Introduction II, Meet Ephesus & Colossae
Colossians; Ephesians · Vern Peterman · Jan 4, 2004
Ephesians & Colossians, No. 02
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/482623245324

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We'll be taking a look at Ephesus and Colossae this morning as an introduction. But before we do that, there's some key things we need to touch on here. And one is just a reminder that for those of you who may not have been here last week, at the suggestion of the Lockwoods, we compiled the Philippians expanded and explained into one document. And so the cabinet immediately to the right as you exit is available there. Feel free to take advantage of it. If we run out, we'll get some more printed and get those in your hands. Similarly, we ran out last week of these covers and binder inserts in case you want to do something like this with the series that we're doing on Ephesians and Colossians here. So more of them out there, feel free to have at them, and if we need to print more, we'll do that as well. Something else to bring to your attention, and I'm going to introduce this with a question. What do these couples have in common? Well, not quite, but here's a clue. All right. Step back into it. Yes. Yes.

All of these couples are indeed expecting and you'll have to follow through with them. So anyway, we've got quite a crop of babies coming into the church here. And so exciting times ahead. And if my counting is correct, they're all due this year. I sure hope so. One other thing, I got another question to ask you here. No, Nancy and I are not expecting. But Becky and Kurt are expecting to get married here. So anyway, that's expected in about six months here. So we're excited about that. Wanted to let you know. Kurt will be here again in a few weeks, so you can talk to him personally about it and be sure to give him a third degree, okay? He likes it. All right.

Anyway, we'll proceed now into our study as an introduction to our study. Again, we're doing a parallel study of Ephesians and Colossians. And as we do it, one of the key things we want to do is to take a look at the characters of each of the cities that are involved here. Now, one of the reasons we're doing that, we had a handout available. We made available almost a year ago when we were studying Philippians. And here, we'd like to make it available again in case you missed it the first time around.

There's a handout. Again, it's on the lobby there. It's a one page kind of, here's how to understand scripture. It won't cover every possible thing, but it's a good introduction. And so feel free to take advantage of it. There's some questions that come out of it.

And obviously the three steps that are important here is we want to observe. interpret and then apply. Those are the three important steps to interpreting and understanding and using the scripture. And the question we're going to be asking this morning about Philippians, excuse me, Ephesians and Colossians is the ones highlighted in blue. To whom were they writing and what do we know about them? Now think about this for a minute.

One of the reasons why we would ask this kind of a question is if you get a letter from somebody, it makes a difference who it's from, doesn't it? The return address. When you see some letter, assuming it isn't just, you know, math mailing or something, when you see a letter, sometimes a certain return address gets your attention, doesn't it? Because it matters who it's from. And that's the same application here. It does matter who it's from and it matters who it's going to. Who it's from and who it's going to is a part of understanding the content. Key point.

So that's why we're going to take the time this morning to introduce ourselves to Ephesus and Colossae and make sure we have the insights that we need to properly understand what we're reading. Here's Ephesus and Colossae. They're two cities on the southwestern quadrant of what is now Turkey.

Ephesus is here on the coast and Colossae is more inland and as we look at these one of the things we notice is Paul's missionary journeys seem to take him through Ephesus the second and third actually went through Ephesus Colossae seems to have been bypassed and so it's interesting we'll get into the question well why do you write a letter to them if he never went there But Ephesus was indeed a place that he spent time at, and so we'll be looking into that more as we study here. Now, Ephesus, we know, enjoyed a substantial apostolic ministry, and others that were appointees of the apostles. We know that Paul went to Ephesus on his second and third journeys. That's recorded for us in Acts, and he makes note of it elsewhere in his letters. Paul spent a total of three years in Ephesus. Remember, he told the Ephesian elders, he says, I was with you for three years and gave you the whole counsel of God.

He said he taught them day and night with tears. So he didn't just say, here's a few handouts and go home and come see me if you have any questions. He taught them with passion. He taught them with thoroughness. He taught them with wholeness. He wanted to give them everything that they needed, the whole counsel of God. It's interesting, this passage in Acts 20 that Dr. Luke records for us, it is the longest addressed to Christians in all of the book of Acts.

And he doesn't meet them in Ephesus, he's in Miletus, which is a major pork town to the south. And he asked them to come to Miletus to meet him there, which would be their last meeting. Now, Paul, as he writes to Timothy, urged Timothy to remain at Ephesus to deal with, of all things, false teachers. And so he has an assignment there to deal with the false teachers.

Now, Paul didn't just give the other people the tough jobs, believe me, but this was an important one that Timothy was assigned to here. He wrote at least one letter to the church at Ephesus. Could he have written more? It's possible, yes. He could have written more that we don't have. This particular one we do have and the Lord made sure and saw fit that we did have it and we'd have it available and can study it.

Ephesus also was one of the seven churches. You remember, boy this was over two years ago now, we studied Ephesus as one of the seven churches in Asia Minor that were addressed in the book of Revelation. It was the first of the seven churches that were addressed in chapters 2 and 3 where the Lord writes through the hand of John to the churches.

And the other thing is that tradition has it that John the Apostle spent many of the last years of his life in Ephesus. There's an old document, it's not in Scripture, but it describes John in his last years when he would have a tough time delivering a full message up front. but they would help him up front, and he would walk up slowly, and he would get up to the front, and he'd turn to everybody, and he would say, love one another, and then sit down. But John spent his last years, by record outside of Scripture, here in Ephesus.

You've got a map on your handout there on page, on side one, And I decided not to include all the massive detail. There's more there than would probably be of interest. The main thing to look at, there's this ancient harbor off to the left. You see that in the left side in the middle? And then there's a roadway that comes from that harbor. And then you see a theater perched along the side of the hill. We're going to see pictures of that in a minute. And a few other scenes as well. Let's take a look at them here.

Here's the harbor as it is now. Okay, this is where the mouth of the Kayster River comes out and that's how it's located, a real pretty place. But that wasn't the ancient harbor, as we'll see here in a minute. The harbor has moved because it's filled in by miles since the time of the New Testament. Here is the theater and the road leading down to the harbor that you see on your drawing there. This theater has been variously estimated. I've seen numbers from 25,000 to 50,000 people could be seated at this theater. My guess is it depends on how close you want to sit. But they would seat a great number of people at this theater. And matter of fact, my recollection is Richard and Doug have each been to Ephesus. Have we got anybody else that's been to Ephesus aside from those? Anyway, place would be neat to go to at some point.

This ancient harbor was filled with silt. You see that in the picture here off in the back here, this area that looks kind of brownish? That was the old harbor. And they used to look out on that and there would be, you know, the sea. And it got filled in over time, but it made a beautiful harbor and very well protected from the sea, which at those times, the ability to handle a lot of the storms just wasn't there with the port facilities. This was a very nice place to come and bring the ships in. And the ships could come right up to the harbor, even right there. Here's the Ephesus Theater again.

This is a different shot. This records what you see described in Acts 19, 23 through 41, took place in this theater right here. This is the riot, basically, that took place over the influence that the Apostle Paul and his companions were having on the church, and it was at least threatening to diminish the sale of these silver idols. And we'll take a look at one of those idols in a minute. They shouted in this theater for two hours, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! For two hours. I don't know about you, but I get tired of it. They didn't. Okay? At any rate, if you want to, you can catch up on that description in Acts 19.

Here's the main street here. And that goes off perpendicular on your drawing there from the road that goes out between the theater and the harbor. And as you can see, this is, you know, considering the centuries that have passed, fairly well, you know, maintained and restored.

Along these streets, there would be processions. part of the festival of Dionysius, Bacchus is the other name that you might have heard, the god of wine. And it was such a saturating religion throughout the culture, it involved all the different segments of society, they even involved the children in these processions and parades in honor of the god of wine. Now, This is why when you see in Ephesians 5, 18-20, Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus and he says, do not get drunk with wine. It's more than just don't get drunk. There's a religious thing going on here. The culture was so saturated with this festival of Dionysus, they would have times when a great portion of the town, involving all segments of society, would be passed out drunk for days at a time.

Paul is addressing this directly in his epistle, but he doesn't do so until he first spends three chapters plus talking about their position in Christ. Not just rules, but the position. Here's the Agora, which is the marketplace, and we don't know for certain, but it's very likely the place where Demetrius and the other silversmiths sold those statues to Artemis, as described in Acts 19. The silversmiths made a significant amount of money.

Ephesus was about a quarter million people, so you'd have a market there. You also had lots of people coming through from the highway that came in, the Roman highway that came in from the east. There was also a Roman highway that went to the north, and there was the port traffic. So with all the people that came through, there was lots of business to be made, and these people were not happy about it being diminished, not in the least. This is a major marketing problem for them, okay?

And you can imagine when this was in operation that there would be colonnades, covered colonnades around the outside and they would have a very nice place for selling their wares. Here's the remains of the city hall. This is where the town clerk would have worked. Acts 19 describes the town clerk as the one who went to try to quell the riot at the theater. to tell everybody, you know, calm down.

Why was he so concerned? Ephesus was a city that was given a great deal of latitude to rule itself and to take care of itself. Yes, there was a Roman legion that was stationed there, but the Roman legion was greatly outnumbered by just the people of other backgrounds that were there. And so this clerk didn't want to have things get so upset that the Romans would have to come in and take So he said, don't let this get out of hand. You've got the courts to deal with things, you've got the complaints, deal with things through the proper channels. Don't let things get out of hand because, of course he didn't say this himself, but I don't want to lose my job. So he went and settled him down. That's where the town clerk would have worked.

This is an artist rendering of the Temple of Artemis. You will see in a moment why I can only give you a rendering. Temple doesn't look like that now. This was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Seven wonders including the pyramids, the gardens of Babylon, and things of that sort. This was a phenomenal building, well over a hundred columns and dimensions, well over a football field's length.

A substantial building. And so when people would come into the harbor, And they'd walk up the road and they'd see this thing. This grabbed their attention. Whoa, this is something. Now, some of the things that went on there was obviously the worship of Artemis. And we'll take a look at the statue of Artemis in a minute. It was also more than a thousand temple prostitutes that worked out of this building and associated with it. That's not all.

It was also a safety deposit box system. Isn't that strange? So you'd go in there and you'd check valuables in if you were traveling and you were concerned that once you're in town that you might have a problem. And so you could leave things there a short or long period of time and they had things locked up and guarded.

There's also something else about it we'll see in a minute that seems like a real anomaly. This is what it looks like now. I had another picture I didn't put in here. It's got a cow grazing. It's really changed in character, folks, I gotta tell you. Things have really gone downhill.

Now, here's the legal quirk which makes the safety deposit box system seem like such an irony, and that is a criminal, if he could make it within a bow shot, I'm not exactly sure what that distance is, but within a bow shot of the temple, could not be charged for the crime. It doesn't matter what the crime was. If you made it to within a bow shot of the temple before they caught you, you were free.

But you had to stay there. Oh boy. Guess what this did? All of a sudden Ephesus becomes a magnet for the worst of criminals. Thieves and swindlers left and right because they could come within a bow shot of the temple and they're fine. So what would happen is there was a ringed encampment of criminals within a bow shot of the temple, because once they were within those bounds, they were free. Now, does that sound like insanity or what? Now, how would you feel about, okay, I'm going to take my stuff up to the safety deposit boxes of the Temple of Artemis as long as I can get there? Kind of tough. So here's Paul.

He writes in Ephesians 4.28, He who steals must steal no longer. Ah, now we know why he wrote that. but rather he must labor." Work for a living? Yes. Yeah, they had to learn to work for a living.

We see very well now with that background why Paul would write that to the church at Ephesus, but to few others. Here, it fits beautifully. Now, here's Ephesus focused on its great building, proud of it, wanting everybody who came to visit and to see, anybody passing through, you had to see our great building. So what does he write to the church in Ephesus? Ephesians 2, 19-22, So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God's household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. See how what Paul wrote was pinpoint targeted for the church at Ephesus. Beautifully, beautifully matched to the culture, to the things that the people thought of, to the ways that they spoke, their mindset. Pinpoint accuracy.

Here's Artemis, Greek Artemis. Rather disgusting, I'm afraid. Spiritually speaking, Ephesus was really dark and confused, and this statue This was the creature that they all gathered in the theater and yelled for two hours, great is Artemis of the Ephesians. This is the one that they were so proud of. Can you imagine that? Here was this temple to Artemis. By the way, that didn't satisfy folks. From the records that we have, 50 different deities have been recognized in Ephesus. So Artemis was great, but not great enough. What do they do? Fifty different deities. Add this one and that one and this one and this other one in order to cover all the bases. And that might be enough, not be enough, so add some more.

The other thing that we know there was a major influence from is magic and astrology. You may be well aware of the passage there in Acts 19 where all these people who became believers brought their magic documents into one place and burned them. and a massive influence for magic. And we find continuing record that. One of the other things is astrology.

You know, it's interesting, here we are, I was noticing, I had just signed on to MSN, and the big thing they had, 2004, Happy New Year, read your horoscope. We haven't come any farther than these folks. This is sad. Astrology was very big. These are the signs of the zodiac that you see there, and it's sort of a gross necklace. Here's a close-up. Sagittarius, you know, there's the Scorpio, et cetera. So they got the signs of the Zodiac on there. So they can't have just Artemis. They got to mix up the Zodiac along with it in the astrology.

Here's a magic text from the times of the Roman Empire. Obviously, we don't have the ones from Acts 19 that were burned. But we have this one here as a sample. And it's interesting. It contains a combination, as they've read through it, of pagan and Jewish magic spells.

You say, Jewish magic spells? Yes. You look in Acts 8, 9-24 and Acts 19, 11-16, and you too will find examples of the Jews involved in various kinds of magic and sorcery. And it's interesting, we hear about the Sadducees and the Pharisees and things like that, but actually, especially as you spread out away from Jerusalem, A lot of the Jews got involved in various kinds of mysticism and magic and this is an example of that. This particular one here had been found in Egypt where the Jews had been involved with the magic and mysticism. And the interesting thing is that the magic that they used at that time very much was involved with naming certain names. You'd name certain magic names and that was supposed to give you great power.

And so what does Paul do when he writes to the church at Ephesus in Ephesians 121, he says that Jesus is far above every name that is named. What that says is, you know, you think you've got your magic? You think you've got the magic names to say? Jesus Christ is above every name that you could come up with. Every name that is named. He's above it all. Higher authority than any of the magic that you can come up with.

Now, Colossae is a different story. With Ephesus, we have lots of archaeological things to look at and you can even go there today and spend all day touring the things that are there. Colossae is real interesting. It was just last March that they got together an organizing meeting to begin to look at excavating it.

It's not been touched. Isn't that interesting? They're just now getting the thing into place and getting the permits and getting a plan in place for excavating it. So there's lots to be discovered, and since we'll probably be going over this in some time, if I hear of some things coming from that, I'll try to keep you posted on how the excavation is going. I have some contacts in biblical archaeology, so I can have them keep me posted. Okay.

One of the things that's interesting here is there's no direct evidence that any of the apostles ever set foot in Colossae. It doesn't mean that they didn't, it means we have no evidence that they did. But we have just this one letter, and really that's the only mention of Colossae in the entire New Testament, is this one letter. But before we set it aside as unimportant, one of the things we have is this neighboring city of Laodicea, and it is mentioned in two places in the Book of Colossians. and also in Revelation, both the very beginning chapter one and then later on it was the last of the seven churches that were addressed.

Then you also see nearby Heropolis mentioned in Colossians 4.13 and there it says make sure that this letter gets read to the churches in Laodicea and Heropolis. So really this church, this letter to the Church of Colossae is addressed to the other two churches as well indirectly. by him saying, please make sure it gets read in all three places.

Okay, here's the site of Colossae. Whoop, jumped ahead. Here is the theater at Colossae. Now that doesn't look anywhere near as cleaned up, okay? And nice looking as the other one. So it's an example. We know it's the theater. That's about all we know, okay? The other theater at Ephesus is very apparent. This one here, if you didn't know, you'd have a hard time telling it was a theater.

Here's what's going on here. Here's Colossae right here at the upper end of this valley. Laodicea is just down the valley a little bit and across the valley and up the hill aways is Heropolis. These trio of cities were all very closely related to one another. And so, pardon? Good question. I think it's something on the order of about 12 miles between Laodicea and Colossae. Something like that. It doesn't have a scale on it.

There is a modern city there that's associated with all those. Here's a view again from the theater area up around Colossae looking down the valley toward Laodicea and Hierapolis, down in that direction. And that's basically the view that, other than a few modern things, that's the view that the people living in Colossae would have as they look down the valley toward Laodicea and Hierapolis. Now, here's an interesting thing. Colossae had a cool stream flowing nearby. As a matter of fact, there were houses that were built on both sides of this stream. Colossae extended up across into the river. And anyway, very cool stream coming out of the mountains.

Hierapolis, on the other hand, had hot mineral springs. This is not snow. This is all mineral deposits. And what you find here is, although it looks kind of like some sort of a large ledge, there are hot mineral baths up at the top. And it's the spillover from those mineral baths that creates all this white, snowy-looking stuff.

And so even now, you can go to Hierapolis, and they've got a hot springs resort there. And it was the same thing in New Testament times. It was a great place to come and enjoy the mineral baths and sit around, sort of a hot tub. No, I think it's just swampy area because you got spillover from the mineral baths.

Hierapolis is farther up on the hill on the north side than Laodicea and Colossae, which are a little farther down closer to the streams. So Hierapolis, from there over to Laodicea, you had an underground water pipe to give Laodicea its water and what would happen, is by going through that pipe, and here's some remnants of the pipe, by the time it got to Laodicea, the water was lukewarm.

So guess what? We read in Revelations 3, 15 and 16, I know your deeds, that you're neither hot nor cold. I wish that you were, excuse me, cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. So this awareness Colossae's got nice cold water, Hierapolis has nice hot water, but we've got just lukewarm water. They were very acutely aware of that. And so that's what you see in the relationship between this trio of cities in the Lycus Valley there.

Now here's nearby Hierapolis, they've got a theater similar to Ephesus and matter of fact they had, more than Ephesus did, they had quite a stage set up including some area underneath for actors and people involved to move about and it was quite a setup. Now remember last week we brought up the Silk Road. This was where silk and spices were brought from China and brought across a network of roads over into Europe and it had major stopovers at Colossae and at Ephesus. And we brought up the fact that one of the things that they brought over besides silk and spices was Eastern religions and philosophies. Colossae was subject to that and a little bit closer on the road than Ephesus was.

And seems to be the place where Paul decided, we need to address this now. And so that's why we see it brought up particularly, this what we call syncretism, just bringing ideas of philosophical and religious ideas together. the mix-and-match approach to religion. And so that's having an impact here in Colossae. So it gives them the warning, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception. Let's take a look at some of Colossae's saints. We'll get some insight there. Colossians 4, 12 and 13, Epaphras is mentioned. Epaphras, who is one of your number, from Colossae, right?

A bondslave of Jesus Christ sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God. For I testify for him that he has a deep concern for you and for those who are in Laodicea and Hierapolis." So he is from Colossae apparently and has had involvement in ministry in all three of these places. You can also look at Colossians 1, 3-8 regarding Epaphras carrying the Gospel to Colossae, where Paul credits him with being the one that took the Gospel there. That's why you can have believers in Colossae, Laodicea, and Hierapolis, and the Apostles had never been there. Because it says in Acts, all Asia, this is part of Asia, all Asia heard the Gospel.

Now another one that you may have heard of, the slave Onesimus and his owner Philemon. appeared to have been from Colossae. And Paul urged Philemon to forgive his wayward slave Onesimus of what would have been an offense that Onesimus could have been killed for.

Because for a slave to run away could, if the slave owner wished to enforce it, bring capital punishment. It was brought up about a year ago when we were looking at the word bond slave. We brought up these little findings here. Here was a Roman slave collar and a request for return tag. They put that on the slave and basically rivet the thing on, and he had a hard time getting it off. And it basically said, come back. There's another one off to the right. It says, I have escaped. Hold me. If you return me to my master, and they gave the name, you shall receive a solidus, which was a gold coin.

So here was an Esimus, a slave of Philemon, And the two of them, it appears, being from Colossae. So here was part of the culture and background of Colossae in ongoing involvement with that church. So although Colossae isn't mentioned in the Book of Philemon, the evidence points in that direction. Here's Tychicus. We remember Tychicus last week. He's the gospel gopher.

He delivered the letters to Ephesians and Colossians from Paul's prison. And Rome, by the way, that was no small trip. Probably at least three months for him to take those letters from Rome to Ephesus and Colossae. So imagine somebody says, hey, would you take this letter for me?

You say, sure. It'll be the end of March before I can get there, but sure. He's going to have to be moving continuously from now to the end of March, to give you a time frame example, before he gets there. And then if he's going to take anything back, it's going to be another three months.

So here's Tychicus, and you see him mentioned several times throughout the New Testament, this being one case here. Now, one of the things I think, as we look at these cities, Paul writes something similar to each of the churches there in Colossae and in Ephesus. And yet there's a difference between the two, and we'll take a look at the difference too. So at the very end of the first chapter of the book of Colossians, Paul writes, we proclaim Him, that is Christ, admonishing every man, look how emphatic he is, every man, and teaching every man with all wisdom so that we may present every man complete in Christ.

What's his goal here? This word complete, teleos, is focusing on maturity. Maturity. And notice what this is telling us here. Is He looking for there to be a small group of mature believers in Colossae? No. He is emphatic. Every man, every man, every man, and not just some wisdom, all wisdom. Four superlatives, if you want.

And what he is spelling out to them, he wants every believer there to be mature in Christ. What does that tell us? It tells us maturity is not something that's for a select few. It's not, oh, we've got a church here, but there's a special group here, we're wanting to get mature, and the rest, well, they can come along as far as they like. No. He is looking to have every single believer mature in Christ. Every. Every. Every. Notice, too, his focus in this passage is individual believers. Let's look at what happens.

He brings up the same word when he writes to the Church at Ephesus, but look at the difference. He says that the Church has been gifted with apostles and prophets, Evangelists and pastors were teachers. And now in verse 12 he says, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ. Building up the body of Christ. And then notice the difference. Instead of the focus on every individual believer, he says instead, till we all come to the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man. This is the same word teleos again, mature. unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." In this letter to Colossae, what we see is individual maturity. Here at Ephesus, he's focusing on the maturity of the body as a whole. Isn't that interesting? He uses the same word. I think that's something for us to take a look at, and we'll see it in more depth as we go through these books.

There is a maturity of individual believers. And what is his intent? His intent is not, we've got a mature group and the rest of them will just sort of leave behind? No. Every believer mature, and then the body mature. See, there are two kinds of maturity, two levels of maturity. There is where is the individual at, and there is also where is the church body at, in terms of maturity.

And he says both. The Colossae he underscores, and it may have to do with something particularly and specifically with that church. Here at Ephesus he puts the focus upon the body as a whole. He wants maturity at both levels. Maturity at both levels.

That's key for us to take a look at. And we'll be obviously taking a look at that in detail as we go through these passages. But the Lord desires that every believer mature. Every believer If you look at this, every believer here at Holly Hills, he wants every one mature. If you look at the letter to the church at Ephesus there, he wants the entire body as a whole to mature.

Both. Both levels. And how does that maturity take place? Can you take a maturity pill? Nope, can't get there that way. Can you say, well, I'll take this one course or read this one book and then I'll be mature, right? No, maturing is a gradual process.

And Paul gives us the exact focus for that maturity to take place. What does he do at the Church of Colossae? He says, we proclaim him. It is Christ. There isn't maturity in just packing your head full of stuff. There isn't maturity in just going through life It isn't automatically guaranteed. But he spells out precisely where that maturity is focused, growing in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word. We thank you for this message to each of the churches in these cities. Each of them face different things, and yet it's very clear, Lord, that the gospel, your truth, for believers was exceedingly relevant and exceedingly needed. And Lord, as we look at these churches and as we examine the things that were written to each of them in the time ahead here, we look to you to teach us and to grow us that this would not simply be a matter of understanding words or cultures or even Greek language.

But it would instead, Lord, lead us to a growing knowledge of your very Son. And Lord, we pray that not only would our minds be caught up with this, but that we would at heart be occupied with your Son. Draw us into that. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.