Redeemer Church of Waterford

The Christian is a person whom the Apostle Paul describes as "a new man" (Ephesians 4:24) who has been transferred from "the course of this world" to "the kingdom of Christ and of God." The decorum of the heirs of this kingdom is holiness, and in Ephesians 5:3-5 Paul delineates behaviors that among Christians are unmentionable, unbecoming, and unfitting and points to God's grace in Christ as the identifying marker of the behavior and speech of believers.

What are the causes of our ineffectiveness in ministry, both in our personal Christian lives and as the church? We find the answer in an analysis of what went wrong and what went right in Elisha's raising of the Shunamite's son from the dead.

Are you feeling like a stranger in your own country? Psalm 137 is a lament by the people of God who have been taken captive and carried away from their true home in Zion and displaced in Babylon. What lessons can we learn from the exiled Israelites in this Psalm which might help us with our own angst and anxiety in 2020 America?

Love in the context of Paul's letter to the Ephesians is defined by what he has already said about love in the first four chapters; but here in 5:2 Paul gives us the most sublimely concise definition of the love of God in Christ as the standard by which we are to live lives of love not only on our relationship to one another, but more importantly in our relationship with the Holy Trinity.

Bitterness is a grief or a grievance that has been nurtured into a destructive pattern of wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking that has as its ultimate goal the destruction of those who have created the grievance.

How do we deal with bitterness before it poisons everyone around us and destroys everything in its path?

Kindness, Tenderheartedness, and Forgiveness are all essential to our life together as members of the body of Christ. But these three virtues are not the natural virtues which even unbelievers are capable of expressing. These virtues are the unique possession of those of have been created after God in righteousness and true holiness.

What is to characterize the way in which God's people speak to one another? Our communication is to have the primary objective of building each other up through admonition, exhortation, reproof, and rebuke with the ultimate result of ministering grace to those who hear.

While there are indeed multiple ways in which it is possible for the believer to grieve the Holy Spirit, the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:30 is narrowly focused on grieving the Holy Spirit in relation to the way in which we communicate with one another as members of the Body of Christ. To understand the seriousness of grieving the Spirit, we must understand who the Holy Spirit is and be aware of the biblical indications that we have grieved Him.