Living Blessed

 DEVOTION

THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

LIVING BLESSED

Eph 1:3-10

3 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. 4 For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love 5 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. 7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace 8 that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. 9 And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, 10 to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment — to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.

NIV

We know we are going to spend a while on this passage because it is chuck full of theological points. Although every statement leads right into the next and in some sense, we should deal with the whole, that would take a book rather than a simple devotion meant to give us a start on our day. The first thing we do notice is that it would be good to start our day giving praise to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which we are usually in the habit of doing, although maybe not the first thing as we open our eyes from our slumber, and yet maybe it should be, even before we get up out of bed. Of course, we have those aches and pains, and our body does need to get moving, but our mind is clear enough that we should praise God the Father of our Lord and Savior before we do anything else. Then we think that we should be about praising God all day long, for many reasons, but this one that Paul mentions appears to be one of the best, if not the best, reasons for praising God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God the Father has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. In other words, Christ is every spiritual blessing. The rest of this passage expounds on what that spiritual blessing is, but just to think that in Christ we have every spiritual blessing.  We have a dear friend, a fellow believer who regularly thank God for bringing him another dark night, but as we ponder on that, we have come to realize that God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is there with us all during the night and has continually blessed us in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. Even while we are sleeping, we are in the midst of being blessed with every spiritual blessing. We are not saying our dear brother means the night is dark spiritually but just sees the night as not the day and understands this spiritual blessing better than we do.  God has promised us that He would never leave us nor forsake us and that includes every second of our lives, whether we are awake or asleep, so we are not convinced the night is dark, at least in the spiritual sense, as in Christ we are always in the Light. However, we still must come to terms with this fact every moment of our lives, always knowing, always aware, and always living with the fact that we have been blessed in the heavenly realm by the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We live in a constant state of being blessed.