“The eyes of your heart having been enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of His calling, and what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” (Eph. 1:18)
In the early hours of the morning, before the sun rises, there is a short time with just enough illumination in the sky to distinguish the horizon at sea. The earth is surrounded by atmosphere, so even before we see the sun, its radiating light is already reflected through the twilight—when it is exactly 12 degrees below the horizon, usually less than half an hour before the sun breaks. It is called dawn.
Dawn is the very specific time when we are seeking, watching, and waiting for the sunrise. Who seeks the Lord’s coming? The people who are in the dawn. At dawn, the ambient atmosphere of twilight is beautiful. We watch for that, because that indicates the Lord’s coming. But ironically, dawn doesn’t appear without the atmosphere; oftentimes, the atmosphere is full of clouds, full of darkness. We all seek the Lord through darkness. That’s who we are. But when the sun comes, we join the sun to become one luminary—the luminary to the world.
Why do we still struggle in ourselves, unable to see the Lord in our lives? Because we never seek God through dawn. We often come unprepared for the meeting—or to meet the Lord. We are still chatting, eating, rushing. But what is dawn to you? It is seeking the sunrise through the darkness, the radiance of the sun through the atmosphere. It is searching beyond the clouds, the darkness—through our failures, through our evilness. It is to watch over our condition so we can transcend and be uplifted. It cannot be done by any action, but simply by finding that we are one that is pleasing to God. We just need to find ourself as an offering to Him, to which the Lord says, “Amen, I accept you.”
The book of Ephesians is a very high book—a radiant, bright, heavenly book. It requires true experience, making it almost impossible to “understand.” We have a lot of knowledge. We have a lot of methods. We have a lot of physical understanding and appreciation of the good things. But something is very dead—there is a vitality that is missing. It is hard for us to reach a book that reaches the character, nature, and atmosphere of the heavenlies. Oftentimes, we are still stuck in Galatians: in religion, in “seeking” the life of Christ yet with a living that is not true or pleasing to God. All around us may be darkness, and yet we do not seek the dawn—that radiating light waiting to burst across the horizon.
Galatians is about dealing with the old. It is a religious world. But Ephesians is in the heavenlies. It is almost untouchable. Without being brought into this sphere of “in the heavenlies,” or being brought into the character or the manifestation or the nature in the heavenlies, there is no way we can be mingled with this beloved One, who is the applicable, experiential, and pneumatic Christ—the Spirit. To come to Ephesians, we must be the watchmen, seeking God through the dawn, living in the transcending radiance of this very Christ, our Lord.
(Above is part 1 of a series compiled from notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 9/11/20, not reviewed by the speaker. Read part 2 here.)