This week’s text, Ephesians 4:9-10, ties together even more firmly the message of the verses that we have studied the last two weeks.
He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things.
Jesus has ascended and is again sitting at His Father’s right hand in all of the glory and splendor of the Godhead. For us to fully comprehend this fact we must also understand why He descended into the “lower parts of the earth.” He became a peasant in the most despised town in the most despised nation on earth because of His love for us. This will be one of the great manifestations of His nature for the creation to behold throughout eternity. To just ponder this one truth will be enough to occupy us for millions of years!
There are no human words adequate to describe the revelation of God’s nature and what He did for us. For anyone who truly beholds the cross, there should never again be any doubt about one thing—God loves us!
We must also comprehend that the reason He descended to become a man and live among us is when He prevailed and ascended He might fill all things. As we covered previously, the ultimate purpose of God in the creation is that all things might be summed up in His Son (see Ephesians 1:10). As we proceed to examine the calling upon the church, how He designed it, and what it is to become, we must always keep in mind that the church is the primary vehicle through which God intends to reconcile the world to Himself.
Therefore, our success as a church will be determined by how we are used to reconcile back to God those within the sphere of authority that we have been given. He wants to use His church to begin this process so that He will again “fill all things.” How are we being used to fill our neighborhoods with Him? Our jobs? Our cities? Our nations? This is our basic purpose for being here.
Of course, we will only be effective in this to the degree that He fills us. That will be directly reflected in the way He fills our time and our mind—our consciousness. The Lord lives in us. Did we wake up this morning in His presence? Did we go to work in close fellowship with Him? If not, we woke up in a delusion, a deception. We let the lower things cloud our perception of Him. The greatest truth, the only true reality is God. If He actually lives in us, how can anything else steal our attention from Him?
Solomon built the most glorious temple ever constructed for God. However, when God filled that temple, no one’s attention was on the temple! They were captured by the One who was filling it. If there is too much attention on the temple, it can only be because God is not in it. The church is a wonderful and glorious creation, but our goal for building the church is so the manifest presence of the Lord will come. God is what we signed up for, not the church. The church is a blessing, and will become the most compelling society on earth, but it is but a shadow of the reality of heaven we are called to represent. The greatest reality of heaven is the presence of the Lord.
So how does this work out practically in our life? We have jobs to do. We have to feed this body hamburgers, and they cost money! We need houses, cars, things, so we can function in this modern world. All of this may be true, and the Lord is not opposed to us having these things, but if Christ is not more important, and more real than all of these other things, then our life is full of idols.
Lukewarmness is the worst state that any Christian can ever fall into. The reason for the lukewarmness of the Laodicean church was because they had everything they needed. Things really can be the greatest distraction from our ultimate purpose. God loves to give His children good things, and He commanded a lot more feasting than fasting, but we must guard our heart against idols, even those things that have been given to us by God.
Asceticism is not the answer to our idolatry. It quickly becomes a way that we measure our own righteousness in place of the cross. The Lord does not necessarily want us to love anyone or anything less than we do—He just wants us to love Him more. He wants us to love Him so much that He can give us all things, but we are not distracted by them because He is far greater than anything created.
There is no greater treasure than our salvation and the fellowship that we can now have with God because He descended all the way to the cross for us. Therefore, let us voluntarily go to the cross every day, willingly offering all that we are and have. Let us be committed every day to the reality that our days are only successful if we did His will. When He is the One who fills our lives He can trust us with all things, but we have a much bigger purpose than gaining stuff. When He fills our life He will overflow from us to bring salvation to others, and then He will begin to fill them too.
This is why the most clear and succinct declaration of the ultimate, apostolic mandate is found in Galatians 4:19 when Paul said, “My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you...” The true success of any ministry and any church, will be by how it brought forth the formation of Christ within His people. Are the people in our church becoming like Him? That should always be the ultimate test of our success.
Jesus ascended so that He can fill all things, and it is by ascending with Him that He begins to fill our life. The cross is the foundation of knowing God, but He is no longer on the cross. He has ascended, and if we are going to abide in Him now, it must be by sitting with Him on His throne. Our goal now must be that He fills our life.
