The Kindness of God
Ephesians 2:1-10. One of the greatest passages ever written.
Susan and I were on vacation this past week with some dear friends, part of which meant I was not in the pulpit at Grace Church this morning. Instead, my good friend and fellow pastor, Jim LaCroix, had the privilege to preach the Word and feed God’s people.
With God’s help, the brother crushed it.
It’s not often, as a preaching pastor, that I get to sit with my wife through a worship service and just receive the preached Word. While I would never trade my calling for anything in the world, it is, at the same time, a sweet treat to sit and soak in what God has placed on another’s heart. I was deeply encouraged and refreshed in many ways this morning by brother Jim.
He reminded me of the greatness of God’s gift to us in the Messiah.
He slowly moved through Ephesians 2:1-10—a stunning and magisterial passage in Paul’s letter—highlighting the wonders of our salvation: grace, mercy, immeasurable riches, gift, rescue, and workmanship.
He gave us ample reasons and gentle exhortations to express profound gratitude to our Father, gratitude that must naturally rise from our minds and hearts when we contemplate, in Paul’s words, what God has done.
And he connected it all to some exciting plans for the fall for our church family — to be the kind of place where this salvation might be celebrated, appreciated, experienced, known, and shared in community.
Again…wow…great job Pastor Jim!
Jim also encouraged us to come back to the text later, to keep meditating, keep prayerfully pondering, so that we might grow in our faith in the coming, remaining five months of 2025. It’s an easy exhortation to follow, because like the Holy Spirit will do differently for each person in a Sunday gathering of God’s children, he gripped my attention and contemplation with one particular aspect of the text this morning.
First, let’s look at the whole section that Pastor Jim exposited —
Ephesians 2:1-10, Christian Standard Bible
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins 2 in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. 3 We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclinations of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, 5 made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace! 6 He also raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might display the immeasurable riches of his grace through his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—9 not from works, so that no one can boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
It was at that turn in the ten-verse sentence…look at it there at the beginning of verse 4…that powerful conjunction taking us from the negative of vv. 1-3 to the postive of vv 4-10…it is right there that the Apostle Paul and Pastor Jim really started to get my attention —
“But God…”
Isn’t grammar amazing!? Just one little word can change your life and turn your world right-side up!
“But”
And what follows in the positives of vv 4-10 is this long, tightly connected description of what God has done for us. At one point in the sermon, Jim said, “Pastor Matthew could probably spend a year preaching through this text,” mining it for the wealth of wisdom and delights to be found here.
He’s so right!
(and maybe at Grace we’ll preach through Ephesians after Exodus!)
But I need to finally get back to that one particular aspect of the text I mentioned earlier….here is what the Spirit made pop right off the page this morning, here’s what he wanted me to see about God…
His kindness.
It’s right there in verse seven. Do you see it?
And just look at everything that leads up to it —
God made us alive, with the Messiah;
God raised us up with him,
and seated us with him,
in the heavens,
in Messiah Jesus;
God did all this,
SO THAT in the coming ages — in the forever and everlasting age of the kingdom of God, in a new heavens and new earth —
he might display the immeasurable riches of his grace,
through his kindness,
to us,
in Messiah Jesus.
What started to form in my mind as Jim vividly held this text up to us this morning was this massive storehouse of God’s grace — this multi-faceted and I’ll-never-be-able-to-plumb-the-depths salvation from the Father and the Son.
And when it says that he will display the riches of that, I started to see this never-ending warehouse — you remember that huge warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie? the one that held all the treasures collected from around the world? like that — this infinitely long storage facility where God will keep drawing our attention to another masterpiece, another aspect, another display of his grace. But it will be waaayy better than a warehouse, probably more like one of the amazing museums at the Smithsonian where you see great works of art displayed.
And then Paul informs us that the means to all of that, the entry point, the reason we get to walk into that treasure-trove of the display of the riches of his grace is God’s kindness.
In other words, God isn’t stingy.
You see, this isn’t a case of the Father against the Son. It is not that Jesus lays down his life for us, saves us, rescues us from our sin (vv.1-3), so now God has to punch our ticket to enter the museum of his mercy.
No! Emphatically…no!
God is doing this through his kindness.
The word here, χρηστότητι, is rich in meaning, communicating the quality of being warmhearted, considerate, gentle and sympathetic. God sees lost souls headed towards an eternity of darkness and damnation, and it is his kindness that flexes to usher us into the displays of the riches of his grace in Messiah Jesus.
How I love the Bible! The flow of Paul’s argument, his Holy-Spirit-inspired description of God’s work in salvation, the logic of this, the details of this, the preciseness of what is ahead of us…well…it’s absolutely riveting! This Word is worthy of my attention, it warrants my contemplation, it deserves prayerful and persistent pondering.
Thanks, brother Jim, for faithfully pressing our noses into the text.
I think I’ll go stick mine back in it right now…
