For you see it is from grace that you have been saved through faith; not from yourself. This is a gift of God, not from works so that none may boast. Ah yes, we are…
Posts By Martin Glynn
Ephesians 2:6-7; A Devotional
And also with Christ, God has raised us up and sat us down in the celestrial realms by Christ Jesus so that within these coming times He has shown, in His kindness, the overwhelming riches…
Friday Files: Billy Birch’s “Point by Point with John Piper on Arminianism”
Ah John Piper: Wonderful pastor; fairly ignorant on historical expressions of Christianity. We’ve posted often on his misconceptions of what Arminianism is, but here is a wonderful post directly going over some things that he…
What Is Classical Arminianism?
I’m frustrated with how so many treat Arminianism today. Many Calvinists have so poisoned the well that most people have no idea what Arminianism is. When they enter the debate, they allow the likes of…
Ephesians 2:4-5; A Devotional
But, being rich with mercy, God, through His great love with which He has loved us though we were dead in trespasses, has made us alive with Christ (by grace you have been saved) The…
Ephesians 2:3; A Devotional
Along with them, we all once lived by the passions of our flesh, doing the desires of the body and of the mind. Like the rest of them, we were children of wrath. What do…
Ephesians 2:1-2; A Devotional
And you were dead because of the transgressions and sins in which you once walked, as the world has through the ages according to the ruler of domain of the air ; the spirit now working in the unyielding6 sons.
A major aspect of Christian life is remembering where you came from. Christianity is fundamentally a faith of redemption. Part of redemption is being redeemed from something.
There are two common problems we encounter when dealing with our sinful past.
Ephesians 1:22-23; A Devotional
And He set everything under His feet, and made Him head over the assembly which is His body: the very thing which fills every bit of everything.
Ok, let us recall Paul’s context:
The Funniest Anti-Arminian Post I Have Ever Seen
OK, this post by Triablogue is so absolutely ridiculous that I find it comical and wanted to share it. Here Steve Hays actually tries to claim that Arminianism is a form of Manichaeism . Wow. Just wow. For those not familiar with what Manichaeism is, let me say that this would be akin to Michael Moore calling Republicans Communist. Seriously.
Ephesians 1:19b-21; A Devotional
…according to the work of His mighty strength which was worked in Christ, arousing Him from the dead and sitting Him at God’s right side in the celestial realms, far above any ruler, authority, power,…
Ephesians 1:18-19; A Devotional
“…having your mind’s eye enlightened in order to perceive what is the hope of His invitation, what is the glorious wealth of His inheritance in the saints and what is the surpassing greatness of His…
Ephesians 1:17; A Devotional
…that the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation on the knowledge of Him… This verse is a verse about the Father, and,…
Ephesians 1:15-16; A Devotional
Because of this, and because I heard about your faith in Lord Jesus and about your love toward all the saints, I’ve not stopped praying for you, recalling you to mind in my prayers. The…
Ephesians 1:13-14; A Devotional
In whom you also have heard the word of truth: the gospel of your salvation by which, having believed, you were sealed by the promised Holy Spirit who is the down payment of our allotment,…
Ephesians 1:11-12; A Devotional
Furthermore, in Him we have been chosen by lot (being predetermined according to the plan by which all things are worked out and according to the purpose of His will) to be who we are,…
Ephesians 1:7-10; A Devotional
Because this is all one sentence in the Greek, I wanted to go back and treat it the way it deserves: as one thought.
[It is in the Beloved that] we have redemption through His blood: the excusing of sins according to the abundance of His grace which He teemed into us in all wisdom and understanding having revealed to us the secret of His will, according to His good judgment, which, through Christ, was preplanned for managing the fulfillment of times in order to coalesce all things in Christ throughout the heavens and the earth.
Ephesians 1:9-10; A Devotional
As I said last time, 7-10 is one sentence, so it is important to have 7-8 in mind as we read 9-10. I intend to recapitulate this section next week, but for now, we’ll just…
Ephesians 1:7-8; A Devotional
Both last week and this week I made the mistake of trying to handle Pauls whole sentence from 7 to 10. However, the content is just too full, and there are too many things to…
Ephesians 1:3-6; A Devotional
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, for we are the blessed in all spiritual blessings, in the heavenly things, in Christ, seeing that He chose us in Him before the inception of the world to be holy and unblemished within His presence in love, thus predestining us into adoption to Him through Jesus Christ, according to the good judgement of His will in praise of His glory and His grace by which He favoured us in love.
Ephesians 1:1-2; A Devotional
Paul, and apostle of Jesus Christ through God’s will. To the saints: the residents in Ephesus and the faithful in Christ Jesus: grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul uses three terms to denote the recipants of his letter: saints, residents, and faithful. I found it very difficult to determine the exact relationship between these three denotations, and I found that most translations simply skipped the second (residents). But I feel that this misses the relationship between being ‘in Ephesus’ and ‘in Christ Jesus’ which is a bit more obvious in the Greek, and I wanted to tease this out.