God, in His wisdom, has chosen to glorify Himself through saving sinners. This is wonderful news! The following is a post I wrote several months back as I was studying through Ephesians. Since this is one of my favorite topics, I thought I would repost it here. I’d love to here your thoughts on it.

There are some major, overarching themes in Ephesians that are fantastic and empowering when we take some time and examine them. I’m not going to examine them all in detail in this post, but we’ll take a look at a few of them.

• God’s glory (majesty, holiness, apart-ness). – Eph. 1:6, 12, 14
• God’s wisdom in working His plan and purpose. – Eph 1:5, 8, 9, 11
• God’s love for His children and the blessings we have in Christ. – Eph. 1:3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13-14, 19

In looking at these verses and themes, if you pull any of them out of context or out of the whole and base your doctrine or theology on those, you could run into one of a couple of ditches. Read more →

There are some major, overarching themes in Ephesians that are fantastic and empowering when we take some time and examine them. I’m not going to examine them all in detail in this post, but we’ll take a look at a few of them.

• God’s glory (majesty, holiness, apart-ness). – Eph. 1:6, 12, 14
• God’s wisdom in working His plan and purpose. – Eph 1:5, 8, 9, 11
• God’s love for His children and the blessings we have in Christ. – Eph. 1:3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13-14, 19

In looking at these verses and themes, if you pull any of them out of context or out of the whole and base your doctrine or theology on those, you could run into one of a couple of ditches.

Bless-Me Theology

You could end up thinking that God is all about you or us as humans. This theology focuses on God’s blessings toward us and thinks that God exists to bless and make much of us. God is all about making you feel good, making you successful, blessing you with a great job or lots of material things. Some things you might hear people who believe this way say are:

• “Just look at all the riches we have in Him.”
• “I’m a child of the King, therefore I deserve this or that.”
• “We are blessed with blessings in the heavenlies.”
• “See God’s love for you. He would never let anything bad happen to you. It’s not his will.”

When God is all about you, you are all about you and everyone else should be all about you also. When this is your attitude, if you don’t get your way, you get angry at the people around you and upset with God because He didn’t give you what you wanted or “deserve.”  Of course we would never say this is what we believe, but our actions, or rather reactions, when we don’t get what we want sometimes prove otherwise.

Read more →