Although it has only been three weeks, it seems like quite a while since we last looked at the book of Ephesians. We’re going to continue our journey through our basic training manual this morning as we come to Chapter 3. Let’s read our passage out loud together.
For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles - Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly.
Ephesians 3:1-3 (NIV)
I’ve now had three weeks to deal with this passage and it’s been a real struggle. It’s not that the verses are hard to understand – in a sense they’re pretty simple. But when I preach one of my goals is always to leave you with something that you can apply in your lives and for some reason, I’ve had a hard time doing that with this passage. It’s not that there aren’t some important principles here. In fact, as I’ve discovered, there are some really crucial lessons for us to learn.
I’d like to use a brief clip from the 2000 movie “Pay It Forward” to get us thinking about the principles we’ll look at this morning. [Show from 29:55 to 35:09 of movie after setting the stage for this scene].
The grace that God has given to us is not just for our own benefit. Although we need to make sure we don’t care the analogy too far, there is certainly a sense in which God bestows His grace on us so that we can “pay it forward.”
So what I’d like to do this morning is to spend a few minutes making some general observations about this passage and then share three important principles that all of us need to apply to our lives as followers of Jesus Christ.
After our journey through the first two chapters of Ephesians, we should be pretty familiar with Paul’s style of writing. He often starts to write about one topic and then something else will come to his mind and he’ll completely change course for a while before he comes back to his original thought. He also tends to use very long sentences. As we come to Chapter 3, we find Paul doing those same things again. He begins this new section with these words
For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles…
And then you’ll notice that in almost every translation those opening words are followed by a dash. That’s because for the next 12 verses, verses 2-13, Paul is going to insert a parenthetical comment before he finally comes back to his opening thought when we get to verse 14 and he writes: “For this reason I kneel before the Father…”
Before we get to the “meat” of the passage this morning, there are two phrases that we need to look at briefly so that we can examine our passage this morning in its proper context.
For this reason…
This is one of those connecting phrases like “therefore”, “because”, “since” or “for” that Paul uses that ought to cause us to pause and to look back to what he has previously written. In this case, Paul is probably referring back to all of chapter 2, but particularly to the idea that Jews and Gentiles have been brought together through Jesus Christ into this new creation that God calls the church. As we’ll see when we get to verse 14, that unbelievable work of God is the reason Paul pauses once again to pray for his readers. That’s very similar to what Paul has already done in chapter 1 where he prayed for his readers that God would reveal Himself so that they could know Him better.
…as I have already written briefly
There are several possibilities that Paul could be referring to here:
• Letter to the Colossians
Ephesians and Colossians were probably written around the same time, while Paul was a prisoner in Rome. So it is possible that the readers of Ephesians were also familiar with Colossians. And in that letter, Paul had brief addressed the whole idea of the revelation of God’s mystery, which we’re going to look at this morning and again in much more detail next week.
I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness - the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Colossians 1:25-27 (NIV)
• Another letter
It is certainly possible, and even likely that Paul wrote other letters that were not preserved and which never made their way into the Bible. And it is possible that Paul had addressed this topic in one of those letters.
• Earlier in Ephesians
Given the context, this seems to be the most likely explanation. Remember what Paul had written back in chapter 1:
And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ,
Ephesians 1:9 (NIV)
By now, we should realize that this first half of Ephesians is clearly focused on God’s actions – what he has done for us. And Paul continues that approach here in chapter 3. Once again the verbs are all passive verbs that make it clear that it is God and not Paul’s readers who are doing the action. It is God who has given His grace. And it is God who has made known the mystery. But those actions of God do require us to respond. So let’s look at three important principles that we can glean from this passage: I’m going to take these in the reverse order in which Paul presents them here.
1. God reveals so I can respond
…the mystery made known to me by revelation…
This is the second time that Paul has used the word “mystery” in his letter. I’m a big fan of mysteries. When I was a kid I loved to read Agatha Christie stories. And I still enjoy watching movies and TV shows that require the viewer to try to figure out a mystery. But when Paul uses the word “mystery” in his writings, it has a different meaning. We’ll spend a lot more time looking at this whole concept of mystery next week.
The way Paul uses “mystery” here in Ephesians, it refers to something that God has revealed in the past in part, but which has now been more fully revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Specifically, Paul is referring to the idea that Jews and Gentiles have been made one in the church through Jesus Christ. That is an idea that is present in the Old Testament, but not nearly to the extent it has been revealed in Jesus.
For Paul, the revelation of that mystery had come on the road to Damascus as described in Acts 9. As a devout Jew, Paul was certainly familiar with the idea that the God intended to bless the Gentiles through the Jews, but like his fellow Jews, he figured that could only happen by a Gentile converting to Judaism and being circumcised. But when Jesus Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus he made it clear that through Jesus both Jews and Gentiles had access to God and that it did not require the Gentiles to first become Jews in order for that to happen.
But that revelation of Jesus was not just for Paul’s benefit alone. Along with that revelation came the responsibility for Paul to pass that revelation on to others – in effect, to pay it forward. In fact, God called Paul to be the apostle to the Gentiles and to focus his ministry on sharing the revelation he had received with those he had previously persecuted.
But Paul is not the only one to whom revelation has been given and he is not the only one who therefore has a responsibility to respond to that revelation by sharing that revelation with others.
Every one of us in this room this morning has received revelation from God. Even if you’re here for the first time this morning and you’ve never opened a Bible, God has revealed and is revealing Himself to you. Although today God primarily reveals Himself through the Bible, He also reveals Himself through his creation, through prayer and even through other people. And because God has revealed Himself to you, like Paul, you also have a responsibility to respond to Him.
If you’ve never accepted Jesus into your life as your Forgiver and your Master, then you need to respond to His revelation by doing that today and we’ll give you an opportunity to do that a little later. But for most of us here who have already responded in that we, we still have a further responsibility to respond to God by sharing what God has done for us with others.
Jesus Himself made it quite clear that revelation always calls for our response:
I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit - fruit that will last…
John 15:15, 16 (NIV)
Jesus is telling His followers that now that he has revealed Himself to them, they have a responsibility to go and bear fruit by taking that revelation to others.
God’s revelation is never just for our information. It always requires us to respond in some way. That’s one reason that we have a response time each week in our worship service. The revelation that occurs each week through the songs we sing, the fellowship we share, the prayers we pray and God’s Word always requires our response.
2. God graces so I can give
…Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you…
The key word in this verse is the word “administration”. Many other translations translate that word “stewardship”. Unfortunately in the church, the word stewardship has become synonymous with giving money to the church. My guess is that if I had included the word “stewardship” in the title of my sermon this morning, some of you would have assumed that I was going to preach about giving money and you would have immediately tuned me out before I even got started.
The word Paul uses here refers to someone who manages, oversees or administers the property of another. So it certainly does include our finances since the Bible is clear that all of our material possession don’t really belong to us. They are God’s and we merely have the responsibility of be good stewards, or managers, of what He has entrusted to our care.
But Paul applies that word here to God’s grace. God has entrusted Paul with His grace, not merely for Paul’s benefit, but so that Paul can manage and administer that grace for the benefit of his Gentile readers. Paul is to be a faithful steward of the grace that God has provided in his life.
If God’s grace was only for our own personal benefit, then there would be no reason for God to leave us here on this earth once we accepted that gift from Him through faith in His son, the Lord Jesus Christ. But, like Paul, when we receive God’s grace into our lives, it is not just for us. God has made us stewards of that grace for the benefit of others. Paul emphasizes that responsibility in his first letter to the church at Corinth:
Let a man regard us in this manner, as servants of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found trustworthy.
1 Corinthians 4:1, 2 (NASB)
As we’ve seen, God entrusts us with the revelation of the mystery of the gospel and then he calls us to respond to that revelation by being good stewards of what he has entrusted to us. We need to pay it forward.
Peter also reinforces this concept:
As each one has received a special gift, employ it in serving one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.
1 Peter 4:10 (NASB)
Peter also makes it clear that we are to be good stewards, or managers, or administrators of the grace of God. And we do that by paying it forward.
In a sense, we’re all to be spiritual “re-gifters”. We all know what re-gifting is. You receive a gift that you don’t really want or need, so you turn around and re-gift that item to someone else. Only in the spiritual realm, we are re-gifting something that is of immeasurable value to us. But the good news is that even when we pass that gift on to someone else, we still get to keep the gift for ourselves. Now that’s a great gift!
3. God ordains, so I obey
For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles…
We now come to the hardest part of this passage for most of us. We don’t mind getting revelation from God and even responding to Him. We don’t even mind being the stewards of His grace and passing it on to others. But I don’t know too many of us who want to be prisoners. We like our freedom too much. But the first two principles we looked at so far – God reveals so I can respond and God graces, so I can give – are 100% dependent on this third principle.
As Paul is writing this letter, he is probably a prisoner in a Roman jail, maybe even chained the guard who was assigned to watch him. But it’s interesting that Paul doesn’t refer to himself as a prisoner of Caesar or a prisoner of Rome. He calls himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus. And He is a prisoner of Christ, not on his own behalf, but for the sake of his Gentile readers.
You’ll remember that Paul was in that Roman prison as a direct result of his work in taking the revelation of the mystery of the gospel to the Gentiles. In Acts 21 we learn that just a short time before he wrote this letter Paul had gone into Jerusalem to deliver the offerings from the Gentile churches to the Jewish Christians there. While in the Temple one day, he was dragged out by an angry mob of Jews who accused him of taking a Gentile into the part of the Temple that was off limits to non-Jews, an accusation that was false.
After his arrest, Paul was allowed to address the crowd. As he began to speak in Aramaic, the common language of the Jews, the mostly Jewish crowd quieted down and listened intently until the point where Paul proclaimed that God had instructed him to take the gospel to the Gentiles. When the crowd began to call for Paul’s death, he was taken away and was about to be beaten by the Roman guards until they found our Paul was a Roman citizen.
Ultimately, Paul appealed to Caesar and was taken to Rome, where he wrote the book of Ephesians from a jail cell.
Paul recognized that he was in that Roman jail cell not because of what the crowd shouted, or because the Jewish leaders had conspired to kill him, but because that was all part of God’s plan for him to take the gospel to the Gentiles. Although Paul was physically in the custody of the Roman authorities, he was spiritually the prisoner of His Lord.
I was thinking this week about what it means to be a prisoner. It basically means that one loses all of his or her freedoms. You no longer have the right to determine how you live your life. Someone else determines your schedule, what you eat, what you can and can’t do.
And that is exactly what God calls us to do as His followers. God ordains what we are to do with our lives and how we are to live and our responsibility is to obey God’s plans for our lives. And that is the key that enables us to respond to God’s revelation and to pass on the gift of His grace to others. Here’s how Jesus stated that same principle:
"I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.
John 15:5 (NIV)
If we are going to be effective disciples of Jesus Christ and bear fruit for the kingdom of God, then we must be willing to give up our freedom and become prisoners of Christ. Or maybe Jesus put it a little more palatable for us – we need to remain, or abide, in Him. No matter what picture we use to describe it, the principle is the same. If I want to be able to take God’s grace in my life and pay it forward as He intends, then I must be willing to make Jesus Christ the master of my life. I have to allow Him to control everything I do.
God’s grace in our life is not just for us. God has called us to be good stewards of that grace by paying it forward so that others can experience every spiritual blessing in Christ in their lives, too.
