Becoming God's Artwork, His Painting, His Masterpiece - Ephesians Series Part 4 - Bill Shiley

In order to become God's artwork, we have to give up our purposes for our life, our plans about how to become great and significant and have fulfillment and all those things. We have to give those things up and embrace the fact that God wants me to do is to be willing to suffer and to discipline myself and to grow so that I can be like Jesus in this world.

Good morning. Welcome here.

When the schedule gets made and you look on there and you say, "Oh, it's my week to preach," you never know who all is going to be there. So it keeps life from getting boring. So I've been preaching through the book of Ephesians.

Last time we charged into chapter two and talked about the concept of the way of life and the way of death and how God has rescued us from falling away that leads to death that begins to produce death now. That begins to produce death now in this life or falling away that produces life in this life and continues on to the next.

Today is kind of going to be a little bit of a mop-up message because there are some things about chapter two, verses one through ten, that I really needed to say, but I couldn't pack it all in one message. So first of all, I want to go back through the first several verses, and I've got a little slideshow to show you that hopefully helps us put together some of these concepts about the way God made us to live and about the choice that we as humans have made to pursue our own way and we have sold ourselves into Satan and about God delivering us from that and walking in the way of salvation.

So I'm going to read the first part of the chapter, actually verses one through ten again, just to give us a refreshment on that. And of course, in order to do that, we have to go back to chapter one and remember what he ends chapter one with because chapter two starts with, "And you." And so there's a direct connection there. So Paul ends Ephesians one with his prayer that their eyes of their understanding would be open and they would know what the hope of God's calling is. So what it is that God is wanting to do with them, what they have to look forward to and to expect. Number two, how rich the inheritance that he is giving them in this group of people who are redeemed and are walking the way of life again.

And see the power that God has to be able to do this, the same kind of power that raised Christ from the dead and made him back up to where humans were made to be, where we're no longer susceptible to our environment, other humans, to the spirit realm. We have dominion over all those things again, that God is able to do that in us. And then he goes on into chapter two and says, "And you," the same way he raised Christ up and gave him dominion over all things, "and you he has made alive, which were dead and trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.

But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." So backing up to the beginning of the chapter, he starts with this idea that they have been raised back to life because they were dead in trespasses and sins under the dominion of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the sons of disobedience. So here's a little visualization of this.

It's nothing fancy, but I forget where I developed it for first. I used it in school some, and it keeps evolving. So hopefully this evolution of it will be better than the last one. So this represents God. God is the source and embodiment of all goodness. Life is who he is, and it's what he makes.

We were created to rule the earth together with God, following him as dear children. That's a theme later in Ephesians. That's the way of life, following God as dear children. That's what we were created for, like chapter two, verse ten says. And that is the kingdom of God, is the people who are living this way.

And so here's man created to walk in the way of life in God's likeness, following God as a dear child.

There is a group of beings who have chosen to try to set up their own kingdom, their own reality, values, and methods of attaining them. They are in direct and malicious opposition to God. We call them Satan and his demons. Their primary principle is to pursue their own power, life, liberty, and happiness with my no apologies to the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence there. And they consume all in that effort and create a realm of death. And so the horns and the pitchforks and the tails are not to be facetious or anything, but just to give a visual representation of these creatures. And notice they're flying the rebel flag. And I am from the south, so this is no prejudicing here.

And there's the skull and crossbones on there. It's rebellion, and it's the way of death.

In Ephesians, Paul refers to this group as the powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world, the principalities and powers who are presently in control of this planet for the most part. Tragically, man, after being enticed by Satan, chose to rebel against God and seek his own way of doing things. By doing this, he became like Satan, a rebel, and served death.

The problem is it doesn't stop there. Because we have walked away from being under God's authority and protection and obeyed Satan, we have sold ourselves to him and given him dominion over us. We become his slaves, and we reap death from him.

There is a whole group of humans following Satan's way and under his control, living the way of death. They are what we call the world. So over here, you'll see a here's a whole group of humans. Notice they're brown because they're tainted by sin, and they are mixed in among them and surrounding them under their control and influencing them is a bunch of demons. And this group of people, their theme is the same. They fly the rebel flag, and it is a realm of death.

And that is true for us no matter what society we live in, whatever group of people we associate with, whatever meetings we go to on Sunday. If we are following the way of ourselves and Satan to whatever extent, we are part of the world.

Naturally, we, as part of the world, lived following the commander of the powers of the unseen world. That's the ESV translates it that way. It's a little clearer. He works in them and used to work in us to produce death. We are by nature children under God's wrath and enemies all the way to how we think because of our twisted behavior, enemies in our minds through wicked works.

However, because of Jesus' sacrifice as the hostage in our place, we no longer have to live under the power of sin. So when we repent of our way and allow God's spirit to control us, so he drops the rebel flag, we are cleansed from our sin and freed from the bondage of sin so we can again choose to follow God in his way, his kingdom, the way of life. We are raised up to sit together in heavenly places in Christ, living the way of life in dominion over the powers. We become demonstrations of God's kindness in his artwork, demonstrating the good plan he had when he created us.

So hopefully that helps put a little bit of connection to those concepts there. A lot of that is over the last, probably last five years, as I've wrestled with reshaping some of my concepts about this is kind of how that got hammered out.

So the next part that we are ready to talk about is verse eight. And basically this morning, I'm going to talk about verses eight, nine, and ten. And it is a verse that is often used as one of the building blocks of our concept teaching about salvation. And it is one of the scriptures on my list of most lethal verses when they're used by themselves. It's not because God did something wrong, but it's one of the verses that does the most damage when it's pulled out of its context and used by itself.

And that is verse eight and nine. "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works lest anyone should boast." And some reason my slides are out of sync here now.

Here we go.

And the part about that verse that's highlighted in a lot of Christianity, Western Christianity, is the not of works part. And so we're taught that we are saved by grace through faith alone, and it's not of our works. We have nothing to brag about.

Well, that's true, but it's a partial truth. And then people go on just looking at that verse and not looking at the rest of what the passage says about salvation, let alone what the rest of the scriptures say about salvation. And then all kinds of doctrines are born out of that, that therefore our works has nothing to do with our salvation. You can never lose your salvation because it doesn't matter what you do, right? It's something God gave us. It's a gift. It's his grace or a gift of his favor.

Grace simply means favor there. And then also they'll go on to say that then therefore there's nothing we don't need to do anything to be good enough for God, which I think is just a bad statement. That's just a bad picture of how this whole thing is. We're not running around trying to be good enough for God, but out of our love for him, we serve him and we honor him and we live his way.

So one thing that is incredibly important about this whole thing of salvation is what do we mean when we say salvation? That's often where the problems are in discussions is what we mean when we use a certain term.

I learned that early on in my endeavors with apologetics about evolution. So the evolutionist says, "Well, don't you believe in evolution?"

And the Christian says, "No, I don't believe in evolution." He says, "Well, that's unscientific because it happens all around us all the time." Well, the question is, what do you mean when you say evolution? Do you mean like my dog doesn't look just like its parents and you all don't look just like your parents? There's genetic drift and slow changes, but that doesn't mean that goo crawls out of a pond and turns into you. They're two different things. So we have to ask, what do you mean when you say that? And we find out that we're using different terms. And that's a little bit the way this is. When we talk about salvation, when God talks about salvation, scripture clearly uses three different tenses to talk about salvation.

Sometimes we just limit it to two because the last one doesn't have to do with right now. And they are initial salvation. So we were saved. There's ongoing salvation. We are being saved. And then there's final salvation. We will be saved.

I'm not going to spend my whole message proofing each of those, but I think it's rather obvious as we look at scripture that those are there. And I'm going to give you just a few examples of that. So for example, initial salvation, initially we are rescued from our bondage to sin. And that's one problem why a lot of Christians, as they talk about this, can get pulled into that trap because the concept of salvation being about being delivered from the bondage of sin as a focal point is just not there. It's not even in their atonement theories. It's all about getting an account balance taken care of with God. So we are rescued from our bondage to Satan.

We are forgiven of our sins. We are cleansed before God. We're no longer children of wrath. We're brought into his kingdom. And that is before we have any righteousness to demonstrate or to show. One passage that talks about this obviously is Ephesians 2:8. Another one is in Timothy where it says, "Not by works of righteousness, which we have done, he saved us, but according to his mercy, he saved us and washed us."

There are many places that teach that, that we are saved initially, and it's not because somehow we have impressed God or rated higher than others. We do have to repent. One of the previous messages we talked about that, that in order to receive God's grace, there are things that we have to do, even if it isn't earned.

The biggest part of salvation, though, is the second part, the ongoing salvation.

I like to think of it as a continuing walk in faithfulness. So this is the sense in which we are saved by our works. And that's going to really trigger some people. That's probably not a good way to say it, but we are saved because of our continuing in faithfulness, I think is just a better way that's not as triggering to people and doesn't connect with some of the bad ideas that are out there.

And one place that point blank brings this out is in Philippians 2, Paul says, "Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling." So continuing to live rescued from sin and living the way of life rather than the way of death is something that we have to choose now. We have been rescued from bondage, and now we are back at a place where we have a choice to make. And we choose to yield ourselves servants to righteousness and reap the fruit of eternal life, or to yield ourselves as servants to sin and reap death, referring back to Romans chapter six again.

So this is the part that we are in now, and I'm going to use a few illustrations of that this later. And then there's the final salvation. It's after this life where there will be no more presence or effects of sin anymore. We will no longer be tempted. We won't get sick and have mosquito bites and all those kinds of things. And this is a place where Paul refers to that, Romans 13:11, "Knowing this and do this, knowing the time that now it is high time to wake out of sleep, for now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed." He's clearly talking about a different dimension of salvation than what first happened or even what is taking place now.

And that final salvation is contingent upon the second part.

I shared a message at the beginning of my "From the Beginning, It Was Not So" series setting the paradigm that that and my argument basically was that every time Jesus says, "This is how you know who is a disciple," or he gives a judgment scene, it's always that we are being judged according to how we have lived. And that is what determines which kingdom that we are part of forever.

So that's the final salvation, and that's dependent on our continuing to walk in faithfulness as obedient children, not necessarily that we're perfect all the time, but we are exercised by our Father's training. We repent and we are corrected by him, and we grow in his likeness.

So back to Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9, that not of works part is not saying that we never have to do anything to remain saved or that works has nothing to do with our salvation. It's talking about initially the rescue process is not something that we did something to merit or obligate or wow God into. And so what happens is people take that initial step of salvation to be released from the bondage of sin and to be cleansed and restored back to following God and living as part of his kingdom in the way of life because we don't have to do anything to deserve that, that therefore it's automatic that we stay there. And we can go back to this, and God just looks at us and says, "Yeah, I know he's that way, but just we'll just ignore that.

Jesus did good enough that it doesn't matter if he lives that way anymore." And this is a big part of the reality that I think that is being ignored.

And let's see if we can get this to work here.

Is this part of our choice to sin? It's not just that God looks at us and we're flying the rebel flag and we're still dirty, but God says, "This is okay." But if we go back and we walk that way, we give ourselves again into bondage to Satan, and we reap death again from that master. So it's something that's partly because a belief that God can impute Christ's righteousness on us and it doesn't matter anymore how we live because of something that happened in the beginning is because we're not looking at the full picture of what salvation is. And salvation is being freed from bondage so that we have a choice to again walk in holiness.

A lot of this stuff happens because of theological rabbit trails. Rather than looking at God's word as a whole and putting it together and saying, "What does this tell me?" We take pieces and then we run off with them and cook up our own ideas. And so we come up with things like our works have nothing to do with salvation and we can never lose our salvation therefore. And then these pictures, these frameworks that obedience is that we're trying to make ourselves good enough for God. And there's people that probably do that kind of thing, but we frame obedience as that kind of a thing rather than taking advantage of the gift of holiness and a new life that God gives us.

And if you notice the rabbits, if you ever watch a rabbit run, they go zigzag all over the place and the trails cross and notice these are all ending up in the woods. And that's how we do when we treat scripture that way and follow our own understanding.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. And if you don't get it, don't worry about it. But it is important that we understand there's a proper way to view scripture and an improper way. And it really is self-explanatory. It's just following the golden rule. So if the terms don't connect with you, don't worry about it. Exegesis, the way I remember, is the prefix ex means out of, right? Like the exit is how you get out of the building. So exegesis or an exegete is the person who is practicing that method is he is letting the truth come out of the text to him.

The person practicing exegesis or the exegete is a person who is taking his ideas and reading them into the text or just going along and just picking. He's not really trying to find out what this is saying. He's just trying to find some cool ideas to run off with and say, "I know what I'm talking about." I like the illustration. This guy, the website is adam4d.com. I didn't check out all of his theology. I liked his illustrations here for this. So exegesis is like the friend who sits in and listens to you and he hears you out, maybe asks some questions and considers you as a person and tries to really understand what were you saying?

What did you mean in this? And that's how we want to look at scripture. We want to listen to the whole thing. This is why it's important to study and to read and to memorize so that it's all there. So when we're reading a given passage, God's Spirit has a library to bring to our remembrance. That's the Spirit's job is to remind us. But if we don't put it there to start with, we don't give him anything to work with. So we want to familiarize ourselves with God's word so that as we read it, we can bring the rest of the big picture and the rest of the things God says to bear so we can truly understand God.

And we do ourselves the favor then because then we can truly walk in the way of life rather than being deceived. And then he uses the illustration for exegesis or the exegete is the person who is like an obnoxious coworker. And I couldn't really think of any of mine that are like this most of the time at least.

Who, for those of you who don't know about probably about 12 of the 14 people I work with full-time are sitting here this morning. So he's like an obnoxious coworker who has selective hearing, exaggerates everything, talks over you, puts words in your mouth, and makes himself the hero of every story.

So he's there. His little blip there says, "I'm going to act like I agree with you, but then I'll twist your words to conform to what I wish you would have said. And then I'll say you said that."

And notice the tools are different there. The exegete, his tool is a shovel. He's digging in. He's trying to find what all is there. Maybe not the best example of it, but that is a principle there. And the exegete, he's got a shoehorn, which is the thing you use when you got a shoe that fits tight, you slide it in there and it acts like a little ramp to help your heel slide in there and cram it in place instead of bending the back of your shoe down.

Often they use them with boots because a boot has to fit tight. And he's doing that. He's trying to push his ideas into God's word and stretch God's word around to make it fit what makes him feel good or what he already thinks.

So we want to be real careful about that as we read God's word that we are practicing exegesis. And even if you don't remember the names, remember the concept here. We want to be like the friend who's listening and really trying to understand what is God saying here and not just grabbing pieces and running with them. And watch out for that in teaching because that often happens. Many bad doctrines and many bad practices have come from people grabbing a piece and running with it.

So back to this thing about salvation and being saved, initially being saved not because of our good works, but being saved unto good works. One illustration is a homeless person. So there are many people who are homeless for many different reasons. A lot of them are homeless because somewhere in their life, they have made some bad choices. They've responded badly to things, and it has led them to a place where their reputation has been soiled. They're no longer responsible. Their relationships are broken. They're financially then because they can't hold a job, they can't provide for themselves. And then that affects them health-wise, and it's just a vicious spiral.

So let's say in the second picture here, someone comes and he reaches out to that guy. It's not because somehow he won the coolest homeless person of the year award or anything, but simply out of his goodwill and his pity for the man, he reaches out to him and offers him a place to live, a shower, food, and a job.

Now, if that man wants to remain not homeless, and if he eventually wants to be able to have a healthy, functional family and a place to live in that security and blessing, he's got to take care of this new opportunity that's been given him. He's going to have to stay clean. He's going to have to take care of his job and be responsible. He's going to have to eat good food. He's going to have to be responsible and keep his house up. And if he doesn't, he's going to end up back down here again as a homeless person. And likely, unless something happens, he's going to meet a premature death because of that. I think that's a picture of this concept that we are saved by grace through faith, through our trust in God because of his gift of favor to us, bringing us up out of our bondage and setting us in a place where we are cleansed.

He trusts us. We're no longer enemies. We're no longer under his wrath. And then we have the choice to make whether we are going to take advantage of that and continue to walk as children as part of his family, or if we're going to squander it and go back to serving the old master.

This is an illustration that the Bible uses, and that is the story of the children of Israel. They started out in bondage in Egypt, and that wasn't necessarily because of sin, but they were still in bondage. And God brings them out of Egypt, delivers them through Moses. They're crossing the Red Sea, and they come to Mount Sinai, and God gives them commandments. He gives them lots of different things to do. He tells them to trust him and go in and conquer the land. And they have to choose whether or not they are going to follow God and obey him or whether they're going to keep trying to do their own thing and go back to their old life.

And that's the story that we're given. And in Hebrews, generally, when this story is talked about, we are framed as being in this time right here, the wilderness journey, where it's a time of testing. Are we going to trust God, and were we going to follow him and then be able to reap his gift of life, the promised land? Or are we going to rebel like down here with the golden calf and with Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who the earth swallowed? Are we going to be like those people or the people who joined the 10 spies and saying, "God is cheating us. We can't have this good land. He brought us all the way out here for nothing."

And their carcasses fell in the wilderness. So again, this is a picture of the same kind of thing. And this is actually an illustration the Bible uses for us of this idea that we were brought out of bondage, and it wasn't because of anything that we did or our abilities. But now we are in this time of testing to see if we are going to continue to walk in faithfulness so that God can give us the goal, the end that he wants to.

Just a little illustration of using exegesis rather than exegesis to look at this passage. We're going to back out, and we're going to read over these first 10 verses again and look at what God is saying, especially in light of the book of Ephesians, being the purpose being to show us God's good intentions, God's dream, his plan, his rescue plan to make us monuments of his goodness, to show all the beings out there his wisdom and goodness by bringing everything together in Christ as we follow him.

So in that light, I highlighted some words here in blue that I think kind of help you step through all the little explanations that dear brother Apostle Paul puts in there that are rich but can be distracting. So starting with verse 4 here, after the part about that we were dead and trespasses and sin, we walked according to the course of this world. We were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace, by his favor, his gift of favor. You have been saved and raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace, you have been saved through faith and not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

So as you look back over that and zoom out a bit and listen to what's being said, the point of this is to show how good and how kind God is and to contrast his goodness with where you were at and the plan, the purpose he has for you to make you a monument of his goodness and abilities.

Another one is if you just look at this down there in verse 9, it says, "Not of works, lest anyone should boast." He's not talking about faithful Christians and that their salvation is not because of their works or has nothing to do with their works. He's talking about back when you were dead in trespasses and sins. And so, of course, it wasn't because you were doing anything good that God saved them. They were disgusting, and they were enemies in their minds because of their own choices.

So again, as you look at the greater context here, it's clear that God is not talking about, or the Apostle Paul and God through him is not talking about our present walk of faithfulness, but he's talking about in the beginning when we were dead in trespasses and sins.

And then another layer of this is looking at it at the purpose. And the purpose of all this, he raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come, he could show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. And later on there, so that we would become his workmanship. And we'll talk about that a little bit later, but his artwork. So it's not because we do anything different, and it doesn't really matter how we live. How do we become monuments of God's kindness and monuments of God's a masterpiece displaying the ultimate of what God is able to do?

It doesn't make sense with the greater context, let alone with the greater message that God has given us in scripture.

So by God's gift of grace, his favor, we have been saved. We have been rescued from the bondage of sin and the destruction that goes with that. It's not because of ourselves. And so it's not of works, and we don't have anything to brag about the position that we are in, the opportunity that we have because we are his workmanship. And that's the word I want to talk about for the rest of the message here, that concept. The irony of this is I have graphic memories. Growing up, we were very well Bible and very well churched and so on and so forth.

And my dad was a very strict disciplinarian. And I remember being I was probably five years old because I remember I can picture the church service. But I remember at least twice. Okay, so let me back up. We were supposed to, in the evening we got home from church, we had to tell my dad something that the preacher said. So you look for something. And I remember twice, I remember quoting this passage that we are his workmanship. And that was something the preacher said. So that got me out of trouble.

And as a five-year-old, I had no clue that the depth that was in that and how God was going to use that very phrase to turn my life around. This concept of workmanship is a translation of the Greek word poema, which, interestingly enough, is where we get our English word poem from. And it means a product, a fabric, something that's fabricated, that's made or workmanship. And it's the concept of artwork. The only other place in the New Testament that this word is used is in Romans 1:19 through 20. And this is the verse we're probably familiar with because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them.

For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. And this term, things that are made, is how the translators communicated this idea of poema.

So in this passage, we often look to this in the realm of apologetics. So how evidence for God, well, God has said he displays his characteristics in the creation so that people can look at that and learn about him, what he is. So it's this concept, becoming God's poema, is this concept of becoming a piece of art, an expression of the skill and purposes and design of a craftsman of some sort that doesn't particularly apply to poetry. Our concept of a poem came from the idea of a craftsman expressing himself. So it's this idea behind a sculpture or a painting or a piece of furniture or a garden,

a cooked dish. And any of those are things that become your poema. They are your expression of your art, your design, your purposes, and your abilities.

And so as we yield ourselves to God and we reach out and accept his gift of salvation, being raised up and freed from the bondage of sin and set back as part of his family to walk the way of life following him, we become now a piece of his artwork displaying his goodness and his purposes that he planned back when he created the Garden of Eden.

Good works is the whole purpose of salvation, and it is the way that we were made to work the best.

Good works prepared beforehand. The New Testament is not plan B, but a fulfillment and restoration of what God planned in creation. And that's how we should look at ourselves as Christians. This whole concept of the kingdom of God and salvation is it's not like God said, "Oh, man, that didn't work. Well, let's do this and we'll come up with something else and we'll come up with this program to keep people so that they can keep people right with me until I can get them out of here so that I don't have to send them to hell." It's not like some sort of plan B, but this is a restoration plan that God has purposed all along.

The commandments of Jesus are not a retrofit to keep us from hell, but they are the blueprint to create the God-reflecting goodness for which we were created. This is the only way that we were meant to operate. I thought about making you promise not to laugh before I show you the next slide, but I won't do that because I don't want to make you promise something you can't keep. But too many people view Christianity as this.

Now, this is actually by an atheist to slam organized religion as a control thing. But too many people view it this way. It's like, "Well, I don't want to go to hell. I don't want to be tormented by the devil. I don't want the devil to get me. And I really want to go to heaven when I die. So I'm sitting here trying to get this, and it really feels very pointless."

And that's just not true at all. Rather, it is the way we were designed for. It's a gift that's given us. It's something for us to desire and to pursue as the restoration of the goodness that God created in the garden that has been messed up because of man's choices. One thing I like to think about this is so we look at the created world to see God's handiwork. We see a rainbow. We say, "Wow, I saw God today."

And different ways like that in the natural world, even though the natural world is broken. Paul says it's groaning and crying out in pain because of the things that are falling apart in it because of man yielding his dominion to the destroyer. But yet, at the same time, we see so much good and beauty. And when we follow Jesus and we obey him, we become part of that beauty. We become part of fixing it. And now we become part of the rainbow instead of the skunks and the maggots and all that kind of stuff in the world. We are becoming part of the goodness and beauty God created. We are part of restoring everything.

Looking back at this chapter, there's two things that stand out to me about what God wants to do. And one is he wants to make us eternal monuments of his kindness. That's the purpose he saved us so that he can display to everybody his kindness and his goodness as we follow Jesus.

And then the second one is becoming his workmanship, his poema. It's the restoration of the very good that he created. That's what God wants to make us into.

The last little bit here, I want to share a little bit of my personal story because I can't talk about Ephesians 2:10 without talking about that because if it hadn't been for what God did in my life through that passage, there is no way I would be up here preaching this morning.

When I was in my early 20s, as much as I can get enthused and talk and talk and talk and convince people about something, I could do that with diesel power. I could tell you which one was the best. I could tell you what chip to put on it, what turbo to put on it, what thing to do your transmission, methanol injection, and all that kind of stuff. And I could go on about it. Somebody would poke me a little bit, and I could go. I could go for an hour and a half foaming at the mouth almost. And when I get done, I would be like, "I feel kind of weird." It's like, "Man, why did I get that cranked up about it?"

And I actually remember I've never heard audible voices, but this was one time was really close. I was working at the sawmill. I was taking a load of logs from the backyard out to the front. And it was like this voice spoke into my head and said, "William, you are either going to be full of that stuff or full of me, but not both."

And I knew that was right, but I didn't know what to do about it because my relationship with God was very strained because I did not understand God as a God who loved me and cared about me. And so something to look up to in the world was the Dodge Cummins because they were great and they could pull things and they were better than the other ones.

And it sounds so stupid now, but I look back and I realize that's what I was trying. I was something to look up to, something to be victorious, something to set things straight in the world. And that's because I grew up in a family that was very, very religious, but very ungodly. And I was brought up, introduced very much to God, very much to the Bible, very much to obedience, but also with a lot of abuse and horrible concepts of God.

And I struggle to know what to say here because I want you to get enough of a picture that you understand what God did in my life. But I really get exhausted trying to convince people what all went on because unless you've lived through that kind of thing, you can't understand it.

But because of trash talk and anger tirades and all this being mixed in with God and being told that we were the worst children in the world and all our family problems were this, and shall we were always weird. So for one, we were from non-Mennonite background. Number two, we were always ultra-conservative.

Number three, we were always poor. We never had a lot of money. We didn't have the stuff other children had. When I was in school and all the rest of the children had fluffer nutters in their lunch, we had cucumber sandwiches.

Fluffer nutters, by the way, were that was the cool sandwich, Fruit Loops and fluffer nutters. Fluff is marshmallow cream and peanut butter sandwich. Yeah. Anyways, and combined with the turmoil in our family because of strife and my parents and anger and moving around with churches, that kind of trauma, anger tirades that would last an hour and a half, two hours of screaming. And when I was 18 years old, I remember standing there getting told off. I don't know how long it was, an hour and a half, probably close to two hours. That to the point where I actually I was trying to keep my eyes open, and I was having a hard time breathing, and my vision just went blank.

I couldn't see anything anymore. That's about the least embarrassing I can tell you of the effects of that kind of stuff. When I was about 16, the church got involved in our home situation, and that made things a lot worse because now the ministry got manipulated into believing that my parents were all fine. It was all us children. So now what happened is I'm sitting here saying, "This isn't okay," and I get told, "You're just making too big of a deal out of it. You're the problem," all that kind of stuff. If you want to understand a little more about that, read the book Secret Shadow. I literally, my mouth dropped open when I read the part there about them going to meetings with the ministry and the ministry saying, "It's all you guys."

And the dad sits there very piously. And then as soon as the door's shut, all hell breaks loose. I'd never heard of anybody else who went through that kind of thing before. All these kind of things built up and developed in me a hatred for myself, a hatred for life, and a very dismal view of God. God was somebody you could never be good enough for because that's just the way my life was. It didn't matter how hard you tried. You always got blamed for stuff. If you were going to get in trouble, you were going to get in trouble for something. It didn't matter how good you were.

I struggled with depression deeply, which very quickly spiraled into suicide. I remember when I was probably 13 and a half, I remember taking a knife and pushing it against my chest until it made a mark. Those kind of things, spitting in the mirror and spewing hate at myself, banging my head on stuff. I never cut myself. I understand, though, people that do that. I'm not saying it's good or right. It's crazy.

But when you hurt so bad inside that it actually is a relief to have something else outside of you hurt enough to focus there and escape the despair and rottenness that you're feeling about yourself inside.

I left home when I was 21 and a half. I got excommunicated basically on the spot. I had tried to get a release and approval to leave, and that didn't work. And I was stressed out to the point I had stomach ulcers. I was down to about all I could eat was a sandwich a day. I've been losing weight. I'm 225. When I left home, I was 155, same height I am now. So I was just in bad enough shape. I had to do something.

So I left and got excommunicated basically on the spot for it. That got ironed out later. But I thought now I'm at a church where people understand what's right and people are godly. And I'm out of the darkness that I grew up in. Not saying everybody there was dark, but the problem is that wasn't true. And the man that I followed had a whole bunch of problems that I couldn't see where I was at before. And he had anger and manipulation problems. And he started badmouthing the church for the things that weren't going on.