Our Father, we want to thank You that You brought us to Yourself the way that You did. As costly as it was, You were not even thinking about that, but You were thinking of what You would get when You redeemed us, and we want to thank You.
And Lord, as we come to You, we want to be open to You. We want to know what it is that You have for us. We know that You have saved us, but Lord, we want to know what it is that You really want, what You are really desiring, why You saved us, and what You have for us, Lord.
And Lord, we just want to admit also that these things are mysteries to us. We cannot tell; You need to tell us. You need to reveal these things to us.
So, Lord, I tell You how I cannot do these things and how I need Your Holy Spirit to open Your Word, and that You would be our witness to Your Word, Lord. I pray they would not be Jim-speaking, but Lord, that You would be speaking from Your Word to our hearts, encouraging us, letting us know that it is Your power, it is Your truth, it is Your house that You are building.
So, Father, we commit Your Word to You now, for Your Holy Spirit’s ministry. Hide me in Jesus, I pray. Amen.
As people know, I have been speaking on Ephesians for the last few times, and I am ready to start Chapter 3. I know we have taken five times to go through the first two chapters, and my wife was telling me that some people are saying, “I cannot wait till we get to the practical parts.” And that is true. There are practical things here for us.
But, you know, if you do not see your goal, if you are not firmly seeing it, then the practical part becomes your effort to do something. The thing is, the Lord wants us so firmly to see what He has planned for us, and that He has the ability to carry this through and to carry us to completion of this, so that our faith and trust rest in Him, not in ourselves.
So Paul spends the first three chapters really kind of laying that foundation, saying, “This is it. This is what you stand on.” And then he steps out and goes on from there.
Now, we have really about a chapter and almost a half before you really get into the things where he says, “Do,” and, “Do not do,” and things like that. But do not lose heart, please. You know, because it is the Word of the Lord. This is the way the Lord wants it. He is just laying that foundation.
So let us go ahead. We are going to read the first half of Chapter 3—not Chapter 13, Chapter 3. I was just saying, if you knew how many chapters were in here, somebody would be going, “Thirteen more chapters? Oh, my God!”
So we are going to read the first thirteen verses in Chapter 3, and it reads:
For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—
if indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you;
that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery, as I wrote before in brief.
By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ,
which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit;
to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel,
of which I was made a minister, according to the gift of God’s grace which was given to me according to the working of His power.
To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ,
and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things;
so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord,
in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.
Therefore I ask you not to lose heart at my tribulations on your behalf, for they are your glory.
Chapter 3 begins—or actually, the verses that we read here—Paul kind of digresses, and some people say this is a parenthesis. We could have actually gone right from Verse 1, stopped at Verse 1, and then started with Verse 14, because Paul’s intention is to pray.
But he does not. He stops, and he does a digression, telling them why he is in the place that he is in and the purpose for him being there.
And I really want to dwell on this one phrase in Verse 10, where it says, “So that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church.”
I want to preface that by saying: people who meet in meetings like us, we hear, “the church,” and all of a sudden it is like, “Okay, we are going into the regular things that we always listen to. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know this.”
But there is something here. It is not that we just need to see; there is something here that we are a part of. What we need to understand is that God is doing something that is so different. It is not just people who want to know, but there are heavenly beings who are looking and saying, “What is it that He is doing?”
The thing is that we are a part of it, and we want to know: What is our part in this? What is our part? We do not just want to know that these things are done, but what is our part in this? They are not just to be something left off to the side, where we say, “Yeah, we know these things. We know these doctrines.” But where are we in this?
Where are the people in Richmond Christian Fellowship? Where is their part? Where is your individual part? And where is our part in the whole work of what God is doing through the ages?
So I want to look at these things with that in mind. As we go down there, I want to say that what we want to look for is the manifold wisdom. Manifold just means that it is many-faceted.
It is like a diamond that has many facets. If you look at the face of a diamond, it has many, many facets to it, and that is what makes it so bright and brilliant, because as the light shines from these different things, that makes it sparkle.
I learned something else about diamonds this week. I just want to show off my knowledge. You can tell a fake diamond: if you put water on it, the water will roll off it. If it is a real diamond, it will stick to it. You know, it is just something a little interesting. I am not going to tell you where I learned it, though.
Anyway, Paul starts out in Chapter 3. Let me just start searching here and looking at the manifold wisdom of God. I think the things that we really want to see are this unity that is in what He is doing—there is a unity there—and then there is an activity there that shows His manifold wisdom.
So I am going to kind of read through these verses as we go. I am not going to comment on a lot of them, but I am going to make a few points on certain things that I think really point out this manifold wisdom.
Paul starts out by saying, “For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles, if indeed you have heard the stewardship of God’s grace.” In other words, he is telling them, “You know, I am in prison because of God’s stewardship to me.”
Now, what a stewardship is—another word, I think some of your translations say “dispensation”—but I like to think of it as a dispenser. I am older than a lot of you guys. Remember the Dixie Cup dispensers? Okay, the Pez dispensers. You guys will know the Pez dispensers. Remember those?
You know what they do? They dispense something to you. You pop that little head on that little Pez thing, and out comes the Pez. You have that dispenser up in your bathroom; you pull out a cup, and it gives you the cup.
What Paul says is, “I have this stewardship. God has made me someone to dispense something, to give something that He wants people to know. He has called me for this purpose, and He is calling me specifically for you.”
To the Gentiles—it is for you expressly. It is not something that I was going, “Oh Lord, I really want to be the apostle to the Gentiles. Please make me the apostle to the Gentiles.” But no, God had found him. He said, “I want this man.”
And He chose him. He took him. He said, “This is what I have for you, and it is going to be suffering and all these other things, but it is glorious.” So Paul took it up, and he says, “I am not living for myself. I am living for what God has told me to do, what God has given me to do, and what He has given me to do is to benefit you.”
That is what he is saying, and he is in prison now because of that. But anyway, he goes on and says, “I have had this stewardship.”
He goes on and says grace was given to me for you, that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery. Now, mystery—we have done a bad job with mystery as far as what the Greek word means.
If we watch a mystery show, we sometimes can figure out who did it at the end. Now, how do we do that? We closely observe, we watch for the clues, and then we use our deductive reasoning. We are like Sherlock Holmes there, knocking out those others until we get to that one.
That is not the mystery that God is talking about, that Paul is talking about here. A mystery is something that is previously unknown, and it would continue to be unknown unless God reveals it.
He is not taking things out and going, “There is a book out—what is it? The Da Vinci Code. Are you guys familiar with that?” Da Vinci was putting all these little clues there to say, “These things are really wrong about the Bible, and the church is hiding things.”
God does not work like that. God does not say, “I have hidden these things. I hope you are smart enough, because they are in there. If you add up all the numbers here, you are going to get the page number the real truth is on,” something like that.
He chooses to reveal things. Even in Matthew, I think it is Chapter 11, Verses 25 and 26, the Lord Jesus Himself prays to God. He says, “Lord, I am so glad that You hid these things from the wise, but You revealed them to babes.”
That is what is magnificent, because as we study through Acts, you see Peter and John, unschooled as they are, before the learned men of the Sanhedrin, and they cannot be refuted. Why? Because things have been revealed to them.
What argument do you have for revelation? You do not. Even if you have revelation, no argument can move you, because you have seen.
So Paul says, “I have been given revelation of this mystery.” People make a deal about all the different mysteries, but here he specifically says, at first, “the mystery of Christ.” So, something that was previously unknown about Christ.
What is the mystery of Christ? I am not going to go into these big old theological things, but you will remember when the Lord was on the road to Emmaus, and He was walking with those two disciples.
It says in Luke 24 that He said, “How is it that you do not know that the Christ should suffer before He could enter into His glory?” Then He started to reveal those things. He started with Moses all the way down, and He began to show them.
Further on in Luke, when He is talking to the disciples before He ascends, it says He opens their minds to the Scriptures, showing them that the Christ should first suffer before He should go into glory. So these things were revealed.
Now, there were portions where you can say, “Well, I can see these in the Old Testament.” But the thing is, the people in the Old Testament were not sure who they were talking about. Look at 1 Peter. You do not have to turn to this, but in 1 Peter 1, Verse 10, it says:
As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries,
seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow.
It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—
things into which angels long to look.
So even these prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah—they knew something, but they did not know the whole story, because it was reserved to be revealed at a different time. But now those things have been revealed.
The mystery of Christ—you know, I know there are different ways that people in our fellowship feel about Christmas. I mean, even saying the winter solstice is coming around.
But when you think of the Christmas carols—and I am not talking about “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” and things like that—but you listen to those Christmas carols. For example, the mystery of Christ is revealed in “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” by Wesley:
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see.
That is a mystery that is being revealed. Or, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”:
How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek hearts will receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.
That is mystery: Christ in us. But these things God now has revealed to us.
This is the mystery of Christ, but it has been revealed first not to those prophets of old, but to the holy apostles—it says the apostles and prophets of the New Testament. They begin to see these things as God reveals them, and then they begin to dispense. They begin to tell out. They begin to show people, “This is what the Lord has done. This is our salvation.”
Then he goes on to say, “Which in other generations was not made known,” as we just talked about. To be specific, he talks about another mystery: that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body.
Now, we talked a little bit about that last time, and I am not going to go over those things. But I do want to say this is the first point where it really talks about unity, which is part of His manifold wisdom.
If you look at Verse 6, where it says, “To be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs”—now, some of your Bibles do not read this one. I am using the New American Standard, which I think I got down on Monday night. Mary Ruth was reading from it, and I said, “Well, you know, that is not a right translation.” I am using it!
But it was the way it translated something. Actually, this is a good translation for these verses here. It says that you are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise. Even up in Chapter 2, Verse 19, it said we are fellow citizens.
The reason why I am saying this is manifold wisdom—this is His wisdom, the facets of His wisdom—is because you have to think about this. Even here in this country, we are fellow citizens, right? But when my grandparents came over, they were not citizens; they became citizens.
Pretty soon, you could tell they were different because of their accents. All of a sudden, you put citizens on a hierarchy. “Well, we were born citizens.” “Well, I was naturalized.” “But I am a citizen.” “Yeah, but we were born—a little peg higher than you.” Well, God knows that.
Then it says in Verse 6, “fellow heirs.” Now, it is true, we are heirs to everything that God has, but heirs are not always equal either. Think about that. In Roman times, you could have a son and a slave, and you could make them both your heirs. But one was your son, and one was a slave.
So there is that in there: “Well, I was born into this.” “Well, I came into this.” “Yes, but I was born into it.”
Then the next one, it says, is that we are members of the body. Now there, that has got to be a good one, right? We are fellow members of the body. But you know what it says in 1 Corinthians? “I am a toe.” What good is the toe? “I am an ear. I hear the things of God. You are just a toe.”
So we get into those types of things. But here: fellow partakers of the promise.
Now, commentators do a lot of things with this promise. They will say, “Well, the promise he is talking about is the promise to Abraham,” and such. But it says the promise. What is the promise he is talking about?
I think this is the promise. You remember when Peter preached in Acts 2? People were saying, “What is happening here? What is going on with all these people speaking in these different languages?” And Peter got up and said, “This is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: ‘And it shall be in the last days,’ God says, ‘that I will pour forth of My Spirit on all mankind.’”
Notice it says, “all mankind.” And then at the very end of his quote, he says, “And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
We mentioned a little bit last time, but if you go to Acts 10, where Peter is at Cornelius’s house, Verse 44 starts: while Peter was still speaking these words, as he was sharing the gospel, it says the Holy Spirit fell upon those who were listening to the message.
All the circumcised believers who came with Peter were amazed. In other words, they went like this. Their mouths dropped, for you guys who cannot see that.
It says they were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the Gentiles also, for they were hearing them speaking with tongues and exalting God. And Peter answered, “Surely no one can refuse water for these to be baptized who have received the Holy Spirit just as we did.”
Now, why am I making such a big point of this? Our unity is not just based on the idea that we are fellow citizens, because I have given you examples where we can say, “Well, you are a second-class citizen. You are not baptized with the Spirit,” and things like that.
That is what Christians do. They get on these other doctrines. We make people less than what they are in Christ. There are levels that you are in Christ that they are not—except for age, because John talks about fathers and young men and children, little children. That is it.
Heirs—we can say, “Well, I have got this,” but somebody can say, “Well, I was born into this. You just came into it.” We do those things. But what is our unity? Where is the big part of our unity?
It is in that we are partakers of the promise. Now, the promise—we could say it is the Holy Spirit—but it is more than the Holy Spirit. Listen, this is Romans 11:17. I am only going to read this verse, and I am not going to comment as to what it is saying in the context of Romans 11.
But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree.
Brothers and sisters, we have been grafted into something. We are in that we are partakers of the same life. That is the crux of our unity. It is not just that we are heirs. It is not just that we are citizens. It is that we have the same life in us.
That is the wonderful thing about grafting. Is it not interesting that people can do that? Someone can take a branch from a different olive tree and put it into a good olive tree. Not only can that branch live, but that branch will bear the fruit of the life that is in that good olive tree.
Therein is the unity. It is not only that we have the life in us, but because we have the life in us, the fruit of that life comes out.
This is wisdom. This is the wisdom of God: that I could be brought into something that happened so long ago and be brought into vital contact with it—so vital that I can have the same life in me as Paul had in him: the life of the Lord Jesus.
So this is our unity. This is where we are really one. It is in that life. These other things, yes, we are heirs; we are citizens; we have the rights of all these things. But more than those things is that we have the life of God, the life of Christ, put into us.
Just to make you think: when Jesus changed the water into wine, the guy who tasted the wine did not know He did it. He did not know it was water turned into wine, because then he would have really fallen off his chair.
But you know what he said? He compared the wine, and he said, “This wine is fuller.” In other words, he said, “This wine is not diluted.”
Brothers and sisters, that is really what the wisdom of God is. There was the idea that if the Gentiles came into the church, it would dilute what the Jews had kept going for all these years. It would dilute it, so they must become Jews first.
What the Lord is saying is, “No. The wine is not diluted.” As a matter of fact, the wine is better. It is not saying the Gentiles make it better, but what I am saying is this: the first wine was the wine of the old covenant.
The old covenant has mixed in it the idea of what I can do to keep that covenant, and it is going to fail, just like the wine of that wedding party. It failed. It just could not supply for the whole time. They just did not have what it took.
But the new wine is the new covenant, and that is what we are partakers of. It is not just us; it is the Jews also.
We need to get off this idea that—even the idea of saying, “Well, I am a completed Jew.” There are no completed Jews. There is one new man. There is only Christ.
It is not like I could say, “Well, I am a Polish American.” No, I am an American. I am a Christian. There are no Jew or Gentile in Christ. It says there are no Greeks or barbarians. There is not even male or female in Christ. It is all Christ.
That is what this is: we have the life of Christ in us. The wisdom of God.
Now, he goes on and says—and I want to save Verses 7 and 8 for the end—it says, “of which I was made a minister according to the gift of the grace of God.” I want to skip on. The end of Verse 8 says, “to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ.”
I am not going to talk about the unfathomable riches of Christ, because we hear a lot of ministry on it. I am not going to go into that here, but I will say this: the unfathomable riches of Christ are for you to find.
Another translation is “the unsearchable riches.” It depends on how we look at “unsearchable.” I can go into my daughter’s room and say, “This room is unsearchable, because I am not going to find anything in here.”
But that is not the meaning that we have here. “Unsearchable” means you can never put a value on it, because the more you find, you have got to keep changing the value, because what you are finding in there is infinite. It keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you cannot put a set value on it because there is so much.
It is for us to find it. It is not to say that God is hiding it. God wants to reveal it, but you have to be in the place to find it. You have got to be looking for it.
The Lord says, “To him that will seek,” what? “He will find.” To him that will knock, what? “The door is going to be opened.” Those are the things. He does not just go, “There it is. Here, find what you want and do what you want.”
He uses our lives to make us go, “I need something.” Then, when we find it, He expands us in our life, and we go, “I need something else,” or, “I need more of this.” He keeps bringing this on until we find those things.
So the unfathomable riches of Christ are there, but they are there for you to find. If I just told you them, this is what you would do: “Okay, I can answer them on a test now. Thank you very much. You have told me the answers. I do not have to look.”
But the joy of finding them—the joy of finding all there is in Christ—I am not going to rob you of that.
Let us encourage one another to find those things in the midst of the trials that we are in—to find them—because part of Paul’s prayer later on talks about that very thing.
Now he goes on: “And to bring to light what is the administration”—now, my version says “the administration,” and that is the right translation—“to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things, so that the manifold wisdom of God might be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in heavenly places.”
This is in accordance with God’s eternal purpose. In other words, this was not something God thought of, like, “Oh geez, My people rejected My Son. What am I going to do now?” No. From the beginning of the world, the Lamb was slain. He had a plan.
He had thought of the church before all creation. All these things were already there; they are now being revealed.
Here is why I want to say I have the right translation here. The word “administration” here is also translated in some of your versions as “dispensation,” “stewardship,” and some have “fellowship.” But the Greek word—and I know I am going to butcher it—is oikonomia, something like that anyway.
You can split up the word: oikos, which means the house, and nomos, which means the law. If you put that together, you have the law of the house.
What is the law of the house? Brothers and sisters, this is what principalities and powers in the heavenlies want to see. They want to see: What is the law of the house? What makes the house what it is? What are they looking at?
I will tell you what they want to see. They want to see this. Now, I am not meaning me, but they want to see a body, and they want to see a body functioning. That is basically what it is. They want to see the body and the rule of the body.
You know, it is an amazing thing, the human body. We do not do this normally, but just to stand up here like this—how many things in the body have to do this so I can stand up straight? My knee is shaking right here. It is trying to get balance against equilibrium up here. My hands are out here balancing.
Look at all the muscles that are going, “Well, we have got to do this. I have got to do this and that.” Where are they getting all this information from? This is coming from up here.
We can say the same thing as I am walking along. Look at all the things that are working together to enable me to walk along like this. What the heavenly powers are looking at, they go, “What makes it work? What is going on here?”
They are not coming to see how we meet. It might sound like, “Well, how they meet here in Richmond Christian Fellowship is different from, let us say, the Baptist church over there, or Grace Chapel over there. Let us see how they meet. They are after it all.”
What they want to see is the manifestation of grace working out in our lives. The reason why I am saying grace working out in our lives is because grace is a response to what God has done.
The way we respond to it is, first of all, how do you respond to the people that you are put in the body with? Where is your response there? Is it like, “Oh, I cannot wait to get out of here. I am going to go to another church. I do not like these people”?
Or is it a response to them as the Lord would have you respond? “I put you here to be a part of these people. This is what I have for you. I want to see them enabled. I want to see them doing the will of God.”
Brothers and sisters, that is the amazing thing. I think sometimes we think that people want to see—we think of the visions of the church, we look at it as a temple, we look at the pearls and everything like that. It is a body.
What good is a body? Now think about this: What good is a body if it just did this, and once in a while self-serving? That is not what principalities and powers are looking at: to see a self-serving body.
But they want to see this goal. They are here—maybe this will help you read it better. You see what I am saying, though? They want to see the body in action, doing things, where it is not just self-serving but it is going out and doing the will of God.
The will of God is not going to meetings alone. That is not it. But it is out of those meetings: do we find what the will of God is and then go and do it? That is what they are looking for.
Are we attached to that Head, or are we so that we are spasming? You know, old Spasm Harold—spasm there. It looks funny, does it not? Because that is not what the body was made for.
The body was made to do things. The body was made to be in connection with the Head so that it would do the will of the Head. It is not made to be a trophy.
The Lord does not just go, “I am going to go work on the weight room today just to see if I can get cut.” The Lord’s eyes go to and fro throughout the earth. He is looking. He wants His will done. He is looking for His body to function so His will can be done. That is what He is after.
I have used this before, and I am going to use it again. In 2 Chronicles 9, the first four verses, when the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon, she came to hear the wisdom of Solomon. So many people want to say, “Well, tell me about Christ.”
But what blew the queen away was this: she goes, “Yeah, I heard about your wisdom and all these wonderful things about you.” I think it is in Verses 3 and 4. Let me find it here—2 Chronicles 9.
And Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was hidden from Solomon which he did not explain to her.
When the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon,
and the house which he had built,
the food at his table,
the seating of his servants,
the attendance of his ministers and their attire,
his cupbearers and their attire,
and his stairway by which he went up to the house of the Lord,
she was breathless.
So it was not just the wisdom of Solomon, but it was the wisdom of Solomon plus the manifold wisdom of Solomon that she saw in his servants. She goes, “Yeah, I came to see this, but this is just too wonderful.”
That is what heavenly beings are looking for. That is what they are looking to see, because God is saying, “You know, I have done something. You see these people over here? Yeah, they are vile sinners. They are the crummiest of the lot. Look what I have done.”
“I want you to look close, because I put My Son in them. Look what that has done to them—not just made them individuals, but they are individuals incorporated into a body. Each has a certain function. Each, within their function, makes the body beautiful.”
But when one grows out of here and one goes out of there, it does not beautify the body. It has got to be kept in its place.
The manifold wisdom of God is that He has His one wonderful organism that is showing forth who He is. It is showing forth who He is because it does His will.
That is the important thing: because it does His will.
A body You have prepared for Me;
I delight to do Your will, O God.
Now, the next thing here—I have lost my place. Here we go. He says this was in accordance with the eternal purpose. In other words, this is what He had in mind from the beginning.
“In whom,” it says, “which He carried out in Christ Jesus, in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him.” Now, this is our part.
Our part in this whole eternal scheme is to be in connection with our Lord and Savior, who is the Head of the body. It is a vital connection.
It is not like one would say, “My finger got cut off right here, and it is just hanging there.” Well, I could let it be there. I could stop the bleeding and let my finger hang there, and it could hang there for the rest of my life—which would be a good conversation piece. You wave at somebody, the finger would be over here, and I would go, “Whoa, look at that.”
But that is not the purpose. The purpose is that it be connected vitally so it can do the things it is supposed to do.
Now, we have access. The thing is, it is not that we just have access. It says, “Boldness and confident access.” Really, what the boldness means is free speech. You are able to say something without fear of getting hammered for it.
I just want to put it this way. You guys know the story of Esther. When she was queen, and she knew that things were up and they were going to kill the Jews, she came to the king, but she could not talk to him unless he held out the scepter to her.
Brothers and sisters, the scepter has been extended to us. Therefore, we can come in boldly—not brazenly. “Well, I am your wife. You better let me in here.”
No, not brazenly, not presumptuously; but in the same way, not timidly or tentatively. Brothers and sisters, why do you think we have been saved? So the Lord can say, “Stand back. Do not come so close. I do not have time for you right now”?
Do you think that is what God has saved us for? No. He has saved us so that we can have access to who He is and the power of who He is. That is for us. He says, “Now you have bold access to Him.”
It is like if you saw something in the distance and you were thinking about approaching it. You go, “God, I do not know. I should approach it.” But then, when you start to recognize the form and you understand that, say, it is your father or it is your daughter, something like that, all of a sudden your gait changes.
Instead of coming tentatively and going, “What is it?” then you recognize, “Oh,” and you come boldly. That is what it is talking about here. We have that kind of boldness.
Now, the access that we are talking about here—how does this bring us into the purpose of God? Well, the access first is this: we have access to Him in His Word and in prayer.
You have to understand that we have access to Him in the Word. He reveals Himself to us in the Word. I am not saying He does not do it elsewhere, but I will tell you, more often than not, He shows you things in His Word. Or He quickens the Word when you see something else; He will bring it back from the Word.
So we have access to Him, and then we have access to Him in prayer. But that is not where it stops.
I think so often we think that, as a Christian, “Well, my life is, well, I pray and I read, and that is it. I go to church, and that is what a Christian is.” That is not what a Christian is.
Why do we read the Bible? Why do we pray? You know why? To know the will of God.
That is why we do it. It is to get the mind of the Lord. Now, once we get the mind of the Lord, what do we do? We step out in faith and do it.
Brothers and sisters, I know I am harping on this, but this is the key. This is the whole thing God is after: somebody to do My will. “I want somebody to do My will.”
Adam did not do His will. He found Somebody in the Son, but now He has called us into His Son. We have been called into fellowship. Is that not interesting? We have those three “fellow” words: fellow heirs, fellow partakers. We have been brought into fellowship with Him. Why? It is to do His will.
So it is not enough that we just read and we pray, but it is to do the will of God.
When we talk about our prayer meetings here, and we pray this, “Lord, Thy will be done,” maybe some of the church should be praying also, “Lord, what is Your will?” so that we can pray that it will be done.
Then You might raise up those among us that will do this part of it, that will do that part of it, so that everybody is involved in the doing of His will. Everybody.
I may not be the one who goes out to the prison, but maybe I am in that prayer meeting praying for those people who are going out to the prison.
I may not be the one who is witnessing on the street, but maybe I am the one who is buying the tracts and praying over those tracts and giving them to those people who are going out and witnessing on the streets.
I may not be the one who is able to go to the hospital and hold the hand of the person in surgery, but maybe I am the one who is praying for those that are.
You know, because we are all doing the will of God together. It is not where it is separate: “Well, I am doing this.” No, we are doing it together. It is a body. The body works for the unit, not separately.
So, I told you I wanted to close with Verses 7 and 8. We get caught up in things, and I am good at this. I am a great person at disqualifying myself for certain things. I do not have the knowledge. Ask my wife: I do not go to hardware stores. I do not. I disqualify myself in certain things.
Even when someone is looking for someone: “Well, you do this?” “Oh, I really cannot.” Moses did that too, did he not? “Oh yeah, You cannot send me.”
I do not think we have got this complex that, “Oh, I am just nothing.” Well, it is fine. You are. You are nothing. That is true.
But you know something? Look at Gideon. The angel of God comes to Gideon and says, “How is it going, great warrior?” Gideon goes, “Well, you know, I am just the least in my family, and my family is the least of all the tribes.” But look how God called him: “Great warrior.”
Is that not interesting? Now look at this. We might say, “Oh, I cannot do these things. Oh, who is able to do these things?” Look what Paul says in Verse 7: “I was made a minister of these great mysteries.”
Then he says, “To me, the very least of all saints, grace was given.” Is that not an interesting thing? Actually, it is not “the very least”; it says “the least of the least.” That is the actual thing.
It is not that he had a self-esteem problem. But if you read biographies of great saints, they all have this complex, because they start to know the Lord more and more. They start to know themselves more and more, and they say, “Oh, how can You let me do these things? How can You send me out to do these things? Look at me.”
The least of the least. Moses said that. David was the least, was he not?
In Toronto, I shared about Mimosa. Here is a real interesting thing. Here you have a woman who is the least of the least. She is like in a low caste in India. But grace was given to her to do this simple thing: to do the will of God as she saw it.
When she saw that it was, “Do not take the ashes,” grace was given to her not to do it, even though she suffered for it.
When she saw other things—that I should be doing this—grace was given to her. Even this little person in India, which is a country of a billion people—a billion people—the least. Grace was given, and she was able to do the will, and it was a testimony. Her husband was saved through it.
Brothers and sisters, what I am saying is, there are no excuses, because the grace of God has been given to us to do these things.
Linda stole my thunder here for this part. She read a verse in 1 Corinthians this morning. You know, this is my favorite verse. This is my favorite set of verses, because any time when I am really going, “God, Jim, you are really crummy,” I read this verse—or this set of verses—1 Corinthians 1, starting with Verse 26.
For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble;
but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise,
and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong,
and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen,
the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are,
so that no man may boast before God.
But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption,
so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.”
You know, we get so far off. We think that we let the Lord save us from our sins. We let Him pay the penalty for our sins because it is great, and we could never pay it.
But is it not just as great a thing to make us into the thing that He wants? Is it not? Why do we not let Him do that? It is just as great a work.
There is no smaller thing. Change water into wine? It is no small thing. But we have this idea of, “Oh no, I cannot do it.”
Brothers and sisters, wake up. Let Christ shine on you. Is that not what it says? Wake up. Let Christ shine on you.
So this is it. Paul’s digression is this: “I am suffering for you, but this is what God has for you. This is what He wants for you.”
“But I am so small.” And the Lord says, “But I am so big. Trust in Me. Let Me have yourself. Give yourself to Me, and I will impress you. I will make you a great thing.”
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, sometimes talking about real spiritual things, we get just hung up on these things being out of our ilk and out of our way. But Lord, You have made them so practical.
We want to thank You. We want to thank You not just that You have made it practical, but that You have included us in what You are doing, and that all angels and principalities and powers are going to marvel, and are marveling right now, and thinking, “What is this that God has done?”
Oh, Father, forgive us that we think that we are just not able to fit into these things. Forgive us that we look at our weaknesses greater than Your power.
But Lord, we are also praying not just for forgiveness. Lord, we want to be that body that does Your will. Boy, that is it. I mean, bottom line is that You want someone to do Your will.
Lord, we pray as a company of people: show us what Your will is. Help us to have that desire to do it. Lord, we thank You for the years of history here.
And Lord, I am not saying the things are lacking, but Lord, for this day, we need to know Your will. We need to know what it is You are doing so that we can be a part of it.
We want to be attached to the Head. We want to see You working in us. We want to be a part of these things. We do not want to be left out.
And Lord, that really scares us in a way. We also just do not want to be playing either. We just do not want to be playing with, “This is the way you meet,” and stuff like that.
You want to do Your will. That is what You bought us for, and we thank You for buying us. But Lord, we want to say that You bought us for a purpose. Have Your way. May Your will be done in us and through us. We ask in Jesus’ name.