SUNDAY 15th
Ephesians 1:1-2
NIV (vv1-2) – ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’
ESV (vv1-2) – ‘Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.’
We come today to the Ephesian letter, and boy oh boy, what a problem this is going to give me. ‘Why?’ you may ask, well put simply because this book along with the gospel of John are my two favourite books of the Bible, and somehow I have got to decide how to break it up and do it justice without spending too long in it! Not that I suppose we can ever spend too long in any book of the Bible, and however long I spend in it, I will never be able to give it the justice it deserves, but I need to treat it in the same way as I have with every other book.
This letter is all about blessings, prayer, grace, the Church / body, relationship, and strength. But more importantly is also about our being ‘in Christ’ and it is a letter that is all about Christ, in one of the Bibles I use (ESV the one I use most of the time) sometime in the past I have gone through all the letters from Galatians through to Titus marking out how many nouns there are referring to the Lord Jesus Christ, the total for each is: Galatians 45, Ephesians 63, Philippians 46, Colossians 35, 1 Thessalonians 33, 2 Thessalonians 23, 1 Timothy 20, 2 Timothy27, Titus 7.
Sixty-three times in Ephesians and that does not include the many times where it says, in him, (six times in just 1:3-14) him, he, or his, referring to Jesus. This tells me that it is all about Jesus, and likewise when it comes to our faith and outworking of that faith it should also all be about Jesus, one of the more modern songs is:
It’s all about You, Jesus
And all this is for You
For Your glory and your fame
It’s not about me
As if You should do things my way
You alone are God
And I surrender to Your ways
Just as we see Jesus as the centre in this letter, so also he needs to be the centre of our lives, and just as all that Paul writes points to Jesus, so all we have and are should point to Jesus. May God help us to always keep Jesus as our focus, and I believe one of the ways that this will be ensured is that we keep close to the Cross, the place where we encountered the life transforming power of the gospel.