Paul’s Spiritual Continuum

Yesterday I listened to my friend Joe Long speak at church on a familiar passage in Ephesians. He alluded to a spiritual continuum that I had never really explored for some reason.

I had read the passage many times in the past and recognized each individual metaphor, but I had never viewed them as stages.

“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”  EPHESIANS 2:19-22 

In this passage, Paul is particularly addressing Gentile believers to help them understand the incredible scope of God’s purposes for the planet and the call to live unified, transformative lives with the first covenant people. But I think Paul is exposing a universally applicable continuum, or spiritual evolution, that we’re all subject to in the text above. A simple graphic looks like this:

Foreigner → Citizen → Household → Temple

Foreigner is obvious nomenclature: someone who is unattached to the country they are in. They can’t fully partake in the blessings and responsibilities of the state in which they reside. They are alien to the system’s connectedness. Strangers in a strange land. And in order to become assimilated, they must first become a citizen.

A Citizen is someone who is a legally recognized member of a country and who enjoys the protections and rights it offers. Paul is making the case that those outside of Israel’s covenant have been grafted in.

The beauty of Paul’s continuum is that it is not merely an individualistic endeavor. The need for community—or to use Paul’s word: household—is critical. That implies the intimacy of family, and in this context, a case of spiritual genetics—they share Holy Spirit DNA. This is more than “protections and rights”; this is shared closeness, familial affection, and inheritance.

Then Paul introduces something larger than a family: the Temple. A temple is a structure of purpose: an edifice built for a god to inhabit. The gathering of these citizens and households creates something new, built with—as the apostle Peter notes—living stones, constructing something never created before.

But why? In the last chapter of Isaiah, God describes the whole earth as His property. In a nearly derisive way, He says all of heaven is His throne and the earth is merely His footstool, asking how anyone could build a physical structure for Him—reminding them that everything in existence exists because of Him.

But then He reveals what He’s really looking for: people who are “humble and contrite in spirit.”

That is what you, as a leader, are partnering with God to construct. In building the Church—and your localized expression of it—you are joining with God in a continuum that creates a dwelling place for God to inhabit: a foretaste of the new heaven and new earth.

It’s important that the people you pastor understand there is something greater than mere methodologies and practices—a work that has never existed before is being created.

Our people must have their horizons broadened. And you, who deeply know that God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,” must expand their worldview.

Or Kingdomview.

Dave Workman | The Elemental Group

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