Today’s Scripture · Ephesians 2:1–10
KJV
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”
EPHESIANS 2:10 (KJV)
NASB95
“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”
ESV
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
When one of our boys at URA had nowhere to stay, our team didn’t file it under “not our department.” He’d been searching high and low — that particular panic of a man with no roof, counting the hours till dark. I know it well. There was a season when my own world collapsed, when I sat in Changi with the walls close and the future gone, and it was there — through Pastor Paul Tan and the Crossroads Bible study — that God met me and planted the vision for what became The Caffeine Experience. I did not deserve the mercy that found me. But God is “rich in mercy” (v. 4), and grace has a way of arriving through unexpected hands: a landlord, a CEO, a stranger who says yes.
So when that boy needed a place, we searched, we called, we settled him. That is the shape of this work. We don’t merely give a Restarter a job and consider the debt paid. We counsel them through the shame they carry. We guide them when old habits pull hard. We walk with them — slowly, over months, sometimes years, the way Justus and I have walked nine years now, even through his own incarceration. Because that is how I was walked with.
Paul says we are God’s workmanship — His handiwork, mended and remade — “created in Christ Jesus for good works.” Notice the order: first we are His work; only then do we do His work. The compassion isn’t ours to manufacture; He supplies it. He prepared these works “beforehand,” laid them like stepping-stones before we ever arrived. Our task is simply to walk in what He has already set down. That boy has a bed tonight. God had it waiting all along.
Questions to Sit With
- ›Where am I still working as though I must earn the mercy that has already found me?
- ›Who is “searching high and low” near me right now — and what would it cost me to be the hand that says yes?
- ›What good work has God already prepared and laid before me today, waiting only for me to walk in it?
Prayer
Father, make me quick to walk the good works You prepared. Where I see a need, let me not calculate the cost but reflect the mercy that first found me. Give me Your compassion for the one still searching in the dark, and let me be the hand that says yes. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria
“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
— 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17 (KJV)
Brewing Coffee & Second Chances
UEN: 201725426R
