Ephesians– overview of 3:1-9; The Secret of the Ages, part 29 (Overcoming sin and suffering).

God says to go ‘there’ and promises that in seeking I will find.

Phi 1:19 For I know that this shall turn out for my deliverance through your prayers and the provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ,

Phi 1:20 according to my earnest expectation and hope, that I shall not be put to shame in anything, but that with all boldness, Christ shall even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.

Phi 1:21 For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

Paul, in essence, says that at that point his life was equivalent to Christ, meaning that it was a manifestation of Christ.

He didn’t say that his letters were Christ, but that his life was.

He went when God told him to. He spoke when and what God wanted him to. He suffered when God saw fit, and he dealt with it all according to truth and complete dependence on God’s grace. He buffeted his body and made it his slave. He worked more than all, yet with the grace of God. Like all the prophets in the OT and the other apostles, the life of God was not in theory only.

In 2Co 11 he writes of his labors, imprisonments, beatings, dangers, shipwrecks, journeys, attacks from false brethren, hardships without food, water, and in exposure, and heaped upon it all was the constant concern for the churches and the dangers that their infancy made them so vulnerable to. And then he writes:

2Co 11:29 Who is weak without my being weak?

“I don’t know ‘of’ weakness. I know real weakness. And more importantly, I know how God can bring you through it, deliver you from it, and from it make you strong. I went ‘there’ and I saw and I believed.”

Why will I find it, see it, and therefore rejoice in it? He has made me new. He has indwelt me. The Holy Spirit is in me for the very purpose of opening my eyes to see what is ‘there’ when I pursue it. I must pursue it, and that means saying no to my flesh, considering it dead, which is another way of saying that I must repent of the self-life, the sin-nature, the world, and sin – through Christ, I’m dead to it all, Rom 8:3.

Considering yourself dead to sin (Rom 6:11) is more than a mental exercise. Being dead to sin and alive to God, I become a servant to God’s will, whatever it may be, whenever, and wherever.