Today, I am reading and commenting on Ephesians 1-3.

In this letter to the Ephesians Paul writes that all of us at one time lived in transgressions and sins.  As a result we did not truly live but were dead from those sins and transgressions.  However, God, in His great mercy, raised us up with Christ and made us alive.  This did not result from anything we had done.  Rather it was a gift God which gave us through faith, so that none of us have any room to boast.  Our works did not save us.  God saved us by transforming us so that we could do the good works which He had prepared for us.  Paul teaches a vitally important lesson here.  Good works will not make us right with God and therefore do not give us any basis for boasting.  However, if God has saved us we will do good works because He has remade us for that explicit purpose.  By allowing God to raise us up and give us life we become able to approach God with freedom and confidence.  Even when we, or others about whom we care, face suffering and difficulty, we know that Gd is able to more than we can ask or imagine through His grace working within us.  So we should not be afraid to ask anything of God which we believe will bring Him glory.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ephesians 1-3.

Paul writes that all of us were by our very nature and actions deserving of wrath.  Note that he does not say deserving of God’s wrath, although we were indeed deserving of God’s wrath.  No, Paul says that we, including himself, were deserving of wrath.  It reminds me of the terrible things done by Hamas, things deserving of wrath from every decent human being.  Paul writes that we are all just as deserving of wrath as those who committed those horrible acts on October 7th, and he is right.  Paul writes that the difference between us and those who committed those horrible acts, if there is indeed a difference, is the grace of God.  We have no basis for boasting about such a difference, because God may yet extend His grace to them as well, transforming them as He did us.  So, we have been saved from the evil of this world through no action of our own, solely by the grace of God.  In no way did our actions separate us from those who have committed atrocities, so we have no basis for condemning them.  Then Paul writes to explain why God gave us this grace by which He saved us.  He did so in order that we might perform the good works which He prepared for us to do.  Our prayers should not be to thank God for making us better than those who commit atrocities, nor should it be that He bring destruction upon them.  Rather we should pray that He pour out His Spirit upon them and transform them in the same way in which He transformed us.  I believe that is part of what Paul is getting at when he writes at the end of chapter 3 that God is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ephesians 1-3.

Paul writes here that we are saved by grace, through faith.  But, that faith is a gift from God as well, so we cannot even boast to be better than others because of our faith.  Paul emphasizes that we are not saved by works, we are not saved by doing good.  Our salvation is entirely a gift from God, our actions have no impact on that salvation.  However, Paul’s next sentence puts an interesting twist on this.  God has given us these gifts in order that we might do good works, works which God prepared in advance for us to do.  As a result of Paul’s teaching about salvation by grace, many people think that we have no reason to do good.  So, Paul writes that we are not saved because of the good works we do, or anything else we have done or will do, but that our salvation results in us doing good works.

Paul points out that before our salvation, before our adoption as children of God, we were divided up into various groups and tribes in conflict with each other.  However, God reconciled us to Himself, and, through that reconciliation to God, to each other.  No longer are we strangers, foreigners, or enemies of anyone who has also accepted God’s gift to be adopted into His Family.  Rather, we are citizens together with them of the Kingdom of God.  I find an interesting corollary to this.  Since our citizenship in the Kingdom of God did not result from anything we did, or anything we were, we should not view anyone as a foreigner, stranger, or enemy, because how can we know that God will not extend His gift of adoption to them through gifting them with faith in Him at some point in the future, if He has not done so already?  Anyone we meet and/or interact with may be, or may soon become, a piece in the building of God’s Holy Temple, no matter how they act, or what they look like.  Let us be reconciled to all others, even if they refuse to be reconciled to us.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ephesians 1-3

Paul makes several wonderful points in today’s passage.  Paul writes that God has revealed His plan to us, a plan which had been kept secret until Jesus came.  That plan is to bring all things together under the authority of Christ.  God began that plan by uniting all of those who put their faith in Christ into one body, despite the many divisions between them which the world has imposed upon them.  The world continually attempts to divide us into different groups, Jew and Gentile, Black and White, etc.  We must reject such divisions and accept God’s unity.  Despite the attempts by the world to thwart God’s plan, He makes everything work together to forward that plan.  God will use the attempts by the world to divide us to unite us in Him.

I was going to go on to something else, but I had to step away for a moment and I lost my train of thought.  I re-read the passage hoping the thought would come back to me, but I just saw more emphasis from Paul on the unity of the Body of Believers.  That is not entirely true, he also wrote again about the fact that we do not and cannot earn our salvation, that we can only be saved by putting our faith in God’s grace.  Then, as I reviewed the passage to wrap up today’s blog, I came upon Paul’s reminder of God’s power.  As I came to the end, I was reminded of the power of prayer, which always challenges me because I do not pray as much as I should.  The reason that prayer is so important is because God’s power is at work within us and prayer allows us to connect with that power.  The power of God within us is able to do more than we can ask, or even imagine.  Let us strive to become conduits of that power so that we might see God’s plan implemented around us.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.  

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ephesians 1-3

I realized as I read today that when Paul wrote that he prayed for those to whom he wrote this letter he actually prayed for all who would read it.  He prayed that Christ would make His home in our hearts.  Which reminds me of a lesson I heard several people teach from this passage.  If Christ makes His home in our heart we should think about the other things we allow into our hearts.  Sort of like the sorts of things we would allow in our homes if we knew we had special guests coming who would move around our home as if they lived there.  Most of us have things in our homes that we would get rid of if we knew someone we truly cared about and wanted to impress was moving into our homes with us.  In a similar way, we should not allow into our hearts things which we would be embarrassed to have seen by someone we want to think highly of us. 

This seems like an impossible task.  There are so many sins which I struggle to resist and parts of my life which I am too lazy to clean up.  Yet, Paul tells us that God’s power is at work with in us and that He is able to more than we can ask, or even imagine.  Not only is God capable of doing more than we can imagine, He is capable of doing infinitely more than we can imagine.  The thing about what I wrote about cleaning out our hearts because Christ is making His home there is that we have rooms there where we want to close the door and tell Him, “Don’t go in there. It’s a mess. Wait until I can get in there and clean it out.”  And Christ’s responds by saying, “Don’t be silly.  Get on with your life, I will clean it out for you.”  If we listen to Him and get on with our life of doing God’s will, He really will clean out those dirty, messy rooms in our heart so that we next go in there all that nasty, ugly stuff we were embarrassed for anyone to see will be gone.  We can never clean those “rooms” out on our own.  When we go in there we get distracted by something and make the mess worse.  When I started this paragraph, I intended to write about prayer, and, in a way, I did.  One of those things we should be busy doing instead of trying to clean our hearts is praying for others.