Who You Really Are - Mike Shaw

There's so much depth in it.

When Paul wrote this letter, he would have written it on papyrus parchment with a quilt.

and it would have just been maybe one sheet.

You can actually read the whole letter out loud in less than an hour.

I read the first three chapters out loud the other day.

It took me about 10 minutes.

He wrote it when he was on house arrest in Rome on e-mail, and he sent it across to Turkey where Ephesus is.

You can go there today to Ephesus.

It's amazing.

Anybody been to Ephesus? Okay.

Yeah, Alice, yeah, it's a great place, great history there.

It's kind of like the second Holy Land, really, that southern Turkey.

You've got all those churches, Ephesus, Myrna, Laodicea.

I've tasted the lukewarm water in Laodicea, and I did spit it out, yeah.

Yeah, it was horrible, but you can actually taste that lukewarm, you know, church of Laodicea.

You know what I'm talking about, eh? Revelation chapter 3, I think it is.

Those churches, that's in that area.

And so Paul would have written this letter and he would have sent it to Ephesus.

Ephesus at that time was a city of 250,000 people.

You can read a bit about it in the book of Acts chapter 19, about how Paul got things going there.

And they would have read the letter all out in one sitting.

Someone would have stood up in the church and just basically read the letter to the church.

possibly there would have been six or seven home churches because at that stage the New Testament church hadn't been building church buildings.

They were still meeting in rich people's houses, big houses.

So maybe six or seven house churches in the city of Ephesus and it was passed from one church to another and someone would read it out.