United by Grace

Continuing the series of narrative sermons on the book of Ephesians, I tell the story of an important scribe named Demetrius, whose first contact with the Christian community in Ephesus comes when he is nursed back to health after a life-threatening illness:

Demetrius was a skeptical man, and not given to new fads. He was grateful to Petros, but the idea of suffering as a sign of God’s presence, rather than absence, the idea of their hero as a man who had been crucified was so strange that at first he thought he was still feverish when he heard it. So he asked Petros to explain it again, and again. And each time he heard it, it was like he caught a glimpse of a different reality, like looking through a key hole into a different room, a different world.