Dock
Resource Kit
Sunday sermon, 18 October 2026
Summary
This week Brigid talked to us from Ephesians 2; where Paul takes us from death to life and from hostility to peace, via the free gift of God’s grace. Brigid explored the problem of our deadness, our personal sin, the ways of the world, and the spiritual powers that oppose God. Then, the solution: God, rich in mercy, makes us alive, raises us up and seats us with Christ, so that we fall into grace by faith and become God’s handiwork, created to do good works. Brigid unpacked Paul’s vision of Jews and Gentiles made into one household, and the church as the new holy of holies where God’s presence dwells. She closed by inviting us to live as people who are alive and raised up with Christ, refusing to rebuild the walls Jesus has torn down.
Key Points & Takeways
Grace is a free gift, and we read to be transformed, not just informed — Grace is a free gift from God to us. Grace takes us from death to life, hostility to peace, and distance from God to being his dwelling place.
We are dead on a personal level — Paul says we were dead in our transgressions and sins (Ephesians 2:1). This death is not an arbitrary punishment but what happens when we turn from the source of life.
We are dead in the ways of the world and under powers that oppose God — The ways of the world are how society organises itself without God, shaping our values through workplaces, WhatsApp groups and social media algorithms. Beyond that lie deeper evils; trafficking, systemic racism, injustice and war. The pit of death is personal, cultural and spiritual.
Jesus climbs into the pit and makes us alive — Salvation is not about us ascending to God but God coming down to us: Jesus climbs into the deepest part of the pit to destroy it from the inside out. We now have spiritual vital signs; loving Christ, his world, and his people.
We are raised up and seated with Christ, so we need not fear — Paul writes in the past tense: we have been raised and seated with the servant king, whose reign is marked by compassion, mercy, justice and love. Even from prison Paul says that is what is real, so death, sin and evil are not final and the resources of heaven are available now.
God saves us because of his great love, not because we earn it — To a first-century Roman used to manipulative, transactional gods, a God moved by love and mercy would have sounded bonkers. Like the bishop in Les Misérables who gives Jean Valjean the silver and the candlesticks, God gives a grace we can never earn or repay.
Faith is falling into grace — Quoting Darrell Johnson, Brigid said reaching out or throwing ourselves sounds too much like work, so faith is simply falling into the new reality shaped by grace. There is nothing we can do to be more or less loved by God this morning.
We are God’s handiwork, saved to do good works, not by them — The Greek word for handiwork gives us the word ‘poem’: something crafted with care, beauty and purpose. Good works flow from grace received, and each of us is called to bring creativity, beauty and order into a disordered world in our own ordinary places.
Grace restores our horizontal relationships: one new humanity — Paul’s vision is Jews and Gentiles brought together as one household without anyone being second class, and not by becoming the same. Jesus, who is our peace, has destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, just as he tore down the temple barriers that kept Gentiles out of God’s presence.
The church is the new holy of holies, so we must flee hostility — Paul uses the word for the sanctuary itself: together we are the place where God’s presence dwells, a small working model of God’s new creation. That means refusing to rebuild walls over background, race, gender, politics or church tradition, and living as people who are alive and raised up with Christ.
Dock Discussion Questions
Brigid began by giving away free flumps to show that grace is a free gift. Is it easy or awkward for you to receive a gift you haven’t earned, and what does that tell you about how you receive God’s grace?
Brigid presented death on three levels: personal sin, the ways of the world, and the spiritual powers that oppose God. Where have you noticed the stories you hear quietly shaping you, perhaps making you more cynical, discontent or suspicious of people unlike you?
Brigid described Jesus not leaning over the edge of the pit to offer a hand but climbing into the deepest part of it, and spoke of the ‘vital signs’ of spiritual life, as seen in her granddad. Which of those vital signs do you see in your own life, and who has shown you what being alive in Christ looks like?
Like Jean Valjean receiving the bishop’s silver and candlesticks, we are given grace we cannot earn, and faith was described as ‘falling into grace’ rather than reaching out for it. Where are you tempted to earn God’s love or hold back because you feel too broken, and what would it look like to fall into grace there?
We are God’s ‘poem’, saved to do good works, and one of the closing challenges was to refuse to rebuild the walls Jesus has torn down. Where has God uniquely called you to bring beauty, delight or order to the ordinary places of your life this week, and which wall do you most need to stop rebuilding?
Long-form, edited transcript
Ephesians: Amazing Grace
Ephesians 2
Introduction: A Free Gift
We are continuing our series on Ephesians with these two words from Paul’s greeting: grace and peace. If you leave here today with nothing else, what I want you to know is that grace is a free gift from God to you. Grace is a free gift from God to you.
In chapter 2, Paul is going to take us from death to life, from hostility to peace, from being far away from God to becoming God’s dwelling place. We’re going to explore a problem, a solution and a vision that God has for his people.
But we’re not reading this passage because we want to be informed about our faith. In fact, there might be some things I say today where you think, ‘Actually, I already knew that. I’ve known that for ages.’ But we are reading this passage because we want to be transformed — not just informed, but transformed by God’s grace.
The Problem: Dead in Our Sins
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.
Ephesians 2:1–3, NIV
This chapter starts with a problem, and Paul paints a bleak picture. He tells us that we are dead in our transgressions and sins. It’s a really jolly way to start our morning, isn’t it? It’s going to seem bleak, and we are going to go deep into the pit of what Paul is saying. But I promise you that by the time the band gets back up on this stage, we will be out of the pit and there will be so much to celebrate. It’s important that we start here, though, so we can understand the hugeness of what grace really is.
Dead on a Personal Level
First, Paul tells us that we are dead on a personal level. Verse 1: ‘As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins.’ For some of us, as we listen to these verses, our story of coming to know Jesus has a really clear before and after. Some of us can articulate that feeling of being dead in sin.
In the Alpha, there’s the amazing story of Shane Taylor. Shane went from being designated by the Home Office as one of the UK’s six most dangerous prisoners, stuck in cycles of violence and anger, to being transformed by meeting Jesus, who radically interrupted his life and entirely changed it. Shane talks in the Alpha series about going from hating himself and hating his life to finding new life in Jesus. He was dead, and now he is alive.
For others of us, perhaps who have followed Jesus since we were tiny, since we were children, it can be harder to see that kind of before and after moment. ‘I was dead, but now I’m alive.’ But Paul isn’t speaking just to those who have dramatic testimonies. All of us, whatever our story, know something of sin and of brokenness. We turn inwards. We organise ourselves and our lives around us rather than God: a little lie for our advantage, giving in to the temptation of gossip, failing to love the person in front of us.
So the death that Paul is describing here is not an arbitrary punishment for getting something wrong. It’s not that God is keeping a big list of the things you’ve messed up on. This is what happens when we turn away from the Creator, the one who is the source of life himself. That is why sin causes death: when we turn from the one who gives us life.
Here, and in other places in the New Testament, Paul talks about this as gratifying the flesh. He’s not talking about our physical bodies; God made our bodies and loves them. The flesh is that drive within us to be in charge: ‘I want to live my own way. No one can stop me.’ That ‘I’ll be the captain of my own ship’ mentality, in big ways and small ways. So often that kind of living leads to loneliness and self-destruction, and so on and so on. All of us will have experienced that feeling of a little death when we know that we have messed up.
Dead Because of the Ways of the World
The death Paul is talking about, though, is not just on this personal level. We’re going a bit deeper into the pit now. Paul also describes following the ways of the world. If gratifying the flesh is about organising our lives around only ourselves, then the ways of the world are the ways in which human society organises itself apart from God, the ways in which our identities and values and relationships are shaped, often without us even noticing. It’s the cultural water that we’re swimming in. When these ways of living are dictated without God, we’re missing the key linchpin for human flourishing.
I wonder how this shows up in our lives. Maybe you can think of subtle, or not so subtle, ways of acting or talking that happen in your workplace, or in your WhatsApp groups, or in your social media algorithms, that are really easy to buy into but lead to a type of death. It’s striking how quickly the conversations we take part in can shape us, and the stories that we live in. We can scroll through social media or join in on a WhatsApp conversation and, before long, realise that we are more cynical, or more discontent, or more suspicious of people who aren’t like us than we were before. No one has sat down and instructed you to start thinking like that. But gradually, through the stories we hear and the things we join in with, we are formed.
It’s not necessarily that any of these things is inherently bad. But the stories form us when we listen to them. This is what Paul means by the ways of the world. If the stories we hear are not centred around God and in line with the values that God teaches us, they can lead to death.
Dead Under Spiritual Powers
Paul also speaks of the death that comes from following the ruler of the kingdom of the air. Another way to think about that is the spiritual powers that oppose God. There is brokenness and evil in our world way beyond any one individual’s actions, or even the cultural narratives around us. Think of human trafficking and exploitation, of systemic racism, of the injustices in our society that lead to homelessness, and of wars across our world. We are told in this passage that God is rightly and justly wrathful: deeply opposed to, angered and grieved by all of these things which are evil.
So this is the pit that Paul is describing: there’s our personal sin, there’s this societal brokenness, and then there are these deep evils, all of which lead to death. We needn’t be afraid. Jesus has won. He is resurrected. He is on the throne, and we’re going to come to that. But there are parts of our world, in us and around us, that are not yet aligned with this victory.
It is a pretty deep pit that humanity finds itself in. The Message translation of the Bible puts it like this: ‘We have let a world that doesn’t know the first thing about living tell us how to live.’
But God: The Solution
So that is the problem. Now we’ll read our next set of verses, verses 4 to 10. And the good news is that a ‘but’ has come.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith. This is not from yourselves; it is a gift from God, not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared for us in advance to do.
Ephesians 2:4–10, NIV
‘But God’. It’s always good news when you see ‘but God’ in the Bible. These verses are a huge mood change, aren’t they? We’ve gone from darkness and rebellion and wrath to mercy and love and life and salvation and kindness. These verses explain why and how God saves us, and what it means to be saved.
So how does God save us? Surely salvation comes through the good works we do in order to please God? By getting in the way of the evil in the world and doing good deeds to solve the problem we’ve just described?
No.
This passage is so clear: we are saved by grace. Salvation and grace are not about how we ascend towards God. They are all about how God comes down to us. God comes down to that pit, and he doesn’t just lean over the edge to give us a hand to get out. God’s Son, Jesus, climbs into the deepest part of the pit in order to destroy it from the inside out.
Made Alive
And we are told by Paul that we are made alive. We are raised up, and we are seated with Christ. Made alive. Raised up. Seated with Christ. This is what it means to be saved.
We were dead in sin, separated from the source of life. But when Jesus died, the power of sin to destroy us or separate us from God was defeated. And then in Jesus’ resurrection, death was defeated too. What that means is that even though our bodies are fragile and aging on this fragile planet, before we reach the physical grave we have been made spiritually alive in Jesus.
Just as our physical lives have vital signs; if you’re in the hospital, they’ll check that you’re breathing, that your heart rate is going, that your blood pressure is in the right place, all those vital signs of physical life, we have new vital signs in our spiritual lives too. That we love Christ and want to know him more. That we love his world and his people, and the world that he died for. That we long for others to know him. That we long for his return, for all things to be made new. There is a quality of life, of aliveness in Jesus, that the grave cannot destroy.
My granddad is in his late 80s and he has dementia. He lives just the other side of the river in Greenwich, so I see him quite often, but he’s not really able to hold a conversation anymore and he struggles to get around physically. But there is something about my granddad that is just intangibly alive. He became a Christian in the late 70s, when people across the UK were being filled afresh with the Holy Spirit, and since then, every day, he has prayed fervently that he would be full of the Holy Spirit. He has received grace daily for nearly five decades and has gone on reminding himself, ‘Grace is a free gift. Grace is a free gift I’ve received from God.’
So now, even though his physical body is aging, he is spiritually alive because of God’s grace. It shines through his eyes, in the way that he grips onto your hand, and in the passion with which he can still say “amen” at the end of a prayer. He might not be able to say much else, but that man can say “amen”. There is an aliveness in my granddad that cannot be taken away by any physical illness, or even the grave, because it has been given to him by Jesus.
Raised Up and Seated with Christ
Not only are we made alive, though. In verse 6, we are raised up and seated with God in the heavenly realms. Since his ascension, we are told that Jesus is seated at the right hand of God, the most powerful position in the whole cosmos, and the world is held together by Jesus. And Paul tells us that we are seated with him.
In Genesis chapter 1, way back at the start of the Bible, we’re told that God created humans that they might rule alongside God. By grace, we are brought out of the pit and put back into that position. Now, I can’t tell you exactly what it means that we are seated with Christ. Paul writes about all of this in the past tense. He’s not saying you will be raised up and seated with Christ; he’s saying you have been raised up and seated with Christ. People much cleverer than me are going to have to tell you exactly what that means. But I can tell you this.
Firstly, even in his ascended state, Jesus remains the servant king that he was on earth. His reign is characterised by compassion and mercy and justice and love. That is the kind of royalty Jesus is, so that is the kind of ruling we are called to as well. And if Jesus is reigning over the cosmos and we are seated there too, then we don’t need to fear the other powers in the world that do not live by Jesus’ values. Jesus has won, and one day all things will be made new in alignment with this kind of rule and power. This is our new reality. This is what grace means: the power of personal sin and the depth of evil in our world are broken, and we have a way out.
Now, this doesn’t mean that our lives have no trouble. Paul himself is writing this letter in prison. But if he can write this letter in prison and say, ‘This is what’s real. Prison, these circumstances, they are what’s fleeting. What’s real is that I am alive and raised up and seated with Christ,’ then we are able to do the same. Yes, these circumstances are hard. Yes, I am facing trouble. But I am alive and raised up and seated with Christ.
When we are in Christ, death is not final, and it doesn’t need to be feared. Sin cannot hold us in bondage or in shame. Evil is not final, and we don’t have to live by its terms. The walls that separated heaven and earth are broken, and the resources of heaven are available to you now. This is what grace is. This is what it means to be saved.
Why Does God Save Us?
But why? Why does God do that? Why does God save us? If you were a first-century Roman listening to this, all of this would have sounded utterly bonkers. The gods that the Romans and the Greeks worshipped were manipulative and transactional, and humans were little playthings to make stories about. So the idea that God might be moved and motivated by love was just bonkers. That God might be merciful and kind was absolutely crazy. That grace and salvation would be a gift you don’t have to earn would be madness.
But it’s so clear in this passage that that is what Paul is saying. God saves us because of his great love. Grace is a gift that we can never earn and never repay.
Has anyone seen the musical or the movie Les Mis? Maybe you’ve even read the book — that would be very impressive. Anyone seen it? Yeah? Okay, great. If you haven’t seen Les Misérables, I highly recommend it. Absolutely excellent soundtrack. No spoilers: this all happens in the first ten minutes. Jean Valjean, the main character, has been in prison for 19 years. He is released, and he’s bitter and angry with the world, convinced there is no kindness on this planet that could be offered to him. He doesn’t have anywhere to go, and a bishop ends up taking him in, giving him food and a bed.
But Valjean decides to steal all of the bishop’s silver and run away in the night. The police catch him and bring him back before the bishop for his condemnation. But the bishop does something extraordinary. He says, ‘No, no, no, police officers, you’ve got it wrong. All of this silver was a gift. And not only that, Valjean, but you forgot the candlesticks.’ He hands over the candlesticks as well, and Valjean is let go. The bishop gives Valjean a grace and a generosity that he has not earned and does not deserve. He responds to betrayal with generosity, and this gift changes the course of Valjean’s life entirely.
Falling into Grace
As humans, we are so wired to perform and to earn, aren’t we? Grace can feel really hard to accept. It can feel shockingly extravagant. ‘God, if you really knew me, you wouldn’t want to give me this gift.’ Some of us can find it quite awkward, I think. ‘God, why? You love me? What? How does that work?’ It can be really easy to start trying to earn grace, or to separate ourselves from God if we feel we don’t deserve it. ‘God, I’m too broken. I’ve gone too far.’
But what if our role really is not to earn it? Darrell Johnson puts it like this in his commentary on Ephesians. Paul tells us that we are saved by grace through faith. Our role is to believe, to trust, to bank it all on God’s grace, and that’s all it can be. But what is faith? Johnson says: ‘I used to say that faith is reaching out and taking the gift of grace. But the verb “reaching out,” well, there’s too much action on our behalf. It’s too close to works. We are not saved by works, says Paul. Reaching out is too much like work. So instead I started saying faith is throwing oneself on God and his grace. But the verb “throwing” is too close to work. So now I say faith is falling into grace. We fall into it. Faith is giving in to the new reality shaped by grace and simply falling in.’
There is nothing you can do to be more or less loved by God this morning. Grace is a free gift. Fall into faith. And if we fully receive this gift, it will change our lives, not just for ourselves, but, as this passage says, as we level up the grace that we are willing to fall into, it levels up the grace that we are able to offer to others.
God’s Handiwork
Paul says in this passage that we are God’s handiwork. I learned something new about a bit of Greek as I was preparing for today. The Greek word for handiwork is poiema, which is where we get the word ‘poem’. Poems, of course, describe something crafted with care, something creative and beautiful and full of purpose. A poem, or perhaps a beautiful painting, or a wonderful meal, or an amazing piece of architecture or composition, or even a great administrative system that brings order out of chaos. Yes, great admin changes the world. All of these things are created with beauty and creativity and delight, and that is what we are called to be. We are called to be God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to bring creativity and beauty and delight and order into a world that is so disordered.
And notice the order in these verses, at the end of this part of the passage, verses 8 to 10. We are not saved by doing good works. We are saved to do good works. We don’t earn God’s love; we fall into it. And then we get to join in with what God is already doing. We are not working to win God’s approval. We are working with God because we have already received his grace.
In Les Mis, the bishop’s generosity doesn’t just get Valjean out of trouble. It changes him. He has received this grace that he could never earn, and he spends the rest of his life doing good. I’m not going to tell you what, you’re going to have to watch the movie, because it’s really good and I want you to watch it. This can’t be about earning the bishop’s grace, because he’s already received it. He can’t earn it if he’s already got it. The good deeds come because he has received it.
You can’t be amazing at reading your Bible, you can’t serve every single week at the night shelter, in order to earn God’s love, because you’ve already got it. You just have to fall into it, and then watch the good works flow from your life as you become the person that God has called you to be.
We are all wired for different good works. We all have a part to play. How has God uniquely called you to bring beauty and delight and order into this world, to display the grace you have received so that others can see it? Is it in the way you welcome someone who is always sitting on the outside? Is it in the creativity you bring to your work? The beauty you make as you craft? The way you stand up for someone who is being treated unfairly? The love and patience you offer to the person right in front of you? Perhaps you are someone who is particularly called to pray, or to tell your story of finding Jesus, or to use your skills to make things better for the people around you. What if the good works that God has prepared for you are just about bringing his extraordinary grace into the ordinary places of your lives? We are all invited into this. We are all invited to be God’s poems, God’s handiwork in our world.
The Vision: One New Humanity
So we’ve seen the problem in this passage, and this is the solution: we fall into God’s grace that we might reveal it to our world. And then we are given a vision. I’m going to read the rest of this passage, jumping back in at verse 11.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called ‘uncircumcised’ by those who call themselves ‘the circumcision’ — which is done in the body by human hands — remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenant of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:11–22, NIV
We’re not going to spend loads of time on this passage, because Michael is going to pick up lots of these themes next week as we look at Ephesians chapter 3, but here are the headlines. Everything we’ve looked at in those first ten verses is about our relationship with God; a vertical relationship, if you like, between humanity and God, between each of us as individuals and God. But when God breaks down barriers, when God offers grace, destroys sin and death, it doesn’t just affect our relationship with God. It also affects the horizontal relationships between us.
The vision Paul lays out here is extraordinary. If you were listening to this as a first-century person, it would have sounded mad. People from radically different backgrounds, Jews and Gentiles, being brought together as one family, without anyone being treated as second class, better or worse. That would have been crazy. And he’s saying that this isn’t achieved by everyone being the same. That’s what the circumcision bit is about. It’s not about Gentiles becoming Jews or Jews becoming Gentiles. It’s everyone, with their difference, becoming one household, made possible through Jesus, who is our peace, bringing us together by grace.
When this letter was written, temples were at the heart of both Jewish worship and Gentile life. A first-century Jewish person knew that God fills the temple with his presence, so if you want to meet with God, you go to the temple. But access to the temple, access to God’s presence, was restricted. Gentiles could only go into the outer part of the temple, the first court. There was a wall that separated them from going further in, and on many temples there was a warning on that wall that said, ‘If you are a Gentile who goes any further, you will be executed.’ Jewish women could go slightly further in, and then the men slightly further than that. And in the very centre, where God’s presence dwelt most strongly, only the priests could go. At the heart of the temple was the holy of holies, and the high priest entered that space only once a year, to go where God was most strongly present. God’s presence was too holy to enter more than that.
So if you’re a Gentile listening to this, you think, ‘Well, I can’t be one with the Jews, because if I even try to step into God’s presence I’m going to be executed. How can this possibly work?’ But Paul says, ‘Jesus himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.’ In Jesus’ death and resurrection, he has torn down the walls that keep different people apart. Everyone, whoever you are, can be brought near to God and given access to God’s grace and peace.
The New Holy of Holies
Jesus is revealed to be like the temple in person. He brings heaven and earth together. He is God’s dwelling place. He is God. And those who are in Christ, this new alive people of God, become the renewed temple, a kind of small working model of God’s new creation. That’s what we are: a small working model of God’s new creation. This is the outworking of a vision for a new humanity. Through the sin-forgiving and grace-giving work of Jesus, Jewish and Gentile believers alike are saved by grace and joined together into a single family of God. That’s what the church was then, and it’s what it remains now. When the church is fully being itself, then Jesus is displayed to the world: all members playing their part, with God himself dwelling in their midst by his Spirit.
Paul finishes the chapter like this. I’m going to read the last two verses again.
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:21–22, NIV
The Greek word that Paul uses for temple here is not hieron, the normal word for the whole temple. The word he uses is naos, the sanctuary. That is the word to describe the very holy of holies, that inner place where God’s presence is strongest. That means that we together, the church, are the new holy of holies: the place where God’s presence dwells because of grace, because of the peace that Jesus brings between us and God, and between us and each other. The vertical relationship is restored. The horizontal relationships are restored.
That means that we, as the church, have to do whatever we can, especially in church and between churches, to flee from hostility and contempt and suspicion of people who are different from us; different in background, or race, or gender, or political belief, or church tradition, in our society, even in our local community. It feels at the moment as though the dividing walls are being built up. It’s really easy to look at someone else on our social media, or someone who’s flying a flag that we don’t agree with, and say, ‘Nope, too different. There can’t be peace between us. We must be different.’ Jesus tells us that it will be a prophetic sign to the world when the church lays down its preferences and says, ‘No, we want unity. We want there to be peace between us, because there is peace between us and God.’ We are those who have received grace. We fall into it. So it has to change the way we see the world, and the way we see others, and the way we choose to live.
This is the vision that Paul can see even from prison. Jesus has defeated evil. He has brought us near to God, and he is building a new humanity in which God himself dwells by his Spirit; a humanity who are alive and raised up and seated with Christ. This is true of you. Can you turn to the person next to you and say, ‘This is true of you. You are alive and raised up and seated with Christ’?
So should we live like it’s true? Should we live like the people God has made us to be? Every day, every minute, let us fall into grace. Let’s refuse to rebuild the walls that Jesus has torn down. Let us become attentive to being people where God’s presence dwells. Let us believe that our life together can show our world something of God’s new creation. You are his handiwork. You are his poem, created to bring delight and beauty and goodness into the world.
Closing Prayer
Thank you, God, for your presence.
Thank you, God, for your kindness.
Thank you, God, that we don’t have to earn or perform for your grace. It is a free gift. Remind and refill and refresh us this morning.
God, move, in the parts of our lives that are feeling dead, where sin, or even just believing the stories or the narratives around us, have led us into death. Lord, we turn back to you and fall afresh into your grace. Lord, give us the knowledge of what it is to be alive and raised up with you. We are your handiwork, called to do good deeds that the world might know your grace. Remind us afresh of that identity.
Amen.