Access to God
By Pastor Matt Black
21
January 2007
Lord's Day morning
Ephesians 2:18
Open your Bibles to Ephesians 2, and let’s read verses 18-22. The title of this morning’s message is “Access to God”.
We will be looking specifically at Ephesians 2:14-22, “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; 15 Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; 16 And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: 17 And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. 18 For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. 19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; 20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 21 In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: 22 In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”
Introduction: We live in an age of unprecedented access.
Access to Everything!
Everything the world has to offer is at our fingertips. Right here, right now—it’s all yours.
Missing the Most Important Connection
And yet, as connected as we are to our world, we are missing the most important connection of all. Money can buy just about anything, but it cannot buy you a ticket to heaven. You cannot buy access to God on the internet. People are so connected, but most of our connections are amazingly superficial.
Earthly Access Will One Day End
You see, no matter how connected you are in this life, no matter how much information you can put into your head, no matter how many cell phones, laptops, and iPods you have, all this access will one day come to an end. We are all part of the ultimate statistic. Ten out of ten people die.
Let’s assume that the average person dies at 70 years old. Then if you’re 20 years old, you have just 2,500 weekends left to live. If you have turned 30, you have 2,000 weekends left until the day you die. If you are 40 years old, you have only 1,500 weekends left. If you are 50 years old, then you have just 1,000 weekends, and if you are 60 years old, you have a mere 500 weekends left until the day death comes to you.
What Does Earthly Access Gain Us?
You see, we have access to so much, but what does all this access gain us? —A more comfortable life? —A soul that is entertained? Our culture is drunk with entertainment and activity. We have access to go anywhere and do anything! But what does all this get us in the end?
What we need to do is stop! “Be still and know that I am God” says the Lord (Psalm 46:10).
With all the access we have, we are missing the ultimate access we need. You see death is coming. It’s ugly. Death is a result of sin. You see Romans 5:12 tells us “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”
Every sickness, every heartache, every pain, every bout of depression is all a very small taste of what is coming. Death is coming. And as ugly and stale and tasteless as your worst day on this earth was, death is infinitely worse.
Brethren, see poor sinners round you slumbering on the
brink of woe;
Death is coming, hell is moving, can you bear to let them go?
--“Brethren We Have Met to Worship” by George Atkins (1819)
Our iPods and emails will do us no good on Judgment Day. No amount of plastic and radio waves will help us. No amount of interesting facts will plead our case with God. All the journeys we’ve taken in this life will mean absolutely nothing if we have not journeyed and walked with God.
So the question I have for you this morning is: Are you connected to God? Do you have access to God?
We will be looking specifically at Ephesians 2:14-22, “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; 15 Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; 16 And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: 17 And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. 18 For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. 19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; 20 And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 21 In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: 22 In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.”
I. Why do we need Access to God? What does God have that we don’t have? Pure and simple: only everything. He knows everything about you. He knows you 10,000 times better than you know yourself. We were created for Him!
A. We were created for God. You did not choose your hair or your parents, or mental and physical capacities. Every day we are all walking around as human miracles. In every human cell there are three BILLION bits of DNA.[1] That’s how much information is in one microscopic cell, unseeable to the natural eye. DNA is the basic information blueprint of your body—the organized information of a cell—like an owner’s manual for a car. To give you an idea how complex one cell is—the DNA of just the nucleus of one human cell has enough information to fill up the 30 volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica FORTY times! If you stacked these volumes up, they would reach 229 feet into the air. Now we have about 50 TRILLION of these cells in the average human body. If a person were to read the information that is in the human DNA of one person line by line beginning right now, non-stop, it would take him the next 100 years to complete the reading of those volumes.
At every given moment there are complex processes and cells working together. The simplest cell is vastly complex, like a little city. Everything in the body works according to the blueprint.
Friends, you cannot explain that by chance, anymore than you would believe me if I told you that a meteor landed on my house and out popped a Humvee! (By the way, a Humvee is infinitely less complex than even one of the cells in our body). We are fearfully and wonderfully made! Your creator is the only one that knows just what you need. He made you! You need access to Him! He made sustains you every day. You were made for His purposes. He made you by design to do His will.
So why do we need access to Him?—because we were created to love and serve Him. We need this access to God for a second reason.
B. Without access to God, we will be eternally separated from God. A person who does not have a relationship, this access with God will live that way for ever away from God’s presence.
Of course, who wants to live this way for ever? Not for a thousand years or even a billion. Forever. It never ends. No one wants to live this way.
Today we need to talk about how to re-establish our access, our relationship to God. It is possible. Our text says it so. Verse 18 says that through Jesus Christ, “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.”
In order to re-establish our relationship with God, we have to ask ourselves another question.
II. What happened to our Access with God? Why don’t we have it anymore?
Many people would disagree. Most people think they do automatically have access to God. Most people in this world have this idea that God is automatically in favor of them because they are a pretty good person. They believe they already have access to God because they pray before they go to bed at night, or because they go to church, or because they have religious thoughts from time to time. Perhaps you think you are a pretty good person. I mean after all you’ve never murdered any body or robbed a bank! You don’t have to be a bank robber to lose access to God.
A. Sin closes off access to God.
1. What if I told you that it takes only ONE sin to make you a bad person? It is true.
Illustration: Satan-cast out of heaven for ONE sin.
You know that Satan is a fallen angel. He once was the most beautiful angel in heaven. How did this beautiful angel become the devil? Did he murder? Did he lie? Did he sin so many times that God just couldn’t keep him in heaven? No, Satan sinned only once to be cast out of heaven. Jesus said, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven (Luke 10:18). Satan simply had a proud spirit. He said He wanted to be like God—like the Most High. Satan for a moment was full of himself. And he is the devil. He sinned only once to be cast out of heaven. Do you think God will have a different standard for you? It is no different from you.
2. One sin is too much for a righteous holy God. He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all (I John 1:5). God is “of purer eyes than to behold evil” and He cannot even look on iniquity (Habakkuk 1:13). Psalm 5:4 says that He is not a God “that has pleasure in evil” and he cannot dwell with iniquity.
It is kind of like this: what would you do with a pie that had only one maggot in it? Would you eat it? It is even so with us. Do you have one sin that defiles you before God’s holy eyes? You know if you compare yourself with the guy down the street, you look pretty good. Even a prostitute says there is another prostitute worse than her. But if you compare yourself with God, you are in BIG trouble!
3. So, therefore, we are all separated from God. We have LOST our access!
In fact look what Paul tells us about ourselves in verse 1 of Ephesians 2.
Ø We are all born “dead in trespasses and sins” (verse 1). We have fallen from God—we have no Access to Him. We “walked according to the course of this world” (verse 2). The opposite of access is separation. John Bunyan went to jail for twelve years, he did not have access to his wife and blind daughter. He was cut off. In the same way, we are born without access to God.
Our sins have separated us from God. Paul tells us there is hostility between us and God. There is a “middle wall of partition”—our sin separates us from God.
Ø David said, in Psalm 130:3, “If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?”
Ø Solomon, the wisest man that ever walked the earth said in Ecclesiastes 7:20, “For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.”
God knows this. He knows right where we are. In fact all this didn’t happen yesterday. You might say, ok, I agree. I have loved my sin. That sin closes off access to God, but where did this all come from? That’s a good question. The Bible has the answer.
B. When Adam sinned, our Access to God was closed.
Paul tells us in Romans 5:12, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned”.
You see Adam disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, and that one act of disobedience brought sin into the world. That day, Adam ran away from God and hid. We read in Genesis 3:9-10, “And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? 10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.”
God called out after Adam. Adam ran from God in fear. That’s where most people are in the world today. They don’t really want much to do with God.
Now don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people in this world that pray. They might go to church once in a while. Yet, by and large, prayer makes very little difference in their lives. God is pretty much absent from the lives of most people.
Illustration: A lot of people who pray have no access to God. They have sinned against God, and they have not entered into a relationship with Him. They are simply knocking on the outside of the door.
Ø They look at God as a cosmic genie who they go to when they need a big miracle.
Ø Or maybe they think if they just say they are sorry to God for their sins, God forgives them. The Bible forgives
III. How do we gain Access to God? Our text says it very simply: Through Christ “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (verse 18).
What is this Access to God?
Access has the idea of an “introduction”.
Illustration: I love the story of the little boy called William who stood wistfully at the gates of Buckingham Palace. He longed to go in and wee the king. He had a problem on his hands for between him and the king were heavey iron gates, rigid protocol, armed soldiers, and watchful police. What he wanted was just out of the question, there was no way in! No access!
A large London policeman was telling the boy it was time for him to go back home when suddenly he sprang to attention when another man appeared on the scene. This mysterious man opened the gates and let the man in but he also took little William with him. They walked and walked for what seemed like quite a distance. The anonymous mysterious man showed William the famous ballroom, the stamp rooms that housed the valuable collection, the Belgian suite for the use of state visitors, the royal wardrobe, the music room, the dining room, and the dazzling green room.
Finally they arrived in the king’s presence, and the mysterious man spoke, “Hello father, here is a little boy who wants to meet you. Meet my frined William. William, this is my father, the king”
Unknown to William, he had taken the hand of Edward, the prince of Whales the king’s son.
Our access to God is an introduction. How can we come to God?
Through our works? There could be no way. “Not of works” (Ephesians 2:8-9). If you offend in one point, you are guilty of all, said James.
What would you say to a criminal who had killed, lied, maimed and murdered? What if he were to say, but that’s all in the past. I’m going to let my good outweigh my bad now.
Have you ever told a lie? You’re a liar. Stolen? You’re a thief. Looked on another person who wasn’t your spouse? You are an adulterer. Have you taken the Lord’s name in vain? You are a blasphemer. You are guilty, and no matter how much good you do, no amount of good will take away your guilt.
How then do we gain access?
1. Our sins are nailed to the Cross of Christ.
Verse 15, “Having abolished in his flesh the enmity”…
Verse 16, “having slain the enmity thereby”…
1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
2. Christ pleads for us—intercedes for us.
Brings us in union with God. As Paul reminds us in Romans 8:26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
1. By the Spirit there is strength in the Joy of the Lord
2. By the Spirit there is life in the Presence of the Lord
Conclusion: Have you ever wanted a ticket to something and it was sold out? Do you realize if the Bears go to the Super Bowl, there will be people sleeping outside all night to gain tickets? What do they want? They want access to some game where 22 men chase a ball around for 60 minutes. It might be fun to watch, but it will not matter one iota in eternity. Much more important is our need to be banging on the doors to Heaven for access. Do you have access to heaven? If you die without access, you will never gain it, if you gain it, you will never lose it. Eternity is too long to be separated from God. Do you have access to God?
Hebrews 4:16, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
Closing Hymn: 410 ‘Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus
[1] Information accessed in this section from http://www.creationofman.net/chapter4/chapter4_2.html. Accessed on 20 January 2007. Also, it would be helpful to read: Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, London: Burnett Books, 1985; Also, The Privileged Planet by Gonzalez, Guillermo and Richards, Jay W.. and The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel.