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Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2024 Bible Study — Good Works Will not Save Us, But We Were Saved in Order to Do Good Works

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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.

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2023 Bible Study — God Has Transformed Us by His Grace, Let Us Pray That He Transforms Others in the Same Way

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.

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2022 Bible Study — Reconciled To God, And Through Him, To All Other People

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.

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2021 Bible Study — Pray To Him Who Is Able To Do Immeasurable More Than We Can Ask Or Imagine

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

Paul writes that we were dead in our sins when we lived to gratify the cravings of our flesh, but that God made us alive by raising us up with Christ.  God has done this by His grace, it did not happen by our effort, or works.  However, when He raised us up, God made us new creations for the purpose of doing good works.  We were not, and are not, saved by doing good works.  We were, and are, saved in order to do good works.  Before, we were of different races, nationalities, and ethnicities, all in conflict with each other.  When God raised us with Christ He joined us together to build a Temple for worshiping Him.  We are no longer Jew or Gentile, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or White.  God has erased those differences and made us all part of His family.

God has given His Spirit to those whom He has saved through His grace in Jesus.  Through that Spirit He gives us great power which we can access by prayer.  Let us allow that Spirit to open the eyes of our heart to God’s power at work within us.  That power which is at work within us is able to immeasurably more than we can ask or even imagine.  I want us to think about what that means.  First, God can do more than we can ask or even imagine.  I don’t know about you, but I can imagine a lot and I know people who can imagine even more.  Yet Paul tells us God can do even more than that.  Which brings us to the second thing.  Not only can God do more than we can imagine, He can do immeasurably more.  Immeasurably is one of those words that takes a little thought to understand.  It is like infinity.  Infinity as a number is so incredibly large that infinity-1 is still immeasurably large.  When something is immeasurably large, that does not just mean that it is too big to measure with available tools, it means that it is too large to be measured at all.  God’s power is like that.

I want to touch on one last thing.  Several times in this passage, Paul talks about praying for the Ephesian believers.  He prays for them to receive God’s Spirit so that they may know God better.  He prays that they have the power to understand the magnitude of Christ’s love and be filled with the fullness of God.  Prayer allows us to apply God’s power, which can do immeasurably more than we can imagine, to the good works for which we have been made new creations.

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

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2020 Bible Study Unity Through Christ, Not Government

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.

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2019 Bible Study — Letting Christ “Redecorate” Our Hearts Because He Lives There

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. 

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2018 Bible Study — God’s Power Can, and Will, Do More Than We Can Ask Or Imagine

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.

    There are several themes which Paul weaves in and out through this passage. I think Paul’s tendency to do this may be part of what sometimes makes him hard to understand. On the other hand, it also helps to make his points better understood once we take the effort to do so. Because Paul does not stick to one theme until he has fully explained it, we often lose the thread of what he is saying. However, these various themes are interrelated and to understand one you need to understand that it relates to others. Additionally, our finite minds cannot fully comprehend God’s truth. If Paul systematically explained his understanding of the various doctrines we might more fully understand what he was saying, but that would give us a false confidence in our comprehension of God’s truth. While I do believe that the Holy Spirit will empower us to understand God’s truth, that understanding must be tempered with a humility which comes from being confused by the seeming paradoxes involved.

    Paul writes that he prays that we will understand the greatness of God’s power in us. A power that is so great that it can do more than we can ask, or even imagine, and not just more, but infinitely more. From time to time a marketing campaign will come out where they claim that their product is better than we can imagine. To which many people reply, “I don’t know about that. I can imagine a lot.” Well, in this case it is true: God’s power can do more than we can imagine by a scale that beggars how much our imagination exceeds the capacity of the marketed item. Often times when we ask God for things we not only fail by limiting what we ask for to what is “realistic”, but by asking for the wrong category of solution. Of course, we should not blame ourselves for our failure to ask or imagine what God’s power can do because it is not possible for us ask for anything that approaches the limits to God’s power. There are no such limits.

    Paul explains that the power of God which works for us and through us is the same power which raised Christ from the dead. God gave that power to Christ when He put all things under Christ’s authority. That authority flows through the Church, which is Christ’s body. As Paul explains elsewhere, each and every believer is a part of Christ’s body and as such God’s power flows to us and through us. Further, as members of Christ’s body we have been united with other believers with whom the world would tell us we should be in conflict. That unity results from us being in Christ and no longer living in sin. Paul points out that being in Christ is incompatible with following the desires and inclinations of our sinful nature. Let us call on the Holy Spirit to keep us from doing so, always praying with the Father from Matthew, “I believe, help my unbelief.” In this case calling on the Holy Spirit to remove those sinful desires from us.

Daily Bible Study

December 7, 2017 Bible Study — To Him Who Is Able To Do Immeasurably More Than We Can Ask Or Imagine

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading. I am pleased that more people have been reading my blog, but am somewhat disappointed that so few bother to click the link and read the Bible passage which I am commenting on. Perhaps some of you are reading the passage in other formats. If so, that is wonderful. I have been blessed by reading through the Bible each year and promise that if you do so you will be as well. My wish is that each of you will read a portion of the Bible for yourself each day, even if it is not the passage which I am commenting on.

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

    There are three themes which Paul writes about in today’s passage to which I want to bring your attention. Paul reminds us that we have been saved by the gift of God’s grace, which we receive through faith. We do not have anything to boast about because our salvation is a freely given gift from God, even the faith through which we receive it is a gift from God. Even though we have been made righteous through God’s grace we have no basis to consider ourselves better than anyone else because that righteousness is not a product of our own actions. Rather it is a product of the Holy Spirit acting within us. Paul goes further to indicate that the Holy Spirit created this righteousness within us in order that we might do good works. Our good works do not make us righteous, they are our response to being made righteous.

    One of the results of the Holy Spirit working within us is that the dividing walls of hostility which come between members of various human defined groups are destroyed. If the Holy Spirit is truly working within us we will be united with those believers whom the world teaches that we should hate. Anyone who accepts God’s grace becomes a member of the Body of Christ, no matter what their background. This is but one of the things which the power of God can accomplish. Throughout this passage Paul writes about the amazing power of God. Power which is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. Joining together into one Body those who were taught to hate each other is but one aspect of the ways this power can work beyond our power to imagine. I want to come back to what Paul says here about God’s power. God is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We need to remember this when we pray about the things we struggle with. We are not even able to imagine the solutions to our problems which God has. One of our failures of imagination is seeing problems where God is providing blessings.

Daily Bible Study

September 23, 2015 Bible Study — Happy Anniversary to My Lovely Wife

For today, One Year Bible Online links here. Today my wife and I celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary. I am so grateful both to God and to her for these 15 wonderful years. I pray to God that we have many more together.

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Proverbs 23:29-35

    If you spend your time trying all the latest wines, beers, or mixed drinks, you will suffer for it. I don’t think there is anything I can say to add any clarity to what is said here.

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Psalm 67

    Yes, I will make this my prayer today. May God’s saving power be known to all people throughout the entire earth. May they come to know and praise God. Then, and only then, will there be peace on the earth.

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Ephesians 2

    None of us have any place to boast about our salvation. It was a free gift from God given to us when we were still enmeshed in sin. He did not give it to us as a reward for our righteous behavior, because if salvation was a reward for righteous behavior no one would receive it. No, God recreated us in, and through, Jesus so that we could do good things. The good things we do are not ours to boast of, rather they are God’s doing. I do not do good things because I am a good person. Rather the good things I do are a product of God’s Spirit working through me.
    God, having given us salvation, is now joining us together into a Temple in which He may live. The purpose of this unity is to bring glory to God. We are not called to unity to make people feel better about themselves. We are not even called to unity to help those less fortunate than ourselves. Those are both valuable things, when done in service to the purpose for which God is bringing us together. That purpose is to glorify God. We do not bring glory to God, by proclaiming that sinful behavior is not sinful. However, we need to remember that we are called to confront ALL sinful behavior, not just sinful behavior we find distasteful.

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Isaiah 41:17-43:13

    As I read Isaiah recounting God’s call for the idols to tell us what they had done long ago, I am reminded that scholars and archaeologists frequently question the historical accuracy of the accounts in the Bible. In the early nineteenth century, it was the accepted “truth” that the Assyrian Empire had never existed, that the Biblical writers had invented it to make points about God’s power. Even after the discovery of Nineveh there were those who questioned the accounts given here and elsewhere of the Assyrian siege and withdrawal from Jerusalem, but those have now been confirmed. The idols worshiped by the skeptics had failed to reveal what had happened long ago, just as God had said that they would. Yet the Bible told us of those events. There is a similar call for those idols to tell us what will happen in the future. Before 1948, those who do not accept the Bible and God’s power would have told you that Israel would never again exist in Palestine. Yet, here in Isaiah, God proclaimed that one day He would bring His people back to the land He had promised Abraham.

    There is another theme in this passage which I want to touch on because it struck me as I read this. At the beginning of Chapter 42, we are told of God’s chosen servant, who will not shout, or raise His voice in public. This is a prophecy about Jesus. However, I felt the Spirit talking to me. We are not called to shout, and scream, and stamp our feet. We are called to calmly, gently, and firmly work to bring justice.