All Saints Church Thorpe Acre with Dishley - Sermon Application Questions

	All Saints Church Thorpe Acre with Dishley
	Thorpe Acre Road, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 4LF, England, UK

Sermon Notes & Cell Group Application Questions
08th February 2009
Terri Skinner

CORE Values: Orthodox Theology

Ephesians 1:1-15

Cell Group Application Questions

1. Apart from “ransom” what other words or pictures might we use to describe what Jesus has done for us? See Gal.1.4; 1 Pet.1.18-19: Eph 1.5; Heb 9.28. Which word/picture do you find most helpful?

2. What does it mean, “to be saved”?

3. “God wants all people to be saved, there is one God, one mediator, Jesus Christ – who gave himself as a ransom of all.” How does all this relate to people of other faiths? How should we relate to people of other faiths?

ORTHODOX (generally accepted – Not to be confused with churches that have Orthodox in their title.) and THEOLOGY (the study of God). Straight to the Bible from whence all orthodox theology must come.

There are a couple of verses in our reading that go right to the core/centre of theological truth.

Key words: ALL; ONE; MEDIATOR; RANSOM.

1 Tim 2.3-6: NIV: ...God our Saviour, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and people, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people…

The Message: God wants not only us but everyone saved, you know, everyone to get to know the truth we've learned: that there's one God and only one, and one Priest-Mediator between God and us—Jesus, who offered himself in exchange for everyone held captive by sin, to set them all free.

All - God wants all people to be saved
One - There is only one God.
Mediator - There is one mediator, Jesus, who bridges the gap between us and God
Ransom - The word “ransom” helps us to understand what Jesus has done for us.

ALL:

God wants all people to be saved – fantastic news but do we believe it? Think for a moment over the whole of history – is there anyone that you think God should not love enough to want to save? Is there anyone that has been so bad that we would expect God to hate them rather than love them? A shocking question but:

Google search (900,000 hits): “God hates” – homosexuals, those who hate homosexuals, America, sinners, miners, liars (enough to send them to the lake of fire), the faithless, Goths, women, freaks, Ireland, Cardiff, cowards, Israel’s enemies, chavs, the rich, West Ham. It is possible to listen to a song that says that God hates us all and to buy a T shirt that says “God hates me”!

It is a struggle not to be judgmental sometimes. Perhaps because people are different to us and we feel threatened by them or we just do not understand them. Dreadful things have been said, thought and done by some Christians against some people. It is easy to presume that God hates those who we hate – but that is to try and create God in our own image. God loves way beyond any capacity that we have to love. That is good news for all of us.

To those who can think of anyone that they think God hates, which part of the word “ALL” is it that you do not understand – God wants all people to be saved, God so loved the whole world that he gave his beloved Son. God who loves all people wants the very best for all of them – he wants to bring healing and wholeness, light and life, forgiveness and purpose. Salvation is about the whole of life not just life after death.

ONE:

This brings us to the truth that there is one and only one God – in our multi-cultural, multi-faith world it isn’t and never has been true that there has been one God for the Muslims, another or others for Hindus, another for animists, Buddhists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or little green creatures from outer space. Nor should we talk about God as the Christian God as though we possess him and he is somehow ours alone. There is one, all-powerful, all-present, all-knowing and all-loving God.

Religion, in the general sense of the word, has been all about how we can know and relate to God, but in that quest we have in various ways tried to shape and restrict God into our image and bring him down to our own size – thinking that we can somehow make God more knowable. In that quest some people have:

Made idols – something that can be seen, touched, shaped and controlled – and they have bowed down and worshiped idols instead of the One God
Invented many gods – each relating to different aspects of life – gods of love, water, trees, suns and moons, and so on. Somehow smaller and more manageable to worship than the One God.
Believed God to be like us – sharing our hates, our loves, our desires, and our prejudices. A god like us is far too small and nothing like God himself.
Decided that God is an impersonal force who cannot really be related to anyway.

But there is one God, only one, and however much we try and invent our own ways of knowing Him, none of them work, none of them get us closer to him. Clearly as God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, he wants us to be able to relate to him.

MEDIATOR:

The problem is that we have built ourselves a wall/dug ourselves a hole – whatever metaphor you want to use. The Bible explains how God made everything and how it was all good. In the beginning people had the sort of relationship with him that was open and personal and full of delight and creativity.

But God did not create puppets, he created people – people with the gift of choice – to love or not to love, to trust or not to trust, to submit to God or not. People sadly, have always chosen to put God to one side and to put themselves in his place, at the centre of our own personal universes. The more we have sidelined God, the more we have turned away from him, the bigger the barrier that we have allowed to grow up between us.

Leylandii hedge (the curse of suburbia!) – planted by house owners to create a bit of a barrier between them and next door and to give them some privacy – only to find that the hedge grows so vigorously that it is not so much privacy that they have gained as total isolation behind a barrier that the sun can’t penetrate even at midday in June. Keep this image in mind:

It is a bit like the sort of barrier that we have grown between us and God. We have let it grow so high that we can no longer see God and because we don’t want him to see us and the sort of things that we do. It is a barrier that has grown out of our control. So we might ask “why doesn’t God just chop it down?” – because we have chosen to plant the hedge and let it grow and because God does not force himself on anyone.

Throughout history people have tried to take control of their own little world. But this simply does not work – something in us longs and hungers for God, we find we need him. But the hedge has grown too high and we no longer have the tools or strength to deal with it.

We try:

We say we will be good and keep it trimmed but still it towers over us.
We try and climb over it but never reach the top. We try and tunnel through it but it is too thick. We simply can’t seem to reconnect with God through our own efforts. We employ other tactics:
We try and tell ourselves that God no longer exists but our longing for him still persists
We try and make our own gods on our side of the hedge but they all prove unable to satisfy.
Sometimes we try and put people on a pedestal and worship them instead but they prove to be unworthy of our trust.

But then we cry out to God and he hears our cry and we find that the hedge has been our problem and not God’s. God steps through the hedge and into our world. Jesus Christ is the MEDIATOR (the one who comes into the middle of a situation in order to effect a solution). Jesus is God the Son, come into our world, not just in a geographical sense of coming, but by coming as a human being, experiencing all that it means to be human, even death itself.

The Pit:

A man fell into a pit and he couldn’t get out.
A psychologist came along and said: “I feel for you down there.”
A philosopher came along and said: “It is logical that someone would fall down there.”
A Christian Scientist came along and said: “You only think that you are in the Pit.”
A Triumphalist preacher came along and said: “Just confess you are not in the pit.”
A Pharisee said: “Only a bad person would fall in a pit.”
A Fundamentalist said: “You deserve your pit.”
Buddha said: “Your pit is only a state of mind.”
A Hindu said: “Your pit is for purging you and making you more perfect.”
Confucius said: If you would have listened to me, you would never have fallen into that pit.”
A Self Pitying Person said: “You haven’t seen anything until you have seen my pit.”
A News Reporter said: “Could I have the exclusive story on your pit?”
A tax man said: “Have you paid your taxes on the pit?”
A Town Planning Officer said: “Do you have a permit for that pit?”
An Optimist said: “Things could be worse.”
A Pessimist said: “Things will get worse.”
Jesus, seeing the man, got into the pit, took him by the hand and helped him out of the pit.

A lovely picture showing how God has come into our world in person, Jesus Christ, to be our Mediator and Saviour.

RANSOM:

Ransom – one way of understanding what Jesus has done for us. Other images that we could use – sacrifice, redemption, adoption…

The oil tanker Sirius Star was hijacked by Somali pirates late last year off the coast of Kenya. The ship and its crew were finally released when a ransom of £2 million was paid.

Usually in a ransom situation, money is handed over. Jesus gave himself as a ransom in order that we could be saved. He gave up the glory of heaven to come to our side of the hedge, he come in person.

What did we do to him? We rejoiced for a while to have him on our side of the hedge. We listened eagerly to his teaching, we followed him, we rejoiced when he healed and set people free, we shouted hosanna and hallelujah when we thought he was God for us, God in our image, God on our side, but then we shouted “crucify” when we realised that God loves all people, whether they are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, Roman oppressor or religious leader, rich or a tramp in the gutter. We got uncomfortable with Jesus; he didn’t fit into the box we had created for him.

But then Jesus showed us how much bigger than all that, he is. He didn’t fit into the tomb either, - it could not contain him, he burst forth in resurrection power. The hedge between us and God suddenly had a gaping, Christ-shaped hole in it.

Now we only have to turn around, turn to Jesus and ask God to fill us with the Holy Spirit and a new and fresh and life-giving relationship with God can start to grow once more into what it was meant to be. Jesus Christ has made it possible by giving himself as a ransom for all.

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