1. If you listened to Brad's sermon, you heard him describe his experience finding a box in his garage full of pictures of people who loved him. He wondered how he might have acted differently through his life, particularly in the difficult times, had he known how much he was loved by these people. How might it have shaped the way you acted and the way you developed as a person during earlier phases of life, particularly the hard phases of life, if you had felt profoundly loved? How might it shape the way you live now if you walked through life with an awareness that the people around you loved you dearly?
2. Brad went on to say that what Paul has been doing in Ephesians 1 & 2 and now in chapter 3 is to communicate that "our future selves are already secure, accepted, and loved completely [by God], so we should live into that reality RIGHT NOW." Take a minute and look back through Ephesians 1 and 2. Where do you see these assurances of God's deep love and care for us?
1. How does this knowledge of God's love and care for us free us to live in the world?
2. How would our lives be different without such assurances?
3. To what degree do you feel confident in these realities? Pray for one another that you might truly feel as loved by God as you are.
3. Paul mentions a "mystery" several times. What is this mystery? (see 3:6)
1. In the Old Testament, to be part of the people of God, one had to be born or become an Israelite, following Torah and, for males, being circumcised. How surprising must it have been for Jews to hear from Paul that, in Christ, Gentiles are now accepted into the people of God as Gentiles, without first becoming Jews?
2. What must it have been like to be a Gentile familiar with the exclusivity of Jewish religion to be told that now, in Christ, Gentiles may worship the God of the Jews and be incorporated into the people of God without first becoming Jews?
3. What are the implications of this radical shift Paul speaks of, this mystery, for us today? How would our lives be different had the Gentiles never been incorporated into the people of God in Christ?
4. Why would God choose to incorporate the Gentiles among His people?
4. What three things does Paul pray for his readers in vv. 14–19?
1. (that He would grant you… to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith [16-17])
2. (that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth [17–18])
3. (And to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. [19])
4. Pray these things for each other.