Paul, the Letter Writer

Talk to kids today about letters, and they might ask, "What's a letter?" A letter is a written communication that is delivered to a recipient. Today's text is taken from such a device.

Ask a group of older Christians to open their Bibles to the epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, and you might get the question, "What's an epistle?"

Quite simply, it's a letter -- especially a formal one.

Ask a group of younger Christians to open their Bibles to the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, and you might get the question, "What's a letter?"

Recently, letter-writing has been largely replaced by email, texts and Facebook messages. But epistles are powerful and important. A recent issue of The Atlantic magazine (September 2017) has a list of the most important letters in history. They range from a letter written by an ancient Persian queen to the message that accompanied the Voyager spacecraft into outer space.

Queen Atossa of Persia is given credit for writing the very first handwritten letter in 500 B.C. She "established the genre," according to history professor Brid McGrath, "and made letters the most normal, effective form of long-distance communication for millennia."

Abraham...