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Andrew Fountain –
?
What is the central
message of Christianity?
Four Spiritual Laws
Anyone hear of the Four Spiritual laws produced by a student organization called “Campus Crusade for Christ”?
Four Spiritual Laws
God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.
Man is sinful and separated from God. Therefore, he cannot know and experience God’s love and plan for his life.
Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin. Through him you can know and experience God’s love and plan for your life.
We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord; then we can know and experience God’s love and plan for our lives.
What’s Good?
Positive
Good news
It does imply you have to follow Jesus by the expression “receive Jesus as Lord”
What’s not so Good?
All about what’s in it for you (Very man-centred)
All about this life. Absolutely nothing about the future
Does the Bible have anything like that in any kind of organized form?
Ephesians is one of the last of Paul’s letters, probably written from prison
I’m planning to do a short series from this book
In it Paul crystalizes down the core of his teaching to it’s very essence
He wrote Colossians at pretty much the same time, and they are extremely similar, parallel in places
Ephesians is slightly fuller, so we will focus on that
Paul’s summary
The supernatural power of his Spirit living in us
His love freely lavished on us
Destiny as a new creation, filled with God’s presence
How do I know that this is his summary?
He spends the first half of the letter explaining it and then summarizes it:
Ephesians 3:16-19
to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Power, love and destiny
He actually begins the meat of his epistle with the almost identical three things, but in reverse order
Ephesians 1:18-19
what is the hope to which he has called you,
what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, [it turns out that Jesus & the Father are our inheritance]
19and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe
The Spirit we have now as a foretaste of our inheritance
He brings us a taste of the love of Jesus
He puts the cry “Abba Father”, which means “Daddy” on our lips
then as Paul begins to develop the story, it goes something like this
This world is broken, fatally damaged, poisoned
Sin has come in and spoiled everything
people
the environment
There is really no hope for it
God is not going to patch it up to keep it going, but eventually will destroy it
God has started a new creation in Jesus
A new kind of being
When Jesus rose from the dead, his new body was not made of dust, but of Spirit
Colossians calls him the “firstborn from the dead”
He was the first of the New Creation
We get from the old to the new by hanging onto Jesus
He died in the old, and rose in the new
Ephesians 2:1–10
continue
Union with Jesus
But we have to live in the old!
How do we do that?
Stylites
We have one foot in the old and one in the new
Actually the outer is the old and inner is the new
We aim to bring the new into the old, not to rescue it, but to reflect the new
Medicine: reflecting God’s desire to bring in a time when there is no more sickness
Of course supernatural healing
But not always because...
Business
Science
Relationships
What Paul does in the rest of the book is to bring the new creation into relationships
Marriage—In the New it will be Christ and the church, so let’s reflect that back into the present
Work
Servants—In the New you will be serving Christ, so reflect that into the present
Government
Farming God’s way (Foundations for farming)
Can they defeat famine?
No, but they can reflect the new
inner lives
Ephesians 4:22-24
Lay aside the old man who is being corrupted in accordance with deceitful desires,
to be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
and to put on the new man who has been created in God’s image—in righteousness and holiness that comes from truth.
when you go out into the world, you are taking a little piece of the new creation inside you—let if reflect out to this world, as a sign that there is something better, newer, coming
