Can you imagine a church...?

Did you enjoy studying Ephesians? I did and have always found it to be a most inspiring and yet challenging book. To me it seems to encompass the essentials for church growth, spiritual development, quality of life and everything we could possibly need if we simply understood who God really is.

It’s the great question of the age: who is God? Is he really there? Can mere mortals ever really know he is there? In Ephesians Paul states that he prays that we might "know God". In that simple prayer he asks God to provide for our every need, not by means of food, housing, clothing but by knowing God. He doesn’t pray for the lost or the world but that we should know God. He doesn’t ask that we should be motivated or less selfish, kinder or more spiritual, for us to give all our worldly possessions away or for us to be missionaries to the lost in dark places. He doesn’t ask for us to heal the sick or cast out demons. He prays that we should know God.

Paul knew his God in a way that most of us have not yet begun to grasp. On the Damascus road he endured such a dynamic experience of God that his life was radically changed and he was never the same again. He had received the grace of God for himself. As a result Paul learned to love the people he had persecuted and discovered for himself something of the breadth, length, height and depth of the love of God. He didn’t have to go to theological college or take part in an internship programme. All the scriptures he had ever learned as a Jew now made sense to him and pointed to the God who had changed his life and made sense of his experiences.

In being obedient to God Paul grew daily in knowledge of his Lord. His hunger for God knew no satisfaction and he constantly wanted more. The more he knew, the more motivated he was. The more he stepped out in faith, the more he saw God move. The more he preached about what he had learned, the more others were drawn to him and to his teaching. Because Paul lived his days out in the power of the Spirit, expecting to see God move, that is what he got, and that is what others saw.

Can you imagine a church in which each member really knew God and understood his grace, the extremities of his character on which we can depend? I’m sure the world would think it was a church full of weirdoes and extremists, until they saw for themselves what was happening in its midst. It would be a church with a loyal congregation of spirit filled believers, those who trusted God to meet their daily needs, those who were not afraid to speak out against oppression, those who regularly prayed for others to be healed or delivered knowing that their prayers would be answered. Others would be drawn to it as to a magnet, drawn by the love of God seen in the life of the believers.

So where has our study of Ephesians left us? With a warm rosy glow at sharing fellowship and ideas with our brothers and sisters? It was great wasn’t it, but if it doesn’t move us on, what was the point? What are we going to do about it?

Picture: The library in Ephesus