Episode 1: Ephesians: How big is your view of Jesus?

How big is your view of Jesus? That's the question we're considering as we kick off this season, looking at some of the big themes in Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Whether this is a familiar letter to you or not, we hope you'll join us as we dig into it together!

• Questions to Dig into over a Cup of Tea

  1. Take time to read through Ephesians. What particularly strikes you, or grabs your attention?

  2. What did you notice about knowing, walking and standing

  3. Pray the prayer in Chapter One, as you seek to get going in Ephesians.

• Sponsorship Details

  This episode is sponsored by Crossway.

  Crossway publish gospel-centered, Bible-based content that honours our Savior and serves his church. They seek to help people understand the massive implications of the gospel and the truth of God’s Word, for all of life, for all eternity, and for the glory of God.

  Check out their website for all their up-to-date resources.

• Episode Transcript

  The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

  Felicity: You're listening to the Two Sisters and a Cup of Tea podcast, the Bible Study podcast for everyday life. We're here for a 20 minute burst of Bible chat over a cup of tea and an English style biscuit as we make our way through a Bible book over the course of the season and drive it to our hearts. And this season, we're getting into Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Whether you've been listening for a while or have just found us, we're so pleased you're here.

  Sarah: We're grateful to be partnering with Crossway this season to bring you some books that we've appreciated over the last little while. A reminder that all of our book recommendations can be found by heading to our Ephesians season page on our website. And I wonder whether, like me, you often want to grow in spiritual disciplines, but it just feels like another thing to add to the to-do list. Well, the Disciplines of Devotion series from Crossway, edited by Winfree Brisley and written by Megan Hill, Glenna Marshall, Emily Jensen, Courtney Reissig, Cassie Achermann and Sharonda Cooper, highlight different spiritual disciplines like Bible study, worship, fasting and the Sabbath, and take time to explore their meaning, biblical examples and benefits. They then offer accessible ways to cultivate the practice faithfully in the midst of real life. They're brief, they're biblically rich and they're highly practical and they really are great for either individual or small group study. I've really enjoyed reading them and mulling over what it looks like to grow in small but practical ways.

  Felicity: Welcome to Two Sisters and a Cup of Tea. My name is Felicity, I'm in the States. I'm here with my sister Sarah. She's in the UK. We're excited to be kicking off a new season, walking through the letter of Ephesians. And I have my cup of tea, Sarah. We're actually recording this just before our family takes quite a big trip to Australia. So I'm flooding my house with all things Australian. And Canberra, well, this tea is called Canberra. In fact, an Australian listener sent it to us and I'm very much appreciating it. It's a kind of delicate black, of slightly coconutty, but with a little dash of milk. And then I was hunting around in my cupboard for a biscuit and I just came across a winning one, gluten-free chocolate chip oat cake. Just lurking in my... I mean, in a packet. It's not stale, but...

  Sarah: Amazing! Well, sounds like you're onto a winner there. You're properly explore the Australian teas once you get there, obviously.

  Felicity: Well, I feel like I should. As someone, a friend of mine said to me recently, said, you're also very predictable in your tea habits, she said to me. She's like, so do you like exploring new teas? Well, I do know what I like. I think as long as I get my one that I really want at the start of the day, then I'm happy to.

  Sarah: Maybe take some Yorkshire with you just in case.

  Felicity: It's in the suitcase. I mean, I haven't packed it, but I have a travel bag of tea bags. Yeah, I do, yeah.

  Sarah: It will be. Brilliant. Well, it is a joy to be back. I am just really excited about getting into these conversations, Fisty. We are getting into Ephesians, one of Paul's biggest letters. Let's just talk about how we've both come across Ephesians, what our experience has been of studying Ephesians up to this point, because we've both had quite different experiences. This isn't a new letter that's kind of brand new for both of us. Some of the books that we've done on this podcast have been like, whoa, this is brand new information. And we're kind of really digging into it deep for the first time. That's not the case here. So tell us what your experience of studying Ephesians has been.

  Felicity: Yeah. Well, I think it was probably about 15 years ago that I read it and studied it, actually in a group setting over the course of a year, along with a few other things. I was doing a kind of program at a church where we were doing that. And I thought I knew what Ephesians said before that, but as I was reading it like that and discussing like that and really digging into it, I realized I hadn't really heard it properly before and it was like light bulbs going off all over the place, particularly in relation to the prayers and what he's praying and why he's praying it. And then this big picture of the church and how God is working through it. And I just never put it all together. I think that classic case of not really having read it in context and then I just, it has become and continues to be actually my kind of go-to book for reading one-to-one with people. And we did it in our women's Bible study here relatively recently. I love it, like I feel like it is the book that I'm most familiar with in some ways for all of these reasons and because I keep on coming back to it. I guess it kind of just is in my head and my heart and I've realised as we've come to this, it really has shaped me and the way in which I seek to do ministry, how I do church life is it's all quite Ephesians kind of threaded through really. What about you? What's been your encounter with it?

  Sarah: I love that but I love that just that kind of journey of actually just continuing to discover its riches every time you come back to it as well. That's just so good isn't it? So I've not kind of taught it in the way that you've taught it, I've not done it in a loads of Bible studies and that kind of thing but a few years ago I was profoundly impacted by David Pawlinson in his book ‘Seeing with New Eyes’ and he wrote this which has just kind of stuck with me ever since. He said this ‘You'll not go wrong if you plunge into Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Master it, be mastered by it. Work Ephesians into your thinking, your living, your prayers and your conversation.’ And I was just really struck by that because basically Pawlinson and gave, Pawlinson and some gave an overview of the book saying this defines your identity in Christ. It provides a framework for spiritual warfare. It offers a model for speaking the truth in love and a vision for community relationships with church. It just, it brings so much of the Christian life together. So reading that a few years ago, that really kind of started in me a desire to really do what he was saying you should do. And so I began to memorize it. I began to study it. I began to just work it into my thinking, my living, my prayers and my conversation. I still feel like I'm doing that. I still feel like it's the book that's most embedded in me and it's the book that most pours out of me in terms of, think, what you were saying, what's impacted the way that I think about church, the way that I think about just God's big view of what's going on, what his plans are in the world. This is the book that is kind of going in and coming out of me in such a way. What I'm excited though about is the fact that we've kind of had separate journeys on this, haven't we, through this, and I'm really just really looking forward to doing this together.

  Felicity: Yes, and as you say, it's a bit different to those books where we're both having the light bulb moments at the same time. But I feel like I'm excited to just get deeper in it in some ways, maybe, like kind of like wrestle through some of these things and what do they functionally, how does it play out, what does it actually mean for how we... Should maybe before we get into Ephesians just talk about the fact that we, there is a bit of a tension with this, we're going to see as we're walking through this letter, big picture of church is going to be foregrounded a lot in this letter and it's going to be foregrounded in our conversations and we're really excited to talk about church and to kind of be engaged in that conversation and to engage others in that conversation. But it's worth acknowledging that there is a tension between the broken world in which we live and many of our experience of church. I very much doubt there's anyone who has a hundred percent happy experience of church all the time. And then you have this picture of church and it can feel quite hard sometimes to see this is what God designed for church, this is the intention and church just sometimes it doesn't feel like it's living up to that. so it's worth, think, just acknowledging that is a tension. We feel that tension. That's not, we don't go to perfect churches by any stretch of the imagination. And yet we want to sit in this, we? And really get excited about church. Yeah.

  Sarah: Yeah, no, I think that's really helpful. I think it is just really important to kind of voice that and to voice what many people will be feeling. Like there'll be across the spectrum of people listening, there will be so many different opinions on church, there'll be so many different experiences, there will be baggage, there will be joys, there will be all the things in between that and that's okay. And just kind of coming to this letter, acknowledging that, but coming to this letter, humbly asking the Lord to show us His design and His good design for church. And one of the big things that He wants to do is to expand our view on why the church is such a good thing. But yeah, I think it's doing that, knowing that the Lord knows, He knows our hearts, He knows our history, He knows where we're at the moment this word isn't coming to us in isolation, it's coming, it's speaking to us. Pawlinson describes the Book of Ephesians as practical theology. This is theology that's gonna work into our everyday, into our living, our breathing, our conversations and our prayers. And that's gonna include how we think about church and that's a good thing. And it's good to be kind of primed in this. So I think, yeah, it can only be helpful to be in this. Let's get into the letter itself though. So we're just going to give a brief kind of overview really aren't we of how, just some of the big themes of the letter. And the first one is to start with that word church isn't it? So this letter written to a church and you can't get away from that the whole way through the letter. It's a corporate letter, it's to be read together as a church. It's not written to individuals, it's written to a body of people, to God's holy people in Ephesus, Paul says, right at the beginning. And all the way through, that reality is integral through the letter. This is to God's gathered people. And it's just, yeah, just that, even to just start off with. Because I think we come from a world that says, read things individualistically, read things as an individual. But no, no this is to a church, in a local place.

  Felicity: Yeah, and in that way, and we see that literally in the way it's addressed to the holy people, like we've got the plural address, but also the letter is gonna be talking about how we pray for one another and also how we interact with one another. We have interaction with the vertical, but we also have a lot of instruction as to what it is to interact with one another and the one anothering that we're gonna see. So there's the shaping of God's people that's going on here. And that is actually a wonderful thing, that's an exciting thing, that's a glorious thing to be part of. And I think that a part of the impact of Ephesians as you read this letter, we pray that we would be more and more engaged in the corporate nature of God's people. And I think it's kind of unavoidable to just kind of be pulled into it a bit as we're in the letter. Yeah.

  Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. But so this is written to a small church in Ephesus. Felicity talk to us about what that context would have looked like for these Ephesians to receive this letter. Where were they living? What is the place of Ephesus like? Tell us a bit about the city.

  Felicity: Yeah, so Ephesus, we actually know quite a lot about the context thanks to Acts. Luke tells us in Acts 19, he takes us to Ephesus as he's describing Paul really planting this church and the situation in Ephesus is one of really complete worship of another god. Artemis is the kind of centre of the city, the centre of all the worship and it's not even just the worship. It's not just happening in the temples, it's actually happening. The whole economy of the city is orientated around this kind of Artemis worshiping, which actually somehow Artemis is connected to this big rock in the middle of the city. There's some kind of mythology around that. But the economy, the silversmiths, everyone is kind of engaged in all that comes about through being the city of Artemis. And so you can imagine this little group, probably a little house church of very newly minted Christians gathering in the shadow of Artemis. And literally everyone in the city would have been running in a different direction. And the Christians are, you know, small, seemingly insignificant, seemingly weak little gathering in the midst of all of that. And even the city people, the kind of the officials and whatnot, they are concerned that the gospel is being preached and the silversmiths even end up rioting over the gospel being preached because this potentially unsettles what's going on in the city. And so you can see why Paul might write this letter to those Christians because there's a lot in this letter which kind of blows out the water. Like this is massive what God is doing, what this plan is, the course of history, all that we see in this letter is bigger even than the Artemis stuff that's going on, bigger even than the fact that your family and your friends are running in a different direction. You're in the right lane, this is the right lane to be in. I think we hear that throughout this letter.

  Sarah: That's really helpful and yeah that comes onto our next word. we've got this church in this city of Ephesus but actually what Paul seeks to do in this letter is to show that these Christians are not just part of this church in this city but they're in the cosmos. The reality is so much bigger than what they can see the letter is bookended with these huge, enormous spiritual realities, these unseen realities, the heavenly realms and the spiritual warfare that is happening that you cannot see but is absolutely real. And that would have been really relevant for them in Ephesus where they're, you know, they're feeling the spiritual warfare, they're feeling the spiritual battle, but Paul's saying, step back a notch, see what's going on. It's like basically, the kind of curtains are unveiling gradually more and more and seeing more and more of the wider context and the context is the cosmos is at play here. We've got the biggest scale you can imagine and yeah, Paul's just seeking to encourage them in that, he? He's seeking to say, look, look wider, look bigger, look broader and you'll see what is at play, what power is at play and essentially who's in control, who's Lord over all, even when it doesn't feel like that on the ground, because who yeah, who's Lord over all is Christ. Tell us how we begin to see that Felicity in this letter.

  Felicity: Yeah, well, I think one of the, mean, as we're getting into the letter and one of that first book end, chapter one, verse 10, we hear kind of like what is happening, where is everything headed? He says, to put in effect when the times reach their fulfilment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. And so, all of the world, all of the cosmos indeed, is gonna sit under the headship of Christ, the rulership of Christ as he returns. And so in fact, we, as we seek to sit under Christ's headship now, as we sit in this spot, being a Christian, trusting him, we're in the right spot in terms of history is running its course in this direction. But it doesn't feel like that. More often than not, it doesn't feel like that. And so in that seeing the direction of travel, that's really, really reassuring. I'm in the right spot. More than that, all throughout this letter we have this phrase repeated again and again of in Christ, in Christ, in Christ. Everything that is told to us about our identity as Christians, everything that is described, all the assurances, all the blessings, there's, I mean, bountiful blessings, are given to us through Christ. It is in Christ in which we stand secure, not just in this world, whatever that feels like, whatever our present experience is, but in the wider cosmos of what God is doing. And so Christ and all that he is, all that he's done, all that he's going to do, all that we are in him is like fundamental to just it all.

  Sarah: So I think what we're saying is we're expecting our view, our vision of Christ to be kind of expanded, to explode almost, kind of, we are gonna have this big view of Jesus presented to us. And that's really exciting, isn't it? Because we always wanna be growing in our love for Jesus. And what better way to do that than grow in our knowledge of him. And that's one of the key themes of the first half of the letter. So if you think of the letter as a kind of theatre production, you've got two acts. The first act is chapters one through three and that is all about growing our knowledge of who Christ is and what we have as a result of being united to Christ. Paul wants us to know these truths deeply, intimately. He wants us to know Christ better. Act two, chapters four through six, then explores what it looks like to walk in light of that. Literally there's the kind of verbs to walk, walk, walk, and also at the end to stand. So we've got knowing in chapters one to three, and then we've got walking in light of your knowledge, walking in light of what you know, and standing firm in what you know. So those are kind of the two halves of the letter, aren't they? And I think it's just really helpful to be reminded what you were saying earlier as well, that actually, like the Ephesians, in terms of salvation history, in terms of where we are in history right now, we are in the same spot as the Ephesians. So yes, we're not kind of living in exactly the same century as them, but actually in terms of what has happened, in terms of where we are in the Bible, Jesus's death and resurrection and ascension have happened, and they are waiting for Jesus to return, and us also, that is what we're waiting for. We're in the same kind of chunk of history, waiting for Jesus to return. And so as we read this, can, we can, apply it in the same way that the Ephesians have been called to apply it because we're sitting in that same spot. Would you add anything else to that?

  Felicity: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think as we're walking through, as those listening, we want to just be, do give Acts 19 a read and just really consider that context because as we're walking through it, we're to be thinking, well, how are we actually in quite a similar spot? Not just in salvation history. What is our experience right now in this culture and how does it compare to the Ephesians? And actually then, how does this letter speak really directly into where we're at, where our hearts are, where we're tempted to doubt, where we're tempted to not keep running this way. So that would be something to be thinking on as we get into this letter. Do give the letter a read, have a check out, check out Acts 19, just be beginning to think along those lines. But Sarah.

  Sarah: What's your prayer Felicity for yourself and for our listeners as they tune in this season?

  Felicity: Well, my prayer, I mean, and ever since I really kind of light bulb moment on the prayers in this letter, I pray that prayer for myself and for others so much, just that the eyes of our hearts, us and the listeners would be enlightened that we might know, that we might know Jesus more. And as we know him more, would we be delighted by him and love to follow him and to trust that we're in the right spot. We're under Christ and that is exactly where we need to be.

  Sarah: So good, I can't wait to get going. Will you pray for us? Will you pray along those lines as we close?

  Felicity: Absolutely, Heavenly Father, we praise you so much that you're a God who reveals yourself and your plan and you invite us into it. We pray, Lord, that you would please do a work in all of us this season. We long that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened, that we might know you better. Would we love to sit under the headship of Christ and as we do, would you grow us in our love and of him. Father we pray for our view of church, for your plan, for what is going on in the world, for what you're doing, all of these things. Please Lord help us to sit and trust and just love to be a part of that and we pray this in your name. Amen.

  Sarah: Well, I am looking forward to this season and I hope others are too. Over two thirds of you regularly use our discussion questions, either for yourselves to dig deeper or with others. That's what they're there for. You can find them either on our episode page or on our website. You just click the link in the app you're listening to or on the weekly biscuit, which is our weekly roundup newsletter that just gives you what you need each week and gives you the resources direct into your inbox. So do sign up for that today if you'd like that as well. We will see you next Friday for episode two as we get stuck into the first bit of chapter one. We can't wait. We'll see you then.

  Felicity: See you then.

  Sarah: This episode has been sponsored by Crossway. 

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