From Eternity to Here

Jan 25, 2009 By: Pastor Joseph LoSardo Series: Ephesians I Scripture: Ephesians 1
Ephesians exists for the people of God to stop and stand in awe of what God has done in one’s own personal salvation – in what He accomplished through Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection, and how this is worked out in His church. Like no other book of doctrine, Ephesians gives us a magnificent sweep of God’s saving purpose initiated before the foundation of the world, revealed and summed up in Christ, and displayed in the teaching, prayers and worship of the church. There are so many exhortations and declarations of His bountiful blessings to His own, that anyone who is alive in Christ will not help but to have his affections stirred as he reads and meditates upon this Epistle. Ephesians lifts us out of our vertical plane of perception and carries us to the heights, where we can observe the great panorama of our personal salvation from beginning to end. From this vantage point we can better understand the array of particular details which have taken place in the course of our own Christian walk of faith. Like the salvation experience it describes, the Epistle of Ephesians does not start with man and ascend to God, but rather begins in eternity past before there was anything but God. The epistle then moves from eternity to the here and now, as God’s purpose which He fixed in eternity is expressed in His church, as different people, with different personalities, from different nationalities and backgrounds, are yet “one in Christ.” Then it tells us all we need to know about who we are in Christ – so that, ‘having the eyes of our understanding enlightened,’ we might live our lives worthy of the name of Christ.