Take Hold Of Your Spiritual Blessings

“Take hold of your Spiritual Blessing!”

Delivered 25 January 2009

Associate Pastor Allan H. Kircher

Ephesians 1:3-6, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.4for he shoes us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love.5 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.”

I want you to see that nothing has been held back. God has already-- not gradually and not at some future date--but ‘has’ blessed us with every spiritual blessing.

Not some, and not to some lesser degree that will increase as we grow more spiritually mature.

God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.

Some scholars claim this letter was written in an attempt to set out some of the greatest truths for which the early Christians stood for in their belief.

Paul spent his life teaching Gentiles that they could be Christians without becoming Jewish converts.

Paul says in his letter, we are all one, come together for the unity of Christ Jesus. Can you imagine the difficult job Paul had to do?

It is God who brings about the reconciliation of Jew and Gentile in the church. It is God who brings restoration to our families and it is God who repairs us individually each day.

To Paul this is a great big deal. For in God there is room, not only for men of widely different races, viewpoints and prejudices, but also that God has the power to solve all the problems of mankind.

To Paul this is a great big deal, to bring into the unity and harmony with God, not only all earthly social and family life, but all the myriads of beings in the infinite unseen universe.

This is why he wrote this, Paul had the spiritual blessings of Christ, the same spiritual blessing we all have in Christ Jesus.

This is amazing when you stop and remember who Paul actually was when we first met him in the pages of the Bible.

He was named Saul and was an antagonist to the Church of Jesus Christ.

His life is an amazing example of the power of God’s grace to change even the most aggressive foe of the gospel.

Paul wrote this from prison in Rome near the end of his life.

This is one of the four “Prison Epistles” and it was written in 60 A D, the others being Philippians, Colossians, Philemon. Paul spent three years in Ephesus. A simple bearer or messenger named Tychicus “tick-a-tis” circulated the letter throughout Ephesus and neighboring cities.

Paul expresses the importance of Christian growth in knowledge in this letter.

The circulation of the Ephesians letter tells us today of the strong emphasis on the divine action in bringing salvation. It has changed none!

We read today of the word of God and share the same eternal glory as the Gentile and the Jew did so long ago.

A mere 30 years after the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Ephesians letter was written. And it is as fresh today as it was then.

It expresses to us today as Christians that only faithful believers have life “in Christ Jesus.”

As a matter of fact the terms “in Christ Jesus,” “in the Lord,” “in him,” etc occur 160 times in Paul’s writings and 36 times in Ephesians.

Right now in our state of mind as believers, we now live and act in the realm of Christ Jesus and we are spiritually blessed.

If we are living In Christ, we have conscious communion with our Lord and in this relationship our very lives are seen as the life of Christ living in us.

Galatians 2:20 tells me as a believer, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

This personal relationship with Christ is the most important thing in Christian experience.

You see, we cannot go any further in our walk if we are not in Christ Jesus.

Union with Christ comes as a gift of God through faith.

The Bible contrasts our new life “in Christ” with our old regenerated life “in Adam.”

Whereas the old life is characterized by disobedience, sin, condemnation and death, our new life “in Christ” is characterized by salvation, life in the Spirit, abundant grace, righteousness and eternal life.

How many times in our life have we done things that were displeasing to God?