Few topics make modern Christians more uncomfortable than slavery in Scripture. We rush past those passages or explain them away. But if we're honest with the text, and honest with history, there's something far more radical happening than most of us realize. The World Paul Was Writing Into To understand Paul's household codes in Ephesians and Colossians, we have to understand the world that produced them. In Aristotle's framework, which shaped the entire Greco-Roman social i

Your parents probably gave a lot of advice growing up. Some of it held up, some of it didn't. Waiting 30 minutes after eating before swimming? Busted. Sitting too close to the TV ruining your eyesight? Also busted. "You are who you hang out with"? Confirmed. Studies back it up: your personality is largely the sum of your five closest relationships. But one piece of parental wisdom I keep coming back to is this: you can't get the toothpaste back in the tube. Some things cannot

There is an ongoing debate, one I'd call unserious at best, about whether Jesus and Paul actually taught the same things. Some claim Paul's letters don't fully align with the Gospels, or even outright contradict them. The more provocative version of this argument is that Paul essentially invented Christianity as its own religion, something largely separated from the actual ministry of Jesus. Makes me wonder if these folks have ever really sat down with Paul's letters. Jesus i

What the Seven Ones of Ephesians 4 Have to Do with Ancient Christian Unity Maybe you remember it from youth camp. Arms around each other, swaying gently in the firelight, singing: "We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord... and they'll know we are Christians by our love." It's a beautiful sentiment. But have you ever really stopped to consider what you're declaring? We are one. Not "we should probably try to get along." Not "we agree on most of the major stuff." We a

A Reflection on Ephesians 4:1-24 There's a shift that happens in the middle of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and it's the kind of shift that changes everything. For three chapters, Paul has been building a case. He's laid out the breathtaking reality of what God has done for us in Christ: redemption, forgiveness, adoption into God's family, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as a guaranteed inheritance. We are God's temple, the very place where he dwells. It's stunning stuff

from Ephesians 3 Imagine writing one of the most encouraging letters of your life from a prison cell. That's exactly what Paul did when he wrote to the church in Ephesus. He was locked up; the Roman Empire was at the height of its power; and the Christians he was writing to were scattered in small house churches throughout one of the busiest, most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world. They were worried. Their founder was behind bars. The odds were stacked against them. Th

In our hyper-connected era, we have built digital bridges that span the globe, yet we have never felt more tribal. Despite the illusion of a "connected" world, our social landscape is fractured by echo chambers and ethnic silos. We retreat into the familiar, assuming that true unity is a modern impossibility. To find the solution, we must look back to a group of believers in modern-day Turkey—the church at Ephesus. The letter to the Ephesians (written around AD 60-62) is not

Based on Ephesians 2:11-22 There's a phrase most of us have heard, probably on a meme: "My body is a temple." It gets used to justify healthy eating, justify not healthy eating, and everything in between. But it raises a genuinely important question. What do we actually mean when we say "temple"? Here's a working definition worth holding onto: a temple is the unique location where God's space (heaven) and human space (earth) overlap. It's the meeting point between God and hu