Book: Ephesians

Church has what you need. You have what we need. God wants what we have. The world needs what we offer.

Forget the power games. What if we all surrender to Christ?

It’s possible to raise our kids with Christian-ish stuff, but not raise them up with Christ. It’s possible to raise them dependent, but not raise them up. It’s possible not to raise them at all. But to raise them…up…with Christ…involves complete self-surrender and authentic sacrificial love. There is no substitute. There can’t be. If there was, Jesus would have chose it.

How should you view your baptism, and the baptism of others? Rest assured there is one uniting baptism, and we have come through the flood together. Let us act like it.

Going to God in prayer is meant to disable all the signals coming from our culture, and even quiet the noise in our heads. It stops the outside voices clamoring for our attention, and forces us to be still. Why? Because we are not actually in control of our lives; and God wishes to communicate with us and even navigate our way in the world.

Join us as we search for the gospel in Ephesians.

Where does the gospel lead? What does the gospel create? What develops as a result of the gospel? Can you imagine an advertisement to be “free from weight loss” where the before and after picture looked the same? In the New Testament, the gospel that frees, the gospel that saves, the gospel that redeems leads to freed, saved, redeemed people living free, saved, redeemed lives. It means recognizing not just what we were saved from, but also what we were saved for.

Parenting is hard but rewarding. It’s easy for a parent to feel inadequate; to wonder where to look for help and guidance. Praise God that we have some guidance, as we look to God as our parent. Both fathers and mothers can find what it means to be a parent from the face of God, and we will find traits that we usually see in our fathers and traits that we usually see in our mothers when we look at God. That is because mothers and fathers, working together, image God on the earth.

How do I know if I am explaining the depth of the gospel or adding to the gospel? The answer is found in discovering the content of the earliest preaching, the central themes that appear in gospel presentations.

What we would need is something that touches on all the central items the gospel seeks to proclaim, the things that would have been believed and received when the “word” was preached. We would want it to include the things that appear over and over again in the early speeches of Acts, that ground the teaching of the Apostles in the rest of the New Testament, and that encapsulates what “the word of His grace” was meant to include. And since baptism dramatically displays the gospel, it would need to include all the major truths being proclaimed in that moment as well.