June 2007 - Elder's Corner - Events & News - Evangelical Free Church of Huntington Beach

Elder’s Corner July 2007

As we were being led through the book of Ephesians by the pulpit sermons, some things seemed to stand up from the pages of the text waving and shouting, Look at me! Pay attention to this! Listen Up!

But one of the quieter verses was 3:1.

Paul there writes: "For this reason, I Paul, a prisoner of Christ for you Gentiles--." It could just as well be (and in some translations, is) translated, "For this reason, I, Paul, am a prisoner of Christ." How odd that Paul writes this while he was physically imprisoned under Roman guard.

And, this seems quite a step down from his self-description in verse 1:1; there he refers to himself as an "apostle." What is the "reason" he demotes himself to a prisoner?

Is it the whole complex of grand theological truths which Paul delineates in Eph. 1:3-14, encompassing election, predestination, redemption, faith, God's will, and the Holy Spirit? .

Or, maybe, what he covers in the famous passage on salvation by grace through faith in 2:1-10?

Could it be his famous legal appeal granted him as a Roman citizen as recorded in Acts 25:11-12?

Maybe, but I think that a better basis is indicated in the verses following 3:1. If you look at 3:2-21 Paul enlarges on what God Himself gave to him: the grace of a vocation or calling. Today we hear "vocation" and think of a job or possibly a career; not so in the Bible. For Paul the Jew, he had been given an awesome calling to mission: he was chosen to tell people who were not part of God's original chosen ones just exactly what God was doing for them through Christ. But not only that! .

He got to reveal to them that God was making known His mysteries not only through Paul to the Gentiles, but [in a sentence that proves that we, now, are engaged in influencing not only this world, but the spiritual world swirling around us] through the Church to the demons and spiritual powers in high/heavenly, places! How incredibly mind-blowing is that!?

Furthermore, and here we see better the reason why Paul had no problem being a prisoner of Christ for his Gentile audience, in vss. 14-21 (one of the most beautiful Trinitarian passages) he prays for the Ephesians that they might also know the love of Christ the way he has known it. The reason Paul feels that being a prisoner of Christ for the Ephesians is a light weight to bear, is that, in his vocation or calling to tell others of Christ, he is already more completely a prisoner, or, as he puts it in II Cor. 5:14, he is constrained, or controlled by the love of Christ. He had been freed from his carnal or self-centered life and values by becoming a slave of Christ (cf. Rom. 1:1, Phil. 1:1, Titus 1:1--like James 1:1, II Pet. 1:1, Jude 1:1).

So, we also, in our vocations, whether we are chained to some demanding toddlers, to a desk shuffling data, to a list of sales calls, or to a classroom full of hormonal students, we, as the Church, have been given the grace of a vocation of witnessing to Christ's love. We are to do this as loving bondservants or slaves of Christ, next to which all other "prisons" are just other venues for the playing of our parts in the cosmic drama that the Almighty Triune God is producing, directing and enjoying.

Keith Griffin