06/23/11

Ephesians 2:11-21

Last week (I know I’m a week behind) Lane walked us through a really cool text that continues along Paul’s really tight line of thinking. One of my favorite things about the way Paul wrote Scripture is how his logical, well-reasoned thinking presents excellent arguments and theology for the first few chapters (especially Ephesians), and then he works off of those themes and draws out applications for the last few chapters. Last week we saw yet another step toward building the theology that he will ‘mine’ for the rest of his treatise. Continue reading →

06/13/11

Ephesians 2:1-10

So this past week (6.5.11) Lane walked through an immensely important passage of Scripture and brought out a few solid key points. Over the last couple of months as we’ve dug into the first two chapters of Ephesians, I’ve been struck at the beauty of how our God serves us and loves us. It’s so easy a lot of the time to take that love for granted and to just bypass all of the blessings that God has poured out on us. But when I take a closer look at my life and dive into Scripture and really read the text for what it says and means, I am overwhelmed by the God who has chosen me and enabled me to love and glorify him. And then, as I think about my life and how God’s sustaining and persevering grace has grown and shaped me over the course of my 27 years, I cannot help but worship him. Which is exactly where Lane took us this past week.

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05/28/11

Ephesians 1:15-23

Last week (5.8.11) Lane touched on several distinguishing factors for our life in Christ – essentially what God has done for us. We saw that God has chosen, predestined, forgiven, obtained, and sealed us. I ended that post by saying what I’m praying for and through – that God would give me a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit, and that I would be thankful for all that God has done for me. That coincidentally was a great segue into this past week’s text in the last half of Ephesians 1.

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05/16/11

Ephesians 1:3-14

So last week Lane preached on several distinguishing factors of life in Christ, and we saw that we’re redeemed for a purpose, we’re redeemed for God himself, and God gives us himself – namely his peace. This week, Lane preached on essentially the same verses, but took a different spin on them by walking through what God (through Paul) is teaching us in this passage. Rather than hitting the topics that are addressed and bringing a full biblical view of each of them, Lane did a great job on focusing his thoughts on this text, and not getting bogged down in the numerous potential rabbit trails he could’ve taken us down. Continue reading →

05/8/11

Quick Update / Ephesians 1:1-14

A Quick Update:

So it’s been a while since I last updated this blog, and life has been both a lot of fun and really involved. From work taking up more time to devising some premarital counseling material to just having a general busy-ness about my life in the last few weeks, things have been… well, busy.

But I do want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading and to give you an idea of what I’d like to do for the next few months, both to keep me posting regularly, to keep you updated on where I’m growing and what I’m learning, and to help me more directly put the sermon into my life. Today will be the first post of my thoughts on my lead pastor Lane’s new sermon series on Ephesians. He and I have been meeting for the past few weeks and he has challenged me to read through Ephesians devotionally, and now he’s preaching on those same passages that I’ve been working through. I’m excited about where the Lord will lead me in the next few months as we take a fairly detailed look at a really precious book in our Scriptures. I’ll also continue to post musings and other things from time to time (so stay tuned for those), but expect that I’ll be posting every week on some take-aways from the sermon Lane preached. Continue reading →