For Your Notebook – Every Spiritual Blessing in Christ Jesus

Scripture teaches us that every state of spiritual blessing enjoyed by the believer is based upon the wonderful place that we have been given, through divine grace, in our Lord Jesus Christ who is now a living glorified Man in heaven. These blessings are heavenly in character but to be enjoyed by faith in the power of the Holy Spirit even now while we are down here. In His prayer in John 17. 24 Jesus asks that They also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am’. 1 Pet.er 1. 4 speaks of ‘an inheritance … reserved in heaven for you’, and in Ephesians 1. 13, 14 we read of the ‘Holy Spirit… which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession’.

Romans 5, verses 1-11 tell us of many of these blessings, ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’, v. 1; ‘By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand’, v. 2; ‘Being now justified by His blood’, v. 9; and ‘we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ’, v. 11.

Romans 8, verse 1 tells us, ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus’. We are ‘made free from the law of sin and death’, v. 2.

Ephesians 1, 1-11 continues the wonderful story, ‘who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ’, v. 3. ‘He hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world’, v. 4; ‘He hath made us accepted in the Beloved’ v. 6; ‘In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins’, v. 7; and ‘In whom also we have obtained an inheritance’, v. 11.

Ephesians 2, verses 5-13 shows that God ‘has quickened us together with Christ’, v. 5; ‘hath raised us up. and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus’, v. 6; and, ‘Now in Christ Jesus ye … are made nigh by the blood of Christ’, v. 13.

Colossians 3, verse 3 reads, ‘Your life is hid with Christ in God’, and 1 John 5. 12, ‘he that hath the Son hath life’. It becomes clear then that there is no enjoyment of true eternal life unless found in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

Every believer is given, by divine grace and favour, a place of blessing in Christ -evidence of the practical effects of new birth, that there is now a new man in Christ where sin and death have no power to spoil and corrupt. As we appreciate the glories of our risen Saviour, may we enjoy these blessings more and more.