Daily Reflections
October 6
The Calling to Proclamation
“Some trust in the chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”
Psalm 20:7
Ephesians 3:1-13
Here, in an aside, as Paul turns to prayer he speaks of his own experience of God’s grace and the charge laid upon him to declare to Gentile as to the Jew the hidden purpose of God. The key words are “mystery” and “grace” (2-4, 6-9). God’s plan of extended grace has been kept hidden “for ages past” (9) but now is to be made known, for through Christ it is being affected (Colossians 1:26,27). This “mystery” is that through the gospel non-Jews are heirs, together with the Jews, of the grace of God. Such a revelation would seem inconceivable, indeed blasphemous, to pious Jews; and we may consider how great the work of God’s grace not only that Gentiles formerly without hope in God should become children of His promise, but that the embryonic church, Jewish as it was in character, should take hold of this revelation which overturned so much of their previous understanding of God. Indeed, it was the bitterness of those Jews who rejected that God could be, or do so, which led to the imprisonment from which Paul was writing. The challenge to us is to see that our idea of God may also be too small and limiting of the breadth and scale of His loving generosity. So in each age we must be open to how He would teach us further of what is as yet “hidden” in His purposes: lest we too ‘imprison’ – in one way or another – His messengers.
Paul’s own calling is specially identified with this “mystery”, which he calls the secret of Christ (4). For as we learn here (and elsewhere), God commissioned him to preach the good news to the Gentiles (Acts 22:3-21; Galatians 1:12-24; I Corinthians 9:17). Again we glimpse the illimitable scale of God’s purpose (10): that even in the “heavenly realms” it is the people of the church, God’s new witnesses, who are to teach the “manifold wisdom of God”. We have a mission destiny even beyond this world: how strange and awesome a calling, either in space or in heaven!
You have called me, Lord, to serve You. I now offer myself to You afresh to be Your servant.
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