Grace and Peace Before You Do a Thing

Two words carry the weight here. Saint — hagios — does not mean a soul made perfect, but one set apart, called out and claimed by God for himself. You did not make yourselves holy; you were sanctified in Christ Jesus. And grace and peace — this is no mere courtesy at a letter's head. Grace is the unearned favor of God poured out on the undeserving, and peace is what grace makes: a war ended, the sinner reconciled to God (Romans 5:1). The one gives birth to the other, and both come "from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" — named together, as befits the Lord he is.

This same greeting stands at the door of nearly every letter I have sent — grace first, always grace (Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3). And that I am "an apostle by the will of God" and not by my own choosing or worth — I labor that point where men doubted my calling, for I was the least, one born out of due time (1 Corinthians 15:8-10). The calling was his doing, not mine.

I write bound, from Rome, to the church at Ephesus — a great city given over to idols and the worship of Artemis, where I once labored three years and warned them with tears (Acts 20:31). They are Gentiles, brought near who were once far off, and much of what follows presses that wonder home. And I write it as a prisoner, chained to a soldier even now — yet I open, you notice, not with my chains but with grace. That is deliberate.

Why call yourselves saints, when you know your own hearts too well — the sin still clinging, the failures of yesterday? Here is the honest difficulty: the word names not what you have achieved but what God has declared. You are holy because you are in Christ Jesus — that little phrase is the whole ground of it. Do not read saint and measure your feelings against it and despair. Read it and see whose you are. The proof is not in your record but in his cross; go back and see that it says "in Christ," not "in yourself."