From Doxology to Duty

The relationship between knowing and doing, between what we profess and what we practice, is at the heart of this text. Paul has just finished 3 chapters worth of describing the glory of God in and through Christ and the people He has redeemed, culminating in Paul's desire that the people of God would be filled with all the fullness of God. That concept sent Paul's soul soaring; It's as if he wrote and wrote and wrote, and then his heart couldn't take it any more, he just had to break forth in explicit praise of the God who ordained all of the glorious realities. And now, in our text, Paul comes back down to earth. Not that he was any less excited, or that what he had described was unrealistic. He comes down to earth in that he now describes what these spiritual blessings, these heavenly realities, look like on earth, as they are lived out among God's people. Thus far, Paul has described what Christians are to know, and now he turns his attention to the necessary complement of that knowledge; he begins to describe what Christians are to do.