When Christ moves into our lives, he brings change. He moves things around and reorders things as he fills our hearts with his love. When he moves into our lives, he changes our lives with the breadth and length and height and depth of his love. That’s what Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-22 is centred around in our reading today. Paul prays that we would be strengthened with God’s power to love. That we will be rooted and grounded in love so we can comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love, so that we may be filled with all the fulness of God.

In this episode Robert Swann shares his testimony of God’s grace in his life. From how the seeds of the Gospel were sowed in childhood, to getting involved in a paramilitary organisation, to coming to faith while in prison to suffering the tragic loss of his son and law and son as a believer. Robert’s story is powerful and honest story of God’s grace in his life.

When Paul uses the phrase ‘the mystery of Christ’ in Ephesians 3:1-13, he is talking about God’s hidden plan being revealed to the world through the Gospel and the Church. Specifically Paul says “This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.” Therefore, in these verses we read of the mystery of Christ, the ministry of the gospel and manifold wisdom of God displayed through the Church. We need to understand how these three M’s fit together if we are to understand God’s hidden plan now revealed.

In Ephesians 2:11-22 Paul clearly teaches that Christ came to make peace between Jew and Gentile through the reconciling work of the cross. The Gospel of Christ is not only about reconciling us personally to God but also about reconciling us to each other in Christ! So much so that Paul can describe us as one new man, one body, fellow citizens, members of the same household, a holy temple joined and built together in the Lord with Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. In Paul’s view this is as much a part of the Gospel as God raising and saving us from our sins by his grace! In Paul’s view this is the mystery that has been revealed in the Gospel!

Psalm 46 is a Psalm that has encouraged many believers in troubling times. It’s a Psalm many have turned to in times of war and great evil. In the US many pastors turned to it following the events of 9/11. It has brought comfort to our brothers & sisters in the persecuted church. It was also Martin Luther’s favourite Psalm during the turmoil of the Reformation.

The gospel is never about what we do for God. It’s always about what God has done for us. Of course, there are things we are called and equipped to do as believers, but these things are the result of what God has done for us and in us. They are the outgrowth of the new identity he gave us when he created us anew. That is what Paul wants us to see. Who we are, what God has done for us and what God is doing in us can be summed up in one word. Grace! In Ephesians 2:8-10 Paul teaches us two primary things. 1. We are saved by grace through faith. 2. We are God’s workmanship. And when we put them together, we see that we – as believers and as Christ’s Church – are God’s work of grace!

What does it mean to be saved by grace alone? Paul’s words about being saved by grace in Ephesians 2:1-10 come amid him talking about being raised with Christ. So, the short answer to the question is: It means being raised with Christ. Raised from spiritual death! Made alive together with him! Yet before writing about being raised Paul importantly points to why we needed raised. We were spiritually dead, enslaved to the world, the devil and our own fleshly passions, and therefore ‘children of wrath, like the rest of mankind’. However, the Gospel tells the story of how God takes us from the depths of such depravity to the heights of being seated with Christ in heavenly places! That’s what Paul wants us to see in Ephesians 21-7!

In this sermon Pastor John unpacks why we practice ‘Believers Baptism’ as a church. Firstly, he shows that in the New Testament baptism always followed believing. It was part of a believer’s response to the good news of Jesus. Secondly, he then highlights how ‘Believers Baptism’ better pictures the Gospel and then thirdly how it also reminds us we are baptised into God’s bigger story of redemption.

This week guest preacher Phillip Griffith shares about the work of Samaritan’s Purse and their upcoming Christmas Shoebox appeal as well as reminding us that as Christians we are all called to be influencers for Christ.

This sermon unpacks Paul’s powerful prayer in Ephesians 1:15-23. A prayer in which he prays for the spiritual vision of believers. He asks that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened to clearly see the hope to which God has called us, the riches of who we are in him, and especially his incomparably great power “for us who believe”. A power revealed most clearly in the resurrection and exalted reign of Christ!