Two artists have lighted the pathway to my preaching from Ephesians. James Galway, the incomparable Irish flutist, declared on television that all true art makes its creative source transparently clear. It causes us to sense the reality of the ultimate. In the presence of a masterpiece we see and hear and feel the originating force from beyond it. He de­clined to use the word God because, as he put it, there is so much controversy associated with the term, but Deity is what he meant. Authentic art, according to the irrepressible Irishman, makes visible the invisible.

The poet John Ciardi has held up the other lamp for me with his insight about poetry. Go into a 14th Street bar in New York, he said, and walk up to one of the lonesome Brazilian seamen there. Speak softly into his ear the word “Bra-zeel,” and you will awaken the blood of things. Poetry does this. It is what comes up behind us and whispers the singing name of home in our ears.^[1]John Ciardi in Saturday Review, quoted by Gerald Kennedy, A Second Reader’s Notebook (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 254.

Put together, these two concepts claim that art is what makes real and near the normally opaque beyond to which we belong as human beings but from which we sense as estrangement.

By this standard preaching qualifies as art, for the person in the pulpit aims at causing his hearers to see what he has seen, hear what he has heard, and be grasped by the same ultimate power that holds him. Is this not the significance of the passage in Romans: “And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher? . . . So faith comes from what is heard” (Rom. 10:14, 17 RSV)? Through preaching the ulti­mate becomes real and immediate to the hearer. Yet this intimacy with the infinite does not seem awkward or in­ compatible. Preaching proclaims reconciliation, the reunion of the separated who belong together (cf . 2 Cor. 5:18-20).

This view of preaching makes Ephesians a document of unexcelled richness for the minister. The letter has the “trans­parency” of  a sermon if not its form. People in every generation have witnessed to its power with extravagant superlatives. Many have disputed its authorship, but no re­sponsible voice has questioned its inspiration. The epistle possesses an incendiary quality. One may reject Christian dogma, but who will deny that a transcendent power gripped the author of Ephesians? Markus Barth even described Ephesians as a prayer. Indeed, Paul never spoke of God as though he were absent. He lived, preached, and wrote doxo­logically.

Moreover, what had laid hold of Paul and what he was trying to lay hold of and utter (Phil. 3: 12) emerges in the Ephesian letter as the Father God from whom we have rebelled but to whom we belong as children in a redeemed and reunited order. The God of Paul is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who loves and blesses and believes in us. So the distinguishing qualities of true art and authentic preaching – the power to reveal the beyond to which we be­ long but from which we are estranged – find sublime expres­sion in Ephesians.

Another consideration gives Ephesians primary significance for the preacher. It contains the most balanced statement of Christian teaching in the New Testament. Paul, the supreme apostolic theologian, provided us the final fruit of his ripened reflections through this remarkable letter. In his other writings, directed to specific congregations with urgent pas­toral and theological problems, necessity narrowed the focus. Galatians speaks of freedom and faith. Romans soars to the heights on the theme of righteousness. In Colossians, written at the same time as Ephesians, Paul magnifies the all-sufficient Christ. But the general letter of Ephesians is Paul’s grand summing up of his Christian vision, the most mature and comprehensive of his writings. This makes it a priceless treas­ure for the preacher. From Ephesians he may gain a rounded view of the Christian reality that is both concise and com­pelling. Even the frailest theological fingers can grasp Ephe­sians because of its compactness, yet the profoundest of Christian thinkers can never fully sound its depths.

Ephesians offers redemption to preachers who rest content with narrow-gauged notions and a hopelessly confused theology. So many pastors, crushed by duties exceeding their resources, live from hand-to-mouth homiletically. They move from street corner to street corner like beggars gladly accept­ing from every passerby any pittance for use in sermons.

Driven by incessant demands, their proclamations week by week become a crazy quilt of ideas with no unifying theme or coordinated perspective. No wonder contradictions curse the pulpit. While preachers should avoid “foolish consistency,” they need to see life steadily and see it whole. Ephesians can help.

So I regard this letter as the New Testament’s special gift to pastors. Its revelatory power sets forth an excellent paradigm for preaching, which must ever strive to make real the Father who loves and longs for his lost creation. Its profound grasp of gospel truth in concentrated form puts a wider Christian world within reach of even the most parochial pulpits.

To illustrate the potency of this letter for those who spend time with it, I include here part of John Mackay’ s famous tribute in his work on Ephesians.

To this book I owe my life. I was a lad of only four­ teen years of age when, in the pages of the Ephesian Letter, I saw a new world. I found a world there which had features similar to a world that had been formed within me. After a period of anguished yearning, during which I prayed to God each night the simple words “Lord, help me,” something happened. After passionately de­siring that I might cross the frontier into a new order of life which I had read about, which I had seen in others whom I admired, I was admitted in an inexplicable way, but to my unutterable joy, into a new dimension of existence. What had happened to me? Everything was new. Someone had come to my soul. I had a new out­ look, new experiences, new attitudes to other people. I loved God. Jesus Christ became the center of everything. The only explanation I could give to myself and to others was in the words of the Ephesian Letter, whose cadences began to sound within me, and whose truth my own new thoughts and feelings seemed to validate. My life began to be set to the music of that passage which begins, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” (2: 1) . . . .

Fifty years almost have passed since that boyish rap­ture in the highland hills and forty-five since I recalled the experience in a student’s lodging in the Granite City. The sum of life is westering, and this mortal pilgrimage must, in   the nature of things, be entering the last lap before sunset. Life has been throughout an adventure, a movement from one frontier to another. For me, as I reflect upon the passage of the years, both as regards the authority of the Bible and the meaning of my own life, subjectivity and objectivity can never be separated. A subjective fact, an experience of quickening by God’s Holy Spirit in the classical tradition of Christian conversion, moulded my being in such a way that I began to live in Christ and for Christ, and “for His Body’s sake which is the Church.” My personal interest in God’s Order began when the only way in which life could   make   sense   to me was upon the basis of an inner certainty that I my­ self, through the operation of a power which the Ephesian Letter taught me to call “grace,” had become part of that Order, and that I must henceforth devote my energies to its unfolding and fulfillment.^[2]John Mackay, God’s Order: The Ephesian Letter and This Present Time (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1956), pp. 6-7, 9-10.

 

Discovering The Perspective

Biblical preaching tries to capture the perspective of the text lest it becomes a pretext. Until the preacher himself has been siezed by what siezed the writer, he will be unable to pass it on with passion and telling impact. Such an experi­ence calls for enough study to understand the document. Here is one approach.

1. Introduce yourself   to the letter with a good Bible dic­tionary or a brief commentary. Get an overview.
2. Then read the text. Read it in its entirety at one sitting. Read it in several translations. Read it in the original Greek if possible.
3. Consult some contemporary theological treatments of Ephesians, such as John Mackay’s God’ s Order, Markus Barth’s The Broken Wall, Dale Moody’s Christ and the Church, Roy C. Putnam’s Getting It All The intro­ductory sections of W. O. Carver’s The Glory of God in the Christian Calling are helpful, especially on “The Church as Continuing Incarnation of Christ.”
4. Always have available a number of solid commentaries so that exegetical matters can be pursued in greater depth. In gaining perspective, however, these commentaries will be of minimal significance except in their introductory sections. From time to time some crucial passage may need examining in detail, but normally these commentaries can be reserved for later stages of preparation.

Short of some such process as this, sermons will have little of the Pauline flavor or cohesiveness. Homiletical des­peration will be the dominant feature of such pulpit efforts. Clearly, of course, this recommended process takes time, calendar time as well as clock time, which means long-range planning. This discipline will deliver us from the predicament described by the inimitable black minister, D. E. King. Once asked about the biggest squeeze he was ever in, he answered quickly: “Caught between two Sundays.” Living thus leaves little time to lift up our eyes to the hills. Being both con­cise and comprehensive, Ephesians offers a way of escape for those of us who have been trapped of ten by our own delays.

In brief, I’m arguing for the importance of getting satu­rated with Ephesians until Paul’s passion is felt at a deep level and personally appropriated. Then and only then can we recognize with the eyes of the heart that this vision springs from the revelation of Jesus Christ and is indeed the “faith once for all delivered to the saints.” Other New Testa­ment writers magnified one dimension of the gospel or another, but Paul, the apostle born out of due season, pro­vides us a full-orbed conception of the Christian reality. From Paul we get the most comprehensive grasp of the gos­pel and in Ephesians his grandest declaration. Whence came this vision? He claims it was given by revelation (3:3; Gal. 1:12). But it was a revelation forged in the fires of persecu­tion, tempered with physical affliction, wizened through the­ological struggle, chastened under pastoral care for the churches, and ripened by years of reflection from prisons where he was an “ambassador in chains” until Ephesians finally poured out of his soul like molten lava glowing with the heat of inspiration and shining with a still undiminished glory.

What are the controlling features of this vision? Through­ out Ephesians Paul views Christ and hi church as a single organism of head and body growing toward the fulfillment of the divine purpose to the glory of God (3:21). The church is Christ fulfilling himself and being fulfilled until he achieves his full stature in his corporate body (1:23; 4:14). Paul saw in the church the pattern for God’s achievement of recon­ciliation. The church not only carries the message of salva­tion; the church is part of this message. It must be part of the good news it tells to make the news telling. The union of Jew and Gentile within the fellowship was the first mighty step in God’s plan to bring all things together in Christ, in­cluding members of the human family and the entire cosmos as well  1:10). People in the church have the high privilege of sharing the knowledge of God’s mysterious purpose, which has now been revealed, and of participating in its realization by belonging to Christ and his church (3: 1-21). Contem­plation of God’s mighty purpose being unfolded   through Christ and his church brought Paul to the fever pitch of ecstasy, so that Ephesians has a doxological character with­ out parallel in New Testament literature. What Ephesians provides is a balance of the heavenly and the earthly, the social and the personal, the devotional and the ethical. The ultimate objective of God in the redemption of the entire cosmos is rooted in the Christ event and tied organically to the believer’s  experience of  new birth and changed   conduct (2: 1-22). Paul’s conception, however, must never be con­strued as a visionary ideal. It is reality, the reality of the church in which Christ’s redemptive dream has become a flesh-and-blood community. What Christ is doing in his church as his continuing body brings glory to God by demon­strating his “many-colored” wisdom not only to earthly   but also to celestial intelligences (3: 10). This anchors Chris­tianity to history and to eternity. In Ephesians the transcendent has become immanent, the infinite has become finite, the eternal has become temporal, and the ideal has become real – not only in the historical Jesus but continuing­ly in his body the church.

 

Fashioning A Plan

After discovering and embracing Paul’s perspective in Ephesians, fashion a plan for presenting this material in homiletical form. Not everything Paul touched in Ephesians can be handled in a single course of sermons. Contrary to some homiletical models, the preaching task is different from and more difficult than pure exposition. The preacher is nothing less than a church builder and therefore a moulder of people. He puts sermons into the service of this objective. They must never be regarded as elegant speeches about sacred things. No sermon from Ephesians could do justice to the centrality of the church and be content with merely explaining the sense of the Scripture. In every pulpit effort aim to fit your hearers for fuller participation in that grow­ing temple in which God dwells (2:20-22).

Be selective. Being a paradise of truth makes Ephesians perilous. We may enervate our people with doses of wisdom too potent for their assimilation. Like a wise builder we will not use everything available at every point in construction but will suit our tools and materials to the different stages.

But selectivity must not obscure the epistle’s unique van­tage point nor lead to distortion. However narrowed a par­ticular series or sermon theme, it must be kept harmonious with the apostle’s vision. Here are some possibilities for sermon series.

“The Once-For-All Faith – Basic Christian Doctrines.” Deal with predestination (1:3-14), the Trinity  1:3-14), new birth   (2:1-10), wrath (2:1-4, 11-12), Christian conduct (2:10), the church (1:22-23; 3:21), the social vision (1:9-10; 2:13-19), prayer (1:15-16; 3:14-16; 6:18-19), the mystery (1:9-10; 3:1-10), the battle against evil (6:10-18), last things ( 1:3-7; 5:3-6). Preach the great themes that structure Chris­tian teaching. Attractive titles can be given each sermon, but treat the fundamentals of faith whatever the titles.

“Life Together – The Meaning of Church.” This series would explore the rich materials in Ephesians dealing with the church in terms of God s dream, Jesus’ purpose, the world’s need, humanity’s hope, different images of the church (body, family, people, temple, marriage), the nature of its unity, the necessity of its unity, individual gifts in the church, the behavior of the church, the growth of the church (numerically, functionally, conceptually incarnationally) the mission of  the church, the warfare of the church.

“Paul, Teach Us To Pray.” Highlight the prominence of prayer in Ephesians. The entire epistle throbs with the dy­namic of a living relationship to God. The language of praise, prayer, petition, intercession, and thanksgiving illumi­nates this document. Note particularly the following passages – 1:3, 16; 3:4; 5:20; 6:18, 23. Some have drawn parallels be­tween the prayer themes of Ephesians and Christ’s prayer in John 17.

“The Way of the Pilgrim.” Challenge people to a Christian lifestyle in this series. Remember that all Scripture aims at helping people to think and live aright. Ephesians was pre­served and elevate to a place of scriptural authority be­cause it fed the faith and life of the church. Magnify the practical elements in the letter in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Show that all efforts to divorce the theological and the experi­ential from one another rest on unbiblical premises. Some possibilities for sermons: the height of lowliness, speak the truth, the fine art of anger, sweat and share, the practice of forgiveness, the posture of caring, purity, the salty and the separated, the discipline of restraint, suffering without sur­rendering, fighting a good fight, vigilance.

Series with a narrower and more contemporary focus can be developed from Ephesians. Retaining Paul’s perspective about Christ and his church, examine some dimensions of domestic life. “The Flesh, the Family, and the Faith” could title this series with Ephesians 5:21-6:9 as the primary pas­sage. Insights from the entire letter would enrich the study, of course. A series about the gospel confronting social life could be developed with “Salt of the Earth” as its theme. On the analogy of Paul’s application of the gospel to specific family and social situations in chapters 5 and 6, make your own use of the gospel content in relation to inescapable issues faced by church members: rebellious children, broken homes, disintegrating job situations, interpersonal relationships in a secular society, labor and management, destructive emotions such as resentment, hostility, lust, and greed, forgiveness and forebearance on the individual and social levels, political decisions, war and peace, ecological issues. “This Is the Vic­tory” might be the theme for another series. Drawn from Ephesians 6: 10-18 specifically, it could use other materials throughout the letter as clues to triumphant Christian living.

 

Crafting The Sermons

With the perspective of Ephesians clearly in mind and a general scheme for treating the epistle, the arduous task of preparing individual sermons still remains. No work can be more exacting or exciting. Redemptive preaching must be purchased at the price of blood. One young pastor got properly rebuked for saying that preaching did not make him tired. “Preaching makes someone tired,” retorted his bishop.

Bear in mind that a sermon is not a lecture on a subject but a speech designed to change people. Material assembled, organized, and verbalized in the presence of an audience does not make a sermon. A sermon should lead those who hear it toward a goal deliberately chosen and aimed at by the preacher. If the situation calls for moving the congregation from ignorance to enlightenment, then the sermon must major on teaching. When error needs conquering by truth, the sermon must aim to persuade. If the congregation’s behavior needs changing, the sermon must motivate to action. With identical material, the preacher can point his sermon toward any of these objectives, but not all of them at once. He must be careful to choose or his sermon will lose force.

A sermon’s objective must be sufficiently limited and ap­propriately modest to be attainable. One sermon cannot win the world. Assess realistically yourself and your hearers. Re­ member that great cathedrals were built stone by stone. A sermon is one stone in a large building. Congregations will respond to this kind of preaching with comments about the practicality and usefulness of the sermons.

Finally, keep in mind the incarnational principle in preaching. God redeems by causing his word to become flesh. In sermonic terms this principle calls for sincerity and reality in utterance. The strength of confessional preaching springs from its adherence to the incarnational standard. Ken Chafin challenged lay people to use their personal testimony in wit­ness to the gospel because it gives an incarnational update to the good news. Charles Jefferson said there is never a Pentecost until people hear the gospel in the language  in which they were born. For sermons to become incarnational they must proceed out of the preacher. They must become “truth through personality,” to recall the phrase of Phillips Brooks. They must pass through the preacher’s experience before they can emerge with his accent. For this to happen there is no substitute for the gestation period. Too many sermons get delivered stillborn. They are served, to change the metaphor, before their time.

To illustrate these principles I have listed below from my own files some subjects, texts, goals, and approaches.

 

“Heaven Now!”
Ephesians 1:3, 20:2:6

Goal: To persuade people that the life of heaven begins now for Christians.

Approach: From several states friends and family had come at the news of her death. Loved by family but sadly neglected in her later years, this antique lady in her nineties gathered more relatives by dying than by living. Blood kin looked at each other as strangers, moved awkwardly through the funeral chores, and mindlessly mouthed religious cliches. Few people had known a more devout Christian than Lydia. Her apparent fortunes had been few, however. Widowed for years and wretched in health, she had never lost her humility or her hauteur. She was an aristocrat of the spirit. When one of the seldom-seen relatives thought to reconcile these incongruities by saying, “Never expect heaven until you get there,” almost everyone felt it a travesty on the tortured but triumphant life. “Don’t expect heaven until you get there” – Lydia would never have bought that idea for a minute. Through heartbreak and pain she found a lot of heaven. Not all of it and not all of the time, but heaven now just the same. She understood Paul: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.”

Years before as a young woman she found the forgive­ness of sins. She knew peace with God and joy, too. Church had been her very life. Increasingly it became her family. She knew God. She talked to him and about him with reverent familiarity. She had a tough mind and tenacious convictions but an open spirit. People sometimes debated which was the choicest: her chicken pie, her sparkling with, or her Baptist pride. Her privations had built for her a private hell but she believed in heaven now and tasted it. So can we all.

 

“Predestination”
Ephesians 1:3-14

Goal: To persuade people that predestination means God’s redemptive purpose for the world in Jesus Christ, not the distortions popularly associated with it.

Approach: “Predestination is a can of worms” said one member when I announced my sermon. He was right. Look­ing at this doctrine is like peering into a can of worms. Who can make heads or tails of it? This confusion keeps us from seeing why God gave his son – so we can know life, share his redemptive purpose, and spread the good news.

On the thirty-fifth anniversary of D-Day in Europe some U. S. Rangers from that famous landing on Omaha Beach were interviewed at the site of the great battle. These sur­vivors belonged to ‘the battalions with the highest of casualty rates. One of them said: “It was a great thing to be part of the big show.” Hearing his words, I couldn’t doubt it. How thrilling to be in history’s greatest amphibious assault, a land­ing to liberate Europe from the curse of Nazism! It was indeed   “the big show.”

To have shared in the dawning of the Christian move­ment must have brought its own heroic exhilaration. Christ had landed. To share that invasion, to help establish his beachhead upon earth, to conquer the rebel forces, to liberate the captives, to reclaim and reunite this world for God – the biggest show of all! But the show continues. Still we live in the last times. We are the ones upon whom the ends of the ages have come. Predestination tells us this. God has not abandoned our world to mindless and destructive forces. He calls us to be soldiers in his army of love and liberation. He has predestined us to be part of the big show. This is good news enough to live by and die for.

 

“Ecology”
Ephesians 2:1-10

Goal: To teach the principles by which people grow as children of light or children of wrath, using the paradigm of ecology.

Approach:

“As a boy I walked these fields,
Knew each tree and clod,
Crushed the soft dirt beneath my heels
And held the hand of God.”

On a recent visit back home I found myself quoting these lines I wrote thirty years ago. The fields have disappeared now. Gone are the quail and the doves and the rabbits I once hunted. Not because of the gun’s greed or the hunter’s appetite. Something else happened. Buildings and concrete crowd the space I claimed then as my hunting and camping ground. The science of ecology tells us how these changes created a new ecosystem, which in turn killed certain things and bred others.

Ecology holds that all energy reaches the earth by way of the sun’s light where it is transformed from light energy into chemical energy, with carbon dioxide and water being changed into sugar and stored into plants. Plants then be­ come the first stage in the food chain that sustains all liv­ing creatures. Interrupt that chain by chemical or mechanical means and environmental changes will take place, and with the habitat modification species change.

The basic principle of ecology, that all energy comes from the sun: helps us to conceptualize a view of spiritual ecology. Our faith teaches but one source of being, namely, God. Everything comes from Him whose power goes out creatingly to make and to sustain the world. One name for God’s out­ going power   is grace. How God’s creative   energy   gets used is not determined mechanistically. People have freedom. How we respond to God’s creative energy at our disposal deter­mines the ecosystems in which we exist. Every ecosystem tends to intensify and produce its own kind. Basically there are two kinds of ecosystems. One produces children of wrath or disobedience (2:3; 5:6), the other children of faith or light. God’s creative energy, his grace, includes both poten­tials. One side is God’s creative delight and the other side is God’s creative displeasure. God’s displeasure (or his wrath) does not arise, outside of his love. The opposite of love is hate, not displeasure or anger.

In the contrary ecosystems of God’s delight and God’s displeasure, the dynamics of growth and change are pro­foundly similar in operation but opposed in outcome. Changes in behavior occur less by direct acts of will as by yielding through identification and association and participation to the dynamic forces at work within a particular ecosystem. A seed grows only when it is planted.

 

“The Wall”
Ephesians 2:11-16

Goal: To teach people that Christ by his suffering and death showed the impotence of every form of legalism to redeem human life and replaced it by the power of love.

Approach: The wall is everywhere. All of us know about it. No age or age group has gone unshaped by its pernicious power. Its menacing presence moves the length and breadth  of human existence. What wall? Paul called it “the dividing wall of hostility” (2:14). He referred primarily to the five foot balustrade between the Court of the Gentiles and the Court of Women in the Jerusalem temple, but he had in mind the principle of legalism in all of its forms. Legalism always produces an in-group and out-group pattern. By its very nature it raises a wall between people, a wall that sepa­rates and fragments and isolates. Legalism intends to do good. It aims at salvation. But it fails. It ends up keeping people apart. It makes them suspicious and distrustful of each other. It kills fellowship and breeds prejudice and spreads gossip and sets loose the dogs of war.

What the law could not do, however, Christ was able to do through his suffering love and death (Rom. 8:1-4). In “Mending Wall” Robert Frost described a New England farmer’s patching up his rock fence in the spring after the ravages of snow and ice had broken it down during the winter. Together he and his neighbor, between whose prop­erties the wall ran, patiently put the fence back together. Frost thought the wall unnecessary and said so: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” His neighbor held a dif­ferent view, still believing what his father taught him that “good fences make good neighbors.” His opinion built the wall and kept it in place. Whether good fences make good neighbors is   questionable, but holding this opinion, making a law of it, does build walls that separate people. Regula­tions and rules have a good purpose, but they end up destroying God’s purpose of uniting people under his sov­ereign love.

Another power works against the wall-building principle. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” This something is Someone. God, whose love breaks down all the barriers, has put his love perfectly into human flesh through Jesus Christ.

Remember Edwin Markham’s poem:

“He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.”

Law draws an exclusive circle. God and his redeeming love had the wit to win. A great new circle of love has been drawn in Jesus Christ to take in all of humanity, to offer what the law cannot supply: forgiveness, fellowship, and hope for a new world.

 

“The Temple”
Ephesians 2:17-22

Goal: To persuade Christians that they are themselves, individually and corporately, the temple of God.

Approach: Little wonder that “temple” is a strange word in the Christian vocabulary. After all, the founder of the Christian movement, Jesus himself, was called the destroyer of the temple. During his ministry he attacked evil practices in the temple, cleansed it, and predicted its destruction. By his death he nullified its functions: the veil of the temple being sundered, its altar of sacrifice invalidated, its dividing wall of hostility broke down. In the name of the crucified, primitive Christian preachers declared that God does not dwell in “handmade temples” (Acts 7:48; 17:24). For two hundred and fifty years after the founding of the Christian movement, churches had no worship buildings of their own and therefore no visible temptation to identify their buildings with the temple.

How surprising then that the “temple idea” persists at the center of Christian teaching. Does not this fact alone bear witness to man’s hunger for transcendence? No matter how corrupt or distorted the temple may get, people will never give up the temple idea. It stands for the necessity of our getting sight of God, our getting right with God, and our getting light from God.

The New Testament boldly declares that God’s people, the church, must now be understood as the temple. Our lives are his dwelling place. Revelation 3:20 suggests the same. Revelation 21:3 points toward the fulfillment of what has begun already. God should dwell with us, for we are his family (2:19) and he is our Father (2:18).

Knowing we are God’s temple, not a trash can, lays the foundation for Christian living. Seeing that we are God’s sanctuary, not a cesspool, motivates us to a higher kind of con­duct (1 Cor. 6:19-20; 2 Cor. 6: 16-18).

 

“Where Would We Go If We Could?”
Ephesians 3:14-19

Goal: To motivate people to yield themselves to the in­ tent of Paul’s prayer for changing the interior of their lives because what a person is on the inside decides his destiny.

Approach: A preacher dreamed one night of the final judgment. The scene differed sharply from what he expected. Although Christ was seated on his throne and before him all people were gathered, not a single word did the Lord speak. He simply waved his hand and removed all restraints, thus allowing every person to move where he wished to go. Those who loved the light drew nearer to Christ and his throne. Those who desired evil, however, like so many nocturnal insects turned from the light and scurried into the outer darkness.

How disturbing and devastating is the truth of this dream! God’s judgment, as Jesus pointed out, means that light has come but people love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. The scriptural witness summed up in the min­istry of Jesus assures us that God guarantees we shall get what we want. Our desires shall be realized. Common sense teaches that people move toward the objects for their de­sire. So we need to be careful of what we want. Will our  “Fantasy Islands” bring us heaven or hell, paradise or im­prisonment? How great is the devastation that comes with getting exactly what we want only to find that it does not bring satisfaction and fulfillment. Where would we go if we could? What would we be or do if we could?

Only those who hunger and thirst after righteousness can be filled, according to Jesus. Leon Blay was right, there is only one sorrow, the sorrow of not being a saint. But how can our desires be changed? For inevitably they decide our direction and finally our destiny; They can’t be altered by direct manipulation. What all of us need is an inside job and who is capable of this kind of delicate surgery? Here we move into the realm Jesus discussed in his famous visit with Nicodemus, spiritual birth from above. Paul’s prayer in this text has the same goal. He prays for a release of power through the Spirit on the inside of his reader’s lies so that they may know a vital personal relationship with Christ (3:16- 17). Life’s profoundest changes occur through relationships, and Christian faith means a personal relationship to God, happening when the Jesus of the story become, the Christ of the heart. Finally we open the door in response to Christ’s knocking (Rev. 3:20). He begins to overcome our evil by his goodness, intensified through the church’s nurture until we grasp the greatness of his love (3:18-19) and get filled with all the fullness of God (3:19). What will satisfy us is not our own fulfillment but God’s fulfillment in us. Paul’s prayer gives us the only goal which will not leave us sad­dened by achieving. Since God has decreed that we shall go where we choose, let us kneel before the apostle. Let him lay his hands upon us in the prayer that we be so changed that our desires will lead us to joy not sorrow, to life not death.

 

“No Salvation Outside the Church”
Ephesians 3:20-21

Goal: To persuade people that there is salvation in the church because the church is both the means and the meaning of salvation.

Approach: Most evangelical Christians grow up with the conviction that joining the church is not essential to salva­tion. To believe otherwise seems an invitation to indifference or an expression of idolatry. Yet a strong theological plank in the Christian tradition declares in the words of Cyprian: “There is no salvation outside the church.” How can these two be reconciled? Does the self-confident assertion of evangelical Christianity that joining the church is nice but not necessary lead to redemption in people’s lives? Unfortunately not. Peo­ple who believe this usually settle for salvation minus the church.

Mass evangelism and the electronic church prosper from this theology and perpetuate it Martin Marty sees the entire parachurch (more accurately, surrogate church) phe­nomenon posing the greatest threat to congregational Chris­tianity at the present time because it caters to the highly mobile and privatized lifestyle of most Americans.

This doctrine encourages human selfishness. Next to want­ing to be God themselves, people want a private God to serve their personal needs. Not having to put up with church peo­ple and still having God and salvation is good news for selfish folks. This doctrine also overlooks human weakness. It falsely imagines that life can be started or nurtured in isolation.

Evangelical Christians need to rethink our theology at this point. What Cypriari said was really a negative statement of something positively true: there is salvation in the church. The church (and its normal congregational form) is the means of salvation because of the message it proclaim, and the witness that it gives and the love that it shows. The church is also the meaning of salvation. The traditional answer to what being saved means is this: when a person dies, he will go to heaven. Since heaven is the perfection of love, where God is loved and people are loved, being saved must mean begin­ning the practice of love now (Mt. 22:36-40). Where else do people pledge themselves to love God but in church? In church peace is made with God, worship is lifted to God, obedience to God is consciously practiced. In church people are loved. They are valued, as made in the image of God, welcomed without restriction in Jesus’ name, and served throughout the earth in response to Christ’s commission.

Jesus was right – the powers of death shall not prevail against the church. The church will win, for God has decreed that glory will be won to his name throughout all generations from age to age in the church and in Jesus Christ.

 

“The Calling”
Ephesians 4: 1-13

Goal: To teach people what God in Christ is calling them to be and to do.

Approach: One night the anthropologist Loren Eiseley worked late in his study. Absentmindedly he laid a fossil bone on the floor beside his shepherd dog. Outside a winter storm howled as the hour crept toward midnight. Suddenly the sci­entist heard a heavy rasping of big teeth and looked down to see the fossilized bone in his dog’s mouth. A strange look glinted from the animal’s eyes and a deep growl rose from his chest. Ancient shapes were moving in his mind and de­termining his utterance. Only fools gave up bones. He was warning his master to come no closer. Yet his eyes were strained and desperate, for all his mortal life he had followed at Eiseley’s heels and loved him. But now something was call­ing him from out of the past, out of the distant past. It was the time of the great and final snow when the shape of this thing in his mouth spelled life. A voice from the past was contending with the voice of his present master. It was a strange encounter. Eiseley was wise enough to back away until the dog’s mood subsided. Afterwards they went outside and played in the snow, but for one terrible moment they had not been friends but enemies, facing each other over an invisible haunch ten thousand years removed.^[3]Loren Eiseley, “The Night the Shadows Whispered,” Reader’s Digest, May, 1968, pp. 139-40.

All of our existence is a response to voices that call us, some call from the age of the Spirit and other, from the aeon of the beast. Athletes and models and merchants and scholars and musicians and criminals are what they are because of voices they have answered. Christianity is different from other patterns of existence only in the nature of its call. Paul plays with this word, the Greek root of which is our English word “call,” and makes it the motif of his greatest composition, the Ephesian letter. See how central this idea is to the entire epistle by reading Ephesians 4:1 as W. O. Carver translated it: “I, therefore, call-you-along, I the prisoner in the Lord, to order your life worthily of the calling with which you are called.”

God calls us in Christ to be the nucleus and pattern of a universal society by becoming members of the church which is the beginning of that final comic unity through which God’s full glory will be achieved (1:10). Christians must commit themselves then to the interests of the church which is the body of Christ (4:2-3) , the basic goals of which are the main­tenance of unity (4:3-6) and the achievement of growth (4:11-13). Christ acquires his ideal fullness through his body the church, which is portrayed as a full-grown person (4:13). The Christian calling never drowns individuals in the corporate unity, however. Our faith paradoxically accentuates both the social and the individual ideal (4:7). The grand climax comes when Christians participate in amplifying and extending this calling to others (Rev. 22: 17).