glad for regeneration, but there’s more.”
“There’s conversion: he gives us faith and repentance to turn to him by faith. And that’s a spiritual blessing. And he could have stopped there. But those who by faith believe, he also justifies. He makes us clean. He saves. He takes our sin away from us, and that’s a spiritual blessing. But there’s more: he then imputes Christ’s righteousness to us so that when he sees us he sees the righteousness of Christ. That’s a spiritual blessing. But there’s more—and this is the one that hits me hard: he adopts us. He could have said, ‘You stay over there.’ He invites us in. It’s a spiritual blessing. See, they’re all for all of us. There is no one who is a believer who God is holding out. He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. There’s not one spiritual blessing that he’s holding back going, ‘I’m not going to give you this one till you prove to me that you deserve it.’ How do I know that? Because we didn’t deserve any of them. That’s why our salvation is by faith alone in Christ alone. We believe Jesus earned it in our place.”
“So he has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. Let me dig into this a little bit more. We’re not talking about material blessings. It doesn’t say ‘with every physical blessing.’ This flies in the face of all those prosperity gospel preachers. If you’re healthy, wealthy, and wise, that means God has favor on you? No, it doesn’t. The devil might be happy that you’re happy without Jesus. It’s not talking about primarily material physical blessings. God may give those, God may take those away. Remember Job—it’s up to God. He’s saying you have every spiritual blessing. All the redemptive riches that can come to you by the power of the Holy Spirit are yours. They belong to you. Everything that we will read in verses 4 through 14 is for you, believer. They’re spiritual blessings for you.”
“This is important because these are blessings for believers. Stop arguing about whether or not we’re going to be sharing the gospel if we believe in election or not. I believe in election because as a believer that’s a spiritual gift that God has given. It’s a blessing that God has shown me. It’s for you, believer. It’s to give you comfort and peace and hope, assurance. These spiritual blessings belong to us because they come to us from God by his work through his spirit. So every single believer already has every spiritual blessing. We enjoy the fullness of salvation’s blessings. We may not have fully experienced them all yet, but we’re not waiting to be blessed with spiritual blessings. We are blessed with every spiritual blessing.”
“Number five: the blessed hope in the heavenly places. You already have it. He’s not saying when you get to heaven you’ll have all these spiritual blessings. It just means that it is a present reality. The ‘heavenly places’ is speaking to the spiritual realm, the unseen reality. Do you know that what you see is not all that exists? We live in a world that focuses on what we can see, what we can experience, what we can taste, touch, hear, feel. That’s not all that exists, beloved. Because if it was, it’s a hopeless situation that we are in. We’re talking about every spiritual blessing that exists in the heavenly places, in the spiritual realm of unseen reality.”
“Ephesians talks about this heavenly places in multiple places: where Christ is exalted above all powers in verse 20 of chapter 1; where believers are positionally raised and seated with him in chapter 2; where God’s wisdom is displayed to the cosmic authorities in chapter 3:10; where the spiritual warfare against the evil forces takes place in chapter 6:12. You have everything you need to deal with everything spiritually. There’s only two parts of existence: physical and spiritual. You are a physical and spiritual being. You need spiritual life. You have Christian spiritual life. And because you have spiritual life, you can experience spiritual blessings. We have all the spiritual blessings we need to deal with everything that is spiritual. You’re not lacking anything you need to deal with any problem you face spiritually. The world will try to tell you otherwise. They will tell you you need to deal with your spiritual problems physically.”
“You can’t deal with a spiritual problem physically. You can only deal with physical symptoms of spiritual problems physically. But you can’t get to the root. The root is spiritual. We need spiritual blessings that exist in the spiritual realm in the heavenly places. And that’s what we have in Christ Jesus. That’s number six: The fountain of blessing. We have all that we need, all these spiritual, every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Everything we need is located in him. Paul explains this—11 times that phrase ‘in Christ’ or something like it like ‘in him’ or ‘in the beloved.’ 11 times. Christ is the fountain of blessing. Every spiritual blessing is located in Christ Jesus. We’ve been chosen in him. We have been graced, helped in the beloved. We have been redeemed in him. We are united in him. We are sealed in him. Our union with Jesus Christ is the source of every spiritual blessing. If we are outside of Christ, we have no spiritual blessing, no spiritual goods, no spiritual ability, no spiritual life. But in Christ we have all of that in abundance richly poured out on us.”
“He is our fountain of every blessing. And because of that we should then tune our hearts to sing his praise. The end of verse 6, 12, and 14 ends with the same phrase: ‘to the praise of his glorious grace.’ Beloved, that’s the only right response to being blessed by the blessed God. God has blessed us richly so we must bless him endlessly. So for the downcast and for the discontent, for the depressed, Ephesians 1:3 is medicine for the mind. It is salve for your soul. It’s healing for the heart. Spiritual solutions that God has provided solve spiritual problems. Spiritual blessings from God help us to deal with our spiritual problems. Christ’s blessings to you, beloved, are sufficient.”
“Your feelings do not then determine your blessings; God does. So when you feel low and you feel like, ‘I don’t feel it, I don’t understand it, I don’t have these spiritual blessings,’ yes you do. Yes you do. Stop believing that lie. Stop believing that lie that you either told yourself or you heard from someone else that you don’t have what you need. You have everything you need, Christian. Your feelings do not determine your blessings; God does. Your physical lacking, the physical earthly trials that you face, also do not cancel out these spiritual blessings. You have them no matter what you face, no matter what you have or don’t have. Repent of believing falsehood, believing lies, and turn instead to believe what Christ has told you, what his word actually says. Believe what God has promised you is actually yours. That you already have these things that you need in Christ Jesus.”
“Here’s my homework for you: read verses 3 through 14. Read this catalog of blessings and keep reading it until thanksgiving rises up in your heart and praise takes the place of your complaint. And when it doesn’t work, keep doing it. Keep doing it. Don’t stop until you believe it. God’s word does its work in your life, believer. Repeat these truths to yourself every single day. See what happens when we get discouraged, when we get downcast, when we get depressed, when we get discontent. God has provided your spiritual solutions to your spiritual problems. Don’t neglect them when you have the spiritual problems. He has provided all we need. Beloved, you are already blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below. Praise him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.”