Ephesians: Introduction for Reals

Guess what, we are finally starting to go through Ephesians! I'm pretty excited, and I think that the Middle School guys who going through it with me are excited too. We met on Friday afternoon, hung out for a while, climbed some trees, ate some nachos, played some frisbee, the boys decided it would be fun to tackle me, and we talked about the Bible. It was fun.

I had two things that I wanted to focus on during this meeting. I wanted to first talk about our goals as a group. And I wanted to talk introduce Ephesians to the guys.

First our goals (these aren't just mine):

• "Bro Time"
• Bible Study
• Leadership
• Fun!
• Accountability
• Encouragement each other.
• Prayer
• Growth
• Eventually, each one is going to actually lead the Bible study.

Those are most of our goals. I'm really looking forward to watching these grow this year!

And then I introduced Ephesians. I'm going to put a few details on here.

• It was written by Paul when he was in prison most likely in Rome around AD 62.
• Paul wrote it to the church in Ephesus.
• Ephesus is the home to one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple to Artemis.
• Ephesus shows up in Acts in chapters 18,19, and 20.
• Paul needed to remind the church in Ephesus of the gospel and that their lives should and need to change.
• A couple of main themes (these came from the ESV study Bible):
• Christ has reconciled all creation to himself and to God.   
• Christ has united people from all nations to himself and to one another in his church.
• There are some awesome pictures of the Gospel throughout the book.
• And there are really good passages about how to live the Christian life. Really applicable.

Those are most of the points that I mentioned. I think that it went pretty good. I think that this will be a fun study. I know I've said it before, but Ephesians is one of my favorite books. In the next installment we will be actually getting into the actual text; we'll be going over Eph. 1:1-14. It'll be good.

Anyway, thanks for reading!
~Than