One Family in Heaven and Earth.
Of God, the universal Father, the whole family in heaven and earth is named. He is Father to them all. They all feel the comfort of His love. And we may be sure that whatever needs to be done in those heavenly worlds in sustaining weakness, in guiding inexperience, in the leading of young spirits, or in the comforting of those that are discouraged by the mysteries of the universe all will be done by the universal Father, who is the same yesterday, today, and for ever.
I. These views ought somewhat to overcome the depressing effect naturally produced on us by the vastness and the grandeur of the material universe. Magnitudes and distances and millenniums are nothing to Him, and He would not have us sink under the weight of them.
II. This passage will do us good if it confirms our faith in the actual objective existence of heaven as a place, a chosen favoured place, where God and His children meet and dwell. Our friends have gone to the old ancestral home, which Christ has enlarged and beautified and fitted in every way for the reception of the redeemed from among men. They have gone from the mere colony, lying far out from the seat of government and the central city, into the better country and within the gates of the bright metropolis.
III. Heaven has great priority and pre-eminence over earth, and we may well yield up our best and dearest to swell its numbers and enhance its glories and felicities.
IV. If we thus regard heaven, we shall find it by so much easier to bear some of our heaviest sorrows and to understand some of the deepest mysteries of life. Among the deepest is death, the premature death, as we say, of those who are just prepared to live, who are greatly gifted, greatly needed, greatly loved. When to live is Christ, then to die must be gain.
V. It surely ought with each one of us to be the great ambition of our life and the very chief of all our cares to belong heart and soul to this great family of God.
A. Raleigh, The Way to the City,p. 46.
References: Ephesians 3:14; Ephesians 3:15. Archbishop Magee, Church of England Pulpit,vol. xxi., p. 145; F. W. Robertson, Sermons,3rd series, p. 181; E. L. Hull, Sermons,1st series, p. 121.Ephesians 3:14-16. Preacher's Monthly,vol. ix., p. 313; W. Anderson, Discourses,p. 19. Ephesians 3:14-19. A. J. Parry, Phases of Truth,p. 249.