Seated

Darlene Cameron, Elder
Life Song Church
Ephesians 1 & 2
Grace to you and peace inner calm and spiritual well-being from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed and worthy of praise be God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ, just as in His love He chose us in Christ[actually selected us for Himself as His own before the foundation of the world, so that we would be holy and blameless in His sight. In love He predestined and lovingly planned for us to be adopted to himself. As His own children, through Jesus Christ, in accordance with the kind, intention and good pleasure of His will. To the praise of His glorious grace and favor, which He so freely bestowed on us in the beloved His Son Jesus Christ. In Him we have redemption, that is, our deliverance and salvation through His blood, which paid the penalty for our sin and resulted in the forgiveness and complete pardon of our sin in accordance with the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and understanding, with practical insight, He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, with regard to the fulfillment of the times, that is the end of history, the climax of the ages, to bring all things together in Christ, both things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him also we have received an inheritance, a destiny. We were claimed by God as His own, having been predestined, chosen, appointed beforehand according to the purpose of Him who works everything in agreement with the council and design of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ who first put our confidence in Him as Lord and Savior would exist to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the good news of your salvation, and as a result believed in Him, were stamped with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit. The one promised by Christ as own and protected by God. The Spirit is a guarantee, the first installment, the pledge, a foretaste of our inheritance until the redemption of God's own purchased possession, His believers, to the praise of His glory. For this reason, because I have heard of your faith, in the Lord Jesus and your love for all of God's people. I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I always pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may grant you a spirit of wisdom and revelation that gives you a deep and personal and intimate insight into the true knowledge of Him. For we know the Father through the Son. And I pray that the eyes of your heart, the very center and core of your being, may be enlightened and flooded with light by the Holy Spirit, so that you will know and cherish the hope, the divine guarantee, that confident expectation to which he called you. The riches of his glorious inheritance in the Saints, God's people, and so that you will begin to know what is the immeasurable and unlimited and surpassing greatness of His active spiritual power in us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of His mighty strength. Which he produced in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and seated him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, whether angelic or human, and far above every name that is named. Above every title that can be conferred, not only in this age and world, but also in the one to come. And he put all things in, in every realm, in subjection, under Christ's feet, and appointed him as supreme and authoritative head over all things in the Church. Which is his body, the fullness of him who fills and completes all things in all believers.
Ephesians 2
And you he made alive when you were spiritually dead and separated from him because of your transgressions and sins in which you once walked. You were following the ways of this world, influenced by this present age, in accordance with the Prince of the power of the air, Satan, the Spirit who is now at work in the disobedient, the unbelieving, who fight against the purposes of God. Among these unbelievers, we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, our behavior governed by the sinful self, indulging in the desires of human nature without the Holy Spirit and the impulses of the sinful mind. We were by nature children under the sentence of God's wrath, just like the rest of mankind. But God being so very rich in mercy, because of His great and wonderful love with which He loved us even when we were spiritually dead and separated from him because of our sins, he made us spiritually alive together with Christ, for by His grace His undeserved. Favor and mercy, you have been saved from God's judgment. And he raised us up together with Him when we believed, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, because we are in Christ Jesus. And He did this so that in the ages to come He might clearly show, the immeasurable and unsurpassed riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus, by providing for our redemption. For it is by God's grace, God's remarkable compassion in favor drawing you to Christ, that you have been saved, actually delivered from judgment, and given eternal life through faith. And this salvation is not of Yourselves not through your own effort, but it is the undeserved gracious gift of God, not as a result of your works nor your attempts to keep the law so that no one will be able to boast or take credit in any way for his salvation. For we are his workmanship, his own master work, a work of art created in Christ Jesus, reborn from above, spiritually transformed, renewed, ready to be used for good works which God prepared for us beforehand, taking paths which he set so that we would walk in them. Living the good life which he prearranged and made ready for us. Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, who were called uncircumcision by those who called themselves circumcision, itself a mere mark which is made in the flesh by human hands- remember that at the time you were separated from Christ excluded from any relationship with Him, alienated from the Commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant of the promise. With no share in the sacred Messianic promise and without the knowledge of God's agreements. Having no hope in His promise and living in the world without God. But now, at this very moment in Christ Jesus, you who were once so very far away from God, had been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He himself is our peace and our bond of unity. He who made both groups, Jews and Gentiles, into one body and broke down the barrier, the dividing wall of spiritual antagonism between us, by abolishing in His own crucified flesh the hostility caused by the Law, with its commandments contained in ordinances which He satisfied, so that He Himself, He might make the two into one new man, thereby establishing peace. And that he might reconcile them, both, Jew and Gentile, united into one body to God through the cross, thereby putting to death the hostility. And he came and preached the good news of peace to you Gentiles who were far away, and peace to those Jews who were near. For it is through Him that we both have a direct way of approach in one spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and. Aliens outside the rights of citizenship, but you are fellow citizens with the Saints, God's people, and are members of God's household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with Christ Himself as the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together. It continues to increase, growing into a holy temple in the Lord, a sanctuary dedicated, set apart and sacred to the presence of the Lord in Him and in fellowship with one another. You are also being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.