Ephesians One verse three can jump to the end, guys. All praise to God, The Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ.

Even before she made the world God loved and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in His eyes, God decided in advance to adopt us, to adopt us into His family, his own family, by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what He wanted to do. And he gave it, gave him great pleasure.

So we praise, God, for the glorious grace that he poured out on us, who belong to his dear son. He is so rich in kindness and in grace that he purchased our freedom with blood of his son and forgave our sins. And he showered his kindness on us, along with all of his wisdom and his understanding. God is the God that we serve.

He invites us to come into a place of intimate relationship, a family relationship. He invites us into a place of deep, deep waters to bring us his heart. He gave his son to die on the cross so that we don’t have to experience the same he gave his son to die, that we could have relationship with the father.

That’s what he’s inviting us into. That’s where he’s calling us to a deeper place. A deeper place of his presence, a deeper place of love, a deeper place of mercy, a deeper place of the presence and the power of God. And he provided it all for us. It’s not something we have to do to earn it. He gave it freely and he put it inside of me.

And he’s inviting us on a journey to live our lives, to please the father, to live our lives full of peace. To live our lives full of joy. To live our lives full of hope. This is the God that we serve. He’s not an angry God. He’s a God of great love and of great mercy. And he’s calling us to himself and he’s calling us back into that place with him.

I believe that some of us are feeling a pull into a place that is deeper than we’ve ever known. Some of us are feeling a pull into a place that we have never experienced, and some of us are feeling this pull into something that we have known and God is calling us back. It’s calling us back. It’s not too late.

You haven’t gone too far. My grace is enough. My mercy is enough. It’s not about you. It’s about the blood that was shed for you to have a life of freedom. That’s his invitation. He’s inviting us to live a life unto him. And he’s been taking us on a journey. And if we’ve studying the Book of Visions and he’s been taking a step by step as we explore and learn the heart of.

God, excuse me, the heart of God that we explore and learn the heart of God to how we are supposed to live our lives. Because God has promised us all these things. And he’s us, everything that we need to attain it. And he’s inviting us into a place of fellowship and intimacy and closeness and relationship with him. And he is telling us, this is what I have for you.

And then he’s proceeded to give us all these ways, these instructions, these how tos this is. I’m not leaving it to you, to out on your own. I’ve given you the blueprint. I’m telling you, this is how you walk. If you want to live a life of peace, this is how you walk if you want to live a life of freedom, if you want to live a life of joy.

And he’s laying it out and he’s giving it to us piece by piece, and he’s telling us to pursue God. He’s been showing us through Ephesians that we must walk not as the Gentiles, but we must follow Christ. He’s been telling us that must put off the old man and put on the new. He’s telling us to be renewed in the spirit, to walk consecrate consecrated, to him, to walk in holiness, to walk in love, to walk in the light as he is light to walk in wisdom, to understand how to live out these godly characters in our relationships with each other, in our marriages, in our homes, in our jobs, in our community.

And he’s inviting us into this place where we’re not distracted by the things around us, but that we will pursue him wholeheartedly. And he’s just walking us on this journey. He’s taking us to another step and another step and step. And today we’re going to be diving into Ephesians six, where Paul is continuing to challenge another area of our lives in the realms of relationship, and that is to live as unto the Lord, everything that we do, to live as unto the Lord.

Ephesians six, verse five says, Bond servants obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling with a sincere heart as you would Christ not, by the way of I service as people pleasers, but as bond servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart rendering serve is with a good will as to the Lord and not to man knowing whatever good anyone does.

This He will receive back from the Lord, whether he be a born servant or free masters. Do the same to them and stop your threatening, knowing that those that he who is both their master and is yours in heaven, and that there is no partiality in him. So we’ve been on this journey in initiations and Paul previously in chapter five, verse 21, he tells us to submit one to another in fear in the reverence for Christ.

And he’s continuing to deal with these elements of relationship, like I said, he was talking about families marriage relationship, he’s talking about parent and children relationships, and now he’s going on into these other elements and areas of relationship to build on what he is talking about, which is first and foremost based in love and submission. He’s teaching us how to live our godly lives and our homes.

He’s teaching us submission. He’s teaching us the challenge how to deal with challenges that come around in our family structures. He’s teaching how to deal with strife and anger. He’s teaching us how to lead. And again, he’s speaking to us how to handle these other relationships. Now, at the time Paul is speaking in any Ephesians six, he is using the word slaves, bond servants.

And at the time it’s really important to understand that slavery was universal in the ancient world and a high percentage of the overall population were slaves. It’s been computed that the Roman Empire, that in the Roman Empire there were more than 60 million slaves. They constituted the workforce. They didn’t just include domestic servants and manual laborers, but it was educated people as well, like doctors and teachers.

Slaves could be inherited or purchased back then or acquired in a settlement. The institution of slavery was just a fact in the economic life at the time, so completely accepted as part of the labor structure here. And although we may not have the same reference to the specifics of slaves and master relationships, there is still reference to us in our, today in our lives in a context of employment and employee relationship.

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First of all, how we interact with people that have both natural and spiritual authority in our lives, how we handle ourselves when we are in positions of authority and in some modern translation. It even draws a direct correlation to the employee employer relationship that maybe is the most culturally relevant. And then passion translation. It says Those who are employed should listen to their employers and obey their instructions with great respect and honor.

Serve them with humility in your heart as though you were working for the master. Always Do what is right and not only when others are watching so that you may please Christ as his servant by doing his will serve. Your employers wholeheartedly and with love as though you were serving Christ and not man. Be assured that anything that you do that is beautiful and excellent will be repaid by our Lord, whether you are an employee or an employer.

And to the caretakers of the flock, I say, do what is right with your people by forgiving them when they offend you. For, you know there is a master in heaven that shows no favoritism. So here we are, we’ve gone through Ephesians, we’ve talked about the ways that God is teaching us, how to live our lives, and here we are.

And Paul is speaking to both the subordinate and this master relationship. He’s telling the slave and he’s instructing them to be obedient and sincere in their hearts, and he’s telling the Masters not to their position of authority by using threats, much like he just instructed the parents to not provoke their children to anger. And in effusion six, four, seven and eight it says serve whole heartedly.

He’s speaking to both of them, serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they be slave or free. Now, it is really interesting that Paul is speaking to them in the middle of this cultural time where it is a very big distinction between a master and a slave.

And yet he’s telling them, hey, it doesn’t matter whether you’re free or you’re in slavery, you must serve the Lord, not people serve the Lord, not people. See, there’s a really important thing that I want to speak to today in these sets of scriptures. There’s a really critical piece that we can take, even if we don’t have cultural relevance, even if maybe it’s something we want to skip over because we don’t have slavery today.

I don’t need this one. There’s a really important line in the scriptures, and he says, Doing service as to the Lord and not to men doing service as to the Lord and not to men. This is a critical component and in this passage, this is the critical component that Paul is telling us that we need to grab onto to be able to live our lives well, to live our lives following Christ.

So how do we do that? So I want to talk about three things today of how we live our lives as to the Lord and not to man. The first one is to serve well. The second one is to not be pleasers of men, and the third one is to position your heart. So Paul is instructing us, and God is telling Paul that we must first function, in obedience, He’s challenging us to serve well.

Now our English understanding of the word obey is to do what I’m told. Yes. And if any of you have had children, you know that just doing what they’re told doesn’t actually mean they want to do it or they are doing it happily or with a smile on their face or in any way, shape or form. Maybe it was just my kids and that’s okay.

They’re great now. Mostly I’m. But there’s a difference to what the Greek word they’re that says obedience is. It’s actually to subordinate to be underneath to submit yourself unto. Now I know my kids can do what I’m told. And so technically speaking, they’re submitting themselves to me. But the difference between this American English obedience and godly submission is a matter of the heart.

You see godly submission is willing to come underneath its obedience with sincerity of heart. It’s obedience. Sincerity of heart. To serve well, we must serve with excellence at all times, to serve well. It’s not just when we’re being watched, it’s at all times. Paul is speaking to a people that probably lived in some of the most atrocious situations, right?

He is speaking to Roman slaves who were Christians. Yes. And he is telling them to be obedient. He’s telling them to submit their hearts, because here’s the deal. Paul wasn’t so much concerned about human rights. He was concerned for Christians to serve their Lord wholeheartedly whatever life situation was, wherever they were at. He was saying, Serve God. You can serve God by serving your master.

You can serve God by coming underneath someone that has authority over you. He didn’t say anything about taking them out of their economic position. He said that within whatever situation, whatever position you’re in, serve as unto the Lord. If the work of a Christian slave could be transformed by doing it as into the Lord, the same must be true for us as believers in a job, as believers in a home or in a school.

As Christians, our entire standard of work and service must be transformed into something totally different from the standard of the world. That is what he is challenging in these sets of scriptures. He’s saying, Serve well, be different, be Christlike in your service, even when you’re not being treated well, even when everything around you doesn’t make sense. And it’s not fair.

Be Christ life like and serve wholeheartedly. Give of yourself, serve of yourself. Because it’s not just your master you are serving. You are serving the God in heaven. And when you do that, He sees it and you have a reward ahead of you. You can serve him for what we do on a daily basis, be different. You know, God wants to transform every part of us to be like him, and that every part of us includes our day to day stuff, our eight to fives.

It includes the people that we come in contact at hour 8 to 5 be different, be different, be different, bring something different, John Scott said in his commentary on Ephesians. The Christ centered ness of this instruction is very striking. The slaves perspective has changed. His arise ins have broadened. He has been liberated from the slavery of men pleasing into the freedom of serving Christ.

His mundane tasks have been absorbed into a higher preoccupation, namely the will of God and the good pleasure of Christ. This is what Paul is pressing on us. We must live our whole lives as unto the Lord, not part of our lives, not just our Instagram lives, not just our Sunday worship lives, our whole lives as unto the Lord.

We must understand that our behavior in every environment that we are in matters how we handle ourselves in church means nothing if we are not living a life of love and submission in our homes and with love and submission in our jobs and in our communities. Charles SPURGEON says Grace makes us the servant of God while still we are the servants of men.

So that again, grace makes us the servant of God while still we are the servants of

men. It enables us to do the business of heaven while we are attending to the business of Earth. It enables us to do the business of heaven while we are attending to the business of Earth. It sanctifies the common duties of life by showing us how to perform them in the light of heaven.

The love of Christ makes the lowliest act sublime. Her magnificent. We need to serve well. We live our lives as unto the Lord and not to men to serve well. This is how we do it. We serve well. Secondly, we’re not pleasers of men now, people pleasers as a pretty common phrase we hear these days. People pleasers in our culture are those that have a drive to please at all cost in order to receive love and affection and care and acceptance.

This can come into play at work. It can come into play in a family. It can come into play at church. But the reality of being a people pleaser is that you set up a belief system in which your personal and acceptance is based solely on what somebody else thinks or does. And in the Bible, there’s only two places in the New Testament where this actual word is used.

Now, Yes, there’s other places where God says, Don’t, please, man, please God. But this word where it actually says men pleasers is only used twice, once here in Ephesians six and the other in Colossians three, which is this parallel set of scriptures. And in both they’re used in the context of slavery. And I would like to submit to you that in our desire to please people, we are putting ourselves into slavery.

To them, a slavery that ties your identity, that ties your value to what others say, rather than who God says you are. And this is a slippery slope, you know, because when our worth is dependent on what others think, what others say or whatever, there’s demonstrate we are putting on chains and binding ourselves to those things. We relinquish our freedom that Christ gave us.

We relinquish the power and authority that God has given me, and we put someone else the position to satisfy our souls when only one is able to satisfy our souls, and that God, when we put somebody else in a position that only God can take and only God can have, we are setting ourselves up to fail. We are setting them up to fail and we’re setting ourselves up to fail because they will never meet our expectations.

And I will never meet theirs. Only God can carry that kind of weight. Only God can be the one to satisfy my. It doesn’t usually start there. It starts often in ascent, wanting to impress someone, wanting to have a good message on a Sunday. I was reminded this morning for what I was preaching when we put our value in somebody else’s hands and not God’s, we are only going to come to a place of condemnation, a place of fear, a place of fearing what others think of us, a place of rejection.

The enemy comes in with lies, of expectations. They have high expectations of you. You better not disappoint them. You don’t want to waste their time. You don’t want to say something wrong in and of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to please somebody but the enemy comes in and he feeds the lies and gives us these expectations. It redirects our attention and redirects our motives.

And when that redirection happens, that’s when we get into trouble. Motive is the deciding factor here. Now, all of my energy is now given to modifying my behavior, modifying my actions to meet somebody else’s expectations, and not God’s. And I would beg to say that is my interpretation of their expectations or somebody else’s interpretation of their expectations. Most of time, if not actually even their expectation, is the enemy of our soul.

Putting on us that is not designed to be their because we serve a God who is loving. We serve a God full of grace. We serve a God full of mercy. And we can fall a hundred times and he is there to pick us back up. He says he leaves in 99 and he goes after the one. And so when we start believing the lies that what I do is going to be what somebody else says I do.

That doesn’t work. When we start believing the lies that their opinion of my self is what validates who I am, it’s what validates what I do. Then we come into a place of slavery. We come into a place of fear, and we are opening the door to walk in fear to walk in fear. And that is not what God has for us.

We open the door for fear and anxiety to consume our thoughts. Because you know what? I’m going to let somebody down. And now condemnation comes in because I’m not properly aligned, because I’m focused on pleasing men instead of pleasing God. This is a spiritual battle. We must begin to recognize and understand the tactics of our enemy. This is such a trap because it is counterfeit love to understand.

This is counterfeit love. God is offering unconditional love and Satan saying, Here it is, but it’s conditional, right? It’s a counterfeit love. We want to feel accepted. We want to feel loved, and our enemy wants us to try to find it from the wrong source so we can keep us in isolation, so we can keep us in depression.

But my God says whom the sun sets free is free indeed. And he has given us a spirit of life, and he has given us a spirit of love and know nothing that will be formed against him will prosper if we keep our eyes on him, and if we understand the purpose that we have and we properly align our lives to look him first and not to be so concerned about what man says or what man thinks, we will begin to walk in a freedom that we have not ever known before.

We will be able to walk in a joy that we’ve not ever known before. You know how much weight is when you’re carrying around people’s opinions of you? And if you can just shake that off, do you know how much like height do you can get to jump? Do you know how much joy you could have to run around your room and run around your house and run around the church?

Because my God, it’s giving me freedom. And I’m not dependent on the opinions of man. I am dependent on God and him alone. Yes, the other side of this pendulum is also just as dangerous. I don’t care what other people think. I’m not a man pleasing. I’m just going to be me. You get what you get and I’m just me.

This is just as dangerous because it is used as an excuse to live a life for self. It is use and it’s excusing the behavior that is dishonoring and rude and selfish. And both sides of this create a life lived for somebody than God, and neither is what God has intended. He wants us to live a full, free, not restrictive life.

But he’s saying to do that, I understand this don’t get pulled into the trap of being a man pleaser. Don’t get pulled in, do everything to please him or him alone upon servants. Be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling and sincerity of heart as to Christ, not with I servants as men pleasers, but as born servants to Christ doing the will of God from the heart with good doing service as

to the Lord, and not to men as to the Lord and not to men.

So we must serve well if we’re going to live this life as to the Lord and not to men, we must serve well. We must not be pleasers of man, and we must position our hearts with sincerity of heart to it, as to the Lord doing the will of God from the heart. This is a critical thing. The serving, the pleasing.

All these things come from a heart that is properly aligned under the authority of Christ alone. There’s no other way that we can do this. There’s no other way that we can serve. There’s no other way that we can not be man pleasing. And so that focused, but to position our hearts under the authority of Christ alone, we must be in a place of pursuing him, pursuing Him and him alone.

We must so close to his heart now we allow him to transform our thinking, to transform our motives, to transform our agendas. He’s wanting us to come to a place of deep relationship with him, and that only comes when we set our heart and we set our affections on the things that are above, not on the things that are below, not on the things around us, not on the people around us, not on the things that we have to do.

Not on the circumstances that we cannot control, not on the heartbreak, not under anything else. But we fix our eyes on him and him alone. It doesn’t matter where you are. It doesn’t matter the challenges are in front of you, what hardship that you are enduring. We can live a life as unto the Lord, full of power and demonstration, full of Holy Spirit, full of the presence of God exploding out of us, full of His glory covering the earth.

And we can only do that if. We fix our eyes on Him, and our hearts are secure in his love and in his grace and in his mercy. We don’t have to try to do this on our own. It’s not anything that I can attain on my on in and of myself. But I fix my eyes and my heart and I position my life under his authority.

And as I do that, he gives us the strength. Second, Peter, one says His divine power has given me everything we need for life and godliness. Everything, everything. I am not lacking anything. The life I am a believer of Christ. He gives us everything that we need for life and godliness. He gives us everything that we need. It is already inside of us.

We just have to get it out of us. We have to get out of the way. We have to break down the mindsets that we have built up. We have to break down the places that we put idols in our life that are not of God. And we have to come into a relationship with him where he says, I love you so much and I’ve given you everything that you need and I want to give you life.

I want to give you life. I want to give you life. I’m not here to bring death. I am here to bring life. I’m not here to bring pain. I’m here to bring joy. And God says it doesn’t matter about the circumstances. He’s the one and he’s the source. And we can live life and we can live joy regardless of what we’re going through, because he alone is our source.

And then going all the way back to the beginning of Ephesians, like I read earlier, we’re reminded that this is all about the understa ending of the full revelation of Christ and the unfolding of his plan, the plan of God to bring forth a reconciliation to His people. It’s not a list of do’s and don’ts. It’s about full restoration of relationship.

It’s about truly walking his sons and daughters and knowing who I am because of him, not because of anything else, but because of him. Do everything as unto the Lord and not to me and my church.