Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

“I commit you to God,” he says, “and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those whom God has sanctified.”14 God’s word of grace was the powerful word of the cross, the life-transforming word of the gospel, the word that started in the ancient scriptures and told the story reaching forward to the explosive new event of Jesus himself. And it was Jesus himself whom Paul invoked at the end. Just as the Jerusalem leaders had urged him to “remember the poor,” so Paul urged the Ephesians to “work to help the weak,” since Jesus himself had said (in a saying unrecorded elsewhere), “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”15 That was how the church was to be known—as the community that modeled the outgoing, generous grace of God. That was how it would confront the principalities and powers who were all out for their own ends. That was why, no doubt, the wolves would come in to snatch what they could; this kind of community was by its very nature vulnerable, and would always be. Loyalty would be contested. But God’s grace and God’s word were stronger, and like good wholesome food they would build up the church’s strength, nourishing the believers and their leaders so that they would indeed “inherit the kingdom,” the worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.