A Minister of Mystery: Part One

Thank you. You may be seated. Thanks to our worship team. If you are our guest, my name is Brian. I'm the lead pastor here, and we've been studying.

The letter to the Ephesians. for a little bit. And we are going to be in chapter 3 this morning.

So you can take your Bibles and turn to Ephesians chapter 3. I do want to mention one thing just to sort of prime the pump a little bit about something that the Lord's doing in terms of some outreach opportunity for us locally that you might be able to get involved in in some ways. And you'll hear more about some of the ways you can get involved with us in this. But the Lord's opened some pathways for us to have quite a bit of involvement at our local elementary school over here, Columbia Elementary School, which we're really excited about, the opportunity. God's granted a great connection over there with the administration, and I'm excited for what the future looks like with that.

I'm hopeful that a number of us could participate a little bit in an event that they're doing on April 11th. That would be a little outreach opportunity with a day that they're having over there.

So you'll hear a little bit more about that. But I want to mention that because it certainly pertains a little bit to our message this morning. But be conscious of how the Lord is just in prayerful, about how the Lord is using us in different ways where we can reach out into our local community and partnerships in a variety of ways.

So we're excited to be coming alongside and in some ways adopting that school a bit to have ministry to the school itself proper, but also to the families within that school. And so be praying that the Lord will continue to open up those avenues for us. Ephesians chapter 3 is where we're going to be, and we finished sort of a full section, so if you're just stepping into this, it'd be great for you to be able to listen to the previous three messages, which were about 2, 11 through 22. We looked at 11 through 13, 14 through 18, and 19 through 22, about how God has in Jesus made one new man. And I started that talking about the animosity that existed a bit between Jew and Gentile in the first century and how pervasive that was, how deep-seated that was, how it was theological in some ways, but more than anything, it was ethnic in those ways.

You know, it's important because the bringing together in Christ of Jew and Gentile and all of its application that we talked about through those messages leads up to the next two messages, which is this morning and next week in Ephesians 3.

So this morning we'll look at 3, 1 through 7. And verse 2 through 7 is just one big long sentence in the Greek text. And actually, then 8 through 13 is you just have two big sentences for the most part. And we're going to look at each sentence over the next couple of weeks. I've titled this A Minister of Mystery because Paul is going to essentially say, I told you what God was doing in bringing together the Jew and Gentile in one new man.

And now I want to sort of place myself, Paul is going to sort of place himself in his role in disclosing that. And he uses this language of mystery, language of mystery.

So I want to begin, though, with a little bit of a historical figure and story. Uh this is David's iceberger and my guess is Hardly anybody here has heard of him, would be my guess. I'm just curious. Has anybody heard of David Zeisberger?

Okay. And this is often the case. There are these people in the history of the church that are astonishing. They're just remarkable people and they're sort of tucked away. And as time goes on, they become more and more obscure.

Zeisberger was a Moravian missionary. And I want you to specifically note the dates of his life, because they're particularly important for how God used him at a particular occasion and season in the history of our nation. and in many ways over against some of the historical forces of our nation. Mm-hmm. And so 1776, our independence, you've got the war that goes from 1775 to 1783.

And David Zeisberger started ministry as a Moravian missionary. There's a college called Moravian College that is up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Nazareth, Pennsylvania area, which is by Allentown, Pennsylvania, all the way over towards the New Jersey border on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania. He began his ministry in an area called the Wyoming Valley.

Now, that's an area I'm real familiar with. I'm from not far from the Wyoming Valley. Wyoming Valley is the land of Michael Scott and Dunder Mifflin. That may be the most appropriate reference for you. But Wyoming Valley is sort of this Scranton-Wilkes-Bury, Pennsylvania area up in the northeast corner of Pennsylvania.

He starts his ministry there, and his ministry is to Indigenous Native peoples. And he's ministering to them. And the Moravians had a particularly unique and very, very effective style of ministry to Native Americans. Instead of coming in and attempting to sort of hardcore come at them and force things upon them, they would often, with these wild tribes that were in many ways at that point in history, very, very uncivilized. They would Pull peaceful natives aside, and they would create these.

communities or towns that would bring together white settlers and indigenous peoples into one community. And they would do this so that they could cultivate life together in some authentic and genuine way that was peace-loving. And then they would survey and they would look, and much of this came down from the the really founder of the Moravian sort of missions movement, Nicholas von Zinzendorf. But they would look and see what people were most given to peace, and they would begin to pull them aside, share the gospel with them, walk with them in life, and begin to work that way in cultivating gospel witness, and then have these communities where people would live together.

Now think about the context, though, where he's doing this. Think about the context of both hostility that exists between the British. and what becomes Americans at that point, the colonialists. Hostilities on the frontier with Indigenous peoples. And he is caught in such a difficult circumstance in so many ways.

If you were to push west of the Appalachians, another artifact of history is just the fact that many of our founding fathers were land speculators and were strongly invested financially in land ownership of what were native lands, but some of them sold to them. But then the acquisition of those lands became rather controversial, and those founding fathers had a lot of financial investment, just put it mildly, and a lot of interest and intrigue in their own personal portfolios in whether or not those lands would be accessed appropriately and acquired appropriately.

So there were all kinds of hostilities if you moved from Pennsylvania west at this time into what we call Ohio country up into Michigan and so forth. Um David Zeisberger was pacifist. And so as a pacifist, he didn't really map on to any Obvious loyalty at that time. Not mapping onto any obvious loyalty, he became suspicious by almost everyone. And so people were, sometimes he was maybe used in a way that would advance a cause or not, but he was very careful to not get involved either way because his focus was sharing the gospel with people in the midst of incredible turmoil.

And the Moravians had great success. One of the reasons they had success is because they themselves collectively were poor people. They weren't people of means. And so they tended to identify with people without means and people who were compromised and people who were having things taken from them. And so they began to identify with those people.

So Zeisberger. ended up being accused of treason. and he was placed in jail at Fort Detroit in 1782. Yeah. When he was placed there...

One of the communities, a main community in southern Ohio that he had founded called Nadenhouten, which interestingly means shielded by grace, which is really important for this message. was raided by American colonialist patriots and ninety six people were massacred. I think thirty nine of them were children. And they were massacred while he was in prison. And it was completely brutal.

In fact, years later, Teddy Roosevelt would make a huge formal apology about it and so forth. But they were massacred and killed. He got out, he came down there, he ended up helping some people relocate, and then he finished his years down in southern Ohio, serving and sharing the gospel with people in this place called Nadenhouten. I mention him. I want to start there because he enters into a context where the central animus is ethnocentric.

And he pulls people in disparate communities, European settlers and natives together into a community, centers it around the gospel, centers it around the idea that Christ is our peace, and in doing that attempts to do what at that point the colossal conflict that birthed our nation and all of the animus that birthed our nation was not just unable to do, but was actually coming against, and even in the name of nation building, caused the annihilation of the very people that he was serving. And yet he lived out his life until 1808 serving these people, giving the gospel unhesitatingly to them.

Now That's what it means. to be someone who is a minister of the gospel. It's way more. It includes, don't misunderstand, but I think when you hear minister of the gospel, you think one of two things. You think of what I'm doing up here.

Or you think of Going and talking to someone directly and sharing the gospel proper to them in a parking lot or something like that. Like, it's either this, I'm going out to share the propositional message of the gospel, or I'm up front and I'm. uh teaching a class in a church or something like that. And that's a very reductionistic view of what it means, both in terms of how many ways the gospel traffics, but it's also in terms of what it actually looks like. In a life that's devoted to that, it's way more than some vocation.

It's more than just a job. It's more than just talking and sharing the attract, as good as that is, with someone that you work with. There's something bigger. That's about being a, I'm calling it a minister of mystery, and you'll see why. It's not that it's a mystery to us, but it was a mystery that was revealed back in the text.

And so, what I want to do is. Move from this man. who modeled this. And think about what it would be like for us to be of a similar ilk. in our lives as we look at what Paul says.

almost autobiographically of himself.

So to do that, we're going to think about these various observations, if you will. About a minister of mystery, six characteristics. And we'll begin in verse one. And I'm just going to read down through verse seven, and then we'll come back and talk through the text, okay? 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've 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.

In summary, the mystery is what he revealed in 2:11 through 22. Gosh. Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given to me by the working of his power.

Now, I mentioned to you that verse 2 through 7 is one sentence in the Greek. I want you to look at the beginning of verse 1. for this reason. For this reason, then look at the beginning of verse 14. See verse 14.

for this reason. What what happened is Paul does what we do sometimes when something is on our minds that we need to have communicated. We start something and then we take a big rabbit trail. And we see, oh, let me tell you about this, this, this, this, this. And then he goes, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let me come back here. And verse 2 through 13 is basically... This extended Rabbit trail a little bit. It's a fill-in, this autobiographical fill-in.

So when he goes to verse 14 and says, for this reason, he's just re-engaging where he left in verse 1.

So when you're reading your Bible, you go from 1 to 14 in terms of the content. You have 2 through 13 is sort of this parenthetical, that's this autobiographical parenthetical. And it's all about this idea of him as a minister on one hand, and then how that plays out as he sets down churches and what those churches look like. And that's kind of what we'll talk about next week. But you have this minister of mystery.

In the first characteristic, he says, for this reason, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles. The first characteristic that you need to note about being a minister of the gospel, which I hope you would understand that if you are a recipient of the gospel, he Has saved you to serve. He has made you a minister. It's just intrinsic upon being signed up in the whole apparatus of kingdom life. That you have a responsibility to be a minister.

It means that you're willing to suffer. You're willing to suffer.

Now, don't reduce. Suffering here, though, to this Category of, oh, you mean I'm willing for someone to mock me if I share the gospel with them.

Okay. Yeah, I mean that's true. And I guess that's part of it, although that's a fairly modest view of suffering. If you go today over to Walmart and you give a track to somebody and they say, hey, I don't believe any of this. You're a loser.

You're an idiot. You're the worst human I've ever seen. You're going to turn around and say, the Lord bless you. Have a great day. You're going to walk away and you're never going to see them again.

I don't know if that 30 seconds is like now all of a sudden you can't function in your life and it's just devastated you beyond belief and you'll never recover because a stranger didn't like a piece of paper that you gave them. Like, so is that suffering? I mean, I don't know. I think we make a lot bigger deal about it than it is. What's the big deal about that, right?

So, I mean, you could go into sales and have to knock on a bunch of doors and have everybody say that for a lot worse product than the gospel, I suppose. You can go do that. But there's harder ways to suffer than that. Harder ways. Let me give you a way to suffer.

A way to suffer is That you have people in your life that you long to see come to Christ. Their waywardness has broken your heart? And now you have to subsist. in painful, enduring, quiet love, Showing the life of Christ, and when opportunity presents, you might be able to say something. And you subsist in that.

That's suffering as a minister of the gospel. Because you're not letting anger win. You're not letting frustration cause you to walk away from the relationship. You're not saying, ah, and get cynical and say, forget it. It doesn't mean anything anyway.

You're willing to see one brick of an interaction as part of a much larger wall of what God might be doing in that. And you treasure the brick, you care for the brick, you nurture the brick, you. are very careful of how you place it. And you're way more strategic than those individuals in your life ever conceive of you being because you're mapping out all these interactions. That's painstaking.

That's heartbreaking. That's soul-destroying suffering. As you pick. painfully wait in quiet for the move of God. That's a way.

that you suffer. There's all kinds of ways that you suffer. You might have to, in our culture, say no to certain things that your company is saying yes to because you know that the gospel, not morality. Not morality. But the gospel is actually at stake.

That you actually wouldn't be able to be who you are as a Christian in that context effectively as a gospel witness. And you might have to suffer serious loss. I jotted down a few questions just to think about for a second. Are you willing to suffer rejection? That's just a basic question.

Are you okay if the person doesn't like you? If you're not okay if the person doesn't like you, then it's going to be hard here because we're not in a spot to make we don't know our ABCs yet to be able to make full sentences. Like you just got to be okay with people not liking you. You have to in your life. Are you willing to suffer the pain of being patient in love?

to to suffer that pain and to still be patient. Are you willing to suffer setbacks as a result of your witness? If it pulls you back from personal advancement, maybe in a career field. maybe in a family dynamic. Maybe in some recreative dynamic that you're moving in.

Are you willing to suffer at the hands of the religiously pious as you patiently serve the lost? Are you willing to deal with not just lost people, not just prodigals, but elder brothers who look condescendingly at you because like David's iceberger you decided to live among the rabble? And you decided to connect. And you decided to be faithful. but you decided to do it in the tensions of a life really lived in space and time with people?

Are you willing to be considered a narrow-minded person as you hold tight to the exclusivity of the gospel of Jesus? That's a hard one in our culture. It's the reason why, when you talk with people and you talk about God, everybody smiles, and then you mention Jesus, and you have nine heads now. It's just weird because you dropped Jesus and we were having a nice conversation about God's spirituality and our random thoughts about existence. And that's always fun.

That's just worldview, fun stuff people love to chit-chat about. Don't we all have perspectives on that? Can't you appreciate mine as I appreciate yours? And then you screwed it up because you mentioned Jesus and you probably mentioned cross and maybe you mentioned resurrection, and now you're on a spaceship of just weirdness with them. Right.

But are you willing to for that to be okay, for you to to you to move forward that way. Paul is. He says he's a prisoner of Christ. It's like a double entendre, by the way. On the one hand, Paul, for him to be a prisoner of Christ, is to mean that he's captive to Jesus.

Like Jesus has his heart and his life. He's enslaved to Christ. That's kind of one of the ways that the phrase is used. But then the other is that he's a prisoner of Christ in the sense that he's a prisoner because of Jesus. He is where he is.

In life, Because of Jesus.

Now he says, on behalf of you, Gentiles, see that? On behalf of you, Gentiles.

So remember this: when you suffer, You can say You're suffering for Christ, and there's a truth to that. That's very true. But you have to think also that you're suffering on behalf of someone else. You're suffering so that they can. That person you love, your patience.

Is an act of suffering so that you can. Can bridge and be used by God to bridge a gap to them. At the end of the book of Acts, remember Paul in Acts 21. The last fifth or so of the book of Acts, a quarter of the book of Acts, is all basically about Paul after he gets arrested by being accused at the Jerusalem Temple for violating the very thing he's talking about in 2.11 through 22. He violated this Jew-Gentile distinction.

That was the allegation. The allegation is that he took a Gentile into the court of the Jews, and they're riding out that accusation. He begins to appeal and push it up the line, and finally he ends up before Nero in Rome. The book of Acts ends, the narrative ends unresolved, and it just tells us that he's there for a couple of years. The final sentence from Paul's mouth in the narrative of Acts, the final narratival words we have from Paul are this.

He's talking to a group of Jews, and it's Acts 28:28. He says, Therefore, let it be known to you that this salvation has been sent to the Gentiles. They will listen. The book stops there strategically and then says, Oh, by the way, he stayed there for two more years, because it's communicating to us that that which started and was this gospel that would go from Judea, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth, finishes with this appeal, this statement to a bunch of Jewish people by the apostle to the Gentiles that this thing is going to go out to the world and the world will listen while you are not. And Paul is willing to go down with a ship and die.

On behalf of Gentiles. on behalf of.

So I want you to think about people in your life just for a sec. Just think about them. What are you willing to suffer? on behalf of them.

So that they might Come to Christ. What would you be willing to endure so that they might? Are you willing to endure your own disappointment and your own frustration? Are you willing to endure praying repeatedly for them without feeling like you're getting an answer? Are you willing to endure repeated negative interactions?

Are you willing to endure keeping your mouth shut when you want to open it and opening it when you want to keep it shut? Most of our suffering is not so much about what other people foist on us, it's about. us internally not being able to actualize the things that we would like to be able to actualize. Can you endure those things? For the sake of another.

A minister is willing to suffer. Secondly. Verse two.

Now he gets into his rabbit trail. He's a prisoner on behalf of the Gentiles, assuming. Sense, maybe, might be, in light of the fact that you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me. Yeah. For you, a minister fills a particular role.

in God's plan. You are. where you are And no one else is. You're there. You're there.

You have people in your life. And you are you in regard to them. better or worse. That's the case. And you have a unique history.

You have a unique opportunity. You have a unique relationship that is textured to be able. to happen. and fill a particular role. What you have to do is think strategically what that role is in terms of the gospel witness available from your life.

What is it? And you have to then Place yourself within that job description. and function responsibly.

Now he identifies this a couple of ways. He points out that ministry is a stewardship. The word is the word from which we get our English word, economy. Oikonomia Um It's this thing that was given to him. with a particular way of going about it.

a particular structure to it. a kind of approach And it was given by God's grace.

Now, I love the translation of this word stewardship because it implies that something was placed in his hands that then he had to act on in a particular way. He had to function within a particular light. Let me go back here. Listen to Colossians 1, 24 through 27.

Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is the church. of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you. To make the word of God fully known. And he uses the same kind of language to the Colossians. And we'll talk about this in a moment, but the mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints.

To them, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches, the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Paul says, I stand on the edge of something in the stewardship, the economy of ministry that God gave me was to open a gate to the Gentiles and to zero in and focus on what it would mean to bring the gospel to them and to take it to the world. And I'm going to take that stewardship. Seriously, so that means two things at least. It means a lot more than this, but a stewardship means, at the very least, two basic concepts.

On the one side, it means that you will be responsible. in a diligent manner.

Okay. And here, when I say diligence, I want you to hear the intensity. that you bring and the intentionality that you bring to any specific given task. That's what diligence is. Diligence means that in this moment, it has all of you.

You are, in the words of Jim Elliott famously, he said, wherever you are, be all there. You're all present. Faithfully, in this iterative moment, you're going to take it seriously. And intensely and intentionally, you're present in that relationship. With the gospel.

Relating. Communicating, connecting, processing, strategizing, but you're there, man. Diligent. Secondly, If you take diligence. and you multiply a diligent moment by a series of diligent moments, you get another concept.

And that is you move from being responsibly diligent and you become responsibly faithful. Faithfulness is just diligence times time. It's just diligence curated over time and events and circumstances. It's that kind of intensity now, and it's just multiplied. You're like that all the time.

You are Faithful. You you you are not iterative or impulsive. You can be intensely and even intentionally sometimes impulsive and compulsive and reactive in a given situation. That that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying you line it up and you see the long haul and you play the long game and you're willing to keep coming back to the well repeatedly.

So ministry is a stewardship. And faithfulness and diligence is what that stewardship demands. Ministry is our mercy. It's a mercy.

Okay. I want you to see a verse of Scripture.

So if you want, just keep your finger here in Ephesians and flip in your Bibles back to 2 Corinthians 4. 2 Corinthians 4. It's in a context that is saturated in gospel language. To be honest with you, my favorite passage, if you're allowed to have a favorite passage of inspired scripture, my favorite passage in all the Bible is 2 Corinthians 3:7 through the end of chapter 5. That two and a half chapters is my favorite section in the Bible.

And I want you right kind of tucked in the early stages of this after he's talked about the glories of the old covenant with Moses comes down, his face radiating, and he says the new covenant's even better. It's more glorious than that glory that was just a shadow of things back with Moses. This new covenant outruns the law. He's excited about the gospel, and then he says this. Therefore, Having this Ministry, which is up above, verse three, or chapter three, having this ministry by the Mercy of God, we do not lose heart.

Here's what I want you to see: by the mercy of God, doesn't go with we do not lose heart, it goes with the ministry.

So when you read that It's saying that We're mercied. We're mercied. That's literally what the Greek says. By the mercy of God, is literally in Greek, having been mercied. God has mercied you.

To give you a life that matters. But it's hard. But I don't like l existing in this relationship. But I wish I didn't have this burden. You have been Mercied.

That is, he gave you something here. Because of your and my pitiful state before him. You have to understand what this implies. It implies that Left To just me. I can't make missional sense of my life.

My purpose. In this world. is itself this mercy of ministry that God has placed upon me. That's what he's done for you.

So instead of hating the relationship, Instead of being frustrated at the job. Instead of pining over the circumstance. What if you realized that it was his mercy to you so you'd wake up and not be lifeless? Not be pointless. Not be purposeless.

That it wouldn't be one Simple Golf game after another, golf game after another, golf game. It actually would not just be a day at the spa every day. You'd wake up and you'd go I have a reason. for doing this. And you do, and he mercied you for it.

Ministry is a mercy. For what? For mercy. You get to be one who is mercied to give mercy. You're mercied.

What a wonderful, amazing thing you couldn't do by yourselves. I couldn't do anything by myself, and he has so graciously granted me the privilege of now being a dispenser of. Mercy. Merced. to give mercy.

A minister communicates revelation, he does not create revelation. Look in verse 3. And 3 through 5 We should kind of see together. We'll see that in the next point, but for now, just verse 3. 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've written, Briefly. Where do you write briefly that? I'm not sure, but it's probably either the text, this text right back here. In Colossians that I read to you.

That's possibly one place. He wrote Colossians and Ephesians most likely from Rome at a very similar time, and they probably shared letters.

So that's possible. It's probably more likely that he's just referring to what he has just said. in 2.11 through 22. He mentions mystery earlier in chapter 1, verse 9, but it's probably 2.11 through 22. We're saying, I touched on this whole idea of mystery briefly, but it was, look at the language, it was made known to me.

It was made known to me. The Lord has revealed it. To me And therefore now I'm going to reveal it.

Now. I got to think with you just for a second about this idea of mystery. Because when we think of mystery, we think of this thing that is Hidden? Or maybe we think in the way that even the term was used, it was coined back in the 7th century BC, but maybe we think of it the way that the Greeks used to use it, of sort of a select set of initiation rites, sort of things that only the insider would know, things that would only be behind the curtain, the people who are the ones in government who read the UFO reports, right? Which by the way, I don't know if you saw the news story this week, but there's nothing to it.

Sorry to disappoint you. You can put your tinfoil hats down. They reviewed them and said, yeah, there there's nothing there. But anyway, I'm sure Roswell will still exist, and everybody will still stop at the Have you been to Roswell? You want to talk about a weird place.

Wow. Anyway, I digress. Mysteries, hidden things. That's how it was used. What Paul is saying is, he's using this term partly because of the way they used it.

But he's trying to upend it. And what he's trying to say is. We're not a people. of the hidden Shadowy. cryptic What goes on behind the curtain?

Shh. Don't tell anyone the special rights and privileges and the unique opportunities that only the select. Few know. What he's saying is I'm the opposite. I'm a mystery revealer.

I'm a discloser. I'm not someone who says, come inside. And I'll give you the secrets that you'll know, the Bible codes, so you can figure it all out. No, I'm just gonna make it plain. And I'm going to disclose things.

Christianity was the antithesis of the mystery cults. It wasn't a hidden thing. It was, let me tell you. Let me tell you something. Why does he call it a mystery, though?

Well, he calls it a mystery because it is something that had been. Seeds of its revelation in the Old Testament. We saw that when I showed you Isaiah 56 about foreigners coming in this. future ultimate reality of foreigners coming with Jews and so forth, and you have texts that point that direction.

So it's shadowy. What's it really talking about? You have all kinds of prophetic utterances where you go, I see it kind of, but it's not fully clear. And Paul.

Now grabs Bob Ross's brush and says, Let's add some more color and some more happy trees up here. And let me show you the happiest trees of all. They're the gospel. They're the revelation now. That this all funneled down in Christ And so what he's doing is not saying, come in and I have secret things to tell you.

He's saying there are things that were not made clear and God wanted me to make them unequivocally apparent to you all. and disclose them. But here's what he's not doing. He's not making up stuff as he goes along. It's stuff that was made known to him.

It's stuff that came to him, and whether it's Acts 9 he's referring to with the revelation on the road to Damascus or other revelation along the way, what you need to know is that what he discloses is not something that he got in a closet and said, hmm, I'm going to make up, I'm going to give my life and die in Rome for a bunch of made-up stuff, and so let me make that up. Doesn't do that. He's communicating.

something that was revealed, he's not creating a mythology.

So Romans 16:25, not a hymn was able to strengthen you according to my gospel. And the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery. That was kept secret for long ages, right?

So it's shadowy back here.

Now, what's happened? But has now been disclosed? Through the prophetic writings, it has been made known to all nations according to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith.

Now, I've taken this and I'm disclosing. We'll talk in more detail specifically what this mystery is and its content in just a moment, but for now, I just want you to know that it's communicated, not created. Why is that important? Why does that matter to you? Because it matters to you, because you don't have to figure out what you're going to say to people.

You aren't making stuff up. Yeah. You aren't writing your own script. You're just telling an old, old story. And if you don't tell it in the sexiest way, good on you.

If you don't tell it with flowery speech, great. If you don't do it in the best way possible, if you leave going, oh, I could have said that better. Relax, chill out. God spoke through Balaam's ass. He can do it through you.

You're gonna be fine. Just relax. and communicate. You aren't a creator. And the moment you start thinking you are and you're an innovator.

You're going to be a heretic.

So don't do it. Just stick with script. And be bland and boring and mundane. And watch what God does. Just watch what he does.

as you just communicate. You want a creator. You're a communicator. You're a steward. You've been mercied.

You have to be willing to suffer. This is where he's placed you. Three through five. Again, verse 3: How the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I've 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's now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. A minister encounters revelation before he explains it. What do I mean? Mm-hmm.

That before you begin to tell everybody else about Jesus and his gospel, make sure you know the implications of it for your own life. Make sure you've sat long and hard with it. Make sure you know what it means for you. Because if you haven't encountered the Lord in a full, meaningful, repetitive, regular way, You won't be able to explain it very well at all. It's got to work its way through you first.

Before we he uses language in here, right? Like verse 3, when I said, made known, it becomes apparent, make known, but what's it say? Made known what? Look at it. To me.

Where Paul was in his life. At that time, he was a wayward. guy over against All the things of the kingdom of God. But God made it known. Not just known.

He made it known to Him, remember Acts 9, even people around him only heard garbled, jumbled nonsense. But Paul heard something clearly. It was known to him. He Had encounter. My insight, the word for insight in Greek, sunesis?

It has the idea, it's used of like two rivers. That come together. Why would that term yeah you you ever s you heard information and you say in you to yourself, okay, now I'm putting it together.

So then? Oh, wait a minute, I figured it out. I put two and two together. We use phrases like that. The light comes on.

This is what the word is implying. Together with, it comes together, it joins.

Now, this and this begin to make sense. Paul saying, I started to get it. Because the gospel came to me, and now I started to have insight into my own life. I started to see how the extant materials of my life and the extant materials of my life, how these molecules and these molecules actually found convergence in a narrative. It was no longer a disparate series of stories, it was no longer.

A bunch of convoluted essays that I couldn't put together, but rather in one story, now God brought my life. It gave me insight. into something. Mystery. comes alive No.

You have to encounter before you explain. Don't go out. to share the gospel. Not spending time on your knees. Don't go to the family reunion and want to be a gospel witness if you haven't spent time with the Lord.

Don't venture into that relationship and the hostile waters that are potentially there. until you have done the spade work of cultivating your own soul with Christ. You've got to experience and encounter him. before you move to explanation. Verse 6.

And number five, the minister shares the whole gospel. This mystery is, and now he explains, he tells you what it is. What is it? That the Gentiles are And he's going to list. The first thing.

We saw back in chapter two. Earlier on. In verse 11 through 22, They're fellow citizens. They're co-heirs. They're receiving the same gift.

Kingdom. In Greek, These three phrases, the mystery is that the Gentiles are, the first one, fellow heirs. They all. Use a little prefix that means together or with. It comes into us in English when you have a word that starts with an SYN or an SYM, right?

Symmetry, two things that come together. Synergy is energy together, right?

So syn or sim come from the Greek, and it's this prefix that's used in Greek to mean together.

So the first is you're an heir together, you're co-heir. You're receiving a similar kingdom. Gentiles, Jews are coming together. Members of the same body, this is the mystery. He brings together disparate peoples, and then he brings them together in one.

One body. I I use this concorporate. It comes together, and that is a real word, by the way, but it comes together in a body. With con. the same body.

So you're you're here. Right? And we've emphasized this repeatedly. You're here in a same body.

Now, you're here in this body, and you're not the same as everybody in this body, but you're here in one body. This is what makes the church utterly unique. and important and not a monolith. We have verses that teach us this. Romans 12, 4, and 5.

For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same functions, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members of one another. I'm not apart from you. You're not apart from me. Everything that you do impacts others here. Every decision you make is a decision that in many ways has deep impact to other lives.

You never live your life in isolation. For just as the body is one and it has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we are all baptized, brought, identified into one body, into one church, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free. All were made to drink of one Spirit, for the body does not consist of one member, but of many. And that text goes on and talks about diversity and unity, showing the beauty of you're gifted differently than you are, than you are, than you are, than you are, and yet we're all contributing to one body because we're individually members of one another in that way.

We're co-heirs, we're concorporate, and we're co-participants. Again, the prefix sin comes before and partakers of the promise. We are Co-participants, partakers is the idea. We're brought together with Participating in the promise or of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. What we participate in, remember all those promises, covenant promises.

To become God's people, to have God's law, to live under God's rule. They all find their culmination in Christ. Abrahamic covenant connects to the new covenant in Christ. The Mosaic covenant and the law connect to the new covenant in Christ. The Davidic covenant ruler connects to the new covenant in Christ.

And what we see is they're all in Christ. That's what the text is telling you. You get all the grammar saying you get all three of these in Christ, and then that comes from Christ to you through the good news of the gospel.

So, what do you do? When you proclaim the good news of the gospel to somebody, you're saying to them, Would you like to be an heir? Would you like to be a fellow member? Would you like to be a co-participant?

So here's where you have to go with this in your minds. Is that to minister the gospel to somebody is not merely to proclaim. A message, it includes that, it necessitates that, it always has to have that. But the consequences of that are significant. It's a reorientation of their entire life.

Their entire life. I cannot express to you In words. And I could literally I mean, I could spend the rest of my life preaching messages on this. I know this for a fact. I could spend the rest of my life preaching messages on this.

And many people in our culture would still be vague on this. Please listen carefully to what I'm going to say to you. And it's not theologically controversial at all. Culturally, it's wildly controversial, and it's stupid that it is, but it is. There is zero.

Zero. Evidence. For a Christian who is not plugged into a local church. They're zero. The Bible doesn't teach.

If you want to believe that, you can believe that. But you're making up stuff the Bible doesn't teach. And it's odd, and it's weird, and culturally, it's completely. completely a creation of post-Enlightenment world. This idea of the privatization, the subjectivization, and there's a whole story that goes back to Friedrich Schleiermacher about it, and you could care less about it, but it's true.

The Bible teaches that if you're a Christian, you just are in community. It's just what you do. It's literally like saying I'm a human, so I breathe air.

So it's important for you to note that the gospel is not come to Jesus, punch your belief ticket, and then, oh, by the way, if you want to be able to grow, there's a little group that meets over at this place on a Sunday and they have a little event called, and they call it church. No, it's that You As someone who is a believer, has been baptized into a. New body. Here it is. That's what it means.

to be a part of the church. It is the dynamic of what's happening. It's deeply important that you grasp that. It's not that being church makes you a Christian, as Billy Graham famously used to say, being in church doesn't make you a Christian any more than being in a garage makes you a car. It's not that.

But cars go in garages, friend. Cars park get parked places. A garage, if your garage is used for your fitness center, it's not a garage anymore. It's a fitness center.

Okay. Yeah. The garage is where the car goes. Church is where Christians go. And it's a natural map on.

And he's making this point here. You're brought into this community through the gospel in Christ. And so the mystery is that the gospel would come to you, would redeem you in Christ, and make you a part of a body. That's the mystery. That's the mystery.

that he would pull you in and he'd make you a party, pull you in and he'd make you a party, pull you in and he'd make you a party. All that. Is the good news that you don't fly alone in life? Final point, a mystery is resourced by God. Verse 7 of this gospel: I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace.

According to there, you should read something like by the standard of, the measure of, God's grace. That that tells you that the central standard barrier of what it means to be a minister is not. Schooling. It's important. I've done lots of it.

It's important. That's not standard. It's not. Birthright. It's not How much money you have.

It's not your status in living. It's not all the experience you've had in life. It's God's grace. You only minister according to, by the standard of, God's grace. Which was given me, and how was it given?

How was this? God's grace, His effectual, powerful work in life. How was it given to me? He says, by the working of His power. In Greek, it means the energy.

That's the word working there, is we get our word energy from it. And the word for power is dunamis.

Sometimes people go, well, it means dynamite. It doesn't mean dynamite. They didn't have a dynamite back then. But it has the idea of here's the difference. One is this Active, that's the working, that's the energy.

It's what's going on right now. The active working of his ability. That's what Dunimus is.

So so I wanna I wanna just leave you with a question. The idea of you willing to suffer, the idea of you being your life being a minister of the mystery. What do you think is God's ability to use you? Not your ability. What do you think is God's ability to use you?

If you look at that and you're pessimistic at God's ability. to use you. You do not have a self-image problem, you have a God-image problem. You have a worship problem. You have a small God problem.

You need some good theology if that's the case. You don't need more people to come alongside and go, no, don't. You're just going to be wonderful. You're going to be fine. You're great.

You have such gifting and abilities. And let me tell you all about them, please. Let me tell you. Oh, no, stop. I don't want to hear it, please.

And please stop. I'm so humble. I don't want to hear all about it all. No, you need to hear more. No, here's what you need to do.

You need to realize That God can use you for things you've never even imagined. You've never even sniffed at. And it has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with him.

Okay. So you Encounter him.

So you can explain him. You don't get cute and sexy with the gospel. Just communicate it. You. Live.

Diligent Faithful suffer long and hard. and move forward. And you plug yourself into a community of a bunch of people that probably if you met on the street, you'd pass by and you wouldn't want to hang out with. But Jesus made you all brothers and sisters, so suck it up, smile at one another. Love each other and live in the community for the glory of God because that's why He woke you up this morning.

Father, I pray. that you would help us. to be ministers of mystery. To stop playing around with life. and to lay hold of the purposes for which you've called us.

To take with weight the gift you've provided. to take with purpose that which you purposely provided. to receive as mercy.

so that we can dispense mercy. Jesus, help us with this. We need you for it. In Jesus' name.