Talks, Sermons and Reflections

EPHESIANS 2.11-22 This is a complicated passage, and I confess that I have really struggled with it. It is about the unity that Christian believers have when we are in Christ, and it can be divided up into three sections. 1. Paul tells us what we were without Christ (2.11-12) We were not part of the people of God He is speaking to people who were not Jews.  4000 years ago God chose the Jewish people to be his people. He said he would be their God and they would be his people. He gave them his law. And he said that through his people all people would be blessed.  But as Gentiles, as non-Jews, Paul is saying to his listeners, you were not part of the people of God.  And we were at war with God.   We chose to live without God, as rebels against God, enemies of God.  I was wilfully blind and deaf when it came to the things of God, because I wanted to live life my way and to satisfy my own desires.  Yes, we might have spent time in meditation and said

                  1. Limitations of language ‘If you can understand it, it’s not God’. (Augustine of Hippo)   2. Experience of disciples a) They knew that there was only one God Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord. ( Deuteronomy 6:4 ) For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me. ( Isaiah 46:9 ) The first followers call the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, God (Colossians 1.3)   They also saw that Jesus prayed to God as Father (eg. John 11.41), is conscious of being loved by the Father, of being sent by the Father, of being given all things by the Father (3.34), of speaking the words of the Father (12.49f), doing the works of the Father (4.34, 6.38), judging with the judgement of the Father (8.16), sharing in the glory of the Father (8.54; 17.5), and of being one with the Father (John 10.29). Jesus had this sense of being in the Father and of having the Father in him (John 14.10f,20). The idea of ‘perichoresi