Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” Ephesians 1:3-6

Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” Ephesians 1:3-6

by Vermon Pierre, Lead Pastor

Some reminders and further thoughts from last Sunday’s sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” (Ephesians 1:3-6):

1. God chose you to be his son. Always guard your heart against apathy or indifference about that statement. Before there was anything, before there was even time, God set his heart and mind on the believer, determining to graciously love us to the point of death and sacrifice. He was willing to risk the perfection within himself so that we might join him in his perfection.

2. God loved us in spite of ourselves. You could say that God had the file on us beforehand. He knew how naturally disobedient and destructive we were. He knew how totally opposite were from him, preferring selfishness, ugliness, greed, and lust instead of his grace, beauty, righteousness and love. God knew all of this – and still he decided to adopt us.

3. Being in Christ means that believers have a fundamentally new identity. “In Christ” is our last name now, and will be our last name forever. This identity gives meaning and purpose to every experience of life. Those who have “weak” identities in our city (like for example the poor, the immigrant, the orphan, the single parent) have an identity that will never perish or fade, an identity imbued with all the forever blessings that are possible in this universe.

4. Being adopted by God means we now act like our God and our new Father. God choose us for himself so that we might be like him, “holy and blameless.” Certainly one example of how God acts is in how he  loved us with a gracious, predestinating love. In what ways are you choosing to graciously love people, whoever they are, or even in spite of who they are?

5. From Henry Alford, “The end, God’s end, in our predestination to adoption, is, that the glory,—glorious nature, brightness and majesty, and kindliness and beauty,—of His grace might be an object of men and angels’ praise: both as it is in Him, ineffable and infinite,—and exemplified in us, its objects.”