Welcome to Studies with Stearman.

Join us as we look deeper into the Bible.

Strengthen your faith with us, even as we see the day approaching.

And now, here's Gary.

We are going to continue in Ephesians.

You might turn to Ephesians chapter 5.

As we go through Ephesians on this particular round, we're going to place special emphasis

on the idea of the will of God.

And we haven't gotten to the point where we're going to emphasize that completely yet.

We've touched on it from time to time.

But the interesting thing about Ephesians, it's not usually pointed out, is that seven times

in this epistle, reference is made both to doing the will of God and to the human responsibility for finding out what the will of God

is. Ephesians 1-1 opens on this theme, Paul and Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.

Ephesians 1-5 says, having predestined us to the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself,

according to the good pleasure of his will.

Ephesians 1.9, having made known to us the mystery of his will.

It's interesting as you proceed through this book, it's sort of outlined.

That is, progressively, the will of God is revealed until you get to the end of the book, which ends in Ephesion 6, 7, referring to the

individual believer with good will, doing service as to the Lord and not to men. In other words, the letter starts by outlining

the concept of the will of God, and it ends with the assumption that the mature believer is

actually doing the will of God. So we're going to be kind of focusing on that. Last week, we

concluded in Ephesians 4.30.

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