Commissioned: Passion to Purpose: Living the Great CommissionSample

God’s Poem

If you ever have a chance to visit Rome, you can visit the Mamertine prison, where the Apostle Paul was confined after he was arrested as a troublemaker for preaching that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. You will descend a circular metal stairway into a damp, claustrophobic cellar into which Paul was lowered by a rope—or possibly dropped. We can only imagine the suffering that Paul experienced in this pit of death--alone, poorly fed, sitting in dank darkness.

It was probably from this cellar that Paul wrote a letter to the church in the city of Ephesus from which the above words are taken. Yet Paul does not speak to them about the misfortune of being lowered into a place of suffering and darkness. Instead he speaks to them of being raised up into the heavens! He speaks to them about life and grace and God’s kindness!

Paul looked at life through the lens of spiritual realities and saw things that we usually do not see. What he saw and shared with the believers in Ephesus is true of every baptized Christian—we have already been raised up with Jesus Christ and seated in heaven in Him! When we were baptized into Jesus Christ, we became part of His body, and all the spiritual benefits that God has given to Jesus Christ have become ours as well. This salvation from sin and death is a gift from God. And Paul says that “in the ages to come”—in eternity—God will show us His immeasurable grace and kindness!

But Paul does not focus only on the ages to come; he has a message for us today. Not only are we already raised up and seated in Christ, but “we are his handiwork.” Paul wrote in the Greek language, and the word we translate as “handiwork” is poiema, from which we get the word “poem.” It means something carefully crafted, a work of beauty and of value. “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art,” wrote C.S. Lewis. Each of us is a masterpiece of grace!

So, God is carefully and lovingly working in our lives to produce a poem, a story of His grace and mercy, and He is doing this with a purpose. “We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them.” God is making us into the very person who is needed to do some good things that He has in mind for us. No one else will fit. No one else has the exact set of strengths and weaknesses (because God shows Himself primarily through our weaknesses) that are needed to love and help some people right around us. We are the right person, in the right place, at the right time—because that is who God made us to be.

Stop, think and pray:

Let’s meditate on these spiritual realities until they become real for us:

• We are seated in heaven in Christ, regardless of our present circumstances.
• We are God’s handiwork, his poem for the world, his masterpiece.
• God has made us into the exact people who are necessary to love the people around us—including our strengths and our weaknesses.

Praise God for His grace and for His wisdom.