May 27th 2007 Organic Unity: Kindness that Imitates God (Ephesians 4.25-5.2) Message #4

People love to imitate other people–rock stars, movie stars, heroes and rebels–but that imitation often leaves us isolated from reality and from other people (after all, it’s hard to think of an example of a rock star or a rebel whose life is full of healthy and meaningful interpersonal relationships). The Imitation of Christ does exactly the opposite–full of Christ, we find meaning in engaging one another. No more pretense, no more lies or wannabees–in Christ, we all find our connection in one another.

May 20th 2007 Organic Unity: The Call of Adolescence (Ephesians 4.1-24) Message #3

Immaturity is exhausting. Being around someone who acts like a child is one of the most trying experiences for anybody, and the Apostle Paul takes great pain in this text to show us that God expects more from us than spiritual nursery rhymes and petty arguments. If, indeed, His blood flows through us then we have a mandate for growing up “healthy in God and robust in love.”

May 13th 2007 Organic Unity: God’s Secret Plan Unveiled at Last (Ephesians 3.1-7) Message #2

The Mystery of Christ is the unity of the Church. There–I said it. It took God almost 6,000 years of recorded history to lay that plan out for us all to see, and it only took me 10 words to wreck the surprise and reduce that mystery to a slogan. Thankfully, there’s more to it than that, and we’ll spend today looking a little deeper at the mystery revealed in scripture.

May 6th 2007 Organic Unity: Believer’s Past, Present, and Future (Ephesians 1.1-2.22) Message #1

It’s nice to know where you came from, and–in these early chapters–Paul gives us our spiritual heritage. He lets us into the mystery of how much we owe and to Whom.

ORGANIC UNITY
What we know about God and what we do for God have a way of getting broken apart in our lives. At the moment the organic unity of belief and behavior is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians joins together what has been torn apart in our sin-wrecked world. He “sets” our belief in God into our behavior before God so that the bones–belief and behavior–knit together and heal. Now that we know that the energy of reconciliation is the heart of the universe, it is imperative that we join in vigorously to bring everything together and summed up in God. Ephesians describes a long-range plan to do just that.
(write up adapted from the introduction to Ephesians by Eugene Peterson for The Message)