I wonder what kind of television or newspaper or media adverts grab your attention. One of the various genres of adverts in our own time are those that present pictures of "before" and "after." They seem to me (although I am not an expert in advertising) to be much beloved of orthodontists, plastic surgeons, and those who seek to sell you weight-control programs. The whole concept is that you look at "before" and you think, “Am I as ugly as that? Are my teeth as twisted as that? Am I so out of shape as that?” and then you see the other picture which shows the same poor person after the orthodontistry, the plastic surgery, or the weight program, and they have become beautiful beyond their wildest imagination. The whole point of the advert is to make you think, “Am I really as bad as that?” Or if you feel as bad as that, and perhaps you really are as bad as that, you think, “Could I possibly look like that?” It’s the power of seeing the ugliness of before and the beauty of after.

And there is a sense in which that is the pattern of Paul’s teaching here in the whole of Ephesians 2. It’s the pattern of his teaching individually. “Here is what you were before you came to faith in Christ – dead in trespasses and sins, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the earth. You thought that you were free, but you were actually a slave.” You were (in the words of a famous 1960s song) “a dedicated follower of fashion.” But now in Christ (verse 4) “God has made you alive. He has set you free.”

And when he turns to the second half of this chapter, he does exactly the same thing. Exactly the same gospel principles, but now he applies them not only to the Ephesians as individuals, but to the Ephesians as a whole community. “Once,” he says, “you were strangers and aliens, but now you are fellow citizens and members of the household of God.” Then and now. And part of the reason he does this is to remind us of what we were or would have been by nature, and to set against that dark background both individually and corporately what we have become in Jesus Christ through grace, in order to teach us this very fundamental lesson of the Christian life that we always need to be revising in our thinking: that by nature we were worse than we possibly imagined, but by grace life is better than we could ever have dreamt! We have been raised up through Jesus Christ and now, he says, marvelously as a community those who were separated and alienated and strangers and hopeless and godless in Christ Jesus (verse 18) have been brought near to the heavenly Father and become members of the household of God.

Much though we sometimes resist it, we need to look at what we are by nature to be able to appreciate the wonderful blessings that God has given to us by grace. And here he is spelling out some of the privileges that are ours together as a community, because we have been brought to a living faith and to a new life in Jesus Christ. I want us to draw out this morning four obvious things that the apostle Paul mentions here for us. What are the privileges, the community privileges that we enjoy because we are Christian believers?

A People to Whom Christians Belong⤒🔗

Number one is this: that by God’s grace we have a people to whom we belong. Verse 19: “So you are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints.” Fellow citizens with the saints! I love it in the United States when the president of the United States, making a broadcast, says, “My fellow Americans.” Doesn’t that make you feel something special is true of you? It ought to! And here the apostle Paul is saying (do you notice how he puts it so marvelously?), “Christ has won peace for us, and now he comes and he preaches peace to us.” And it is as though He gathers us as not just our President, but as our Lord and our Saviour. And he says, “Now my fellow citizens, in the kingdom which I have established, here are the privileges that belong to you as a citizen in the kingdom of God. And the first of them is that you have a people to whom you belong!”

Last Sunday evening Doug James was drawing some of the parallels that there are between the requirements and the privileges of being a green card holder in the United States and being an alien resident in this world as a Christian believer who belongs to another world. Well, I can speak from a little experience, having held a green card. You know, if you are a green card holder there is one thing that you do not experience. What you actually experience as a green card holder, if I may say so, is (among the privileges) you have taxation without representation! You do not have the right to vote; you do not have the right to hold public office; you have taxation without representation. But you see, the apostle Paul is saying here that when you are a green card holder among the people of God, you have the very reverse of that - you have representation without taxation. He says earlier on in Ephesians 2:8, “It is by grace that you are saved.” That is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. And he gathers us into this community and says to us, “My fellow citizens in the kingdom of God and of heaven, I am giving to you a community of people to whom you now belong!”

And do you notice the way he puts it in verse 18? He says, “In this community, by what I have done in the cross through my gift of the Spirit to you from heaven, you have access to the Father.” Remember that occasion in the book of Esther when, trembling and uninvited, Esther came into the throne room and wanted to speak to the great king, and the king held forth his golden scepter as the sign that she could speak ­– that she could ask for whatever she needed? And this is what the Lord Jesus Christ says the Father does for His people, as He stretches out His golden scepter and says to us, “You belong here. Ask for whatever you need, because you belong to my people. You who were once not my people are now my people!” You know, the most common title for poems written by teenagers in the late 20^th century was this: Who Am I? And it was one of the great signs to the Western world of the confusion and the struggle of the coming generation, because they didn’t know who they were or where they belonged. And here is one of the ways the gospel of Jesus Christ comes to meet us in the particular shape and fashion that our alienation from God has taken in recent years – it gives us a people to whom we can belong. And it means when we gather together there is some sense in which we feel, “If I belong anywhere in the universe, this is where I belong.” A people to whom we belong.

A Family with Whom Christians Live←⤒🔗

But we have already got hints here that Paul is teaching us something in addition to that. Not only a people to whom we belong, but a family with whom we learn to live. It is one thing to be a citizen in a great nation; it is another thing to be a member of a great family. And Paul speaks about this; he says, “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens and…” as well as being fellow citizens with all the saints “you are members of the household of God.” He has actually been drawing this teaching out very slowly throughout the letter to the Ephesians. In Ephesians 1:5 he had spoken about how we are adopted into this family. This is not a family to which we belong by nature; it’s a family into which we are brought only by grace. And not only are we brought into the family, but (Ephesians 1:11) we are given a glorious new inheritance. And that’s (Ephesians 2:18, as we have seen) we have access to the Father.

And you see that in the teaching of Jesus this was the great privilege that he wanted his disciples to see and to enjoy, because he knew it would transform their lives! He says, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, “If you only understood that He is your heavenly Father, then you would be done with all hypocrisy and you would be done with all anxiety, because your life would be released from these things, knowing that He was your Father.” And now Paul takes this a little further. He says, “But if he is our Father,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “then He has brought us together into a family with whom we learn to live. As our Lord Jesus said to his dear disciples in the farewell discourse in John 14: “I will not leave you as orphans.” I will not leave you as orphans.

A friend and his wife have gone to Russia to adopt a little girl, and she will not be left as an orphan. They have gone that enormous distance, as some of you have also done, in order that a little boy or a little girl might not be an orphan. And Jesus Christ, the gospel is saying to us, has come this vast distance into our lives of sin and need in order that we might not be orphans but be brought together into His family! And so this is a dominant picture in the New Testament: that church is family. That we are brothers and sisters together, and that this is the disposition that we have to one another: that we treat each other as we know we would and should treat our brothers and our sisters. So there is a kingdom into which we are brought as citizens. There is a family in which we learn to live together.

A Home in Which Christians are Secure←⤒🔗

Thirdly, says Paul: there is a home in which we become secure. He says, “Think a little about this family of God that you’ve been brought into.” “Members of the household of God” (verse 19), but this household is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone” (verse 20). What a home to live in! What kind of foundations does your home have? Well, says the apostle Paul, we have been brought into a family, into a home in which we become secure. It is a safe place to live by God’s grace, because its foundations go down through the apostles and the prophets into Jesus Christ.

You know, in the south there is such great pride and esteem for history, and from time to time in different parts of the south I have been taken to towns where there are these great antebellum homes. And I suppose that if you lived in one of these great antebellum homes you would have this tremendous sense of history. You would show your house with a certain pride and tell the story of those who had lived in the house. And it means something to our fellowship that as a fellowship we have foundations that are antebellum. Not every church enjoys that privilege, but our foundations go back two hundred years ago and more. But you see, the apostle Paul is saying that Christians belong to a house which is even more secure in its foundations, because they go back and back and back and back into Jesus Christ. My brothers and sisters, like every true fellowship of Jesus Christ we are an antebellum big-time, aren’t we? Big-time antebellum, because we belong to the church, to the family of God that goes back to Jesus Christ himself. What a family to belong to!

And therefore a house, a home in which we and those who come to us should be able to feel secure by the way we treat them with grace. You know, you don’t find that; increasingly you don’t find even that lingering element of gospel power in the world in which we live. You just need to drive on the highways to see how true that is. But here in the fellowship of God’s people, strangers who come among us – timid members who are among us – they are to feel secure, because they are welcomed in Jesus Christ, and because the foundations go so deeply down, and because in the family (as Paul says in Romans 12) the members outdo one another in honor. That is, to every other member we say, “No, you first. I count you as more significant and important than myself.”

And you see, this is an atmospheric thing, isn’t it? It is an atmospheric thing individually. You meet people and you instinctively recoil and you say, “I could never feel secure in that person’s presence.” And the same is true of the whole church fellowship sometimes. But the great thing that grace does is it so transforms the atmosphere that is created by the love of the family members for one another that people want to be there. Even if they don’t yet understand what it is that creates this new atmosphere, they sense, “I could be secure here by God’s grace.”

A Community in Which Christians Grow in Worship←⤒🔗

Fourthly, says the apostle Paul, in the Church of Jesus Christ we are brought into a community in which we grow in worship. A people to whom we belong. A family with whom we learn to live. A home in which we become secure. And a community in which we grow in worship. Ephesians 2:21: “In Christ this whole structure” (and it is a people structure), “being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” “Oh,” we say, “Lord Jesus, I thought you were turning me into a little cottage in the mountains, where the air would be cool and the streams would be pure and life would be pleasant. But since I became a Christian I feel that you’re banging me around, and I feel your hammer and your chisel, and you’ve set your stone-masons upon me. I don’t understand what you are doing!” And He says, “Don’t you understand, my child – I’m fitting you not into a little cottage in the hills or in the mountains to which you can retreat from time to time; I’m actually building you to become part of a temple that I’m creating downtown in the city centre, so that my glory may shine.”

And within that context He says, “I’m doing this so that I may build you together as a community in which you grow in worship so that you will be built together into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit.” Now what is he talking about there? It is the same thing that he talks about in 1 Corinthians 14 when he says that strangers come in and they sense that this people – now they were meeting in perhaps public places, but not in buildings like this – but when people came in among this new temple that Jesus was creating out of people they felt the secrets of their hearts were being exposed, and at least inwardly they fell down on their faces and they said, “Surely God is in the midst of you!” God is in the midst of you! And it is this that the apostle was teaching the Ephesians: that when God is in the midst of us and we sense something of the weightiness, the gracious weightiness of God’s presence and His goodness and His grace bowing us down in worship, we don’t feel adequate rightly to praise Him. We certainly don’t feel good enough to experience the blessings of His presence. And He weighs us down with the grace of His presence, and there is a sense in the community that God is among His people. And our hearts break out in love and affection and service for all those who have shared in the sense of God’s presence among his people. And it seems, amazingly, almost natural for us to honor each other before we honor ourselves and to love one another with a brotherly and sisterly affection and zeal, because we’ve been bowed down in worship and praise before the infinite glory of our heavenly Father.

And you know, one of the results of that is this: that it would almost break our hearts to have to go anywhere else, because here we are home, here we are secure, here we are family, here we have grown in worship. It would almost break our hearts to go somewhere else. In 1772 John Fawcett, an English minister, was called to one of the most famous Baptist churches in the English speaking world. And he and his wife had all the furniture and all the books and all the family on the wagons, and they were just about to hear the old words “Wagons ho!” And as the people he had served and loved gathered around him – and they were weeping their hearts out – Fawcett and his wife began to weep, and he turned to his wife and he said, “I can’t bear to leave these people.” In the months that followed he wrote a hymn: “Blessed be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”