Empowered through the Gospel

So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith - that you, being rooted and grounded in love. . . that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17, 19

We all have the desire to become better versions of ourselves. For 292 weeks—nearly six years!—Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life was on Amazon’s “The Top 20 Most Sold and Read Books of the Week?” What accounts for its success? It seems that there’s an itch among young men and women to become a better version of themselves, and Peterson, and other’s like him, scratch that itch.

But, what if there is a more compelling vision for young men and young women than Peterson’s? Ephesians 3:17 and 19 offer just that. These verses explain that God empowers his people to become all he created them to be through the gospel.

God empowers his people to become all he created them to be through the gospel.

The gospel is the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. This gospel enables the Ephesians to draw strength from Christ’s presence. This gospel plants the Ephesians in Christ’s nourishing and steady love. Finally, through this gospel they are filled with the fullness of God. That is they can become all that God intends. In the gospel, the conditions to become all that God intends have been realized.

But let’s give a little more color to God’s intentions for his people. In a few key verses, Paul explains God’s vision for the Ephesian church. God is forming them into his dwelling place (2:19-22) and into a community that reveals his wisdom (3:10) and glorifies him forever (3:21). Later in the letter, Paul summarizes God’s vision for the new church like this: “. . . until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (4:13). God’s vision for the church is that she become like Jesus, who is God in the flesh!

You see, in the beginning, the first humans were promised by an untrustworthy snake that they could become like God by rejecting God and forging their own way. Mind you, this way has only to lead to innumerable heartaches, injustices, wars, and deaths. Today, this same faulty promise still rings in our ears. It doesn’t necessarily come from the mouth of an ancient and mysterious snake, but it still ends in death. However, Jesus has come, and He said, “I am the way, and the truth and the life. . . . Take up your cross and follow me. . . . Eternal and abundant life, the best life, is to know me. Through the gospel alone we can become all that God intends for us. We can become like Jesus himself in this life, and then finally in the next.