“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen” (Ephesians 3:20-21).
Every time the person who accused me of… I am actually not sure what I was accused of, but he sure didn’t like my comments about Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. I had been asked to speak on the background of Ephesians just before the Scripture reading—which was to be from Ephesians—so that people in the audience would have a better understanding of the text. That was to be my ministry—one of which I am well suited since I have a lot of experience interpreting the Bible (over twenty-eight years). So I briefly outlined the content of the Letter and then pointed out that much of the Letter was written to help us imagine what the church is to be like. That for some reason bothered the pastor. And now I have been banned from helping the congregation from understanding the Bible (imagine that!). But anyway… I amazed each time we sing, per the pastor’s choosing, “I can Only Imagine” during morning worship. What made it worse one morning was a reference to Ephesians 3:20-21 (as posted above). Right there in the very text is a benedictory plea for God to help us imagine what God has done on behalf of and in and through the Church. The word that is used for “imagine,” is νοουμεν (noomen) which is a Greek word for think, imagine, ponder, consider, “to exercise the mind.” So we have it in the text, an indication that Paul was harnessing the truth about the Church and its nature and mission to get us to imagine what the Church is to be like in this world. Sometimes we get into the conflict with our own images of the church verses what the Bible actually wants and describes (maybe that’s the real issue here). We need to be cautious that how we imagine the church ought to be does not overshadow what God imagines. We tend to want the church—our church—to be made in the image of what we want, rather than what God wants. That is why God left us—at least one of the reasons, anyway—the written material from the apostles that describe for us what God intends the church to look like and do, and in turn, this written material helps us to imagine “his power that work among us” so that we can see His “glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus,” not ours. Long before we sang choruses like “I can Only Imagine,” we sung beautiful hymns that molded our minds about God and His work. I recall singing, “May the Mind of Christ,” allowing it to stir my thoughts—yes, my imagination—on Christ and my commitment to Him. I loved to sing the final two stanzas:
May I run the race before me,
Strong and brave to face the foe,
Looking only unto Jesus
As I onward go.
May His beauty rest upon me,
As I seek the lost to win,
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.
That’s Paul’s letter to the Ephesians…brave to take on the foe (Eph 6), looking only unto Jesus (Eph 1-2), and living in such a way that, in the end, those around us forget the channel (Christians) and see only Him. This is what Paul through his letter to the Ephesians imagines for the Church. If only we can imagine?
Posted by Chip Anderson at 07:53 AM. Filed under: In the Margins • Gemara (expository notes) •
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