Small Group

The summation of Paul’s ethical rules is contained in 4:32-5:2 – Give grace to one another, just as God in Christ gave grace to you and be imitators of God, to walk in love with one another just as Christ sacrificially loved you.

Paul is not merely writing that we should be gracious to or forgive others, but we must be continuously gracing and forgiving each other. This endless gracing of one another is what a Christian community look like.

Christ’s gifts are given to individuals, not for their own spiritual benefit, but to benefit the church itself. Our gifts can only be properly utilized in service to the body. Otherwise, we are like the servant in the parable who received the one talent and buried it in the sand.

Paul exhorts the church to lead a life worthy of the calling to which we have been called – a unity in the Spirit which is that visible symbol of Christ’s victory over the powers and principalities of this world.

Of all of Paul’s doxologies, this is the only one that mentions the role of the church. The glory (doxa) of God is found not only in Christ Jesus but also found in the Church, the gathered Christian community.

Sanctification is “the process of becoming holy through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit . . . by means of which we grow into the fullness of the redeemed life.”

God’s grace through Christ, as demonstrated in Paul, reveals not an angry capricious god or even a just karmic god, but that loving father who invites even his greatest persecutor to be his apostle. The eternal purpose for which Christ Jesus came was the reconciliation of all of us with our creator so that we have that blessed assurance that we have been redeemed, forgiven, and lavished with God’s grace.

The source of Paul’s excitement is God’s revelation to him of the mystery that has been hidden for the ages – that all people are one in Christ Jesus and that the Church is the physical manifestation of the fulfillment of this mystery.

The church as a place of peace and reconciliation between different peoples is not simply an ideal that will only be achieved eschatologically, but is (and should be) the actual current situation. We, as the church, are the place of peace where those things that divide human society are abolished and all are one in Christ.