The sermon titled 'Walls Torn Down at the Cross' by Scott Brown delves into Ephesians chapter 2, highlighting how the cross of Christ transforms Gentiles, bringing them near to God and each other through the blood of Christ. The sermon emphasizes that the cross breaks down the walls of division between Jews and Gentiles, creating a new, unified community in Christ. It underscores the richness of spiritual blessings bestowed upon believers and how this reshapes their relationships, urging them to live in love and unity. The sermon also explores the dual nature of Christianity as both a unifying and divisive force, reconciling believers to God and each other while separating them from non-believers. It calls for believers to embrace their new identity in Christ, as part of one family and one body, highlighting that the power of the cross and the wisdom of God surpass all human divisions and philosophies.

I'd like you to begin in verse 11 of Ephesians chapter 2. Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, made in the flesh by hands, that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ for he himself is our peace who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separatists making peace and that he might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross thereby putting to death the enmity and he came and preached peace to you who were far off and to those who were near For through him we both have access by one spirit to the Father. Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God having been built on the foundation of the Apostles and prophets Christ Jesus being himself the chief cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together grows into a holy temple in the Lord in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you so much for giving us your word. We thank you for what you have done through your Son on the cross. And we pray, oh Lord, now that you would give us understanding that we might observe wondrous things from your holy and pure law amen please be seated Please be seated. The book of Ephesians is written to help Gentiles find and understand just how absolutely rich they are in Jesus Christ.

The letter begins by declaring that they've been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. And what the apostle is trying to do to this Gentile congregation is to explain to them how rich the glory and the grace and the wisdom and the power of God is through his son Jesus Christ. And so the Apostle Paul in one sense is is asking the the Ephesian Gentiles do you have this sense in your life do you do you see the richness of it all? How beautiful it is, how these gifts have been lavished upon you from heaven, do you see it, do you see it? And he gives many, many views of this.

And the first three chapters of the book of Ephesians focus on the wealth of the believer. And I'm telling you it is some kind of everlasting wealth. And secondly, he speaks of the walk of the believer in chapters four through five, particular matters of our walk in Jesus Christ. And then he finally closes the letter in chapter six with the battle that we're in and the spiritual warfare that we are all engaged in. Now, when you get to chapter two, particularly in verse one, you see a truth that runs through the entire letter, and that is, what does it mean to be alive?

And he starts out by saying, he made us alive, who were dead in our trespasses and in our sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world so he's talking about the way we used to walk and then he says we walked according to the prince of the power of the air the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of the flesh and fulfilling the desires of the mind and what he's talking about is that there are ways that we walk in every area of life that are just the ways of the world. And the apostle is convincing the Ephesian Gentiles of the superiority and the beauty of God's ways. But what our text speaks to here is the whole relational aspect of that, how we think about one another, how we treat one another, because there's a way that you can think about and treat one another that's just the way of the world. It's the way of the powers and the principalities. And we need to quit thinking like that.

That's what Gentiles need. They need to quit thinking like Gentiles and start thinking like true Christians. So that's the argument of the book. In verse 10, just before the verses that we're engaging with this morning he says but you for we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works so that's the whole context you've been made alive you are rich you have so much Here's what it means to you personally with one another. You got that?

That's sort of the beginning of it. Now our text today, of course, is Ephesians 2, 1 through 11. And this is, as you may know, the fifth message on the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ in this series that we're explaining the various Tributaries to John chapter 19 where Jesus is on the cross. We are speaking of the accomplishments of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross and the particular power of the cross that I'm addressing today is how the cross tears down the walls of division among his people. What a blessing it is to see that.

And this passage here shows us in very stark and vivid incredibly detailed terms that the cross doesn't just reconcile sinners with God. It goes far further than that. And that is that the cross completely reshapes our relationships. And God takes sinners. He teaches them how not to think and act and talk like the world so that they would love one another with the love of Jesus Christ.

Earlier in the service we read in Philippians 2 those words, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus. He was in the form of God, and yet he humbled himself. So, here what we find is this scene on the cross, in John chapter 19, that instructs us about the power of the cross now There are dozens and dozens of applications. There is one truth I want to bring today with probably hundreds and hundreds of applications But even I want us to recognize that even while Jesus Christ was on the cross, he was breaking down the dividing walls and creating a new family, a new community that actually supersedes even family bonds. And how did he do this?

And you see it in the most tender moment of Jesus Christ on the cross, particularly in John's record of it. Jesus is on the cross. He's been beaten, he's bleeding, he's been mocked and scorned, and he looks down to the apostle John, and he says, behold your mother. And then he looks at John, or then he looks at Mary, his mother, and says, behold your son. And what we find there, Jesus Christ, the head of the church, the head of the body, makes a new community, a new community of love, and creates a family of brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers, and it's a supernatural family in the church of Jesus Christ.

And what you find is the strangest thing. Now, John, who is not Mary's son, becomes Mary's son. And Mary, who is not John's mother, becomes a mother. So it's this picture of reshaping of humanity. In the Church of Jesus Christ, everybody has a father, everybody has a brother, everybody has an uncle.

Maybe you grew up without a father, maybe you grew up without an uncle. Come to Jesus Christ and his church. His fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, oh, you don't have a grandma? Oh no. In the church of Jesus, there are a lot of grandmas.

Praise God for that. Now, Jesus actually was alluding to this even earlier in his ministry in Matthew chapter 12 verse 48 Jesus is talking to the multitudes and his mother and brothers are standing outside and then somebody said hey look your mother and your brothers are out there you know they're waiting for you what are you going to do about it? And Jesus says, who is my mother? And who is, or my brothers? And the text says that he stretched out his hand toward his disciples and said, here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

This is a massive reshaping of culture and of relationships in the world. And what I want to say here today, it's really a very very simple message today and that and that is that that at the cross Jesus Christ broke down the walls of division. And that has so many implications in the world that we live in today. What we need to recognize is that scripture is sufficient for all these things. If you want to be reconciled to your brother in the church, scripture is sufficient for that.

If you want to seek people, if you want to seek what people commonly call, and I hate to even use the word racial, racial reconciliation. If you want to seek racial reconciliation, Scripture is sufficient for that. If you want to seek reconciliation with people that are ethnically different, they come from massively different backgrounds, Scripture is sufficient for that. And if you want to seek reconciliation with an offended brother or sister, scripture is sufficient for that. And you don't need a bunch of books to help you figure it out.

You need the cross of Jesus Christ and his word to guide you through the maze of reconciliation in this world. God's word teaches us how to be reconciled and this passage makes it very very clear. And you'll see how Jesus Christ on the cross made all the walls come down. He broke the walls and then he gave us laws and ways to live together so that we could grow in the ways of reconciliation. Now these doors of reconciliation, they only swing open by the power of the cross.

I'll just say that again. The way these doors of reconciliation open, only and exclusively swing on the cross of Jesus Christ and the power of the gospel. So we've been trying to illustrate what the cross says. And you know, First of all, we covered John 19. He is the man of sorrows, and he carries our sorrows.

In the second message on this series on the cross, we made it very clear that the cross gives us many reasons to boast. God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then thirdly, why it's appropriate to know nothing but the cross of Jesus Christ. The apostle says to the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians 2, 2, for I determined to know nothing among you except Christ in him crucified. And then in the last message we focused on the forsakenness of Jesus Christ on the cross, that the central proposition of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that Jesus Christ was forsaken at the cross.

He cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And he was forsaken so that you would never be forsaken. So that's the series so far. Well today, we will speak, this fifth message, we'll speak about this particular power of the cross where Christ breaks down walls of division. Now there's so many aspects of this.

We talked about the cross as being like a diamond. There's so many sides to it. You can't even get around them all. It's like a mountain. You know, you look at it and you look at it again from different angles and you walk up it and it's different everywhere.

There's so many different beautiful elements of the cross. So that's what we're doing. Now in these verses, The power of the cross breaks down walls and you'll notice in this passage the language explains far far more angles of this than we can explain in a message like this. This is a flyover. I hate to say it but it is.

But let's talk about the power of the wall breaking cross. And the first element of that is that we're brought near. Now I hope you have an outline in front of you. You can see the trajectory and the particular focus. Here's what you recognize about this outline.

It's so massively inadequate to capture everything in these sections. So there you have it. We are brought near, verses 11 through 13. Brought near by the cross of Christ. Therefore, Remember that you once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision, by what is called the circumcision, that's a technical term for kind of a heretical group in the ancient world, made in the flesh by hands, that at that time, you were without Christ, being aliens from the Commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise having no hope and without God in the world this is like a lot of people they grew up with no Bible no understanding of God They just grew up with nothing and they become Christians and Then he says but now in Christ Jesus You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ What a blessing it is to read those words.

And he tore the walls of division down by his blood in verse 13. That's so clear. He brought believers near to himself, and as he brings us to himself, we find that there are other people there. And we are all brought near. We are brought near to him, And we are also brought near to one another.

We have a supernatural bond that doesn't exist in any other way, in any other institution or organization or company or anything in the world. And this is the power of God and the salvation transforming every relationship that you had. You know, when you get married, it transforms every relationship. When you get married to Jesus Christ, it transforms every relationship as well. Christ brought down real divisions.

The Jews viewed the Gentiles as filthy and beyond hope. Their rituals, their food laws, their ceremonies, their holy days, their circumcision divided them from the Gentiles. And in fact, even the design in the temple divided them you had the Holy of Holies only the priests could go into the Holy of Holies Christ even tore down that veil and that wall so that all gather as priests before the Lord. You know, Herod built the temple to replace Solomon's temple, and it had far, far more walls of division. In Herod's temple, the Gentiles were behind a wall way outside, And that's how the Gentiles were treated.

And so Paul is explaining their former state of identity, Gentiles, of the flesh, and he's differentiating them by the mark of circumcision, that physical mark, an outward mark in the flesh, not in the heart. It's an external that separates separated them and But they were without hope and without God in the world now these same do these divisions after the resurrection emerged in the Galatian church and in Jerusalem. But now in a later time in the Ephesian church through this letter Paul is trying to convince the Gentiles of the treasury of their privileges that they're not far off They should not be treated as far off In in Galatians the Apostle is rebuking the Jews for making the gentiles get circumcised and practice all the ceremonies. So that's one difference in Ephesians and Galatians. But this division was real between Jew and Gentile.

They have now been brought near, brought near to Christ. And so what this means is that there are only two classes of people in the world. These so-called racial skin color divisions that are based on a trace, hardly a trace of melanin are not real. But there are two races of people. There are sheep and there are goats.

That's all you have. There are the saved and the lost. There are the born once and the born twice. That's all you have in the kingdom of God. There's none other.

And what God has done is he crushes all ethnic skin color cultural differences and he brings people together under one new man Jesus Christ. So here's another power of the breaking of the wall breaking cross of Jesus peace is made. Verses 14 through 18. This might be the heart of the text here. Verse 14, for he himself is our peace who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation." Now four times in this text we are told that Christ is our peace or he made peace And he makes peace with us and puts us in his family and then he draws us near and he makes peace between us in the family.

Christ is our peace. He is our peace in the same way that he is our Passover, in the same way that he is our sacrifice. He is a curse. He was cursed for us and he is our peace as well. And then we learn that the enmity is abolished.

Verse 15, having abolished in his flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances so as to create in himself one new man from the two, thus making peace. Enmity, What's enmity? It's hostility. Those who turn to Jesus Christ have a germ of hostility that's broken. And a Christian spends the rest of his life working out that hostility.

But a power has come upon him that gives him the ability to stop being hostile. And there is one new man from the two. One new man from the two. Do you see that language there? What does that mean?

It means we become so connected with one another that we actually are one another. We are one body. That's the miracle that we find here. And When he speaks of this law of commandments, he's talking about the ceremonial law, not the moral law, and this is very relevant to Gentile Christians because he is referring to, if you see the exact wording, ordinances. In other words, the feasts, the food laws, the ceremonies, the circumcision.

The moral law was given and then the ceremonial law, but God is abolishing the ordinances, the Sabbaths in Colossians two, and the feasts and the food laws, Christ abolishes those and is the embodiment of those for believers. Jesus Christ fulfills all the law in that sense. And then also the enmity is put to death on the cross. That is verse 16. And in other words both Jew and Gentile are reconciled to God, they are simultaneously bound to one another, they are one.

But notice the sequence, the reconciliation with God comes first, it must come first. And then reconciliation with man. When we had our Bible study we talked about this and one man said this is a math equation. Reconciled to God equals one body. Reconciled to man.

That's the equation. And we are made into one body, one building, we have one cornerstone, we have one husband, we eat one bread, there is one Lord, there's one faith, there's One baptism, one savior, and he has one people, and they are one. That's the whole idea. It is communicating. Now, just a quick qualifier.

I won't elaborate on it, but Christianity is both a unifying and a divisive force. It's a double barrel. It does both. It reconciles man to God and man to man, but simultaneously at the same time it divides man from man. It divides the sheep from the goats.

It will even divide families and it sometimes even divides churches. But God has designed this unity to exist supernaturally with his people and nothing, nothing can undivide them. Not their different opinions about this or that. Because it is a unity that God has created supernaturally. And he preached peace to you who are far off, peace to those who are near and far off.

Near, Jews, far off, Gentiles. Now, this language makes it very, very clear that there really are no elite Christians, no elite Christians. There is no elitism in Christianity. There is order and authority in the Church of Jesus Christ. There is order and authority in the home.

There is order and authority in the state, but there is no elitism in the Church of Jesus Christ. And it doesn't matter if you were born in a Christian home, if you came right off the streets, if you were without God and without the promises and without the Word of God, If you were a drug addict, a prostitute, an abortionist, or an aborter, or a liar, or a homosexual, or an idolater, no one is excluded. There's no elitism. There's no hierarchy in that sense. You don't get higher on the scale because you became a Christian 35 years ago oh the thief on the cross proved that today you will be with me in paradise that's what Jesus said to him the rich the poor the wise the foolish the famous the invisible ground is is truly level at the foot of the cross.

Verse 18 nails it. For through him We both have access by one spirit to the Father. Notice the focus on one. All of us are one. Don't let it happen that anybody in this church looks down on another for any reason.

These are blood-bought saints by the same blood, part of the same family. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. Now, no two people can be reconciled until they're reconciled with God. That's very important. You know, we live in a world that's divided, very divided.

There's The cultural diversity in the world is remarkable. We happen to live in Wake Forest, in the Wake Forest area, and we're a reflection of our community. I think that's very clear. We ought to have wide open arms to everyone in our community, every single person in our community. We live in a somewhat affluent community.

Our church kind of reflects that. And the question is, do we cause unnecessary division in our church because of different things that don't matter. That's really important and we understand that. We ought to be the kindest people on earth. Why?

The Bible makes this argument in many many different ways. I'll just make it in one way. Our sins have been expiated. We talked about that last week. Expeation has to do with you.

Your sins have been forgiven. And the commands, the relational commands of the Bible, they run in a particular theme, and they basically run like this. How dare you have an offense against your brother when God has dropped all his offenses on you? How dare you not forgive your brother, he has forgiven you? We have been forgiven so much.

And we celebrate it every Sunday at the Lord's Supper. When we come to the Lord's Supper, we see two things. Oh my lord, I'm such a sinner. Oh Lord, you're such a great Savior. Thank you for For washing away all my sins at the cross But the reconciliation starts with God I'm reading a book.

Oh, I think I quoted it from it last week, Donald MacLeod, the cross of Christ. I'll quote one sentence from the book. Every wrong ever committed against us by fellow believers all have been dealt with at the cross. And Donald MacLeod's not talking about your sins, he's talking about your brother's sins. Those have been atoned for at the cross.

Those judgments and curses have been obliterated against them and so you ought to do the same. That's the logic of the apostolic preaching of the cross when it comes to the relationships in the church and you'll find when you when you when you read the apostolic preaching of the cross. There are there are places where Christ shed blood on the cross is becoming a curse against you is applied very directly in every Christian relationship and that you ought to let your brothers off the hook as well. We are not cursed by God, and therefore we do not curse one another. And we are not cursed by one another.

Now, that may happen, but God has given us his word to teach us not to do that take sometimes it takes a long time to learn that And everybody in the church need to understand needs to understand that it can take people time God breaks down the wall of division He forgives us all and then it takes a little bit of time for us to learn how to walk it out. And every person in the church needs to understand that. Give people time. By the way, pastors have to understand that too. Sometimes they might get slandered and they need to recognize that God has taken care of that person.

God will see them through. In time, God will remove all those offenses. So we don't want to be too hard on each other. That's the idea here. It's seeing people through the lens of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Those who are blood-bought, reconciled, friends of God, free from the law of sin and death. I hope you see each other that way. You see each other that way? Do you have bad feelings? There's little clouds you know hanging.

Let the clouds get blown away. Let the walls fall down. We are fitted together. That's the third element of this power of the cross to break down the walls. We are fitted together, that's verses 19 through 22.

Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Now I warned you that these headings don't capture everything in these verses. I'm just gonna focus on being fitted together. We are fitted together.

We're so different but God fits us together. He takes all of our gifts, all of our backgrounds, and he mashes them together for his glory. And this was achieved by Christ's blood shed on the cross. He creates a mash-up community of all these unusual people. It is true that people in the church are kind of weird.

In some senses, God must like weird. Don't you think so? Look who we brought together. Nobody would do this in the world. We would want to try to find people a little bit more like us.

Well, that just doesn't happen with the church. And that's the beauty of it. You know, There's so much richness in it. One of the things that really hit me after I'd been married for a little while, I finally woke up and I said, you know, I actually like things that I didn't used to like. How did that happen?

Well, I married somebody that was like different than I was. She liked some different foods. I find myself liking them now. She liked certain things and places. I like them now.

I do, I like them. Yeah. Like I went from, I don't really like that I totally dig that. Marriage to Christ does the same thing. God has done a miracle.

He does what nothing in the world can do. He made a way for people to love one another like no love exists in the world. He's broken down all the dividing walls and made people one family, one nation, one body. It's a new bloodline, really. You can think of it in terms of a new blood.

You get new blood. Christ sheds his blood and you get it. That might be not the exact theological way to think about it, but I I think you understand the point you get new blood you get it you get a transfusion And love is in that transfusion And he does it out of every tongue and tribe and nation. The hostile cultures toward one another are softened. The distrusting ethnic groups are reconciled.

The alienated nationalities are brought close. The subcultures are flattened in the church. The separations are dissolved and the Paul is saying that the cross puts an end to the division And the laws of God continue it on in one life to the next, often very slowly, but he is bringing many sons to glory, bringing many sons to glory. I'll just make a quick comment about this. The social justice movements over the years and the current social justice movements expressed in affirmative action, they're always going to fail.

They're always going to fail to bring people together. They will always divide people because there is only one thing that brings people together and that is the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. And you cannot do it by passing laws. There are various philosophies of reconciliation known in more modern times in the latter half of the 20th century, intersectionality and critical race theory, these are just part of the problem, they're not part of any kind of good solution. They only further divide people because God has given us everything we need to be united.

He broke the power of sin and he gave us ways that we ought to think about each other. And the solutions are of those two categories. So we are fitted together because the power of sin has been broken and the works of the flesh are being dissolved right before us. Human beings just naturally build walls of division. We are master wall builders, but Jesus Christ is always among his people tearing those walls down.

The walls he tears down can never be built back up, but we try to put little bricks back on them of division with one another. And then finally, the power of this wall breaking cross, it is a power, It's a display of power and wisdom. Verses 22 to 25. This is really a remarkable section in this text. For Jews request a sign and Greeks seek after wisdom blah blah blah blah.

But we preach Christ crucified. To the Jews, a stumbling block, and to the Greeks, foolishness. But to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God, and the wisdom of God, and I love this last phrase, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. It's stronger than any of your philosophies, any of your books, any of your angles. It's stronger.

It actually does the job, is the idea here. So Christ's blood shed on the cross creates a community of love. He does it by breaking the power of sin and then he builds on it by giving us his ways. And I'm just going to characterize those ways by using this terminology, the relational commands of God in the Bible. That's how it happens.

And if there's division, it's because either The love of Christ has never invaded and the power of sin has never been broken or the commands of God have either been ignored or they've not been really understood in the course of time. So God is kind to us. And that's why the the Lord Jesus, when he was on the cross, he looks at his mother and he says, behold your son. And he looks at John and says behold your mother because he's creating a new kind of community of love. This is a miracle and it cannot be done any other way except the love of Jesus Christ.

You are given a transfusion, you have a new bloodline, and it is created at the cross. And you are now one new family, one new body, one new people from every tongue, tribe, and nation. If you've ever traveled and been with Christians in other countries, you know how nice this is. You can relate to Christians all over the world, even if you can't understand what they're saying. There's just something about it.

It's a supernatural bond. Supernatural bond. Being culturally far from one another were brought near and God brings us together culturally by his word, by his sufficient word, the only authority to correct every culture, to bring it into one new man, one new family, one harmonious family, created by his word, by the power of the cross. And in the Gospel of John, Jesus has spoken about this many times already. In John 13, 34, he said, a new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you love one another.

And it just means that we have a new power as a result of the cross. It tears down the walls, and it gives us the ability to forgive as we have been forgiven. So, do we love one another the way that we've been loved? That's a big question. I wanna pose that to all of us.

Or let's say it different. Do you love one another the way you have been loved? Think about that. How have you been loved? How has he treated you?

How has he cared for you? Has he been patient? Has he had mercy? Has he brought you the truth? Has he convicted your heart?

Has he confronted you? And yet has he walked with you? And has he continued to pour out his grace every day? And at least if you're in this church you know that every Sunday, that you're reminded of his grace at the Lord's Supper. So just to run through some of these things again, finally we've been brought near by the blood of Christ.

He is our peace. He broke down the middle wall of celebration. He abolished enmity. He created one new man. He gave us access by one spirit to the Father.

We are no longer foreigners. We are no longer strangers. We are fellow citizens with the Saints, members of the household of God. We're being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit because Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. And that wisdom is stronger than any force in the world.

And we have that with us today. The power of God unto salvation that creates one new family. And that's why God in his word calls the church a family. And such we are. Would you pray with me?

Oh Lord we are so thankful for the accomplishments on the cross. How you have done so many wonderful things for us as a result of your suffering. And so we pray that you would give us such a sense of it today as we worship, as we continue to fellowship, as we celebrate this marvelous ordinance of the Lord's Supper to remind us of the greatness of your loving kindness. Amen.