Transcript
(Disclaimer: This might not be exactly what is said but is the general gist of the message!)
Hi!
By now you should have received your first letter from Paul. I hope you enjoyed reading it. Paul was a man who lived 2,000 years ago at the same time as when Jesus was around. He was one of the early leaders in Christianity and he wrote letters to lots of different churches to help the people in those churches to understand what it meant to be a Christian.
The letter that we’re going to be looking at is his letter to a Church in a city called Ephesus and the people in that city were called the Ephesians. In the Bible, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is split up into 6 sections, which we call chapters, and so you will be receiving 6 letters, one for each chapter.
In this first letter there are 3 main things that Paul talks about:
- Who he is
- The wonder and the glory of God
- The power of the Holy Spirit
We’ll cover these three points in a bit more detail.
So firstly Paul introduces himself. This is quite a normal thing to do at the start of a letter and we see Paul do this in letters that he writes to other churches too. He tells us his name and his job. He is Paul and he is an apostle. We might do the same today when we introduce ourselves. Hello I’m Mike and I’m a teacher, a builder, a doctor or whatever, but the interesting thing about this is that Paul was a tentmaker, that’s what he did to make money to live. But Paul doesn’t introduce himself as a tentmaker, no, he introduces himself as an Apostle of Jesus Christ – that is the job that he sees as being most important. The job of supporting churches and spreading the message of who Jesus is, was what Paul saw as being the job worthy of telling people about and that is what he wants people to know his as not as a tentmaker.
The next thing that Paul does is talk about how amazing God is. He goes into detail about how Jesus was God’s plan to save the world. He tells us that Jesus lived a perfect life, died on a cross even though He had done nothing wrong and then defeated death by coming back to life. Not only that, but he says that if we believe that Jesus did all that and put our trust in God and follow Him, then everything that God has, we can have too!
This leads me on to the final thing that Paul mentions – the Holy Spirit. He says that in following God, we are given a great power. This power is called the Holy Spirit and is the same power that brought Jesus back from the dead. It has the power to make us bold, to give us unshakeable faith, to give us peace beyond understanding as well as power to see the sick healed, the blind to see and the dead raised to life again. When we choose to follow Jesus, the Holy Spirit comes to live inside each of us and we can ask God for that power to be present in our lives.
I’m going to finish by praying and if you have any questions or thoughts, be sure to explore them more by talking about them with your family or church group or through the activities on the reverse of the letter.
Lord Jesus, thank you that you sent your son Jesus. He really is as amazing as Paul describes in his letters. I pray for each person who puts their trust in you that they would know the truth of your words in the Bible and the power of the Holy Spirit living inside of them. In Jesus’ name. Amen.