Ephesians 4:8

Ephesians 4:8 , Ephesians 4:11

A Glorious Ascension.

To ascend on high must have meant for Christ a large increase of His quickening influence, more power to act beneficially on human minds and hearts, to purify and energise, to inspire and elevate, as hitherto He had not been able. That was His supreme ambition, the height for which He sighed; and was it not even thus that He went up gloriously at last from the cross and the grave, mounting from thence to be a greater saving and subliming force than He had ever been before, to beget repentance and remission of sins beyond what He had ever done?

I. He led captivity captive; in plain language, He captured the prisoners, making happy captives of those who were the victims of a miserable captivity, emancipating them from the bondage in which they were held by bringing them into subjection to something better and worthier. They were captured by the vision of a spiritual redemption a spiritual redemption, not for Jews only, but for peoples of all nations, for men everywhere. In leaving them alone to mourn and wonder, Christ drew forth from them the ripe fruit of what they had blindly and little by little imbibed from Him. Then at length He rescued them from prison to be the bondsmen of a grander Lord; then at length He raised their ideal.

II. "He gave gifts unto men." The men who had been redeemed from their former sensuous dreams to discern and follow the glory of the spiritual began to blossom all over, became thereby more Divinely endowed. Christ enriched them with a heritage of gifts simply by detaching them from the meaner object on which their eyes were fixed and binding them fast to a higher ideal. Gifts that are not ours do often lie hid and slumbering in us, waiting only for the application of the needed stimulus healing or cleansing to display themselves; and blessed is he who with some disturbing, quickening touch helps to elicit them.

III. Christ left behind Him men qualified and ready to labour in different capacities. Here was the issue and fruit of Him, a number of living souls, whom He had been slowly training, on whom at last He had succeeded in impressing Himself, a number of living souls, at last in fellowship with His mind, understanding and sympathising with His aims, touched by His Spirit. Let us not doubt that that is always the Divinest work: to get at a man and be the means of ministering in some way to his healthier growth or finer inspiration, of helping him in some way to juster thought or loftier feeling.

S. A. Tipple, Sunday Mornings at Upper Norwood,p. 1.