Ephesians 3:1-13

Ephesians 3:1.

The Grace Given to Paul.

The enthusiasm with which the Apostle speaks of preaching the Gospel to the heathen is contagious. His words burn on the page, and our hearts take fire as we read them. What was the secret of this exultation in the Gospel and in his commission to make the Gospel known to all mankind? The question is a large one, but considerable light is thrown upon it by the contents of this Epistle.

I. Paul had a vivid intellectual interest in the Christian Gospel. To him it was a real revelation of the most wonderful and surprising truths concerning God and the relations of God to the human race. It urged his intellectual powers to the most strenuous activity; it never lost its freshness; it was never exhausted. I believe that in all the great movements of religious reform that have permanently elevated the life of Christendom there has been a renewal of intellectual interest in the Christian revelation. And if at the present time the religious life of the Church is languid, and if in its enterprises there is little of audacity or vehemence, a partial explanation is to be found in the decline of intellectual interest in the contents of the Christian faith which has characterised the last hundred or hundred and fifty years of our history.

II. The heart and imagination of Paul were filled with the infinite and eternal blessings which were the inheritance of the human race in Christ. For human sin there was the Divine forgiveness; for human weakness in its baffled attempts to emancipate itself from the tyranny of evil passions and evil habits there was the Divine redemption. Paul believed in the unsearchable riches of Christ. We shall never recover his enthusiasm as long as we dwell chiefly on the external and incidental benefits which follow the acceptance of the Christian Gospel.

R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians,p. 220.

References: Ephesians 3:1. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 203.Ephesians 3:3; Ephesians 3:4. H. Wace, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 45.Ephesians 3:3. C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons, p. 438.