Who Am I?

Posted on 31 May 202619 June 2026 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

As we move into the letter of Paul which we know as the letter to the Ephesians, we should begin by saying it probably wasn’t a letter to the Ephesians—not specifically. For one thing, from the oldest manuscripts we have, there’s good reason to think the words “in Ephesus” in 1:1 aren’t original to the text. For another, Paul founded the church in Ephesus and then spent three years there, his longest documented stay with any one church. He’s imprisoned in Rome following his arrest in Jerusalem; consider that on his way to Jerusalem for that fateful visit, he had the ship sail past Ephesus to Miletus and then sent a message to the elders of the Ephesian church to meet him there. He couldn’t just sail past them without saying goodbye, but he knew if he stopped there, it would take him weeks to tear himself away again. Yet with all that affection and all those strong relationships, there are no personal comments in the letter and no references to specific situations in the Ephesian church.

I believe, as many have for centuries, that this was actually a circular letter which was sent to all the churches in the Roman province of Asia, which occupied the western part of the Anatolian Peninsula, what we now know as Turkey. It seems to have been inspired by the issues Paul was addressing in his letter to the church in Colossae, with which Ephesians shares a great deal of material, and one of the earliest lists of New Testament books references it as the letter coming from Laodicea which Paul mentions in Colossians 4:16. The subject and concern of this letter is the unity of the church as the body of Christ; Paul takes his language from 1 Corinthians, where he tried to help the Corinthian believers understand their unity in Christ, and broadens it out to apply it to the whole church in every place and culture and language. As the great New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce summarized it, Colossians lays out “the role of Christ as Lord over the cosmos”; this is how Paul counters the false teachers in Colossae. Ephesians takes it a step further, asking what this means for our understanding of the church as the body of Christ.

One Generation Will Call to the Next

Posted on 17 May 202617 June 2026 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 145; Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 1:1-11)

As we’re concluding our series from the Psalms this morning, it seemed good to me to take a few minutes to look back at how we got here. We’ve considered a selection of psalms through the lens of the question that opens Psalm 137: how can we sing the song of the Lord in a strange land? Most of us, at least, have not endured the kind of savagery that community had, but as followers of Jesus, we are in a strange land even in our own nation. Remember the statement from Meister Eckhardt I quoted some weeks ago: “God is at home. We are in the far country.” From Jesus on through to Revelation, the New Testament is clear: this world is hostile territory for him and thus for all who follow him, whether it seems to be or not. If we are to sing the Lord’s song, then—both literally, in our songs of worship, and figuratively, in the way we live our lives—we have to understand what it means to do that in a strange land.

I’m not claiming to have offered a comprehensive answer to that question; even if I had one, which I don’t, it would take a lot longer than we’ve had so far. We’ve seen some pieces of the answer, though, which I think fall into three categories. First, singing the Lord’s song in a strange land requires honesty, toward God, ourselves, and other people, about our reality—ourselves, our situation, and our struggles. So, for instance, Psalm 88 shows us our need to be honest about the reality that life is hard, faith is hard, and doubt happens. We’re responsible for how we handle the hard times and what we do with our doubt, but if we judge others—or ourselves—as if those things shouldn’t happen at all, we aren’t operating in the truth.

God Is Bigger

Posted on 3 May 20267 May 2026 by Rob Harrison | No Comments

(Psalm 139; John 20:30-31, 21:20-25)

The genesis of this sermon was in a social media post I saw briefly weeks ago and have never been able to find again. I think it was on Threads, since that app does this to people routinely, but it doesn’t really matter. Whoever the poster was, they told a story about a physicist who gave a presentation on Christianity and science and how their scientific work supported and enriched their faith in Jesus and the Bible as historically understood by the Christian church. In the question-and-answer session after the talk, someone in the audience went up to the mic and asked, “How can you believe a God who’s that big could possibly even notice individual people?” The scientist quietly answered, “My God is bigger than you think.”

I wish I could find the source, if only to give credit wherever it may be due, because that’s absolutely brilliant, and absolutely spot-on. If for some reason you needed to summarize Psalm 139 in a sentence, that would do. As Derek Kidner, whom I’ve referenced a few times in recent weeks, puts it, “Any small thoughts that we may have of God are magnificently transcended by this psalm; yet for all its height and depth it remains intensely personal from first to last.” In that spirit, though it would be easy to dive deep into this psalm—there’s a lot here—I want to take the 30,000-foot view and look at the ways Psalm 139 shows us that God is bigger, with some echoes from the end of the Gospel of John.