Gulf Coast Community Church Podcast – St. Petersburg

After a 12-year relationship with Mia Farrow, Woody Allen (then 57) trying to explain his controversial relationship with his lover, Mia Farrow’s 19-20 year old adoptive daughter, said “The heart wants what it wants?” I’ve heard similar reasoning as a spouse explains why their new love relationship must be God’s will because it makes them happy. Referring to Allen’s explanation, Cornelius Plantinga says, “That’s the conversation stopper. The imperial self overrules all” (emphasis mine).

In Ephesians 1:3—4:16 Paul painted a glorious vision of a whole new world. One in which walls of hostility that incite rage between humans have been broken down. One in which the people of God, Jew and Gentile, have made the love of Christ their own and walk in all the fullness of God. One in which the church has been given by God as a gift to the world. But there’s a catch.

I know. There’s always a catch. The catch is our destructive desires. We keep harming one another instead of loving one another. Paul knows that its because, “The heart wants what it wants.” He speaks of a new way… a new humanity rooted in Jesus that we must become.

Join us in worship as we explore Ephesians 4:17-32 in our series: Imagining the Kingdom, answering the question, “Why do I keep doing the things that I do?”

How well do you walk? According to at least one fitness guru, “almost nobody is good at walking: not you, not me and not all the other people in the park….” This may seem odd considering most of us have been doing it since we were one, and that without much instruction. Do we really need to learn all over?

Yes. At least I am pretty sure I need to learn how to walk physically like most, but I know that we all need to learn how to walk in a way that corresponds to our calling. God has called us to something in Christ, and we don’t walk in it naturally. We must change how we walk.

Join us in worship, as we turn our attention to Ephesians 4:1-16, we find Paul getting to the heart of how the first 3 chapters call us to a whole new way of life. Indeed, they bind us to this new way of living.

Paul makes some audacious claims in his letter to the Ephesians. Not only has God, before the foundations of the world, chosen to adopt the Gentile Ephesians, but also Jews like Paul, in Jesus Christ, he has also made them one people. Despite their natural orientation toward rage and hostility toward one another, He has made peace between them through the cross of Christ.

Is that enough? Is it just enough for Paul to tell us (and for us to read it) that all of this is true? Can we now just go out and live it? My experience tells me, “No!” My experience as a Christian, a parent, and a pastor tells me that it doesn’t work that way. This explains why the grand claims contained in Ephesians are accompanied by a ton of prayer.

How do we change? What is needed? Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 answer these questions. Join us in worship as we continue our series Imagining the Kingdom and our walk through Ephesians.

I’d like to suggest that Paul’s goal in Ephesians 2, is for God’s newly adopted children to reimagine warfare, to reimagine the basis of our hostility. In His great mercy, God has rescued us out of our rage and disobedience, He has broken down the walls of hostility, and He has designed us to be his agents of good works—world transforming works.

We do have an enemy, but we must rightly identify the enemy and understand how he works. Until then, we are apt to fall right into the traps the enemy sets. Hostility will only increase. And we are prone to such traps because we were born with a nature of impulsive anger.

The Gospel is the story about how God bears all the hostility which humanity could give him (Jews and Gentiles alike band together to crucify Jesus) and forgives us. He doesn’t retaliate. It is more than that, but not less. As Paul puts it to the Corinthians, God is not holding their sins against them (2 Cor. 5:19). Ephesians 2 is about what God has done to reconcile the world to Himself, and humans, whether Jew or Gentile, to one another.

Join us in worship as we continue our series, “Imagining the Kingdom.” As we worship together, may our imaginations be reshaped to see the world as God is remaking it!

Do you have a bucket list? What’s on yours? What’s important to have on it? Does it help you focus on what’s important? These days, everyone seems to have a bucket list, but as believers, do we have those things on it which Jesus said would be important?

Last week I was prepared to give a short message around 1 of 4 parables Jesus gave concerning his return in Matthew’s Gospel. As it turned out, time did not allow for me to give that message. This week, since I have my normal amount of time, I’ve expanded that to cover all 4 parables.

People have all sorts of ideas about when Jesus is going to return and what it will be like after that. In these 4 parables, Jesus addresses none of that. Rather, everything they say about Christ’s return makes a claim on how we live today.

Join us in worship as we explore Matthew 24:42—25:46 in the message: Ready or Not, Here I Come.

In the first half of Ephesians 1, Paul praises God our Father for how He gloriously adopted us in Jesus Christ, a plan He had from before the foundation of the world, and a plan rooted in His love for us. A plan which made us heirs of God through Jesus Christ. As heirs of God, we have been called to live a certain way.

In the second half of Ephesians 1, Paul isn’t satisfied that we simply know the glorious truth of our adoption, He wants it to transform our lives into those of true sons who carry on the Father’s business. In order for that to happen, we have to see in a whole new light.

It’s like we’ve been living in houses with an entire side, that which faces God and spiritual realities, having no windows. Maybe a small hole to peak out is all. We have to have large windows installed on that side. Once we can see the realities of our adoption, we can reimagine how the world works. That will enable us to live the new lives God intends for us.

Join us in worship as we continue exploring our adoption as God’s sons and daughters from Ephesians in our series Imagining the Kingdom.

Paul’s opening praise of God for what he has done in the glorious gospel in Ephesians (1:3-14) is amazing. It speaks of our adoption and says much about how it came about. It all revolves around our being “in Christ,” our union with Christ. Yet Paul assumes we understand what this phrase means.

What does it mean to be in Christ? Whenever I see new books on the topic of our union with Christ (our being “in Christ”), I buy them and set out to read them. The authors identify something I also recognize: this is a very important theme for Paul; it appears to be central in His thinking.

However, I find myself somewhat disappointed. Don’t get me wrong, they are usually well written and discuss so many relevant aspects of the topic. They always point out why it is so important but often come up short when explaining what it means. I’ve begun to discover why.

This Sunday as we continue our exploration of the theme of adoption in Ephesians, we are going to take a bit of a deep dive into the inner workings of our union with Christ. It calls us to develop a sanctified imagination of the Kingdom in order to live as God’s children.

Adoption is one of the greatest pictures given to us to understand our relationship to God as the church. Unfortunately, it is also veiled because adoption in the ancient world was quite different than adoption in the 21stcentury. If we are going to imagine the kingdom, a kingdom headed by a Father whose Son is King, we must allow Paul’s understanding of our adoption to paint its picture in our hearts.

While some might think I planned to start this theme of adoption on Father’s Day, but I’m not that smart. However, as I was preparing this week, the thought crossed my mind that this would make a good Father’s Day message (and then I realized…). J. Todd Billings, on the subject of adoption, writes,

“The gospel does not so much offer a low-cost ‘eternal life insurance’ as it gives the tremendous privilege of learning to be children of the King, living into our new identity in a kingdom that is coming forth to us from the future.”

After exploring the marathon of faith in Hebrews 11-13, we now turn to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where he calls us to imagine a whole new way of relating to God and one another.