by Ray C. Stedman
CONTENTS
The book of Ephesians has changed my life again and again.
In fact, of all of Paul's writings, the two letters that have affected me most profoundly are Romans and Ephesians. Both set forth a clear, concise explanation of the entire Christian view of life and the world. While Paul's other letters deal with specific situations and problems, Romans and Ephesians deal with the panoramic sweep of God's truth.
How has Ephesians changed my life? In several ways:
This letter taught me to recognize and combat the spiritual attacks of the enemy so that I could effectively deal with doubt, temptation, fear, anxiety, and depression. Ephesians is the believer's guidebook to spiritual, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
As a young man, I learned from Ephesians how to handle the sex drive God had given me and how to live an upright life in a sex-saturated society. America today is amazingly similar to Ephesian society in Paul's day both are highly immoral and sex-obsessed cultures. Both then and now, it is a difficult challenge to stand for Christ and for Christian morality. But this practical letter teaches us how to come to grips with life as it is.
Ephesians taught me profound truths about marriage and family life. I can't imagine any married man or woman trying to live out God's ideal for marriage without being immersed in Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
Ephesians taught me how the body of Christ functions. The truth of Ephesians 4 blazed in my heart when I was a young pastor-in-the-making, fresh out of seminary. I began to pastor a small group of people meeting together in Palo Alto, California, and I was convinced that ministry is the function of all believers, not just the so-called "minister." The pastor's function, I believed, was to help people find their ministries and to prepare them to exercise their spiritual gifts. Ephesians 4 was our foundation during those formative days at the beginning of Peninsula Bible Church--and it remained so throughout my years there.
As you begin your study in Ephesians, I hope you are eager and excited about the tremendous truth that is so densely packed into this letter by the apostle Paul. I would encourage you to take at least an entire month to live in Ephesians, immerse yourself in it, revel in its sparkling riches. I suggest that as you read this commentary, you also take time to read the letter to the Ephesians from start to finish at least once a week.
The first week, clear a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon and read the entire letter in a single sitting. The next week, read a chapter a day for six days. After that, read Ephesians in two or more contemporary paraphrases or translations, such as the J. B. Phillips' version or Eugene Peterson's The Message. Let the truth of Paul's letter come to you afresh in a new way. I guarantee that if you will faithfully, daily bathe your thoughts and emotions in this powerful, practical letter to Christians, you will never be the same again!
One thing you are sure to notice is that this letter builds toward an epic crescendo in chapter 6, where Paul deals with spiritual warfare--the epic struggle between good and evil, between the prince of peace and the prince of darkness, a battle that stretches from one end of history to the other, a battle that rages across the planet and within every human heart. Since it is a battle none of us can escape, we should make sure we are on the winning side! In Ephesians, we learn how to be effective soldiers under our Lord and Commander, Jesus Christ--and we learn the secret of ultimate victory in this epic struggle.
So come explore with me. Come search for riches beyond your wildest dreams and discover adventure and glory beyond anything else this world has to offer. Turn the page--and set foot on the pathway to courageous, confident, victorious Christian living.
Part One
Our Riches in Christ:
Ephesians 1-3
1. God at Work: Ephesians 1:1-2
Billy Graham tells a true story told him by a pastor he met in Glasgow, Scotland. There was a woman in this pastor's parish who was in financial difficulty and behind in her rent. So the pastor took up a collection for this poor woman at church, then went to her home to give her the money. He knocked and knocked at the door, but there was no answer. Finally, he went away.
The next day he encountered the poor woman at the market. "Why, Mrs. Green," he said, "I stopped by your house yesterday, and I was disappointed that there was no answer."
The woman's eyes widened as she said, "Oh, was that you? I thought it was the landlord and I was afraid to open the door!"
The riches of God have been made available to us in Christ, yet most of us shrink back from receiving all that God eagerly wishes to place in our hands. The riches of God cannot help us until we open the door of our hearts, until we open the pages of Ephesians, and reach out with both hands to receive from Him. The first three chapters of Ephesians reveal to us the riches of God in Christ and tell us how to lay hold of those riches for our lives.
Paul's circular letter
This letter was written about A.D. 61 from Rome during Paul's first imprisonment there. The recipients of the letter were the Christians in the Roman province of Asia (which is Turkey in the modern world). While this letter is commonly called the Epistle to the Ephesians, many ancient manuscripts do not mention any specific city as the destination of the letter. Many scholars believe this is a "circular letter," intended to be circulated among many churches in the region around Ephesus.
Some Bible scholars suggest that it may have been addressed to the very churches addressed by the Lord at the beginning of Revelation, beginning with Ephesus and ending with Laodicea. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes, "After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea" (Colossians 4:16). Some Bible scholars believe the letter from Laodicea to be this letter to the Ephesians.
The letter to the Ephesians was dictated by Paul to Tychicus and hand-delivered by Tychicus. It may well be that it was circulated from church to church and read in each one, and that it finally ended up in Ephesus where it was labeled "The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians." As Paul says in his concluding footnote, this letter is truly addressed to all Christians everywhere. Ephesians 1:1-2 begins:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
That is the briefest salutation in any of Paul's letters, composed of three components:
1. Paul's credentials. Paul describes himself as "an apostle . . by the will of God." An apostle was a messenger from God, a spokesman for God. Paul gloried in the fact that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ. As he tells us in Galatians 1:11-16, the Lord Jesus appeared to him directly. Paul did not learn what he knew about the gospel by discussing it with the other apostles, but by receiving it directly from Jesus Christ. That is his authority. So when you read Paul, you are reading an authorized spokesman for the Lord Jesus.
Notice that Paul offers no other credentials. He doesn't refer to his elite training at the feet of Gamaliel nor to his privileged Hebrew background (see Acts 22:3 and Philippians 3:4-6). He simply says, in effect, "I'm an apostle by the will of God. That is the foundation for everything I say in this letter."
2. An affirmation of the saints. Paul describes these Christians as "the saints. . . the faithful in Christ Jesus." That word saints makes us shudder a little, doesn't it? We don't like to be called "saints" because we have such a plaster-icon image of what a saint is. We think of "saints" as being unreal--so beatific, so holier-than-we, so unlike ordinary human beings. But the saints of the New Testament are not that way. They are people like us. Saints are people who struggle with problems in their families, problems at work, even emotional and spiritual problems. They're normal people like you and me.
But one thing is remarkable about them: They are different in that they are set apart for God. That is what saint means: someone who is set apart. In the Greek, the word for "saint" comes from the word for "holy." And holy means distinct, different, whole, set apart for God. A saint is just like other people, except that he or she is expected to live differently--to live for God. That is the mark of the saint. He has problems like everyone else, but he approaches them differently. He has a different lifestyle. That is what Paul is talking about here.
The essential characteristic of a saint is faithfulness--saints don't quit. They just can't quit being Christians! A young man once called me in his discouragement, telling me he had lost his confidence in prayer because he felt no answer was coming. "I feel like quitting," he said. I replied, "Well, why don't you quit, then? Just stop being a Christian." Surprised, he said, "But I can't quit!" And I said, "That's right, you can't quit. You're a saint, and saints don't quit." Christians saints are sealed by the Holy Spirit, so we can't quit! The Holy Spirit keeps us faithful to God. That faithfulness is the mark of a believer in Christ.
3. A greeting of grace and peace. Then comes the invariable greeting of Paul to the believers: "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." The two great heritages of the Christian are grace and peace. These are two things you can always have, no matter what your circumstances.
Grace is all God's power and all His love and all His favor made available to you. The Greek word for "grace" comes from the same root word from which we get our English word charm. Grace is charming, lovely, and pleasant.
Peace is freedom from anxiety, fear, and worry. Together, these two characteristics should mark the life of every Christian, all the time. Grace is the sign that God is at work in our lives. Peace is the sense of security and trust in God.
A man once said to me, "I've learned something new about trust. Trust is not knowing--yet still being at rest and at peace." That's true. A baby doesn't need to know how Mom and Dad are going to pay the mortgage and buy the food and meet all the bills. A baby simply trusts her needs will be met without knowing all the whys and wherefores. A baby simply trusts that Mom and Dad have matters under control. If you have to know everything, you aren't trusting. Trust is not knowing, and still being at peace.
The blessings of God
Following the salutation, the letter follows the usual structure of Paul's letters. First comes doctrine--the great spiritual principles that God wants to set before us. Next comes the practical application, the working out of those principles in the trenches of our daily lives. The practical application is our everyday response to the fundamental spiritual principles of the doctrines of God.
Many people think of doctrine as just so much theological double-talk. No! Doctrine is truth, it is reality. The doctrinal section of Ephesians is not merely academic theory--it is the truth that we are to base our lives and our everyday actions on. That is why Paul always starts his letters by setting forth the radical facts of life--God's doctrines--exactly as he has received them from Jesus Christ.
Paul begins with a great doctrinal statement that gathers up the great themes of Ephesians. He will return to this theme again and again in Ephesians: The theme of blessing.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
This is Paul's summary of the themes of Ephesians, and there are four elements in this summary in Ephesians 1:3 that we will explore in the rest of this chapter: I. The One who is the source of all blessing. 2. The aim of God's blessing. 3. All blessing is "in Christ." 4. The place of all blessing is in "the heavenly realms." Let's look at each of these four elements in turn.
1. The One who is the source of all blessing. Paul begins in Ephesians 1:3 with the One who is behind all blessing, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is his starting point. Is that your starting point and mine? Our problem, all too often, is that we don't start our thinking with God. Instead, we tend to start with ourselves and our experience, which is only a partial view of truth. We narrow the range of our vision to what we are going through and what is happening to us, and we don't see this in relationship to the entire span of reality around us. So we end up with a distorted idea of what God is doing in the world.
The only way to view truth and understand truth is to start with God. Only He is great enough to encompass all truth.
That's the difference between what the Bible calls "natural" thinking of "the natural man" versus the "spiritual" thinking of "the spiritual man." Natural thinking is limited and myopic. Spiritual thinking is God-centered, expansive, and eternal. We need to learn to be spiritual thinkers about ourselves and about life. We need to begin where Paul begins: with God, the Source of all blessing.
2. The aim of God's blessing. The second element in Ephesians 1:3 is the aim of the work of God. Paul says God "has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing." That is what God intends to do. His goal is to bring about a world, a universe, filled with blessing. Throughout Ephesians we find that everything occurs "to the praise of God's glory"--that is, in order that God be praised. He wants His people to be so struck by the wonder of what has happened to them that their' hearts will automatically reflect praise, glory, and blessing back to God.
This is not because God needs his ego to be massaged. Rather, praise and glory to God is simply a natural consequence arising from the true nature of God's awesome power, character, and deeds--once the true, shining reality of God breaks through upon our dull intellects! Once we truly, accurately see the blessing of God upon our lives, what can we do but stand in abject awe and amazement, saying, "My God, how great Thou art!"
That is what God is after--a sense of awe and amazement that mirrors the reality of His greatness, and that causes us to stop and give thanks and praise to the great and glorious God who has given us every spiritual blessing. Paul goes on to list these spiritual blessings for us. First:
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight (1:4).
That is blessing number one. It goes back before the beginning of time, before the foundation of the universe: He chose us even before the world existed to be His holy children. The second spiritual blessing:
In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will--to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves (1:5-6).
What an immense, awe-inspiring blessing that is--to be members of the family of God, partakers of His divine nature! Third spiritual blessing:
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding (1:7-8).
Think of it! All our guilt is removed, utterly gone--an incalculable blessing from God. The fourth spiritual blessing:
And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ (1:9-10).
We have been taken into the secret councils of the Almighty. He has unfolded to us what he plans to do, what he is going to accomplish in the future. Fifth spiritual blessing:
In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory (1:11-12).
God has appointed us to demonstrate His great truths, and to live our lives so that He might receive praise and glory. Sixth spiritual blessing:
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation (1:13).
God has blessed us with His truth, the straight scoop on all reality--and when we heard His truth and responded by turning our lives over to Him, we were included in Christ and His salvation. Seventh and final spiritual blessing:
Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory (1:14).
These blessings make life worth living. Without them, life is desolate, dull, and ultimately unbearable. We cannot produce these blessings on our own; we can only receive them from God. These are the blessings, the gifts of God.
3. All blessing is "in Christ." The third element of Ephesians 1:3 is that the apostle points out that all of this blessing is "in Christ." All this comes to us in Christ--in the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Himself. This fact is stressed again and again throughout the letter to the Ephesians. No two words appear in it more frequently than "in Christ," or "in him."
We cannot claim to have God's blessing in our lives without acknowledging the centrality of Christ in our lives. The only spiritual blessing that can ever come to you from God is that which comes in Christ. There is no other way we can receive God's spiritual blessing.
If you are involved with a group that sets aside the Lord Jesus Christ and tries to go "directly to God" to claim the great spiritual promises of the New Testament, you are being led into a realm of spiritual fraud. God only accomplishes spiritual blessing in Christ. Material blessings are available to "the righteous and the unrighteous" alike (Matthew 5:45), but the inner spirit of man can be healed and cured only in Christ. There is no other way.
4. The place of all blessing is in "the heavenly realms." Finally, notice the locale where all spiritual blessing occurs--"in the heavenly realms." Now, that doesn't mean heaven, as we usually conceive it. Paul is talking here about the present experience of these blessings. We are involved with the "heavenly realms" right now. These heavenly realms, which are mentioned throughout Ephesians and other passages of Scripture, are really the realm of invisible reality, of things that are real and true about life in our universe, but which we can't see or touch right now.
The heavenly realms are intensely real, and they play an important part in our lives right now. This is what Paul refers to in another letter: "So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18).
We see a powerful illustration of the heavenly realms in the Old Testament story of Elisha and his servant. They were in a small city, surrounded by the armies of Syria, as we read in 2 Kings 6:15-17:
When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. "Oh, my lord, what shall we do?" the servant asked.
"Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them."
And Elisha prayed, "0 LORD, open his eyes so he may see." Then the LORD opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.
If only we could see the horses and chariots of fire who are arrayed about us, and the angels God has placed in charge of our circumstances. The real spiritual battle takes place there, in the heavenly realms--not somewhere in the clouds or in outer space, but right here, within and around each of us. We need to ask God to open our eyes so that we may see His reality.
Paul's starting principle in this passage regarding the blessing of God is that His blessing is something that has already been accomplished. It is not a promise to be fulfilled, but a present gift to be grasped. It is not based on human activity, but on God's love and grace. God's blessing is something only God can do, something He has already done. All progress in the spiritual life comes by understanding a truth that is already true. It is available to us the moment we open our hands to receive it.
What God is doing
Ours is a busy world of busy people. Our newspapers, magazines, and airwaves are filled with the latest stories of what our leaders and trendsetters are doing around the world. We easily forget that the only activity which truly, eternally affects lives, hearts, and human events is the activity of God. His activity, though profound, often goes unseen and unnoticed by the world. Yet that is where we need to focus our thoughts: on what God is doing.
It might be useful for you to take a pen and underline all the verbs of this passage. You will notice that they all refer to God, to the work He has done: "blessed," "chose," "predestined," "has freely given," "loves," "in Him we have redemption," "He has made known to us his will," and on and on. As you go through this passage, you will see that every verb you highlight is a sign of God at work.
Man's glory shall fade. All the accomplishments of our present day will someday be little more than footnotes in some future history if that much. Only the work of God will endure. Rudyard Kipling once wrote about the British Empire:
Far flung, our navies melt away,
on dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
The glory of Rome is a distant memory. In our own lifetime, imperial England has been eclipsed. The greatness of the Soviet Union has collapsed. America's greatness too will fade, as will the greatness of all the nations of the earth. Only what God is doing endures. If we want our lives to have eternal meaning, then we must give our attention to these great thoughts that God planned before the foundation of the world. Most of all, we must give our attention to the one Person who, in all the span of history, is able to accomplish what no other man could do, Jesus Christ.
That is what Ephesians is all about.
As we move through the rest of this great letter of the apostle Paul, given to him by inspiration from God Himself, let us ask Him to remove the dimness from our vision and the dullness from our understanding, so that we can see the grand and blazing spiritual reality that is all around us in the heavenly realms in which we live from day to day. Let us ask Him to help us to think deeply and seriously about these incalculable spiritual blessings he has given us, so that our lives would better reflect the awesome reality of who God truly is and what He is doing in our world.
2. The Work and Blessings of the Father: Ephesians 1:3-6
A rich man was in the habit of giving his wife an expensive piece of jewelry every year on her birthday. One year he might phone the jeweler and say, "Send me your finest pearl necklace, along with your bill." Or, "Send me your finest diamond pendant, along with your bill." Or the finest emerald bracelet or ruby ring. Each time, the jeweler did as the rich man asked, dispatching a messenger to the rich man's mansion to deliver the jewelry piece in a box along with his bill.
But every year the rich man would play a game with the jeweler. He would send the messenger back to the jeweler along with the original box, a note, and a check. The check was always written in the amount of several thousand dollars less than the price on the jeweler's bill. The note would say, "Sir, I like the jewelry piece, but I do not like the price. If you will accept the enclosed check for a reduced amount, then please return the jewelry box with the seal unbroken."
For years the jeweler put up with the rich man's game, accepting the reduced check, and returning the box with the seal unbroken. He still made a profit on the jewelry, even if it was a lower profit than he liked--and at least he was able to keep the rich man's trade year after year. In time, however, the jeweler began to tire of this charade.
Finally the day came when the rich man placed an order for a lavish diamond necklace, and the jeweler decided he would not get clipped again. As usual, the jeweler sent the necklace in a box, along with his bill. Again, as usual, the box was returned with a reduced check for payment and a note.
Enough was enough! The jeweler refused the check, kept the box, and sent the messenger away in disgust. When he opened the box to reclaim the necklace, he found that the necklace had been removed. In its place was a check for the entire amount of the jeweler's bill.
For years, the rich man had been sending the entire asking price of each jewelry piece--hidden inside the sealed jewelry box. In all that time, the jeweler had accepted thousands of dollars less than he could have received--because he didn't open the box and look inside.
The hidden riches of Christ are available to you and me but to find them, we have to open the letter of Ephesians. It is here, in this letter, that we find the description of the riches we have in Jesus Christ.
Paul speaks passionately and extensively about these riches--and with good reason. Having traveled throughout the Roman empire, he had seen the spiritual and material poverty of the Roman world. He had spoken to rulers, soldiers, business leaders, merchants, laborers, farmers, and slaves. He saw that all of them, regardless of material wealth or status, suffered from the same spiritual deprivation. All were depressed, discouraged, beset with fears and anxieties, jealousies and hostilities. They were under the grip of superstition and filled with the dread of the future. They had no hope of life beyond death.
Paul's great joy and mission in life was to unfold to us the riches available to us in Jesus Christ--riches which liberate and transform us, bringing us into a new experience of joy, love, and radiant faith. He gloried in the vast riches of God in Jesus Christ.
The structure of Ephesians 1
In the previous chapter, we examined the summary statement with which Paul gathers up the great themes of this letter, Ephesians 1:3:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
There is an unusual sentence structure in this passage which is apparent in the original Greek New Testament, but which cannot be seen in the English translation. Verses 3 through 14 were actually composed as a single unbroken sentence filled with many adjectives to amplify and enrich our understanding of God's blessings in Christ. If you want to get the full effect of it, take a deep breath and read those verses together without pausing. You'll gain a real appreciation for just how much meaning Paul crams into that one great sentence!
It is easy to imagine that Paul is dressed in khakis and pith helmet, looking like Indiana Jones, taking us on a guided tour througha treasure chamber like those of the Egyptian Pharaohs, describing what he sees. He starts out describing the most immediate and evident facts--then something else comes into view and he shines his lantern on it. Then comes some new glorious object or artifact, and glory flashes upon glory until he has compiled a dazzlingly complex sentence describing the vast and nearly indescribable riches of the chamber.
That is how Paul shows us that all of God's truth is interwoven and interconnected--you can never touch upon one great theme without finding that it leads to others, and that those lead to still others. All of God's truth is like that--His spiritual truth, and also His truth in nature. You can't study one subject in nature without touching upon a great many others.
But though these verses are presented to us in a single complex sentence, there is actually a very natural, simple division within Ephesians 1:3-14. It divides into three parts around the three Persons of the Trinity, because that is how the spiritual blessings are divided. These blessings gather about the three Persons of the Trinity--the work of the Father, the work of the Son, and the work of the Holy Spirit. In verses 3 through 6 you have the work and blessings of the Father:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will--to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
Then, in verses 7 through 12, you have the work and blessings of the Son. Notice the rich and exalted language Paul uses to describe the Son and our relationship to Him:
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.
Then in verses 13 and 14, you have the work and blessings of the Holy Spirit:
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory.
All of these blessings take place, remember, not in some future time and place, not in the afterlife, but in the here and now, in an unseen but utterly real dimension that Paul calls "the heavenly realms"--the invisible realities of our lives today. Yes, "the heavenly realms" do extend on into eternity--but this dimension of life is also something to be experienced now, in our daily lives.
That is what Paul is talking about--your thought life, your attitudes, your inner life, your behavior--the place where you experience conflict, pressure, struggle, temptation, disaster, and triumph. It is the place where we are exposed to the attack of the principalities and powers mentioned later, in Ephesians 6--those dark spirits in high places who get to us, depress us, frighten us, and fill us with dread, anxiety, rage, and hostility. "The heavenly realms" are a place of conflict--but also a place where God can release us and deliver us, where the Spirit of God touches us at the seat of our intellect, emotions, and will.
These principles are not mere doctrinal or theological ambiguities, they are the rock-solid foundational truths that sustain us through every moment and every trial of the Christian life. They are as reliable as the laws of nature, and they function regardless of how we feel.
Once, while I was doing some amateur electrical repairs in my home, I discovered that electricity follows a pattern of its own and takes no notice of how I feel at the moment. While I understood this fact in theory, it was quite a shocking experience to encounter this fact experientially. The electrical current I came in contact with was not in the slightest degree impressed with my position as a Bible teacher, pastor, or author. When I closed the electric circuit with my own body, that current didn't hesitate to flow through me as if I were an insulated copper wire.
Spiritual principles operate with the same impartiality as electrical principles. We respect spiritual truth to our own benefit, and we violate it at our own risk. Spiritual principles are not respecters of persons. For our own good, we must come to understand spiritual truth, respect it, and align our lives according to its principles.
The work of the Father
In the rest of this chapter and the two chapters that follow, we will take a closer look at the three natural divisions of Ephesians 1:3-14, the work and blessing of the three Persons of the Trinity. We will begin in this chapter with the work and blessings of the Father, and examine the work and blessings of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the next two chapters.
Look at the first statement:
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight (1:4).
This is an expression of what theologians call "the doctrine of election," or predestination--the fact that God chose us to be in Christ even before the creation of time and space. If you try to encompass that truth with your finite mind, you will experience a mental overload! It is an astounding truth, and we struggle with it, we question it, and I would submit to you that we really don't believe it, because so often our actions just don't show it. We wonder, "How could God choose us, and yet still offer a choice that we must make?" We struggle over the seeming conflict between our human free will and the sovereign election of God.
Many try to explain away this paradox. "Well," they say, "God can foresee the future, so He looks ahead in time, sees we are going to make a choice, and 'elects' us on the basis of a decision He knows we will someday make." But that is not what the Scriptures say. Others say, "Well, God sees what kind of people we will be, and recognizing our value to His plan, He chooses us on that basis." Nothing could be more un scriptural. God doesn't need our help to carry out His eternal plan. To think that we, by our own effort, can make ourselves useful to God is pure human arrogance. We can accomplish nothing for God apart from His choosing, empowering, and will.
As hard as it is for us to understand and accept, the fact is that we are chosen by God. Jesus said so Himself: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). That's putting it plainly, isn't it? You can't come to Christ unless you are drawn by the Father. God has to initiate the activity.
Then why does God appeal to our individual human will? For in Matthew 11:28, we also read, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." That means it's up to us as individuals to make a choice. You cannot become a Christian until you choose to come--yet it is equally true that you cannot become a Christian unless God has chosen you. Both facts are true. We can't reconcile them in our puny intellects, but we can accept them by faith.
Think of it: Before the creation of the world--uncounted millions and billions and trillions of years in the past--God chose you to belong to Him. Let that sink into your mind for a moment! Drop to your knees in awe and humility before this loving eternal Being who is not confined by past or future, by years of time or light-years of space; who knows the future as certainly as He knows the past; who determines all things by the counsel of His will.
Do you see how this fact elevates your identity as a child of God? We are not afterthoughts in God's plan. There are no second-class citizens in the body of Christ. We are all chosen of the Father, selected as members of His forever family. He has chosen us to be holy and blameless. These truths are so revolutionary we are afraid to believe them! We can scarcely believe that these truths literally apply to us!
The reason we find it hard to believe is that our understanding of the word holiness is so distorted. We think holiness is sanctimoniousness, when the truth is that holiness actually means "wholeness"--being restored to the useful function for which we were originally created. Physical wholeness prevails when the body works the way it was intended to work, and spiritual wholeness results when our entire being functions as God designed it to function. When we are spiritually whole, we are holy.
And what does it mean to be "blameless" before God? It doesn't mean to be sinless, because (as Romans 3:23 tells us) all have sinned. But thanks be to God, though we are sinful, we can still be blameless. While it is not in our power to go back in time and undo the sins we have done, we can still accept the righteousness of Jesus and the forgiveness of the Father as a covering and cleansing for our sin. When God lifts the blame and shame of sin from us, we become blameless.
Verse 5 records a second great aspect of the work of the Father, which is related to the first:
He predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ. . . .
Here is a partial explanation of how God takes care of all the past failures and the shame of our lives, to produce a Christian who is holy and blameless for His use. God accomplishes this change in us by means of a new family relationship. He destined us to be sons, to be adopted as His own children.
Adoption means leaving one family and joining another, leaving behind all that was involved in the first family and assuming the name, identity, resources, and history of another. This is how Paul describes this new relationship. We all were born to the family of Adam. We have left that family to belong to a new family, the family of Jesus Christ. That doesn't mean that we are not human; it means that we are no longer identified with the sinfulness of Adam. Though we are human and subject to the temptations of Adam's race, we are no longer enslaved by death and sin. We've been transferred into a new family, and we have received a new identity.
As adopted sons of the living God, we have the only begotten Son of God as our forerunner and example. We learn how to live from Him--and we are to copy His life. Our aim is to live exactly as Jesus lived. We are to derive our way of life from Jesus, just as Jesus derived His life from the Father. In John 6:57, He said, "Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me." God the Father was His resource, wisdom, strength, and power. Everything Jesus did was in reality the life of God the Father being lived out through the Son. In the same way, we are to derive our life from Christ, to become a channel through which God can work. As adopted children of the Father, we are to share the life of God's only begotten Son. That is what pleases the Father.
It's all God
The rest of verse 5 and verse 6 tell us why the infinite God of the universe should stoop to choose weak, failure-prone, sin-ridden creatures like you and me as part of his ultimate plan:
. . . in accordance with his pleasure and will--to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
That really makes it clear that we have no reason to feel important because we have been chosen by God. On the contrary we are humbled by the truth. There is not anything in us that God needs to fulfill His plan. His choice is based not on our intrinsic merit, but on the kind of God He truly is. He chose us for adoption as His sons for two reasons:
Reason 1: "In accordance with his pleasure and will. "
Reason 2: "To the praise of his glorious grace."
It is all God. None of it is us. It begins with God's pleasure and will. It gives him pleasure to save us for his use. And the final result of his choice is praise--all the universe responds with joy, praising God throughout creation.
The final phrase of verse 6 introduces the next theme the work of the Son. Here Paul speaks of the grace "which [God the Father] has freely given us in the One he loves!, Jesus Christ. God "en graced" us (that is a good rendering of the original Greek); He poured out His grace upon us in Christ. Jesus was sent to us by the Father. That is the mark of His love. Jesus came to be poor, to be misunderstood, opposed, and hated, to be spat upon, beaten, and crucified--and why?
So that we might be rich!
Remember how Paul put it in 2 Corinthians 8:9: "For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich." So my question to you is: Are you enjoying your inheritance?
Every morning, when the sunlight opens our eyes, our first thought should be, "I'm a child of the Father! I've been chosen by Him to be a member of His family! His peace, His joy, and His love are my legacy, my inheritance--and I can draw upon his riches every moment of every day, no matter what my circumstances may be." The letter to the Ephesians ought to be a treasure store to which we go whenever we feel discouraged.
I once read of an old Navajo Indian who became rich when oil was found on his property. He took all the money and put it in a bank. His banker became familiar with the habits of this old gentleman. Every so often, the Indian would show up at the bank and say to the banker, "Grass all gone, sheep all sick, water holes all dry." Without a word, the banker would take the old Indian into the vault, show him several bags of silver dollars, and say, "All this is yours." The old man would spend about an hour stacking up the dollars and counting them. Then he'd return the bags to their places, come out of the vault, and say, "Grass all green, sheep all well, water holes all full."
It is amazing the change that comes over us when we simply review our resources and count our blessings. That is where true encouragement is found--in an honest accounting of the Father's limitless resources and blessings, made available to us in Christ.
3. The Work and Blessings of
the Son:
Ephesians 1:7-12
When I was a student at Dallas
Theological Seminary, I spent my
summers working at the Lincoln
Avenue Presbyterian Church in Pasadena.
My wife, Elaine, and I would
drive to California at the end of
the school year very short of cash,
and it took all our pitiful
savings just to buy gasoline for the
trip. We slept in the car
and arrived flat broke and hungry, having
skipped the last few
meals. There would be a week, sometimes two,
until I received
my first check, so I had to pawn something to make
ends meet.
The only thing of pawnable value in my possession was my typewriter. So the first thing I did when I arrived in Pasadena was to hock my typewriter. The pawnbroker and I got very well acquainted over those summers. We would live on the money I got from pawning my typewriter, and when my first check came, I would redeem my typewriter from the pawn shop. During the time my typewriter was in hock, it was useless to anyone. I couldn't use it, the pawnbroker had no right to use it, nor could he sell it to anyone else. Only when it was redeemed could it be put to its proper use.
As we are about to see, this is the word-picture Paul uses to describe the work of Jesus the Son: He has redeemed us from being "in hock" or in bondage to sin. Have you ever thought of yourself that way? In your natural human condition, you were useless to God--unfit for the purpose He created you for. Only when you were redeemed could you achieve your true God-given purpose.
Redemption is the work and blessing of the Son. In verses 7 and 8, we see how the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, accomplishes what the Father has willed and decided. The act of deciding was the Father's; the act of accomplishing the Father's decision is the act of the Son:
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.
The key word in this section is redemption. Unfortunately, that term has largely lost its original meaning. It sounds vaguely theological to modern ears, but it is not a term we use much. Unless we visit a pawnbroker or use coupons regularly, few of us know what it means to redeem something. So I want to substitute a more common synonym in place of redemption. That word is liberation. In Christ the Son, we have liberation through His blood, and the forgiveness of sins. That is the work of the Son. That is the truth the apostle Paul wishes to bring home to us.
The picture the word redemption suggested to the original hearers of Paul's letter to the Ephesians was that of a slave market a common sight in the Roman world. Human beings were offered as merchandise for sale. In Paul's imagery, we were bound as wretched slaves in a great slave market. Jesus came, paid a price, bought us, redeemed us, and liberated us for useful service. When we were slaves in the slave market of sin, God could not use us. Once our liberty was purchased by Jesus Christ, we were free to be useful and profitable to God.
Lasting fulfillment
Our relationship with Christ, then, is the source of our purpose in life. But does that mean nonChristians cannot have a purpose in life, that they cannot achieve worthwhile things? Understand that we are not talking about a sense of achievement or feelings of fulfillment in human terms. We are talking about finding God's ultimate, eternal purpose for our lives. Many human activities and achievements can give us a temporary sense of well-being and happiness, but they do not eternally satisfy. Only the work God does through us gives lasting satisfaction and has eternal value. That is what Paul is talking about.
I once taught a home Bible class in Newport Beach. The host and hostess invited their neighbor from across the street--a brilliant engineer and a tough-minded agnostic. He announced to the group that he had no need of God or religion in his life, but he came to the Bible class as, in his words, "the Devil's Advocate." I replied, "Well, curl your tail around the chair, and sit down. We'll be glad to have you." He spent most of the evening challenging our statements and trying to disprove them. But it was obvious that, beneath his skepticism and intellectual arrogance, there was a hunger, almost a longing, to be proved wrong!
I maintained contact with him for a time afterward, and occasionally talked with him at length about the Bible. He continued to insist that he had no need for God. In time I learned that he had been stricken with terminal cancer. Many of his Christian friends prayed for him, hoping that he would turn to Godin this ultimate hour of need. He had money, he had intellect, he had position in the community--all of which came to nothing, nothing at all, in the face of his spiritual poverty at the end of his span of years. Tragically, he made a heartbreaking choice to take his own life rather than turn to God for strength in his time of crisis.
This man's tragedy affirms what Paul is saying to us in Ephesians. A man can have all the achievements in the world but that is not authentic fulfillment. True, lasting, satisfying fulfillment comes only in Christ. It is the result of our liberation by the saving work of Christ.
The Cross Argues For Us
Jesus came into our slave pit, He struck off our fetters, and He set us free. He restored us to fruitful, eternally significant living. Paul goes on to tell us that in Christ, we have the forgiveness of sin. Those sins were once our slave-chains, binding us in our enslaved condition. Our guilty awareness of those sins makes us hide from God and from each other--and even from ourselves. Sin brings shame, withdrawal, and denial. The memory of our sins makes us feel unacceptable to ourselves and others. The shame of sin makes us reclusive, secretive, suspicious, lonely, and despairing.
When Jesus comes into our lives, His light dispels the darkness of our sin. As He said to the woman who was caught in the act of adultery, "Neither do I condemn you. . . . Go now and leave your life of sin" (John 8:11). By what right does this Man forgive the sins of others? How can He set our guilt aside and still remain just?
Paul's answer: "We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins" (Ephesians 1:7 emphasis added). That is how it happens. His blood paid the price for our redemption. His blood bought our liberation from enslavement to sin. His blood, spilled on a cross of shame, set our guilt aside. That was the work of the Son.
The cross is not a pleasant thing. Blood is a sticky, messy, even sickening subject for most people. There are many who faint at the sight of blood. So this whole business of a bloody Savior is offensive to people, because they do not understand why God insists upon blood before there is forgiveness. Yet there is no other way. Scripture is clear: "The law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood," says Hebrews 9:22, "and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness." Why? Because the blood underscores the reality of our guilt. Jesus died because we deserve to die. We deserve the judgment of God.
Jesus died in our place. His blood is the substitute for our blood, His cross the substitute for the cross you and I deserve. And He was not merely a substitute, a replacement for us on the cross--He was identified with us. He actually became us on the cross. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Corinthians 5:21). When Jesus took our place and identified with us, God put Him to death--because that is what we deserve. It is a fact that Scripture will not allow us to escape.
Some people are offended by the blood of Christ. They don't want to hear about the cross, the blood, or the debt of sin and shame He died to repay. I don't think it is the blood itself that so offends them--it is what the blood means. It signifies the fact that we are guilty, we are to blame, we deserve the sentence of death--and many people deny the fact that God's judgment against sin is true, and that we all deserve His wrath. To such people, the cross is bad news--even unbearable news.
We need to understand that the cross is truly the best news of all. The blood of Christ tells us that God is just, and He deals with sin. When Christ died, God's integrity and justice were upheld. He is now free to love us to the utmost degree. No one can ever stand in the shadow of the cross and argue that God takes a light view of sin. This gory episode in human history speaks to the fact that God will never, ever put up with evil. All have sinned--you have and so have I--but the cross argues for us, the blood liberates us. Our account is stamped paid in full, and God now fully accepts us in Christ.
God's lavish riches in Christ
This marvelous truth is what Paul calls "the riches of his grace." God did it all. I did nothing, I didn't even add to it. I can't deserve it or merit it in any way. I owe everything to the riches of God's grace, as Paul goes on to say:
. . . in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding (1:7-8).
When Paul says that God has "lavished" His riches on us, he is drawing a word-picture of riches that are heaped, piled, and spilled onto us, beyond measure, beyond counting. This is a reference to the fact that God not only washed us clean at the moment of our conversion, but he continues to cleanse and liberate us throughout our lives. Though we are now God's adopted children, we are still prone to sin and fail--so God continues to lavish his riches of grace and forgiveness on us. When we stumble and cover ourselves with the filth and grime of sin, He picks us up, dusts us off, forgives us, and restores us to our proper service for Him.
God's forgiveness is ever-present, lavished upon us throughout each new day and throughout our lives. It is a magnificent sense of liberation that we receive anew and afresh on a daily basis. Again and again, as we walk with the Lord, we can experience the joy of being set free and restored to usefulness. God fully, lavishly accepts us. We are not second-class citizens of heaven, but full-fledged children of the living God. Because He freely accepts us, we are free to accept ourselves.
Some may say, "Well, if God is so lavishly forgiving, then I can sin all I want, knowing that God will always let bygones be bygones, right?" Wrong. If that is your attitude toward the grace of God, then it may well be that you've never truly experienced it! Those who truly know God's forgiveness would never take it so lightly. Grace is a thing to be accepted in awe and reverence not exploited or trampled underfoot.
As Paul writes in Romans 6:1-2, "What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?"
There is no agony like the agony of guilt. Nothing haunts the soul like the shame of sin. At the same time, nothing liberates the soul like the knowledge of God's forgiveness and the experience of God's wholeness. Once we have been set free from sin, why would we ever want to go back into bondage and struggle under that awful, crushing load again?
Thank God we have been set free by the work of the Son upon the cross.
The mystery of unity
Some years ago, I received a thick envelope from the city of Palo Alto. The envelope contained a letter and a petition signed by 114 neighbors living near the church. The petition asked the city government to revoke the use permit of Peninsula Bible Church and to restrict our church's operations. My immediate reaction was anger. Who do these people think they are, I seethed, wanting to stop the work that God is doing in this church? Don't they understand that lives are being redirected, marriages are being saved, and people are coming to Christ because of this church?
But then the Lord brought to my mind the fact that few of these people had even been inside our church--they had only been outside. They didn't see the wonderful things that were happening inside our church. They only saw that traffic in the neighborhood was snarled on Sunday mornings, and that exhaust fumes wafted into their yards from our crowded parking lot, and that the lights of our church shone into their homes during our evening services--and their annoyance was perfectly understandable!
I realized that this petition against our church might actually be God's opportunity to be a witness to our own neighborhood. So in the next few weeks our congregation made it a point not to fight the petition with legal action, but instead to demonstrate a genuine, loving spirit to our neighbors. We sent delegations from the church into the neighborhood with the message, "We are sorry for the inconvenience and irritation our church has inadvertently caused you, and we want to be good neighbors. Please tell us how we can help reduce this irritation in your life."
The neighbors responded positively to this outreach, and we made a number of changes that lessened the impact of our crowds on the neighborhood--and we made some new friends. We even began to see some of our neighbors joining us in Sunday worship!
God showed us how to break down the barriers that we had unwittingly erected in our own neighborhood, and He showed us new ways to build relationships with the people He loves. If only we could see all our problems this way--not as obstacles, but as opportunities to witness the miracle and mystery of unity in Christ.
In Ephesians 1:9-12, Paul tells us that this is the purpose of history, the reason for the existence of time and space: to unite all things in Christ. God wants to bring unity and wholeness to His creation, and that means there must be unity, not division, between the sacred realm and the earthly realm; between the church and the neighborhood, between those who have already received His good news and those who desperately need to hear it. In these verses, Paul writes:
And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment--to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.
If we will apply ourselves to truly understanding these powerful words, then we will begin to understand God's purpose in the world. We will begin to understand the world around us and the course of history as it rolls through time and space. But in order to understand the statement Paul makes in these verses, we must take this statement apart. There are four major divisions in this statement: 1. The mystery of God's will. 2. How the mystery of God's will was made manifest. 3. The time the mystery of God's will is to be manifested. 4. Our part in manifesting the mystery of God's will.
Let's look at each of these divisions in turn:
1. The mystery of God's will. Here, Paul tells us that God has a hidden purpose, which he calls a "mystery." A mystery is a secret God understands, and that people need to know, but which cannot be understood unless it is disclosed by God. The mysteries of God answer the great questions that throb in the human heart. No seminar, no university class, no scientific probe can reveal these answers. They can only be revealed by God Himself. Once God reveals the mystery of His purpose in the world to us, then the swirling chaotic events that flicker on our TV screens and scream from our headlines begin to make sense in God's cosmic scheme. Only after we have read and understood God's revealed Word can we even begin to read a newspaper or watch CNN with any intelligence and comprehension--because only then can we see how our current events fit into the program and purpose of God.
We in the Christian church have the answers to the mysteries of God. He has made us the stewards or dispensers of those answers. Tragically, we have too often failed in the job God has given us. We do not speak clearly to the world about the mysteries of God, and that is why the world continues in its confusion and darkness. It is up to us to tell the world, loudly and clearly, the answers to God's mysteries.
In verse 10, Paul says that the great secret or mystery of God is that He plans "to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ." That is what God is doing in history: uniting all things in Christ. You may wonder, "How can that be? I look around and it doesn't seem that the world is uniting in Christ, but falling apart and falling away from Christ! I don't see unity, I see division! I don't see Christ's unity--I see atheism, paganism, and immorality! There is even division within my own soul, as the good Christian person I want to be is constantly at odds with the desires of my old sin nature!" Paul has an answer for that objection, which we'll come to in a moment--but first he wants us to understand that God's ultimate plan is to bring all things together under the headship of His Son, Jesus.
When Paul says "all things," he means all things. In fact, he amplifies it: "all things in heaven and on earth." He is saying that, ultimately, all things in both the invisible realm of reality, heaven, and the visible realm, earth, will be united under the lordship of Christ. Where we now see a struggle between good and evil, struggle among nations, and struggle among people, we will one day see unity. Christ will be the supreme administrator of all things, both in the heavenly realm and the earthly.
We see this principle in Philippians 2:5-11, where Paul writes that our Lord Jesus took the form of a servant and humbled himself, being obedient to death on the cross--and as a result, "God exalted [Jesus] to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." That is God's purpose in the world; that is where all of history is moving.
2. How the mystery of God's will was made manifest. In Ephesians 1:9 Paul tells us how the mystery will be revealed: "And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ." That is the clue: the revelation of the mystery of God's will and purpose in the world takes place in Christ.
The wisdom and plan of God has been manifested in the life and ministry of Christ. Look at the Lord's life and you will see what Paul means. Take, for example, the Lord's miracles. There is that beautiful passage in Isaiah 35:5-7 where the prophet predicts that God shall come to us, and that the result of his coming will be that the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will leap, and the dumb will sing for joy. In other words, the coming of the Lord will be manifested by a great eruption of healing and gladness.
That is exactly what happened when Jesus came. He healed the blind, deaf, lame, and mute--and more! He mastered the forces of nature, stilled the storm, changed water into wine, released captives from bondage to Satan in the spiritual realm. This was the visible demonstration at the beginning of a work that is continuing today, and which will one day be completed when all things in heaven and on earth are united under the lordship of Jesus Christ.
The principles by which this healing manifestation would take place in men's spirits, as well as their bodies, are set forth in the words of Jesus. So it is important that we listen to His words, as recorded in the four Gospels. That is why we should heed the Beatitudes, the life-changing message in the Sermon on the Mount and the parables, His dialogues with His disciples, the clashes with His opponents, the rich words of His prayers, His final instructions in the Upper Room, the intense words He spoke from the cross, and the words of comfort He gave following His resurrection. These words reveal the mystery of God's purpose in the world, and in our individual lives.
3. The time the mystery of God's will is to be manifested. In verse 10, Paul says that God's purpose in history will be fully accomplished "when the times will have reached their fulfillment." He is talking here about the cycles of history. Historians tell us that history moves in cycles. There are times of peace and prosperity which lead to a time of apathy and lethargy; this foments calamity and uncertainty, producing a time of rebellion and revolution; these changes bring us back to peace and prosperity--and the cycle begins all over again. These cycles are called "seasons" in the Bible.
Paul is telling us that a time will come when the seasons have been completed and the cycles will be ended. At that point, God will have fulfilled His promise to tear down the old creation, destroying it utterly, while building up the new. This is hard for us to understand in the finiteness of our experience. To our way of thinking, it is necessary to tear down first, then rebuild. You must demolish the old, run-down, rat-infested, graffiti-scarred tenement before you can put up the brand-new high-rise.
But God doesn't work that way. He tears down the old at the same time He is building up the new. In fact, the marvel of God is that He tears down the old and builds up the new at the same time, in the same process. When we look around us at the decay, misery, injustice, and sin around us, we only see the tearing-down of this world. We forget that God is also building a new creation at the same time, on the very same spot. By means of the hate and the hurt of this old creation, He is building His new creation. As the old is destroyed, the new emerges--finished, complete, and exactly as He planned. That is what Paul means when he says, "when the times will have reached their fulfillment."
4. Our part in manifesting the mystery of God's will. What is our part? Well, Paul has put it in one phrase in verse 12: "in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory." That is our part.
Unfortunately, this translation softens the cutting edge of Paul's statement in this verse. What Paul literally says is, "We have been made Christ's inheritance." As believers, we are the inheritance of Christ--His heritage. Later, in verse 18, Paul will expand on this theme, writing, "I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints."
So there is a double inheritance in the Christian life: We inherit Jesus and He inherits us. He is our inheritance and we are His. He is our resource, our power, our strength, our love, our wisdom, our truth, the precious One from whom we draw our life and our purpose for living--and we are His precious prize, which He Himself has redeemed from the muck and mire of our sin, and it pleases Him to use us to glorify the Father.
Once we truly understand what that means, it puts an end to complaining about "our lot in life." It is God in Christ who has chosen us, allowed us to go through the situations we are in (many of which, if we are honest with ourselves, are of our own making), and it pleases Him to bring His blessings about and to weave His perfect plan out of our problems and hurts and failings. His riches of grace are manifested in our lives, and the life of Jesus is released in us as we learn to respond to trials and sufferings in the same way that He did. Day by day, moment by moment, God is destroying the old in us and creating the new, bringing us to wholeness and inner unity in Christ, conforming us to the likeness of the Son.
May God give us grace to play our part by faith, to cooperate with God and not resist, as the old self gradually collapses within us and a new and Christlike self-glorious, eternal, and pleasing to God--arises to take its place. The more we understand and allow this process to take place within us, the greater will be our joy as we see God's purpose fulfilled in our lives.
In this and the preceding chapter, we have examined the work of the first two Persons of the Trinity, as presented by Paul in Ephesians 1:3-14. In the next chapter, we will examine Ephesians 1:13-14--the work of the Holy Spirit.
4. The Work and Blessings of the Spirit: Ephesians 1:13-14
The great American preacher, Dwight L. Moody, was scheduled to launch an evangelistic campaign in England. Hearing of Moody's plans, an elderly English pastor complained to a younger colleague, "Why do we need Mr. Moody to come here and preach to us? He's an uneducated former shoe-clerk--and he's an American, for goodness' sake! Who does Mr. Moody think he is, preaching to us? Does he fancy he has a monopoly on the Holy Spirit?"
"No," the younger pastor replied, "but the Holy Spirit seems to have a monopoly on Mr. Moody."
That was true. In fact, D. L. Moody himself once observed, "I believe that the moment our hearts are emptied of pride, selfishness, ambition, and everything that is contrary to God's law, the Holy Spirit will fill every corner of our hearts. But if we are full of pride, conceit, ambition, and the world, there is no room for the Spirit of God. We must be emptied before we can be filled."
Many people today miss this simple but profound truth about the Holy Spirit, as given to us in Ephesians 1. When we placed our trust in Jesus Christ, we were sealed by the Spirit of promise, and our inheritance of God's riches was guaranteed. We already have all there is of the Holy Spirit. The issue that confronts us is: Does the Spirit have all there is of us?
The Word and the Spirit
As we return to Ephesians 1, we should remind ourselves that verse 13 and 14, dealing with the work and blessings of the Holy Spirit, are actually the closing phrases of a single sentence that begins in verse 3 and doesn't stop for a breath until verse 14. This one unbroken sentence (in the original Greek language) gathers up in a single vast statement all the tremendous themes to which Paul will return again and again in his letter to the Ephesians.
This is the normal structure of Paul's apostolic letters--they usually begin with a summary and then that summary is broken down into detail, enabling us to focus keenly upon the truth presented. Paul wants us to see both the forest and the trees, the broad sweep and the minute details, of God's truth for our lives.
In the previous two chapters, we looked at the first and second aspects of God's threefold work the work--and blessings of the Father and the Son. The Father chose us and called us before the creation of the world to be part of His family. The Father made a decision about us before the foundation of the world. Then the Son accomplished the Father's decision. He took our place on the cross and liberated us from sin and death. Through Him, God's grace continues to be lavished upon us again and again. In Christ, God breaks down divisions, destroys the old, raises up the new, and brings all things into unity under the lordship of the Son.
Now we come to the work of the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 1:13-14:
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory.
Notice two areas of emphasis that are always found together in Scripture--the Word and the Spirit. Both are absolutely essential. There is no salvation without both of these instruments of God's eternal purpose. It is always a mistake to emphasize one to the exclusion of the other.
Some groups and individuals emphasize the Spirit and ignore the Word. They say, "We don't need the Word. All we need is the Spirit within. All we need is to trust our feelings--the indwelling Spirit will lead us." This is almost invariably a prescription for error and heresy as people drift away from the revealed truth of the Bible and into all sorts of confused, mystical, cultic views and practices, all in the guise of "following the Spirit within." Many a cult has begun with earnest, sincere believers who fell under the spell of a false messiah who claimed to speak for the Spirit of God, even while contradicting the clear teaching of the Word of God.
Yet, there is an equal danger in following the Word and rejecting the ministry of the Spirit. I have been in many churches that have been orthodox in their adherence to the Word, but completely devoid of the freshness and vitality of the Spirit. In such churches, worship has become mechanical and perfunctory--a ritual that enshrines the form of the Word while denying its life-changing power. Such churches are orthodox to the core, but they are also sterile, dull, and lifeless. The result of emphasizing the Word to the exclusion of the Spirit is a kind of clenched-teeth piety in which the people resolve to do their "Christian duty" while demonstrating no motivation, satisfaction, love, warmth, or joy.
In Scripture and in every faithful, dynamic fellowship of believers, you find the two together, the Word and the Spirit. The Spirit interprets the Word, and the Word becomes fresh and vital where the Spirit of God is present. Through the ministry of the Spirit, Jesus Christ steps out of the pages of the Bible and stands in our presence as a living, breathing, life-changing Man. By the light of the Spirit, we can see the Lord's face, we can touch His nail-pierced hands, we can hear His voice and sense His heartbeat. That is the job of the Spirit--to take the words of the pages of our Bible and make them come alive in our daily experience.
The Word of God identifies the Spirit and validates His voice within us. The Spirit of God would never urge us to violate the teaching of God's Word. So we can be assured that if some inner urging runs counter to God's Word, it does not come from the Holy Spirit. There are many spirits abroad today, many voices talking to us, many sources of information and ideas that bombard us daily. How do we know which of these voices and sources are true and which would lead us into error? The Word of God points to the true Holy Spirit, while detecting all false spirits. We must have together the Word and the Spirit for balance and sanity in our Christian lives.
The three essential experiences of a believer
Next, notice in verse 13 that there are three experiences Paul says every Christian should have in the course of the Christian faith: First, "you heard the word of truth;" second, you "believed" in Christ; and third, you "were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit."
Let's examine each of these experiences in closer detail.
1. The "word of truth!' Paul begins by saying, "You have heard the word of truth." The world in which Paul lived and wrote was a world like ours today--filled with all kinds of distorted ideas and godless philosophies. Then as now, there were many delusions and illusions abroad. The gospel is a return to reality, it is truth, it is the end of illusion. By hearing and receiving the Word of truth, we get back in touch with reality.
For example, the gospel describes the true condition of the human heart. It punctures our human denial, our false and self-deceptive desire to insist that there is nothing seriously wrong with the way we live, the sinful habits we tolerate, the wrongs we perpetrate. We all want to see ourselves as "good people," as being "okay." Sure, we sin and fail like everybody else, but we're really not so bad.
The gospel comes crashing into our denial, rubbing our noses in the fact that our condition is so bad, so desperate, that our sins literally nailed the Son of God to a cross! Our problem is so desperate that it is truly incurable, from a human perspective. We cannot save ourselves. Only God Himself can save us.
Today, because of what Scripture calls "the wrath of God," human evil is allowed to run its course in the world--with devastating consequences. But the good news of the gospel is that God loves us, He hasn't forgotten us, and He has entered human life to share in our sorrow and pain. God, through the Son, has personally taken the penalty for our evil upon Himself. It is a deep, dark, impenetrable mystery, far beyond our imagining and our reasoning--but even though we cannot grasp it, we can accept it and receive God's pardon, deliverance, and freedom from bondage as God's own adopted children. That is "the word of truth" that we have received, the first essential experience of a believer--the gospel of salvation.
2. Belief in Christ. The second essential experience of the Christian, says Paul, is that we believed in Christ, we placed our trust in Him. "And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation," says verse 13. "Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit."
Belief is an essential prerequisite to a relationship with Jesus Christ. Paul stresses this fact: We must not only hear the word of truth, but we must also respond to it in faith. We must believe it. And to believe it means to accept it as truth, and to act accordingly. You have never believed unless something is changed in your experience. If you say that you hold something to be true, but you go on living in the old, unbelieving way, then you haven't really believed it. You are only kidding yourself. Belief results in change, in conforming yourself to the reality of what you believe.
What's more, our belief must be focused in a Person--the Lord Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul never lets us forget this. In the first fourteen verses of Ephesians, he mentions the Lord Jesus Christ fifteen times. He is constantly bringing Him before us because God wants to drive home this great fact--that we cannot experience blessing in our lives apart from a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
I once counseled a woman who was a highly respected medical doctor. For forty years she had been a member of a denominational church, but when she came to me for counseling, she said that her life was empty and filled with anxiety and fear. She took medication to quiet her nerves, but found her emotional problems growing worse, not better. Though doctors could find no cause for it, she had a perpetual pain in her stomach. By the time she came to see me, she was on the verge of a breakdown. When she talked to her own pastor about these problems, he told her, "You're just feeling sorry for yourself."
As we talked, it became obvious to me that, despite all her years of church attendance, she had never experienced a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus. I explained to her the simple invitation of Jesus: "Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me" (Revelation 3:20). I asked, "What is your response to this invitation?"
Very quietly, without another word from me, she bowed her head and began to ask Jesus to take control of her life. She told Him quite honestly how empty her life was, and she asked Him to enter her life and be Lord of all her circumstances. The moment she finished praying, I could see the new radiance on her face. "Oh, thank you so much!" she said, "I can't tell you how much this means to me. Already things are different!"
Once she placed her trust in Christ, this woman's emotional and physical problems receded. The pain in her stomach left her immediately after she prayed. And she quit taking medications for her anxiety and depression. Her problem was not medical or emotional, but spiritual--and only a spiritual cure would work. The cure was to experience a personal relationship with Jesus Christ--not just believing about Him, as she had for many years in her church, but believing in Him, trusting in Him, and knowing Him in a personal way.
3. Sealed by the Spirit. The third essential experience of the believer is described by Paul with a rather strange phrase: "you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit." What does it mean to be sealed with the Spirit? This is undoubtedly a reference to the ancient practice of sealing letters or other official objects with sealing wax and impressing the wax with a raised seal worn on a ring, bearing an identifying image. The use of the seal always denotes two concepts: ownership and preservation.
The seal on the letter made it clear that the letter was owned by the individual who had sealed it. And the seal of the Holy Spirit makes it clear that the life that is sealed by Him belongs to God. As Paul says elsewhere in the New Testament, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20); and, "The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children" (Romans 8:16). The Spirit who seals you is God's mark of ownership upon you.
Just as the seal on a letter preserved it from tampering, the Spirit's presence speaks of God's preserving seal upon our lives. We find this concept richly described for us when Paul writes, "Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession--to the praise of his glory." As Paul puts it here, God has guaranteed our inheritance by means of the Holy Spirit.
The New International Version brings out this concept with clarity in rendering Paul's concept of the Holy Spirit as "a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance." In Greek, the word deposit is arrhabon, which means "a down payment." If you've ever bought a car, you know what arrhabon is all about. You sign a paper and pay a down payment, a deposit, and that is the arrhabon, the guarantee that there is more to come. The presence of the Spirit in your life--the joy and the peace He gives--is the guarantee that there is more yet to come from God. The Spirit is the down payment on a much greater, fuller, richer experience of God than you have ever known before. The Holy Spirit is just the beginning of the blessings you will receive in Christ.
Paul goes on to say that this deposit or down payment guarantees our inheritance "until the redemption of those who are God's possession," as the NIV puts it. In the original Greek, this phrase is literally "until the redemption of the walk-around." This sounds strange to our ears, but the first century readers of Ephesians instantly understood this phrase as a reference to the custom of buying a piece of ground and then going out and walking around it to symbolically establish your ownership rights to that ground. By walking around the property, you made it yours. It was a sign that the property was now in your name.
That is what Paul says God has done with us. It is not we who acquire God, but He who acquires us. He has made the down-payment on our lives, the Holy Spirit, and that preserves us as His possession until He returns to claim his purchased possession--your life and mine, which is now in His name.
When Paul talks of the "promised" Holy Spirit, he refers to the promise made to Abraham. Some 4000 years ago--2000 years before Paul's day--God told Abraham, "I will surely bless you. . . and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me" (Genesis 22:17-18). God was promising Abraham that all who would exercise the faith of Abraham would receive the Holy Spirit. And that promise has been fulfilled, because that is how you and I receive the Holy Spirit today--by faith. Paul makes this same point in Galatians 3:6-8 and 13-14 (emphasis added):
Consider Abraham: "He believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: "All nations will be blessed through you." . . . Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree." He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit.
You don't have to plead with God to send the Holy Spirit. You don't have to wait and hope for a second experience after salvation. It is impossible to have salvation apart from the indwelling Spirit. The promised Spirit is received simply by faith in the Lord Jesus. The minute you believe in him, you receive all you will ever have of the Holy Spirit. As you grow and mature in your faith, becoming progressively more obedient in your walk with God, the Holy Spirit gains more and more of you.
To the praise of His glory
The Spirit is God's seal upon your life. He marks you and identifies you as His own. He guarantees that he will perform every word he has promised, until the moment you stand in God's presence, overwhelmed by all that God has done for you--to the praise of His glory.
That is a crucial phrase Paul uses at the end of verse 14--"to the praise of his glory"--and it is the third time Paul uses that phrase in the passage. Each Person of the Trinity--the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit--accomplishes His work so perfectly that it always produces praise and glory. When we see the work and the blessings that each of the Persons of the Trinity has performed in our lives, we can't help but sing and glorify God for all He has done.
We have been sealed by the Holy Spirit, who was promised to Abraham. Here is where we find our identity and our purpose in life. Here is where we find the power and resources to cope with the problems that come to us each day. This is not mere theological double-talk. These are practical truths that enable us to handle the difficulties, pressures, problems, stresses, uncertainties, and disappointments of living out our lives. Knowing that we are sealed and possessed by God is the greatest, most life-changing truth of our existence.
We should awake every morning and say to ourselves, "I am a child of God. I have been forgiven of my sins. I am accepted in God's family. He has marked me out as his own. He has put his Spirit within me, releasing in me the full life of the Lord Jesus Christ. All the power that Jesus Himself relied upon is now mine through the promised Holy Spirit. I am equipped to handle whatever comes today. I can take whatever life throws at me because I have the Spirit, and all the fullness of His life."
That is our identity. That is the truth which transforms our lives.
5. Praying with Power: Ephesians 1:15-18
Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, was once asked if, in the process of researching and experimenting with his invention, he ever came to a place where he didn't have a clue what to do next. "Oh, many times," Morse replied. "Whenever I was baffled and frustrated, I went to my knees and asked God for light and understanding. He showed me the way. I believe God wanted the telegraph to be invented because He knew what it would mean to mankind. After the invention of the telegraph, I received many honors--but I feel undeserving of honors. I have made a valuable application of electricity not because of superior gifts and abilities, but because God was pleased to answer my prayers and reveal to me a few of the wonderful secrets of His universe."
It is significant that the first message ever tapped over the telegraph key were the words of Samuel Morse himself: "What hath God wrought!" He believed the telegraph was not so much his invention as it was God's answer to his prayers. The prayers of Samuel Morse unleashed an enormous power in the world--the power of electrical communication. As we approach the end of Ephesians 1, the apostle Paul tells us how we are to pray with power.
Paul prays for the saints
With Ephesians 1:15 we leave the great doctrinal passage in which the apostle Paul teaches the fundamental principles of the Christian faith. We turn now to the issue of prayer and the crucial place of prayer in the Christian experience. Paul, having finished the great passage in which he set forth the work and blessings of our threefold God, now adds these words addressed to the Ephesian Christians:
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.
Paul starts with the words: "For this reason," then he goes on to list the evidence for his confidence in the genuineness of the faith of the Ephesian Christians. The phrase, "For this reason," looks back upon the great passage that we previously examined, Ephesians 1:3-14, in which the apostle outlined the fundamental truths of our faith--the fact that we were called by the Father, that we are destined to be His children, that redemption and forgiveness are available to us in the Son, that our eyes have been opened to the eternal plan of God, that we have been sealed by the Spirit, and that the Spirit has guaranteed our inheritance in Christ. It is for this reason, Paul says, that he prays for the saints at Ephesus and others who read this letter. It is because they need to understand these truths.
Paul is convinced that they are genuine Christians because of two things that have come to his attention--their faith and their love. The apostle has evidently heard in Rome of the faith of these Christians, many of whom he had never met. He has heard that they have confessed Christ and turned from their pagan idols. But the most convincing evidence of their faith was their love. Their genuine caring for each other proved that Jesus was actively at work in their lives.
That is crucial: If your faith has not made you a more loving person, it is not genuine faith. It is mere intellectual assent to an orthodoxy, which means nothing. That is the point the apostle James makes in his letter, where he says that authentic faith is revealed by a concern for the hungry, the homeless, the needy, and the oppressed. He said, in effect, "Show me your love, and I'll see your faith; but don't talk to me about faith unless love is present" (see James 2:18).
Paul notes that their love is demonstrated toward all the saints, not just toward some of them. The truth is that some saints are easy to love--and some are not so easy. True faith in Christ is demonstrated by a love for all the saints, not just the most beautiful or the most powerful or the most good-natured. The church is a family of faith. If we want harmony in our family, we must learn to love all our brothers and sisters. That is what the Ephesian Christians have demonstrated to Paul.
Assured of the genuineness of the believers in Ephesus, Paul tells them, "I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better." Notice, first, the two unusual names for God that Paul employs: "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father." Why does Paul say that? It is interesting that Paul makes no mention here of the fact that the Son is truly the equal of the Father-God in human form. He is not praying directly to Christ; he is praying to the God of the Lord Jesus.
The reason Paul addresses his prayers in this way is that God the Father is the One to whom the Lord Jesus prayed. He is the One upon whom Jesus depended for the enlightenment of His own disciples. Jesus prayed for His disciples--sometimes spending whole nights in prayer on the mountainside--that the truth might grip their hearts, and that the truth would change their hearts. Paul wanted the Ephesian Christians to understand that the same God to whom Jesus prayed, and upon whom He depended, is the God to whom they were to pray, and upon whom they were to depend.
Paul's next name for God, "the glorious Father," is a beautiful name. It speaks of the One who originates and radiates glory. I recall attending a glorious wedding, followed by a glorious reception. The setting was resplendent, the food was lavish, the decorations were festive, the bride was beautiful, and the people were joyful. I found myself talking to a man in the comer, and discovered that he was the father of the bride. He was the one who would pay all the bills for the entire glorious occasion. He was, on that day, "the father of glory."
That is very much the idea Paul conveys when he calls God "the glorious Father," or as some translations render it, "the Father of glory." He is the source of all glory and beauty and delight in the universe. He is the one who has paid all the bills, the one who makes all this glory possible.
What Paul prays for
Paul turns now and prays for these Christians. Notice what he prays for in verse 17: "I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better." Why does Paul say that? Aren't these Christians he is speaking to? Haven't they already received the Holy Spirit? Yes. Paul has already acknowledged that. He has said that they were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. So he is not praying that they will be given the Holy Spirit. He is praying for a special ministry of the Holy Spirit.
In the book of Isaiah, the prophet speaks of the seven spirits of God--the spirit of wisdom, the spirit of understanding, the spirit of counsel, the spirit of knowledge, and so forth. He doesn't mean that there are seven Holy Spirits, but that the one Holy Spirit has a seven-fold ministry of illuminating and enlightening the heart. That is what Paul is praying for here.
Paul doesn't take it for granted this ministry of wisdom and revelation will automatically take place--he goes to God and asks for it on behalf of his Ephesian brothers and sisters. If you want the Word of God to come alive in your life, you must ask for illumination. That is what this passage teaches us. And if you want it to come alive in the life of another, you must intercede in prayer for that person, asking that your friend be granted the Spirit's ministry of wisdom and revelation. As the apostle James tells us in James 4:2, all too often, the reason we fail to receive is that we fail to ask.
If the Bible seems dull and boring to you, perhaps it is because you have never asked God for a touch of the Spirit's wisdom and revelation. You hear the words, but the message falls flat because you have not asked God to open your heart to His message for your life.
We must also be aware that there is a spiritual war going on around us. Later in Ephesians, we will examine the issue of spiritual warfare, and we will see that we have a cunning enemy who seeks to rob us of the reality of God's Word for our lives. So some of the dullness or flatness we feel when we open God's Word may be due to the blinding, darkening work of the powers of darkness which want to wall us off from God's truth. To counteract the enemy's attacks, we must bathe ourselves in prayer, asking God for the wisdom and revelation that only the Spirit of God can provide.
Do you pray when you read your Bible? Do you open the pages and say, "Lord, show me Yourself; make Yourself real to me in these pages"? Remember, the Bible is not just a history book about the past or a prophecy book about the future. It isn't just a self-help book of ethical guidelines and life principles. It is, first and foremost, the revelation of the living God. He gave us His Word in order that we might see Him, know Him, feel His love, discover His wisdom, draw upon His strength, and rely upon His power. The purpose of the Bible is to introduce you in a personal way to the God of the universe, and His Son, Jesus Christ. So, if your Bible study time is dull and dreary, take that as a hint and pray that it would come alive, so that you may truly know Jesus Christ.
The eyes of your heart
Now let's look at Paul's final statement in his introduction to prayer, in verse 18: "I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints." That's an odd expression, isn't it? "The eyes of your heart." What does Paul mean?
We know that the eyes are expressive. You can sometimes look at a face that seems dull and impassive--a "poker" face--but the eyes usually give an indication of what is going on inside. I have often visited people in the hospital whose faces and bodies have wasted away, but their eyes are full of life and vitality. So the eyes are extremely expressive, and the eyes of the heart express the feelings of the heart.
The eyes are also the instruments of perception, enabling us to see. The eyes of the heart, then, are also the instruments of the heart's perception. If you listen to truth, your heart is receiving and perceiving. You are absorbing reality at the innermost level of your being. The heart, which the Bible describes as the seat of human emotion, is an instrument of perceiving and understanding deep truth and deep reality.
Truth comes first to the mind, the seat of the intellect--but for truth to truly take hold of us, it must penetrate all the way to the heart, the seat of our emotions and motivations. The will is never properly energized and motivated until the heart has been moved as well.
In Luke 24 two disciples are walking on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion of Christ. They don't know that the Lord has already risen. Suddenly He appears to them, but they are so defeated and discouraged over the crucifixion that they don't recognize Him. He walks along with them as a stranger, unfolding to them the passages of Old Testament Scripture which promise the coming of the Messiah, including his sufferings and his resurrection. Suddenly they recognize Him--and he vanishes from their sight. Remember what the disciples said to each other? Luke 24:32 records, "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?"
That "holy heartburn" represents the eyes of the heart being opened. Paul desires that our hearts--yours and mine--would bum within us in the same way. When the heart bums with truth, when God's truth becomes so vivid and real to you that your heart is captivated by it and begins to bum within you, then you know with certainty that God is real, that the hope of your calling is genuine, that the power of His presence is coursing through your life and the riches of His ministry have been poured out upon your being.
I remember one couple at Peninsula Bible Church who provide a vivid illustration of the powerof prayer to ignite a cold heart and make it burn for God. The husband had become a Christian and had married a young woman who grew up in PBC. At first this young man was on fire for God, but gradually his excitement and passion for God began to wane. He turned cold, lost his interest in the Scriptures, and quit coming to church. He avoided other Christians.
His wife was very alarmed over the decline in her husband's spiritual condition. She could have nagged him and begged him to come back to church, but she knew that it would probably have the opposite effect, driving him further away. So she asked a friend to pray with her for her husband every day. They met daily for a month, praying faithfully, and at first nothing happened. But they remembered that Jesus said in Luke 18:1 that we should pray persistently and not give up. So they kept praying.
In time, the wife noticed a gradual change in her husband's attitude. One day, she was astonished to come home and find him reading the Bible. She didn't say anything to him about it, and he didn't say anything to her--but her heart sang when she saw it. One Sunday, he said to her, "Honey, I'd like to go to church with you." She rejoiced inwardly, but avoided making a big deal over it. Finally he said to her, "You know, dear, I've really been way out of it! Somehow or other I lost all my interest in the Lord. But God has met me and brought me back." And he came alive again--without his wife saying a single word to him about the Lord. What a wonderful testimony to the power of prayer to open the eyes of the heart!
So let's be in prayer as we continue our study in Ephesians. Let's pray that God would give us the Spirit of wisdom and revelation as we study His Word, and that He would open the eyes of our hearts to the burning truth He has for our lives.
6. Hope, Riches, and Power: Ephesians 1:18-23
The issue in the closing verses of Ephesians 1 is motivation. The apostle Paul understood the Christians in the area of Ephesus. A veteran warrior of the cross, Paul had been a Christian for many years by the time he wrote this letter. He was well aware of the many moods and experiences a Christian is subject to. He knew the lukewarmness that often sets in--the lethargic, apathetic attitudes that can sometimes arise after a warm and hopeful beginning. He knew of the danger of losing one's motivation in the midst of the Christian struggle.
Perhaps you know that danger yourself. No Christian escapes it in his lifetime. At times, our passion for Christ cools and our spirits grow apathetic. The apostle understood that. So he turned to prayer, and his prayer reflects a deep understanding of the needs of those who would hear this letter. He prays in verses 18 and 19 (emphasis added):
. . . that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.
Hope, riches, and power. Notice how specific Paul's prayer is. He doesn't simply say, "Lord, bless the Ephesians this morning." We all know what it is to drop blanket prayers on people and expect that to take care of the situation. But Paul knows these people better than that. He knows that there is a danger that they could lose their vision, they could sink into indifference, they could lose sight of their hope. Yes, they have sound doctrine, but there is a danger that they could fall short of the deep, vibrant experience of knowing Christ. So Paul prays that God will enlighten their hearts so that they may know the hope of God's calling, the riches of their inheritance, and the power of God.
Paul's prayer for hope
The word hope is part of the great triad found in the Scriptures: "faith, hope and love," the essentials of a well-rounded Christian experience. Hope always concerns the future. The Ephesians were in danger of losing their hope for the future. Many of us know that feeling. We all await the return of the Lord, but we don't really get very excited about it.
The hope of the believer is described for us in Romans 8:18: "I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." That is the hope--a coming glory, a glory toward which we are moving day by day. Paul goes on to say, Romans 8:19-21: "The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."
That phrase, "the bondage to decay," is an accurate description of what scientists call the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy, the scientific principle which states that everything in the universe is running down. Science and Scripture agree that the universe was once wound up, but that it is now decaying. When Paul talks about "the bondage to decay," he includes not only the natural world, with its constant decay, but the human body as well.
In Romans 8:22-25, he says: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently."
That was the hope these believers entertained in their minds. They knew it academically. They knew a day was coming when their bodies would be redeemed and transformed--not an uncertain dream or a faint possibility, but a guaranteed certainty. You may say (as many Ephesians Christians no doubt said), "A future hope is fine--but how does it help me now?" The answer is that our future hope is being worked out in the here and now. Our hope will not only be realized in the resurrection at the end of the age. Our hope is being realized right now, as we are gradually, almost imperceptibly being transformed into new creations in Christ.
Here is how the apostle Paul explains it in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18: "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
It is important too as we read these words of Paul that a little later in 2 Corinthians he lists some of what he calls "our light and momentary troubles" that he himself had endured: beaten with rods three times; thirty-nine lashes from a whip five times; shipwrecked three times; a night and a day adrift at sea; stoned and left for dead; danger on sea and land; danger from false brethren; sleeplessness; hunger and thirst; and more. All this he gathers up in the phrase "our light and momentary troubles." All of these things, he says, work in our favor, preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
That flat tire you had yesterday which upset you so is working for you, preparing you to handle pressure, teaching you about patience, building Christlike character. All those problems you face are giving you the opportunity to exercise the power of Christ that is available to you. The lost wallet, the missed appointment, the argument with your spouse, the arthritis in your shoulder, the diagnosis you just received, the business failure you just suffered, the heart-breaking loss of a loved one--all of these are working together for your good and for your growth. God didn't cause this pain in your life, but He knows how to bring His good out of it just the same.
If you learn to look at life that way, you will never lose the hope of your calling in Christ.
Paul's prayer for God's riches
Paul was concerned for the Ephesians' sense of impoverishment, so he reminded them of the riches that were theirs in Christ. He knew the dangers of self-limited thinking, and he wanted to broaden their vistas from one horizon to the other. So he prayed "that you may know. . the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints." Notice how he puts that. He is not asking that they understand that God is their inheritance. It is true that God is our resource and our strength--but Paul is taking a different viewpoint, God's viewpoint. He is emphasizing the fact that we are God's inheritance, His property. He has an inheritance in us. It is His delight to use us.
If we lose sight of this truth, then we will shrink in fear from allowing God to use us. We will narrow our experience to a single well-worn rut. The Christian life, for us, will become nothing more than a gray succession of drab, dreary days. We need to understand and welcome the adventure that awaits us when we make ourselves available to God.
We need to move out, boldly take the plunge, and even take some risks for His sake! As we begin to dare great things for Christ, we will discover that life brings enrichment--the riches and rewards of adventure, excitement, and varied, delightful experiences. Once, while I was at a conference at a beautiful estate on the Columbia River, I took a walk down a well-worn trail. As I walked, I noticed a little trail that wandered off to the side. It was obviously not as well traveled as the main path. Intrigued, I veered off and followed the trail-less-traveled to see where it might lead. It soon sloped steeply downward, and I worried that it might be difficult climbing back up. But before long the little path opened upon a lush clearing, affording a magnificent view of the river gorge, the cliffs, the woods arrayed in autumn colors, and the majestic mountains beyond. I was so glad I had taken the less-traveled path!
That's the way life is. There are riches and rewards for those who would step out of the well-worn ruts and strike out in bold directions. There are risks, it's true but the rewards of boldly following Jesus more than outweigh the risks.
Paul's prayer for God's power
Finally, Paul makes a request on behalf of his Ephesian brothers and sisters, "that you may know. . . his incomparably great power for us who believe." He knew that the Ephesians, like all Christians in every place at every time, were sometimes subject to immobilizing fear and insecurity. There was fear of a hostile society, fear of persecution, fear of ridicule, fear of failure. They were pressured without by an evil world and pressured within by feelings of inadequacy and impotence.
The answer to fear is power. The moment you feel empowered, fear vanishes. So Paul prayed that the Christians would see the limitless power that was theirs through Christ. The power is available to us all--but we often fail to see it, believe it, and act on it. When we feel powerless, we are quick to give up. The struggle overwhelms us and we just throw in the towel. It is because we have lost sight of the One who gives all power, and whose power was demonstrated at the resurrection, when God raised Jesus from the dead. Remember, resurrection power works best in a cemetery!
If everything is going well, if your boat is shipshape, your skies are blue, and the breeze is at your back, you have no need of a lifesaver. If everything's coming up roses, who needs a delivery from the florist? When you possess the riches of Donald Trump, Bill Gates, and David Rockefeller combined, why would you need a winning lottery ticket? It's when everything is lost that you need to be saved. It's when you face death, darkness, and despair that youneed resurrection power.
Praise be to God, resurrection power is still with us today. God is alive, and He continues to work his miracles of transformation, quietly and without fanfare, bringing life out of the gloom and darkness of death.
The power that God makes available to you and me is nothing less than the supreme power in the universe, as we read in Ephesians 1:19-20:
That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
The power of God is far above any other force, stronger than anything that can be launched against you. So believe Paul's words! This is what the apostle is praying for that you would truly grasp this thought and understand the true power that He offers you.
A young man once came to me in tearful emotional agony. He told me that he had been struggling with terrible feelings of lust. The feelings and temptations grew so strong that he often fell back into habits that were wrong and destructive to him and his loved ones. He feared that he would never be able to overcome those temptations