The 20th century Welsh minister Martin Lloyd-Jones said that there was ‘nothing more sublime in the whole of Scripture’ than Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. When it comes to showcasing the sheer scale of Jesus Christ’s cosmos-shaping work, then I’d have to agree.
Ephesians is a great book to get to know, especially because at just six chapters, it’s not too difficult to feel like you’re getting your head around it’s structure. And there’s a good argument for the claim that Paul didn’t just send this letter to the church in Ephesus, but that he used it as a sort of discipleship manual for churches across the region. I love to read through it one-to-one with people, and it was the first book of the Bible that I taught through after we planted Grace Church.
Recently I had the opportunity to write a series of twenty-five daily devotions going through the whole of Ephesians, which was a really rich experience. When preaching I’ve typically broken the book up into ten or so sections, so splitting into twenty-five passages felt like we were going much deeper.
If you’d like to join me, you can pick these devotions up in the October-December 2020 edition of Explore, a set of quarterly dated Bible-reading notes which aim to “help you read, understand and apply the extraordinary truths of God’s word, every single day.”
Filled with Christ
One of the surprising blessings was reflecting on the repeated language of fullness throughout Ephesians, something I’d not really made much of before. This is really fascinating to explore when you then read Paul encouraging Christians to be ‘filled with the Spirit’. This is often read as if we’re a jug and the Spirit is the liquid being poured into the jug. But perhaps it’s better phrased as to indicate that the Spirit is not the liquid, but the one doing the pouring. The Spirit loves to fill our lives with Christ – as part of God’s plans to fill the universe with Christ.
In slightly more unchartered territory, you can also journey with me through the Old Testament book of Nahum over five days as part of the same Explore.
In fact, not only do you get thirty Bible devotionals on Ephesians and Nahum, you also get seventy-two others (i.e. enough to last you three months) on Romans 1-6, Habakkuk, Ruth, and Christmas. All for just £4.24 – bargain!
You can pick up a copy here. Or download the app and pay through that.
More on Explore
If you’ve not come across Explore before, it’s well worth checking out. Spending a little bit of time reading and praying through the Bible each day is a brilliant rhythm to get into – even if it’s just five minutes.
There are lots of ‘daily Bible reading notes’ out there, but one of the things I love about Explore is that it aims to push you into the Bible, rather than just skimming along the surface. Anyway, that’s what I’ve valued about Explore in the past – I hope this doesn’t tarnish that reputation!
You can hear a bit more about the vision behind Explore from Carl Laferton, one of the Senior Editors, here:
Called the ‘Spotify of Bible listening’, the Dwell app is a whole new approach to audio Bibles. For most of Christian history, the main way to engage with Scripture has been through Bible listening, not Bible reading.
Whilst audio Bibles have been around for decades, often their listening experience is hard to customise, limits Bible exploration, and lacks variety in the voices provided.
Enter Dwell. Founders Jonathan and Joshua Bailey wanted to create a ‘beautiful, easy-to-use, Scripture listening app’. The digital format provides all sort of creative functionality: navigating to a specific chapter or verse is simple; a multitude of curated listening ‘plans’ provide focused listening (everything from Bible in a Year, to thematic, to the thoughtful ‘I’m feeling…’ options). We actually initially downloaded it to listen to its ‘Sleep Playlists’ – good to have the last thing you hear at night being the promises of God with relaxing backing music!
ESV, NIV, NRSV, KJV and Message are currently available (and the NIV is using the NIV’s official David Suchet recording). Users can also choose to repeat a portion of Scripture with reflection time in between, making it perfect for memorisation.
An enhanced listening experience
Dwell offers eight voices (currently seven male, with two more female in development), mixing accents and nationalities. Users say the voices feel ‘more natural and relatable’ than many audio Bibles. Another unique element is the option of original, background music (a choice of five instruments), designed specifically to draw readers into the text. I wondered if this would feel cheesy, but actually I agree with users who say this enhances engagement.
Notably Dwell does a church package rate, unlocking the app for a whole congregation. The option of church-specific reading plans is also in the works.
Matt Chandler calls Dwell one of his favourite tools to ‘soak in the word of God’. Perhaps we have over-emphasised Bible reading, and underplayed Bible listening. Dwell changes that and has great ministry potential. The free trial period means I don’t know why you wouldn’t give it a try.
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An edited version of this article was first published here in the September Issue of Evangelicals Now and is shared here with permission. EN is a monthly newspaper published in print and online, offering a biblical perspective on current issues and insight on what’s happening with God’s people worldwide. Online subscription is just £10 p/a with print & online combined for just £18. Order a free sample or subscribe here.
How we ‘do life’ seems to be what counts. Are we failing at life, or winning at life? No doubt our heightened awareness of everyone else’s lives – or at least the curated version on our social media feeds – is a significant factor. Coupled with this hyper-aware-hyper-connectedness, most of us find ourselves incessantly busy and overwhelmed, with an unsurprising desperation to find a technique or method to control our chaos.
But it seems this isn’t just a trend amongst non-Christians. My sense is there has been a recent increase in evangelical Christian literature with a decidedly practical focus. I’m going to consider four recent contributions, reflecting briefly on their insights as we seek to engage with a generation hungry for method in the madness.
Converted Lives
Christian lawyer Justin Whitmel Earley begins The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction (2019) with a powerful story of his own conversion (my extended review is here). Yet this isn’t a conversion to Christianity, but rather about when his body finally became ‘converted’ to the anxiety and busyness that had become his default setting. Though a Christian, functionally he worshipped the idols of his career and lifestyle: ‘I had said one thing: that God loves me no matter what I do – but my habits said another: that I better keep striving in order to stay loved.’ This subsequent ‘crash’ led him to consider how he might restructure his life – and what followed was ‘the common rule’, a series of eight habits that make up a twenty-first century ‘rule of life’.
Earley’s argument has two particularly persuasive steps: firstly, humans are creatures of habit. We all have habits, even if most of these haven’t been questioned or acknowledged. Consider what you do when you first wake-up, or when you get home from work, or how you spend your weekends. These routines, rhythms and norms are all habits.
But secondly, these habits shape us – and much more than we know. Here Earley is indebted to the work of James K. A. Smith, who frames such habits as ‘cultural liturgies’, silently schooling us in how to live and make sense of the world. Whether or not we’d be predisposed to the ancient religious notion of a ‘rule of life’, Earley’s point is that each of us already has one. The key question is whether we’re awake to the ways in which these life patterns are forming us?
Signposts to Another World
The ‘rule of life’ that Earley advocates is effectively what a previous generation would have labelled as ‘spiritual disciplines’, also the subject of Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World(2017), written by Mike Cosper. Of course, some may consider it a strange incongruity to find ‘wonder’ and spiritual disciplines in the same breath. As theologian Michael Horton observes, historically amongst evangelicals the language of disciplines has often been ‘surrounded by an air of legalism’. But if anything the pendulum has now swung the other way, with many practices, such as family devotions, private prayer, solitude and sabbath, all ‘falling off the radar’.
That may be more to our detriment now than ever before, according to Cosper. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Taylor, he argues that we live in a disenchanted world that ‘conditions us for doubt’. As such, we miss spiritual disciplines and their value as ‘rhythms, signposts and practices that orient us to another world’. Such practices can disturb our culture’s default setting and help us to see beyond its shallow horizons.
Cosper’s primary concern is the faithfulness of Christians, but there is a missional edge to this too. A tangible or ‘thick’ spirituality, where Christ’s followers evidently live with a deep sense of God’s involvement in their lives, is a means of embodying the gospel and bringing us up against Newbegin’s famous mantra: ‘the church is the plausibility structure of the gospel’. On the contrary, if our daily lives are no different to our secular neighbours’, bar a few hours on a Sunday and midweek, then surely we short-change a world still ‘haunted by transcendence’?
Union and Communion
Undoubtedly all this talk of ‘rules’ and ‘disciplines’ could seem burdensome, if not framed by the sovereign grace of the gospel. Tim Chester is one of the UK’s most prolific evangelical authors of this generation, and yet it’s one of his most recent books, Enjoying God (2018) that is being hailed as his most significant. In it he seeks to help Christians have a strong sense of living in relationship with God in the everyday stuff of life. Evangelicals often speak of being in a ‘right relationship with God’, but we sometimes might wonder how that’s meant to cash out day-to-day.
In responding to this tension, Chester takes readers back to the seventeenth-century. He draws on the great divine John Owen, who distinguished between our union with God through Christ and our communion with God. The former is something we’ve been ‘given and cannot ruin’, whereas the latter is the two-way relationship into which we’ve been saved. Chester’s point is that we can emphasise the former to the extent that we never expect much of the latter. And yet, ‘what we do really does make a difference to our experience of God’.
And so unsurprisingly, Enjoying God is theologically rich but unashamedly practical. Whereas the standard practice in many Christian books (and sermons!) has been to end a chapter with ‘discussion questions’, Chester instead uses practical ‘action points’. It may seem a small difference, but after trialling it in his hugely popular You Can Change, Chester believes it’s an important emphasis: ‘what I want to show people is that the triune God is intimately at work in our lives in many different ways all the time.’
Habits flowing from Means
Finally, Desiring God’s David Mathis wrote Habits of Grace back in 2016. The title is his way of describing ‘the countless practical rhythms of life we can develop… for accessing the timeless “means of grace” that God has given’.
Mathis’ brilliance lies in his simplicity, highlighting the three ‘means of grace’ (Bible, prayer, fellowship), but giving a wide-angle view of how we can creatively cultivate all sorts of personal rhythms and patterns that position ourselves to keep on receiving through those means. We can’t make the water flow, but ‘we can open a tap’; God’s sovereign grace is not dependent upon us, but God has given us ‘pipes to open expectantly’.
In using the language of ‘means of grace’ over ‘spiritual disciplines’, Mathis is seeking to place the emphasis firmly on God’s role as supplier and provider, rather than on our initiative and effort. Along the way Mathis also sensitively notes the danger of feeling we need to ‘wear Saul’s armour’, i.e. the tendency to compare ‘our’ practices with those of others. This brings us full circle to Earley’s ‘Common Rule’ and the pastoral tension of helping people imagine what their lives could look like, without binding them to a specific form of practices.
A Gospel Net to Catch Our Days
The American writer Annie Dillard wrote that ‘how we spend our days is how we spend our lives’. To put it in more familiar terms, ‘we become what we worship’. I’m grateful for the calling of these four Christian authors to consider the formational influences at work in our lives and the degree to which we live with intentionality.
Personally, I’ve been led to consider how my daily rhythms might include ‘gospel hooks’ that snag at my life and re-orientate me to Jesus and his grace. Conformity to a set of practices can never be the sum of Christian maturity, but I am convinced that as we push the gospel into the ‘nooks and crannies’ of our lives, God loves to grow our imaginative vision for Christlikeness. Living a life worthy of the gospel can only be done by living ordinary days that are worthy of the gospel. In a similar vein to Titus, I pray it also stirs those whose lives are intwined with our own to ponder the goodness of this ‘good life’.
This certainly isn’t a process that happens on auto-pilot, a twenty-first century ex opere operato, but it’s also more than simply cognitively telling myself truths. Ultimately, rather than pitting the mind and behaviour against each other, it’s my heart that I want to keep warm in the sunshine of the gospel, all day long, world without end.
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This article first appeared in the Spring 2020 edition of Commentary, the twice-yearly magazine of Oak Hill College, which explores a wide range of cultural, ethical and theological issues in the light of biblical teaching. The magazine can be viewed online or downloaded here.
Hello, my name is Robin. Welcome to That Happy Certainty, where I write and collate on Christianity, culture, and ministry. I’m based in Barrow-in-Furness in South Cumbria, England, where I serve a church family called St Paul’s Barrow, recently merged together from two existing churches, St Paul’s Church and Grace Church Barrow.
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Filled with Christ
Christian lawyer Justin Whitmel Earley begins The Common Rule: Habits of Purpose for an Age of Distraction (2019) with a powerful story of his own conversion (my extended review is 
The ‘rule of life’ that Earley advocates is effectively what a previous generation would have labelled as ‘spiritual disciplines’, also the subject of 
Undoubtedly all this talk of ‘rules’ and ‘disciplines’ could seem burdensome, if not framed by the sovereign grace of the gospel. Tim Chester is one of the UK’s most prolific evangelical authors of this generation, and yet it’s one of his most recent books, Enjoying God (2018) that is being hailed as his most significant. In it he seeks to help Christians have a strong sense of living in relationship with God in the everyday stuff of life. Evangelicals often speak of being in a ‘right relationship with God’, but we sometimes might wonder how that’s meant to cash out day-to-day.
Finally, Desiring God’s David Mathis wrote Habits of Grace back in 2016. The title is his way of describing ‘the countless practical rhythms of life we can develop… for accessing the timeless “means of grace” that God has given’.
Hello, my name is Robin. Welcome to That Happy Certainty, where I write and collate on Christianity, culture, and ministry. I’m based in Barrow-in-Furness in South Cumbria, England, where I serve a church family called 
