1 God s Commitment to Man s Calling 10 so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 3:10 ESV) I. GOD S COMMITMENT TO MAN S CALLING A. God states His divine intent in Ephesians 3:10. His objective is to work through the church. This is a commitment to work through real people, through real flesh and blood. B. Through the church is an amazing phrase. It shows God s continuing commitment to man s calling. God designed man to govern the earth and to declare the wisdom and knowledge of God to the earth. God remains committed to man s calling, and this is why Paul tells us that God intends to make His ways known through the church. He has gathered together a redeemed people and commissioned them to declare His ways to the nations. C. Jesus is the ultimate example of God s commitment to man. When God wanted to make His ultimate statement to creation, He choose to make it through a man. 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Hebrews 1:2 ESV) 1. Yes, Jesus is divine, but we cannot miss the fact that God has spoken to creation through His Son - through a human being. 2. God could have spoken again as He did at Sinai through smoke and fire, but He chose to release His final, ultimate statement through a man. 3. God declared from the beginning that man was to make Him known in the earth, so He put the highest revelation of Himself in a human being. 4. God rules over the nations through a man (Psalm 2:6-8; 110:2). D. God remains forever committed to the calling of man. This is why God released the ultimate revelation of Himself through a man - the man Jesus - and why God is going to make His wisdom known through the church. God is going to make the ultimate statement of who He is through redeemed humanity. Not only is God committed to speaking to the earth through redeemed humanity, He is also going to reveal His wisdom to the rules and authorities in heavenly places and principalities through man. This verse, as much as any other,
2 reveals the high calling of man. God has chosen man to be His spokesman of His own wisdom, not just on earth, but also to those who dwell in the heavens. 1. This calling dignifies everything we do because God ultimately makes His wisdom known in the weakness of flesh and blood. 2. The whole testimony of the Bible including Jesus life indicates that God loves to work through human beings. God speaks through human processes and the stuff of ordinary life. 3. Here God has taken His stand. This is the place that He wants to speak even to the rulers in heavily places. 4. This infuses every part of what it means to be human with significance and meaning. Not only is man s calling high, it is demonstrated in the ordinary things of life. E. God is going to bring a demonstration of His wisdom, but it is going to happen through real human beings and happen in the rigor of daily life. It is not something that will happen only in religious services or only through vocational ministers. The testimony of every major figure in the Bible is that the demonstration of God s wisdom happens through the unique union of God s power and our human response because God wants to make Himself known in a way that is normal, natural, and shockingly human. II. EMBRACING OUR DIVINE CALLING A. Given the exceptionally high calling that God has for mankind and, in light of God s commitment to that calling, we have to make sure we recognize the weight and significance of who we are as humans. Not only must we recognize who we are, we also need to recognize God s commitment to man s calling even though we are weak and broken. 1. God is not just committed to working through perfect human beings - He is committed to working through us. 2. Recognizing the significance of God s calling for humanity should not become a yoke that condemns us because of how far we have fallen from the glory of God (Romans 3:23), but rather something that gives us vision to respond to the invitation of God and allow Him to bring us into our calling through His own purposes. 3. Our high calling should give us vision. Human beings do not live correctly when they like vision and purpose (Proverbs 29:18). Because of this we have to recognize God s original purpose for man, God s
3 commitment to man s purpose in spite of man s sin, and God s assurance that man will come into His calling. All these things combine to give us hope and hope is ultimately what feeds our soul. Hope gave Jesus the strength to embrace the cross and hope fueled the apostle Paul s labor and it fuels our response as well (Romans 12:2; 15:4, 13; 1 Corinthians 15:19; Hebrews 12:2). B. Given the exceptionally high calling of man, we must ask several critical questions: 1. Are the things we are pursuing the kind of things God wants revealed to creation through the church? 2. To say it another way, are you and I known for the things God wants humans to be known for? 3. Have we truly left behind our fallen vision and embraced our higher calling or are we content with lesser things? III. A NEW HUMANITY A. It is time for the church to step into the purpose for which we were made. That purpose is only found in the man Jesus. He alone can transform the human frame so that we can come into our calling. This is precisely why Paul says that we are a new creation or a new creature. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:17 ESV) 1. The word that Paul uses there refers to God s activity in creating something that has never existed before. 2. In Jesus, God is creating a new humanity - a new mankind - that has never existed before. 3. In order for man to be what God wants Him to be, He must be something completely new and different. 4. We must ask, what is in God s heart for man that it requires He create an entirely new creature in order to do it? B. John reminds us that we have not yet seen the full expression of what God has done in us.
4 2 Beloved, we are God s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2 ESV) 1. We have not yet seen what we will be because our glory as redeemed humanity is presently veiled and hidden. We have not yet come into our full inheritance, but God is committed to us coming into that inheritance. 2. He has yet to unveil the full measure of what redemption has accomplished. When He does it we will be utterly amazed at what Jesus accomplished and at who mankind truly is. In fact, the measure of glory demonstrated on us will be so great that we dare not exalt ourselves. 3. We will tremble because of His glory. Redeemed man will have such a weight of glory resting on him that it will cause us to erupt into praise of the glorious One who was able to do the unthinkable - take fallen man and redeem and restore him. C. C.S. Lewis perhaps described it best in his book The Weight of Glory: It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament
5 itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden. 1 1 C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 45-46.