Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript
## Reformation Covenant Church | Pastor Dennis Tuuri

The sermon text today is found in Ephesians chapter 1 beginning at verse one and we’ll read through chapter 2 verse 10. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. To the saints who are in Ephesus and 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 with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, by which he made us accepted in the beloved.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace, which he made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence. Having made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he purposed in himself that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times he might gather together in one all things in Christ both which are in heaven and which are on earth in him.

In him also we have obtained an inheritance being predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of his glory. In him you also trusted after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. In whom also having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession to the praise of his glory.

Therefore, I also after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints do not cease to give thanks for you making mention of you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ the Father of glory may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him the eyes of your understanding be enlightened that you may know what is the hope of his calling what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints and what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the working of his mighty power which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named not only in this age but also in that which is to come.

And he put all things under his feet and gave him to be head over all things to the church which is his body the fullness of him who fills all and all. And you he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in trespasses made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus for by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for this most wonderful book that we can ever imagine. This revelation of who you are and who we are. Thank you, Father, for this text from Ephesians. May your spirit, Lord God, write it upon our hearts. Cause us, Father, to repent of our autonomy, our claim to our own works. Help us, Father, to rejoice once more in the doctrine of your sovereignty, that you’re working all things according to your good pleasure. Bless us, Lord God, to the end that our children may see better times than the ones in which we live. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Frank Bernard sent me a link to an article this past week about a mother. I think she was suing the school district. Her ten-year-old child had gone to the Halloween celebration and the school had mandated that everyone had to wear a costume or else you were put in the computer room. And so this student who comes from a Christian family dressed up like Jesus, went to church as Jesus, and the school ordered him home. Can’t be here dressed like Jesus because that’s a violation of the separation of church and state.

Now, there were, of course, many people there dressed as demons and witches and Satan, but not Jesus.

At last week’s Restore America conference, Miss Fuller gave a number of instances and great warning signs to us of what’s happening in our country and around the world. They’re preparing a TV ad. I don’t know if they started showing it or not. There were these two grandmothers who were at a homosexual rally, I think, or some sort of homosexual event and they were there witnessing to the Lord Jesus Christ passing out tracts to old infirmed ladies and they were arrested for handing out tracts for causing a commotion at this gay rally.

This is not the only case where in the last year or two various people that go and try to witness in the context of rallies where homosexuals are, to try to love them and to turn them away from their sin and to repent to the Lord Jesus Christ, uproar breaks out. The homosexuals get all angry and mad and surround people and then the police are called and on more than one occasion the police then arrest the Christian who is simply trying to bring the peace of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the situation.

I keep thinking of Al Gore at some Democratic nominating convention in years gone by. Everything that’s up should be up is down and everything that’s down and should be down is up. And he was talking about unemployment and inflation and gross domestic product and how the whole country was turned upside down, is what he said.

And as we think about these examples and you know there are a number of them now increasingly across our country—of course, you know, those that exalt the Lord Jesus Christ maybe in not a very good way. I’m not sure the Puritans would have liked people dressed up much like Jesus either but for completely opposite reasons, right? But still trying to honor the Lord Jesus Christ, they’re ordered away from school. They should be up and exalted. But no, they’re sent away. And the ones who are dressing up like demons and witches are exalted.

I know that there’s some fun going on there. And I’m not saying—but I’m just saying that, you know, it’s topsy-turvy. And when homosexuals who hate God, you know, shout and scream at Christian men and women just trying to talk about the gospel of Jesus, and then the Christians are arrested. You see, things that are up should be up. An appreciation for Christians in our culture is down. They’re being persecuted. And what should be down, the open displays of homosexual adherence, that should be down. That should be back in the closet. That’s horrible, sinful, wicked stuff. And I don’t care.

You know, they pass a law here in the next couple of weeks in Oregon. You know, I think this Wednesday is the big homosexual lobby down in Salem. We’re going to get a bill of civil unions and we’ll get an anti-discrimination bill and I don’t know what the implications of that may be immediately or in the long term but you know Canada of course has legislation that says it’s illegal to engage in hate crimes and that includes pastors have been arrested for talking about the sinfulness, what an abomination homosexuality is.

Let them arrest us. Bring it on.

As President Bush said, this culture has become topsy-turvy. It’s all turned upside down. I’ve got a son and I named him Jason because his meaning is strong one, and his God is to be Yahweh, the God of the scriptures. I named him Jason from Acts 17:5-9. We read this. The Jews who were not persuaded, becoming envious, took some of the evil men from the marketplace and gathering them mobs at all the city in an uproar, attacked the house of Jason and sought to bring them out to the people.

Well, this is going on in our day and age, is it not? Muslims break into Christian homes, Christian assemblies, kill people, torture them. This is increasingly going on in our day and age. But when they did not find them, they drag Jason and some brethren to the rulers of the city, crying out, “These who have turned the world upside down have come here too. Jason has harbored them, and these are all acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king, Jesus.”

I named my son, one of my sons, Jason, because of this verse. We’re in a culture where everything’s upside down. And not because we’ve turned it upside down. We’re trying to right the ship. The ship of state is upside down, taking water and going down. And we need Christian men and women. We need sons and daughters of families in this church who will stand for the truth of Jesus Christ who will once more preach the gospel that there’s another king to which Caesar and the state must bow. King the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s got laws. He rules. He rules in the affairs of men.

And I hope to God that our children grow up and have a better place to live than we do because it’s getting bad. When you destroy the family, as Herb Titus taught us at the Restore America conference, you destroy the economic base of the culture. And that’s what’s going on. There are bad times in front of us on many levels.

We just recited Psalm 90. Make us glad according to the days in which you have afflicted us, the years in which we have seen evil. We’re beginning to see more and more evil. Obviously, in this land, it’s horrible. We’ve seen evil. We’ve been afflicted. And we should pray of this same thing that God might give us gladness according to the days in which he has afflicted us. Let your work appear to your servants in your glory to their children. We pray that our children might live in better times than us. Times in which the Lord Jesus Christ is honored once more in the context of our nation and our culture.

And we wonder what has happened. What has happened to cause the world to be flipped back around from its Christian moorings in this country to now Christians are the tail and not the head.

What’s happened?

Well, I think what’s happened is—you know, the conference I was at, put on primarily and spoken at primarily by evangelicals. It was a very encouraging conference and I don’t want to take anything away from it. I think it’d be really useful for us to get some of the DVDs, show them to the young people’s group maybe on Friday nights or some other groups, get discussion going, some of the excellent talks that were given.

But I don’t think the evangelical culture has quite hit the pogo moment yet. Old reference: pogo. You know, we’ve seen the enemy and he is us. What we have here is not the result of somebody—you know, the homosexuals attacking the church and the church not being up to the task. What we have is the church failing to honor the God of the scriptures and as a result of that, the judgments of God on the church.

We lead whether we like it or not. And we’ve led this culture into a death lifestyle, into an into a closer and closer to the abyss. The evangelical church, us included, we’ve done this thing. We brought this on ourselves. Why is God afflicting us? Because we’ve sinned. We’ve sinned in lots and lots of ways. We’ve sinned in denying, you know, theocracy. And I know people don’t want to talk about theocracy because the Muslim example is the one. But all it means is God rules. Should our laws be patterned after the scriptures or not? And we say they should. That evangelicalism has said for way too long that they shouldn’t.

One of the speakers at this conference was one of the Christian leaders, head of a group called Christians United for Israel, something like that. Christians United in defense of Israel. A Jewish man who denies that Jesus Christ is Messiah. A man on the way to hell. All right. There’s no other name under heaven by which men must be saved. A man on the way to hell got up and spoke as a Christian leader. Now I pray to God that he repents. But as of right now, his eternal destination, should he die in the middle of that talk without repenting, he’s going to hell for rejecting Christ.

And that man got up for forty-five minutes and tried to encourage Christians to work for the well-being of the state of Israel. Now, there may be geopolitical reasons to support Israel as a state and nation. All I’m not—you know, I’m okay with all that, but what I’m not okay with is that somehow we’ve got two ways of salvation. One for the Jew and one for the Gentile. That is not true. The New Testament is entirely about the getting rid of the distinction that God had set up of a priestly nation, the Jews, to minister to the world.

And now in Christ, there is no more Jew or Gentile. It’s gone. It’s over with. And this man, you know, said that we’re all praying to the same God. And people applauded that line. Most people applauded that line. What is going on?

See, this is the problem we have. Judeo-Christian ethic got talked about a lot at the conference. Well, the Judeo-Christian terminology, if Gary North’s research is right, comes from German theology in the nineteenth century, which was an explicit attempt—an explicit attempt to break off Christianity from the Old Testament. Judeo-Christian: they get the Old Testament, we get the New Testament. And what’s the New Testament without the Old Testament? Why, it’s all, you know, sail, no anchor. Its anchor is the Old Testament. And it ties back to it over and over and over again.

But no, the liberal theologians don’t want us tied to the Old Testament because then we’re going to talk about laws. We’re going to talk about nationhood. We’re going to talk about what we should do in all kinds of ways that they’re not going to like. It was an explicit attempt to take away the honor of God’s law for a people and nation. And now it’s standard fare in evangelicalism to talk about the Judeo-Christian ethic foolishly. We’ve been led down the primrose path to destruction through evangelicalism. It goes back a long way.

Who’s in charge? That’s the question. Is God removed? Is God imitated in man? There’s nothing more fundamental to what this church believes of what we’re going to talk about today than that God is sovereign. This is not, you know, one of those many doctrines that good Christian men disagree on over the course of the world and this and that. This is bedrock stuff we’re going to talk about today. This is stuff that the church has agreed on from the time of the early church through the confessions and councils of the early church to the Canons of Dort.

The God of the fathers, the God of the scriptures is a sovereign God who saves men not by their cooperation with him, but who saves men, one could say, in spite of their uncooperation with him. Now, that’s what the scriptures teach. Evangelicalism has denied all these things and posited, you know, a god who is weak and ineffectual.

There’s a book we read many years ago, some of us, called The Feminization of American Culture. And I, you know, women are wonderful. I love to hear the voices in four-part harmony and the women with those angelic voices singing. But you, can you imagine if all four parts, if all men and women were singing the high parts without bass to it? That’s what’s happening in our culture.

Anne Douglas wrote this book, I don’t know, twenty or thirty years ago, called The Feminization of American Culture. People have remarked upon the fact that we become more and more feminine in our culture instead of masculine. You know, we don’t believe in hierarchy. We don’t want to talk about, you know, what’s truth and not truth. We want to talk about relationships and everybody getting along and all that sort of stuff.

Now, there’s a place for all that, but you know, everything has moved. Men’s magazines—do you know men never used to have plastic surgery? Now they have it a lot. Men never used to worry about what they look like, right? Because they’re not the beautiful ones. They never will be in the context of our species. The women are. We used to know that. We didn’t bother with that stuff, but not now. We’re becoming more and more like women. We’re becoming a culture that has stressed a feminine aspect to the detriment of the masculine aspect of culture.

And Anne Douglas wrote about this. I was interesting. I was—I couldn’t, I had a senior moment, forgot her name for a brief moment and went to the internet to look up feminization of American culture and I came across an interesting article in the World called “The Feminization of American Culture” and it talked about, you know, the obvious things that everybody sort of knows—that we’ve become more feminized in our culture and gave all these evidences of it.

And the reason they say we have is—they apparently have—well, it’s kind of a long article but I’ll cut to the chase here. They believe that there are chemical compounds in flexible plastic containers, Pepsi bottles, Coca-Cola bottles, the inside lining of cans. And this particular plastic sloughs off chemical compounds that are very similar and act the same way as estrogen. And so what they say is, what’s happened to us?

Everybody’s saying, “What happened? Why are we so feminized? Why did we vote for Bill Clinton feeling our pain, a draft-dodging, you know, guy as opposed to a war hero who was a man of honor and distinction?” Why did we do that? Well, I know the tax thing, but I mean, overall, it’s a good illustration of the shift. Left away from—why is it that when TV shows and movies used to portray fathers you know they were kind of solid strong leaders? You watch the commercials and the TV shows this day—men are idiots according to these things. Some women liberation or feminist writers now are saying we don’t even need these guys. These guys are a bunch of buffoons. That’s what it’s come down to.

And they think that’s because of these chemical compounds. Everybody knows we’ve become feminized. The question is, why? And they cite some interesting statistical data that fish are becoming more and more feminized downstream from large cities in waterways. Fish now are looking more and more—the salmon look more and more like women or girl salmon. Both sexes, you got to take them out and actually do genetic testing to see if they’re male or not. So that’s the way we are.

You see, men—I don’t mean to get too graphic here. But sperm count down fifty percent, they say. I don’t know. And on the other hand, young women are actually coming to maturity, sexual maturity at a younger and younger age. So, you know, maybe there’s something to it. I don’t know. That’s what they think is the reason for feminization.

Now, Anne Douglas traced it back to the rise of Arminianism and Unitarian pastors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She said that what happened was kind of an alliance between women and pastors who rejected Calvinism of the fathers, the god of the scriptures, the god of the fathers, and went instead for kind of a god who, you know, who was more feminized, who didn’t really wasn’t sovereign. It was really kind of up to man now to do things. And she traces the feminization of American culture to that very aspect.

And I think she’s right.

Now, the Lord God, you know, he can do interesting things. And, you know, maybe that chemical compound idea isn’t so far-fetched. I used to make fun of the Birchers for saying the fluoride in the water was going to make us a passive people. But I looked around and maybe they were right. What happened? Why are we so passive? Why can’t men be men anymore?

Maybe there’s some truth to the chemical thing. But see, that is not the problem. The problem first was the movement away from Calvinism long before these chemical compounds were developed or found. And maybe God’s using that secondary means. He does that kind of thing. But it isn’t going to do us any good to attack the secondary means without getting to the root of the problem.

And the root of the problem is our understanding of the person of God. It comes down to evangelicalism and its rejection of a sovereign God, positing an Arminian god.

Francis Schaeffer in nineteen eighty-four wrote a book called The Great Evangelical Disaster. Pretty good title. Probably nobody here has ever heard of it. Well, probably some of you have heard about it. Nineteen eighty-four—let me read a couple of quotes.

“Ours is a post-Christian world in which Christianity not only in the number of Christians but in cultural emphasis and cultural result is no longer the consensus or ethos of our society.”

That was one of the quotes from him. He said, “Here is the great evangelical disaster. The failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this, namely accommodation. The evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age. First there has been accommodation on Scripture so that many who call themselves evangelicals hold to a weakened view of the Bible and no longer affirm the truth of all the Bible teaches—truth not only in religious matters but in the areas of science and history and morality.”

He also said that second, there’s been an accommodation on the issues with no clear stand being taken even on matters of life and death. So he says the evangelical disaster begins first with a compromise on the word of God and then it moves out into a compromise on the issues of the day.

They compromise, we compromise as a culture on the sovereignty of God. That has led to a compromise that has led us into a feminized culture which now accommodates to the issues of the world.

He then said, “Thus we must say with tears, with tears we’re sad to have to say this: But it is the evangelical accommodation to the world’s spirit around us, to the wisdom of this age, which removes the evangelical church from standing against the further breakdown of our culture. It’s my firm belief that when we stand before Jesus Christ, we will find that it has been the weakness and accommodation of the evangelical group on the issues of the day that has been largely responsible for the loss of the Christian ethos which has taken place in the area of culture in our own country over the last forty to sixty years and now we’d say eighty years.

Let us understand that to accommodate to the world spirit about us in our age is nothing less than the most gross form of worldliness in the proper definition of that word. And with this proper definition of worldliness we must say with tears that with exception, the evangelical church is worldly and not faithful to the living Christ.”

Now evangelicals came together a thousand of them a week ago in Portland and they said, “Well, we are going to respond to the issues of our day. We’re not going to accommodate to them.” That’s good. I said back in the early eighties, “Two problems: are Christians going to get involved in political action and are they going to get involved in a distinctively Christian fashion?” And I knew the first one was self-correcting.

When you got homosexual marriage and a discrimination bill being passed that says you can’t rent your house out, you can’t refuse to rent a house, give somebody a job, whatever it might be, because they’re homosexual sinners—I don’t care what your theology is, you’re going to start to get involved. And so the evangelicals are starting to get involved.

But will they get involved in a truly Christian way? Will they accept the word of God? Will they accept the law code of Deuteronomy as an example to us of how to build a culture? Will they say that yes, a nation—our evangelical post in the world in Deuteronomy was directly tied to the statutes and judgments which God had given us. He said people are going to look to you, other nations. “Oh, what a wise and understanding people that have such great laws, statutes, and judgments. We want to be like them.”

Will the evangelical church get to that place of structuring law codes around God’s word and calling people to do it?

And today we want to talk at an even deeper issue. We want to talk about: will they repent of their view of God itself? Our view of God determines everything else in the context of our culture.

I’ve got another article on your outline. Zachary Gapa, November 3rd, wrote an article, “The Not So Conservative Religious Right,” and what Gapa said was that the religious right is coming out of evangelicalism but evangelicalism itself is the source of the problem.

Gapa’s critique is that evangelicalism rejected tradition. They rejected the institutional church in place of Christianity, individual relationship to God. No structure, no order, no institution. It’s all personal, individualized. It’s a lot more relational. You see this movement from masculinity to femininity in terms of the church.

And what Gapa says is all the problems we’ve got is a direct result of that. Everybody’s supposed to do whatever they want to do. Traditions aren’t important. We don’t care what the Founders said in the Constitution two hundred years ago, who cares? It’s a new age. Everything’s relationship. It’s just me and Jesus. And if Jesus tells me that I should be kind toward homosexuals or maybe even I am one, well, that’s what Jesus says.

That’s why Dolly Parton can sing in an ad about being born again by getting a sex change operation. Christian singer supposedly influenced the Christian culture that way. Why? Because tradition, church, all that stuff has been set aside. And evangelicalism stresses the individual and as a result we have the culture in which we now find ourselves with growing evil in every direction.

There was an article by a guy named Drury years ago called “Where Have All the Calvinists Gone?” He says, “You know, I’m an Arminian but those Calvinists, they sure help. And if those Calvinists, you know, we’re on the left flank of the line and they’re on the right flank and we’re the caring, emotional, relationship guys and they’re kind of the sturdy, staunch Calvinists who keep things, keep us from going off too mushy, getting too sentimental, getting too far away from hard and fast truths.”

And Drury ten years ago was bemoaning the fact that the Calvinists were going away. They’re all becoming Arminians. He said, “What’s going to happen if you guys don’t get back to your side? Hold down the right flank. We’re all going over the cliff. We’re not going to win the game. We’re all going to become sentimental, mushy. Everything goes. Everything’s relational.”

And again, that’s just what’s happened.

Where has Calvinism gone?

Well, I don’t know. It’s pretty well gone completely though. I saw a map that showed all the counties in America and it showed by how dark they were, what percentage of the people were reformed. And there were a few counties in Iowa, Michigan, and maybe a few on the east coast that seemed to have any semblance of darkness to them at all. The whole country is white. The whole country—there are most people say they’re still evangelical, but they don’t believe in the sovereignty of God. They’re not reformed. And that’s the problem we have today. We have today the problem that stems from a rejection of the sovereign God.

So let’s look at the text of Ephesians.

And I, you know, I don’t even know why I have to preach on this. By the way, let me just say, here’s an example of how this church falls right into this stuff. Evangelicals rejected the church as an institution and then provided this idea of everybody’s an individual and we can do whatever you want to do and the church is not—the church was defanged, completely torn down as an institution.

In this church the fact is that whenever we try to follow up folks but decide to go someplace else and they almost never tell us, they almost never talk to the elders, “I’m going to go over here. I’m looking for another church.” And then if the elders are so bold to contact folks and say, “Well, where are you going to church?” it’s seen as some kind of harassment. It’s seen as some kind of overreaching of the institutional church because, hey, we’re all free moral agents. What are you talking about? I’m going to worship wherever I want to go to worship.

You see, now that’s exaggeration for effect. I’m telling you though that in this very church, we have begun to lose a sense of what a covenant community is. We are drifting toward an evangelical concept of the local church. We are diminishing it. We don’t, you know, people are worried that we’re stressing the institutional church too much. I’m astonished by those kind of worries. We haven’t had one church court case here for years, and we have had lots of people go down the street to, in some cases, very non-reformed churches, and when we want to talk to them about it, we’re seen as bad guys somehow.

We’re drifting just like evangelicals drifted. We’re drifting away from our roots. We’re drifting away from the truth of Ephesians.

I don’t know why I have to talk about this text. It is so beautiful and so—but let’s just look at it a little bit. Okay. Paul says in the very first line, “I’m an apostle by the will of God.” Church-splitting words. Some of those began several families here used to go to Cedarbrook Bible Church. And when we went there in the early eighties, there was a man named Lauren Oberston. He taught a Sunday school class and I don’t remember if it was Ephesians or not. There’s several other epistles of Paul where he says this, but it might have been Ephesians.

And Lauren said, “Well, as we begin this text, begin this book, Paul wants us to know that he’s not an apostle because he chose to be one. In fact, he’s not a Christian because he chose to be one. He is an apostle by the will of God.” And he talked a little bit about the sovereignty of God and election and how men are dead in trespasses and sins, just what Paul’s going to go on to write about here.

And the next Sunday, the entire elder board went to that Sunday school class and he knew it was coming and he just gave a full-blown both barrels blown away, you know, firing away from Scripture about the sovereignty of God and Calvinism and that was it. That was his last Sunday school class he would ever teach.

That church—that church had always said that it was a Calvinist-Arminian church, that it’s two tracks, right? Calvinism and Arminianism. You probably think this way. Some of you probably think this way yourself. Well, it’s just, you know, like that Drury article—Calvinists on one side, Arminians on the other. I remember talking to the pastor of this church. He said, “If you look down there far enough, those train tracks come together.” And I told him, “That’s an optical illusion, pastor. Those train tracks never come together. If they do, we’re having a train wreck.”

So, but no, this man was gone. I don’t object to the elders going to that class. That’s what elders are supposed to do. They’re supposed to guard the church against heterodoxy, false doctrines. But the false doctrine they were guarding it against was the premier doctrine of the Protestant Reformation. The foundational doctrine of the Protestant Reformation as seen for instance in Martin Luther’s Bondage of the Will was not justification by faith. It was deeper than that. It had to do with who God is. It was grace. And that God’s grace is not somehow ninety-nine percent reaching out to us. It is absolutely sovereign. We are dead in trespasses and sins.

So this is church-splitting words these days: Jesus, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. But that’s what he does.

Psalm 115:3 says, “Our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases.” Don’t like that so much.

Psalm 135:5, “I know that the Lord is great. Our Lord is above all gods. Whatever the Lord pleases, he does.” Why does he do what he does? I don’t know all the ins and outs and the machinations, but I know that whatever he pleases, he does. He doesn’t wait for you. What he pleases, he does. That’s what these texts tell us.

Job 23:13—God is unique. Who can make him change? Whatever his soul desires, that’s what he does. God involved in the world? Absolutely. He’s involved in every second of every moment. And what is he doing? Just what he wants to. Whatever pleases him.

The will of God is what’s determined whatsoever comes to pass. His decree. Daniel 4:35. This was the message to change the empire. This is the message we need. If we’re in a Babylonian captivity of the church today, as Luther said he was, how do we change it? This is the message that Daniel used:

“All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing. He does according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. No one can restrain his hand or say to him, ‘What have you done?’ He does what he pleases on heaven and on earth.”

That was Daniel’s message and it changed the empire.

In the gospels, Jesus answered and said to them, “My thank you, Father,” he prays. “Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in your sight.”

Why does he hide the truth from some and not others? So it seemed good in his sight. That’s the end reason. The will of God is being exercised in the context of the world.

So the will of God—God is sovereign. This is the God of the scriptures. This is the god of the church fathers. In 1:4, before the foundation of the world, we read in chapter 1 verse 4, he has blessed us just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

We talked about this before in terms of the golden chain. Look at that verse in your Bible though, in verse four. He chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him. And then it says “in love.” My translation puts “in love” as modifying “before him.” But I think “in love” goes with verse five.

So he says he chose us before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame. And then he says, “In love having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will.”

So he’s repeating here in the same kind of form, a little shortened form, the golden chain we talked about. That everything begins with God’s eternal choice before the foundation of the world. And that choice is a setting his love upon those whom he then predestinates to become conformed to the image of Christ, that they’d be holy and blameless.

So before the foundation of the world—and I’ve got a bunch of scriptures there that talk about the counsel of God—before the foundation of the world, God decided what comes to pass. In Romans 9:11, we’ll talk about Romans 9 next week. We’ll deal with the doctrine of reprobation. He says, “For the children not yet being born or having done any good or evil”—this is Jacob and Esau—”that the purposes of God according to election might stand, not of works, but of him who calls, said, ‘The one I loved and the other I hated.’”

So God has these his purposes of God in eternity. And that’s why this specific thing is worked out in the lives of Jacob and Esau.

Isaiah 46:10, “God declares the end from the beginning and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand. I will do all my pleasure.’”

Isaiah 46:11, “Calling a bird of prey from the east, the man who executes my counsel from a far country. Indeed, I have spoken it. I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it. I will also do it.”

The sovereignty of God before the beginning of time, as we know it, determined certain things. That was his purpose. And what he purposed, he brings to pass.

So before the foundation of the world, God has determined certain things. Ephesians 3:11 says that this truth of our salvation is according to the eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.

So there’s an eternal purpose of this sovereign God and then he accomplishes that purpose in the context of human history.

Acts 4:27, “Truly against your holy servant Jesus whom you anointed both Herod and Pontius Pilate with the Gentiles and the people of Israel were gathered together to do what? To do whatever your hand and your purpose determined before to be done.”

Even the crucifixion, the arrest, trial, crucifixion of our Savior is the eternal purpose of God being worked out in the context of history. They’re going to do what you in eternity past have determined to be done. What your counsel, what your purpose was, they’re bringing it to pass because you’re sovereign.

2 Timothy 1:9, “He has saved us and called us the Holy calling not according to our works, according to his own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.”

And we’ll talk about this in a couple of minutes. But see, if we ignore that this is the counsel of God before time began, then in Paul’s letter to Timothy, he’s saying “You’re working in the context of works.” Now, if you think that—we’ll talk about that more in a couple minutes—but the point here is text after text in the scriptures talk about God has an eternal purpose and then performs these purposes, the purposes of his heart.

Jeremiah 23:20, “The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and performed the thoughts of his heart.”

So God has eternal thoughts and in his providence he works out his decree sovereignly.

Why?

You know, immediate question. Well, if what we’re talking about here is restoring a Calvinistic view of the world and as a subset of that, a Calvinistic view of salvation, why does all this happen? Why has God decreed that homosexuals get this bill passed in our legislature and we end up suffering because of that?

Well, why? God is all powerful? Yeah. Does he know everything? Absolutely. And if he knew this was going to happen, why didn’t he do something about it?

Well, we don’t know. Well, we do know, but we don’t know the details. We don’t know much, but we know enough. In verse three, it says that he is doing these things according to the good pleasure of his will. Why is he doing it? Because of the good pleasure of his will. It pleases him. That’s all we know about it from one perspective.

Well, this is repeated over and over again in the Bible.

Psalm 51:18, “Be good in your good pleasure to Zion.” Why does God do good to Zion? He’s called upon because of the good pleasure. Be good in your good pleasure to Zion.

Matthew 11:25, when we read this just a minute ago: “You’ve hid these things from the wise and the prudent, revealed them to babes. Even so, Father”—so it seemed good. Same word here. It was your good pleasure to do it this way. Why does he open the eyes of some and not others? His good pleasure. That’s the reason the Savior gives us.

Luke 12:32, “Don’t fear, little flock. It’s your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” It’s the pleasure of God ultimately to give us the kingdom, his good pleasure.

Ephesians 1:5 and 1:9, “He’s predestined us to adopt as sons by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will. Why predestination? It pleases him. It’s his good pleasure.”

“Verse nine: Having made known to us the mystery of his will, according to the good pleasure which he purposed in himself.”

Philippians 2:13, “For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for his good pleasure.” Why do I have this health stuff I’ve got going on? It’s the good pleasure of God. I don’t know more than that.

2 Thessalonians 1:11, “Therefore, we also pray always for you that our God would count you worthy of his calling. Fulfill all the good pleasure of his goodness and the work of faith with power.”

The Belgic Confession says this: “Those of mankind that are predestinated unto life, God before the foundation of the world was laid according to his eternal and immutable purpose”—he can’t be changed—”and the secret counsel and good pleasure of his will has chosen in Christ unto everlasting glory out of his free grace and love alone.”

Heidelberg Catechism question 20: “Did God leave all mankind to perish in the estate of sin and misery?” “No. God, having out of his mere good pleasure from all eternity elected some to everlasting life to enter into a covenant of grace to deliver them.”

God chose some people who are on their way to hell. Why did he choose them and not somebody else? Because of his mere good pleasure. That’s the answer. That’s it.

Now, that’s a doctrine that you can get all tangled up about. You can spend the rest of your life trying to figure that one out. Why did God do it this way? Why did he predestine? Why did he choose me and not this person? Why?

Well, at the end of the day, God says rest in this truth. It is because of the good pleasure of his will.

Now, you can either, you know, kind of not like that much and not be satisfied, want to know more than that, or you can, as a humble, submissive child of God, say, “You know, if that’s what Father wants to do, there must be a good reason for it. I’m going to trust him.”

So that statement can either be one of great anxiety to people who want to be God in themselves, determining for themselves what’s right and wrong, figuring it all out, or to us who are accepting of our creaturely status—that we’re created beings. We’re not the creator. We have knowledge that God gives us through the scriptures but we don’t have the same kind of knowledge of God nor certainty, the quantity of knowledge of God. And we can rest in that truth or fight against it. It’s up to us.

But that’s what the Bible says over and over and over again. And this is what I cited—the Heidelberg Catechism, Belgian Confession. We can look at the Westminster Catechism. We look at the early church councils. They all said the same thing because it’s what the Bible clearly teaches right here in Ephesians, that the reason for this is simply the good pleasure of God.

Rest in it, children. Rest in it.

You know, we babysit little Ariana S. have her this weekend and she doesn’t know half of what is being done to her. Her “why,” right? You got fifty-year-old people who are wise and understanding. They do certain things. Do we expect her to know what the heck is going on with that? No, of course not. What we expect out of little Ariana is to trust her grandmom and granddad knowing they love her, to trust her parents, and not wait till she figures it all out, but rather to say, “Well, they’re, you know, they’re the authority. They’re the parent and I’m not. I’m just going to trust that.”

Well, it’s a bad analogy because it’s still human and she’ll grow in her understanding, but it’s a very—you know, it’s a somewhat useful analogy because that’s the way it is with God. He does these things for his good pleasure.

Verse 11 says, “He works all things according to the counsel of his will.” That means all things means all things. You know, we got a little picture on the front of the order of worship today of Jesus walking on the water. He stills the waters. All things, the very storms of heaven, as Marshall taught us about last week, are used by God for his people. He’s got control over everything.

And it’s not just when miracles happen. Every bit of the created order is under the control of God. He is sovereign over all things. And I’ve listed various texts in your script, in your handout. He’s sovereign over chance. Dice cast into the lot. Every decision is from the Lord.

The best one I like about this—I mentioned this before—but 1 Kings 22:34. Ahab has got the word of God given to him. He’s going to die in battle. He changes garments with the other king, tries to disguise himself, and then we read this: “Now a certain man drew a bow at random, just by chance. Let that thing go—chance. And he struck the king of Israel between the joints of his armor.”

Not only did he fire—in the providence of God, by chance—at the right guy, but it happened to come down on him. But not only that, but it found the chink in his armor, right? It happened to fall between the joints of his armor. So Ahab said to the driver of the chariot, “Turn around and take me out of battle. I am wounded.”

And then he dies. He dies. God is sovereign over chance.

He’s sovereign over the elements. He’s sovereign over the very hairs on our head. Matthew 10:29 and 10:30. He’s sovereign in terms of our calamities. Oh, it’s important to know that.

Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create calamity. I the Lord do all these things.”

You want to know ultimately what happened in New Orleans or with the tornadoes last week? The Lord God creates calamities. He’s sovereign over them.

Now, we don’t want to, you know, go too deep into that. We don’t want to kind of stretch out maybe some implications. All we want to say is we don’t understand why good people die and why storms happen. But we do trust God the Father. We know he’s sovereign. We know he’s all powerful. We know he’s explicitly in control of the weather. And we know he has said explicitly that his sovereignty extends to calamities.

Ecclesiastes 7:14, “In the day of prosperity be joyful and in the day of adversity consider. Surely God has appointed the one as well as the other so that man can find out nothing that will come after him.”

God has appointed the day of affliction, the day of difficulty as much as he has appointed the day of blessing. He brings to pass great things and he brings to pass calamities. Why? For what purpose? For the pleasure of his goodwill.

Now, we can rely on the character of God. He loves us. He loves the world. We know all that stuff. It’s important to bring that in. But, you know, today what I’m talking about is this is a God who is sovereign and for his good pleasure afflicts the children of men.

Physical handicaps. You know, who made the man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I the Lord?

Can’t get this one wrong. Can’t dispute this. Somebody’s talking in unbelief perhaps. No. God himself says that he makes the mute, the deaf, and those that can’t see the sovereignty of God in physical difficulties.

Evil men in power. Over and over again, God says that these evil men in power are there because of what he wants to do.

In Exodus 4:21, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘When you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh which I have put in your heart. But I will harden his heart. He will not let my people go.’”

God has sovereignty over evil rulers.

Romans 9:18, “Therefore he has mercy on whom he wills and whom he wills he hardens.”

So there’s evil rulers. Why is—you know, Klingowski proposing these bills and pushing them? The Lord God put him there. The Lord God put him there.

Response to the gospel message itself. Acts 13:48, “When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed.”

We preach the gospel. Who’s going to believe it? Ultimately only as many as God has appointed to eternal life.

Why? To the praise of his glory. His purpose is his eternal good pleasure. And the end result is the praise of his glory. And this again is a phrase that’s found three times in Ephesians 1 alone, in verses 6, 12, and 14.

To the praise of the glory of God.

And what that tells me is that if we mess with the sovereignty of God, if we mess with him having an eternal counsel and then working things out in relationship to that counsel, if we reject those things, if we reject that it’s God and God alone who has brought us to life in Jesus Christ, then we are working at cross purposes to the praise of the glory of his grace. Are we not?

Isn’t that what’s going on here? These things are lined up for us to the praise of the glory of his grace. And when the church for the last hundred years in this country has moved away from that and embraced a doctrine of Arminianism, a God who is not sovereign, who doesn’t exercise his powers and authorities, then what we are doing is not pleasing to God. What we are doing is reducing in the terms of what he has called us to do in worship and in our lives. We are reducing the praise of the glory of his grace. Are we not?

Why is God happy with us? He’s not. That’s the point. He’s not happy with evangelicalism that compromises on his word, compromises on the issues, tries to develop a Judeo-Christian ethic by ripping out the Old Testament in terms of its relevance for the Christian or the world today. And he is certainly not pleased with the kind of evangelicalism that says that God will do ninety-nine percent to bring you to him in faith as a Christian, but the last one percent is up to you.

Now, that’s Billy Graham. He’s not at all pleased with an evangelicalism that has its roots in the revivalism of Charles Finney in the nineteenth century who denied completely everything we’re talking about today, who denied that the fall of man made him incapable of living a godly life. And he said, “Actually, yeah, you can live a perfect life apart from the grace of God.” That’s what Finney said.

Wait till we get to the atonement, folks. We talk about the atonement of Jesus Christ in a couple of weeks. Finney denied it. He denied any kind of real atonement of Jesus Christ. And yet to this day, Finney is quoted as some great father of modern evangelicalism. Well, he is. And he’s father of a movement that has turned its back on a sovereign God and denied him the praise of the glory of his grace.

You know, the analogies are out there, right? Well, you know, it’s like we’re out there drowning in the middle of the ocean and we’ve gone down a couple of times and, you know, we’re going to drown and there’s nobody around and God is going to have to go all the way out to us. He’s going to have to send a ship. The ship’s going to have to throw a rope to us. The rope is going to have to get in the right place.

There’s a sovereign God. They’ll say he’s doing all these things. Bringing the ship, bringing the man, bringing the rope, and the rope is thrown just exactly where it needs to be. So I can grasp it.

But the last bit, you see, the grasping of the rope, they say, “That’s your job. And if you don’t grasp the rope, you’re going to hell. And if you do grasp the rope, you’re going to heaven.”

Another analogy. R.C. Sproul has a paper called “The Pelagian Captivity of the Church” in which he gives these illustrations. He’s coming to Portland in October, by the way, I think, to talk about the sovereignty of God. All of us ought to try to go. He talks about another illustration the evangelicals use about this. It’s like you’re not dead. You’re mostly dead in the words of Miracle Max, right?

You’re mostly dead. You’re lying in the hospital. You’re almost dead. You need medicine now. You can’t get up to get it. You can’t even ask for it. God, this sovereign all-working God, has to come into your room. He’s got to get the medicine. He’s got to pour it into the—into the thing. And you’re too weak even to, you know, reach out for the thing he gives you. He’s got to pour it into your mouth. But then what you have to do is either open or close, right? And that’s the part.

They say your opening and closing of the mouth, your reaching for the cord is apart from the grace of God. You’re fallen, but you’re not so fallen you can’t do something to embrace God. And in fact, as Billy Graham said, ninety-nine percent is up to God, but the last one percent is up to you.

Who gets the glory for that? You do. Of course. The scriptures tell us, “No, that’s not what happened at all.”

In chapter 2, verses 1 and 5, the application of God’s sovereignty to salvation is: “You he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins.” And then in verse 5, “Even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Jesus Christ.” We’re not mostly dead. We are stone cold dead. We’re walking dead. We’re walking around doing things according to the prince of the power of the air. But we’re dead.

Bob Dylan, you know, when Bob Dylan says it better than Billy Graham, you know that things are upside down. They’re topsy-turvy. But he said this in his song “Saved”:

“I was blinded by the devil, born already ruined, stone cold dead as I stepped out of the womb. By his grace, I’ve been touched. By his word, I’ve been healed. By his hand, I’ve been delivered. By his spirit, I’ve been sealed. I’ve been saved by the blood of the lamb.”

That’s what Ephesians says. It’s the application of the sovereign God in terms of our salvation. It’s the gospel, plain and simple. And the gospel is that God is sovereign. The gospel is that we were dead in trespasses and sins. And the praise, the glory of God’s grace is diminished when we say we weren’t totally dead. We were only mostly dead.

Why does he do this? That he might show the exceeding riches of his grace.

And when we take an Arminian or a—use this term Pelagianism very briefly and we’ll come back to this some next week as we talk about reprobation. And there was another man in the fifth century whose name was Pelagius and Pelagius was a monk in England and he heard a prayer by Augustine.

Augustine prayed this: “Oh God, command what thou wouldst.” Okay, he was okay with that part. “And grant what thou dost command.”

Very simple prayer. And yet that sparked—Pelagius could not live with the last half of that prayer, that it’s up to God. It’s up to a sovereign God to bring to pass what he has commanded. “Grant what thou dost command me to do by thy grace.” Augustine said, “It’s solely the grace of God that I’m alive in Christ, and it’s solely the grace of God that is the basis for my sanctification.” And he prayed that way.

And Pelagius said, “No, no, you know what is wrong with you, man? There’s no fall of Adam. The church had always taught, church still teaches that when Adam fell, we fell covenantally in him. We’re born dead after that. Pelagius said, “No, no, no, no, no. Man is neutral. He’s a blank slate. He comes out of the womb and he can either choose to do what’s right or he can choose to do what’s wrong. If he chooses to do what’s wrong, that’s bad. That’s sin. He’s going to go to hell. But he can just as easily, apart from the grace of God—God doesn’t have to grant what he commands. God commands us to do things. And we have the power or ability, Pelagius said, to do those very things. We can live a perfect life and go to heaven.”

And in fact, he says some people do it.

Now, that was condemned at various early church councils as heresy. It’s the opposition of what we read right here in Ephesians in very plain words.

Now, since then, people have gotten a little trickier. Evil always gets tricky. And since then, the position has come up that some people refer to as semi-Pelagianism.

Well, we’re mostly fallen. Yeah, we’re mostly no good. We’re mostly dead. But still we have that little ability, that one percent. We need so that God does all this ninety-nine percent for everybody in the world. You see? And then the determining factor is not the counsel of God in eternity. It’s not his sovereign good pleasure to do this or that. It’s not, you know, to the ultimate glory of his grace. It’s not that he’s working out in providence what is decreed to come to pass. It’s not that he’s chosen and elected some based on his love for them. He didn’t look at some people and say, “I love you” and other people, “No, I’m not going to love you.” That’s not it. They say he loves everybody. He died for everybody. He’s reaching out to everybody.

And who does God save? Nobody. Because you saved yourself when you grabbed that rope. When you opened your mouth, you see? The ultimate glory then—who goes to who? It doesn’t go to God. It goes to man.

Why has evangelicalism become man-centered instead of God-centered? Why the institution of the church and worship of God and praise of his name junked for silly little ditties that make everybody feel good because we’ve moved away from the glory of God? We’ve said we can save ourselves.

Oh, you know, God did ninety-nine percent. But the determining factor who—it doesn’t go to God. It goes to man. The determining factor, semi-Pelagianism says, Pelagianism says, Billy Graham says, the determining factor, Charles Finney, the determining factor, you know, all kinds of evangelists sense them, the determining factor evangelical churches today is you.

Isn’t that nice? I’m feeling pretty good. Darn it, I’m here. I chose. Yeah, that’s why I’m up here. That’s why you guys are here today. Ultimately, you’re better than those jerks outside, right? They could have chose. They could open their mouth. They closed their mouth. They could have grabbed the rope. They didn’t grab the rope.

So ultimately, it’s me. And ultimately then, my assurance doesn’t stem from a sovereign God. I can’t rest in that. I can’t hope in that because history is about my choice or not. That’s why I’m going to go out there and try to get some assurance by God. “Remember when I chose? When I grabbed the rope? Remember the time and day?” And go pound a stake in my backyard, reminding myself that I did that. My assurance becomes my action.

You see, this is horrific. This is so opposed to what Ephesians said about God, what he did, and the purpose for what he did, and the end result being the glory of his grace.

No, we live in dark times. And we don’t live in dark times because of some chemical. We don’t live in dark times ultimately because evangelicalism gets squishy on the issues. We can take care of the chemicals. We can take care of the issues. Evangelicalism is bouncing back. We’re trying to get involved with the Christian right.

But we haven’t had the pogo moment. We are this way because of our own sin, our rejection of the Calvinistic sovereign God, clearly taught from the beginning of the Bible from one end to the other and certainly here in Ephesians, repeated over and over and over again.

Oh, we can fix things, but you know, it’s not going to do us any good. I don’t know about the chemical thing. Sure, maybe there’s some chemicals out there. Maybe God’s using that in his sovereign pleasure to inflict more feminism upon us. Could be, right? I mean, it could be. So the problem is we take care of the plastic bottles. Well, it doesn’t work that way.

Amos 5, talking about the day of the Lord: “What good is the day of the Lord to you? He said it’ll be darkness and not light. It will be as though a man fled from a lion and a bear met him. Or as though he went into the house, leaned his hand on the wall, a serpent bit him. Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light for you that reject me?”

And we can, you know, go into our house. We can take care of the lion, change the chemicals, change the political atmosphere, change laws, promote Christian marriage, but that’s not why the judgments are coming upon us. The root reason for the judgment upon this nation is its rejection of the sovereign God that the church fathers taught from Augustine to the Protestant Reformation.

They were divided on lots of issues, folks, but they were completely united on this issue: that God is sovereign in salvation and they were in opposition to the Babylonian captivity of the church as Luther called it, which was a dependence upon man and his activity for salvation. And we are in that same captivity today. We’ve gone back to those bars. We could call it now, as Sproul does, the Pelagian captivity of the church.

That is the root reason why God is angry with this nation. That is the root cause that must be repented of if our children will indeed experience these wonderful days of blessing after all the days of affliction he’s brought properly upon us. And that is the Christian message that will once more convert men and women and bring them to their knees in this country and will usher in a golden age.

There’s no doubt about it. I don’t know if it’ll be America or not, and I don’t particularly care. I’m not an American first and foremost. I’m a Christian. And what I want in this space of land right here in this piece of real estate is people that acknowledge the glory and grace and sovereign good pleasure of God, bow the knee to the sovereign Lord Jesus Christ, and say, “You are sovereign. You have crown rights over every square inch.”

That’s what I want for this land. I want worship services in Oregon City where the power and strength of the sovereign God is preached out and people say, “Amen, what a wonderful doctrine of comfort and assurance. I can rest in that. I can’t rest in my own works.”

Right? That’s what we want and it’s going to happen because God says it will. He brings affliction so that we would repent of our sins, humble ourselves before him, go through those days of prayer and fasting that Marshall talked about before Dunkirk and other battles like Midway.

You know, those were the solemn days of prayer and fasting, humbling ourselves before God for ignoring his sovereignty, his glory, and his grace. And that’s when God moves. And he doesn’t care, you know what would we worry from then? If God is on our side, who can be against us? He moves the weather for heaven’s sake. Can he do? Can he deliver us from the kind of political difficulties we have now? Oh, yeah. No problem.

This is the sovereign God who does whatsoever he pleases. May he in his grace grant what he commands of us a bowing of the knee to his sovereignty.

Let’s pray.

Father, please, please forgive us for our sins. We know that this charge is laid right at our own hearts. We know that we are all too tempted to think somehow it is the arm of our strength that accomplishes the things round about us. That somehow we can through our own abilities do what you have commanded us to do. Forgive us, Father. Grant us, Lord God, broken hearts, contrite ones, acknowledging that you, in your grace, must indeed grant that we do these things you’ve commanded of us.

Help us, Father, to once more be a church that is committed to these basic, fundamental, bedrock truths of who you are in relationship to our world. Grant, Lord God, revival once more, but only after, Father, you’ve granted repentance for how we’ve denied your glory, your grace, the good pleasure of your will. We’ve traded away the beauty and riches of this text from Ephesians for a mess of pottage.

Grant us, Lord God, humble and contrite hearts before you. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.