We’re in Ephesians 2:11-22.

¹¹ Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— ¹² remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. ¹³ But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility ¹⁵ by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, ¹⁶ and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. ¹⁷ And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸ For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹ So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, ²⁰ built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, ²¹ in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. ²² In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:11-22 ESV)

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven. We wait for you. We wait for your justice, your mercy, and revival. God, you reconcile us to you. You give us hope when we were hopeless. You are full of mercy; you are abundant in love. Your grace fills our deepest longings. Your kindness is immeasurable. God, receive us today, wherever we are, however we are, so that we can embrace you as our father.

Help us see your son with eyes wide open, with ears unclogged. Lord, we want to be a part of your household. We know that we have indelible freedoms as part of your household. Freedoms that weren’t earned through battles or wars, but given to us by you, because we are your beloved children. Lord, help live as your beloved child, united with your son. Give us boldness to glorify you and point the world to your love. We pray all this in Jesus. Amen.

Last week, we concluded by saying: Our new lives with Christ are gifted to us so that God’s glory would be on display through them as his masterpieces. As God’s masterpieces, we must live full of purpose everywhere we do life: at home, at work, and the relationships we have with others in between.

This week, we’re taking that idea further by moving from individual to collective. Our individual identity and purpose must complement our collective identity and collective purpose. Our Christian faith was never meant to be lived alone. In fact, our Christian faith was always meant to be lived out in community, with others united to God by the salvific work of Jesus Christ.

Here’s the problem, this isn’t happening in our world, is it? We see families break up. We see churches split. Denominations are currently are fracturing. If we’re being real honest, most days we can’t even get our own bodies to agree with what our minds are set to doing!

To live purposefully while collectively complementing the purpose of a corporate community is countercultural and is a radical departure from how we live out our everyday lives. I understand your hesitation to live in cooperation and collaboration with other people. Other people are broken and untrustworthy, and they will let you down or stab you in the back the first chance they get.

Some of us have been plotting an exit strategy from a relationships that may go too deep! Some of us keep an arm’s length from truly knowing anybody. You want to be free and unhindered by the rights, struggles, and issues of other people. That’s why you keep an undated resignation letter as draft email in your outlook.

Despite the potential conflicts and hurts of living our faith entrenched with others, our new lives with Christ are exponentially enhanced when surrounded by a multitude of God’s other masterpieces.

If that is hard to believe or accept, let me deconstruct the worldview of individualism so you can really see what individualism is. Individualism: You do what you do, eat what you eat, and think the way you think because you can and are. Well, if you think about why, you can and how you are, you realize that you are shaped by the collective activities, agendas, and movement of cultural politics, ethnicity, and social contracts being applied to your being. Unless you’re naked and alone in an undiscovered part of the world, simply, your individuality is a product of your surroundings, and the people around you. We’re not as independent or as self-reliant as we believe or are taught. None of us are actually blank slates, nor our lives blank slates for us to create from scratch.  

This is where we pick up our passage today in verse 11.

¹¹ Therefore [you who are God’s masterpieces] remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called “the uncircumcision” by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—

Let me stop there for a minute to provide a little context regarding the people Paul is writing to. The church in Ephesus was ethnically diverse. In fact, a majority of the church was comprised of non-Jewish believers. Non-Jewish people were referred to by the Jewish people as Gentiles. The physical distinction Jewish people had versus non Jewish people was the fact that Jewish males were circumcised 8 days after they were born. The Apostle Paul is playing on ethnic politics and sarcastically drawing out this point by using the terms uncircumcision and circumcision because nobody is really checking! Family, if we’re not careful, we will innately categorize people through the lens of fleshly biases. We’re going to see this in more depth a little later, but the categories we put people in are not the categories God puts people in. Verse 12.

¹²remember that you were at that time separated from Christ,

Here’s my first point.

Point 1. Remember who we once were (vv11-12)

Regardless of the color of skin, the families we were born to, the economic status we have, the religious rigidity we follow—every single person, Jewish or non-Jewish person is sinful before a holy and righteous God, deserving of death because our sins condemn us. You see being separated from Christ leaves us guilty of sin and trespasses. Without a new life with Christ, we are condemned by our sins and trespasses to eternal death.

There is no such thing as a sin that doesn’t condemn people to death because sin is treason against God and people, everybody sins. The Bible says in 1 Kings 8:46, “there is no one who does not sin.” Sin doesn’t have varying degrees of unacceptableness before God. It’s ALL unacceptable to God and his expected standard of holiness. We need to understand who we once were, not from our perspective, because we tend to sugarcoat things and excuse ourselves. But to the standard held by God for us.

God is holy, so his people must be holy and everything short of that is sin and it doesn’t matter how you are categorized because those categories are constructs “made in the flesh by hands.” And anything made in the flesh, separated from Christ has the same result—death. Jew and Gentile, circumcised or not were separated from Jesus’ salvation and excluded from the life of God. That is who we once were. Continue reading with me in verse 12. Adding to our Christ-lessness, we were once:

alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise….

If being Christ-less wasn’t bad enough, Paul says at least, if you grew up Jewish, you at least were part of the commonwealth of Israel and members of God’s covenants with the nation of Israel. So even if not having Christ wasn’t an issue, at least being Jewish, you knew what you were entitled to, you knew what to do before God. But, as a gentile or a non-Jewish person, you were double alienated because you never knew God but you were also a foreigner, ineligible to the promises for his people.

Most of us here are not Jewish by heritage. The rights, blessings, and way of life of the people of God were not accessible to us. We couldn’t suddenly become Jewish no matter how hard we tried. We wouldn’t be accepted as Jewish either.  

If you are an immigrant or a child of an immigrant, you know this feeling of double alienation all too well. You neither belong to the people or culture you have ancestry in, nor do you really have belonging in the United States and fit into the way of life here. Its not just the way you look, the language you dream in, or the food your mom makes that gives you comfort, the majority cultures on either side never accept you… that’s double alienation. You are not known, nor are you blessed by same cultural rights, blessings, and way of life of the people in the country you’re living in. So, what did you do as a response to that alienation? You spent your life either fighting to fit in or fighting to be known and that is the subconscious motivation that drives you.

My parents were Korean immigrants to the United States in the late 70s, they were rejected by American society, but they were also rejected by Korean society in Korea because they left. Most of my childhood and adolescence was spent trying to reconcile where I actually belong. So I worked, trying to get acceptance from other Koreans or trying not to be the stereotype that my non-korean peers put on me.

All of us, our former spiritual lives, before we accepted Jesus in faith, was all an attempt to obtain the rights belonging to the ideology you longed for; or you worked hard trying to be known, so you rebelled to forge your own way. You know that made you a person:

having no hope and without God in the world.

We were once was hopeless. Hope, is the projection of goodness in our present and our future; it is the expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. Our former way of life was hopeless, that’s why many of us accepted Jesus Christ as our savior. We didn’t have hope for any goodness in our lives. If you’re still searching for hope, stop searching because Jesus Christ is hope, he will give you the life you were looking to have. Don’t continue to live without Jeus because only when God intervenes and gives us new life can we have hope to truly live!

If that wasn’t enough, we were also godless. That phrase “without God” is where we get the word, “atheist” from. Atheism, in the broadest definition is the absence of belief in the existence of deities. Functionally, if we are living without knowing or concern for God – then we are atheists. We are sinners because we live without God.

We once were dead, alienated from God and his people, hopeless and without God. Verse 13.

¹³ But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

You see that? This is the turning point from how and who we once were to now. BUT by the blood of Christ we are brought near to God. Verse 14.

¹⁴ For [Jesus] himself is our peace, who has made us [Jew and Gentile] both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility ¹⁵ by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, ¹⁶ and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

Point 2. Unity with God and with others are from Jesus Christ (vv13-18)

Jesus’ blood shed on the cross reconciles us to God. Jesus took our place so we would be reconciled with God. Sinful physical, economic, social, ideological activities, differences, and preferences are no longer the source of alienation we have with God or with one another because of Jesus’ sacrifice for us killed the hostility between God and people. Alienation with God is no longer possible because the fleshly barriers that once stood in the way of unity with God were removed by Jesus’ own perfect flesh being nailed to a cross.

Our sins, which was living without regard to God, alien from his ways, whatever they were, didn’t hinder Jesus from dying for you. He did not put conditions on his sacrifice. Jesus didn’t reconcile us to God after we addressed our sins. Jesus chose to die because we didn’t have hope for reconciliation without his sacrifice.

• That is the good news of Jesus!
• Jesus is the peacemaker!
• Jesus is the reconciler!
• The cross of Jesus changes reconciles us with God and to each other!

The reason we hang this cross here is not for aesthetic. It’s hanging as a reminder that our reconciliation with God, our new life, our peace, cost Jesus, God’s perfect, righteous son, his life! Our unity with God and with one another are not from ideals and categories that change, but in the unshakeable reality that Jesus would do this in real life because of love for you and me.

I’m going to stop right here for a moment because I know some of you are hung up on the phrase: “by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances…”

This phrase doesn’t mean, “oh nothing in the Old Testament applies to me because Jesus ‘abolishes the Old Testament social contracts, like the ten commandments, or Mosaic law, and the moralistic code.” You see, the commandments, the mosaic laws, and moralistic codes in the Old Testament reveal the character of God, they reveal the nature of humanity, and most importantly, the centrality of faith to a right relationship with God.

What Jesus abolished, as he made peace between us and God by dying on the cross, was the hostile purposes to which human sinfulness puts the Mosaic law’s good purposes to drive people faith in God to denying people access to God entirely. You see, what was happening was that because gentiles were not circumcised, they were being denied access to God, but Paul is saying all those rules about access to God don’t apply because Jesus is now the access for everybody. Paul was referring to the literal walls standing in the temple of Jerusalem as he was writing this. Josephus, the 1^st century Jewish historian, tells us that the walls of the temple were set up to deny access by Gentiles to worshipping God in the same way Jewish people would worship God at the temple. Attached to these dividing walls of hostility at regular intervals were messages in Greek and Latin, warning that the Gentiles must not proceed further lest they die.

With Jesus’ death, those barriers are gone. So there is no longer politics, ethnicities, social contracts created by the flesh that distinguishes Jews or Gentiles. Christ’s blood has obliterated the old, long-standing division between Jew and Gentile by dying on the cross for all who believe in him.

This is so important for us as Christ followers, especially now. You can pick any topic around any subject you want and there will be two equally hostile Christian sides trying to cancel one another and disunifying what Christ unites for us on the cross: LGBTQ, immigration, healthcare, political parties, race relations, women’s rights, abortion, death penalty, taxes, name your topic and issue etc. These are not non-Christians cancelling Christians, these are people who confess new life and unity with Jesus cancelling each other and bringing disunity.

If an “us against them” mentality describes our actions and our relationships, then we are still living and acting the way they once were, “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Jesus Christ’s death gave us peace, reconciling us to God as one person, not two. Jesus killed the hostility.

We cannot be united with God, and not united with one another. Logically and theologically that can’t happen. When Jesus died on the cross “by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, he created in himself one new man in place of the two, making peace, and reconciled us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” That type of dividing hostility cannot be justified and must be resisted. We cheapen his death if our actions and relationships with one another and toward one another are not washed by the blood of Jesus on the cross.

Division because disagreement on topics and issues is not the unity we have through Jesus’ blood. Unity is not ideological consensus. Unity, as we read it here, is tying the welfare of others to us. In this case, Jesus tied our eternal welfare to himself. He died so we could have life. So, we could be reconciled with a holy God. If, in faith, our welfare is tied to Jesus, then we are part of the “new man” Jesus created in his death, his church. The individuals making up the collective church body, then must be united. Our welfare and the welfare of others are tied to each other.

Some of us right now, have created hostility in our relationships with others. We treat their welfare in contempt because of our sin or their sins. We are all sinners. We all need to repent before God, repent to those you have hostile relationships with and seek each other’s welfare and be united with God together. Before you send nasty emails to me this week about confronting people with sin, and disaffiliating with the sinful, etc. I want you to know that Jesus confronted people in their sin all the time, but he didn’t stop pursuing their welfare. So, you too should continue to confront your brothers and sisters in sin, but do not stop pursuing their welfare in Christ. Jesus continued to move toward sinners, opening his arms wide to them, full of love, as they turned from their sin.

So we, united to one another together with Jesus in God pursue each other, confronting our own sins and the sins we each bear, so our can be holy, like our God is holy.  

• Confrontation does not require division or hostility. Nor does it mean we stop pursuing their welfare.
• Debate doesn’t require division or hostility. Nor does it mean we stop pursuing their welfare.  

Division, hostility, and alienation is not from God, it’s from our flesh, it’s sin; but unity is from Jesus Christ. Verse 17.

¹⁷ And [Jesus] came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸ For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. ¹⁹ So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…

Big Idea: Reconciliation gives us an irrevocable identity and purpose

Jesus calls all people, regardless of age, backgrounds, ethnicities, sins, and stories to be a part of the family of God and have unity with one another. If you are here today and have ever been marginalized, estranged, and broken because you were a stranger or alien: you are being called to draw near to God, your identity is in Jesus Christ. His cross affirms you as God’s own; you are not a stranger or an alien. You are a fellow citizen with the saints and members of God’s household. This birthright is ours as a result of our new life paid by the blood of Jesus Christ.

In the family of God there is no first class, no second class, all are equal, everyone is known and rooted in life with Christ. Fleshly distinctions and categories in Christ mean nothing! All of us in faith, by grace, are accepted into the family of God part of Christ’s body. So live as Christ – holy and acceptable to God. Do what Christ does. Be pure, and blameless as our redeemer and savior is pure and blameless. If you’re wondering how, then know that the Spirit of God who gives you access to the Father moves you to be sanctified, to condemn sin in our lives and bring us more into likeness like Jesus.

• If we accept Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to reconcile us to the father, then we are all part of Christ’s body.
• And if Christ came to preach peace and bring peace; then, as Christ’ body, we must pursue those alienated from God with Christ’s peace.

Now ask yourself honestly, do our relationships and actions preach the peace of the gospel and pursue those alienated from God? Because if we’re part of Christ’s body, and if Christ came to pursue those alienated from God with his peace, then

Point 3. We have a part and role in God’s growing family (vv19-22)

Verse 20.

[Our lives are] ²⁰ …built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, ²¹ in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. ²² In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The key phrases here are “Jesus himself being the cornerstone”, “being joined together” and “being built together” in God and for God. We are a part of what God is taking upon himself to build and grow. Isn’t that wonderful? God brings us in and joins us with what he’s doing. God builds on you and around you. This is a beautiful purpose he has for our lives.

We’re not isolated individuals who have access to God. We are integrated individuals in the family of God. We must take church and commitment to the church body seriously then. If we’re not living as part of the church, then we’re not living out our identity and purpose to intended designs God has for us. We can’t fulfill our part and role if we’re not looking past our noses. Only when we’re living our faith in the context of community, with love for one another, will we fully see what God is joining together in him and building together for him.

We have a part and a role to play in the sanctification of the lives of the people around us and others have a part and role to play in the sanctification of our lives. We are to grow together as a temple of God, to worship God. We are being built together so that he can dwell with us in spirit.

• This is irrevocable identity: a temple of worship to God.
• This is an irrevocable purpose: a spiritual dwelling place for God.

Two ways you can start living into what God is building in you and through you in the context of a church for God.

First, actually get plugged in and commit. Look at your bulletins for a moment, there is an event for every single person in the month of July. Events for men, for women, for families. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what stage of life you’re in. The reason we have all these events is not because we’re bored. It’s so you can discover your part and your role in God’s growing family. To be sanctified like Christ, to sanctify others like him.

• If you’re a dude, then Men’s BBQ night.
• If you’re a woman, Women’s Community night.
• If neither of those days work, then Dinner on the Lawn, every Tuesday except the 4^th of July.

Second, after the service, you know what, do this now, allow the cross of Jesus confront your fleshy categories. Go find somebody you’re not sitting with and get their number. If Christ broke down distinctions based on race and ethnicity, political social ideologies, and comfort preferences to bring them into the family of God, then we, as his body should embrace and act as Christ would. Passionately pursue others in Christ, loving them to glorify the crucified savior who unites us together and draws us to God. Be a part of their lives and allow God to grow us and build us together to be his dwelling place. This week, your goal is to text that person you got the number for and make plans to invest in the lives of people who are different than you, eat with them, hang out with them, sanctify one another.  

Let’s pray.

Father, we are united to you by your son Jesus. He is the cornerstone of our unity with one another. He is the reason we can be drawn closer to you. Lord, we are so grateful that we have access to you in the Spirit you provide to us. I ask that your peace overcome all of us, that the hostility we have from our former life can be just distant memories pointing us to the glory that is in being part of the new man created in Jesus.

Lord, I ask that you continue to give us hope, courage, and draw us closer and nearer to you as we boldly love the way your son loved us. We thank you for Jesus’ shed blood. We thank you for adopting us into your household. Let us be joined ever so closely with you now and in the future. In Jesus name. Amen.