Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
1: 17 The Triune God at Work in Us
I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
A small child who visits a seaside resort every year for family holidays soon gets to know the ocean. But a fisher who lives there and daily sets out on the sea for his livelihood knows it that much better. In a different way, a marine biologist knows the ocean even better. But who really knows the ocean in all its vagaries and vastness? So it is with God. We will always be able to know him better. All eternity will be spent in getting to know God better, without exhausting his infinite being. A Scottish preacher called it “unplumbed inexhaustibility”. Paul describes the gullible people in the last times that will be “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3: 7). But those who know God as Father can be always learning and ever coming to knowledge of the truth that is in him. That is what Paul keeps asking God for.
Did you notice the reference to the Triune God in this verse? The glorious Father is the God of our Lord Jesus Christ and he gives us the Spirit, who in turn gives us wisdom and reveals the Father to us. An interesting study is to look for all the verses that refer to each of the three persons of the Trinity. Another is Ephesians 2: 18. But this is more than a Bible search. It defines the very essence of mission.
Anything less than a Trinitarian understanding of mission will be deficient. God the Father loved the world so much gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him should not perish. “This is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” said Jesus (John 17: 3). The Father sent the Son into the world, not to condemn it but to save it through him (John 3: 17). The goal of mission is that people should come to know God as their Father.
Jesus, on the other hand, empties himself of his prerogatives as Son of God, becoming human and dying on the cross to become Saviour of the world (Philippians 2: 6-8). He in turn sends his disciples into the world: “As the father has sent me I am sending you” (John 20: 21) and sends the Holy Spirit to help them and be with them forever (John 14: 16) and empower them to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1: 8). The good news of mission is that salvation is “in Christ”.
The Holy Spirit is “God the Evangelist” as David Wells put it. It is he who communicates truth, reminds us of what Jesus taught us, testifies about Jesus (John 14: 17, 26; 15: 26), and proves to the world that they are wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment (John 16: 8). In the words of The Book of Alternate Services of the Anglican Church of Canada,
We give thanks for your Holy Spirit who teaches us and leads us into all truth, filling us with his gifts so that we might proclaim the gospel to all nations and serve you as a royal priesthood (The Celebration of Baptism).The Holy Spirit is the means of mission.
This three-fold way of understanding the church’s mission is rooted in the triune nature of God himself. If any one of these is taken in isolation as a clue to the understanding of mission, distortion follows (Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret, page 65)
In this way mission is an activity of the Triune God; mission is not ours, it is missio dei.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, may we ever increasingly know you, and ever more effectively make you known.
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