Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now, we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one's about Ephesians.

Ephesians is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the church in Ephesus, and it reads

will weigh different tonally than what we've seen in 1st and 2nd Corinthians and in Galatians.

It is clear that Paul thinks very highly of this church, and that Paul loves this church,

and that this church, unlike Corinth, has not been a pain in the butt. Instead, here he feels the

opportunity to write a letter that is very forward-looking and very celebratory about what God has done

and the role that they have played in it there and Ephesus, and what the implications of what

God has done in the distant past and in the recent past, what those implications are for whoever's

reading this letter moving forward. So this is a very optimistic letter that is not all about fixing

stuff that is broken and screwed up and looking backwards. This is forward, forward, forward, hope,

hope, hope, and there's a reason this book of the Bible has been beloved by Christians for two millennia.

Paul's relationship with the church in Ephesus, which is on the far west coast of modern day

Turkey and was a very, very prominent Greek city back in the day. Paul's relationship with this

church is different than his relationship with some of the other churches we've seen where he

obviously had the primary role in founding that church here. It looks like there were already

Christians in Ephesus when Paul first showed up, and this is where we get introduced to the

characters of Priscilla and Aquila, a couple of important Christian leaders. They were a married couple.

They factored prominently in the church and Rome as well. And so in Ephesus, Paul was more joining

something that already had some momentum and bringing theological clarity to it as well.

And also Paul very quickly earns his stripes in Ephesus. He's there more than once,

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