Hope Blog

▶ 1:12:50

Matt began not with the household code but with a scale, because he wanted the room ready for what was coming. Our default settings, he said, are not wise, pure or loving — so scripture challenges us, and the challenge is where the life is. He passed along a preacher’s image he has never forgotten: Jesus holding a sword to a person’s heart and saying come. “It’ll pierce you, but there’s life. He might wound us, but there’s healing.”

The scale: hate it, tolerate it, love it

▶ 1:14:33

Picture any passage on a line. At one end, being pricked by it and — honestly — hating it. At the other, cherishing it, because those words once cut through the fog of your life and left God’s fingerprints all over it. In between sits the largest group: the people who tolerate it.

His examples were deliberately uncomfortable. Leviticus 18 on uncovering the nakedness of close relatives has a target audience that hates it and needs it, another that has never once been tempted and is glad it is there, and a third that simply accepts it as probably a good idea. Then Ephesians 4:32 on kindness, 4:31 on bitterness and anger, 4:25 on truth-telling, 5:17–18 on drunkenness. Each has a different audience feeling the point of the blade.

Which is the argument for reading the whole thing. “If we just gravitated to God’s wisdom when we liked it, we would have these little redacted Bibles” — skinny things. Matt’s own joy in preaching straight through a book is that it forces everything out into the open, including the parts nobody would have chosen.

What the culture says a marriage is for

▶ 1:18:27

Before opening Ephesians 5, Matt catalogued the reasons our culture gives for pairing off, drawn frankly from movies and pop songs rather than from scripture. You complete me. I love the way I feel when I’m with you. You make me happy. I like the way you look. I like me better when I’m with you. Nice tone, he allowed. Not a great message.

Then the reverse list, the reasons given for splitting: I deserve someone better, I want someone who makes me happier, I’m not excited about you anymore. Both lists answer the same question — what do I get out of this? He was careful not to overcorrect. God’s wisdom is not the mirror image of the world’s; it runs on a different axis entirely. Nobody is being told to marry someone whose whole vibe they cannot stand.

Philippians 2, and the Tiger Woods problem

▶ 1:21:40

Great theology until you apply it to dating and marriage, at which point most of us slide back down the scale. Matt named the dodge he had preached on a month earlier and called the Tiger Woods principle: we affirm humility, then smuggle pride back in by redefining it as accuracy. True humility is knowing what I’m really worth — and then we quietly inflate what we are worth and go looking after our own interests under cover of honesty.

The answer is the model Paul gives next. Philippians 2:6 — he “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped” — does not mean Jesus was less than God. It means he declined to exploit it. He knew his rank and his worth and did not descend as a chiseled golden warrior; he came as an actual baby, and let people spit on him, call him demonized, and slap him.

The curse, and what Paul does to it

▶ 1:30:06

Ladies first, Matt said, and read it without softening:

Then the obvious question: where is the sting? It stings because being lorded over by a man — particularly a man who is not good — feels like degradation. The fear has a name, and it has an address in scripture.

▶ 1:31:07

Matt questioned “contrary.” The Hebrew simply says your desire shall be to your husband, and the word for desire is strong and rare — it appears again in the next chapter, where sin’s desire is for Cain and Cain must rule over it (Genesis 4:7), and once in the Song of Solomon, where the beloved’s desire is for her lover (Song of Solomon 7:10). Imagine longing like that and getting domination in return. That is the curse, and that is what people brace for when Paul starts talking.

▶ 1:32:56

But watch the two halves. Paul says submit, not be dominated — and submission that is willingly offered ends the pecking-order fight outright, because one person has said, in effect, I’ll see you at the bottom. And the very next thing Paul says is to the husbands: love your wives. The unreturned desire is returned; the rule is replaced by love. Both halves of the curse, inverted.

Matt added a boundary and did not bury it: never to anything immoral. And the willing part is the whole point. “It’s a gift. It isn’t taken. It can’t be taken. It has to be given.”

Where the husband’s sting is

▶ 1:35:04

At which point, he said, the men relax — this message is brought to you by the men’s ministry of Hope Chapel — and the women wonder where his half of the cost went. So read it closer.

“As Christ loves the church is not just in degree, but in manner.” How did he love? Matthew 20:28 — he came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. So the husband’s goal is not to be served.

▶ 1:36:48

Men have long counted working hard at a job as their laid-down life. Jesus did not only provide financially for the church. He also took a towel and washed his disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5) — and Matt was quick to insist that this was not yet a ceremony. In a foot-washing service today he would feel he was doing you a favor: showered, socks, air conditioning, feet fine. Then, it was an actual chore. Find the parallel in your own house: the gross job that has to be done regularly and nobody wants.

He noted who Jesus aimed that at — religious men like himself, the ones who wanted the long tassels and the fancy greetings in the marketplace and the special chair at the feast. Jesus made fun of them.

▶ 1:39:30

If both are racing downward properly, there is no oppression and no degradation available. Paul keeps going: Ephesians 5:28–31 — love her as your own body, since no one ever hated his own flesh — and the “one flesh” language, Matt pointed out, is used in the Old Testament of kin, bone of my bone. You are making a brand-new family.

A bad picture of God ruins the model

▶ 1:41:01

Here Matt named the failure mode he thinks does the most damage. Husbands are told to look like God — but many of us painted God’s character years ago from the template a father or stepfather who mistreated us left behind. Children project their dad onto God; grown men then work backward from that projection to decide what a husband should be. A vicious cycle.

What scripture actually says is that leaders in Christ’s body never lord it over anyone. Humble service, doing the things nobody wants to do, to the point of embarrassment. So, husbands: your wife is going out of her way to honor Jesus — not primarily you — by living a life of deliberate submission. What would it look like for you to find your way all the way down to the bottom with her? To serve her in ways so humbling that if she did not honor and respect you at home, you would be humiliated?

▶ 1:43:02

At home, Matt said, we get the privilege of theatrically acting out Christ and the church — children watching, before they can even read, the message of Christianity played out in their own living room. And yet Paul repeats the commands in verse 33, so it is never only analogy.

Children, and servants, and masters

▶ 1:44:05

In the baptism classes he and Holla teach, this is the point they save for the end. Keep obeying your parents, because the analogy runs on into your heart. Make a habit of saying no when your parents ask something and you will have built a reflex — I don’t really want to do what you said, I’m going to do what I said — waiting there the day your heavenly Father asks. The same boundary applies: never into anything immoral.

▶ 1:45:40

Then the workplace. Ephesians 6:5–8 tells servants to obey with a sincere heart as they would Christ — not with eye-service, as people-pleasers — knowing that whatever good anyone does he will receive back from the Lord. Nobody, Matt granted, goes above and beyond at Walmart because they love Walmart. But that is how we would serve Jesus, and Paul says we can serve that way, for the sake of what it does in here. And it cuts upward too: Ephesians 6:9 — masters, do the same, and stop your threatening, because their Master and yours is in heaven and shows no partiality.

Could we learn to love it?

▶ 1:48:08

Matt closed by gathering the three points — Paul inverts the curse, he pricks both sides, and it looks like a race to the absolute bottom — and then pushed past tolerating. Notice that Paul did not say the same thing to wives and husbands. He said different things. Could we get to the place where we love that men are not women and women are not men, rather than merely accepting that the scriptures talk that way? “The way God made you is good… Together, we are the image of God, and we’re not the same.”

Same question all the way down the passage. Could we learn to love that children obey their parents instead of ruling the roost? Could we learn to love serving an employer the way we would serve Jesus — and could employers learn to love treating their employees knowing that Jesus is watching, with no partiality in him? Where each of us sits on that scale, he said, is between us and Jesus. Next Sunday: the armor of God.

▶ 1:12:01

Matt opened by gathering up where Ephesians has been. Paul keeps saying in him — the blessings are not adjacent to Jesus, the promises are not yes and amen somewhere in his general vicinity. “Don’t feel too comfortable being near the church, mixed in with the church, knowing people who know Jesus,” Matt said. “In him is where you belong.”

Transaction or transformation

▶ 1:14:07

Every culture, past and present, runs the same instinct: how do I get you off my back, God, or how do I buy your favor. Pray more, read more, be loved more. Matt refused the premise. “He has left it all on the field. Even when we were his enemies, he died for us. He’s given us his whole self. He incarnated, took on human flesh — these are things he’ll never undo. That’s how all in he is.”

So the good works of the next four chapters are not payment. They are what people do who have been transferred out of one kingdom into another — and even the prohibitions are part of the rescue. Matt tied it to a shepherd leading sheep away from rushing water they are terrified of: “When God says no to sin, that is grace. It is love and it’s freedom.”

Put off, put on

▶ 1:16:57

The expectation is fingerprints — evidence, fruit. “Whoever the Son sets free is free indeed,” and that freedom makes itself known. We have been carried from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the beloved Son (Colossians 1:13), and the thief who comes to steal and kill and destroy has no business setting the terms of a life Jesus came to make abundant (John 10:10).

Matt pressed on where fruit actually comes from. Not from a prayer said in college, not from a baptism thirty years ago. “Even now, ten years later, twenty years later, thirty years later — abide in him. That’s where the promise is.” The old self was crucified with Jesus (Ephesians 4:22–24); what counts now is a new creation, free to do the good works God prepared beforehand (Ephesians 2:10).

▶ 1:19:54

He set that beside Romans 12, and returned to it later in the message, because it names something we only get to do on this side of glory:

Serving him when your body hurts, when you are confused, depressed, persecuted — none of that will be available after this life. “We get to offer him a literal sacrifice now. We won’t have that chance later.”

What repentance looks like on a Tuesday

▶ 1:20:59

Repentance is a turn, not an apology with feeling attached. And it is yours to make — “I can’t reach into your heart and grab the steering wheel,” Matt said, though he added, thanks be to God, that we have a high priest who can reach those inner places.

▶ 1:22:25

Paul is quoting the Old Testament here. “Speak the truth to one another” comes out of a passage where God announces he has purposed to do good to Jerusalem (Zechariah 8:16) — the command is a blessing, not a mood. Matt had no patience for the alternative’s reputation: “The culture would like us to think the kingdom of darkness is cool and edgy. It’s super duper lame. Lies are lame.” He worked the edge cases anyway. A surprise party has a deadline and intends the truth, so it is not a lie. What passes between a husband and wife behind closed doors is private, not deceit. Withholding vital information purely to benefit yourself is lying. And unfiltered stream of consciousness is not truth-telling either — “a mature person knows to live by the truth and to carefully guard their mouth.”

▶ 1:25:29

“Be angry and do not sin” echoes Psalm 4:4, with its instruction to ponder on your bed and be silent. Anger will come; anger is not inherently sinful. Your response is the part you manage. Matt admitted he does not read “do not let the sun go down on your anger” as a curfew on sleep — some things really are enraging — but Paul lists anger again among the things to put away (Ephesians 4:31), and he had looked up whether it was the same word. It is. The distinction he drew: anger happens to you; stewing in it and gripping it is what you do with it.

▶ 1:26:26

On Ephesians 4:29 — talk that builds up and gives grace — he named the categories plainly: foul language (“that one is tough for me”), inappropriate humor, bad-mouthing someone who is not in the room, and Christian gossip, which is ordinary gossip dressed as a prayer request. Pray for Sister Susie, you know, because of her husband. And then, five minutes later, a very small actual prayer.

Forgiven much

▶ 1:28:01

Two of Jesus’ stories sit under that verse. The servant forgiven an enormous debt who then goes and throttles a man over a trivial one (Matthew 18:23–35) — and the woman with the alabaster jar at the Pharisee’s table, where Simon answers his own question correctly and convicts himself doing it (Luke 7:36–47). Whoever has been forgiven much loves much.

Then Matt turned the “us” of forgave us back on the room. “Lest we forget, the us of ‘Christ forgave us’ is not cream-of-the-crop humanity. What he has forgiven this room — the secret stuff, the obvious stuff — is an immense magnitude.” Which is why the kindness runs downhill: God was tenderhearted toward us, so we are tenderhearted toward each other.

▶ 1:31:02

That is exactly how Paul pivots — “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love.” Matt lingered on the title. “I don’t know if you’ve really cherished it recently, but you are beloved children of God.” And to the objection everyone was already forming — but have you seen these people — he had two answers. Christ died for us while we were actively his enemies. And: “How else could we learn unconditional love if all we’re ever asked to do is love people who meet all our conditions?”

The one you didn’t look at

▶ 1:33:37

Sexual immorality, impurity, covetousness — Paul lists them together and calls the covetous man an idolater (Ephesians 5:3–5). Matt noticed which word our eyes go to. Let them, he said; that one is there. But let them also land on greed, which is harder to see and is not confined to people who look wealthy. Money is not the root of all evil; the love of it is a root of all kinds. “The same zeal we should have to root out sexual immorality should be embraced for rooting out greed.” Filthiness and crude joking get replaced, and the replacement is specific: thanksgiving. That is repentance again — not an empty mouth, a differently full one.

You were darkness. You are light.

▶ 1:35:01

Matt flagged how intense the grammar is. Not walked in darkness — were darkness. Not walking in light — are light. He traced the thread back to Isaiah, where the remnant is told that raising up the tribes of Jacob is too small a thing: “I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6). Then to the one who claims that title outright — “I am the light of the world” — and who turns and hands it to his disciples (Matthew 5:14). Hidden in Christ, the ancient promise gets fulfilled through us; it is his light on us that makes us light.

Step one is being seen

▶ 1:38:50

This was the turn of the message, and Matt ran Paul’s logic in reverse. Anything exposed by the light becomes visible, and anything visible is light. So if you do not feel like you are in the light, do not start by trying to shine. Start by becoming visible. And if you want to be visible — be exposed by the light.

In practice: time with him, his word, confession one to another, opening up about where you have been lying. “You might feel more free gripping tightly on those dark spots you’re trying to keep hidden. That’s not freedom. That’s a prison.” He anticipated the flinch, too. If it were a random guy asking, he would not trust the random guy either. “Jesus is not a random guy. He’s a tender, kind, humble and lowly shepherd. You can trust him.”

He was careful about the other half of the command — exposing the unfruitful works of darkness is not a license for the people whose whole ministry is hunting for imperfections to take a ministry down. It means shining Christ’s light, not collecting scalps.

▶ 1:40:53

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead” is likely an early Christian hymn, and Matt traced its roots: Isaiah’s bleak admission that the nation had writhed and given birth to wind, followed by the promise that the dead shall live and those who dwell in the dust shall awake and sing (Isaiah 26:18–19) — God’s victory over the last enemy. And then:

On purpose

▶ 1:42:02

“Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise.” Matt read “look carefully” as premeditation. It is the opposite of going with the flow of whatever is around you — the same posture as the angry person who stops to reflect before answering. And Paul keeps circling back to discerning the will of the Lord, which Matt took as a hint that it is worth doing on purpose rather than by accident.

▶ 1:43:12

Being drunk means being under an influence, so Matt asked what it looks like to be under the Spirit’s. He told on himself twice. Once he got off a bus so full of joy he felt giddy, asked the first man he saw whether he wanted to come to church, and the man — waiting at a bus stop, presumably to leave — simply followed him to campus worship. Another time, by the eggs at Walmart, he knew God wanted him to speak and it came out like a boy failing to flirt. The man said, let me stop you right there, I don’t want to talk to you. “That’s kind of a relief, because this wasn’t going well.”

Both, he insisted, are good. “It’s so good when it’s easy. And it’s also so good that we get to serve him when it’s hard, because that’s a gift you give him.” He ended where he started, with the identity rather than the assignment: because we are, after all, children of light. That is who you are as beloved children.

▶ 1:12:26

Hope has been working through Ephesians, and Matt opened by recommending you read
the whole letter out loud in one sitting — slower, but your eyes and ears are both in it. Last
week’s ground was Paul’s prayer: that the Spirit would strengthen them powerfully, that Christ
would dwell in their hearts, that they would be rooted and grounded in love with strength to
comprehend it, and that they would be filled with the fullness of God. Paul measures three things
in a congregation — faith, hope and love — and the Ephesians’ faith and love were already
noteworthy. What he wanted to stir was their hope, which is why he keeps returning to the end goal.

1. What is this all going toward?

▶ 1:14:05

Matt’s illustration came from a Ronald McDonald House his mother’s friend helped build:
cabinets hung so high you couldn’t reach the bottom shelf, electrical outlets placed exactly where
the bathroom mirror goes. All of it had to be redone. The purpose of a cabinet is to put things
in. The purpose of an outlet is to plug things in. If you are only slapping something together
you can forget that; if you are actually going to use the building, you cannot.

So when Paul turns from that prayer to talk about good works, it looks like a pivot and is not
one. It is the same subject, approached from the destination.

2. Worship will not need to be commanded

▶ 1:16:06

Picture the new Jerusalem, resurrected in power, standing before the Lord of glory — and an
angel patrolling with a bat: all right, worship him, it’s been five minutes. Matt’s
parallel was a high school principal assembling the boys in the gym to inform them they are
morally obligated to develop a crush this year. You could try to stop that. It is not going to
stop.

“You hang out with him with relational depth, you’ll find him so beautiful, funny,” Matt said.
He will show you every place he intervened in your life, and put on display what it meant for him
to disarm the rulers and powers. “You could have some angels try to hold you back from worshiping.
It’s not going to work.” Sports fans do not cheer out of duty; they lose their minds. In a kung fu
movie you spend two hours waiting for the villain to get it in the face, and when he does, the joy
is not an obligation.

We love because he first loved us
— not as a cascading chain of obligation like the drive-through line where everyone feels stuck
buying for the car behind them.

3. Love is an action, not a vibe

▶ 1:20:52

Faith, hope and love are shown. You hope actively in a person; you show faith with your
choices; you show love with verbs.

Peak love is sacrificial action. And the wedding passage —
1 Corinthians 13,
written in context about the gifts of the Spirit — reads as a list of decisions once you notice
it. Patience has to be shown when longsuffering is required, or it is only a self-description.
Kindness given when everyone is already nice to you is not kindness. Not envying, not boasting,
not insisting on its own way, not being irritable or resentful, bearing all things, enduring all
things: “You show these things. You don’t just declare it.” You do not, as Matt put it, decide
that patience is a vibe and hashtag it.

▶ 1:22:28

God works the same way. Imagine arriving in glory and being handed a scribbled card —
“Hey, welcome. Thanks. Love, Jesus” — because he is busy, he has a lunch, he has a
conference call tomorrow. He does not phone it in. He gave his life and he maintains and stays
with his church.

▶ 1:24:03

Which brings the third point back around to the first: you can begin tasting and seeing that
he is good now. His love does not wait for the resurrection, and neither does ours. In a world
Matt called the dark outer regions of despair and ignorance, relationship with God is usually sold
as a crushing obligation. But there is no angel on patrol in the new Jerusalem making sure you
love him back. You are simply going to want to.

4. Walking worthy — Ephesians 4

▶ 1:25:47

The “therefore” reaches back to the God who does far more abundantly than all we ask or think.
Matt described what he expects at that meeting: ugly crying, being held, and being reminded of the
times when darkness looked more powerful and he showed allegiance anyway. “I will be so happy he
noticed — and I’ll be wishing I had been able to do that more.” Even the crown you are given for
those things you will hand straight back. What else did you bring to heaven? What does he need?

Our lives here are short — grass in a field, here today and gone tomorrow — and the honor is
that in the middle of sorrow and difficulty we can still choose to serve him sacrificially. That
is the frame for humility, gentleness and patience, every one of which is an action and none of
which can be declared. And the unity Paul is after is not organizational: “Our unity — you, me,
others, people we’ve never met, those who have gone before us, those who come after — our unity is
in him.”

5. The gifts are callings, not personality types

▶ 1:32:26

Jesus descended to the place of the dead, died for us, and is enthroned now to fill all things
— “there will be no part of his kingdom without him,” no phoning it in, a very present shepherd.
At his ascension he handed out gifts, and Matt went after what he called a sacred cow: those five
are not a personality quiz. Read the prophets and they are obviously not the same man — the
hardcore voice in the wilderness, the weeping prophet, the musicians, the desk-job prophets, the
aggressive justice prophets, the ones who volunteer and the ones who keep saying no. Same with the
apostles: Jesus prayed all night before choosing them, which he would hardly need to do if John
and Peter were the same person on the inside.

His objection to the personality-type reading is that it makes God passive — souls dropped like
chips on The Price Is Right, and whatever slot one lands in becomes the church’s
governing structure. “No. Jesus is present. He’s paying attention. He’s choosing people. He’s
raising them up.” Sometimes people you would not expect, because it is his project.

6. Grown up into the head

▶ 1:36:00

We are not carrying rocks from one side of the yard to the other to stay busy until we die.
Matt read the goal line slowly and then made the obvious deduction: if the standard is the full
measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, then we still need apostles, prophets,
evangelists, shepherds and teachers — which is to say we still need a very active, present Lord.
And the purpose of that maturity is protective, so that we are
no longer children tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine,
by human cunning and deceitful schemes. Ask who the victim is in that verse: us. He is looking out
for us.

▶ 1:38:21

Then verse 16, and Matt asked the room to notice the subject of every verb:
Christ is the one joining and holding together every joint, equipping, making each part work properly, making the body grow.
He is not seeking balance. He wants health, vibrance and abundance. It is his body.

7. Repentance is a verb

▶ 1:41:34

“This is no lame, heavy-handed bundle of shoulds,” Matt said. It is not righteousness by law or
by deeds; it is an invitation to freedom, and it means the old self has no power over you —
whoever the Son sets free is free indeed.
The alternative Paul describes is not a rule you broke but a way of living that wrecks people:
futile minds, darkened understanding, hardness of heart, callousness.
God cares that we not walk that way. This is a relational faith with a real Jesus at the center,
not the best-marketed twelve-step program available.

So repentance is not the apology. “Repentance might involve confessing your sins or saying
sorry, but repentance is not saying sorry. Repentance is not just naming it.” You were speaking
falsely; God convicts you and sets you free; now you
speak the truth with your neighbor.
The clearest case is the thief.

Taking what is not yours at other people’s expense, turned all the way around into working
extra hard so you have something to give away. That is a great deal more than “sorry, I took
things I shouldn’t have.” The same shape governs
Ephesians 4:29–32
— corrupting talk replaced with words that build up and give grace, bitterness and slander put
away, kindness and tenderheartedness and forgiveness put on, “forgiving one another, as God in
Christ forgave you.”

8. Why do any of it?

▶ 1:44:47

Asking why we should be kind and forgiving, Matt said, is nearly as strange a question as
asking why we should worship him when we are standing in front of him. Have you met him? When the
love of Christ reigns and we have been
transferred out of the kingdom of darkness,
we tell the truth instead of lying and give instead of stealing because it is right and beautiful
and it heals instead of harms.

He was careful not to let that land as a word game — the cheerful “you don’t have to,
you get to.” It is more than that. Like the principal and the boys: it is happening.
Romans 12:1
puts a whole life on the altar, and one of the most beautiful things we can give him is
sacrificial service offered here, where it is painful and confusing and draining.

Verse two explains verse one. Imitating God means following the Son who took on flesh and gave
himself up for us — which we can do now, with actions and choices, walking in light instead of
darkness and letting his love run through us to other people. The message closed with Paul’s own
prayer prayed back: that the Spirit would strengthen the inner person, that Christ would dwell in
our hearts, that we would be rooted and grounded in love with strength to comprehend it, and
filled with the fullness of God.

▶ 1:31:08

Matt opened not with the text but with the neighborhood. Hope Chapel grows
mostly by organic connection — a friend bringing a friend — but he wanted the room to know
what deliberate outreach has looked like: a professionally edited book of testimonies called
Reset, mailed to about a thousand homes around Crestview; monthly postcards to
people who move in; and a prayer-walking team that blesses houses along Choquette, Woodrow
and Ruth. Training requirements: none. “It’s not paid training, but it’s a good experience.
You could put it on your CV.”

Praying for houses, and a new idea

▶ 1:34:02

Occasionally a house sticks with him. He writes down the number, prays over it at home,
and then writes the family a letter explaining why they are getting a letter from a stranger
— with a book from his own shelf that matches whatever came to mind while he prayed, joy or
the fatherhood of God, his business card tucked into the chapter he recommends, gift-wrapped
by his assistant Debbie and hand-delivered. “I spooked one person. I was like, I’m not
selling anything.” The new idea, offered for the congregation to pray over: A-frame signs
on the sidewalk with a large QR code linking to the exact moment a member’s testimony begins
in a Sunday recording, one word summarizing the story. The signs are already in his office,
unassembled.

The god who needs feeding

▶ 1:36:18

Matt has been reading the Iliad, where a Greek or a Trojan promises Athena a
herd of calves in exchange for help in a fight. That instinct is not confined to Homer. If I
do something you want, you owe me something I want. A disaster arrives and we assume we
have offended: I missed one quiet time — is that why the car broke down? “This kind of
business negotiation relationship with God is really natural for the human mind to fall
into. It’s not healthy, but it’s really natural.” And it is self-focused twice over — about
me, and a projection onto God of exactly how I would behave if someone forgot my birthday.

▶ 1:38:18

Ask a Babylonian why humanity exists and you get the Enuma Elish: quarreling
gods, a father who wants to kill his noisy children, a corpse split to make the sky, Marduk
crowned king — and at the very end, in a couple of lines, human beings made to feed gods who
were tired of the work. Matt was not mocking it. He was pointing out that when we back into
religion by instinct, we end up worshiping ourselves. Which is why the Bible reads, in his
word, almost extraterrestrial: even in the sacrificial system, nobody was feeding God. He
was not famished. He is not weak, no longer able to save with a strong arm.

The recap: what Ephesians has already said

▶ 1:41:07

Hope has been walking through Ephesians slowly. Matt recommended the opposite as a
supplement: read it in one sitting, the way you read a letter from your mother or your boss.
It is roughly the length of a long email. Then he rewound to the opening.

“Before him” is not God merely being aware of us at a distance; it is standing in his
presence. And the stated purpose of his will is adoption — “not to fill out an I-9 and do
things for him for the rest of time.” He is the responsible party. We are not adopting him.

▶ 1:43:00

Access again — he wants us standing before him, and not as knickknacks. Not a new
assembly of people only, but one new man, so intimate that it is truly said of us
that we belong to Jesus’ own body. Matt named the false humility that shrinks from that:
“Oh, if only I could be in just the borderlands of heaven, at the edge. Just the waiting room
is fine for me.” No. “He wants you all the way in. The burning hot, ooey-gooey core of it
all, his very own self.” Which is why Ephesians 2:19–22
calls us members of the household — again, not butlers — grown together into a holy temple.

What a temple is actually for

▶ 1:45:12

Not a heavenly Uber Eats. When Moses’ tabernacle was finished, God overshadowed it and
came in with his glory — and he had not been homeless before that. He owns the cattle on a
thousand hills and the galaxies besides. The tabernacle was a hangout spot, for lack of a
better word, a place he invited people to meet him. His presence was already everywhere, and
then it was all the more there, until the priests could not stand to serve. “That’s a
relational display of glory, not fireworks for no reason.” Which is why an offering matters:
bringing an offering brings you. Matt credited that line to Steve, learned Steve had
it from the Bible, and passed on Geno Hildebrandt’s joke about preachers — quote the man the
first time, “I’ve heard it said” the second, “as I always say” the third. “So that one’s mine
now.”

A tangent about grace, and it is the point

▶ 1:47:47

At Ephesians 3:1
Paul writes “for this reason” — and then does not say the reason. He detours, and picks the
phrase back up at verse 14. Not a copying error, Matt said; a Pauline tangent, and a worthy
one.

Paul did not apply. He was harassing the church when the appointment came. Matt pressed
the implication: the church is not staffed by the alpha, the wealthy, the smartest, the best
speakers. “That’s exactly what you would think if this was a human enterprise run by humans
for us to do something for God as if he needed it.” And the unsearchable riches of Christ are
not the opportunity of a lifetime to work off your debt “by making license plates in the sky
for God forever.”

The word has a life of its own

▶ 1:52:01

Nor are these dark times unprecedented. “It’s been dark. As long as there have been two
brothers of the same parents, we’ve been killing each other.” And in that world he spoke, he
redeemed, he built a church out of people who were harassed, robbed and killed. Matt stacked
the evidence: Acts 6:7
says “the word of God continued to increase” — odd phrasing, as if the message itself were
alive. Colossians 1:5–6
says the gospel is “bearing fruit and increasing” in the whole world. God’s plans do not
collapse for lack of a volunteer; he raises up servants from the small, the weak and the
outside — even from among his opponents.

A human enterprise could be imprisoned and intimidated into oblivion. Poor, confused,
threatened, martyred — the church is still here.
1 Peter 1:23
says we were born again through the living and abiding word of God. “We do bear a message,
but in truth, that message bears us.” And Paul, who outworked every other apostle, filed the
credit elsewhere: “by
the grace of God I am what I am.”

So what is all this grace for?

▶ 1:56:26

If he is the power and the brains behind the operation, why not send everyone home? Back
to the plan, hidden for ages in God:

Not primarily to whip us into shape, and not even primarily to launch a movement with a
new way of life. Something cosmic, far bigger than any of us — and, Matt noted dryly, you do
not always look around a church and think the wisdom on display is impressive. That is
rather the point: the wisdom being displayed is God’s.

“For this reason” — the sentence Paul finally finishes

▶ 1:57:33

At verse 14 he returns to it, and what he asks for is power — strengthened with might
through the Spirit in the inner being. Then comes the why, in three parts. Why would you need
supernatural power poured into you? For a golden retirement? “Do you need power for that?”

One: Christ dwelling in your heart. Two: strength to comprehend a love that surpasses
knowledge — and you need the Spirit for that, because the natural mind flinches from a love
that large and files it under gobbledegook. Three: filled with all the fullness of God — and
the “you” is plural. Remember the tabernacle and the glory that came and then came more. That
is what a living temple is.

He finishes what he starts

▶ 2:01:23

Lofty enough that the obvious reaction is: I can’t pull that off. True, Matt said. You
can’t.

This is not our project that we are hoping God will assist with. It is his, and he does
not abandon what he begins. Jesus is the one who mocked the man who laid a foundation and
could not finish the tower, and the king who marched out without counting his troops
(Luke 14:28–31).
We assume God would scold us for that and then fail to live up to it himself. He starts
things that he finishes. The inheritance is locked away under his protection.

▶ 2:02:48

So yes — serve, obey, give, pray, share, be generous. But those are not the prize. “The
why is that Christ would dwell in our hearts, that we would know his love, and that the
fullness of God would dwell in us. That’s very different from a vending machine relationship
with God.” And the closing turn was the one worth carrying out the door: as much as you want
depth of relationship with him, as much as you want to abide in his love forever, he wants it
more. We forget while we are making a sandwich, thinking about the sandwich. He never stops
thinking about it. We get intimidated and discouraged when people say mean things to us. “He’s
never going to run out of steam on this. This was always plan A. And you can trust him.”

Matt closed by praying that the Spirit would strengthen the inner person of everyone in
the room, and then made the invitation plain: if you are near Christianity but next to Jesus
rather than in him, talk to someone. It does not have to be the pastor — the priesthood of
believers is alive and well. Talk to the person in your pew, or whoever brought you, or the
heart ministry teams standing at the front.