FROM THE SERVANT GENERAL
OUR THEME FOR 2023
(Part 9)
FAITH AND LOVE THAT ARE IN JESUS – 2
October 15, 2022
Today’s reading: Ephesians 1:15-23
Paul extolled the Ephesians, after “hearing of your faith in the Lord Jesus and of your love for all the holy ones” (v.15). Faith and love are the foundations of our life in Christ. We put our faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord, and we live out that faith by love—love of God with our all, and love for neighbor, especially our brethren in Christ. So we are to be firm in faith, founded on love.
Our faith comes from our “knowledge of him.” (v.17c). We meet Christ as we are evangelized. We get to know him as we undergo formation, and especially as we read and study God’s word in the Bible. In this process, we are given “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” (v.17b). God reveals Himself to us. The Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom by which we can accept and understand these revelations.
As “the eyes of (our) hearts (are) enlightened” (v.18a), as we begin to live Christ, we get to “know what is the hope that belongs to his call” (v.18b). So faith, love and now hope—the three theological virtues. Then we understand the nature of our hope, which is that we look to making it to our eternal home. We look to “the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones” (v.18c). Finally, looking to our hope, we begin to know that this is not done by means of our earthly gifts or powers, but that we look to “the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe, in accord with the exercise of his great might” (v.19).
And what is the evidence for all these? It is Jesus himself. It is what God “worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens” (v.20). Jesus rose, and we are to rise with him. Jesus is seated at the right of the Father in heaven, and it is in their company that we will also go to.
