LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
We’ve all felt the crash that follows a sugar high—the emotional win, the reassuring word, the earthly success that lifts us for a moment before the bottom drops out again. Paul knew that feeling too, which is why he doesn’t merely greet the Ephesians with good wishes but with something that doesn’t fade: “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So, here we are, and as you may have noticed, I am not Jason. I know, I promised Jason today, but he had the audacity to get a kidney stone, totally unacceptable. No, seriously, we need to be praying for Jason because obviously that is a—well, I’ve not been through it, but I’ve heard it’s a very, very unpleasant experience, so we need to be praying for our brother’s healing. Because I know he would much rather be here, and he’d much, much rather be sharing God’s Word with us tonight, but we just need to pray for his healing. He’s busy getting better, and we are going to get better in our souls by studying God’s Word tonight.
One of the ways we try to stay healthy is we try to eat the right things, right? And do you remember this? This seemed like it was sort of the Saturday morning liturgy, right? You’d hear the commercials during Saturday morning cartoons, and inevitably there were all the sugary cereal commercials, right? The more sugar, the more likely it was to be advertised. And what did they always say? Part of a complete breakfast, right.
So first we established that they’re, let’s say Kellogg’s sugar frosted flakes, what are they? They are great. And then once we established that, then we went to the second part of the liturgy, a part of a complete breakfast. Now, the thing that’s interesting when you look at how they become a part of a complete breakfast is that they always have that picture, and it’s not the front picture with Tony the Tiger there looking all happy because he has his frosted flakes, the part of a complete breakfast. It’s the one in the back that shows this bowl of cereal, smaller bowl than anyone eats, sitting next to an egg and a piece of fruit and some toast and orange juice, maybe a glass of milk.
In other words, there’s an entire breakfast without the frosted flakes. If you put them in an entire breakfast, yes, they are a part of a complete breakfast. But outside of that, they really aren’t. Not only do they not contain everything that a healthy meal should have in them, or even close, even the things they do contain, they’re not the good versions of those things. I don’t understand all these things fully, but I do understand enough to know that while we do need carbohydrates and it’s good that those are in there, what you want are complex ones, the kind that stick in your body for a while and give you energy for the day.
But when you have that part of a complete breakfast, what do they give you? They give you simple ones that just go flying through your system. You wake up for a moment, and then an hour later, you’re miserable and tired and dragging. If you’re a kid, you had a little bit of time of being hyper in between there, right? But it didn’t actually get you to where you were trying to go. They’re not really great. But technically, in a technical sense, they’re part of a complete breakfast.
When we’re talking about how we nourish our lives, we run into a similar problem. There are lots of things that say these things are a part of a completely nourished life. The only problem is they’re the part that doesn’t do anything good. And maybe they don’t necessarily do anything bad in moderation, right? If you enjoy having a bowl of sugar in the morning, and you balance it with other healthy things and more power to you. But it has to have those other things, the things that actually energize us and nourish us and prepare us. And if it only has that part of a complete breakfast, ooh, not good.
We need to be reminded of where we find our nourishment, where we find the source of our life nourishment. Because just like we need someone to say, hey, you know, eating a bunch of sugar in the morning probably isn’t the way to have a good, healthy life, likewise, we need to have someone who says, you know, all those sugary things of life, the emotional highs, the successes, and so on, they’re earthly. They might give us that sugar rush for a moment, but we’re going to come crashing down, too.
Let’s pray tonight that God would help us to see where we’re depending on sugar highs and we need the rest of that complete breakfast. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that you would help us and guide us as we come to your Word tonight. Lord, as we look at the next part of Ephesians chapter 1, would you help us to understand where the source of our nourishment and life truly comes from? Would you indeed nourish us with your Spirit? And Lord, as we’re nourished by your Spirit, we do also pray for Jason that you would heal him and bring him back here safely soon, that you remind him that we are surrounding him in prayer tonight and that you are with him. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
So here’s the thing. If you look at that picture on the back of the box and you say, okay, now I want to know what really is nourishing, and you start to say, well, I know fruit’s nourishing, you look that up. I know an egg is nourishing protein, I’ll look that up. A good piece of bread, okay, that’s a good carb with some dairy, some butter on it. That’s actually been found not to be as bad as people actually thought for a while. It’s really not so bad. Okay, I know that. Well, what do you know? I’ve hit all my nutritional goals. I don’t even need that sugary thing.
And what God’s calling us to do is to look at the picture of a healthy life, and as we do, we say, you know, all those things I keep putting in, thinking this is what’s going to balance me out and make life good, I don’t think they’re actually anything to do with making life good, because the complete breakfast is already laid out there.
Take a look at verse 2 of Ephesians 1. Paul says, “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ.” And you say, okay, we’ve been talking about nutrition and what we really need in life, and Tim, you read a greeting. Was I at mistake? No, no, not at all, because the challenge when we read Paul’s greetings is we read them and we know what Paul’s going to say, right? And if we want to kind of sound all spiritual, we’re going to say, write a letter to another church about some ministry we were doing. Someday we were doing a youth retreat or something, and Kathy’s coordinating it, and so she decides to write the local churches and say, hey, you know, we’re doing this youth retreat. So how do you sound Christian as you do it? Grace and peace to you from Little Hills Church, right? We’ll go ahead and do that.
I’ve actually, maybe you’ve done that, I’ve had to write sort of formal church letters at times in different ministries I’ve been in, and you put in some of that stuff and make it sound almost like Paul does. We know the form. Well, so did the ancient world. It was the form of an ancient letter. It wasn’t some weird, necessarily Christian form of greeting. It was the ancient way of writing a letter, but with a few tweaks that made it a weirdly Christian greeting, because when you wrote people in the ancient world, you’d say greetings, and you’d note who you are in there. You wouldn’t have it on the return address and just down at the bottom as you signed it. You noted there at the beginning of the letter. This is all part of the formula, but what’s notable is that Paul changes the words he uses in the formula.
Instead of saying greetings, which in Greek looks an awful lot like grace, but not quite, he uses the word grace. And he knows that people are going to see that. It’s a play on words, essentially. I like to do some punning. I know some of you do. It’s sort of like that. Paul’s essentially punning here. He knows that people are expecting the word for greeting, and he says, I’ll almost give it to you. It’s actually a related word, but I’m going to give you grace, because we need to talk about grace. Because the original word that ancient letters would use, well, it’s sort of like when we say I hope you’re well. It’s sort of formulaic still, but we also hopefully mean it when we say it to people. What’s it mean to say I hope you’re well? Well, it’s saying I’m not wishing anything bad on you. I’m looking with expectation, maybe you’re going to tell me that things are actually pretty well okay, and even if they aren’t okay, you’re going to tell me that they’re pretty well okay. But it doesn’t actually change anything if they’re not okay.
Let’s use a word that actually changes things. Because greetings, saying I hope you’re well, well, is that part of a balanced diet? Yes, I mean, it’s polite, it’s good to be polite, but you know what’s even more nourishing? Something that actually transforms us when things aren’t all right, that’s God’s grace. Paul here essentially, as he says grace and peace to you, peace being, grace being a play on the Greek greeting, peace being more of the Hebraic greeting, he sticks those two together and says, here, let me put out the platter for you. Here is a balanced life, a life living in God’s grace and his peace. Those are the two things, and that’s what I’m greeting you with. I’m not just greeting you, I’m not just saying I wish you were well. I am greeting you with the two things that make for a balanced life.
Quick thought, right, someone’s not doing well and everyone says, I’m thinking of you. Isn’t that a nice thing? Well, yeah, it’s nice to know that people are thinking of you, but we’ve all been in those really bad spots, right? Those places where we’re really hurting, we’re really struggling, we’re really sick. And someone says, hey, I’m thinking of you. And we get that little boost, right? Feel a little better for a moment, but it’s one of those sugar highs, because then they move on and we go back to our pain, our misery, and we start thinking about it again. And again, I’m not saying it’s not good to check in on people, it is, it’s not bad, in fact, it would be bad to not do that, but it’s not enough. We know that.
Paul brings something more. He doesn’t want to just give them a sugar high, hey, the Apostle Paul is thinking about us. Paul says, I want you to know that God is thinking about you, and that makes all the difference. Here are some complex carbs, here are those oats that are going to stick to your ribs and give you energy for the day, right? I mean, the good stuff. Because we need something deeper. We need something that’ll last. That’s exactly what Jesus offers us.
John chapter 14, verse 27: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Jesus says to his disciples, this is in the upper room, as he’s preparing them for his departure, he says, I’m departing, but I’m giving you my peace. I’m not really leaving you. You’re going to have my grace, you’re going to have my peace. And it’s something that’s going to last.
Every once in a while, I’ll get the opportunity to reconnect with a friend I haven’t talked to in a long time. We have that experience too, and it’s another one of those sugar highs, right? Because you think, you start reminiscing, you talk about all the old memories, and wasn’t this fun, wasn’t this great, wasn’t this horrible, but now we can laugh because it was a long time ago. And then it’s over, right? Maybe the friend traveled to town, or you traveled to that person’s town, you come back and it’s back to normal. Maybe even, it feels a little worse. Sometimes I feel a little worse after those times. Not that I don’t, not that I’d prefer not to have the opportunity, sometimes it feels a little worse because then I’m all reflective and kind of melancholy, oh, that was, you know, if only, but that time’s passed. It’s a sugar high again.
What kind of peace does Jesus give to us? It’s not a sugar high, it’s not a temporary, hey, let’s go visit Jesus on Sunday, and then, you know, Tuesday we think, wasn’t it nice when we had God’s grace and peace with us on Sunday night? No, this is what I’m giving you to stay. Grace being God’s undeserved favor, we don’t deserve it, and we’re talking about that more in Sunday School Express as we talk about justification tonight. We don’t deserve it, but God gives it. And as we dwell in and are nourished by that undeserved grace, what does that do in our lives? Well, it moves us to peace, peace with God, because if we have His grace, His undeserved favor, now we have peace with Him, we’re no longer separated from Him.
And Paul can say this about the Ephesians, because as we’ve already talked about last week, he’s writing as someone chosen, but despite his failings, despite his flaws, chosen by God to serve, he’s writing to a people chosen by God. And so you can say this is something that’s true for you. So you have peace with God. What does that mean? You can have internal peace, eternal peace, but also internal peace, because that peace means that we don’t have to be at war with ourselves. Even when we fail, we don’t have to be at war with ourselves, because we can understand that God is the one working in us. It doesn’t mean everything’s perfect, it doesn’t mean everything’s going to go smoothly, but it’s no longer a battle to see if somehow we can better ourselves enough that somehow, someday, God will love us. It’s already established He does.
Reminds me of the old late night host on Camo X, Jim White. Someone would call up. First call, Merlene knows exactly where I’m going with this. First caller would ask, how are you, and he’d say however he was. Second caller, what was he going to say? We’ve already established that, and then probably hang up. He was just this wonderfully cantankerous voice covering the continental United States at night on Camo X, but we’ve already established that. It’s already established. Our state before God is already established. We don’t have to ask, does God love me? Does God not love me? If you follow Jesus, if He’s your Savior, He loves you. That’s already established. Thankfully when we ask, He doesn’t hang up on us. He doesn’t even cantankerously say, we’ve already established that. But He might nudge us and say, we’ve already established that. You don’t need to worry. You’re my child. I love you.
So we have that peace internally. What does that mean then? Then we have peace with each other. And Paul is speaking to this as he’s greeting the Ephesians, right? Because they’re one particular body of the church, of the overall body. And Paul can write them in peace because what? Because we’re united together in Christ. The fact that he wasn’t a member of the Ephesian church, that wasn’t his home congregation, didn’t mean that somehow when he wrote them that he had to determine, well, are we really at peace or not? No. We should live as a people at peace with the larger body of Christ. Why? Because we’re in Christ. The very fact that we have peace in ourselves is because of Jesus. So how can we not be at peace with each other? That’s what He calls us to.
There’s a peace that lasts because of that already established fact of God’s grace. All the other ways we try to establish peace in this world, they don’t last. How often is it we try to find a way to reach peace, to experience peace, to live in peace, and it falls apart. I’m not telling anyone here anything new, right? Because we’ve all experienced it. If you’re alive, you’ve experienced this. Peace feels so passing. It comes and goes and comes and goes.
And a lot of times when we talk about peace, it sort of feels like the buildings from the 1904 World’s Fair. Now, of course, I wasn’t there at the 1904 World’s Fair. I’ve seen pictures. I’ve also seen Meet Me in St. Louis. So, you know, I know the basics. But you look at those pictures and the grand buildings, and there are a few left, right? There’s the main hall at Washington University. There’s the art museum. There’s the birdcage at the zoo. But for the most part, the buildings, grand, magnificent buildings that look like Roman architecture, they’re gone. They’re meant to be temporary. And you might say, I certainly say, well, why didn’t they leave? And they were beautiful. These giant columns and ornate carvings and so on, they were absolutely amazing. Why would you tear these down and bury the debris under the ground of Forest Park? Why would you do that? It’s because they didn’t build them to last. They looked magnificent. They looked like they could last as long as the buildings in Rome itself, but they weren’t that way. They were built with something called staff.
I didn’t know what staff was, but staff is a variant of plaster of Paris. And they pretty much used staff. All the different uses I found of it were for World’s Fairs, World Expos, where they were building grand buildings, but not intending them to stay up. And so what did they do? They didn’t carve out magnificent carvings. And they didn’t make them even out of concrete and molds. They took this easy, quick-drying, plaster of Paris-based solution and put it over, say, burlap and other things to help give it shape, put it in molds, and made these beautiful things that would only last for a short time. And even if they’d chosen not to tear them down, they would have come apart anyway. Some of them did. It was commented that the reason the art museum was built with something better than that is that those who owned the art wouldn’t loan it unless they built it out of something better, because they knew that these buildings were flammable. They’d go up in flames. In fact, the Missouri exhibit at the World’s Fair did go up in flames just a few weeks before the end of the fair. So they weren’t meant to last.
Worldly peace isn’t meant to last either. When we achieve peace, whether it’s peace between nations or peace between people that’s based on just worldly styles of getting along, here’s the problem. We’re using some plaster on burlap. And sometimes the weather will slowly chip away at it and what was once goodwill will eventually go back to being just sort of ruins because the weather tears it down. Sometimes it’ll be in a flame of glory. Someone lights a cigarette in it and it goes up in flames. But it doesn’t last.
As Paul greets the Ephesians, he wants to talk about peace that does last. He wants to say, like all of us, you’ve been searching for peace. And you’re chosen by God. You are those in the Lord Jesus. So here’s what you need to know. Here I’m writing you about a peace that lasts. It’s not a piece of plaster of Paris. It’s chiseled in the hardest of stone. Nothing can break it. No human hand even has a chisel strong enough to carve further in it. What God has carved is what is carved.
So why do we cover our lives in staff? Why do we put that plaster up over and over again somehow thinking that’s what’s going to make us happy and peaceful? I think sometimes it’s because we look at other people who have done some of that plastering. And just like those World’s Fair pictures, those buildings look spectacular. Every single one of those buildings is a beautiful spot in a strip mall. And if you just saw the picture, right? Our front door. I mean, I love our front door. It has so many happy memories. But you look at our little spot here from the outside, take a picture of that, and you put it next to one of those grand buildings like the Palace of the Liberal Arts from the World’s Fair. Oh, and look that up. It’s beautiful.
Which one would you say you’d like to have the church in? Oh, well, sure, we’ll take that Palace of the Liberal Arts and we’ll make a grand Little Hills church out of it. It’ll be great. That building wouldn’t even last for us. It looks good. We see that over and over again, people achieving peace in different ways, seemingly at least. Seemingly having their lives together. And we chase after those things because it looks so much grander than what we have. Sometimes God puts us in that strip mall and it may not look as beautiful, but here’s the thing. It is more beautiful than we can imagine because God’s the one who carved it. And if we look at the other that looks beautiful in this moment, well, that strip mall’s going to look a lot prettier when all the plaster starts falling off and it’s just a bunch of wet burlap.
What are we going to trust? Paul’s saying it’s time to move from the plaster to the quarry. Take a look at Ephesians 1:3. He was blessed to be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.
Paul wants us to understand that our nutrition comes from God and our nutrition takes us to God. That’s a really important part that I think we miss.
Verse 3, it doesn’t look that way if you look in your English Bible, but verse 3, if you look at it in the Greek, Paul knows how to write a long sentence. And just to give you the idea, if you try to read through it, try to read from verse 3 all the way to verse 14 without stopping because that’s Paul’s sentence. For anyone that might be joining us who was an English teacher, you’re thinking, run-on sentence, oh boy. But it was okay in Greek. That was acceptable. Paul still pushed the limits, but it was acceptable. And Paul is going to keep going. Why? Because Paul is going to talk about how much God has provided and what blessings we bring to God. He’s going to talk about that and then he’s just going to go flying through it. He wants to talk about it all. He doesn’t want to stop for a moment. He’s going to get it all in. He’s like that announcer at the end of the commercial on the radio that has to get through the fine print. He’s going to get it all in and he’s not going to stop, so no one’s going to interrupt him. It’s just going to get out there.
So when we read verse 3, what we should be thinking of is verse 3 is setting up, is teeing off everything that we’re going to see all the way through verse 14. And as we look at that, Paul starts with blessing God. What does that mean? It means coming to God with praise, coming to God in awe. What’s he going to do first? Bless be God. Because we want to understand what it is to be in God’s blessings. If we want to understand what it is to be before God, the first thing we do is we look to God and we’re in awe of Him. And you can take the Ephesians there without fear that it’ll somehow tear them apart or bring them to great depression, distress, their lesser state because He’s already established that already established fact, that really important fact, that unchangeable fact that they are chosen by God, they are part of God’s kingdom. And so you can say, okay, you already know where you are before God, so let’s just look to God now, see His holiness, and praise Him for it. Because we’re secure to do that.
We usually want to start with our wants instead. I do, right? How often do I think I should pray and the reason I think I should pray is because something is going wrong, something is uncertain, I’m worried about something, and sometimes that’s the right move, right? Someone comes in and says they’re struggling. On a Sunday here, you go over to the door and you see someone walk in and you say, how are you? And the person says, well, you know, I’ve just got this really bad medical diagnosis. You don’t need to pray a five-minute doxology about how great God is before you actually pray for the person. It’s okay just to come and pray for that thing. And indeed we see that in scripture, but when we’re talking about our overall balanced diet of interaction with God, we start with praise. We should keep coming back to praise. Sometimes we should pray in only praise. And certainly we should check our hearts if we’re just rushing through to get to the part where we can say, God, now here’s what I want. Here’s what I need.
We really want to understand what it is to be in God’s grace. We need to start with who He is and celebrate who He is. And that’s a good thing because God isn’t going to leave us far away kind of peering through the binoculars at this wonderful, amazing, gracious God who’s too distant for us to ever touch. He’s drawing us to Him.
I like what Francis Fulk says. He says, life now, if it is life in Christ, is the heavenly realm. Life now, if it is life in Christ, is in the heavenly realm. We think of heaven as something distant, something to be dreamt about, something to be hoped for for the future. But if we are in Jesus and we’re focused on who He is, we’re already in His presence. That’s the joy of Pentecost. God’s presence is here. So if we want to know where heaven is, if we want to know where the glory of God is, we don’t need to look far away. He’s right here.
That’s why Paul goes and he praises God because God’s right here with Him. He’s right there with the Ephesians. He’s right here with us now. And so we don’t need to wait and we shouldn’t wait and we wouldn’t wait if we visually saw the awe and wonder and majesty of God before us. We’d say, oh, I think it’s time to praise God. But His awe and wonder and majesty is right here, right now. He answers the prayer for His presence to be near. He draws us into the heavenly presence even as we are here.
What do we pray in the Lord’s Prayer? Matthew 6:10: Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God is faithful to answer that prayer. He doesn’t just have Christians over the millennia praying that prayer and saying, you know, someday maybe I’ll do that.
Every time God’s people gather together, every time God’s people are praying to Him, every time we’re walking through life as followers of Jesus, we are in His heavenly presence. Life, if it’s lived in Christ, is a life in the heavenly realm. Notably, that’s not about heaven being more like earth.
Sometimes, actually, I think one time dragged heaven down into earth and do that by whatever earthly means possible. And if it sullies heaven a little bit, that’s okay, there’s enough glory on it, right? It’s fine, we’ll just pull it down. We use earthly methods, we cut corners, cheat a little bit, break a few laws. It doesn’t really matter, right? Because we’re getting heaven on earth.
And that’s not what God wants. And it’s really a lie that the evil one wants us to believe that somehow we need to bring heaven to earth when the truth is God’s presence is already here. He wants us to live in that.
How can that be? We live in a fallen, broken world. We know that, right? Sometimes we know that more than others. If you’re in the hospital tonight with a kidney stone, you know that. I’m sure Jason, if he happened to be—I’m sure Jason, if he happened to be listening tonight, I think he might not be would be my guest, but if he were, he’d be saying amen right now because he knows that right now. And we’re in those places and we know that right now. God’s spirit is with us.
Acts 1:8, Jesus says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria.”
Whatever it looks like right now, whatever the messiness of our current moment is—our lives, our city with all the tornadoes and such and damage from storms, our world and all the unrest in it—it doesn’t change the fact that heaven is right here with us. It’s right here. Our heavenly king. Our heavenly king.
Kind of interesting this week. You may have heard there was a slight spat online between two powerful figures this week. Maybe you heard about that? I don’t know. I know it was kind of an oddball thing, but, you know, just the richest man in the world and the president of the United States arguing over social media. I mean, nothing to see, right?
It’s kind of interesting watching people’s reactions to that. I saw multiple people say it felt like a divorce. They felt like they were the kids in a divorce. And here were their parents, and they’re arguing and throwing everything at each other and the pain they felt. Why? Because they’ve been putting all this hope in these figures that somehow they’re going to make everything right. Everything’s going to be good. We’re going to fix the wrongs of the world. And now they’re arguing and tearing down each other, and what are we going to do?
That was so telling, that divorce image kept coming up. It was really telling. And it’s spot on to one of the problems we have in life, which is that we keep looking for substitute earthly parents that are big and powerful and are going to take care of our problems.
Here’s the thing. We got to see it in social media this week, but certainly that kind of falling out is not anything particularly new or different. If you look back through history, I read a great article this week listing presidents who were at times friends and then enemies and then maybe friends again and then enemies again with various titans of the industry. Nothing really new. It just was very public.
That should tell us something. No matter how much we might seek after someone who’s big and powerful and strong and we feel like, oh, this person’s going to champion what I want, they’re going to do this, the very fact that when it happens and when it breaks down and when we see this sort of thing, we think, wait, but there’s a divorce going on. This hurts. It tells us we’re looking to the wrong parent.
Because no earthly substitute parent we come up with is going to right the wrongs. None of them are going to bring us into the heavenly kingdom and allow us to experience God’s glory. There’s a truth to what we’re searching for. We do need a father. But he’s a heavenly one. All the others are putting up plaster. They can come and go and be good for a moment, but it won’t last.
Asking which earthly power is the one that’s going to quench our needs and fill us up and nourish us and give us that balanced diet is like asking, should I eat golden grams or frosted flakes or maybe Lucky Charms? It doesn’t really matter. None of them are going to do the trick. It doesn’t matter if I go Team Kellogg’s or Team Post or Team General Mills. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or Republican. It doesn’t matter if we’re looking to earthly solutions for a heavenly problem. It’s not going to work.
And just like 2,000 years ago, the problem is that many of us, even those of us who are Christians, at some level are looking for an earthly Messiah, someone to right the wrongs here. Because we think that Earth is really, as it is, the kingdom of this world is really what we need to fix and where we need to stake our claim to and where we need to find our hope. And in that we’re reading frosted flakes. Because anyone that even writes it for a time, it won’t last. The best leaders in history still died and their empire still fell apart.
But God offers a heavenly balance, a real balance, the real nutrition that we need. And as Paul writes and he greets the Ephesians and he says these things, they’re going through the same things we are. They saw leaders rise and fall. They hoped that somehow it would right the wrongs of their time. People who said they would enlighten them and make them wise and popular. People who said they’d make them rich or famous. They saw these things too. They had their spats with friends and family. They experienced the brokenness of life just like we did.
And there was only one thing that was going to balance it out and give them the nourishment they needed. There was only one who was going to do that. And nothing’s changed.
So as Paul writes to them, he says don’t feast on the things of this world that feel like they’re going to somehow make things right. Feast on the Father’s balanced diet. You don’t need to tell me if you’ve been eating Post or Kellogg’s. Because either way, what you need to do is feast on something else. You need the Father’s balanced diet brought by the Son and delivered by the Spirit.
And that’s what we need today too. And on Pentecost, and on Pentecost Sunday as we reflect on the fact that God sent the Spirit into the world, here is the truth that we can hold on to. That balanced diet is here. It’s now. The Son’s work bought and paid for on the cross, it’s here. It’s now. And the Spirit, we’re looking for what we can hold on to in this world. It’s the heavenly one in this world.
May we do that today. May we do that today. Would you pray for me, please?
Father, we come before you as people who have big and small fears, big and small struggles, moments where things feel stable and moments where things feel like they’re coming apart. Oh Lord, would you help us not to trust the things of this world, the leaders of this world, the resources of this world? Lord, every time we turn to the tools of this world, what do we find? We find those tools crumble. Those tools wash away.
But Lord, we know that you are permanent, that you are true, and so would you help us to trust in you all the more in this week ahead, that we would be a people who say, there’s all kinds of ugly stuff going on in this world, there’s ugly stuff that I’m facing. But I know there’s one who makes things right. There’s one who can nourish me. I trust in him. I want those around me to know that he is the one who offers a balanced nourishment. Lord, would you use our lives to give that testimony we pray? Amen.
Start the Conversation