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In the movies, every important meeting starts with a clear “You may be wondering why I’ve called you here today.” Real meetings leave you guessing the whole time—and sometimes long after. We often treat God’s Word the same way, yet Ephesians 1 addresses the question head-on: why are you here?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
I want you to imagine a scene for just a moment. A scene where you’re watching a movie, right? We have some popcorn here that we have. Kathy actually has a bowl right now right in front of me. It looks really good. So you’re sitting there watching the movie, and it comes to the scene where there’s a meeting, right? Okay, so everyone’s coming into this boardroom, and it has these rich mahogany walls and big leather chairs, and people come in and gather around this long table, and there’s this very authoritative person, and maybe it’s the President of the United States or the Chairman of the Board or something sitting at the end of the table, right? Everyone has their suit on. They’re ready. They’re solemn. They have their notepads. They have their laptops. They’re ready for this meeting.
And then the person at the end of the table says, “You may all be wondering why I’ve called you here today,” right? We’ve heard that phrase. And then he explains why he’s called them all there today, right? I’m going to tell you exactly why. And of course, you know why that shows up in the movie. It’s so they can explain some part of the plot that’s too hard to demonstrate visually. So the person is going to talk about the big threat that’s coming or the shortfall in income at the company that’s going to cause them to have to lay off people right before Christmas or whatever it’s going to be that’s going to set up the rest of the movie that’s too hard to show without some just extended dialogue.
I thought about that, and I thought, well, that’s a great plot device. But I’ve been in real meetings. Anyone been in a real meeting? Real meetings never start that way. They never start that way, right? You get called to this meeting. It’s scheduled. And you come in, and you think, I wonder why we’re here. And the meeting starts, and you still think, I wonder why I’m here. And the meeting goes on, and you think, I wonder why I’m here. And sometimes you walk back out, and you still are thinking, I wonder why I was there. That, that is a meeting, right?
How often is it that when a meeting happens in real life, some kind of formal meeting or informal meeting, it doesn’t really get all that clear exactly what was supposed to happen? We think, hmm, what was I supposed to get? Did I get it? I don’t know if I got it. And we really want to know. And a lot of times, a lot of times it’s the organizer’s fault, right? And I have been that person. I have organized meetings that did not have a clear trajectory, didn’t make everything perfectly clear. I know what that’s like. And I know what it’s like to be the person sitting there, right? I’ve been on both sides of that and thought, oh, hmm.
You know, sometimes, sometimes you’re in a meeting, and sometimes you’re sitting with a friend talking about something, and you think, I wonder why I’m supposed to be here. And you realize that the real issue isn’t that it wasn’t specified, it’s that you weren’t paying attention. I wasn’t paying attention, right? Oh, it wasn’t just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There was actually something being said, right? And I was supposed to hear it. And then I’d know why I was here.
Well, I think sometimes when we come to God’s word, we almost think he’s more like the real life meetings we experience, right? We wish it were always. We open God’s word. And every time we open it, it began with the phrase, you may be wondering why you are here, and I’m going to tell you. Wouldn’t that be great? Every single time, just open up the Bible in any place, it says exactly what our reason for being here is. But then we fall into the trap, whether it’s listening to a sermon or reading God’s word in our devotional time, listening to a podcast about God’s word, that we just zone out and we turn why we’re here into blah, blah, blah, blah.
It’s not that God doesn’t want us to know why we’re here. But he needs to remind us to pay attention to why we’re here. That’s our challenge that we’re going to be thinking about tonight. So as we dig into God’s word, let’s pray that he would speak to each of us and help us to hear why we’re here. Let’s pray.
Father, we do pray that you would help us, that you would guide us in understanding what it means to be here. Lord, we want to do your will. We want to understand your word and your way. And Father, we pray that as we study your word tonight, that you would guide us, that you would help us to hear your truth and your love in everything we do. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
So why are you here? Why am I here? Well, there are several different answers we could give to that. But I think the first one we need to look at is the fact that God wants you here. God wants me here. It’s because God has placed us here. And that’s what we see in verse 11. Ephesians 1, verse 11. If you go there, we read, “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
Why are we here? We’re here because God wanted us here. God placed us here. And I think that’s so important for us to understand because we fall into this temptation thinking, well, maybe it doesn’t really matter if I’m here. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I’m doing anything. Maybe I’m just insignificant. And what we need to understand is, no, God wants you here. We’re here only because he wants us to be. We’re chosen as heirs, Paul says here.
And so you can see this has been building over the last few weeks. We were freed from slavery, freed to sonship or, say, daughtership as well, freed to be children of God. And as those who are freed to be children of God, then what? Well, then God takes us and he uses us.
Why are we here? Because God wants you here. That’s so, so important for us to understand. It’s no accident. Just look again at that verse for a moment. “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined, predestined according to what? According to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
We’re here because God wants us to be. And we’re kind of used to being able to make our own way, right? We’ll get to where we want to be and we’ll do it on our own. I remember as a kid, one time my parents and I, we went to Sam’s Club, and this was years ago. It’s been years where you could just pay a certain fee and go into Sam’s, but this was before that. This was when, like, you had to be, you had to work for a certain government agency or belong to a certain credit union or this or that. You had to have certain things. And if you had those things, you’d go into Sam’s Club and shop.
But if you didn’t have those things, you couldn’t go into Sam’s Club and shop. And I remember we went in and we just wanted to look around. My dad and I were just talking about this yesterday. We went in just to peek, just to see what it was like, and they said, no, you can’t come in. Nowadays, they’ll let you in even without membership and say, yeah, you can look around, because they want you to say, oh, I wish I could buy this stuff. And then you go up to the desk and say, here’s my $40 I want to be a Sam’s Club member, right, or a Costco member. But at the time, it wasn’t that way. And it kind of, well, it didn’t kind of. It felt weird, right? We can’t establish our place here. We don’t belong here. Because why? Because they’ve chosen not to let us in here. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
Well, the flip side of that is if you were one of those people who qualify, one of those people who did belong there, you walked in. And maybe if you actually walked in as others were being turned away, you might even feel like, wow, there’s a purpose to me being here. I’m not just randomly here because I wanted to be. I was invited in. How much more so with God that as we look at His promises, He’s invited you in. You’re the reason you’re here. I mean, He’s the reason you’re here.
There are some places we can’t get ourselves into. And preeminent amongst those is into God’s kingdom. We can’t get ourselves into God’s kingdom. We can’t get ourselves into God’s presence. So the very fact that we have the opportunity to know Jesus and the fact that you’re here as followers of Jesus, what does that say? You’re here for a reason. And if you’re tuning in tonight, maybe you hopped on to our social media and you’re watching, and you’re thinking, well, I don’t know if I’m a follower of Jesus. I don’t know if I’m supposed to be here. Jesus has you watching tonight for a reason. And you should take advantage of that. If someone invites you into something, you respond.
It’s not our brilliance. It’s not our luck. We want to think it’s those things. If only other people weren’t so dumb. They’re just like dumb rocks. They don’t understand what it means to follow the gospel. If only they were smart, they would believe it’s right here. And yet, how many people, how many really brilliant people have looked at God’s word and walked away from it?
I can’t look at God’s word and say I’m smarter than so many figures throughout history who have not responded. What I can say is I’m here because God invited me. God brought me here. It’s not a matter of luck. God didn’t roll the dice, right? He didn’t say, oh, oh, she’s in, she’s not. He’s in, he’s not, right?
Congratulations, all of you here today. You get salvation, you get salvation, you get salvation. But those of you that aren’t, too bad you didn’t come to the live studio audience today.
Why are we here? Because God, from the foundations of the world as we’ve seen, already had a plan. Now one thing that means, and I think a reason why it keeps coming back to this all through chapter one, is that Paul wants us to hear that we’re secure. That if God’s the one who’s invited you, then you belong here and you’re not going to be turned away from here.
In those old days of Sam’s Club, when you had to have a qualifying membership somewhere else, some reason to be invited, you didn’t have to worry that they were going to come up in the store and say, well, you’re not supposed to be here. Why? Well, because you were supposed to be there. You were invited there. You hadn’t earned anything.
But on the other hand, if I pay my $40 membership, and I think that my $40 membership is in July and I don’t pay it in June, when I go to check out, they’re going to let me know I don’t belong here, even though I thought I did. Because I did it. God is the one who makes it so that we can be here. It’s not an accident, though. We need to ask something else as well.
Why? Why? What is it that he wants us here for? Well, he wants us here because he loves us, but he also wants us here to do something. Do we ask that question enough? Sometimes we get bogged down in that, well, am I really here? Am I not here? We get stuck in that spot. But then the next part of it is, what am I supposed to do now that I’m here?
I’m not supposed to be self-focused. I’m not supposed to be focused on glorifying myself. Because if I’ve been invited here, then I can’t go around bragging about how great I am. Look at me. I believed in Jesus. I can’t do that. Because I’m not the reason I’m here. But I can talk about the one who invited me here. That’s what he’s inviting us to do, what he’s calling us to do, that we don’t just stop at the point, oh, good, I’m secure, I’ve been invited here, I couldn’t do it on my own, now I’m good, but that we keep wrestling with the fact that God has called us here for a purpose, to glorify himself.
How? By relaying. By being in the relay race of faith. You think about why we’re here, we’ve been talking about that, you say, Tim, well, I’m already thinking about that. But, of course, there’s two reasons why any one of us is here. One is that God directly called you. God made it so that you could be here. God opened up your heart to him. God gave the sacrifice for you. God did that work.
But the other thing is someone, someone shared. Someone shared the gospel with you. God works through human means. Why are we here? We’re here because God invited us. God invited us how? Through people sharing his word. The problem so often is we only get part of that.
We get there, but imagine if you’re at an Olympic relay event, you’ve qualified and you’re there, and you run your part amazingly, and then you just sit down and carry the torch, or not the torch, the thing that you, you can tell how good I am with this. Baton, there we are, thank you. You carry the baton, that’ll teach me for extending the example on the fly. You carry the baton back to the seat with you. It’d be a failure, right, no matter how great a job you ran in your moment. Our calling is to pass the baton. There we are, there it goes. Pass it so that it keeps going.
Think back to where Merlene took us in the confession time. Ezekiel 36, verse 22, right in the middle of the two parts we looked at during confession, listen to what God says. Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God, It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.
Notice here, and we confess those places that we do that, and we do that over and over and over again, and God says, I’m going to actually vindicate myself through you. Here’s the problem so often as believers, we go in the world and we are constantly falling right back into that. We can confess that tonight, we go back into the world this week and we act like the world, and we profane God’s name. Why? Because we look like the world, we don’t look like God.
Take off the T-shirt, or the bumper sticker, or the quote on our social media, and you just look at what we’re doing, and no one, in so many cases, would ever think that, oh, I wonder if that person’s a Christian. So we profane God’s name. We take that baton, yeah, we ran the race well, we showed up at church on Sunday, we studied his word together, we prayed together, and then we go and sit down with the baton and go through the week.
Why are we here? We’re here to glorify God, to point people to, to relay that to others. So the fact that we realize that we’re secure, that just is freeing us to do that, that we don’t have to act through the ways of the world, because God wants us here.
Years ago when I was in seminary and I was looking for an internship, I found myself looking for a new church to do an internship at, and I showed up at a church, and everyone knew at the old church that I was at that I was a total geek. I loved technology, I built the first full-fledged network at the church, got the first church website up, I tinkered with the computers that were too old to make them work for a while longer. I did all that stuff.
Everyone at church, you know, if they saw me and there was a problem with their computer, what did they do? They came up to me and said, Hey Tim, can you come over and look at my computer? Can you tell me what to do with my computer? And so even though I was now no longer a teenager just fiddling with computers, I was now in seminary, and I wanted to be a pastor, and I wanted to teach people about God’s word, what did people want to talk to me about? They wanted to talk to me about how to fix their computer.
And so when I showed up at the new church, guess what I didn’t talk about? I didn’t mention for quite a while. I didn’t mention that I knew anything about computers. Eventually I did. I couldn’t. Something happened, and I couldn’t stand it, and I had, you know, I fessed up. But I held on to that for a while because I wanted to be known as a pastoral intern, not as an IT intern.
And I knew the temptation would be if I was known as being able to do that stuff, that’s what people were going to want to talk to me about. We’ve probably all been in that place where we have some expertise in some area, and we go around other people. We don’t want to think about it. We don’t want to do it. There’s something else that we feel even called to focus on, something that’s more important to us in that moment, and yet that’s what people are going to talk to us about because that’s what they know that we know that they don’t know.
And we do that with God. We know that God can fix things. We know that He can answer prayers, and yes, we should bring those prayers to Him. But how often do we forget our purpose because we’re too busy asking Him to take a look at our computer and see if there’s some viruses that need to be removed from it? God says, I want you to focus on my glory. I want you to focus on sharing about my word to others. I don’t want you to be focused purely on whether I can remove the virus from your computer or not.
I can. That’s not all I want you to know me for. And ultimately, I was able to find something of a balance at least because I became known first as a pastoral intern, and then as the guy who eventually admitted he knew how to tinker with computers and fix things. And so in doing so, I could do some of both.
And God’s inviting us. He can do way more than any of us can in any area. He doesn’t just tinker. He rebuilds. He creates. He’s the one who made everything and the one who fixes everything. And He wants to do that for us. He just wants us to keep in mind the purpose too, that we’re called to do something.
And how often is it when I pray to God, when I’m even thinking about praying to God, when I’m reading His word, I’m thinking, how is God going to fix this particular situation I’m in right now? Or maybe we make one step further along the path, how is God going to fix this situation about someone I care about? How is He going to fix this situation or that situation? And how often do I forget that God isn’t the heavenly geek squad? He’s better than it, but that’s not His sum total.
And in fact, when we come to Him, He doesn’t want us just to be talking about how He can fix things. He wants us to be talking about His glory and wanting Him to guide us in how we can share His word, how we can share His hope. It isn’t just about my happiness and my preferences and my success. It’s about glory and the expansion of His kingdom.
When we’re focused on me or even we, the problem is we end up forgetting about these out there, those that we’re called to reach. And God doesn’t want us to do that. He wants us to understand that yes, we’re here because He invited us here, and we’re here because we’re supposed to invite others to here.
Verse 12: “So that we who were first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory. In Him you also.” And I’m going to stop there right in the middle of that thought. I’ll explain why in a second. Sorry to pause us there. We’ll get to the rest next week. Yeah, I know, I know. But we don’t want to miss why He can say, “You also.”
Now, as Paul makes this point, he says so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory. Who are the first? And commentators have wrestled with who is he thinking about here. And one possibility is he’s talking about the Jews, right? Because Jesus, well, He’s born into a Jewish family. He’s a Jew. His disciples, they’re Jews. Okay, so first Jews.
And we see some of that discussion in the Gospels. For example, when Jesus ministers to the Samaritan woman, He talks about coming first to the Jews, right? We see those sorts of hints. And so it could be that’s what Paul has in mind here. Or he could have in mind those who are the first to respond, maybe up to Pentecost or a little beyond, those who maybe witnessed the risen Lord. And so they’re first, maybe some Gentiles, and there may be some Samaritans, but those who are the initial followers of Jesus.
Either way gets across the same point. Because now he’s writing to people who are beyond that. And that’s why we’re only looking at the first part of 13. 13 is going to go into what it means for them. But the first thing we need to acknowledge is that it didn’t stop with the first people. It didn’t stop with the people that saw the risen Lord. It continued into the people who heard about those who saw the risen Lord. And Paul can say here, “In Him you also,” because the Ephesians, as they responded to the Gospel, they weren’t first, but they were continuing. And we look back and think of them as first, right? Boy, they were mighty close to the beginning. They might as well be first. But they weren’t first. They were some of the first recipients of the passing of that baton.
And throughout the ages, God’s people, Israel and then the Church, have had the same purpose. It’s not distinct. The early Church’s mission, it wasn’t to hunker down and avoid persecution. It was to keep expanding in spite of persecution because Satan can’t cut off the Church. He wasn’t going to triumph over it. And so it was supposed to fearlessly expand even when things got tough. But before that, it was supposed to pick up the example of what had come before as well. Just keep carrying it on and on and on.
How had the Israelites profaned God’s name? Well, they’d become all about themselves. They were going and asking for the Heavenly Geek Squad to fix their situations, right? We want king. We want prosperity. We want our fields to grow wonderfully. We want, we want, we want. And we’d even like to maybe get to follow some of the other gods.
Incidentally, if anyone here has ever done IT, you know this is the other thing. You give people advice and they go and do something else and they want you to fix it, right? That’s what they did with God, right? God says, here’s what I want you to do. Here’s how you’re going to experience blessing in life. And they said, well, can we do that plus, you know, Moloch’s looking pretty good right now. Can we do a little Moloch worship as well? And you can just fix whatever goes wrong with it?
What they weren’t focused on, though, is how do we get those around us who follow Moloch to understand that he’s a false god, that he doesn’t really exist, that he’s powerless? How do you instead communicate you should be following the Lord like we are because the Lord is the one who has blessing? The Lord is the one who fixes things. And so by the very fact that they were intrigued by that which was outside, rather than wanting the outside to be intrigued by what was inside, they were profaning the name of the Lord by implying he wasn’t adequate, that he wasn’t really the destination.
And over and over again throughout the history of Israel, we see that, where they were called as a nation of priests, but they weren’t actually doing priestly work. They weren’t communicating the Lord to those who needed to hear. Some did, a little bit. And certainly they relayed within themselves. But may it never be as a church that we are simply relaying to ourselves and making sure that we continue on, but we need to be relaying beyond ourselves.
Doesn’t mean that we don’t care about relaying to ourselves, right? We do things like Sunday School Express, and in large part that’s for further discipleship, right? If you want to better understand God’s word, we’re gonna discuss things together and learn from each other and so on, but it’s not the end.
Read about a story a few weeks ago of an officer in Michigan, a police officer, who pulled over someone on a seemingly routine traffic stop. He was in a 45 mile an hour zone, and the car was going 75, 80 miles an hour. Perfectly explicable that he was going to pull this car over, right? And he pulls over the car, and the driver’s actually trying to wave him down as he’s walking up to the car, and he comes up to the window to find in the passenger seat an absolutely terrified mother, a little baby, and the baby’s uncle who had been recklessly driving the car.
Now, was it his duty to stop reckless drivers? Yes. But what did he pick up in that moment as he listened to these panicked people? The baby wasn’t breathing.
And instead of going and saying, okay, I’m going to run your license now, and I’m going to write out that ticket, and then you can get on your way, just please be careful as you’re driving to the hospital, what did the officer do? He called for more help, and he took the baby out, and he managed to, he knew the technique to work on the baby to get whatever was choking the baby out of his throat. If not for Officer Brendan Fraser’s quick thinking and realizing what he was really there to do, that baby wouldn’t have probably even made it to the hospital.
You’ve been so focused on, but you aren’t supposed to be driving like that, and I was just sitting there peacefully on the roadside, I wasn’t really looking to do a speed trap right now, and now I had to get out, and now I’ve had to walk up to the car, and you shouldn’t drive like that. He saw the need, and he acted, and he saved a life.
Reflecting on it, he said, just rely on your training, that’s what you need to do as a police officer. And I thought about it, there’s parts of the training that are, don’t let people drive recklessly, don’t let people speed. But why are all those things there? It’s because a police officer’s duty is to make his area of patrol safe. To provide a peaceful place for people, to ensure public safety, that’s what we use if we’re being a little bit more formal, public safety officers.
We understood that safety wasn’t just making sure someone isn’t speeding, but making sure that someone wasn’t dying. That made the difference.
God’s given us all kinds of training, and sometimes we get focused on some part of it, and it’s the equivalent of being focused on you shouldn’t be speeding and not looking and seeing the baby dying. And we can make sure we get the part where we need to have a church that continues, we can get the part where we need to have doctrine that is sound, we can get the part where we need to be passing on in our own families the truth of God’s word, and all those things are absolutely true.
It’s absolutely true that a police officer should pull over people who are recklessly speeding. But how often is there someone dying there, choking on sin, and we’re not focused on that because we’re too busy writing the ticket? And instead of being the hero, we’re the one who oversees death.
We need to remember why we’re here. Officer Frazier didn’t forget why he was really there. And there’s a baby that’s going to grow up because he didn’t forget. And every time that we remember why we’re here, and we’re not just asking God, what can you do for me? How can you do it for me? But even when we’re studying God’s word together, even when we’re trying to learn so we better understand, we’re doing all that so we can be those who keep passing down the relay and passing it on so that more people know God’s word and experience his freedom. We’re remembering why we’re really here.
God’s people are public safety officers, as it were, for the world. Because there’s men running rampant, driving recklessly, bringing death, causing people to choke. And in each moment, we need to remember why we’re here. And sometimes, yes, we need to do the ticket writing and the pulling over. Sometimes we need to go back to the academy and train a little bit more ourselves. As long as we remember why we’re here.
We’re here as those who God chose. And we’re here as those whom God chose so that others whom he’s chosen would know him. May that be the people that we are. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would help us to be those who are ready and able to share your word. That we don’t get so bogged down on details that we forget that you’ve called us to be here, to bring glory, to continue that relay that it wouldn’t stop. That just as the early Christians, those first believers passed on the baton to the Ephesians and so many other churches, and there was a second generation and a third and a fourth, and however many countless generations until we reach ourselves, Lord, would you help us to be eager to pass on to a world that has sin running rampant and the safety, the security, the health that comes only through you. Would you direct us and help us not to forget our training, that you’ve trained us for a purpose and that you are using us in that purpose even today. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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