Good morning and blessings on your week. Here’s a manuscript of the Ephesians Introduction Video that aired in service yesterday. If you missed it or would like a second glance, it can be accessed here. As you read / watch it, here’s some study questions with which you can wrestle:
• Did you learn anything about the apostle Paul in this conversation? What most inspires you about his life?
• If Artemis worship was the epitome of “successful religion” in Paul’s day, what might be a contemporary example of a “successful religion” that is not God-honoring? Why is counting “nickels and noses” such a limited way of measuring success from a God-honoring perspective?
• What is the significance of seeing Ephesians as a circular letter from the Apostle Paul? Is there any current comparison to be made between this “circulating sermon” from Paul and YouTube, Zoom, and Facebook broadcasting of services? What are the limitations and benefits of these methods?
May God guide our study as we worship and learn together this fall! Amen.
Ephesians: Getting Church Inside People
Introduction
A Balance Between What We Believe and What We Do
Ephesians is not Paul’s longest letter, but it might be his best summary of the basic concepts of the Christian faith. Here Paul powerfully describes God’s plan and purpose for the church in terms of doctrine and practical living. I love how Eugene Peterson describes that great balance between the important teachings of our faith and the practice of our faith:
What we know about God and what we do for God have a way of getting broken apart in our lives. The moment the organic unity of belief and behavior is damaged in any way, we are incapable of living out the full humanity for which we were created. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians joins together what has been torn apart in our sin-wrecked world.
Coming out of this pandemic, as we begin a conversation about having the truths of the gospel living inside us, this letter Paul wrote to these early believers feels like a good place to start.
A Prison Epistle of Paul
Paul, the author of this letter, was originally known by his Hebrew name, Saul. He was born a Roman citizen in the city of Tarsus. As a young, Jewish pharisee, Saul studied in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, one of the most prominent rabbis of his day. With passion for his Jewish faith, Saul considered converts to the Jesus Way to be heretics and traveled around persecuting the early church with vicious tenacity. On the Damascus Road, Saul was blinded by a great light, heard the voice of Jesus, and was radically converted to Christianity. Saul the enemy of the church became its greatest proponent and came to be known by his Greek name “Paul.” Interestingly, the Greek name “Paul” meant “little.” While we consider Paul to be a spiritual giant, he was likely appropriately named, because a book from early church tradition depicts Paul as short, fat, bald, bowlegged, and bushy eyebrowed with bulging eyes. When we read of Paul’s courageous faithfulness, we probably imagine him looking something like this. Historically speaking, he probably looked more like this. Paul’s ministry reminds us that people can come to faith from all kinds of backgrounds and that our eternal influence has little to do with external measurements of success.
Paul traveled across the ancient world with the gospel, leading Jews and Gentiles to faith in Jesus and planting churches. At different stops on this journey, he corresponded with these new fellowships through letters teaching them about Christian faith and practice and encouraging them in the face of internal problems and external persecution. Those letters now make up a good portion of our New Testament. The titles of the New Testament letters came long after they were written. When the early church unrolled this scroll, it didn’t have “Ephesians” written in bold, 14-point font centered in the page. The other New Testament letters were given titles related to who wrote them with names like 1st and 2nd Peter and 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John. Paul’s letters are named based on their original recipients like 1stand 2nd Corinthians and Galatians, because he wrote so many of them. Imagine getting ready for this sermon series and hearing me say, “This morning’s reading comes from 13th Paul”.
Ephesians sits alongside Philippians, Philemon, and Colossians as one of Paul’s prison epistles, written during his time of Roman house arrest. I can’t speak for you, but if I have a bad day or face a little hardship, I might forget to pray or read my Bible. Paul found himself imprisoned because of his faith in Christ and used that time to write letters to encourage and bless churches. We can learn so much from Paul’s example about how to let our own struggles point us toward God’s heart and inspire us to encourage others in their spiritual journey.
The City of Ephesus
Located in the region of modern Turkey, Ephesus was considered “the first and greatest metropolis of Asia” with a population of around 250,000 people. Ephesus was the center of Artemis worship. The temple of Artemis was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, drawing thousands of visitors to the city annually. Artemis-worship was big business. The Artemis priesthood used the wealth they accumulated as occult leaders to become the bankers of the East and accumulated even more money by making huge loans to individuals and even nations. The practice of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery all flourished in Ephesus. The fledgling church of Ephesus was formed with small groups of believers gathering in little houses. Their movement must’ve felt inconsequential when compared to these flourishing, pagan religions, but God’s Spirit was using them to bring hope and meaning to people who were discovering that their “successful” religious ventures were empty, cold, and lifeless.
The book of Acts tells of Paul’s great miracles in Ephesus and how many people in Ephesus brought their magic books together and burned them because of their new faith in Christ. When “they counted the value” of these resources their worth was estimated to be about “fifty thousand drachmas” (Acts 19:19). To put that estimated value into perspective, it’s believed fifty thousand drachmas would be worth about $500,000 in today’s money. Religious professionals who made a fortune off pagan practices faced an economic crisis because of the church’s influence in and around Ephesus. Idol-makers were losing so much as people turned away from false gods and to Christ that one of the leaders of their guild started a huge riot that led to Paul’s departure from the city. That riot had a little to do with opposition to Christianity and a lot to do with money! In Ephesians, Paul says, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”. This message about the war with cosmic powers is set against the backdrop of this rub between the church and the pagan religions.
Circular Letter with a Specific Purpose
In some of the oldest manuscripts of Ephesians its recipients are not specified. This reality, coupled with the absence of personal references that we find in other letters from Paul, has led most scholars to believe that Ephesians was originally a circular letter that was designed to be shared, not just in Ephesus, but also among churches in the surrounding cities of Asia Minor. We can imagine it being read aloud in churches with the reader inserting the name of that specific church. We might think of the introduction sounding something like this: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, to the saints who are in Weslaco, and are faithful in Christ Jesus” (1:1). We can imagine that if this letter were written today, it might be intended to be read by churches not just in Weslaco, but throughout the Rio Grande Valley.
For the purposes of this introduction, we’ve been calling Ephesians a “letter,” but it is very different from Paul’s other letters that tended to include more personal instructions and notes for a specific church in a specific place. As we work through this study, we might think of Ephesians as something more like a circulating sermon manuscript. When you’re listening to my sermons and they feel like they’re dragging on a little, please bear in mind that this circulating sermon from Paul is six chapters long!
Ephesians is considered by many to be Paul’s greatest doctrinal statement in the New Testament. Here he puts together his ideas about salvation, truth, and righteousness in a concise but comprehensive statement of the Christian calling. This sermon describes God’s plan for believers to mature in their understanding of grace and to apply these truths to daily living. Though the church seemed small and insignificant and Paul’s imprisonment in Rome felt like a great defeat, this new community formed in Christ would, in the end, be part of God’s great victory over the spiritual forces of darkness. This triumph would be accomplished through ἀγάπη, the Greek word for “love” that the early Christians filled with meaning. Paul uses various forms of this word nineteen times in Ephesians and begins and ends his message with love (1:4,6 and 6:23-24). Because of the love that comes from God through Christ Jesus, these believers could turn away from idolatry and abandon labels like Jew and Gentile and become one in faith and service. The prevailing message of Ephesians is that the world will be transformed by God’s love that’s at work in and through the church, as the church gets inside God’s people.