Day 1: Ephesians 1: 1-2: Grace, Peace, & Identity

In Christ, identity is received through grace, not achieved through performance. 

Paul opens Ephesians by identifying himself as an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, grounding his authority not in status but in calling. He then addresses believers as "saints," meaning those who belong to God and are set apart in Christ- not because of moral perfection, but because of identity.

In a city like Ephesus, where identity was shaped by trade, religion, and social class, this was a radical statement. Paul then speaks grace and peace over them, reminding them that the foundation of the Christian life is not striving toward God but receiving what God has already given through Christ.

Reflection: Do you then to define yourself by what you do or what God says about you?

Transcript

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Hello everyone, and welcome to day one in Ephesians. Today our theme is grace, peace, and identity. And we're reading only two verses. Our passion passage is Ephesians chapter one verses one and two. Our reflection question to think about throughout our devotion today is do you tend to define yourself by what you do or what God says about you? Let's read the text together. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by God's will, to the faithful saints in Christ Jesus at Ephesus, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That's the word of God. That's it for our passage today. When Paul is calling himself an apostle by the will of God, he is dismantling the idea that spiritual authority comes from human achievement. In a Roman world built on status, lineage, and recognition, Paul roots everything in calling. That means even leadership in the church is not self-assigned, it is received. Then he turns to the believers and calls them saints. This redefines identity in a city where status determined worth. A saint is not someone who has mastered holiness, but someone who has been made new in Christ. Any believer throughout the whole body of Christ, the body of the church, any believer is referred to as a saint. When Paul is using the word saint, he is talking about all of us. It is not the same definition like used in Roman Catholicism, where saints are an elevated figurehead that people pray to, and that that's a different use of the word. For us in Roman or sorry, us in Ephesians, saints is referring to all of us believers. Then Paul says, Grace to you and peace. Grace is God moving toward you when you could not move toward him. And peace is the result. It is reconciliation with God. In the gospel, grace is not a starting point you outgrow. It is the atmosphere of salvation. And today that challenges every performance-based identity system we live under. As much as it challenged the Church of Ephesus. We feel valuable when we succeed. We feel good about ourselves when we're meeting all the standards around us that people tell us success should look like. But when we fail, we immediately start feeling unstable, start questioning our standing with God. Paul begins by anchoring identity somewhere unshakable in grace and peace in Christ. So grace is not something that you earn or grow beyond. It is the foundation you live in. Where in your life are you struggling to believe that you are already fully received by God? So in just these two verses, Ephesians is already doing something radical. It is pulling identity out of performance and placing it into grace. I did do a little bit more research on um Ephesus on the word guild, G-U-I-L-D, because it is used quite a bit to try to explain how they incorporated a pagan idolic worship system into their literal jobs. It affected everything, their income, etc. And so the word guild refers to a group of people or organization that are united by a common skill or service that they provided. So, for example, uh Demetrius led a guild of silversmith. There were guilds of merchants and over certain uh trades, right? And this guild as a group would not only establish like pricing and the trade routes and who they were trading with and that kind of the side of the commerce for um these trades and skills, they would also incorporate religious practices and ceremonies, idolic worship as part of that, as part of the way they did business. So for a small group of believers in Ephesus to understand that they were actually only submitting to the authority of Jesus Christ and were not going to worship other gods, when we say that it wasn't just a matter of them changing their beliefs, this affected everything. If they could not fulfill everything that was required of them culturally and career-wise in these guilds by meeting all of the all of the uh, let's say check box markers, right, established by the guilds because it went against their new faith and belief in Jesus Christ, this would affect their income, their social standing, their ability to provide for families, even what they're able to do. Um, and I think that it's very similar in terms of what we go through now, where, like we've talked about, we are still very much in performance-based systems, you know, whether that's within our families or even sometimes our churches and and community and how we define success and reminding ourselves that there are spiritual forces working against us using those things. And sometimes they're not bad things, right? Being a hard worker is not a bad thing. Um, alone they're good, but when they start replacing God, they become idolic worship. Our cultural culture right now is demanding that of us. There are spiritual forces competing against Jesus. So we need to stay in the word, heed this advice from Paul because it applies to us now how we can stay close to the source of life of Jesus Christ and continue to operate spirit led through the Holy Spirit and the ultimate authority overall. Amen. We'll talk tomorrow. Love you guys.