Page 11 - Ephesians

Stand”, or “Stand, Walk, Sit”. It starts with sitting because you
can’t walk until you’ve learned to sit. Many people try to learn to
sit, by walking. “If I can only learn how to live the Christian life,
then I can rest.” No, you don’t learn to live the Christian life in
order to rest. You start by sitting. You start by resting. That’s the
emphasis of God in Ephesians. When God burns the message of
Ephesians into your heart, what will you learn? Someone might
say, “I’ll learn how to sit down with Christ.” No; you won’t learn
that. No place in the Bible does God tell you to sit down with
Christ. There’s a tremendous bondage in trying to sit down
with Christ.

Did you ever try to rest? It doesn’t work. The more you try, the
worse it gets. If the Holy Spirit begins to burn the message of
Ephesians in your heart, you won’t learn how to sit down. You’ll
learn that you are already seated with Christ in the heavenly
places. That’s not just language. That’s a different direction.
You don’t have to do anything. It’s already done. One of the
things that God is going to do in this study is to open your eyes
wide. He’s going to show you what is already true and what is
already a fact. You’ve already been seated with Christ. It’s not an
act to do. It’s a fact that’s done. When God begins to anoint our
eyes with this message then we’ll see where He has placed us in
Christ. We’ll see that we’re already seated with Him in heavenly
places; that we’re multi-billionaires in Christ and that nothing can
be added to it.

In the book of Ephesians God uses a recurring expression that
doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible. You won’t find it in the
Old Testament and you won’t find it in the New Testament. Five
times in the book of Ephesians is found the expression “in the
heaven-lies” or “heavenly places”. Let me try to take all five
descriptions and give you a common denominator description. I
want to make it broad enough so that I include everything. If I just
say, “It means spiritual things and spiritual places. If I say it
doesn’t mean heaven and the presence of God. Then how in the
world would you interpret chapter 1:20, which says, “When He
ascended, He was seated at the right hand of God in
heavenly places.” It must include the presence of God. But it
must also mean whatever chapter 6:20 is referring to when it