Friends, if you would please turn in your Bibles to the book of Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 3. And as you’re doing so, I’d like to just say what a joy it is to be back at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi. It’s already been something of a reunion this morning to be in your midst. Scott had to grab me to get me up onto the platform so that the service could begin, and I wasn’t ready to stop visiting, so I hope I get the chance to spend some time with a number of you following the service this morning. Now I realize a number of you are new to First Pres since I was here back in the dark ages now it seems. It was nearly 13 years ago! There’s a little less hair on the top of my head as I return to you 13 years later to open up God’s Word, but many familiar faces to be able to look out upon this morning and it brings great joy for me to have Christy and at least four-fifths of the Shurden kids here for worship this morning and delighted that we get the chance to be back, as it were, home with you here at First Pres and to open up God’s Word from this amazing passage in Ephesians chapter 3.
Before we look at God’s Word together, let’s pray and ask for His help and blessing. Let’s pray together.
Father in heaven, it’s an incredible honor and joy to be in Your presence with Your people on this Your day, a day that you have set apart for rest and for gladness, a day that You have given to Your people for building up in the faith. Would You come now as we attend closely to Your Word. Would You lead and guide us by Your strength. And would You help us to understand that which Your servant, the apostle Paul, has written to us in Ephesians 3 that we might know the truth of the Gospel better and that we might walk worthy of it. Hear this prayer in accordance to Your wisdom, by the enlightening of the Holy Spirit. Come and make all the riches of the unsearchable grace of Christ known to our hearts we pray, in Jesus’ name, amen.
Ephesians chapter 3. We’ll pick up the reading in verse 1. This is God’s Word:
“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, 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. 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.
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what 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. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.”
The grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.
Now it’s July 4th weekend and I know there’s a number of First Pres members who find themselves vacationing in various places, and that is a wonderful thing to do during the summer vacation, and I’m sure there’s not a few of them that haven’t found the beach somewhere over the course of this weekend, and might be, actually at some point, opening a book. A book by Tom Clancy or a book by P.D. James or some other great mystery novel. I love mystery novels myself. I, in some ways, cut my teeth on them as a young man. Maybe you will recall The Hardy Boys. I read and read and read some more of The Hardy Boys when I was a kid and I think I read so many of them that I ran out of the ones that I could find, The Hardy Boys, and don’t tell anyone, I started reading Nancy Drew. I hope my secret is safe with you!
Mysteries are a delight to read. They are a delight to read because they always have a twist. In the midst of the plot, there’s something that’s going to unfold that is going to be revealed that is going to teach us that the way in which we were thinking this was going to unfold is going to be really different from what we anticipated. Now if you’ve read mysteries, you know that there’s something of a pattern and a formula to the way in which they unfold. Something fairly early on in the book is going to be unexplainable. It might be a supernatural event. It might be one of those, “Who’s done it?” kind of crime novels and mysteries. And what’s going to happen is the plot of that novel is going to set an investigation where we are going to seek to uncover as best we can all of the various persons and events and happenings so that we can put together the dots to figure out why this happened and what it all means. You know, “Was it Mrs. Scarlet with the wrench in the parlor?” We’re not sure! And we’ve got to make our way through the novel in order to find out whether that’s the key. At some point in the story, a key revelation is going to present itself, and when that key revelation presents itself, that twist, that turning point, everything is going to come to light. And you as the reader do something of, “Ahhhh! It’s actually Colonel Mustard and it’s in the billiard room with the revolver!” And no one saw that coming. That’s the nature of a mystery novel.
Now Paul tells us that the Gospel is, in some sense, tied to the reality of mystery. He says it in verses 3 and 4 and in verses 5 and 6 and even again in verses 8 and 9, that this Gospel, this mystery of the Gospel has been revealed to me. This very central message of the Scriptures is ultimately at its foundation, in some way, shape and form, as the Bible has been unfolded, been revealing to us a grand mystery. And really, if you can think through the story of the Bible, it in some way unfolds along the plotline of a mystery. In Genesis chapter 3 with the fall of Adam and Eve and all of the collateral damage that happened from that fateful event, we get a prophetic word that leaves to us a mysterious clue in Genesis 3:15. Now the seed of the woman is going to come and is going to crush the head of a serpent. And the people of God are going to be redeemed. And it’s almost like that little clue in chapter 4 of the mystery novel that you go, “This is going to be important later, isn’t it, in the story?” And indeed it is. For that moment we are beginning to ask the question, not, “Who done it?” We know who done it – Adam and Eve. But now we are asking the question, “Who’s going to do it? Who is the one who is going to get us out of this crisis, out of this crime, and bring all of it to resolution?” The Gospel, Paul says, is a mystery.
But it’s not the mystery in the way that a Tom Clancy novel might unfold. When we use that word “mystery” we usually think something is not known, and thus it’s confusing to me. But when the Bible uses the word “mystery” it means there was something about this story that was known, it was revealed, but it lay sort of covered or hidden, not yet revealed. There’s a part of it that still is yet to come to light. There is a greater revelation that’s coming. Something that’s been stated but we’ve not yet seen the fullness of it. If you look at verse 3, you see that Paul actually helps us understand that this is how we understand the Gospel. Notice, “This mystery was made known to me by revelation” – something more has come. In verses 4 and 5 he says, “You can receive my insight into the mystery of Christ,” notice, “which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations;” it was hidden. But “now has been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” It has come to light; the turning point. That plot twist has emerged. Paul says something similar in verses 8 and 9 as he describes his ministry. Notice the language. “Grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ and to bring to light,” reveal, “to everyone what is the plan of the mystery that was hidden for ages in God.”
Now when you hear that language of the apostle Paul of “mystery coming to light,” you begin to realize that, yes, this mystery has come to light. What particular way is Paul actually speaking about the mystery here in Ephesians 3? How does he want us to understand the very heart of this mystery? Well he doesn’t leave that a mystery! He actually tells us there in verse 6. He says it in so many words. “This mystery is that Gentiles” – that’s probably most of us here in this room – “that Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promises in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” He says this is the mystery – that the covenant promises which were made in the Old Testament to the people of Israel, of which the bloodline of redemptive history runs through ethnic Israel, going all the way back to the foundation of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, running through the lines of the Old Testament, this Gospel, redemptive promises through Israel, is coming to the Gentiles. And it’s been given to the apostle Paul to be one who is going to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ to the Gentiles. That’s the marvelous thing that we, in Jackson, Mississippi, in the uttermost parts of the world – Do you think of yourself as the uttermost parts of the world? The New Testament would have thought of you in that way. That the Gospel has come to you. That Christ has come for you. That the riches of God’s grace promised years ago to Abraham have come to the Gentiles.
Now some of you, as you hear that, you think to yourself, “Well that’s hardly a mystery. I’ve been at First Presbyterian Church for years.” You may be saying to yourself, “I know that from covenant to covenant, throughout the Old Testament all the way to Christ, we see foreshadowing of that promise leading to the fulfillment of Christ.” The Old Testament says it over and over. We think of that Abrahamic promise, don’t we, in Genesis chapter 12. In Genesis chapter 12, we are actually told that God has made a promise to Abraham that is going to extend to all the families of the earth. Listen to these words. “I will bless those who bless you, Abraham, and him who dishonors you, I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth will be blessed.” Now do you hear the promise? “All the families of the earth” – that includes you and me. All the families of the earth, this blessing that is going to come through you is going to touch all kindred, tribes, tongues, nations, even Jacksonians are going to be in on this.
That promise given to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 was hinted at and alluded to and revealed in various ways but never fully coming into the light of its glory until the revelation of Christ in the New Testament. That hint, those collection of clues, extending to the nations have now come into full realization with Christ’s coming. This is the mystery that has been revealed to us in Christ Jesus. And part of what the apostle Paul is aiming at in Ephesians chapter 3 is to stir up your amazement of that. The promises given thousands of years ago to a lineage and to a people of which you are not the inherited bloodlines of, to a commonwealth of Israel of which you are strangers to those covenant promises, where you were without God and without hope in the world, that those promises are now yours. That you are in on a secret, a mystery – that God had you in mind from before the foundation of the world that when Jesus came and died on the cross, He didn’t just die for one ethnic people, but He has for Himself a people of which He has chosen from all over the world, throughout all generations and times and spaces. He wants you and I to be astonished at this.
Do you know that point in the mystery novel where you get to that emerging key fact that changes everything about the book and you say to yourself, “Ah-ha!” That’s the moment that Paul is at here in Ephesians chapter 3. “Oh, God has been planning this from eternity past!” And He wants us to live in the astonishment that we are actually those who are fellow heirs even with father Abraham, and that Jesus died on the cross for the likes of us. Oh the mystery of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now I wonder, has that become a familiar tune to you? Is this old hat? Are these the kind of truths that you filed away in the filing cabinet of your mind and we are just pulling them out and dusting them off this morning? Or is there fresh astonishment that God loves you in Christ Jesus, that the mystery of His grace has had a target on you and He has made you His child, His son, His daughter. He has given you all the inheritance of Christ, and as Paul had said earlier in Ephesians, that “every spiritual blessing is yours in Christ Jesus.” What an astonishing mystery this is. It’s almost like we didn’t see it coming, and now that we do, we can go back and read the Bible, can’t we? And when we go back and read the Bible, you know what we do? When we get to the end of that mystery novel and we see that emerging reality come, we go back to chapter 5 and we go, “Oh, we missed that. We missed that in the story. That’s right! Colonel Mustard had that conversation with the gardener and the whole plotline was turning and I missed it!” Like He’s going to be a blessing to all the families of the earth – that’s why the Israelites missed it. Even in the time in which Jesus Himself was on the earth, He was preaching to the people that He had come, that were His covenant people, and they missed Him.
You know, it’s easy sometimes in the context which we are in, generational Christianity, the faithfulness of God’s covenant promises, for it to become lackluster and lose its shine; that the astonishment of the fact that God’s love for us in Christ Jesus is ours, can be lost on us. Paul welcomes you to the wonderful mystery of the Gospel today. And he’s wondering at that with you. So not only do we see the wonderful mystery of the Gospel in this text, that we as Gentiles are included, but Paul is wondering at the fact that he gets to minister this Gospel. If we were to break up this sermon into a couple of points, we would look at the wonder of the mystery of the Gospel and then we’d look at the wonder of the ministry of the mystery of the Gospel. Because Paul here is the one who is preaching the unsearchable riches of the grace of Christ Jesus – did you catch this – to the Gentiles. Now why would Paul be absolutely flabbergasted by the fact that he was the one who was commissioned to be the apostle to the Gentiles?
Would we remember who Paul was? You can read about him all the way through the book of Acts and you will remember at the point of his conversation in Acts chapter 9 that he was actually persecuting the church. This Pharisee of Pharisees, this blameless man according to the law, as he says in other places in the New Testament, was on his way to Damascus to actually persecute the church after having just looked upon Stephen’s martyrdom with approval. This Pharisee of Pharisees, who completely missed Jesus and Christianity up to that point, actually meets the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. We would call that a turning point. And in that moment, his life was turned upside down. The truth that the reality of the mystery of the Gospel came home to him, and the one who was a hater of Christ became a lover of Christ, the one who was a persecutor of the church became a proclaimer of the Gospel that the church would be saved by, remarkable, Gospel changed happened in Paul’s life and now he sees, in this text, that he is astonished at the wonderment that he, as a Gospel minister, is preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ.
He actually says in verse 8 he is “the least of all the saints.” Now that is not a false humility. Paul is actually saying, “Do you know my pedigree now as it relates to being a Gospel preacher? I was the least likely candidate.” If there was a high school annual in the first century for notable Christians, he would have been “Least Likely to Succeed as an Apostle and Missionary”! This is one you never would have turned to. And yet, the apostle Paul becomes a serial church planter, the one who, in a sense, has his own heart set on first by the Gospel and never had it quenched. In this, the apostle Paul is a mystery, a wonder that the Lord would use him as the instrument through which the Gospel would go forth; a mystery of mysteries. He sees this not as his ability, not as his intuition, his instinct or his strength; he says, “I am a minister and a steward because of the grace of God.” He didn’t make an educated decision. You know, “I think I can make a good living preaching this Gospel thing. I think I’ve got what it takes.” No, he met the risen Christ, and, “So help me God, a deposit, a stewardship of grace was given to me,” he says. “I must go preach the Gospel and I’ve got to do it to the Gentiles. That’s who the Lord has called me to.”
And remarkably, the apostle Paul now understands the whole of his life and everything that happens to him according to the Gospel. I don’t know if you caught this at the very beginning of the passage, but Paul refers to himself in a most unusual way. He refers to himself as “a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of the Gentiles.” Now at the point in the letter, the church at Ephesus would not have even known that Paul was in prison. He had not revealed that so far in the letter of the Ephesians. So they would have heard it only through rumor if they had heard it at all. And so now he says, “I am a prisoner for Christ Jesus.” And you think to yourself, actually, you are a prisoner in Rome. You are a prisoner under Caesar. But that’s not the point that Paul is making. He is a prisoner of Christ Jesus. All of his life is under the Lordship of Christ Jesus. Everywhere he goes – whether he’s free preaching the Gospel, whether he’s held captive, he is preaching the Gospel. No matter where he is, he is exactly where God has called him to. He is on the adventure mystery of following Jesus wherever it is that He sends him. That’s where Paul is. He is suffering for the Gospel.
And notice at the very end of this text, he says, “I don’t want you to worry about my suffering. It’s actually for your glory. My hardships are actually extending the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ and it’s a blessing to you, church at Ephesus, as I suffer it’s for the purpose of the salvation of the Gentiles.” Notice how the apostle Paul is interpreting his life – all by the mystery of the Lord Jesus Christ. Have you noticed this? When you are the midst of trials, when you are in the midst of difficulties and you have that pity party, “Woe is me over what it is that is happening to me, life should be different than it is,” and you have those narratives that run through your own mind and those false conceptions of interpreting life. And then all of a sudden, someone, a kind Christian friend here at First Pres, comes to you and whispers Gospel truth in your ear. And the first time it’s as if you see that suffering truthfully by the light of the mystery of the Gospel. And it’s like a turning point in your suffering. The burden got lighter and your misery became a ministry.
Oh the mystery of the Gospel. This powerful truth that changes all of life into the light of what is really real. And then, about as quickly as you have that moment, you lose it. Don’t you? Welcome to th Christian life. Welcome to the struggle of staying in the mystery – coming back to the richness of the Gospel. You know that’s why you are at worship today. You know the wisdom of the Lord’s Day is that you would come back into the house of the Lord and hear the same things you heard seven days earlier and it will sound like the first time again. Oh the mystery of the Gospel. Oh the richness of His grace. You see, that’s the wisdom of our God. He wants us close to one another, close to His means of grace, because this is how He restores us and grows us into the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That legacy has been given to you. That legacy has been richly held by this congregation for decades and decades. And God has placed you in this generation and me in this generation to be those who would hold fast to this mystery of the Gospel and would minister from it with the astonishment, dependent upon the Lord’s grace, that a generation yet to be born might carry the torch of the Gospel further than we have, that every kindred, tribe, tongue and nation would be represented as the church of Jesus Christ. Be freshly astonished at the mystery of the Gospel and be freshly committed to walk in its ministry until faith turns to sight and prayer to praise.
O Father in heaven, I pray that You would enlighten our hearts in such a way that the richness of the manifold wisdom that has been given even through the church would instruct even as Paul said in this text, the angels above, the mysteries that they long to look into. Lord, would You cause us to be on display for the angels as a practice of inquiry and study as they see Your providence and Your grace unfold in our generation and that Lord, we might be faithful to carry the torch just a little bit further by Your grace. Would You hear this pray and in Your wisdom, which is always full of Gospel mystery, would You answer it? We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.