I'm struck again by who we are. Reading in Ephesians today, something has always bothered me that came back to bother me today. Look and see if you see it too:
Eph 1:3
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
What does it do for me, if I'm blessed with every spiritual blessing "in heavenly places", if I'm struggling here just to get by?
I missed what He said. Today I went back to the Greek one more time to see if there wasn't an answer for my frustration. This is what I found: the verbs in the introduction are all participles, describing God. "Blessed the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one having blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heaven."
Do you see the difference? Everything that is in heaven, He has blessed us with in Jesus. He has brought it to bear here, and now, on our life and in our lives. That is the only way the next verses make sense:
4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved. NKJV
Do you see! By this, our very lives become something to praise God about! People look at me and know, only God could do something like that with someone like me. It's exactly what Zechariah sang in his song in Luke:
Luke 1:70-75
70 As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets,
Who have been since the world began,
71 That we should be saved from our enemies
And from the hand of all who hate us,
72 To perform the mercy promised to our fathers
And to remember His holy covenant,
73 The oath which He swore to our father Abraham:
74 To grant us that we,
Being delivered from the hand of our enemies,
Might serve Him without fear,
75 In holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life. NKJV
He promised that we could serve Him in holiness all the days of our life! Not after we were dead. But that will only happen, when we put on every spiritual blessing that heaven has to offer.
Let's do it.
Pastor Pete
