1. Allow God’s vision to “baptize” our imaginations to the point where our priorities, passions, and practices reflect God’s.
As God’s Subversive Counter-Revolutionary People we must learn to “read” our world in accord with the vision we are fighting for in our struggle. We must therefore:
Get the Story straight[1]
Become familiar with the 6 chapters of the biblical Story (Creation [Gen.1-2], Catastrophe [Gen.3-11], Covenant [Gen.12-Malachi], Christ [Matthew-John], Church chapter, and how each is related to what has gone before and what comes next in the Story.
Write out a brief paragraph expressing how you believe is God’s Counter-Revolution fares in each of these six chapters in the Bible Story. Don’t exceed one page. This will be a baseline that you can revisit and refine as your grasp of the Story grows.
As we grow in our grasp of the Story we will notice that our minds are increasingly conformed to God’s agenda and strategy in pursuing his Counter-Revolution and we begin to imagine a world in accord with that divine intention.
Get the Story in. Learn about and try out living with silence, various versions of meditation, spiritual Bible reading like lectio divina. Each of these positions us before God to listen deeply before responding. Research in creativity and use of the imagination clearly suggests that nearly all breakthroughs in these areas come out some form of receptive or passive practice.
Traditional Bible reading, on the other hand, begins with us asking questions of the passage before us. This is not wrong, of course, but if it is our only way of engaging scripture we are stuck with a one dimensional practice focused on what we want to know and how we want to know it. We need a multi-dimensional approach that allows God through scripture or silence or meditation to speak to and question us.[3]
3. Allow Paul’s view of God in this passage become your own.
In this section of Ephesians, Paul presents a God who is:
Personal (tri-personal, Trinitarian)
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He establishes and sustains relationships, makes plans, achieves goals.
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People-oriented
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Himself an eternal triune community, God seeks community with his creatures and his creation
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Purposeful
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He knows what he does what he does and never gives up till his goal is achieved
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Potent
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He is active, energetic, able to make happen what he intends
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Predestinating
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He takes ultimate responsibility for what happens. We are not in control, it is not all up to us. This gives us the proper human, creaturely freedom to do what we can and let God do what only he can do.
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Prodigal
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Perhaps the overwhelming impression of God from this section is this. God here is marked by abundance and generosity of all good things. We know from the beginning that God is well-disposed toward us and not, as I have elsewhere suggested we too often believe, the “God with a Scowl,” always ready to pounce on and punish our every flaw and failure.
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4. Meditate on the astonishing reality that God’s people, and you in particular, are God’s inheritance.
Carry it in your wallet. Paste it on your mirror so you see it in the morning. Have it pop up first thing when you boot up your computer each day. Whatever way you do it, keep this truth close to mind and heart. This is the identity we need to act out of; another other or lesser identity will ultimately play us false and keep us from being the people God so dearly desires us to be.
This is a God we need to know deep in our hearts before we can fully commit to the rigors and difficulties of being his subversive counter-revolutionary people. Paul has placed this unusual “Blessing” section first in this letter just to life up the kind of God with whom we have to do. We ought, I think, take some time to absorb and reflect on the reality that this is the God who has called us to be his people!
To “Sit” then deals primarily with getting the story straight and getting the story in to our heads and hearts. When we move to the “Walk” and “Stand” sections of Ephesians we will see how Paul directs us to get the story out. But it is essential for us to “Sit” before we “Walk” or “Stand”. I hope you will “Sit” a bit with this opening section of Paul’s great letter and allow the Spirit to immerse you in its graces and gifts to better equip you to join God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement.
[1] An excellent resource I just recently become aware of is built around the book The Insect and the Buffalo: How the Story of the Bible Changes Everything by Roshan Allpress and Andrew Shamy (http://www.compass.org.nz/ib/home).
[2]The website Contemplative Outreach (http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_practices_lectio) introduces a variety of these practices in accessible ways.
[3] Renovare’s The Life with God Bible (New York: Harper Bibles, 2001) has many good features to facilitate a multi-dimensional engagement with the Bible. You can check it out at http://www.renovare.us/.
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