Project 119: Heaven and Nature Sing | Ephesians 2:1-10

 |  Project 119  |  Mary Splawn

Reading for Wednesday, December 9: Ephesians 2:9-10

By Thine own eternal Spirit
Rule in all our hearts alone;
By Thine all-sufficient merit,
Raise us to Thy glorious throne.
-"Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus"

Many of us grew up in churches where we only sang the first or second verse of hymns. In one such church, a retired pastor named Bob spoke up after a song was cut short. “Why don’t we sing the whole song?” he said at a rather awkward time. On that day, the church began to sing all the verses and they continue on until this day in the same fashion. They began to sing all stanzas out of reverence but they continued this pattern as they learned that the verses they’d been skipping were great texts that led them to profound worship of God.

I mention that because today’s hymn text is like that often forgotten fourth verse. Pastor Bob was surely right about this one! We must sing the last verse because a careful examination of the words remind us that if we miss this verse, we miss the true hope of Christians at Christmas! This verse is the culmination of our longing for Jesus. It is a prayer for trust and obedience in this life and a prayer of longing for the second coming of Jesus to take us home.

Charles Wesley’s choice of the words are rich with meaning. I believe that when we parse out the prayer: “by Thine own eternal Spirit, rule in all our hearts alone” we find that what the writer is highlighting is the eternal nature of God and the necessity of our dependence on God’s Spirit to rule on the throne of our hearts. God is unbound by time. He is fully aware of our past, present, and future and His perspective on all things is infinitely greater than ours. That is why the connected Scripture passage today is so comforting. Paul says that God “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions” (Ephesians 2:5 NIV). God knows our past, but He loves us anyway! We should not live in nostalgia of the past or even in inordinate regret over past sins that we have confessed and from which we have turned. Jesus Christ “breaks the power of canceled sin” as another hymn by Charles Wesley states (Charles Wesley, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”). 

God knows our future as well, and Paul reminds us of our glorious hope of resurrection in this same passage when he says that “in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:7 NIV). The hymn says it this way: “by Thine all-sufficient merit, raise us to Thy glorious throne.”

As we await Jesus’ return and our eternal home in the new heavens and the new earth, we are called to live fully present in today instead of anxiously awaiting a new day or living a life of regret. In this present season, we are called to redeem the time we have been given “for we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10 NIV). We are not promised tomorrow on this earth, but we are promised the gift of God’s Spirit and we are given the light of today to be about His handiwork. May this day be one of intentional worship of our eternal God and one in which we love and serve others, in the name of our all-sufficient King.