Let No One Decieve You
Posted by Pastor Pat on December 8, 2009
Read Ephesians 5:1-6
There is an element of perplexity offered to us in the text. Is it possible for those who have the inheritance to become disinherited? Is it possible for those who are citizens of His kingdom to be expelled from its realm? There is a weight to what faces us in this text that must not and cannot be negated. Paul speaks to the Ephesians and reminds them that if in Adam behavior characterizes their lives then they are in real danger of losing their inheritance and becoming outcasts of His kingdom.
Let us attempt to put his charge in its literary context. Paul speaks of those whom God as a Trinity secured to become sons and daughters by fully engaging all that He is in His essence and all He has at His disposal. All the resources of God were deployed for the purpose of redeeming the sinner’s debt and adopting the orphaned. Everything in chapters 1 through 3 speaks to the new man created when God acted. It is from this tree that unity, purity and charity now flow. In the absence of individual purity and charity, the unity secured by the cross is in jeopardy of failing. This failure refers to its manifestation in the community of faith. Nothing can ever undo what God did. Yet it is possible to speak and live so poorly as to significant obscure the manifestation of the cross in one’s community of faith.
