That Ephesians is stylistically different from the other letters by Paul is obvious on even a cursory reading. As Liefeld has noted in our quote of him in the Introduction, the major distinctive of Ephesians is not any individual topic but the way the topics are viewed, and how things are said. Francis Foulkes observes:
In many respects Ephesians reads more like a sermon—in some parts more like a prayer or a mighty doxology—than a letter written to meet some special need in a church or group of churches. It is like a sermon in the greatest and widest theme possible for a Christian sermon: the eternal purpose of God, which He is fulfilling through His Son Jesus Christ, and is working out in and through the Church. One thought leads to another all the way through the Epistle without constant reference to the situation of the readers. 1
With slightly more care in our reading of the letter, we will notice that the letter seems to fall naturally into two parts. Chap 1 opens with a glorious blessing ("Praise be to the God" or "Blessed is the Lord," v3) and this does not end until we come to the "Amen" in 3:21. A different tone and rhythm is noticeable from 4:1 onwards. It is as if having concluded his prayer, he gets up from his knees, looks around and begins to give his counsel on issues he sees in the church in Ephesus, and this continues until 6:21, when he informs the church that Tychicus would soon be on his way to them. These two sections, however, are not disconnected; Andrew Licoln argues that "There is an explicit link between the two parts [Chaps 1-3 & Chaps 4-5] through the notion of calling. If chaps. 1-3 are a reminder of the readers' calling (cf. 1:18, 'that you may know what is the hope of his calling'), then chaps. 4-6 are an exhortation to live in a manner appropriate to that distinctive calling (cf. 4:1, 'I . . . exhort you therefore to lead a life worthy of the calling with which you have been called').2
Ephesians is, therefore, not a difficult letter to grasp. What intimidates most of us has to do with the loftiness of the prayer in the first section. It is, however, a lifting up into the heavenlies that, especially in our modern and clinical multitasking culture, we—in particular, we lay-preachers—need to soak up and to inculcate in care of God's flock. "These lofty, soaring themes of Ephesians," says Walter L. Liefeld, "can be sighted but never completely captured by any human author."3 We agree, and are, therefore, thankful that Paul's Ephesians should offer us such a glimpse of it. We hope, therefore, that the insights we have gathered here will help you sight them more clearly and enable you to preach Ephesians more effectively even if we will never capture them exhaustively.
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2022
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