I switched the hosting for this blog from 1and1 (Ionos) to Bluehost. There were some technical glitches along the way (mainly between my chair and the keyboard), but now I’ve got the Kitchen up and running again.

Let’s kick off the year with a minor epiphany I recently experienced. We’re studying the book of Ephesians on Sunday mornings, using some wonderful notes prepared by James Thompson. He pointed out something about Ephesians 3:14. When Paul says, “For this reason I kneel before the Father,” he’s probably not specifically talking about prayer. Jews in Paul’s day typically stood to prayer. Kneeling was the posture for worship.

That’s not a major point, though it does help me see the connection with the previous passage. Paul is overwhelmed by what God has done in the church, and it leads him to worship God. Rather than a call to imitate Paul in worship, this verse is more a call to recapture the sense of wonder at what God is doing.

Interestingly enough, the Greek contains no specific reference to prayer in this section. I’ll copy the last verses of Ephesians 3 from Young’s Literal Translation, just to make that obvious:

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in the heavens and on earth is named, that He may give to you, according to the riches of His glory, with might to be strengthened through His Spirit, in regard to the inner man, that the Christ may dwell through the faith in your hearts, in love having been rooted and founded, that ye may be in strength to comprehend, with all the saints, what [is] the breadth, and length, and depth, and height, to know also the love of the Christ that is exceeding the knowledge, that ye may be filled — to all the fulness of God; and to Him who is able above all things to do exceeding abundantly what we ask or think, according to the power that is working in us, to Him [is] the glory in the assembly in Christ Jesus, to all the generations of the age of the ages. Amen.”

It makes me think of the young autistic boy who spontaneously called out “Wow!” at the end of a Mozart concert. I’ll include that video, in case you haven’t seen it. That’s what I want to find, the sense of wonder that will drive me to my knees and make me cry out “Wow!”