Friday, June 18, 2010

Ephesians 1-3: Before and After

I really love those HGTV shows where a designer comes and changes a room. Sometimes the ideas the designers come up with sound absolutely crazy, the colors seem a little extreme, and they do things with rooms that I would NEVER in a million years think up. And at the end of the show, they contrast the "before" room, which generally looks pretty awful, with the "after" room, which almost always looks incredible. It turns out their random ideas weren't so random after all. After all, they are designers.

I think I watch for that moment when the producers show the before and after shots, juxtaposed, one on top of the other, and I can see what the designer had in mind.

I was reading Ephesians this morning, and I realized that's sort of what Paul is doing right here, showing us what the master designer had in mind when he sent Jesus to earth to die for our sin. We are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Paul gives us a picture of who we are BEFORE Christ:
We are dead in our sin
We are objects of wrath
We are excluded from citizenship-aliens
We are without hope and without God
We are darkness

And then he gives us a picture of the AFTER, when when we are in Christ:
We are alive
We are loved by God
We are fellow citizens of God's people and members of God's household
We may approach God with freedom and confidence
We are light

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ!

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