4/30/20 I Devotion

Ephesians 3:14-21

Therefore, as a prisoner for the Lord, I encourage you to live as people worthy of the call you received from God. 2 Conduct yourselves with all humility, gentleness, and patience. Accept each other with love, 3 and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together. 4 You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope. 5 There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 and one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all. 7 God has given his grace to each one of us measured out by the gift that is given by Christ. 8 That’s why scripture says, When he climbed up to the heights, he captured prisoners, and he gave gifts to people. 9 What does the phrase “he climbed up” mean if it doesn’t mean that he had first gone down into the lower regions, the earth? 10 The one who went down is the same one who climbed up above all the heavens so that he might fill everything. 11 He gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. 12 His purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ 13 until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son. God’s goal is for us to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. 14 As a result, we aren’t supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to deliberately mislead others. 15 Instead, by speaking the truth with love, let’s grow in every way into Christ, 16 who is the head. The whole body grows from him, as it is joined and held together by all the supporting ligaments. The body makes itself grow in that it builds itself up with love as each one does its part.

Devotion

We pray “about” a lot of things. In our western culture, prayer generally is viewed as a personal and private practice of faith. We may pray for others, but we rarely pray with others outside of church. We often pray about problems and concerns more than we pray from a place of adoration or thanksgiving. We fill our prayer time with what we want to say to God, and leave little time for God to say anything to us. Prayer is one of the most important spiritual practices that connects us with God and with one another.
 
Our passage in Ephesians today is a prayer. We have read Paul’s blessing to believers in Chapter one, his hymn of reconciliation and unity from chapter 2, and now his Prayer for the gentiles in chapter 3.  The prayer in Ephesians is a wonderful reminder of the way we should pray, not just on our own, but together in Christian community. It is a prayer of faith and hope, love and promise. The very things we and the rest of our world desperately need.

Paul prays for us to have a faith that is firmly established in love and community, and then prays that we will know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge. I think we, as a society, take pride in what we know. We place emphasis on education, and learning new things. My husband is the worst at knowing useless facts. He's the perfect partner for a trivia night. It is kind of funny the things we remember. When I read this passage about knowing the love of Christ beyond knowledge, I wondered how is that possible? Isn’t knowing something knowledge? How can you know beyond knowledge?
 
So, I began to do a little research. The word ‘know’ means to learn, to come to know…especially through experience. Paul is wanting us to experience the Love of Christ, not just know about it, see it, witness it….he wants us to be part of it. Knowing about something and knowing something are different….and that difference is experience.

Today it is my prayer that you experience God's love in real ways. 

Amber Lea Gray, Associate Pastor