Monday, December 4, 2017

Looking Back; Looking Forward

     As we finish our study of the Book of Ephesians I would like to encourage you to study it again! What we have done is just an introduction to the book. Yet, we have done some important introductory work.
     Quiz yourself and see what you got out of the book. Can you think your way through it? What is in each chapter? Where are Paul's two prayers? What is the chapter division between the "spiritual" and the "practical"? What are the spiritual blessings Paul talks about? What is the character of the Christian walk? Those are the overarching ideas of the book.
     Looking back through my composition book I see an early note from Jensen's New Testament survey book...  We looked at the history of the church in Ephesus in Acts. But when Paul wrote to the church it was the mission center toward the other European and Asian churches. [Remember in the beginning Jerusalem was the hub, then the church in Antioch was the "home church" for Paul and his teams. By now that "home church" was Ephesus. That makes a lot of sense out of the story of Paul calling the elders to the seaport on last recorded trip to Jerusalem in the book of Acts..... I'll have to read that again...] John himself settled there as one of the elders.That position of prominence adds weight to the message of the book.
    How to summarize the message of the book.. that IS what I was trying to do here.
    His blessings have been bestowed according to His will. Bigger blessings than we can express in exalted spiritual language: read them often. And always connect them to the fact that the came to you through His will, His love, His grace, His plan for you and for the world. Pray them for the church as Paul does in this letter.
    "At the center of all this, Christ rules the Church. The Church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the Church. The Church is Christ's body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence." Message; Ephesians 1:22-23
    And that church....what should it look like? That's spelled out for us in detail also, just as the blessings were. The Church is Christians living out the truth of our blessings. The Christian walk is a tangible thing. It looks different from the world because we are different from the world. Not that we have a facade which appears spiritual. We are different. We are like Christ.
    I don't think I could summarize the book of Ephesians any better than Stott's idea of the Imperative and the Indicative. "The indicative refers to what we are and the imperative is what we are called to do or be. Scritpture tells us the imperative is grounded in the indicative. That is, we are not commanded to be something before God says that we are that something. The indicative comes first---because we are something God calls us to be that something. We are becoming what we already are."
    That is an amazing and important truth, relevant to the entire New Testament. Whatever God has called us to be, he has given us that. In the big ideas and in the details, God has given us all that we need to be who he wants us to be and to do as he wants us to do.
    I want to close with a last word, again from the Message [6:13-18] summarizing the illustration we call the Armor of God. "Truth, righteousness, peace, faith and salvation are more than words. Learn how to apply them."

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