Reading the Bible in 2014 - Day 151: Ephesians - Going Deep and Growing Up

“Go deep!”  “Grow up!”  The first sounds like something you would hear from a quarterback wanting to practice his ‘Hail Mary’.  The second sounds like classic advice from an older sibling to a younger (or even from a parent to a child.)

I also think they summarize two passages which together capture the heart of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.  The first is Paul’s prayer in 3:18-19.  “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

Paul is saying, “Consider the love of Christ…and really consider it.”  Linger with it.  Look at it from one angle, then from another.  Walk around it.  “Walk about Zion, go all around it, count its towers, consider well its ramparts; go through its citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God…” (Psalm 48:12-14)

There is a praise song from the Australian Christian fellowship called Hillsong.  The song is called, “Oceans”.  The second part of the bridge goes like this, “take me deeper than my feet could ever wander, and my faith would be made stronger in the presence of my Savior.”

There is an ocean depth to the love of Christ which should make explorers of all of us.  In the same way that scuba-divers strap on their suits and oxygen tanks and go fathoms deep to explore the coral and the ocean floors, we should take our tools of Scripture, silence, imagination, deep longings, and prayer, and explore the height, depth, and length of God’s love in Christ.

What does it mean to go deep?  Jessica’s parents visited recently.  We were considering driving to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center.  I was sitting at home reading online reports about the Space Center to see if it was worth the money.  The Atlantic space shuttle exhibit came up everywhere – “go see it!”  “Don’t miss it!”  “Leave yourself many hours for this!”  I could confirm this once we’d gone: it gave us different experiences of what goes into space travel.  There were films that showed the initial dream: a paper airplane space shuttle that could land itself.  The actual shuttle was there – hanging in the exhibit with all its glory.  Astronauts were there to share a handshake, a personal story, or a photo.  A launch simulator led us through the shaking, rattling, and rolling of going up into space.  Hubble satellite pictures displayed the great invitations of vast galaxies and stars from the great beyond.  Little kids wandered in and out of interactive cockpits.

When I sat down to read Ephesians, I thought about the breadth, length, height, and depth.  And I thought about the folks at the Kennedy Space Center.  They wanted folks to understand the breadth, length, height, and depth of the excitement, will, energy, drive, innovation, teamwork, and discovery of space travel.  The Atlantis exhibit is what they developed to accomplish it.  To go deep is to know and experience something on multiple levels and in multiple ways.

Which leads me to ask: how does God intend to initiate us into the breadth, length, height, and depth experience of Christ’s love?

The answer brings us to our second passage: by growing up.  Consider Ephesians 4:14-16: “We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming.  But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

Have we considered how much about good, righteous living we have learned from just being around other people who are living this way?  This is how we learn everything, from our infancy onwards.  We learn so much from being around other people – talking to them, listening to them, thinking about them, being surprised by them, being moved by them, getting angry at them, apologizing to them, experiencing forgiveness, grace, humor, singing with them, and endless more.

Paul is saying that this is how it works.  The church is a gathering of people who build one another up in Christ from day one.  All that is required for the Atlantis exhibit of the Christian faith is speaking the truth in love.  Christ’s love, to be specific.  We need it.  Christ is the source.  In Ephesians 2, he is the foundation stone for a building being built.  In Ephesians 4, he is the head which cares for, and builds up the rest of the body.  In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine and you are the branches.”  We need to be rooted and grounded in him.

We also need truth.  “Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up…”  Think of it this way.  You can spend time with Christ.  You can also spend time with other believers.  But if you don’t tell the truth about yourself to Christ or to other believers, what are you left with?  This was the predicament of Judas Iscariot.  He had spent so much time with Jesus and other followers who had left everything.  Yet in the end he had nothing to show.  He had a hidden life with hidden motives. 

We need to tell the truth.  And we need to tell the truth about ourselves.  It can’t just be telling other people the truth about themselves.  Sometimes when people use this phrase, “speaking the truth in love,” they basically mean this, “I’m going to tell the painful truth about other people.  They’ll probably get mad.  But they shouldn’t.  Why?  Because they should trust that I don’t mean any harm.”  This very well could be all truth and no love.  It makes a lot more sense if you make your heart and vulnerability known to others, drawing the strength to trust other people from your experience of the love of Christ.  In other words, speak the truth about you, your sins, your falsehood, your idolatry, your reliance on Christ for acceptance and grace.  Speak that truth in love.

This is how we grow up.  This is also how the church grows up.  Speaking the truth in love to one another allows us to tap into our amazing gifts to learn to live rightly merely by being around each other.  Normal life, normal gatherings, normal friendships gathered around normal meals together become powerful experiences of the risen Lord Jesus.  The rest of chapter 4 and then chapters 5 and 6 provide wonderful practical guidance on what this life of speaking the truth in love looks like.

There is a lot more to Ephesians, obviously.  But these two passages paint the big picture of God’s will for the Ephesians, and also God’s will for us: going deep and growing up.