Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. Here we are just a few days

after Christmas and I hope you all got exactly what you wanted for Christmas and maybe

some of you even got this book that I'm holding in my hands. It is John Calvin's

Sermons on Ephesians. And if you did not get this book for Christmas, maybe you'll want to go get a copy for yourself.

These sermons on Ephesians are a wonderful text from the pen of John Calvin.

The editors in the introduction to this volume note

that as we think about Calvin's writings,

we have his sermons, his commentaries,

as institutes, they say this.

In these pages, that is the pages of these sermons,

we hear Calvin.

Not as we do in his institutes, which were so carefully written and reworked, nor as in his commentaries which he also

revised, but we hear him just as he spoke from the pulpit of St. Peter's.

These sermons on Ephesians were preached

beginning May 1, 1558.

Calvin preached 48 of them, and he finished up in March of 1559.

When Calvin started preaching these series he was 48 years old. He was beginning to enter into a period of his life where he would have significant health issues.

Pain would rack his body until his death.

And it was also during this series of sermons

that at one point Calvin was preaching so strenuously to his congregation that he burst a blood vessel.

When Calvin preached, he used no notes, he had no manuscript, and he did not have any mechanism set up to have those sermons recorded.

About a decade before he started preaching the sermon series on Ephesians.

...