Purposes of Edification

“…till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ...“ Ephesians 4:13. 

In the last post I mentioned that the aim of five ministries were to edify us. Where does edification lead us or what are the aims of it? God’s is intending to bring us all to the unity of faith and also to make us like Christ through knowledge of Him. 

Unity of faith is not that we logically agree in all points, but that we have deep inner convictions and live our lives based on them. Knowledge of Jesus is not some intellectual understanding of what He says, but living that knowledge out, embracing it, enjoying it and staying in it.

By grace through faith

„For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.“ Ephesians 2: 8-9

I have already written a number of posts from the second chapter of Ephesians. Let’s do one more. It is such a rich epistle that you do not want to skip a single verse. 

Two things save us from wrath of God and they are: grace and faith. Grace shows where the source of salvation is and faith enables us to connect to the source. I am happy that Paul added the part about works. They won’t save us. The Word of God does not leave us any possibility to boast or claim that we are good enough to be saved. We are not. It is all through His Grace and it is all by faith.

Hope in Heaven

Colossians 1:5: “the faith and love that spring from the hope stored up for you in heaven and about which you have already heard in the true message of the gospel”.

Hope is always connected to the future. Faith is now. We need faith daily. However, if we fail to keep hope daily we will become weak pretty soon. Faith helps us much on the short term perspective. It helps us today. Faith does not look tomorrow. Hope does. We need to develop our perspective on everything in life from both short term and long term perspectives. You can be tossed like a wave here and there if you do not know what to do now. But you will lose motivation and inspiration very fast if you do not look ahead. You have hope in Heaven. That should help you keep you strong and inspired as well as motivated throughout your entire life. God bless you!

Great faith

Luke 7:9: “When Jesus heard this, he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd following him, he said, “I tell you, I have not found such great faith even in Israel.”

Few of us have great faith. Most of us have great doubts. We run to all possible sources for help and treat God as last insurance who pays premium at your death in case nothing else works. No wonder there are very few miracles in churches nowadays. Our faith is weak. We rely on our five senses and believe only what we see. To tell the truth we should hardly be called believers, because believing doctrines and affirm to them in your mind is not a big deal. We have to learn to trust God on daily basis in various problematic situations. That is how we make our faith great.