Ephesians 2:6

Ephesians 2:6

The Church a Home for the Lonely.

The subject suggested by the text is the need which mankind lies under of some shelter, refuge, rest, home, or sanctuary from the outward world, and the shelter or secret place which God has provided for them in Christ.

I. By the world I mean all that meets a man in intercourse with his fellow-men, whether in public or in private, all that is new, strange, and without natural connection with him. Christ finds us weary of the world, in which we are obliged to live and act, whether as willing or unwilling slaves in it. He finds us needing and seeking a home and making one, as we best may, by means of the creature, since it is all we can do. The world in which our duties lie is as waste as the wilderness, as useless and turbulent as the ocean, as inconstant as the wind and weather. It has no substance in it, but is like a shade or phantom; when you pursue it, when you try to grasp it, it escapes from you, or it is malicious, and does you a mischief. We need something which the world cannot give; this is what we need, and this it is which the Gospel has supplied.

II. I say that our Lord Jesus Christ, after dying for our sins on the cross and ascending on high, left not the world as He found it, but left a blessing behind Him. He left in the world what before was not in it: a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever they are found, in spite of the world around us. This is the Church of God, which is our true home, of God's providing, His own heavenly court, where He dwells with saints and angels, into which He introduces us by a new birth, and in which we forget the outward world and its many troubles. The world is no helpmeet for man, and a helpmeet he needs. What is our resource? It is not in arm of man, in flesh and blood, in voice of friend, or in pleasant countenance; it is that holy home which God has given us in His Church; it is that everlasting city in which He has fixed His abode; it is that mount invisible whence angels are looking at us with their piercing eyes, and the voices of the dead call us; Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world." "If God be for us, who can be against us?"

J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. iv., p. 185.

References: Ephesians 2:7. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxviii., No. 1665; H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 140; J. Baldwin Brown, Ibid.,vol. vi., p. 373.