It’s a Small World, After All

I am Arab-American. My paternal grandmother was Lebanese and her father arrived on Ellis Island in 1908 with less than ten dollars in his pocket. Just a few decades later he was the proprietor of one of the largest independent department stores in the Western United States. My Lebanese family have been Christians as far back as we can trace. In fact, Lebanon still has one of the highest percentages of Christians of any country in West Asia.

This family legacy of faith makes Ephesians especially meaningful to me. If not for Paul, who was commissioned by God to preach the good news of gospel inclusion to the Gentiles, I might not know Jesus. The church, united across race, class, ethnicity, age, and gender is an incredible, miraculous thing, but so often we miss out on its centrality to the gospel because we read the Bible so individualistically.

Ephesians was written to a local church congregation. That means that in the original Greek, almost every time the pronoun “you” occurs it was plural. In English we use “you” to address both an individual person or a group of people. We say “I love you” to our spouse, and “I asked you to clean up your rooms!” to our kids as they sit playing video games together. The other side of my family is from Louisiana. Americans from the South do have a plural form of “you.” They say “y’all.” When I began to read Ephesians (and other New Testament epistles) replacing “you” with “y’all” or “you all”, a whole new world of understanding opened up.

When we read Ephesians this way it becomes abundantly clear that life in Christian community is the vehicle through which God moves and works in the world. In fact, Paul claims that the church is how God intends to reveal his manifold wisdom and bring the light of the gospel to the unsaved (3:9-10)! God didn’t design us as individuals to change the world. He designed his church, united as a body of believers and living out the gospel together to transform the world.

As individuals God grants us spiritual gifts. Ephesians 4 lists some of them: apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, and teachers (4:11). But the purpose of these gifts is very specifically “to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” (4:12). God has not called us to single-handedly do great things for him, but to do great things with the church. God desires for us, the church, to “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (4:15-16).

Our aim should be to display the love of Jesus to the world, and we cannot do that individually. We can only form a complete picture of love as we live and serve together. This means that any change we can hope to make in the world is only going to happen through our participation in the humble local church. It’s popular for people today to say “I love Jesus, but I’m just not a fan of the church.” But Ephesians makes it very clear that you cannot separate the two. If you want to be part of Jesus’s work to transform the world, then you have to be part of a local congregation.

Of course there are risks! Relationships are messy, and we must not dismiss the many people who have been harmed in the context of the local church. The solution, though, is not to give up on the church, but as Paul urges the Ephesians, to keep pursuing unity, insisting on love, and believing that Jesus is indeed sanctifying his bride.

Read Ephesians 3 again. Read each “you” that you see in English as plural (“you all” or if you’re from the South “y’all”). How does that change how you understand this chapter?

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Thank you for taking this journey through Ephesians with us. We pray you have a new understanding of God’s will for your life, and a deep peace that faithfulness is possible. Beautiful Discipleship publishes articles, essays, and insights into Scripture like these every week. Sign up to join the community at beautifuldiscipleship.com.