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Posts tagged with: Ephesians

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Honor Your Father and Mother in Memory

Before we leave the command in Ephesians to honor our parents, one borrowed from the Ten Commandments, I’d like to share something I’ve learned about honoring one’s parents even when they are no longer alive. People have many different ways of doing this. Some visit the graves of their parents on special occasions. Others hold on to keepsakes that remind them of their mom or their dad. Others offer regular prayers of thanks for their parents. Many pass on memories of their parents to their own children and grandchildren. The possibilities are limitless.

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A little boy laughing on a bench with a bible

Honor Your Father and Mother

Ephesians 6:1 is the first Bible verse I ever learned in Sunday School. My family and I had recently moved to Glendale, California. On a hot Sunday morning in September 1963, we visited the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. I joined the first grade department for a short worship service, after which several boys and I followed Miss Kane into a small classroom. There, we were introduced to Ephesians 6:1 in the King James Version: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.” In the next week, I dutifully memorized this verse. I hope I also put it into practice!

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The Act of Balancing Opposition Pt. 2

It’s not that we don’t expect things that challenge our beliefs to happen, or that we want all things to be perfect, but we do put boundaries on our acceptance of “other” or the unusual. We like to think we live in a world of up or down, black or white, wrong or right. But that’s not the world we actually live in from God’s perspective.

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The Act of Balancing Opposition Pt. 1

The portfolio of God is very diverse, and its nature is atmospheric and embedded with context about unity, harmony, and connection. The most powerful being in the universe, our God, loves compliments, attraction, and relationship.

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Inside of a church sanctuary

What Can I Do to Love the Flawed Church?

One way to love the church is to be careful with criticism. I’ve been on the receiving end of church criticism and I can tell you it hurts, big time. Sometimes criticism is deserved, of course. I’m not saying we should sit back and ignore real problems and shortcomings. There is a time and place for critique. And there is a way to do it. When we point out what we perceive to be wrong with our church, we should do so in a way that is consistent with Ephesians 4:15, where we are called to speak the truth in love.

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How Do We Know that Christ Loves the Flawed Church?

Christ calls each of us to join him in work of church renewal, not only because the church is central to his plan for the cosmos, but also because he cherishes the church. Thus, rather than taking potshots at the bride of Christ, shouldn’t we find ways to affirm and embrace her? Rather than separating ourselves from the imperfect, wounded bride of Christ, shouldn’t we join Christ in his work of washing, cleaning, feeding, and caring for her? If Christ loves the church so much that he gave up himself for her, shouldn’t we seek to imitate his self-giving love in our relationship with the church?

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Stained glass windows

Christ Loves the Church in Spite of the Church’s Flaws and Failures

It’s also common today for believers to minimize the value of the church, to claim that we need Jesus, not the church. Post on Facebook that you love Jesus but not the church and you’ll get a slew of “Likes.” Yet if we were convinced that Jesus loves the church would we be so quick to reject his beloved? “But,” one might fairly protest, “the church the exists today is such a mess. The actual church is nothing like what Christ intended it to be. I can love the church as a theological ideal, perhaps, but the real church is just not lovable.” To be sure, the church has plenty of flaws. I’ve seen them, felt them, bemoaned them, and added to them. But does this allow me to fail to love the church?

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Black and white image of a cross on top of the steeple of a church

Christ’s Self-Giving Love for the Church

Ephesians 5:21-33, though offering instruction on the marriage relationship, actually has more to say about Christ and his relationship with the church than it does about husbands and wives. This passage reveals truths about Christ and the church that are not found explicitly anywhere else in Scripture. In fact, this is the only place in the Bible where it says plainly that Christ loves the church. We could derive this by implication from many other biblical texts, of course. But Ephesians 5:25 puts it plainly: “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.”

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Three young women praying together

Share Your Gratitude with Others!

When I hear what you’re thankful for, not only can I join you in your gratitude, but also I am reminded of gifts for which I also am thankful and may not have remembered until I heard from you.

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Double Your Delight in Thanksgiving Dinner

Gratitude is like this. It’s a kind of slowing down. It’s attending to things rather than simply consuming them. It’s acknowledging our debts, counting our blessings. Gratitude heightens our awareness of good things. It enables us, in a way, to enjoy them all over again.

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Giving Thanks for Everything? Really?

Yes—in all things, even the hard things in life, we can thank the Lord. Thanking doesn’t mean pretending or denying. It doesn’t mean ignoring pain and loss. It does mean recognizing God’s grace in the midst of a broken and hurting world. It means trusting that God, in his mysterious way, is working out all things for good, even when we don’t understand what he’s doing. It’s seeing God’s gifts and acknowledging God’s grace.

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Always Giving Thanks? Really?

It’s unlikely that the Paul uses the phrase “always giving thanks” to mean “giving intentional, verbal thanks every single moment.” Surely there were times when his verbal skills were focused on something other than articulating prayers of gratitude. But this qualification should not let us off the hook. I don’t mean to say, “Oh, Paul didn’t really mean it, so let’s all go back to our ordinary, thankless lives.” On the contrary, I believe Paul meant at least two things when he said we should be “always giving thanks,” two things that can challenge and invigorate us.

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Let the Spirit Inspire Your Gratitude

On this coming Thursday, citizens of the United States will celebrate Thanksgiving, a national holiday dedicated to thanking God for his blessings. In much of our society, however, this holiday is actually filled more with feasting and football than with gratitude. In order to reset this balance for my Life for Leaders readers, I thought I’d focus our reflections during this week on the theme of thanksgiving. Whether you live in the U.S. or not, giving thanks to God should always be in season.

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Christ Cares for His Church . . . Through You

So, even as we celebrate that fact that, as members of Christ’s body, he is caring for us, we must also own the fact that we are essential to Christ’s system of body care. Christ wants to work through you to nurture his body. He does this by giving you empowering gifts through the Spirit, by using your literal body to communicate his love for others. Christ loves the lonely person in your church, but your arms are the ones through whom he will embrace that person.

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Light shining into the windows of a very clean church

Vision of a Radiant Church

These days, it’s pretty common for people to speak poorly of the church. This is understandable, given all the ways the church is struggling in our current cultural context. These are not exactly glory days for the church. But, while we ought to pay close attention to the shortcomings of the church, we ought also to allow the vision of Ephesians to lift our eyes to the future, to see the church that Christ is forming through his sovereign grace.

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