Ephesians 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
The opening scripture is a confirmation that we are blessed. The tense used is a past participle which describes an event that just happened in the recent past. The Bible never said, “… who is blessing us..” or “..who will bless us..” Christ’s death brought us a package of blessings and so we are not about to be blessed, we are already blessed. This is the summary of the Christian faith and journey: Christ came to die for us so we could enjoy what we were already destined to enjoy when man was first made. Hence, we are to enforce and bring to physical manifestation what is spiritual.
When you take a look at the scripture, you see that the blessings are spiritual and located in heavenly realms. What we need to focus on is how we can bring these blessings to the earth and make them tangible and then we can see their effect on our lives. In Hebrews 11:1, we see that faith is the substance of things hoped for. So by faith, we are making what is intangible become tangible.
This is what came to me as I meditated on the opening scripture: I don’t think that you would give your house keys to a stranger. If a number of people are living in the same house, it is likely that they all have a key so that if they get home and there is no one, they can still have access to the house. God is the owner of the heavenly realms where the spiritual blessings are located. You cannot have access to the heavenly realms without having a relationship with the owner.
I can have access to any house only if I have a relationship with the owner.
A person must trust me well enough to give me the key to their house. This is the same way God has to trust you enough to grant you access to the blessings in heavenly realms. 2 Peter 1:3 says, “As His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue.” So, we are able to access these spiritual blessings through our knowledge of God. And the next verse tells us how we are participants or partakers of the divine nature. So you could have the right to something and because you don’t know, you’d not benefit from it.
The lack of knowledge of what you have doesn’t make you different from another person who doesn’t have it at all. So the only way I can enjoy something to the fullest is when I have knowledge of the fact that it’s mine. If I’m not sure it’s mine, I’d be careful about using it. But once I know that it belongs to me, there’s a confidence I would exude. This journey of faith is a quest to discover what is ours in Christ and take hold of it. That’s why we need to grow from faith to faith and faith thrives on knowledge.
Paul said in Philippians 3:12, ” Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” In other words, he didn’t want Christ’s saving him to be a waste. He wanted to take hold of the reason why Christ saved him. Why did Christ save us? So we can have forgiveness of our sins, become rich through His poverty, enable us to have a fruitful relationship with God, and be healed by His stripes, etc.
The more we grow in the knowledge of God, the more we can’t afford to tolerate what isn’t part of the divine nature. There are people who believe in divine health and don’t remember the last time they fell sick and there are others who are not at that level yet. It shows that there are levels to faith in God. Don’t ever think you’ve arrived when it comes to faith in God because there is more in God when we go deeper. When I first heard a man of God say that menstrual cramps are not normal, it ceased for me. Because I had heard that it was normal for women, I had permitted it for years. Once the knowledge came and it got into my spirit – note that it’s not a head knowledge thing- I didn’t even have to pray. Since then, I haven’t had such pain.
This concept is just like how the Bible says we’ve been given a measure of faith. Once we accept Jesus, there is a measure of faith but we must grow that faith so it becomes huge and doesn’t remain small as a mustard seed. Also, when the Bible speaks of fanning to flames the gift of God in us, it meant the gift is there but we have to make it visible. So we’ve been blessed but it’s not visible because it has not been watered so we can see the fruits. Working out our salvation means the salvation is there but it would have to be worked on so results can be evident.
Because of what Jesus did, we are fighting from a place of victory. We do exploits not based on our efforts but using what Jesus did as a stepping stone. So spiritual blessings are meant to be enforced.
The Word In Clarity 