Sunday Praise & Worship 10:00
Christian Education - 10:00 - Casual Dress - Loving Childcare
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Ephesians 3:14-19
(January 18, 2004) Scripture quotation taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright© 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. Sermon Notes Key Verse: Ephesians 3:17 “And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love.” When I was in high school, I was applying for a scholarship at the University of North Carolina that involved a series of interviews with professors and business leaders. As my guidance counselor prepared me with a mock interview with members of my high school faculty, I will never forget the advice she repeated to me often: “Just be yourself. And as often as she told me to be myself, a voice deep inside my head haunted me with a question: “Which self?” I ran in many circles in high school. I sang in the ensemble; wrestled and played football; acted on stage and was active in my youth group at church. But I also abused alcohol and liked to “let my hair down” with a far more dangerous crowd of “friends”. I applied to an engineering school as well as a liberal arts school. When the scholarship board asked if I knew what I wanted to be, I had no idea. Though I’m grateful to have found better focus in my adult years, I have never been completely free from questions of identity and purpose, as I struggle with tempting pulls in every direction for my time and energy. Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus addresses this issue of every human being’s identity in God, our Creator and Savior. From his prison cell, the self-proclaimed “jailbird preacher” focuses on three primary boundary (or defining) issues. They involve saying a “No” followed by repeating “Yes” twice to who God calls and saves us to be. Paul first addresses the boundaryless existence in which Christ’s love and mercy finds us. Here we must say “No”. Read his diagnosis of the human condition in Ephesians 2:1-3: It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. (The Message translation) When we trust Christ to free us from this blindness, we say “Yes” to Christ’s ability to break down the false boundaries that separate us from each another. As Paul puts it in Ephesians 2:19: This kingdom of faith is now your home country. You're no longer strangers or outsiders. You belong here, with as much right to the name Christian as anyone. God is building a home. He's using us all—irrespective of how we got here—in what he is building. (The Message translation) Here in this “home country”, Paul invites you and all of God’s children to say “Yes” to the ultimate boundary promise in Ephesians 1:11: It's in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living…. Questions for Reflection
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