Sunday June 7th, 2026 – Ephesians 3:20-21
If you wanted to see the glory of God, where would you go to find it? The instinct is to look up and out — to the billions of stars that declare His glory, or back to Solomon’s temple where the cloud filled the house so thickly the priests could not stand to minister. So when Paul erupts in praise, we might expect him to name the heavens or the holy place as the arena of that glory. Instead, he names something far more surprising: the church. The glory of the God — who breathed out the universe with all its intricate detail — is now put on display in a gathered congregation of forgiven sinners. And this is no accident of placement. It is the very thing the whole letter has been building toward — God uniting all things in Christ (1:10), making the dead alive (2:1-10), tearing down the wall of separation to form one new humanity, building that humanity into a holy dwelling place of God, the locus of His manifold wisdom before the powers, the center point of His reclamation of the cosmos. The church is the arena not because she is impressive in herself, but because she is so joined to Christ that to glorify God in the church is to glorify Him in Jesus, and to glorify Him in Jesus is to glorify Him in the church. We do not manufacture this glory; we acknowledge it, the way a crowd’s cheer affirms an athletic feat it could never itself perform. If we truly grasped that the glory once reserved for the cosmos and holy spaces like the temple now rests upon the people of God, there would be a line out the door every Sunday waiting with anticipation to worship! Arise and shine, church — the glory of God has come to rest on you. To Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, to all generations, forever and ever. Amen!