Friends,
Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ!
This week we looked at the love of God — in particular, we looked at how that love showed itself to us in the Old Testament and how God’s love for Israel opens up in the New Testament to include all the nations of the world (which was always the plan anyways).
Here are some links (to the recording on YouTube, a PDF of the slides, and a printout of the reading plan), some ‘art’, and a look ahead to next week! If you just want a recap of what we talked about, check out the audio summary, linked above.
Resources
* Video Recording (PM)
* Slides
The Art of Paul
If there’s one thing many of us have learned the last year or so, it is how fragile things are. As over half a million people died, businesses shuttered, and demand for restaurants, oil, and church attendance plummeted, many of us got whiplash from the quick crumbling of things we had taken for granted.
In a way I see a similar lesson when I look at pictures of the ruins of a great city like Ephesus. Once the largest, proudest city in its area, it has now been reduced to scattered piles of weathered stone. Once bustling, her streets have now mostly been reclaimed by grass. Once a busy and important seaport, silting now places it about two miles from the shore. You can see more pictures of Ephesus on Wikipedia or in this video made by our own Galynn Ferris after his 2014 trip there.
Ephesus was also an important center for early Christianity. Not only is it associated with one of Paul’s letters, it is also one of the named recipients of the book of Revelation, the traditional eventual home of the apostle John (and consequently the possible location where John’s gospel was written), the recipient of one of the letters of Ignatius (early second century — some of the most important early Christian writings in the generation after the apostles), and, a few centuries later, Ephesus was even the site of more than one important church council.
Now Ephesus has crumbled, as has her port, the supposedly ‘eternal’ empire of which she was a part, and the worship of Artemis, her most important deity. I’m sure that if there is a church there anymore it is little more than a sad shadow of what it once was.
But the movement of which the Ephesian church was a part lives on. Cities and empires and nations and churches rise and fall, just like the tides and the stock market. And always these events are the subject of much discussion and analysis. But whatever else may fail, our God is still at work. He has called a people out of all the nations. He loves them. And he has given them a job to do. This you can always hang your hat on.
And, in light of that, we’d better get to work.
For Next Week
Next week we’ll conclude our whirlwind tour of the Apostle Paul with a third and final look at his message. We’ll focus on “the community of the Holy Spirit.” Paul has quite a lot to say about both. Unless this community or the Holy Spirit intervenes to give me a better idea, we will be spending some time in 1 Corinthians.
See you next Wednesday!
In Christ,
Pastor Cabe
