Transcript
(Disclaimer: This might not be exactly what is said but is the general gist of the message!)
Hello again! Welcome back for another video on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Today we’re unpacking the second chapter of Paul’s letter, which you might hear it referred to as Ephesians 2.
In this letter Paul goes into more detail about what it means to be saved, which in his first letter he says he did through Jesus.He talks about what it looks like both for me and you to be saved as individuals and for the whole world to be saved. We’ll take these two aspects one at a time.
When Paul talks about us being saved he explains it by saying what life is like before Jesus and then what it is like after Jesus. He does this quite bluntly – he says that before Jesus it’s like we’re dead. Now obviously we’re not physically dead, we can still walk and talk and appear very much alive, but Paul says that without Jesus our souls are switched off to God and we just do whatever we want to make ourselves feel good.
Paul also uses the idea of being dead because it’s the opposite to being alive and he wants everyone to know that Jesus is alive because he defeated death by coming back to life after he died on the cross. He also uses the idea of being dead to make the point that being made alive with Jesus is a free gift and not something that you can earn. Someone who is dead can’t really do anything at all, let alone earn their way into God’s good books. Instead anything that happens to them must be done by someone else and in this case it’s done by Jesus bringing our souls back to life so that we can do the good works prepared by God.
Now Paul turns to think about what it looks like for the whole world to be renewed by God. He talks about two groups of people, the Jews, who were known as being “God’s People” and the Gentiles – anyone who wasn’t a Jew. He makes the point that in Jesus, everyone can be brought close to God and that because of this, the world can be united, without anything blocking us from loving one another – a kind of picture of world peace, brought about through Jesus.
Finally, Paul ends by coming back to the Church again. He says that we are all united through Jesus as a family. Often you will hear Christians refer to each other as brothers and sisters, which is what Jesus calls us and makes a lot more sense when you think about being united through Him. Paul says we can come together as a church of God’s people knowing that together we are the place where God will live on this Earth. From the last letter we know that he is talking about the Holy Spirit living inside of us, remembering the power that it gives us.
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.
Jesus I pray that we would know just how amazing it is to be made alive in you. I pray that you would help to show us the good works that you have prepared for us. We pray for the unity and peace in the world that Paul describes, knowing that you are the prince of peace and destroy all hostility. In your name Jesus. Amen.