Lay a Firm Foundation
A good friend of mine once told me that the pastor of a church she used to attend spent six months teaching the first three chapters of Ephesians and a year and a half teaching the last three. It was little surprise, she reflected, that the church was so legalistic.
Why would she say this? Because the first three chapters of Ephesians are all about who God is and what he has done for us in Christ. It’s about God’s great love for us, his plan to save us, and the high calling to which he has called everyone whom he saves. In short, it’s about the gospel. The final three chapters are what we think of as the “application” portion. It’s where Paul teaches us some of the ways in which the truth of the first three chapters should change the course of our lives. In other words, the Gospel is not just a starting point, it is THE point. It is at the heart of everything God has done and is doing in this creation and it is at the heart of every plan God has for us.
So it’s essential that we not get this wrong. The gospel is the only foundation on which we can build godly lives. God’s great love for us and Christ’s great sacrifice are the only motivations powerful enough to sustain us through the tribulations that accompany our calling. This constant focus on our Savior is at the heart of what it means to live by the Spirit. Attempting to live a “Christian life” any other way will ultimately lead to failure.
There are a couple of ways in which we can go wrong with a book like Ephesians (and with the Gospel in general). Some, like my friend’s former pastor, want to rush through those doctrinally rich first chapters and get to the application. We’re Christians, right? We’re already saved. Now give us the checklist. We’ve got this! This way of thinking leads to legalism. Legalism was the sin of the Pharisees, who prided themselves on their ability to follow the rules. And their pride became the besetting sin that caused them to miss the gospel entirely. Legalism is what sucked the joy out of my friend’s salvation and sent her in search of a church that would fill her heart and mind once again with Christ and his great love for us.
Others are tempted (sometimes as a reaction against legalism) to downplay the final three chapters. Salvation is all of grace! What we do doesn’t matter! This is the error of licentiousness. It sees grace as a license to sin, forgetting that sin is exactly what Christ came to deliver us from.
For years I thought that the secret to being a good Christian must lie in finding the exact balance between legalism and licentiousness. If I could just find the perfect center of that continuum, I thought, I wouldn’t keep swinging like a pendulum between two extremes. But the Scriptures teach something altogether different. In God’s word I learned that the whole continuum—left, right, and center—was a continuum of sin, and every inch of it was powered and motivated by the flesh.
“For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.” (Rom. 8:7-9).
In the gospel, God is calling us to abandon the sinful continuum of the flesh, to leave behind every hint of legalism and licentiousness, and to live an entirely new life in Christ, a life motivated and characterized by the character of the God who loved us and saved us
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:1-2).
We seek to live godly lives because we have a loving Father, and a Savior who has not only reconciled us to the Father but made us a part of His family. This is the only unshakeable foundation for our faith. We can’t afford to rush through the gospel to get to the application. We need to know it well and make sure that we are building every aspect of our lives on it.
