Living Hope

20 applications from Ephesians 1:3-4

1.         “Blessed”

You have reasons for worshiping God no matter what is happening in your life.

2.         “Be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”

There is a complexity to God that is important you work on understanding and appreciating if you are going to worship Him enthusiastically and biblically.

3.         “Who has blessed”

It is sinful for you as a believer to think or act like you have not been given anything by God.

4.         “Who has blessed”

As a believer you do not come to God first hoping for God to give you something, but instead as someone who has already been given something – beyond your wildest expectations.

5.         “Us”

While God has been very good to you as an individual, it is important you do not lose sight of the fact that God’s great plan is bigger than just you.  He is seeking the long term good of the church.

6.         “With every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”

It is not only wrong for you to think you have not been given anything.  It is wrong for you to think or act like you have not been given much by God.  To have every spiritual blessing is to be rich.  When you act as if you were poor, you are forgetting who you are.

7.         “In Christ”

Because every single good thing in your life comes from God as a result of Jesus, while you should be confident as a believer, you should also be extremely humble and thankful.

8.         When you are in difficult circumstances you should follow Paul’s example and take time to meditate and enjoy what you know to be true about who God is and what God is doing and what you know about the plan He is accomplishing in this world.

9.         When you are in difficult circumstances it is tempting when you talk to others to try to find a way to focus their attention on you, but Paul does not do that.  Instead he seeks to encourage others to focus their attention on God.  

 10.      “Just as He chose us in Him”

God’s choosing of believers is an example of God’s goodness and a reason to worship and if I think of it as something other than that I am not thinking of it correctly.

11.       “Just as He chose us in Him”

You should always feel a deep sense of dependency on Jesus because there has never been a time in the history of the entire universe where any of your blessings came apart from Him.

12.       “Before the foundation of the world”

If you ever wonder if the church is an important part of God’s plan you need to see that it goes before the universe.  In other words, God did not create the universe and say how should I fill it, but chose the church and then went about designing the universe.

13.       “Before the foundation of the world”

When you begin to become worried about the success of the church, you should remember that God’s work in the church is not a passing whim but instead part of a decision He made before the foundation of the world.  

14.       Because God’s choice of you happened before the foundation of the world and it happened only in Christ, it is obviously very foolish for you to think of your salvation as being based on what you deserve for living your life a certain way.

15.       When you begin to feel insecure about God’s plan for your life, you need to remember this is not something he just started working on but instead something He has been deliberately moving towards for a long time.   

16.       “So that you might be holy and blameless before Him…”

While the world around you minimizes the importance of holiness, God does not.  Your holiness is an important issue to God.  He chose you for it.

17.       “So that…”

When you look at your life and wonder if you are ever going to be holy before God, here you see that it is not just wanting to be holy but God choosing you for the purpose of being holy and if God wants that to happen, you can be sure it is going to happen.

18.       “So that…”

When you look at the church and you begin to become discouraged because you think how can this work, how can I help these people become holy, you need to step back and enjoy the fact that God is much more interested in the church’s victory than you could ever be.

19.       “We might be holy and blameless…”

When Paul thought about God’s eternal plan for the church, one of the things that excited him most was the fact that we as a church will be holy and blameless before God some day.  While there were many other things he could have mentioned, like He chose us to be rich, or He chose us to be pain free, holiness and blamelessness were especially precious to Paul and they should be to you as well.  If you were to make a list of life’s absolute greatest blessings, would being pure and holy come to your mind?  This is something you should long for, for yourself and others as well.

20.       “Before God”

Knowing that you will stand before the Creator of the Universe and He will look at you and your life and consider you clean, right, and without blame should make what other people think about you matter much, much less.  Why spend your life trying to gain the approval of other people when you already know you have and will continue to have the approval of God.  

“To be spiritually minded … is to have our minds really exercised with delight about heavenly things … especially Christ himself as at the right hand of God.

Spiritual mindedness is developed, exercised and reinforced by meditation.  By … .  meditation, I intend the thought of some subject spiritual and divine, with the fixing, forcing, and ordering of our thoughts about it, with a design to affect our own hearts and souls with the matter of it… . In meditation our principal aim is the affecting of our own hearts and minds with love, delight, and humiliation… .

Because persons are generally at a great loss in this duty of meditation … I shall … give briefly two or three rules for the directing of believers to a right performance of this great duty, and they are these:

Meditate on God with God, that is, when we would undertake thoughts and meditations of God, his excellencies, his properties, his glory, his majesty, his love, his goodness, let it be done in a way of speaking to God, in a deep humiliation and abasement of our souls.

Meditate on the word in the word; that is, in the reading of it, consider the sense in the particular passages, … looking to God for help, guidance, and direction, in the discovery of his mind and will therein, and then labour to have our hearts affected with it.

What we come short of in evenness and constancy in our thoughts … let it be made up … by frequent returns of the mind to the subject proposed to be meditated upon.”

John Owen

We will be meeting in small groups this Sunday morning before our service in the afternoon.  These small groups are scattered throughout Pretoria.  As our church grows, we hope these small groups will become more and more an important part of each church member’s lives.  Here are some reasons why:

1.   Small groups provide an opportunity to get to know other believers in your local church in a more in depth way.

2.   Small groups provide an opportunity to think specifically about the truths you are learning from the Scripture and to talk with other believers about how to apply these truths to your everyday lives.

3.   Small groups provide an opportunity for you to show the love of Christ to others and enjoy the love of Christ as it is shown to you.

4.   Small groups provide an opportunity for you to use your spiritual gifts in service to others.

5.   Small groups provide an opportunity for you to work at becoming a biblical friend to others within the local church.

6.   Small groups provide an opportunity to receive godly leadership from leaders within the church.

7.   Small groups provide an opportunity to invite unbelievers to an informal setting where they can learn more about the gospel.

8.   Small groups provide an opportunity to think with other believers how to make Jesus look great in your local community.

We don’t know when Jesus is coming back, but we know for sure He is.

1.  The trustworthiness of the Bible demands it. 

In the Scripture God promises hundreds of times that Jesus will return and God always tells the truth.

2.  The justice of God requires it.

God hates sin and will not leave it unpunished.  He is sending His Son to judge it.

3.  The love Jesus has for His people necessitates it.

Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus comforted His disciples by promising to come for them.  His love for His people has not diminished.  He will return.

4.  The hopes of all God’s people depend on it.

Everything we long for as believers is based on Jesus’ future return.  If He doesn’t come back, all of our hopes are dashed.

5.  The purpose of the universe calls for it.

The church, the world and the entire universe is about the exaltation of Jesus Christ.  The last time the unbelieving world saw Jesus He was hanging on the cross.  God the Father is not going to leave it like that.  Everyone in the entire world will see that Jesus Christ is King.