Last week I watched an amazing piece of video of a man who talks very fast.  Really fast.  He could probably preach this sermon in around three minutes.  Unfortunately for you, he’s not preaching it, but I am.  But this motor mouth, whose name I don’t know, recited all 66 books of the Bible, the seven books of the book of Mormon, all 44 Presidents of the US, the 50 states, and all the winners of the Oscar for best picture since the Academy Awards began in 1928 in 1minute and 53 seconds.   Incidentally, the holder of the Guinness world record for fast talking is a New York woman named Fran Capo.  She clocked 603 words in 54 seconds.  Now St Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians; but if he’d spoken it he may have come close to that record.  Because he begins it like he’s selling livestock at an auction.  He gushes.  The first thirteen verses of this letter are all one sentence.  He begins one thought and then goes off onto another.  He’s so excited by his subject that each word sparks off other thoughts and on he goes until after a couple of hundred words he comes up for air. 

And his subject matter is exciting and magnificent.  It starts with the most wonderful description of what God has done for Christians.  Paul says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the spiritual realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  For he chose us in him before the beginning of the world to be blameless and holy in his sight.  He predestined us to be adopted as his children, according to his pleasure and will.”  I’ll just break off there, because that’s more than enough.  Paul tells his readers that God has blessed them with every spiritual blessing, chosen them before he’d even made them, and adopted them into his family.  And he did it all because he wanted to – because it gave him joy to do all this.  Sometimes it’s possible for us as Christians to get distracted from the truth of what Christ has done for us.  We can get preoccupied with our failures and weaknesses and our struggle and temptations that we forget just who we are. 

We become a bit like spiritual Cinderellas with amnesia.  Cinderella-with-amnesia wakes up the next morning and she goes back to cleaning the house and acting as a salve of her step sisters.  And she forgets all about the ball and the prince and that dance.  But occasionally she spots this glass slipper and she ponders it and she has a vague memory of that night.  The truth, of course, is that Prince Charming loves her and is, even now, conducting a thorough search of the kingdom to find the woman whose foot fits the other glass slipper, the one she left when she ran out of the castle on the stroke of midnight.  Yet she goes on with her daily life as if she were not loved.  So she sweeps the floor, washes the clothes, cooks the meals for her ungrateful stepsisters, all the while failing to live up to the fact that someone regal and majestic has chosen her will not rest until he has brought to his palace and pledged eternal love for her.

And that is how it often is for us as Christians.  God has done all wonderful things for us – “blessed us in the spiritual realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  For he chose us in him before the beginning of the world to be blameless and holy in his sight.  He predestined us to be adopted as his children” – all the things Paul writes about in the epistle reading.  Yet we go right on living in the hovel, sweeping the fireplace and living a life of drudgery at the beck and call of things that don’t love us but dehumanize us. 

Now in the book of Ephesians Paul goes on to give some good, challenging instructions about how the Christians are meant to live.  But he only does that after he has laid this foundation.  The temptation is for us to think ‘well, here are all these instructions that God has given us in the Bible, and we should try our hardest to follow them, and if we do then we’ll reach a point where we will deserve God’s forgiveness and become secure in his love.’  But Paul says that the truth is the other way round.  We don’t follow Christ in order to receive God’s love and forgiveness; no, we receive God’s love and forgiveness in order to follow Christ.  We don’t live out his instructions in order to be acceptable to him, we live out his instructions because we are acceptable to him.  Our living for God comes as a result of God’s accepting, loving and forgiving us, not the other way round.  And that is such a better way of trying to live the Christian life.  We do it because we are loved, not because we want to become loved. 

The Christian life is all about being what we already are.  We are put right with God, now we are to live like it.  We are forgiven, now we are to live like it.  We are adopted into God’s family, now we are to live like it.  Those things didn’t happen as a result of our efforts or commitment.  They happened as a result of Christ’s effort and commitment – his going to the cross and his devotion to us.  And it is essential that we get it that way round.  The target for us is not way out there somewhere that we have no possibility of reaching.  The target is within our grasp; in fact we have already attained it.  Paul says that God has already blessed us with every spiritual blessing.  Not that he will at some point in the future or when we die or are in heaven.  We have all we need right now to be able to live good lives for God.  All we have to do is realise the incredible resources that God has poured into our hearts. 

So we have a tremendous hope.  It seems that the Ephesians Christian lacked hope.  They had all these wonderful things as gifts from God, yet didn’t realise it.  So, in the second half of the reading, Paul tells them that he’s praying for them.  He’s praying they will have ‘wisdom and insight, and a growing knowledge of God and his plans for them’.  This, he says, will give them hope and confidence.  They had so much but they didn’t have hope.  The missing piece was the missing peace.  And I think that’s a really important lesson for us.  Sometimes in the life of faith we defeat ourselves because we expect to fail.  We can look ahead at our day and think that a bunch of temptations are going to come my way, and I’m bound to give in to them.  I’ll get impatient or lose my temper; I’ll snap at someone in the supermarket or be critical of a co-worker.  But I suspect that if we face our day with the assumption that we’re going to be overcome by whatever temptation or mood happens to turn up then we probably will be.  In a sense we can cause conflict in our families and even our church by expecting it.  Maybe you know this pattern: you predict that you’re going to have friction with someone, and so in an effort to protect yourself from the hurt associated with the falling out, you behave defensively in your words and the way you conduct yourself, and that defensiveness causes the falling out you were trying to avoid.  Do you know the kind of thing I’m describing?  Now, this is not pop psychology, and I’m not talking about the power of positive thinking.  God is still in charge and he calls the shots.  We don’t have the power to determine everything.  But if we approach our day with hope in Christ then I believe that we will see God at work in our lives.  If we approach it with gloom, predicting that everything is going to go badly, then we can contribute to that actually happening.  So, Paul would say, have hope.  We can face today with confidence that we don’t have to give in to every temptation that comes our way.  We don’t have to have conflict with people around us.  We don’t have to be hurt by life’s circumstances.  We don’t have to

Why?  Not because we are masters of the universe and lords of all we survey.  No, on our own we can’t do much at all.  We can have hope and confidence because of Christ.  God has blessed us in the spiritual realms with every blessing in Christ.  He has chosen us and adopted us.  He has given us, as Paul says, “incredibly great power”.  He has given us his Spirit.  We fight from a position of strength, but only in him and never in our own accomplishments and skills, no matter how great they might be.

In April 1996 Sotheby’s auctioned some 566 articles belonging to the late Jackie Kennedy.  This was a big event.  40,000 people attended the pre-sale viewing.  Not surprisingly there were some very nice items for collectors to bid on.  But there were also some fairly ordinary things.  Bear in mind that this was a big family, and all the really nice stuff and the thingts with special sentimental value were inherited directly by members of the family.  For example, a journalist bought two belts worth an estimated $400 for $7,475.  A young couple who had been planning their wedding decided instead to spend their savings on two pairs of ear-rings predicted to sell for $300 at a cost of $16,100.  Some books estimated to fetch $400 sold for over $18,000.  A fake pearl necklace, valued at $200, went for over $211,000.  The delighted auctioneer sold President Kennedy’s humidor for $574,000.  And three small photographs of portraits of the presidential couple (not the portraits themselves, but photographs of the portraits) fetched $68,500.  Even JFK’s golf clubs went for over a million.  Why?  Why were people willing to spend their fortunes on some secondhand costume jewelry?  Why spend stupid money on things you can get for a few bucks in an antique shop?  Well because, to those buyers, these things had a value that went way beyond the actual items.  There was a meaning to these objects.  Helen Goldenberg of Sotheby’s put it this way, “This auction is merely a vehicle to get a piece of the magic, a piece of the dream.  This is about a woman who was once the most admired woman in the world.”  If my Aunt Gladys had owned those old spoons they would have just been sent to the charity store when she died.  But because they belonged to Jackie Kennedy they were auctioned for thousands of dollars.

What made these nick-nacks valuable was the person who’d owned them and the passion of the buyers.  And that explains why God has blessed us, chosen us and adopted us – because he sees us as more than secondhand, damaged, past-their-prime objects.  He sees us as his children – he loves us with an intense passion.  God looks beyond our mistakes and frailties.  He sees past our broken promises and our good intentions we didn’t followed through on.  And he accepts us anyway.  And he thinks we’re worth it.  On Christmas night I preached about the worth of Christ’s birth.  How we can give up all we have in order to gain Christ, and it would be worth it.  The life he gives is worth any amount of sacrifice we can make for him.  But this morning I want to say that this is reciprocal.  We are so valuable to God that he thinks we are worth any amount of sacrifice he can make.  And so he did.  He made the ultimate sacrifice of himself, in the person of Christ, in order to have friendships with us.

And so this morning at the start of a new year I want the message we take home to be a positive one.  God has blessed us with all we need.  We can face the day with hope that he is in charge and has given us a future and the promise of a good year lived following Christ.