Starting Ephesians

We have just finished out our series through the spiritual disciplines, which was so much fun. I honestly enjoyed getting to go through those 8 spiritual disciplines with you all, and I really think that the series has helped to grow me and I pray that it’s grown you.

Now, we are going to jump back into a study through a Book of the Bible. It’s always fun getting to do something on a topic, but the Bible is THE revelation of God of who He is and who we are called to be, and so we here really value getting a chance to go through the Bible verse by verse.

After prayer with the leaders, we decided to go with the Book of Ephesians!

So, with that in mind, why don’t you turn in your Bibles to… Revelation 2:1-7 (bet you didn’t think that was gong to be what I said did you?

The Ephesian church is the only church that has a letter written to them in the Bible and is referenced in Revelation, which is pretty cool! But, from this passage we can see some of the things that the Ephesian church did well, and not so well, after Paul had written to them.

The Good

They we’re really good at doctrine (knowing what to believe)

They didn’t like false preachers

They endured through suffering and hardship really well.

The Bad

They lost the love that they had at first.

The good outnumbers the bad, but the bad was killing them.

The church at this point knew their stuff! They were the smartest people in the room, and if you believed the wrong thing, they’d make sure to tell you about it!

But, they also did it without love because they weren’t acting in love.

If Christians don’t have love, then they don’t have faith.

Jesus was a Person who loved people radically, the Bible calls us into a crazy long love story, and if we lose sight of that and become bitter and hard to other people, we will end up just like the Ephesian church.

What the Ephesian church had was a problem of identity. They started out a community of love, but the hardness of dealing with the world made them bitter and angry and lacking in love.

But, to figure out how they got there, let’s look at how they started out! Let’s open our Bibles to Ephesians 1:1-2

The start of the Ephesian Church

The Ephesian church was started all the way back in Acts 18 by Paul and his missionary friends Priscilla and Aquilla. They were a couple that were from Rome, but had gotten kicked out of Rome because of their faith.

Paul and his friends land in Ephesus, and Paul helps start the church, but leaves pretty quickly, and then the couple stay to build the church, the church even met in their house.

Eventually, Paul came back and started preaching in Ephesus and working on the side, and things went crazy

Tons of people were believing in Jesus, miracles were happening everywhere, and people who practiced demon worship and witchcraft burned all of their stuff because they believed in Jesus.

It got to the point where the economy was beginning to be effected.

Ephesus made a lot of silver shrines and idols (images of Artemis), but people stopped buying them because they didn’t believe in it anymore.

That really messed with the people that were selling those, which effected the whole economy, to the point where there were riots and people wanted to kill Paul.

So, Paul left Ephesus, but the church continued and grew and became one of the major churches of the world at that time.

By the time that Paul is writing the letter to the Ephesians (which is what we were reading), Priscilla and Aquila had left to go back to Rome, and they were in need of some guidance.

So, as we approach the Book of Ephesians, there’s a couple themes to keep in mind throughout our readings.

God’s plan in salvation

One of the main things that keeps popping up in the first half of Ephesians is God’s plan and power in salvation.

For the first three chapters, Paul basically provides the framework to help us understand what God has done and is doing in saving us.

He talks about the power of God in Jesus, the fact that we are brought from death into life, our unity, and God’s plan in bringing all peoples to a faith in Him.

So, the first 3 chapters are going to be pretty dense, it’s going to be a lot about the knowledge behind why God has done stuff and His plans (as best as we can understand)

Identity

A big component of this section will be identity, both who God is and who we are.

We get to learn about God’s character more in this Book because We get to see His heart in what He’s done for us.

We’ll learn about how He cares for us individually, how He wants us to get along, what He did in dying for us, and more.

We’ll also learn about who we are.

When we get to see God working and why He’s working, we get to see who He sees us as.

A big topic today is self-image, how you view yourself, but a big topic that isn’t really touched on very much is God’s image, how He views you, which is way more important!

When we learn about who we are, that will inform what we do, which leads us to the second theme of Ephesians!

Our Story

Once we have a decent understanding about who God is and what He thinks of us, then we’ll move from that into understanding how that knowledge will change how we live.

There’s two main formulas that Ephesians uses to explain this

Former-Now

Throughout the last section of Ephesians, Paul uses the idea of how we used to live versus how we live now.

Basically, he’s saying that if we’re really going to be followers of Jesus, our lives must be different from our non-Christian friends.

For Paul, the concept that a Christian would be living the exact same way as someone who isn’t a Christian doesn’t make sense.

So, we can look at the former way of living, and then see how you and I are supposed to live now.

Truth and Love

The other main theme in the last half of Ephesians is that we are to be people of truth and love. Those are the two dominant traits that a Christian must have in their life.

If we don’t act towards God and other people in truth and in love, then we aren’t doing what we need as a Christian.

All of that will weave in and out with a discussion on identity.

Who are you

Is this what God created you to be?

We’ll have to deal with the fact that maybe some of us claim that we follow Jesus, but at the same time, we don’t exactly live like it.

We’ll have to work through some of our difficult things we believe about God.

And, we’ll have to question if we’re living a life that is rooted in Jesus, or if we’re living the same way as someone who doesn’t believe in Jesus.

It’s going to be an interesting, difficult, and great study. My prayer in all of this is that God will work in us to understand Him and ourselves better, and I think that can happen if we do this honestly, lovingly, and prayerfully.

Questions.

What is your favorite character trait about yourself?

What are you most interested in learning about God?

How can learning what God thinks about you affect how you feel about yourself?