Our text for this week is Ephesians 2:17-19:
or through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father.
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God's household,
The gospel that led us to salvation was a message of peace. In II Corinthians 13:5 we are exhorted to, "Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!" One of the primary tests of whether we are continuing on the path of life is by the peace in our life. Jesus is the Prince of Peace, and if we are walking close to Him there will be a peace in our life that exceeds anything that can be known in this world without Him.
If there is a lack of peace in our life, if there is striving and anxiety, then we have drifted from Him. If this is the case, we certainly need to heed the exhortation to "examine yourselves!" Where did we miss the turn? What has come into our life that began to eclipse our relationship to Him?
We are told that through Jesus we "have our access in one Spirit to the Father." The basic purpose of the atonement is to restore the relationship between God and man. Is this being accomplished in our life? The primary way we can determine the degree to which redemption has worked in our life is by how close we are to the Lord. How is your relationship to the Lord these days? This is another fundamental way that we can test the degree to which we are still walking in truth—are we getting ever closer to the Lord?
This also relates to the next verse, we are "no longer strangers and aliens, but are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household." One way that I can tell how close I am to someone is by how comfortable I feel in their house. There are some people that I feel so comfortable with that I don’t even have to ask if I want to go to the refrigerator and get something to eat or drink. If I don’t know someone very well, I would never presume to do something like that. However, I am never going to be as comfortable in anyone else’s house as I do my own. How comfortable do you feel in God’s house? I am not talking about a church building, but rather in His presence, in the midst of His people.
The Lord’s household is our house too. We are not strangers, and should never feel like strangers in the presence of the Lord, but rather we should feel right at home. This does take time for any new believer, but it is another way by which we can measure how we are doing. Where do we feel the most at home? This is what is elaborated on in II Corinthians 5:6-8:
for we walk by faith, not by sight—
we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.
Do we feel more comfortable walking by faith than by what we see? Are we becoming more at home in the heavenly realm than in the natural? As Joe Garlington once said, "We are not human beings having a temporary spiritual experience, but we are spiritual beings having a temporary human experience."
One of the popular questions today is "Who is your daddy?" When you think of your father, who do you think of first? Is it your Father in heaven, or your earthly father? We might also ask, "Where is your home?" When you think of home, where to do you think of first?