Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
Hey everyone, Mark here. Welcome to the Mark Clark Podcast. Hopefully you are doing well. Today we are tackling one of the biggest questions we all ask: What is the will of God and how do you know if you're living actually in it? This message actually comes from Village Church in Vancouver during its early days, and Paul's words in Ephesians 1 bring clarity, confidence, and freedom to all of us. If decision-making feels overwhelming or direction feels unclear in your life, This passage grounds us in something bigger than anxiety or guesswork. Today we're talking all about the will of God. Hopefully you enjoy this episode, and if you do, share it with a friend, share it on social media, get the word out that these Bible teachings are actually helping shape your life. Let's get into it.
Mark Clark [00:00:48]:
Ephesians chapter 1, the will of God.
Mark Clark [00:00:50]:
Okay, uh, book of Ephesians, turn there. Ephesians chapter 1, and we've been, uh, 2 weeks in verse 1, and, uh, this week we're gonna do, uh, Verse 1. So, I'm not joking. So we're going to wrap up verse 1, and the reason we're in it for so many weeks is because Paul— we will pick up the pace in coming weeks, but Paul really lays out a whole bunch of really important things here in verse 1 that he will then go on in the book to unpack. And so it's really important up front that we grasp this. So as you turn to Ephesians 1, if you don't have a Bible, there are Bibles on the connect desk on your way in, and so you can grab one of those and take one if you don't own a Bible. So let me set it up this way. When I first started going to church when I was 19 years old, I went to a church and they pulled a guy up on stage and I knew the guy.
Mark Clark [00:01:41]:
I knew behind the scenes he had a bunch of secret sin. His life was a bit of a mess. But they brought him up on the stage and they presented him to the church and they said, "This guy is going to be a pastor. He came into our office. He said he has a call to ministry. We want to get behind him. We affirm this in his life. This is the will of God." And then, Within probably 3 months, his entire life had fallen apart.
Mark Clark [00:02:05]:
He left school. He didn't have a job, and he started just having relationships with random women. His life fell apart. He walked away from the Lord, and he actually ended up having multiple kids with multiple women, and he's just completely off the rails today. And so I was sitting there thinking to myself, why would a church just get up and declare the will of God over someone's life so quickly? Alright, so now just frame that for a second in your mind. On the other hand, I have this buddy, okay, his name is Mike. He's 30 years old, he lives with his parents. That's supposed to get a laugh right there, alright? Alright, he doesn't have a job, and the reason he doesn't have a job is because he says he's waiting for the will of God to be expressed to him very specifically.
Mark Clark [00:02:58]:
And I said to him, okay, so what is the will of God for your life? And he said, I'm supposed to start a news organization. Okay, so what does that look like? Have you ever been a reporter? No. Have you ever written an article? No. Do you have any formal education? No. Okay, but the will of God in my life, through a subjective experience, has told me that I need to open up a news organization. So here's where these two things interface with each other. How do we discern the will of God? And biblically, is that even a legitimate question? And so what Paul does is he starts his letter to the Ephesians by saying, "Paul," introduces himself. Here's— I'm the guy who's writing the letter.
Mark Clark [00:03:44]:
And then he calls himself an apostle of Christ Jesus, a sent-out one, a missionary, a church planter, a pastor. "I'm a sent-out one of Christ Jesus." And then he says this, "By the will of God." And so the reason he says this is because there were a whole bunch of people in the city of Ephesus that were hating on Paul. And they were saying, "What authority does he teach by? Who is this guy? Don't you understand that he used to persecute Christians, kill Christians?" Paul is saying, "Hey, look, my authority doesn't come from me. It comes from God. This is the will of God that I would be an apostle." And he's looking back in retrospect and saying, I understand my identity to be an apostle by the will of God, not by the will of people. And so this is the authority that I'm speaking from. And so what he's doing is he's looking back at his story. His testimony is told in Acts chapter 9, where Paul was going along in his life like many of us.
Mark Clark [00:04:46]:
He was a complete religious conservative. Okay, he only read the King James Bible. Alright, he had this because that's how God speaks. Did you know this? That's how God speaks. That's why the Book of Mormon is written in King James. Alright, because even that late, the angels were still speaking in King James. And I'm being sarcastic for those of you who are new. Alright, he was a religious— he loved religion.
Mark Clark [00:05:14]:
He loved lists. Alright, he would sit in the same chair at church every week. 'Cause I was like, "Yeah, that's my spot! And I want the pastor to be able to see that I was here!" Alright? Religion. I had it. I did this, and I had this list, and that list, and I knew what made me good, and I knew what made me bad. And that was Paul. And then what happened is Jesus Christ hunted him down. Read his testimony in Acts chapter 9.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
Blinded him and said, "Knock it off. I want to do something great with you." And that became Paul's paradigm for salvation, where he says, listen, we don't seek after God. In Romans 3, he says there is none who seek after God. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. We are all sinful. We're not saying to ourselves, I really want to worship God today, if we don't know him. That's not the tendency of our heart, because that would mean that God would have to come in and ruin something that we love to do the most, which is worship ourselves. That's what our heart does.
Mark Clark [00:06:18]:
Martin Luther said the definition of sin is humankind turned in on himself. That our hearts love ourselves, we worship ourselves, and that's why, as we've talked about here before, when you see a picture and there's a whole bunch of people in it and, you know, it's your old class picture from 8th grade, your eyes go, "Eee, what? Where's me? Oh, look at how cute I am." It's beautiful. Nobody else matters. Me, right? That's, that's the tendency of our human heart. And so Paul says, look, you're not seeking after God. What God has to do is he has to hunt you down, grab you, save you, call you, use you to do something great. And the Apostle Paul is saying, I'm a missionary, I'm a church planter, I'm an apostle by the will of God, not by the will of people. And he's saying, that's where my authority comes from.
Mark Clark [00:07:03]:
Now, this is where it gets confusing for us, because in the book of Ephesians, the will of God is one of the great themes in the entire book. But the way that that language is used is interesting. It's the will of God conversation is very confusing for many people because when people talk about the will of God, they talk about it in a few different ways. On the one hand, we say all things are according to the will of God, right? And so we say everything that happens, it's all by the will of God. And then on the other hand, we say, man, I want to try to do and be obedient to the will of God. And then on the other hand, we talk about finding the will of God. So what does that mean? Those are 3 different ways of talking about it, and the Bible really does unpack those 3 ways. So right up front, we've got to understand and wrap our heads around these 3 different concepts.
Mark Clark [00:07:49]:
So first, the idea that all things that happen are the will of God. This is what theologians call God's will of decree. All right, and what it means— we saw this all over the book of Ruth in our last series— that everything that takes place, everything that happens is according to God's sovereign will and plan, that he's meticulously sovereign, he's meticulously involved, ruling over all the angels, all the animals, all the bad people, all the good people. And nothing comes into your life without it going through the Father's hand, right? That's the idea. Like, my wife, when she was really small as a kid, she used to have high anxiety. And what her parents used to sing her at night is, nothing will happen to you today, nothing good, nothing bad, nothing will happen to you today without it going through the Father's hand. That's the idea that the Bible lays out in chapter 1, verse 11. This is what Paul says: according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.
Mark Clark [00:08:47]:
So how many things are done according to the counsel of his will? All. All right, not, not many, not some. All things that take place are done according to the counsel of his will. So God micromanages the universe. All right, now there's a few different passages that illustrate this. Matthew chapter 10, here's what Jesus says: Are not two sparrows sold for a penny, and not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father? But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Here's what Jesus is saying: Who cares about sparrows? Nobody. They're annoying.
Mark Clark [00:09:33]:
You could sell 2 of those things for a penny. Nobody cares. But not one of them dies without the Father directing it to happen. That's what he's saying. He micromanages. He's intimately involved, meticulously sovereign. He's also sovereign through history. In Acts chapter 4, there's a bunch of disciples praying, and here's what they say.
Mark Clark [00:09:56]:
For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you appointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand in your plan had predestined to take place. So what he's saying is, as shocking as it is, the most heinous crime of history, the murder of the Son of God, was orchestrated because of the plan plan the of God, which he wrote out before the creation of the world. Right. So we got to grasp this, that the will of decree can never be overturned. It can never be thwarted. Every person, everything that happens is going to work to the glory of God. That's the idea. God's will is going to get done.
Mark Clark [00:10:43]:
That's what chapter 1, verse 11 is talking about, meaning that every agnostic, Every atheist in here, you are going to do the will of God. You are going to, in the end, bring glory to God, either as an object of mercy or an object of wrath. All right, meaning God is going to get glory whether we actually in our life say, okay, I want to give my life to Jesus. If you do that, then you're an object of his mercy. And you bring Him glory, and it's great. If you choose to kick against Him for your entire life and die outside of Jesus, you will still bring glory to God as an object of wrath because you will show Him to be a just God. So the point is, God's glory, that's getting done, all right? That's getting done. So this is the image of Jesus in Jerusalem.
Mark Clark [00:11:37]:
He comes in and everyone's singing to Him and saying, "Hosanna in the highest. You're the King. I love You." And the Pharisees come and they say, "Hey, can you stop your disciples from singing this song to you?" And Jesus' answer to them is, "Man, if they stop singing, the rocks will cry out." Why? Why will the rocks cry out? Because he's saying, "Listen, any way you cut it, this song is getting sung. Now, whether you choose to enter into it or not, that's on you." But he's saying, man, if you don't sing it, if you don't give your life to Jesus, if you don't praise God, the trees will do it. Because it's just true. And so that's what the idea is, that God's glory is gonna happen, God's will is gonna get done. It can't be thwarted in the end. Now, there's a second idea of God's will, and that's God's will of desire.
Mark Clark [00:12:34]:
All right, and that means what God commands us to do and be, how we are supposed to live, God's heart for us. So be faithful to your spouse, love your neighbor, serve other people. You know, it is better to give than to receive. Be moral, be growing in Christ. And so this, for example, is in 1 John chapter 2. This is how John uses the will of God language. He says, do not love the world, verse 15, or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, for all that is in the world Look at this critique on our lives.
Mark Clark [00:13:08]:
The desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life. How many of us live on the desires of the flesh rather than the desires of the Spirit? How many of us live on the desire of the eyes? That what I see is what I go after. How I look is what matters. How other people look is what matters. My reputation is what matters. How people view me is what matters. He's saying those are not things of the Father. Father.
Mark Clark [00:13:37]:
Those are things of the world. The pride of life. Our hearts are proud. We're the center of all reality. We are everything. We're the story. We're what's important. That's called pride.
Mark Clark [00:13:50]:
Any of you watch The Flintstones? All right, I was raised on The Flintstones. That was my childhood. Flintstones, Fred always in focus. He's the— what do the background of The Flintstones do? It just repeats itself over and over, right? Like they're running, there's a tree, there's a tree, the same tree, same tree, same rock, same rock, same tree, same tree, same rock. I mean, the artists are like, man, I'm not putting any effort into that. That's not— that's just detail in the background. That's how many of us live. God, people, our neighbors, they're all just trees in the Flintstones.
Mark Clark [00:14:22]:
They don't matter. Here's where the real action is, right here. I'm in focus. That's the pride of life. And He's saying that doesn't come from the Father, that comes from the world. And then He says this: "Those things are not from the Father but from the world." Verse 17: "And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever." So He's not talking about God ordaining all things, He's saying doing the will of God, doing what God commands us to do, the morals that God lays out. I don't want you to kill people. I want you to be faithful.
Mark Clark [00:15:00]:
Matthew chapter 7, very similar, very convicting passage for us. Jesus says, "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven." Again, so God's will is shorthand for what God commands of us. That we don't just say, "Oh, I'm a Christian." Well, why? "Because I say I am." He's going, "Yeah, no." In the end, it's the one who does. So it's not just this cognitive idea. Does it filter down to your life? Where you actually begin to function in a way where you're doing the will of God. You're doing what God has commanded. This is God's will of desire. And so God's will of decree cannot be thwarted.
Mark Clark [00:15:41]:
God's will of desire, though, can actually be disregarded. We disregard it all the time. God says, "Hey, I want you to live like this. I want you to be like this." And we don't do it. So this is what Paul's talking about in Timothy when he says, "It is God's will that all men be saved." It is God's will that none would perish. It means, this is my heart, this is my desire, that no one would perish. That's what I want. But is that going to be the case? No.
Mark Clark [00:16:08]:
There are many who perish. There are many who don't get saved, who don't give their life to Jesus. Jesus Christ said himself in the Sermon on the Mount that the road is extremely narrow and very few find it. Because God is saying, "This is how I want you to live," but we can actually disregard that, the will of desire. And then thirdly, and this is where we tend to spend most of our life even though it's not the focus of the Scriptures, is God's will of direction. And this is what this means. What does God want me to do in this particular situation? Who does He want me to marry? I want a name. What province am I supposed to live in? What job am I supposed to take? So here's what begins to happen.
Mark Clark [00:16:51]:
This becomes very confusing. Confusing. This is my buddy who wants to start a news organization, all right? Sitting around not doing anything because he wants a name, he wants a time, he wants a moment. So here's the kind of the two extremes that modern people live in. The first one are a bunch of people who under-spiritualize their lives. Many of you are here, you under-spiritualize your lives, meaning this. This is like the church who just They saw a guy, he came in the office. Oh, okay.
Mark Clark [00:17:22]:
Yeah, you want to be pastor? Sure, I'll put you up there. No prayer, no discernment, no seeking wisdom, no going to the text, no wondering about his life. Some of you live like this. All right. It's basically like you're functional atheists, right? You say one thing, but you live a particular way. And so if, if, if you have a job opportunity, you take it. If there's a girl in front of you, you marry her. All right, no discernment, no prayer, no asking people around you to help you understand what you're supposed to do.
Mark Clark [00:17:53]:
And so many of us actually live like that, right? We just functionally— we say we believe in God and we believe Jesus died for our sins, we believe Jesus rose from the dead. You got to think, man, if you— if we actually believe that stuff, how much would our lives be just so different? I mean, if you actually believed, like, not, not just this, but like that sunk down that Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead? How would that change how you live your life, how you spend your money, what you do with your time, how you're constantly just gravitating towards security and comfort? Is that how you would live if this just dropped on you and it was real? When you read the New Testament, it's like a bunch of guys who are like, what? Jesus rose from the dead? I'm not even afraid of death anymore. Why? Because he rose from the dead, and if I'm in him, I just go to a better place. And so what constantly happens with us is we gravitate toward— and so there's a lot of people who need to become people who just stop, who pray, who think through decisions, who ask other people to speak into their life. Give me wisdom. Give me your ideas about this decision I'm making. There is constantly in my life this reminder that God is still alive.
Mark Clark [00:19:09]:
Today.
Mark Clark [00:19:09]:
He's alive. He is well. He still speaks. He still affirms. How many times in my life have I been depressed or down or just feeling like, man, I want to give up, and God comes through with somebody and affirms? I pick up the scriptures. I read them. God speaks to me. I walk into church.
Mark Clark [00:19:25]:
I hear a song. Someone walks up to me, you know, hey man, affirms something in my life. Because listen, there are dark days in ministry. One pastor that I know calls it Bread Truck Mondays. Meaning that's the day he wants to quit and start driving a bread truck because bread trucks don't cheat on their spouses. Bread doesn't gossip and want to cut down the other bread. Bread doesn't tend to send emails to the driver of something that he said on Sunday that they didn't like. And so he said, "Man, it would be just easier to drive a bread truck.
Mark Clark [00:20:00]:
Punch a clock." That's it, 9 to 5, I'm done, and it smells good. And the reality is, when you're down in that moment, and there's been Bread Truck Mondays for me, it's an email from one of you that's positive. It's a phone call that's affirming. It's a hand on the shoulder, it's a prayer, it's a, this is how I did it, all of that, and it's okay, I will continue to go down this road. I'm not going to quit. And so that— God is alive and well. So those of you who under-spiritualize everything, you need to hear that. You need to pray, you need to stop, you need to think, you need to read the text, you need to get people around you.
Mark Clark [00:20:39]:
But there is this huge trend today to over-spiritualize everything. All right, these are the people who talk about the will of God's desire at every moment, meaning God better show me the exact situation at the exact moment before I ever move or do anything. And what happens with these people is it creates a scenario where they are passive and ultimately useless because they sit around for days, weeks, months, or if you're my buddy, years waiting for the voice of God. And they're constantly putting out fleeces. God, just show me what you want me to do. Tell me, give me a sign. Everything's give me a sign and everything in their life's a sign. Right? I saw a commercial for baby wipes.
Mark Clark [00:21:28]:
That means I gotta start a diaper company. No! Just a commercial. It's Pampers. Chill! But everything's a sign. Everything's a moment. And so they're putting fleeces out. They want to hear this. They want to hear from God.
Mark Clark [00:21:43]:
They want to hear these very specific things. Before I move, before I do anything, God, I want you to make everything very crystal clear. This is a theological problem that the Apostle Paul was facing in the book of Ephesians. It's called Gnosticism, and it was alive and well in the city of Ephesus. And basically it was people who sought after— I want a mysterious wisdom. There's a mystery, there's a secret out there, and I want to get in behind the secret. And if you were special enough, God would reveal the secret to you. He would give you the mystery.
Mark Clark [00:22:17]:
And so constantly we think about God like that. He's a crystal ball who has to reveal every single thing, all the specifics before I ever move. And the reality is, when Paul talks about the will of God in the book of Ephesians, which he does more than any other book, he's not talking about people finding the will of God all the time as if God's some secret, you know, he's over here and oh, if you can figure him out. He's not talking about that. He's constantly pushing us to say the will of God is about God's purposes in all things. That's what that's the— how he unpacks the will of God in the book of Ephesians. Because what begins to happen is right here he's saying, hey, I'm an apostle by the will of God, meaning I didn't sit around and just do nothing. I moved, I acted, I lived, and now I'm looking back retrospectively and I'm seeing that this was the will of God in my life.
Mark Clark [00:23:15]:
I'm looking back. I'm not sitting around just waiting for God to give me some message in my breakfast. But I'm looking back and I'm saying, this is the will of God. And so what begins to happen is, is when we constantly focus on God's will of desire or direction, constantly, constantly, we get passive, we become useless, and we sit around. And it actually begins to breed a culture, and we already have a culture specifically of young men who sit around and do nothing. They have become absolutely useless. And if you're Christian, sometimes you will use the language of God's will to justify your apathy and your uselessness. So CNN this week released a study, and they were talking about the fact that we are raising a generation of men who are absolutely useless.
Mark Clark [00:24:05]:
All right, they're not doing anything. And the two reasons that they cited were porn and video games. Porn and video games have ruined a generation of young men because they want absolute pleasure with no intimacy, and they can't lead. The Bible has for thousands of years been calling young men to lead. Be leaders. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Yourself. And now we have a generation of guys, they can't lead anything except their group on Halo.
Mark Clark [00:24:42]:
Useless for the kingdom of God. Halo's a video game for those of you over 31. Useless for the kingdom of God. And so I was sitting with a young couple a few months ago, Christian couple, love Jesus, They said, "Man, we're sleeping together." I was like, "Okay." And he said, "You know, it's a struggle, it's tough, so just pray for us, okay? Just pray for us." I'm like, "Yeah, okay, let's not over-spiritualize this, okay? I'll pray for you, but let's do something else." Stop! Let's not end this meeting with "I'll pray for you," Knowing you, it's going to take a month or two to settle in, you know, and then you'll get, you know, now we're a month out. No, you got 3, 4 months to your wedding. Listen, it's on you, bro, to lead this. She, over the next 3 months, should never have to say no. That's your call.
Mark Clark [00:25:42]:
And his response was, okay, you're right. Praise God. Other couple I've met with, I don't believe it's the will of God that we should stop sleeping together. Really? Where did you get your interpretation of the will of God? Was that in the Bible? Show me, I'm ready. No, no, no, it's a feeling that I had. Oh, so a feeling? No, you ate too much pizza because the problem is, is the Bible doesn't say that. No, no, no, I feel it in my heart. Don't trust your heart.
Mark Clark [00:26:16]:
Jesus says the heart is wicked. Out of the heart comes sexual immorality, idolatry, greed, murder. That's why Jesus needs to give you a new heart. Your heart is a mess. Listen, your culture's gonna tell you, "Follow your heart." The Bachelor's gonna tell you, "Follow your heart." "I make a decision based on what my heart's telling me." You know what the Bible would say? Don't listen to your heart. Your heart is wicked. You know what your heart will tell you? You've been married for 5 years, you've had some kids, your wife doesn't have time to put on makeup in the morning, she's got cereal in her hair, and that's getting— that's getting annoying. And so you go to the grocery store and every lady in there looks amazing.
Mark Clark [00:27:01]:
And your heart's gonna tell you, "Ah, it's an opportunity." Don't listen to your heart. Your heart's a mess. But my heart told me it's the will of God. It's based on my subjective experience, on my Very emotions. dangerous way to try to live your life. So here's what we need to start doing. We need to start coming back to God's will of desire, where He's saying, "Here's how I want you to live. Here's what I want you to do.
Mark Clark [00:27:36]:
I want you to become more like Jesus," rather than constantly seeking out God's will of direction, which is always about, "God, I just want to know that everything's gonna turn out." Hey, listen, there's no verse in the Bible that's gonna tell you whether you should marry Margaret or Sarah. Alright, you can go the Hebrew, the Greek, everything. It's never gonna say that. Here's what it will tell you though. Whoever you marry, serve her. Like Christ served the church. That's what it's going to talk about. God's will of desire, alright, to see you become more like Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:28:18]:
So whomever you marry, serve her, sacrifice for her, love her like Christ has loved the church. Now, our obsession with Gnostic mysticism of the crystal ball— God, you better show me every situation before I ever do it, it comes from a few different things. The first is a lack of faith. I just think we're a generation of people who lack faith, meaning, God, you better tell me that everything's gonna work out perfectly before I ever make a move. We don't want to be let down, we don't want to make— and so we just lack faith not realizing that the Christian life is all about, man, you're going to fail sometimes, then you got to get back up and you got to love Jesus. And sometimes you're going to suffer, but then he's making you into his image. And so that's why constantly in Christian life, what's talked about is faith, faith, faith. And that's why God said, look, I'm not going to lay everything out for you in the clouds.
Mark Clark [00:29:17]:
This is why God constantly is saying in the Bible, what does he say? Seek wisdom, seek wisdom, seek wisdom. I gave you a brain. I gave you prayer, I gave you people, I gave you the Scriptures, but I gave you a brain. So stop looking to your toast. What's the mystery though? What's the mystery? What's the Gnostic mystery of where I'm supposed to— what am I supposed to— am I supposed to go to Tim Hortons today or Starbucks? There's people who are living in bondage out of that world. All right, and here's why. Because you've been pitched the will of God as if it's a corn maze, or like it's one of those choose-your-own-adventure novels. You ever read those as a kid? All right, I used to read those as a kid.
Mark Clark [00:30:05]:
You go to page 20, you're gonna go to the cave. But if you go to page 46, you're gonna get on the rocket ship. And you're like, what am I supposed to do? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Because if I know, if I choose one of those bad ones, then I'm gonna end up dying. Uh, rocket ship, shoot! I knew 4 pages ago I should have gone to the corn maze, because if I'd gone to the corn maze, the helicopter would have come and picked me up. But now 3 decisions ago I made wrong, and now God's going to kill me because I'm not in the tracks, and it's God's will. Yeah, you need to be set free from that. That is not how the Bible lays out your life.
Mark Clark [00:30:36]:
brother. Amen, God, yes, all things that happen are by the counsel of his will. It doesn't mean you can figure it out before you make the decision to move. So we have this sense of a lack of faith. We need to know everything right now. It's not the way God works. Secondly, I think we have a sense of entitlement in our culture. We are born and bred to say, hey, I know you're just right out of college, but you should be able to live like your parents live right now, right now.
Mark Clark [00:31:15]:
Yes, I should. I should be able to own my own house. But you just got out of school. I know. Entitlement. You've been told your entire life that you deserve everything. And so you know what you do? I deserve to know the will of God. Does He know who I am? He better tell me.
Mark Clark [00:31:34]:
He better tell me every decision I'm going to make. He has no idea who He's dealing with. My teacher said I never lost anything. My whole class, we were all winners. No one ever lost. But he jumped further than me in the long pit. Nah, you're all winners. Just pop psychology, man.
Mark Clark [00:31:56]:
It ruined us. We have a sense of entitlement. Everybody better tell me right up front what's going to happen. Thirdly, I think We expect perfect fulfillment in our lives in such a way that we're afraid to make bad decisions because it may mean that we don't get absolutely fulfilled in this life. We're a generation of people who aren't pilgrims. We don't like any delayed gratification. Even heaven is too far delayed gratification. So that stuff better come now.
Mark Clark [00:32:27]:
So I don't want to make a bad decision that's going to mess all that up. So God better tell me really clearly right now what's going to happen because if I make a bad decision, decision, my life, my quality of life might come down a little bit, and I am not even going there. Because we believe God has said, hey, you got a 5-star hotel kind of life at all times. That's your life. You should go after it. So we're not pilgrims. We want heaven now. We think we should be able to come right out of college, get a job making a ton of money a year, and, and that job has to fit our personality profile.
Mark Clark [00:33:06]:
Right? I mean, this is why I'm gonna do a personality test and I'm gonna take a job that fits me well because I'm very unique. Well, what about a job that just provides for your family? Is it gonna be unique to me? Is it crafted? Is it crafted around me? My teacher said I should only take a job that is crafted toward me where I'm gonna flourish. I should be able to get married and have great sex week 1 because that's what I see on Grey's Anatomy. I think I should be able to travel a lot, different countries, all different countries. I believe my work life is supposed to be personally fulfilling. It's amazing, I was reading a book this week by a guy named Kevin DeYoung called Just Do Something where he's talking about all these things about this culture of entitlement. And he said, do an experiment. Go to your grandparents and ask them whether their jobs were personally fulfilling.
Mark Clark [00:34:11]:
They won't even know what you're talking about. And he said, what will happen is, is they'll tell you, I didn't work for fulfillment, I worked for food, and I was thankful for the job that I had. And so I I was in Toronto last week. I went to my 90-year-old grandfather who still cuts the lawn on his 3 acres. Alright? I showed up, I'm like, "I could have done it." He's like, "Ah, you're an idiot. You don't even know how to start one of these." So I said to him, "Grandpa, you worked 35 years at IBM. Was that job personally fulfilling to you?" And he was looking at me, he looks up and he's like, "What?" I'm like, "Personally fulfilling. Was that personally fulfilling to you?" He's like, "Personally fulfilling? I don't know what you're talking about." He said, "I had to eat." He said exactly, and then he phrased exactly like DeYoung said in the book.
Mark Clark [00:35:13]:
He said, "I was thankful for the job that I had." See, here's what happens generationally. Our generation is obsessed with Gnostic mysticism and knowing the details of everything because we have way too many choices and we get very confused. And so what— it's called the paradox of choice. It actually paralyzes our lives, right? This is why when I go to a grocery store, it's like, I don't know. My wife says pick up diapers. It's like there's 50 different kinds. And so she has to write out detailed lists. All right.
Mark Clark [00:35:53]:
And if— because if she didn't give me detailed lists, I'd come back with the wrong kind. It's Dora, it's not princesses, it's age 4, it's not this, it's the right barcode, it's this, it's extra light, not extra heavy. Like what? Choices, choices, choices. And all these choices absolutely paralyze us. So we go in generationally, we're like, God, what am I supposed to do with my life? Where am I supposed to travel? What job am I supposed to get? How am I going to fulfill all my potential? And it's like, go 50 years ago. You didn't have any potential. Here's what you did 50 years ago. You were a farmer.
Mark Clark [00:36:26]:
Why? Because your daddy was a farmer and your grandfather was a farmer. And you ended up working in the shop because your daddy worked in the shop and his daddy worked in the shop. And you weren't going, "Who am I supposed to marry?" because you were trying to choose out of the 2 dozen girls in your town who weren't your sister. That's it! That's the choices you had. It wasn't hard. Those people weren't like, "My gosh, who am I supposed—" For us? "Who am I supposed to choose, Lord?" How many choices you got? 400 million! Because I got the internet. So God, you better let me know which one of these 400 million girls you want me to marry, because I am terrified to make a choice. And it's absolutely paralyzing.
Mark Clark [00:37:28]:
It's not the way that God wanted us to live our lives. The way He wanted to live it was, look, seek after the will of desire, which means I'm gonna make you holy so whomever you marry, you can serve her well. And when you're constantly seeking after the will of direction, you're basically doing that because you want everything to work out perfectly. And the reality is, is God never promises that your life is gonna work out perfectly, ever. That's what faith is about. And so here's what he says. Once we have in our minds the will of decree, the will of desire, and the will of direction, then we can move forward in understanding what Paul is going to unpack. Here's what he says in the rest of the verse, and we'll wrap up verse 1 today.
Mark Clark [00:38:18]:
To the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus. I love that Paul says this, "in Ephesus and in Christ Jesus." That is the dual identity that we all have. We are in Christ, and yet we are in Ephesus. We live in our world. And some of us feel that tension, and we tend to stray to one side or the other. And so we tend to either be in Christ so much so that we, we just come off of being in Ephesus at all. But you live in a city, you're supposed to love your neighbors, you're supposed to reach your neighbors. And what happens with us is we go so far in Christ that we're like, man, I'm a Christian.
Mark Clark [00:38:53]:
And sooner or later you wake up and you don't have any non-Christian friends. Sit in your basement and read a book about how to reach your neighbors than actually going out and reaching your neighbors. And you're going to start a blog where you can talk about, oh, Calvinism versus Arminianism and complementarianism versus egalitarianism and get all your Christian buddies together. And this is hilarious and this is fun. And you spend years. And years and years, and you waste it because you're in Christ, but you have no idea what it means to be in Ephesus at all. On the other hand, there's people who are so ingrained in Ephesus they can't even hear Jesus anymore. They're just so lost.
Mark Clark [00:39:31]:
I was trying to be relevant, I was trying to fit in, and then you got killed. And this is why Paul says, here's who I'm writing to. To the faithful in Christ Jesus. Here's the question for the Apostle Paul: are you gonna be there in the end? The faithful are people who've, yes, put their faith in Jesus Christ, but also the question of, are you gonna actually remain faithful for your entire life so that in the end, in the end, you are still with him. In the end, you are still loving Jesus. In the end, you are still serving. I'm not talking about how you start. How you start is awesome.
Mark Clark [00:40:15]:
The first day is important. We celebrate it. But the most important day is the last day. So we got over 50 people being baptized next weekend. Like, that's crazy. 50. And we're all gonna celebrate it. We're all gonna be pumped.
Mark Clark [00:40:33]:
We're all gonna see that and pray for you and love that and celebrate. But here's the question: where are you going to be in 50 years? Is your baptism day going to translate into being faithful, or was it a day years ago that you did, in a decision that you made, but you're no longer living it? The question is, look, all of us are going to face difficulty in our life. Every single one of us are going to hit tragedy. Every single one of us. And the question is, when you are 80, when you're 90, when you're dying of cancer, when you're 40, are you still going to love Jesus, or will the world crush you? That's the question at the center of the book of Ephesians, and that's why he put it right up front. Who I'm talking to are the faithful, the people who in the end— there is a a companion of Paul, a guy named Demas. He rolled with Paul planting churches, preaching the gospel. He's mentioned 3 times in the New Testament.
Mark Clark [00:41:36]:
The first time is Philemon. Paul says, "Damas, awesome guy." Second time is Colossians 4. "Damas, awesome guy." Third time, about 5 years after Colossians was written, in 2 Timothy, Paul says, "Damas has left." He walked away, and the reason, he says, is this: he fell in love with the present world. See, here's the thing. There's a lot of reasons why people fall away from Jesus. I think if there was one banner that all of them could be gathered under, it'd be that. They fell in love with the present world. I fell in love with my idols, and I love them more than Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:42:19]:
I fell in love with pleasure, and I loved them more than Jesus. I fell in love with my idols and my sin and my money and my pleasure and my comfort, and those things took precedent. So when I had a decision to make, because I was kind of living in this tension, and when those two things collided, I chose world instead of Jesus. And there's a whole bunch of you here who fit right into that category. And here's the great thing. God is not done with you because you're sitting right here. He is hunting you down. He is chasing you down because that doesn't need to be the end of your story.
Mark Clark [00:42:52]:
The end of your story can be on the last day, I stand for Jesus. On the last day, I am faithful to Jesus, love Jesus. Yes, I've had bad days in the past, but I'm giving my life back to him. Village Church is full of people like that, and we praise God for it, because what Paul is laying out right at the beginning of Ephesians Ephesians is not, did you make a decision 20 years ago? It's, are you making decisions every morning when you wake up, when your feet hit the floor, to still follow him? That's the question. And my prayer is that that would be our testimony as a church. So Father, I pray for each one here, including myself, who are tempted to stray, who are tempted to absolutely give up following you because we could fall in love with the present world, we could fall in love with the idols, we could fall in love with the sins and the pleasures around us, so much so that it just absolutely takes our hearts and minds over, and we stop loving you. And I just pray that that is not the testimony of this church, of the people sitting here right now, that we would be faithful, that we would not only have a good first day but we have a great last day where we can hear from you that you are pleased with us in what we've done. We know that that's only possible possible through you, Jesus, who came, lived a perfect life in our place, died on the cross because we deserve to die, but you died in our place, and you rose again, and you offer us a new life, new creation, new identity, new status, a new heart.
Mark Clark [00:44:20]:
And I just pray that that would be our testimony as we move forward in life. We would be faithful, that in the end we would stand before you Not as people who fell away because of the things of the world drew us out, but because we were so attached to you, so in love with you, that the things of this world just faded. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.