A few weeks ago my housemate built me a bed from scratch. It’s amazing – a bed 5 ft off the ground, with sliding shirt hangers underneath, and all from a few blocks of wood and some hardboard from a skip. I was seriously chuffed and the week after he made it I couldn’t stop banging on about it.

So there you go – it’s not that I’m not a praising kind of person. It might not be Tottenham that does it for me, but give me a new bed or three points to the Hammers and I’ll be waxing lyrical. But the challenge of Sunday’s sermon on Ephesians 1.1-10 was whether or not we ‘bless God’. Hmm. Do I? I’d even estimate 90% of the time I sing praise songs in church I’m not actually mindfully thankful.

I was chatting the other night with a friend and we quickly reached the conclusion we’re both really unthankful to God when it comes to day-to-day life. So today I’ve been trying to think about my day with the reality-specs on, knowing that God has given me every good thing in it and therefore being thankful to God for the great time with a friend, the pleasure of the Mars Bar milkshake, a productive morning at work. The ‘what are you thankful to God for?’ question is one we’ll definitely start asking each other. But Sachy showed us Ephesians 1 is about more than just that; Paul grounds his praises to God with the reasoning that he ‘has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing’. And then it’s bam-bam-bam.

On Monday morning I thought about some of the particular blessings Paul says God has lavished upon us… all of them are blessings – they’re things that God has given to us because we are included in Jesus, because we’re Christians. We talk about ‘not deserving them’, but I realized how easily I pass over the reality of that in my emotions. The whole shebang of Paul’s super-sentence (1v3-14) is the heart and soul of being a Christian. And it’s all stuff that I don’t and can’t have any natural claim on – being chosen, being made God’s child, forgiveness of sin… it’s all complete unmerited gift. And so I found the refrain in v6 and v14 a really great way to anchor my prayers and prompt me to being glad – ‘to the praise of his glorious grace’. To complement that I’ve found a few songs all about praising God to ‘sing’ along to on the old mp3 player as I walk to work, keeping in mind God’s gracious inclusion of me in his plan.

This has started to help me bridge the gap between knowing logically it’s a good thing to be ‘in Christ’, or articulating the goodness of the gospel when I’m chatting to someone who’s not a believer, and then actually knowing these blessings and realizing the goodness of being included in this plan so that I’m actively praising God. Its gonna take lots of adjusting my eyes to the Ephesians 1 planetarium and its gonna take questions from my Christian mates, but I’m praying that my thankfulness for all that I have in Jesus will remain long after the novelty of a new bed has faded.

The original post from In the Shadow of the Gherkin can be found here.

Reading Ephesians 5 with Steve on Wednesday. I often find myself cruising through these back-end sections of Paul’s epistles as if they’re some after thought sticky-taped on. No doubt I’m governed by some misguided approach where I tell myself I’m in need for some ‘real theology’ not just some ‘do this and don’t do that’.

Of course that’s all rubbish – everything Paul says is completely rooted in what God has done for his people. We’re called to be ‘imitators of God as beloved children’ (5v1). Paul’s not whacking Christians over the head with a load of ‘to-do’ lists, rather he’s getting right into the heart of the relationship between Christian theology and Christian living.

The call to imitate God is not some wishful thinking on Paul’s behalf, but rather its based on the wonderful reality that we are now God’s beloved children, and children imitate their parents. This pattern pops up again and again in the back end of Ephesians – reason for action is everything, and for Paul the reason is knowing who we are. In v3 our identity as ‘saints’ means certain stuff isn’t even to be named among us. In v4 it isn’t that filthiness and crude chat is bad that should stop us from doing it, but that it’s ‘out of place’. Again, in v7-8, ‘do not associate with them; for one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light…’.

Christian ethics, that is how you live as a believer in Jesus, is always worked out and motivated by taking note of who you are. It’s what fits. Of course if there’s no knowledge, if there’s no awareness of who we are, then we’re either gonna forget and worse head elsewhere for our sense of identity, or we’re gonna drift into a stuffy moralism that has lost sight of reasons and truth and thinks of Christianity as actions alone.

That’s why simply remembering my identity, as a child of God, a joint of Christ’s body, a member of the household of God, is such a precious and cruical thing to do each day. It rams home the importance of a book like Ephesians in stopping us in our tracks and giving us a reality check. This is reality.

Was a joy to recieve and be challenged as Justin Mote opened Ephesians 4.17 – 5.20 at CU Central on Saturday night. We need to change clothes! It was helpful to see the thread of Paul’s letter stand out as we engaged with this meaty practical passage: All things are going to be united under Christ (ch. 1), including the new one man who makes up the church (ch. 2), which is to declare wisdom of God to the heavenly places (ch. 3), and so to do this the church needs to be united!

We looked at conduct that leads to a united church, and light that emanates from a pure church.

The gospel that was preached to the Ephesians made clear the need for change (4.20), for a fundamental turnaround, and so evangelism must call for a new self. Not like the rent-a-car contract with its miniscule small print!

Conversation afterwards hit on 5.6-10 – and the command to not associate with those who decieve with empty words, for now we are of the light, so need to live like it. And thus, we expose unfruitful works of darkness. I realised that over the last year the significance I place on the local church has grown considerably. When the question of joining a church that you knew dealt in empty words, in the hope you could help it, came up, my natural response was ‘that’s stupidity!’ Surely that would be spiritual suicide? But maybe I could help change it? But if the power and life of the church comes from the preached word, then being part of a lifeless, powerless church would be no spiritual gain, in fact it would have negative effect, such is the importance of the preached word in one’s own life.

Praise God that he transforms us. Praise God that our lives in the light are invitations for others to wake-up.
Clothe up in the gospel dress to see unity; avoid scandal to be a light emanating CU!