Spiritual Blessings for the New Year!

The beginning of Ephesians takes the form of a blessing rather than the more usual thanksgiving of the first verses of
these types of letters in the New Testament.  Ephesians 1:3-14 is all one sentence in the original Greek text.  The one sentence gives emphasis to the bountiful blessings that are made possible in Christ.  It is as if the author could not stop once he started talking about “every spiritual blessing in Christ” (1:3).  The blessing of these first verses gets at the heart of what it means that God became human in Jesus.  The grace that God shows in the birth of Jesus is only the beginning of what is made available to us in Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension.  The Holy Spirit is the “guarantee” that God’s blessing in Jesus has the purpose to draw us all into the richness of God’s life in abundance (1:13-14).  I usually don’t wish people a “happy and prosperous” new year, because there is something much more important than that to pray for, namely “a blessed new year” during which you will be able to live into the fullness of the abundance of spiritual blessings that God will give you during the next year.  May God take you out of any mentality of scarcity into His life of abundance in 2011!!!