Ephesians 2:11-16 • God's Masterpiece
Listen to the audio version of this message with the player below.
Sermon Notes
sermon note files here (add download buttons or image blocks as necessary)
Transcript
(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)
"That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth." It is the reminder that it is the Word of God upon which we base our faith and by which we overcome the Satan of this world.
We overcome by what the Apostle Paul has reminded us is our hope, not our works, but the grace of God. That was the great Reformation verse that we began with last week. By grace are you saved through faith. And this is not your own doing. It's the gift of God, not of works, so that no one should boast. It's the reminder that we are made right with God by His work, not by ours. His grace alone.
But now, having heard of and received that grace, so what?
What are the consequences? Are we just supposed to feel good?
Is there not some calling upon the lives of those who have been redeemed by the grace of God?
The Apostle Paul begins to address that calling in Ephesians the second chapter as he continues his understanding of the implications of grace as we will consider verses 11 through 16 this day. We ask that you would stand as we would consider this portion of God's Word, Ephesians chapter 2 verses 11 through 16 as Paul begins to unfold the implications for a people who have been saved by grace alone.
Verse 11, "Therefore, remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from God, in the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who are once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for He Himself is our peace who has made us both one and is broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross thereby killing the hostility."
Let's pray together.
"Hemelay, Father, we thank You for the wonder and the nobility of Your Word.
Here You tell us that the peace that has come to us by the grace of our Lord Jesus is not only ours to receive but to share.
But even as we read words about the gospel crossing lines of peoples and ethnicities and demographics, as much as we might take hope, we also are cautious.
What does that exactly mean?
What does it call for from us? Help us to perceive, Father, this day not only the wonder of the gospel but the wonder of being a people who are Your expression of it to the world by the way that we love
and receive and forgive and unify, becoming the very masterpiece of our God by the way in which His grace shines through us. Help us to perceive it and to live it by Your Holy Spirit, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen."
Please be seated.
In the 1995 film, Mr. Holland's Opus, there is a composer who is writing what he perceives to be the symphony that will bring him fame and fortune.
But he has to make a living while he's writing.
And so he takes a job as a high school music teacher, anticipating he'll just be there for a year or so before getting back to the fame and the fortune of the symphony career.
But then life happens.
The woman he marries gets pregnant, has a child, with health problems, the bills mount up, the symphony gets delayed, and before he knows it, he is taught at the high school for 30 years.
And then a financially strapped school district discerns that it must cut the fine arts program.
And not only is he not gotten to the symphony, he's now going to lose his job.
It's devastating.
Everything he's given himself to, everything he's put aside, simply indicates a life of failure.
He's not accomplished anything that he intended. He's packing up his books, he's leaving the office, and to his surprise is invited to an assembly he did not know was going to occur. He walks in, and to his surprise are students from the years of teaching, including the local governor of the state, who begins to address the crowd and Mr. Holland and says,
"Mr. Holland had a profound influence on my life and on a lot of lives that I know.
But I have a feeling that Mr. Holland considers a great part of his own life misspent."
Rumor had it he was always working on this symphony of his, and this was going to make him famous, rich, possibly both.
But our Mr. Holland isn't rich, and he isn't famous, and it might be easy for him to think of himself as a failure.
But if he thinks of himself that way, he would be wrong, because I think he has achieved a success far beyond riches and fame. Look around you, Mr. Holland. There is not a life in this room that you have not touched, and each of us is a better person because of you. We are your symphony, Mr. Holland. We are the melodies and the notes of your masterpiece. We are the music of your life. All teachers now stand up and cheer, you know.
It's just a great moment as the declaration is being made that it is the masterpiece that is taking shape in the lives of people touched that is actually the great work that has gone on.
The Apostle Paul has talked about a great work of God thus far in this portion of the book of Ephesians. He has talked about how God, by His grace alone, has wreaked salvation for a people who were wrecked, has made them right with Himself simply by digging that channel of faith into our hearts by which we receive the grace that is in Christ Jesus alone.
But is that the end of the story?
The Apostle says, "No."
He actually says, remember verse 10, that we are God's workmanship now. We are the product of His great mercy and work of grace. And as we are His workmanship, we are God's masterpiece, you and I. To what end? How is that supposed to affect us? That we are the craft of God in His hand by virtue of His grace.
What's the effect to be on our lives?
The Apostle begins to explain it as he says, "Among other things that should be affected is our memory."
I mean, that's where he begins in verse 11. "Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision," by what is called the circumcision, which is made by, made in the flesh by hands. I mean, we're just kind of saying, what am I supposed to remember?
Well, remember your roots.
You were the uncircumcision.
You were Gentiles in the flesh. Now for those of us these days, we hardly hear the words as they were intended anymore. When the Apostle says, "You were Gentiles," in some of your translations, in some Bibles, the word Gentile just means nations. You were from nations that were not Jewish.
Okay. You were Gentiles in the flesh. You were not of the nationality of Jews. But when he says, "You were Gentiles in the flesh," he's reminding them that they were not just of other nations. They were the goyim.
They were those the Jews looked down upon. They were Gentiles, meaning you were not the treasured people. You were those that we hated.
Some of you may have traveled in nations that I do in which the actual name for one who is not of the race of the people who are there is you are identified, the actual translation is, "foreign devil."
And children are identified, taught from the very young age that if somebody does not look like them, it is a foreign devil. So I have ridden on subways where children just look at me and break out in tears.
You know, it's a foreign devil. He doesn't look like us. He's from a different nationality.
But that separation of nationality and ethnicity is not all the Apostle says. He says, "You weren't just godless by nationality.
You were a Gentile. You were godless by nature. You were a Gentile in the flesh."
That is your very being reflected, the impurity of not being of the people of God. You were one that we not only hated, but we viewed you as impure.
That's what Paul says when he says, "You were called the uncircumcision. You had not gone through our holiness rituals, those things that we did." So when we looked at you, we called you scum.
We called you impure. We didn't want to touch you. In fact, if any of our holy men did touch you, it would make them unholy.
We thought of everybody not like us as Ebola-like.
We did not want you, and you were looked down upon because of us. It was more than geography.
You were to us unclean, impure, according to your very flesh.
When Paul is talking about those things, he is reminding us of something he has said earlier in the chapter, "You were by nature children of wrath. You were those who by your very nature were godless, unholy, and not right before your God."
What's so amazing for us as Paul is writing to try to win people to the gospel is how scathing is this assessment. You need to remember who you were.
You were people we thought were scum.
But when he's addressing them, it's not just one or the other, he's saying, "You were all that way."
It really is in some ways the Christian revelation.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize winner for fiction.
You may remember did, not for fiction, for literature. You may remember wrote out of his experience of being in Soviet gulags work camps.
When he was first there, he was a communist, not doing what all the communists wanted. That was actually his philosophy. And it was actually by being in a prison camp where he became helpless before the cruelty of the world that he became a Christian.
And when he was later in life released and began to write the books and got the fame of criticizing the communist Soviet government, what people expected him to do was to use his craft, to use his art to go after his oppressors.
But curiously, from his Christian perspective, he never did that.
And though he described the humanity and the cruelty, he resisted ever saying, "The people who did this to me are evil in ways that I don't myself know."
In fact, he wrote these words, "If only there were evil people, somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds that the rest of us do not know about, then it would only be necessary to separate out the evil people from the rest of us, and we could then dispense with them.
But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
The evil is not in some, it is in all.
And the reason that we cannot simply dispense with evil people is nobody wants to dispense with themselves.
The gospel revelation is all of us were unrighteous before God. There is none righteous, no, not one. You were children of wrath according to the flesh. You were all goyim. You were all impure. You were all unholy before God. And while we Jews had a name for you."
Paul is reminding us that was just by virtue of some fleshly ritual, right? Verse 12, "Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope without God in the world."
The reason that we identified you as foreign to us, as people who were not worthwhile to consider is there had not just been this circumcision right performed with hands. There had not been some mark in your flesh.
And so we disregarded you. We said, "You're alien, separated, no good."
But Paul is saying that that label was totally unfair.
We called you the uncircumcision. He called us the circumcision because of something just purely done by a ritual done with hands.
It's not just an old story.
Some of you have seen the movie, "If You Could Bear It" to go through it, "Hotel Rwanda,"
where you recognize the genocide that was done in Rwanda's neighbor turned upon, neighbor killing with guns and machetes, just wanton bloodletting. And if you said, "What was the difference between those African peoples as they turned on each other in Rwanda?" And some of you know the difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi was purely a difference of height.
Hatred, born by generations of privilege going to some and not to others, but the distinction had nothing to do with skin color. It had nothing to do with intelligence, had nothing to do with character. It's somewhere taller than others.
And the apostles saying, "Can you believe it? There were people who were hating you simply because of some fleshly difference that's been maintained." It still happens. It's happening right now. We so grieve and lament what is happening to Christians in the Middle East as a result of the oppression and the murder of ISIS.
But I hope you recognize there have been more Muslims killed than Christians by ISIS. And the Muslims that have been killed have been killed because they wear different clothes than those who are killing them, or some of them because their beards are different shapes.
And you're saying that the way that they are identified, I know there are greater religious differences, but the way they are identified is just by these mere fleshly distinctions that result in people hating one another and killing and murdering one another, purely because of a fleshly distinction. And that's not just something out there somewhere.
I mean, in us, among us, there are people who have felt the terrible hurt of not being of the right skin color or the right part of town or the right high school or the right background and know what it means to feel the absolute unfairness of having been differentiated by things that are purely fleshly.
I can remember coming home from junior high one day and finding my mother and my younger brother holding each other and just sobbing and asking my mother, "What's wrong?"
And she said some kids at school today learned a name to call your brother.
Retard!
And I can still remember, even as I say it, the rage and the confusion and the shame and not even being able to figure it all out. We didn't do this. We didn't choose this. We didn't... How could you hurt us this way for something that's so unfair, that's merely a matter of biology and background and birth? How could you do this?
And it's simply the reminder that when Martin Luther King Jr. talked about a dream in which people would ultimately judge by the content of their character rather than the color of the skin, it is a dream that is not lived by many who are living the nightmare of fleshly prejudice even this day.
And the Apostle is so bold and so brave here as just to say to people, "Listen, if the gospel is going to have the effect upon your church, your being, your person, as I intend, you have to remember some things.
The unfairness of a culture who judges people according to the flesh because the church is supposed to take you from that."
It will not do it, however, unless we recognize that these fleshly distinctions are actually reflection of something that we hate talking about.
And that is a spiritual reality. Verse 12, "You were at that time," when these fleshly distinctions were being made, "You were separated from Christ."
You were separated from the covenants that were being made with Israel, the covenants of promise.
Oh, yeah, it was totally unfair to base distinctions and prejudices upon something done in the flesh. But the reality the Apostle reminds them of is that these ritual religious distinctions did reflect a spiritual reality. You were not the children of promise.
Those who were expecting the Messiah were Jews, and you were separated from the Jews. The promises then made with the Commonwealth of Israel, with the nation state of Israel, were not applied to you.
So you were hopeless, and you were without God in the world.
That was your reality. Yeah, God made wonderful promises to Abraham.
I will make you a father of many. And he made promises to David. I will make an eternal kingdom through you. And he made promises through Jeremiah and Nehemiah. And even when you go wrong, I will maintain steadfast love toward you.
But that was for Israel.
Didn't apply to you. Sorry, Cinderella. You don't get to go to the ball.
And that's what you're to remember.
The sense of unfairness and hopelessness.
So even as Paul is talking to people of his day and his era, he recognizes things we should recognize. What would it be like to be in a troubled marriage and to be without hope and without God?
To be single and hurting for that, and to be without hope and without God? What would it be like to recognize these dramatic hurts in our world that I have troubled children or I can't have children? And to say in all the difficulties that I'm facing, I have a difficult job or I don't have a job. In all the fears, the hurts, the pain, you have no help.
Because you have no God. You are separated from the promises. This does not apply to you.
That sense of desperation that would mean to grow on us is all that the apostle is meaning to build because he's getting us ready for verse 13. I want you to face your desperation, your hopelessness of being without God so that you will recognize the importance of this, verse 13, "But now," something's different. Something has changed. "But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ." Something is different now.
You are no longer separated that there was a ritual of flesh that meant simply by the shedding of blood that you were separated, but there has now been the shedding of blood of the Son of God. And through that you have been brought near. And so we get these wonderful contrasts of what the apostle is saying. What did used to be the case. Yes, once upon a time, you had no help, but now you have God.
What difference would that make for us if we really felt the weight of it? If we felt the weight of it not just for ourselves, but for others?
I was reading recently the biography of David Livingston, the missionary who went into Africa and took Christianity across the African continent.
And what continued to motivate him at times, as people said, is too dangerous. And the people who are there are not worth saving. And why would you even bother to put your sake and your family and your own life at risk by going there? And Livingston wrote at one point of an experience in which he'd been in a village, and while he was in that village, the danger that came upon them was a lion who killed one of the mothers in her garden.
And Livingston wrote what his own response was. He said, "During the whole day after this mother's death, the surrounding rocks and valleys rang and re-echoed her orphaned children's bitter cries.
I frequently thought as I listened to the loud sobs painfully indicative of those who have no hope, that if only the churches of my land could have heard the wailings of their children, it would have wakened to them the firm resolution to do more for these people.
If you really could hear the cries of those who have no hope, what would it do in you?"
I think of those of you who heard those cries, those of you who have rescued children by adoption, by childcare, by your own lifestyles of ministry from poverty and from pain, and some of you rescuing children from what was almost sure death had you not done something.
You heard the loud wails, but some of you, the reason that you heard those wails is at some point in your own heart, you wailed, "I did not know God. I did not know His help. I did not know I could be helped." And when that wailing, that true hurt captures your mind and your memory, then you begin to say, "If I can be released from this, I have such hope I want to share and make other people know." Paul begins to detail the measures of that hope. You were Gentiles in the flesh, but now you are in Christ Jesus.
Once you were impure by your nature, but now you are united to God by Christ. His righteousness is yours, His favor. He sits at the right hand of God. If you're united to Him, you're at the right hand of God too. All this wonderful beauty is yours. You were once, verse 13, far off, but now you are brought near.
At the right hand of God is favor and privilege and great love. You were rejected by a blood ritual not being performed, but now you are redeemed by the blood of Christ having been given in your behalf. And the results of all of that, he describes in verse 14, what's the consequence of this great change that's now coming over the people of God because they are no longer separated? Verse 14, "He Himself now is our peace, who made us both one and is broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility."
We're at peace with God now.
While there's all this that could have separated, the hostility that could have been there, Paul says now the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down. Now some of your Bibles are even going to discuss the fact in the footnotes that there's discussion among the commentators of what is this dividing wall of hostility.
I think the most common understanding is that there was a wall in the tabernacle in the Temple of Israel, the outer courts where the Gentiles could go and the inner courts only for the holy Jews and a sign between them saying, "You cross the wall, you die."
There was a dividing wall of hostility. And the fact that it was there in the tabernacle that Paul says now the ordinances that separated people, these rituals, these sacrifices that Christ has fulfilled by His death upon the cross so that no more sacrificing, no more ritual purifying is needed. But now that separation is gone, which is meaning that people can come close to God.
Christ has made peace between us and God by His death, killing the hostility between us and God.
But if I'm united to Christ and someone else is united to Christ, the reality is we're now united to each other.
And that's the point Paul has been driving at all along.
Not just your sake that the grace has come, but now that God has changed you, now that you are His masterpiece, it is for a purpose. Verse 15, "By abolishing the law of commandments expressed by ordinances, God disred that He might, creating Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace."
It's really an incredible statement.
For a Jew, there have always been two basic races, Jews and everybody else.
And now Paul says the things that distinguish the Jews, the rituals and the ordinances of the religious tabernacle system, those are abolished by Christ.
Now there's nothing separating. There's now one race of humanity.
In Christ, only one people. God has broken down the walls of hostility. He has come and made peace for you who are far and you who are near. But is the consequence one new man in place of the two? And so God has made peace.
Oh, I know we rejoice in the peace that we have. That is the glory and the wonder and the goodness of the gospel, that we can have peace with God.
Some of you know the writer John Grisham.
John Grisham does not write Christian books, but he is an author who is Christian.
And so he finds moments in his novels to include his faith. And one of the things he talks about at one point in the testament is what it means to have peace with God when once you were far away, once you were separated.
He talks about an attorney named Nate O'Reilly who's been through multiple marriages and addictions of various kinds and now faces a ruined career.
And John Grisham describes what it means to actually have peace with God and how that happens.
He says it this way, "With both hands Nate O'Reilly clenched the back of the pew in front of him.
He repeated the list, mumbling softly every weakness and flaw and affliction and evil that had plagued him.
He confessed them all. In one long, glorious acknowledgement of failure, he laid himself bare before God. He held nothing back and when he had finally finished, Nate said in his tears, "I am sorry.
God please help me."
And then he felt the baggage leave his soul.
His slate had been wiped clean. He breathed a massive sigh of relief but his pulse was racing. I love it.
He breathed this massive sigh of relief. He was at peace with God. Grace had come. His slate had been wiped clean but his pulse was racing. As though there's something to do now. It's not just, it's all done. Instead there's a power, there's an energy, there's something that's seizing him. And the Apostle is talking about that when he says, "We have peace with God, the dividing wall of hostility between us and God has been removed. But what that means is if I'm united to him and you're united, we're united to each other across all the boundaries that used to separate us so that now there's one race, one reality, and that means we are to have peace with each other. Verse 16, "What was the purpose that God might reconcile us both to himself in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility?"
It's just incredible. I mean, it's kind of an easy image, you know. If there's a rescue boat and I'm in the rescue boat and you're in the rescue boat, then we're both in the same boat.
What is the boat now that we're both in one body?
We've already been told, do you remember?
Verse 22 and 23 of chapter 1.
There's describes God as having put all things under Christ's feet and gave him his head over all things to the church which is his body.
God made us together in one body.
Now, I want you to think historically what it means before we talk today.
All these little churches in Ephesus, little house churches in this great city, this great city that has people because of commerce from different ethnicities, different backgrounds, different former religions, different sides of the tracks, and yet the Christians are coming together into these little house churches.
And Paul is actually saying, "That is the design."
And his goal in saying, "You have peace with God, but they do too now. No longer are there the ordinances that would separate this from that. You're now in one body." And the reason is that the hostility that would normally separate people would be broken down.
Paul has said something amazing already in the earlier portion of this chapter. He reminds us that the great testimony of the Holy Spirit to our hearts of the reality of Christ is faith.
The fact that we have faith that Jesus would save us is a miracle in itself. We're not depending on other things. We're not depending on our works. We're not depending on our affiliations. We depend upon Christ alone. That is such a non-human thing that the apostle says that's the miraculous witness of the Holy Spirit that we have faith in Jesus Christ. That's the witness to my own heart that Jesus is real. I have faith in Him.
But the witness to the world that Jesus is real is the unity of the church.
I mean, that's not normal.
I mean, I know we sing the song. They will know we are Christians by our love, by our love, you know.
But then when you think what that really means, all barriers down, all hearts open, that is a challenge.
Able to be received only if we remember who we were and how unfair the fleshly distinctions were, and what it now means to be received by Christ on the basis of His work and no distinction in us.
So unusual, so amazing, so miraculous is the willingness of different kinds of people to get together in the body of Christ that it is actually described as God's masterpiece,
God's work of art, the thing that He is doing that shows the world how glorious is the gospel, is people like us getting together with people not like us.
It calls for everything in us.
I think in the strange places where masterpieces show up from time to time, one that I'm aware of right now and some of you may be aware of too is something that's happening in this election cycle that's about to occur. In the state of California, there is something known as Proposition 47, and I'm not advocating its merits or demerits, none of that.
I simply stand amazed at its genesis.
How did this proposition come along that's encouraging a whole state to consider how it is going to treat non-violent criminals in a new way?
In 2005, a young woman named Dionne Wilson got a knock on her door late at night.
On the door, some policemen who worked with her husband, a policeman named Dan, and they reported to her that on a routine call that night, he had been shot seven times and killed
by a man named Irving Ramirez.
When young children, having a dreaded future now in front of her, her hope was in the just prosecution of this man who had shot her husband, she would find peace.
The prosecution continued. She participated in the prosecution.
And ultimately, as her friends told her, when he was sentenced to death, she hoped to find peace. There was closure, there was resolution, there was justice, now she would find peace.
Guess what?
No peace.
As spiritual dynamics began to work into her heart, some years later, she actually wrote a letter, and I know this is going to strike you as all kinds of questions, and is this right? She wrote a letter apologizing to Irving Ramirez in prison, and this is what she apologized for.
"When I testified against you in court, I spoke of you as less than human.
I did not deal with you as someone made in the image of God. I'm not asking for justice not to be done, but it was not right for me not to recognize who you are. You were a child of wrath, even as I am apart from the work of Jesus Christ."
Now I know what your minds will do, mine does it too. Well, what should she have done? What is the just... No. I just want you to recognize this.
She found peace as she expressed the gospel.
We think at times that when we talk about reaching across lines, that that's good for other people. We'll be nice to them. It's us expressing our grace toward them, and we forget that the gospel becomes real to us when we remember what we were and how Christ crossed all lines to welcome us. And now when that becomes the expression of our hearts and our lives, how we understand the gospel better, we're not just serving other people. By extending the peace of Christ to others, we know the peace of Christ better ourselves.
The expression of the gospel is the gift of the gospel, even to us, not just to others.
I so rejoice to be a part of a church where so many of you have heard the cries of children, where there are adoptions that are happening among us with such wonderful numbers of people moving across nationalities and ethnicities. And I think about how you are expressing such wonder of, "I've experienced the gospel. I want to share it." But even as you do it, those of you parents who have done such things, you know how the gospel becomes more real even to you when you understand what God has done in your behalf by the way you're expressing it.
And yet I think even as all those challenges are here, how much more we're being challenged with. I think of the young people who are working on an adopt-a-block program. I think of some of you who for years have been doing tutorials in different parts of our city, and the wonder of being willing to cross those boundaries. But I recognize that the peace is not fully felt for the gospel and the people of God until those who are far off have been brought near.
Those who are different are brought here.
When that happens, the world says, "That is a miracle.
That is a masterpiece of the hand of God that we are inviting people who have been homeless and imprisoned in different parts of town and different nationalities and hurt us maybe. And we are saying, "For Christ's sake and actually for my own sake to remember the gospel,
I'm going to reach across all the boundaries and love for Christ's sake."
It humbles us even as it teaches us at the same time.
I felt it so intensely just a few weeks ago when I was with some of you in this church and we were down at the art fair down on the riverfront and got a call from my son in St. Louis.
And he was saying, "I am at the farmer's market in Ferguson, Missouri where Michael Brown was killed."
And my first thought is, "What are you thinking?
Get out of there. You know, I'm afraid for him." You know, and he's saying, "I will not let hatred stop me from showing Christ to my neighbor." And my next thought was, "I'm so proud of him.
You know, he so wonderfully expresses my values."
And then I think, "Now wait a second. I'm at the art fair. He's at the farmer's market in Ferguson, Missouri."
It's not me.
He is a masterpiece of his Savior.
He is a work of art in the hands of Jesus as God is showing the world the reality of the gospel that is more in kind of sitting and soaking, more of just kind of relishing, look at the great grace that I have. It is saying, "I have been overwhelmed by the power of the gospel and now not only do I have peace, my pulse is racing. I want more to know. I want to show it in the way I live and the way my culture lives, the way my church expresses itself. I want the gospel here." And when we do that, the masterpiece that God is creating among us and through us will be on display as people will say, "My, what a God!"
If he can bring those people together, but he will as we remember what we were and rejoice in what we are through Jesus Christ who would use us as his masterpiece to paint grace to the world. Father, would you so work the gospel into our hearts that we who know it well would be a people who simply delight, simply delight to find ways to express it from our homes, from our lives, in our church, finding ways to have all barriers down, all hearts open and show the world what the love of Christ means because we have received it and disgrace now quickens our pulse to show it. Help us, we pray, to be that people who have risen to the task by the grace of Christ we ask in Jesus' name, amen.