• Bible Studies

    Ephesians 6:10-17

    The Armor of God One of the downsides of Bible study is we get in the habit of making personal applications for what Paul intended for the Church as a whole.  That’s certainly the case here. Paul is not writing for personal devotions but for the entire Church. If we are not clear on that then we reduce what he is saying to purely individual applications.  We will be a mob of armored up individuals instead of the Body that Paul intends. We will be primarily concerned with our own individual equipment instead of seeing that Paul is describing protection for the whole Body.  So, when he says, “Put on…

  • Bible Studies

    Ephesians 6:1-4

    We’ve come to the fifth commandment this morning. First, God gives the four commandments that focus on the nature of God and our relationship with him. Now we see the fifth commandment that comes directly after that. What is the nature of our relationship with our family? It’s almost as important as our relationship with God. After the fifth commandment will be the description of our behavior within a broader community or tribe but this relationship – family – is central to our lives and the life of our community. That is why it follows immediately after the first set of commandments. There can be no society without strong families…

  • Bible Studies

    Ephesians 5:21-33

    There are a few times when it helps to start at the end and read back to the beginning.  Did you know that copy editors are trained to read a page backwards? Otherwise, they get caught in the flow of a thought and their mind skips over the errors and fills in the blanks.  This is a good example of starting at the end and working backwards. Paul writes in verse 32 that “this is a profound mystery” and we could have a few responses to that if we started at the beginning and worked our way to the end. “Well, if all of this is a mystery then why…

  • Bible Studies

    Ephesians 5:1-17

    Normally, we think of chapters as the beginning of something new – a new stage of life, new development or new thought. There is a break, we turn the page and then start the next chapter.  As you probably know, chapters and verses were not added to the Bible until much later than the original writings. A man named Stephen Langton divided the Bible into chapters in the year 1227. Langton was a professor at the University of Paris at the time and later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. Modern verse division for the New Testament was the work of Robert Stephanus, a French printer. He divided the Greek text…