Series: Ephesians, One in Christ 6 Text: Eph. 3:1-13 Valley Community Baptist Church May 6/7, 2017 Avon/Bristol, CT Pastor Jay Abramson The Mystery That Is the Church My father was a soldier in WWII under the command of George Patton. He received the bronze star for his contributions in the defeat of the Nazis in the town of Metz, France, a town that had not been captured in battle since 415 AD. But that was not General Patton s greatest success in battle. His greatest success was his surprise counter attack upon the city of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton marched his troops 100 miles in three days to rescue the American troops surrounded in that city, which eventually ended the German offensive. The Germans surrendered just four months later on this weekend in 1945. In Ephesians 3, the apostle Paul speaks of a surprise counterattack by God upon His enemy. He calls it the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God. It employs a secret weapon. Do you know what that is? It s YOU! You say, You re kidding, right? No, I m not kidding. This is a fascinating section of Scripture, full of surprises and full of great hope. First, Paul says that he s been sent to show us I. The New House Rules of God When you read the apostle Paul, you have to be prepared for a grammatical and literary adventure. I ve pointed out before that he tends to produce run-on sentences. These 13 verses are actually only three Greek sentences and the first sentence is six verses long. Here, we also have to deal with broken, disjointed and uncompleted sentences. (Which is a good description of how I write! If you read my sermons in transcript form, you should thank my brilliant assistant Gail Brundage not me for their readability.) Paul writes: For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God s grace that was given to me for you (Eph. 3:1-2) Now, let me just pause here to point out that the rest of our passage today is basically a giant parenthesis. If you look at verse 14, you see that he goes back to finish his original thought, begun with the words, For this reason in verse one. See it? So, our entire sermon today is Paul s parenthetical thought. It s a good parenthetical thought, but I just thought you should know that. He continues how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. (Eph. 3:3-5) Back in verse 2, we see the phrase, stewardship of God s grace. In other translations, instead of the word stewardship, we find words like administration, or dispensation or even economy of God s grace. When you see a lot of different words being used to translate the same Greek word, it means it s probably a pretty important word to understand. The Greek word here is compound, made of two Greek words: the words oikos (house) and nomos (law). Literally, it s the law of the house. So, what s Paul trying to say? He s saying, I assume you ve heard that God has some new house rules concerning God s grace. These new house rules are a battle plan. The battle plan is a means of accomplishing the overall goal which he calls the mystery of Christ. In verse 6 he tells us what that is: 1
This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. (Eph. 3:6) But the mystery is only part of the secret battle plan, the surprise attack. How do I know that? Because he says that the full mystery was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. (v.5) In other words, what was known from the Old Testament about God s plans for defeating Satan is not His FULL battle plan. We know from the Old Testament, for example, that God always intended to offer salvation to Gentiles as well as to Jews. Isaiah 42:6 NIV: I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people And a light for the Gentiles The mystery isn t that Jesus would come one day. Multiple prophets told us that; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Zechariah, Malachi. And we knew He would have to die (Jeremiah 53.) But something surprising has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. Something not made known to the sons of men in other generations. What was that? It is the secret weapon of the Church! The Church is: the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. (Eph. 3:9-10) Have you paid any attention to these verses before? Let s unpack them. First, who are the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places? These would be spiritual beings not of this world. So, these are angels. But there are two types of angels loyal angels and disloyal or fallen angels, also known as demons. So, God hid His plan to create the Church from both His loyal angels and from Satan and his demons. Nowhere in the Old Testament does it ever speak of the Church. Not a hint. Now, I know, some Christians say that the church is revealed in the Old Testament. These are those who promote what is called Covenant Theology, which translates all the promises to Israel in the Old Testament into promises for the church. But if you read their literature, they claim the blessings to Israel as their blessings, but the curses on Israel, as belonging to Israel! Interesting No, the truth is that the Church was birthed at Pentecost and it was a surprise to everyone in this world AND in the heavenlies. So, Satan had no idea it was coming! Just as the great German general, Field Marshal Rommel, missed the beginning of the Normandy invasion because he was celebrating his wife s birthday back in Berlin, so the devil was caught unprepared when the Holy Spirit invaded Jerusalem in 33 AD and set free 3,000 of his POW s. He had no knowledge that such a thing was planned! It wasn t mentioned anywhere by the Old Testament prophets, which Satan knew well enough to quote to Jesus in the wilderness, remember? The Church is the heart of the New House Rules of God. So, the next question is II. What Do These New House Rules Reveal? First, let s clearly define this word mystery because it has a slightly different meaning from what we might give to it. Paul uses the word three times in these 13 verses. We often use the word mystery to describe something we can t understand, something illogical or so complicated that it s beyond us. That s not what this word means. This word in the Greek context is closer to our word secret. It s not that anyone isn t capable of understanding it, but that they don t have the required information to understand it. Greeks used this word to refer to a new member of a secret society who was given a password to enter and once you knew the mystery word, you were in! This is how Paul uses the word. He speaks of: (Eph. 3:3-4) 2
... how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ What does this secret reveal? As we ve already noted, it reveals that Gentiles, which includes all non-jews, have an equal opportunity to receive God s grace and mercy. But it s not JUST that. It s also that Jews and Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. It s not like I ve been graciously invited to have dinner with the Rockefellers once a week. That would be great, but that s not what this is. No, the new House Rules mean now I AM a Rockefeller! I m an heir to what every other Rockefeller is heir to. Only these are not the puny riches of the Rockefeller family, I m an heir to the riches of the Creator of the Universe! As Paul puts it: though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ (Eph. 3:8) That s the first part of the secret: that we re heirs of the riches of Christ. And the second part is even better. You say, Better? What could be better than the riches of Christ? Well, it has to do with the secret itself. What s the hardest part of keeping a secret? Isn t it keeping it a secret? Yeah, don t you hate it when someone says to you, Can I tell you a secret? I hate that because I want to know the secret but then I m going to have to KEEP the secret!! So Paul says, God had this deep secret that He kept from everybody for thousands and thousands of years (except Jesus and the Holy Spirit, of course. I mean, you know, they re family.) And then, Paul says that God told the secret to him and to the other apostles and New Testament prophets. Only God didn t say, Can you guys keep a secret? No, God said, Can you guys blab a secret? They must ve been thinking, What??? If we blab the secret then it s not going to be a secret anymore. God said, Yeah!! That s the whole idea! Paul puts it this way: to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things (Eph. 3:9) This is one of the new House Rules. Don t you love it? God s got thousands and thousands of secrets. When you re in His family, He whispers them in your ear, and then He says, Now, go tell that to everybody! A lot of those secrets are in this book, but some aren t. Like the secret God whispered to Isaac Newton. God whispered, What goes up, must come down. And Isaac shouted that secret to the world as he did many other secrets God whispered to him. And it was Isaac who also shouted, He who thinks half-heartedly will not believe in God; but he who really thinks has to believe in God. The new House Rules of God reveal God s grace and mercy to every person on the planet. Which brings us to Paul s concluding remarks which interestingly, reveal III. The Highest Purpose of the Church Throughout this letter, Paul keeps coming back to the church. Last week we heard him describe the nature of the church, that it was both a place for His people to gather and a place from which His people would scatter. He also compared the Church to the Old Testament temple and to the human body with Christ as the head and as a growing, living organism. In chapter four he ll describe its purpose with regard to us, members of the church. But here, in this unique statement, he underlines a higher purpose. Let me read it again, highlighting his primary message: (Eph. 3:8-10) 3
To me this grace was given to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. So, do you see it? The highest purpose of the church isn t for anything on this earth. There are secondary purposes, of course, that relate to us, but the highest purpose is that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. If somebody who had never been to a church asked you what Valley is all about, is that what you d say first? Would you say, Our church, first of all, is about making the wisdom of God known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms? I don t think I ve ever said that. But that s what Paul is saying. He s saying, Job #1 for the church is just by its existence to prove to the invisible powers of the Universe that God s wisdom is the greatest! So, if that s not the first thing that comes to our minds about the church, have we lost something? Francis Chan, as I said last week, was the final speaker at the Exponential Conference that I attended with several staff members a week ago. If you don t know Francis, he planted a church in Simi Valley California in 1994 that almost immediately went viral. He is a dynamic speaker and their church, Cornerstone Church, saw almost immediate success. But after 16 years, in 2010, Francis just walked away saying that God was calling him to something else. He actually kind of disappeared with many people not knowing where he was. A few years later he reappeared in San Francisco leading a house church ministry. At the Exponential Conference, he began his talk by quoting from A. W. Tozer s book, The Attributes of God, vol. 2, which he said was having a deep impact on his life and new ministry. He read: Many of the gospel churches have made some gains over the last years but we ve also suffered one great loss; our lofty concept of God Christianity rises like an eagle and flies over the top of all religions of the world chiefly because of her lofty concept of God. That concept of God now is so low as to be unworthy of God and a disgrace to the church we drag the holy, holy, holy God down and turn Him into a cheap Santa Claus that we can use to get what we want. Christianity has lost its dignity. And will never get it back unless we know the dignified Holy God who rides on the wings of the wind and makes the clouds His chariots. We have lost the concept of majesty and the art of worship. Francis described their house-church worship. He said it includes prayer and Bible study and singing - possibly the worst sounding singing you ll ever hear. But he said, It s not pretty. It s not always organized and timely. But it is unashamedly from our hearts. We focus on lifting up the name of God. We focus on the majesty of God. Their church website describes their church s purpose: While we are far from perfect, we are pursuing the promises laid out in God s Word. We believe that we can have perfect unity (John 17:21-23), supernatural power (I Cor. 12:7), and involve each member in making disciples of every nation (Matt. 28:18-20). Perfect unity, supernatural power, and everyone involved in making disciples Francis says that his house-church members really believe they can have that. Do you have to meet in a home to have that? I don t think so. I think it s not about the location, it s about the condition of your heart. And that s why Paul ends his extended parenthesis with these words: (Eph. 3:13) So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. When we do church God s way, we ll have unity, power, and a desire to make disciples. Our hearts will be in the right place when we acknowledge the majesty of God. We do that corporately in our worship and individually with our lives by our actions through the week. 4
God s is to use us as His secret weapon so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Let s put those rulers and authorities on notice this week: the majesty of our God makes Him unstoppable. Let s pray 5