Ephesians 4:1-6. Paul spent the first three chapters of this letter encouraging the gentile (non-Jewish) believers in the church in Ephesus that God was using his enormous power to do a new thing, a mystery, he called it. But it was a mystery no more, God was using his power to build a forever family for himself. This family would include not only Jews, who had had hints about the plan in the rules and other writings God had given them (the Old Testament) but non-Jews too. They would all be equal in God’s new and forever family, his kingdom. He also wanted to be sure that the fact that he was imprisoned and awaiting a trial was not discouraging to them. He told them it was a prisoner because he was going everywhere telling people how to have a relationship with God through Jesus. Jesus was the solution to each persons broken relationship with God (see “A Tale of Two Trees”) and if telling people about Jesus made trouble in his life it was worth it, he was willing to trade and easy life here and now in order to help people everywhere hear about Jesus. He began the letter with a prayer honoring God and he ended chapter three with a similar prayer. Specifically he was praising or honoring God because God’s massive, indescribable, immense, huge power was working in all of the believers to do more that we can even imagine. He also asked in that ending prayer that God would help all of his readers be strong in the poser of the Holy Spirit living in them (see “Three or One?”, that their faith would help Jesus be a part in their lives, and that love would be the foundation of their God honoring lives.

In today’s reading Paul starts a new section where he wants to tell them how to live for God; how to be a part of this new family of God. He calls this new family of God the church (the word means gathered or assembled ones). He also compares the church to a body, a building and a temple. Each believer in Jesus is a part of the “building” that God is putting together. Each one has a part in the building and each one is being carefully fit together with all the others. In Ephesians 2:10 Paul told the Ephesian believers that each one of them had been brought into the church for a purpose; Paul says we were “created in Christ Jesus”. God has an active place for each one of us in his forever family, God knew before he even created us physically if we would follow Jesus and when he created us he made us just right for the place we would one day have in the church.

God’s wisdom, power and insight are amazing and because of that Paul begs the believers in Ephesus to live (walk) lives that measure up to place they have in God’s forever family (worth of the call to which they have been called).   One of my sons has a leadership role on a ship owned by a missions organization. The ship travels all over the world and stops in ports where they distributing both educational books (that part allows them to enter many of the countries) and also Christian books. They also have classes for pastors to attend, they have a creation exhibit, and they are all tasked with making sure they try to tell the locals they meet about Jesus. They also do stuff off the ship like taking stuff to prisons. The department he oversees basically has to work every day since they provide a necessary daily service. Part of his staff has a regular duty of cleaning up from their regular work. There are also special event that need to be cleaned up from too. His clean up staff don’t think they should have to clean up after the special events, they resent that that department gets to rest while they have to work. But they are missing the point, they don’t have to work, they get to work.  God hive to each person the talents, gifts, and abilities that are just right for the job he has for them. It’s a privilege to be entrusted with more. It’s like human pyramids in the circus, should the guy on the bottom complain that he is holding them all up? No, he has the strength and its an honor to be entrusted with that job.

In verses 2-3 Paul uses four phrases to tell them how to “walk” for God. This isn’t a “what” but a “how”. There are many different “what’s” when it comes to living for God; like the story above leading, cleaning up, running special events, running the regular stuff; later Paul will mention a couple of specific jobs God has given some people but here he is talking to all the believers about “how” they do their jobs, mostly its about attitude. The first thing he tells them in verse 2 is that they need to do the job God created them for with humility and gentleness. In the Greek culture of the time humility was seen as a weakness; that idea hasn’t really changed much throughout history. In Philippians 2:3-4 humility is contrasted with selfish ambition and conceit. It is an attitude that sees other as even more important that ourselves. The word translated “meekness” is really the idea of being polite even if the other person doesn’t deserve the politeness (Galatians 6:1). The second idea the Paul says should control how we live is “patience”. The idea here is patient when you are being provoked, you might translate the original word “have a long fuse” or “take a long time to boil over”. It’s not about picking up 200 marbles that you just dropped with out having a fit, it’s about picking up the 200 marbles you just dropped without having a fit while people are walking through the area kicking them around. Next Paul tells them they need to “tolerate each other in love”. Put up with others that seem to be a pain in the neck in love. This is no argggggggggg, type of putting up with those that annoy us we need to see them as a valuable part of the team, of God’s family. Pretty tough! Finally Paul tells the readers to work hard (be diligent) at watching over and protecting (keep or protect) the unity of the Spirit (this is back to the idea of the church, a group of believers in Jesus, as “one new man” (Ephesians 2:15), a body (Ephesians 2:16; 3:6, see also Ephesians 1:22), a building or house (Ephesians 2:19-22), and a temple (Ephesians 2:21). Notice that this unity is a product of the Holy Spirit. When people trust Jesus as their savior (see “A Tale of Two Trees”) God, the Holy Spirit (see “Three or One?”) comes into their inner being and starts helping them live for Jesus. Each of us does that kind of differently based on the particular way God has designed us and what he has made us for (Ephesians 2:10) but there are a lot of things that are the same (like the four ideas above and more). For sure, we are all part of God’s forever family and should live in ways that honor him for that. As the Holy Spirit helps us live that way we have unity (or should).

The last little piece of the puzzle here is peace. We are told that we have this unity that the Spirit is producing “in the bond of peace”. The word bond here is the idea of a fastener, like a button. But it also is used for things like ligaments that hold muscle to bone and can also have the idea of things like “team spirit” or the bond between family members (of course that is probably the idea here). This bond is described as peace. Back in chapter 2 Paul talked about peace between the two groups of believers, Jewish believers in Jesus and non-Jewish believers in Jesus. This peace was produced when Jesus died and fixed the sin problem between us and God, he made peace between us and God possible (See Luke 2:14, that peace was most likely the peace between God and man that Jesus was going to make possible, see also “A Tale of Two Trees”). So the peace is first between each of individually as we accept Jesus as the solution for our broken relationship with God but it is also peace between the different types of people who would come to be part of God’s new family (Ephesians 2:17). In Ephesians two of those groups were the gentile believers and the Jewish believers (Ephesians 2:14-16, in verse 16 the word translated “reconcile” means to “bring back together again”). So the sacrifice Jesus made for us, a sacrifice that made peace brings us back together and that unity and bond is maintained by the holy Spirit in our every day lives.

In verses 4-6 Paul repeatedly uses the word “one”.   There is one [Holy] Spirit, One hope that we were all called to, one Lord (since almost all of Paul’s uses of this word so far have been linked directly with Jesus, that is who he is talking about here, Jesus as our master. This word also has at least hints of deity; pointing to the fact that Jesus is God), one faith (in who Jesus is and what he has done for us (Ephesians 1:15; 2:8; 3:12,17), one baptism, and one God and Father. This list of “ones” shows just how united these believers ought to be. They aren’t just “fans” of the cowboys, or “Americans”, children of the same parents they are united a bunch of ways. Paul puts God last probably to make us think about him a little more. He is the “father” of all, probably pointing out both that he is a creator and his personal love for us. He is also “over all”, he’s the boss. “Through all” either points to God as the creator or maybe to the one who actively keeps the whole universe together.   “In all” might point to the fact that the whole universe proves the existence of God to us, everywhere we look scientifically, morally, socially we see evidence of a loving creative being whose universe is a universe of order not chaos. It’s difficult to divide up these ideas, the language kind of overlaps, and other places in the New Testament some of these “works” of God are credited to Jesus and even the Holy Spirit (like the peace and unity above where we see activity on the part of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, see “Three or One?”).

Also a little note on “one baptism”. The Greek word translated baptism is “baptizo” and it means to dip or immerse. It was used for the process of dying cloth, where the cloth was submerged in the liquid dye to give it color. In the ancient world of Jesus time many groups used a ritual where they would “baptize” people into the group by submerging them into a body of water. We see this when John the Baptizer (Matthew 3:11) was baptizing people who wanted to show they knew they had a problem with God and wanted to change (repent). From the earliest days of the church people were being baptized to show their identification with Jesus (Acts 8:12, 16). In Colossians 2:12 (a letter written at the same time as Ephesians) Paul describes baptism as a way of identifying with Jesus’ death (which took the penalty for our sins away, see ”A Tale of Two Trees”) and his resurrection (which proves hos power over death and gives us hope of our eternal existence with God; we will be resurrected too). So baptism is a symbolic action that believers do to show that they identify with all Jesus has done for us.

It’s too bad when believers in Jesus don’t get along, it gives God a bad reputation. We need to recognize that that we are all part of one new eternal “family” that God has created. Paul wants us to recognize that, appreciate it, and live out that appreciation by getting along with each other. We aren’t on our own in this though we have the Spirit of God living is us, helping us be all that we each can be as we live and work together as God’s children. This doesn’t mean we need to compromise what we believe, the Holy Spirit that binds us all together is called the “Spirit of Truth” by John (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13) and in those chapters we see that he teaches about Jesus in a why that honors Jesus. ON the other hand there are lots of real churches all over the world that do things differently from each other. As Paul has already said in chapter one Jesus is the head over the church(es) not me. In 1 Peter 4:15 Peter instructs believers not to be surprised if there is trouble in their lives for following Jesus, it shows that the Spirit of God is controlling their lives. But he warns them to bring trouble on themselves by sinning (doing things that dishonor God) One sin he mentions is “busybody” or “troublesome meddler”. That’s a very funny word in the Greek language. It’s a compound word that only appears in that verse and experts think that Peter invented the word. Literally it means “another man’s overseer”. That could mean don’t be someone else’s boss; don’t run other peoples lives. The word for “overseer”, by the time Peter wrote, had become sort of a technical term among believers and was used for leaders in the church called elders. What Peter may have been warning his readers about was not going around stirring up trouble by trying to run churches they were not a part of. I think we need to cooperate within our church and cooperate with other churches as much as we can. We need to stick to the truth, but the point is we need to stick to the truth, we need to individually live in peace. We need to spend our time building up other believers in the local church that we are part of. We need to cooperate with Christians everywhere as much as possible and we need to let Jesus and the Holy Spirit do their work in all believers everywhere, starting with ourselves. Remember God is powerful and can take care of himself.

Thank you God for the Holy Spirit. Help me learn to listen to him better each day. Thank you for calling me into your forever family, thank you for the certainly that I will be with you and you with me forever. Help me be diligent to preserve the unity of what your Spirit is building through the peace you have offered to mankind. Thank you for giving me a part in the plan, let me do my part to build up. Help me recognize that my part is different that the part of others. Help me be patient and recognize that the church needs all different kinds of parts to help the world find you. Thank you for your patience with all of us for whom you died while we were still enemies. Help me help the world find peace with you. Let me focus on them and let you worry about the others.

Ephesians 3:14-21. In yesterday’s post Paul began a prayer, or rather he began a report about how he had been praying for the believers in Ephesus. As he began he mentioned the fact that he was in prison. Although he was being held by the Roman government awaiting a trial he says he was a prisoner of Christ Jesus. He then went on explain how God had a plan for his (God’s) household and how he (Paul) was a manager (the word stewardship) of that plan. He called the plan a “mystery” that God had now revealed. Earlier in the letter he had talked about the “mystery” and explained that it was about God saving mankind through Jesus. Yesterday Paul was a little more specific about how gentiles and Jews were equal partner in God’s forever family. Even though the Jews had had a little advantage, since they had originally had some information about how God was going to deal with the sin problem (see “A Tale of Two Trees” or maybe “The Old Testament Connection”). He also reminded them that God was the creator of all things, told them that this new family they were now a part of, the church, was showing to demons that God is wise, loving and powerful, and he reminded them that they were God’s children and could talk to God boldly and confidently if they had put their faith in Jesus as God’s solution to the sin problem (their rebellion, disrespect, and disobedience toward God). He ended his little side journey by asking them not to be discouraged by the fact that he was under arrest. He reminded them that he was there because he was out serving God by helping people find Jesus , and their honorable place in God’s forever family.

In today’s reading he returns to his report about how he had been praying for them. In verse 14 he tells them because God had given him the privilege of getting to help people know about Jesus that he “bowed his knee before the Father.” In verse 16 Paul says he is “bowing the knee” so that God would do something. This clearly tells us he is asking God for something. In Paul’s day the most normal way people prayed was standing up. The idea of bowing was something that people did before kings and people of great power, both of which God is.

In verse 15 he shows one way God is powerful when he tells the readers that it is from God that every “family” in Heaven and on Earth get their name. The Greek word translated “family” is “patria” (remember that the New Testament was written mostly in Greek, the language of Paul’s day).   We get English words like patriarch and paternal from that word. The Greek’s associated families with the father who was the head of the family. So God is seen here as the one who forms or founds every “family”. Bible experts don’t agree on what it means “in Heaven and on Earth”. Some believe that in Heaven human families will still have some connection, others say that the word is sometimes used for other social groups or even people groups. Sometimes we talk about a group of friends or people we work as a “family”. Also Paul has just been talking about God as a Father and we know that he often uses family language to describe how believers relate to each other, so the family in Heaven could be God’s family and the families on earth could be human ones, or it could be about other groups. Some experts even extend the idea to the “family” of demons in verse 10. The point though is that God has authority, he is the head over all of it. God is powerful.

Although God has power that is probably not why Paul is “bending his knee” rather than standing in front of God talking to him. Yes God is powerful, but remember that Paul just told the Ephesian believers that they could boldly and confidently approach God. In Luke 22:41-43 Jesus knelt down to pay to God. This is just before he was to be arrested, tortured, and executed. We see he was very distress and emotional about what he was facing. Sometimes when people are faced with something very emotional they go “weak in the knees”, they just lose all strength to stand up. In light of what Paul told the believers about approaching God and the use of the word Father for God the picture we have here is of Paul being very emotional as he prays for these believers in Ephesus. He barely knew them, if at all, but he felt very connected to and responsible for them.

In verses 16-17 we see that he is asking God to give them strength in their inner person (Inner man, heart) so that Jesus could be a part of their lives, influence how they thought and lived (dwell or live in them). There are two important parts to how the power of God to do this comes into their lives. It is through faith and with the help of the Holy Spirit(remember before we learned that faith, hearing about Jesus and believing what we know he has done for us and trusting our life and eternity to him alone, is what brought salvation from sin into our lives, Ephesians 2:8-9. Also the Holy Spirit is how Jesus actually “lives in us”, John 14:15-16, John 14:25-26, John 15:26, John 16:7).

Greek documents (like this letter) were written without punctuation and without spaces between the letter. Also they were written in all capital letters, though there were variations as to how letters were made for books verses quickly written documents like this letter; carefully hand printed verses “handwriting” or cursive. Translators need to consider what they are reading and what they know about the person, situation, etc. to figure out things like punctuation and capitalization. Some times translators have different ideas about that in different places. It’s that way with the end of verse 17.

In the Greek ( the way Paul wrote this, or had his secretary write this) the words “in love” come first. It literally says “ you in love rooted and founded” (like a foundation of a building). Or more completely “to dwell Christ thorough faith in the hearts you in love rooted and grounded”. Now most translations say something like “so Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, so you, being rooted and founded in love” and then continue on into verse 18 “may be able to grasp or comprehend…” Interestingly the “so” or “that” that they put after the word “faith” really comes after the “rooted” and “grounded” words.

I hope you are still here thinking, don’t freak out, there’s a good point to all of this. You may not know that the Bible, as it was originally written didn’t have verse numbers, those were added around 1500 AD to help people studying the Bible find different parts. Remember it was written with no spaces between the letters and no punctuation. It’s really no problem for most people to read the language they grew up with if it is written that way. Also different languages put words in different orders. In English we talk about “the red car” but in Spanish they talk about “el carro rojo”. They put the adjective (red=rojo) after the word it is describing. So the fact that the Greek words and the English words are in different orders doesn’t mean that the translators did a bad job, and in fact the fact that many English translations have the same sort of order helps us see that they did a good job. Those translations were done a different times in history by different groups of guys so the fact that they agree is a good thing.

The reason I mentioned all of this though is because some experts in Greek think that the words “You in love rooted and founded” are a separate little statement. Since the word “so or that” is right before the rest of the words in verse 18, they think it should say something like, “so Christ may live through faith in your hearts; in love you have been rooted and founded, So you may be able to understand with all God’s people…” They say the grammar is a lot like Ephesians 2:8-9 “for by grace you have been saved; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God”. So what’s the point? Both was of punctuation this have the same basic meaning, Paul want Jesus to be strong in them so they can understand something, that we haven’t come to yet. They are planted and have a good foundation but Paul wants them to have more. He wants the tree or the building to grow. All of this comes up because the grammar is very hard here at the end of verse 17. It even seemed that way to early believers near the time of Paul that were native Greek speakers (By the way Paul spoke an older form of Greek. Modern Greek is different, think English you use and the English in a King James Bible or the way actors talk when they are doing Shakespeare). We need to remember that Paul was dictating this. Some Greek experts think that Paul was becoming very emotional. Remember he cares about these people. He keeps taking them about the power of God and how they are all a part of God’s family. They are not second class Christians behind the Jewish believers they are all one “new man” one “family of God” one “house for God to live in”. Although this is a report of how Paul has been praying for them it is turning in to a prayer right then and there as he speaks, a fact we will see when we come to verses 20-21.

In verses 18-19 Paul says he wants the gentile readers (see Ephesus 3:4-6) to “be able to comprehend” (the word translated “comprehend” means to grab ahold of something). He wants them to have the ability to grab something and make it an active part of their lives. He says he wants them to be able to really understand know the size of something. Interestingly he doesn’t actually tell them at first what he wants them to know. In verse 18 he uses four different words for dimensions. Width, length, height,and depth this is his way of saying, “Dudes, I’m praying that you really have the ability to get this totally huge thing.” He finally tells them what the huge thing is though, “I want you to know the unknowable love of Jesus so you can be filled all the way up.” This doesn’t mean that Paul is praying that they will become like God or as strong as God or as smart as God he is praying that they will be strong in Jesus so they can be all God made each of them to be.

In verses 20-21 we see that this is no longer just a report about what he had been praying, all this emotion has turned his words into a prayer right there on the spot, right in the middle of his letter. He has just told them that he has been asking God to help them really understand the love and power of God that God has used for them and placed in them. How God has fixed their broken relationship with him and made them one new group for him. Here at the end of all that Paul recognizes that God can do way more that we can even imagine. When Paul calls God “the one who is able” he uses the Greek word for “power”, “the powerful one”. Then Paul uses two two ideas to describe this power. The first one means something like “way more” or “more extremely”. The second idea is something like “infinitely more than”. Both of these apply to what the readers could ask for or even imagine. Paul’s words are communicating an insanely powerful God who is using that power through the loving plan he has for us in Jesus. That power is working in us, and Paul want them to understand that. But he knows we will probably never really “get it” all the way because God’s actions are way big, more extreme, and unimaginable. Now in these two verses he says, “To that huge God who is working in us beyond what we could even imagine be honor and recognition (glory) in the church (all believers in Jesus from all time) and in Jesus (as the one who made the church possible through his actions as the “chosen one”, the “Christ”; chosen to be our substitute, our savior).

So Paul ends this first part of the letter the way he began, with a prayer that God would receive honor (Bible scholars like to call these types of prayers “doxologies” from the Greek word “doxa” which is translated “praise, honor, or glory”). This first part has been all about the power of God and how he used it to build Jewish and non-Jewish (gentile) believers in to one new group; a family, a house for God, a temple of God, the family of God. He has written especially to gentile believers who must have been feeling unwelcome or under other pressures from the people around them. He asked God that they would understand the immense size of His love in Jesus so they could be all that each of them was meant to be, as a person with a relationship with God. In the next few reading we will find out more about this full life.

I may have said this before but it is amazing how much God loves us. It is amazing that the creator of the universe would create a universe for us, a world , for us, friends and families for us, that he would create each one of us with a place and a purpose and that that place is with him and that the purpose is part of his world. Its amazing that we get to be with God, relate to him, share in the “administration” of the forever existence of us and the world. It’s amazing that we can talk to God boldly and confidently. It’s amazing that he took rebellious disrespectful us, rebellious disrespectful me and cleaned me up and gave me power to start living for him. We need to never doubt that God loves us, that he wants us with him. We do need to accept his forgiveness though. We need to admit we fail and need his powerful help. Once we accept that we are on the winning team. Hopefully we will understand the tip of God’s love for us. May he be honored in your life and mine as we live as part of his forever family.

God help me live and learn and honor you. Let my life bring you honor. Help the world understand you though my life. Help others respond to you. Let my life teach them. Thank you for opening your family to me, to us. You are way big, way powerful, more extreme, way better. You are “far out” and close in, thank you for your love.