Ephesians 1

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¹I am Paul, and this letter is from me. God picked me to work for Jesus Christ. I’m sending this letter to all you Christian people there at Ephesus, all you people that follow Jesus Christ properly.

²I’m asking God our Father, and Jesus Christ our leader, to be good to you, and to make you feel happy and quiet inside yourselves.

³God is the Father of our leader, Jesus Christ. He joined us to Jesus, and he gave lots of good things for our spirits. So we have to thank him, and praise him a lot.

⁴Long ago, before he made the world, God picked us to join us to Jesus Christ, and to get us to be really good, with nothing bad in us at all.

⁵He loved us, so he got Jesus to bring us into his own family, so we can be God’s own kids. This is what God wanted to do, and he was really happy to do it.

⁶So we thank him so very much for this. God loves his son, Jesus, very much, and after we are joined on to his son, God is really good to us too.

⁷You know, Jesus died for us, and his blood came out for us. We were prisoners of the devil, but Jesus paid for us with his own blood, and he set us free. So now God will not punish us for all the bad things we did. Yes, God is so very good to us.

⁸He does all this for us, and he also helps us know things properly and think the right way.

⁹God let us know the secret things that he wants to do, that make him very happy. God is using Jesus to show everyone what he is doing.

¹⁰And he will finish doing these things at the right time. Then he will bring everything together, the things in heaven, and the things on the earth. God will bring them all together, and Jesus Christ will be the leader and boss of everything.

¹¹A long time ago God wanted us to be his own people, and at that time he picked us to join us to Jesus Christ.

¹²At first he picked the Jewish people. They were the first to trust Jesus Christ, and to wait for him to save them. God wanted the Jews to be the first people to praise him, and to say how great he is.

¹³Now it is your turn. You people that are not Jews, you heard that good story that God saves you, and you believed in Jesus Christ. And God gave you his Holy Spirit, just like he promised It is like he put his sign on you, to show everyone that you belong to him.

¹⁴Now God promises us that one day we will be properly free from doing wrong things. He gives us the Holy Spirit now. It is the first part of the good things he gives us. It shows us for sure that he will give us the rest. So we really thank God, and say that he is very great.

¹⁵People have told me that you keep on trusting our leader, Jesus. And they have told me that you love God’s people. So, since they told me these things about you,

¹⁶I never stop thanking God for you, and I always remember to pray for you.

¹⁷I pray to our very great Father, the God of our leader, Jesus Christ. I pray that his spirit will help you to think properly and show you about God, so that you will know him better.

¹⁸God has promised his people very great things, and now he has them ready for you. I pray that he will show you them clearly, like he will switch on a light in your minds, so you can know and be sure about these good things.

¹⁹I pray that you will know that God is stronger and more powerful than anyone else, and that he will help us people that trust him. God is very powerful.

²⁰People killed Jesus Christ, but God used his power to make him alive again and take him up into heaven. This shows that God is really powerful. God put Jesus in the most important place in heaven. He is sitting right next to God, on his right-hand side.

²¹Jesus is now the big boss of all the other bosses everywhere. He is the big boss of all the spirits everywhere. He is the big boss over the spirits that are in this world now, and he’s the big boss the spirits that will be in the world that will come later. Not one of them is stronger than Jesus. Only Jesus has God’s power.

²²God pushed all that mob down and put them under Jesus’s feet. And he made Jesus the leader of his people. Those people are his church.

²³Jesus lives in his church, like it is his body and he is its head. He comes into his people and fills them up. He is in everything everywhere.