#17. April 27, 2015
2015 Devotional. Our goal for these weekly devotionals is to grow in humility and to grow spiritually by memorizing selected passages, putting them into context, and by applying them to our daily living. These passages are taken from: “100 Verses Every Christian Needs to Know” by Freeman-Smith. All passages are from the NIV.
Ephesians 2:8-9
8 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
Ephesians is about the Church, about what “God prepared… for Christians to do.” At the beginning of the letter Paul highlights reconciliation by God’s love for his people and ends the letter with practical ways to serve God and each other.
I grew up in religion and from the time I started to understand God’s grace I found that religion often stood in the way of it. What was so important about wearing dress pants to church or catechism instead of the jeans we wanted to wear? As teenagers, a couple of us wanted to join the church Bible Study but because we had not yet made Profession of Faith we were not qualified to join. Really? We had to be in church twice on Sunday “come hell or high water”. Heaven forbid you bought something on Sunday, like gas when on empty or food if hungry, if you did, apparently hell was your next destination. OK, true, that was a long time ago but more recently when I wore my sandals while preaching and Alisha joined the Praise Team with her great voice and her many tattoos some people were uncomfortable: grace went missing. There are many other recent examples but suffice it say that salvation by works is alive and well. That means that grace, compassion, and forgiveness are also missing. When God’s love (Jn. 3:16-18) is missing in our church or our lives it minimizes God’s grace extended freely to everyone.
God’s free grace is what the verses we are memorizing are all about but this discussion starts at verse 1 of chapter. 2 and continues through verse 10. Paul tells us that we are “dead in our sins and trespasses”. How would that truth fly in our secular postmodern culture? That does not even go over well with religious types. We are dead and we deserve all of God’s wrath and that goes for all of us, every person and every Christian “but because of his great love for us God, who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead” That is a once and for all event set in motion before the beginning of Creation (Eph. 1:3-6). And it is an everyday event because the old man is very much with us and spiritual death still stalks us but God’s grace by faith in Christ has set us free.
That is what it means to be alive in Christ, not perfect lives, not by our own efforts, but as “a gift from God” in Christ Jesus and “not by works”. Paul gives us God’s purpose and God’s goal for our lives: We are His “workmanship” recreated in Christ “to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Good works in Jesus’ name is the result of God’s grace in our lives.
Heavenhigh 