Preface

This study grew out of the conviction that Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians is the letter the confessional Lutheran tradition has been quietly relying on for five hundred years. The doctrines the Reformation insisted on (grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone) find their clearest and most cosmic statement in this letter. The Lutheran teaching on election as the assurance of the saints, the doctrine of vocation, the household ordered by the gospel, the Christian’s standing against the powers of darkness: all of it draws first from Ephesians. And yet for many lay readers in our pews, Ephesians remains a letter known mostly in fragments. Chapter two at a Reformation Sunday sermon. Chapter five at a wedding. Chapter six at a children’s chapel. The whole letter has rarely been sat with as a single, sustained pastoral word from a man in chains.

The man in chains matters. Paul writes this letter from prison, most likely from Rome, around AD 60–62, under house arrest while awaiting trial before Caesar. He names his imprisonment three times in the letter. He calls himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles” as he opens the central section on the mystery hidden for ages and now revealed (Ephesians 3:1). He calls himself “the prisoner for the Lord” as he turns from doctrine to the Christian walk (Ephesians 4:1). And he closes the letter with a request for prayer that he might keep speaking boldly as “an ambassador in chains” (Ephesians 6:20). Paul does not lead with his imprisonment. He does not pity himself or invite our pity. But the chains are not incidental; they punctuate the structure. A man chained to a Roman guard, writing about Christ’s authority over every power that exists. A man whose body could not move freely, declaring that the saints have been raised with Christ and seated with Him in the heavenly realms. That contrast is the letter’s theological frame.

What follows is an eleven-session Bible study designed for use in adult Sunday school classes, small group settings, or personal devotion. Each session opens with the assigned Scripture passage, walks through it as the apostle’s pastoral word to the saints in Ephesus and to the Church across the centuries, and closes with discussion questions and a prayer drawn from the language of the text itself. The study is unapologetically confessional in its theological commitments. It treats the Lutheran reading of Ephesians (as a sustained meditation on God’s eternal purpose to gather all things in Christ, accomplished by grace alone through faith alone, working itself out in the new humanity of the Church and in the ordinary callings of the Christian life) as the reading the letter most rewards. The Book of Concord is treated not as an outside witness brought in to police Paul’s text but as a faithful guide that has heard Paul rightly and confessed him faithfully.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the NET Bible. Participants are encouraged to keep their Bibles open, to read each passage carefully before the session begins, and to return to it during the discussion. The Lutheran Confessions are cited inline by their formal names (Augsburg Confession, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Small Catechism, Formula of Concord) so that readers who wish to consult the source can do so. A familiarity with the Small Catechism will enrich the reading but is not required.

The volume’s title is taken from Paul himself. The phrase in Christ, together with its variants in Him and in the Lord (and in the Beloved at 1:6, which the NET renders “in his dearly loved Son”), appears with extraordinary density in Ephesians. It saturates the opening eulogy, runs through every chapter, and carries the letter’s whole theological weight in two short words. To be a Christian, in Paul’s vocabulary, is to be in Christ. Everything the letter has to say about grace and faith, about the Church and the Christian life, about marriage and work and the powers of darkness, flows from this single phrase. This study takes the phrase as its name and asks the letter to teach us what Paul means by it.

The aim is not that participants come away from the study having learned about Ephesians, but that they come away having heard the apostle Paul himself speaking to them, and through him, the Lord he served and for whom he sat in chains.