[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear saints of God, we give thanks to God the Father through our Lord Jesus Christ in
the Holy Spirit that he has given us his word and most especially we thank him for this
most blessed letter of St. Paul to the saints of God in Ephesus.
We’ve been studying it.
The last couple of weeks we did chapter 2, the end of chapter 2 last week, and that’s
where Paul talked about how Jesus has made the two different bodies, united them into
one body in Christ, the Jew and the Gentile, those who had Moses and those who did not.
And that middle wall of separation, He’s torn down, and He’s made out of the two one body.
Paul presses on with that theme in the beginning of chapter 3. We don’t have the beginning
of chapter 3 in our lesson today. I’m going to give you just a quick summary, and in fact
there’s one verse I want to read you. But Paul presses on with that theme of how the
Lord has mysteriously made the Gentiles, those who are not Jewish, part of His people. And
He’s brought them into the covenant so that they’re no longer aliens and strangers, but
friends of God and friends of all the Lord’s people, and so that we’re united in one church.
And Paul in chapter 3 talks about how he’s called to be a minister of that gospel that
brings people together, that that’s the office that the Lord has given to them, that’s
to be the revealer of that particular mystery.
Now there’s one verse in the middle of that. This is Ephesians chapter 3, verse 10, where
Paul says something astonishing. He says something that I’ve been meditating on this particular
verse for a year and a half, trying to understand, and I still don’t get it, but I want to read
to you, but to read you verse 10, I have to also read you verse 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 because
it’s all one sentence. That’s how Paul does things. But here it is, to me, Paul writes,
to me, whom less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given, that I should
preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all people see
what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden
in God who created all things through Jesus Christ, to the intent that now the manifold
wisdom of God might be made known by the church to the principalities and powers in the heavenly
places according to the eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord in
whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.” Now, there’s a lot
in that sentence, like there’s a lot in every sentence of St. Paul. He’s reading Paul,
you remember, he’s eating cheesecake. I mean, it’s just dense. But the thing I want you
to notice in this, it’s kind of a tour guide, just don’t miss this, is that Paul says that
the wisdom of God is made known to the principalities of the heir through the church. That means,
that God’s wisdom is shown to the devil and the demons through the preaching of
the gospel in the church. Now that means at least that the devil comes to church
because if the devil wants to know what God thinks he has to see it in the
preaching of the word. He has to hear it in the preaching of the word. That God
God is pleased to make his wisdom and his plan and his works known to the angels and
the demons through the gospel ministry on earth in the church.
Now what does that mean?
I don’t know.
But it’s astonishing, so you should notice it.
Now we’re going to look at the epistle text.
It starts at verse 14, and there’s probably three things I want to think about in this
text, but let me set it up this way.
But one of the biggest questions that we need to just ask in the world, with ourselves,
in our own lives, one of the things that we need to consider is, what does it mean to
be a human being? What is a human? Now, this is an old philosophical question. It’s an
old question that all people at all times have asked, and the way that you answer that
question is particularly important. What do you think we are? I was telling Vicar Davis
this morning about this old Greek philosopher, Diogenes, who was really a piece of work.
He was a student of Socrates, like Plato, but he was like the anti-Plato. He lived in
a bucket on the side of the street. He wore old rags. He was, he had, like the only possessions
he had was like a shirt and a cup, like a wooden cup that he would drink out of, the
rain. And one day he saw a kid drinking with his hand and he smashed his cup to the ground
and says, I can’t believe I carried this useless thing all my life.
That’s the kind of Diogenes style.
And the famous, like, one of the famous Diogenes stories is that he was, Alexander the Great
came to visit him in Corinth, and Diogenes was over this open grave looking at these bones,
and Alexander the Great walks up to him, Alexander the Great, you know, and he says, what are
you doing?
And Diogenes is looking at the bones like this, and he says, well, I’m trying to tell
the difference between your dad’s bones and the slave’s bones, but I can’t tell the difference.”
Well, that’s pretty bold to say to Alexander.
Well, one day, Diogenes was listening to Plato answer the question, what’s a man?
And Plato said, a man is a featherless biped.
So the next day, Diogenes comes back into the school of Plato holding a plucked chicken.
And he says, now don’t miss this, and he says,
Behold the man.
Now that’s the same words that Pilate says
when Jesus was beaten.
Behold the man.
Wow.
Now how do you answer this question,
Behold the man?
I think that, you know, Aristotle, Plato,
all the philosophers have different answers.
The culture always has different answers.
You know, evolution has the answer,
is that we’re just advanced creatures,
but we’re the same as the animals?
Or I heard one guy, he was an anthropologist,
and he says, you know, all that humanity is,
is just, we’re just food tubes.
That’s a really pessimistic view of humanity.
You know, we just eat.
But I think there’s actually something to that.
I think that our culture wants us to think of ourselves,
well, it just wants to think of us in two ways.
That we are externally consumers.
We’re defined by what we consume,
by what we buy,
by what we eat, by the clothes that we wear, by the car that we⦠by the place we live.
We are consumed by the material that we gather around ourselves externally, and that internally
we’re defined as⦠we’re consumed consumers. We’re defined by our victimhood. We’re
defined by our⦠by our hurts. We’re defined by our wounds. We’re defined by the ways
that we have been sinned against, really. The world wants us to divide up, you know.
the world is always trying to slice humanity. Here’s, you know, here’s the haves and
the have-nots. Here’s the rich and the poor. Or here’s, even by ethnicity, here’s
the white and the black and the brown and the whatever. It’s always trying to divide
us up, and this becomes our identity. You know, we’re in this age of identity politics
where you have to divide⦠what part of humanity do you identify with? How you answer that
question is vitally important for how you think the world should be structured, for
how you think the government should work, for how you think the church should bless
you, for what you think the family is, even for what you think your own place in this
world is. What is humanity? Now the Bible offers a really clear and powerful and compelling
answer to this question, what is a human being? And first, it says that human⦠in fact,
we could probably say four things, that human beings are God’s unique creatures, that
Adam and Eve, unlike the entire rest of creation, the stars and the planets and everything on
earth and all the animals and even the angels, that man and woman, Adam and Eve, were uniquely
created in the image and likeness of God. That’s the foundation of what it means to
be human. But we also know that Adam and Eve are fallen. They’re sinners and so are we.
So that that image of God has been lost in a profound way and corrupted in a profound
way so that we are sinners, but that Jesus, by His incarnation, is our brother. He took
on our flesh and blood so that He would be our brother, and by His death and resurrection,
He is our Redeemer.
When Pilate said of Jesus, stripped, beaten, whipped, crowned with thorns, wearing the
purple robes, barely able to stand up, when Pilate said of Jesus, behold the man, Pilate
was right, because Jesus has taken up into Himself all of humanity and all of our sin
and all the results of the fall, and He suffered all of that before God so that in His death
and in His resurrection, He has redeemed humanity, all of it.
Behold the man on the cross, and now behold the man sitting on the throne, and we are
with Him, so that we are the brother of God who has become our brother according to His
flesh, He’s died for us, and we will be resurrected.
Created in the image of God, fallen, redeemed, and resurrected.
This is what humanity means, and that is true.
This is how you should think about yourself, and maybe this is his point, is that you are
much more than you think of yourself.
I was trying to figure out how I think of myself, and how most of us sort of conceive
ourselves, especially⦠we’re Christians, we’re Lutherans, we come to church and we
confess our sins. We know that we’re⦠I mean we’re tempted to call it⦠like
Luther would always call himself a maggot bag. That’s descriptive, right? Like we’re
just these sort of bags of rotting flesh that carry around sin and probably make God mad
all the time. That’s true enough, but there’s more to it than that. The Lord looks upon
you and says, you, in fact, bear my name.
Now Paul takes this question up in Ephesians 3.
I think there’s probably three things to say about humanity and especially about what it
means to be a Christian from the epistle text that he said right now.
Paul is praying in the verses and he tells us what he prays for.
So take a look at verse 14, it’s there in your bulletin.
The first thing that Paul is going to say is that every single person is part of humanity.
There’s⦠there’s no⦠wait, this is a big thing now about race.
This is the⦠the Bible says⦠there’s no race, we’re all related to Adam and Eve,
we’re all related to Noah, for heaven’s sakes.
We don’t⦠you don’t have to go back that far to find out how you⦠you guys are
all related to each other.
Everywhere you goâ¦
We talked about this a couple⦠last summer.
Everywhere you go is like a Noah family reunion, right?
There’s no such thing.
We’re all partâ¦
Look at what Paul says like this,
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and
on earth is named.
We’re all one in this whole big deal.
But more than that, to be a Christian is to be part of a new humanity that possesses the
Holy Spirit.
Now, there’s a word that Paul uses in this text and all throughout the epistle that’s
a difficult word for me to wrestle with, but that word is the word strength. It comes with
the word power. Look at verse 16, that according to the riches of His glory, He may grant you
to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ
may dwell in your heart through faith, so that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may have strength.
You are, and I am, a temple of the Holy Spirit.
God the Holy Spirit lives in you from your baptism.
And He lives in you to strengthen you.
you. And not just God the Holy Spirit, but Jesus Christ Himself lives in your heart by
faith so that you bear Him wherever you go. Remember the Old Testament? They would walk
around with the Ark of the Covenant, and wherever the Ark of the Covenant would go, there’s
the presence of God, and there He would bless the people. So you are like many arks of the
covenants. Jesus is there, and the Holy Spirit is there in you. Luther says it like this,
That the Christian is a living monstrance.
Monstrance is different than monster.
It sounds the same.
That kind ofâ¦
I’m going to play on words on that.
Dr. October can help me with that.
Play on words.
We need that.
But a living monstrance.
The monstrance was the old Catholic idea that when you consecrated the body of Jesus, you
would put it on the altar in the monstrance, and then people would come and adore the body
of Jesus.
Or on the Corpus Christi parade, the day of Corpus Christi, you would take the body of
Christ and you would put it in a glass⦠you would surround it by this glass with
a kind of sun around it, and you’d put it on a pole, and the priest would walk around
with the Corpus Christi, with the body of Christ, and he’d march around the town,
and that body of Christ was supposed to bless all the shops and houses and streets and
all the people that are living in the city.
We don’t do that, because Jesus didn’t say, take and march, or take and adore, or
take and put it in a monstrance, My body.
He said, take and eat.
So we take and eat His body.
But Luther says that the Christian is a living monstrance, that Christ dwells in you.
His Holy Spirit dwells in you, so that wherever you go in the world, you bring Jesus with
you.
You bring His light, and you bring His word, and you bring His life, and you bring His
holiness, and you bring His blessing.
Wherever you go, scattered throughout the world, you carry Jesus with you.
And the Holy Spirit and Jesus who are in you are not justâJesus is not in your heart
taking a nap.
He’s working, and He’s strengthening you.
But why?
What, what is that strength for?
Now I think if I just ask this question, what is the Holy Spirit doing in our hearts?
I think the Holy Spirit was probably, should be in our hearts, fighting against our sin,
fighting against our sinful flesh, giving us wisdom to know how to live, helping us
to do good works and service to our neighbor.
And that’s all true, but that’s not what Paul’s talking about.
There’s something else that the Holy Spirit has to do.
There’s strength for a different work that the Holy Spirit has to give to us.
And we have it now in verse 18, and especially verse 19.
Take a look at the text.
That you may have strength to comprehend.
And that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what’s the breadth and
length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
Now that’s a trick, right?
Did you get it?
Paul says you’ve got to know what you can’t know.
You have to know something that surpasses knowledge.
You have to reach something that’s out of your reach.
So the Holy Spirit has to come and help you do this thing, and that is to begin to know
how much Jesus loves you.
Paul is saying that by your own reason or strength, by your own effort, by your own
will, by your own mind, you can never get there. You can never even begin to know how
much God loves you. You can never begin to know all the things that Christ has done for
you. It’s too deep. You can’t see the bottom. It’s too high. You can’t see the top. It’s
too broad. It’s too long. You can’t see the edges. You are not strong enough. His love,
His mercy, His kindness, His peace, His grace, His forgiveness, His blood, His sacrifice.
It’s all too much.
You can’t handle it.
So the Holy Spirit comes so that you could know what otherwise cannot be known.
And that is this, Jesus loves me.
This I know.” That is the Holy Spirit’s first and chief work in us. So that while
the devil preaches that we deserve God’s wrath, and while the world preaches that we deserve
to be cast away, and while the flesh preaches that we’re guilty sinners that deserve God’s
condemnation the Holy Spirit comes and preaches this Christ has died Christ is
risen and we are with him in his love in his mercy and in his kindness so that
you would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and then be filled
with the fullness of God.
We are so much more than we think.
We are the children of God.
We are the brothers and sisters of Christ.
We are the temples of the Holy Spirit.
Our hearts are the throne of Jesus himself.
We belong to Him now and forever.
Amen.
May God grant us the spirit so that we would dwell in this hope and peace.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
