Ok … I’m gonna let y’all in on a little secret here … My mom had a superpower … I think it gets inserted into moms and teachers somehow through a flux capacitor from the planet Zerton, because it seems they all end up with it … They have this way of just …. lookin’ … and … waitin’ … and … eventually, you tell the REST of the story …

What started off as “me and Timmy were down by the well” somehow ends up with 2 cats, 4 dogs, 3 stitches and an apology to 4 neighbors with a promise to never do it again … How’d she do it!!!!

Details matter … If we’re only getting a small piece of the picture, it’s hard to even see who’s involved. A little more, we may know the characters … but we may need several pictures before we can put the story together …

That doesn’t only apply to, let’s say, “rambunctious” or “adventurous” younguns, either …

You see, one of my pet peeves in Bible study is when someone will throw out a single verse (or a short stack of them) and then pull an entire sermon out of it … taking the verse, in many cases, out of the well it was drawn from.

Let’s take one … Ephesians 5:22 … “Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord.”

That’s a pretty powerful line if you wanted to build a whole sermon on it. But the sentence before it says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” And the rest of the chapter spends a lot more time on how a husband is supposed to love — the same way Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her. That’s a servant’s life. That’s literally laying His life down for the ones He loves.

Same move Isaiah makes when he says lift up your eyes … the One who brings out the starry host one by one, and calls each of them by name, doesn’t lose a single one. A star by itself is still a star. It just isn’t the sky.

If you ever wonder why the readings here tend to go past the “key verse,” it’s because we want you to have the picture around it.

Just a thought from a guy who tries to lead his household every day the way Christ taught him how … by serving it.

Bible Verses

Ephesians 5:21-33 / Isaiah 40:12-31

Questions

How do you feel about reading through context instead of just single verses? What changes when Ephesians 5:22 has to sit next to Ephesians 5:25?