We’re in Ephesians 3:1-13.

¹For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles— ² assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, ³ how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. ⁴ When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, ⁵ 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. ⁶ 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.

⁷ Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. ⁸ To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, ⁹ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, ¹⁰ so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. ¹¹ This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, ¹² in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. ¹³ So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.

(Ephesians 3:1-13 ESV)

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, if we would just live as your prisoners—how would our lives change? God, how would our attitudes and activities be altered? What patterns and viewpoints would we adopt? Lord, I want to confess my own ability live arrested for you. I know others here feel the same way sometimes. We are arrested by idols, by vanity, by stuff, by entertainment and consumption. Free us and liberate us from those false gods and imprison us with your love. Let our submission to you give us a glimpse of your infinite mercy.

Lord, you give us spiritual gifts, and riches, and enable us to live as missionaries for your gospel. Let the world visibly see how different we are and see Christ through us. Allow us to be faithful ministers of your grace. Give us confidence and boldness to access you, as our heavenly father. Give us your Holy Spirit so we could see your unfolding plan for us and your love for the people around us. Now help us live into that empowered reality—prisoner of Christ, partakers of the promise, spirit-filled missionary for all people.

We pray all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The title of today’s sermon is: Living as a Missionary.

How many people here believe you are called, but also gifted, and empowered to be a missionary?

[If there are a few people] Yeah. Not many of us. If you raised your hand, come see me after the service, I’d love to meet with you.

I bet some of the thoughts that prevented some of us from saying yes was the notion that

• You’d have to leave everything you know behind. Going somewhere else is an impossibility.
• Maybe it was language. You’re not gifted there. I mean you barely passed high school English, how can you be expected to learn another language?
• Maybe it’s because you think of the obligations and duties you need to fulfill right now.
• Actually, I think I know what it is, some of you just don’t like people. You’re not a people person.

But what if I told you that you’re missionary isn’t some far off country in a remote place of the world, but actually in the routine of our daily lives. What if I told you that are specifically called, gifted, and empowered to be a missionary? Would you believe me? Moreover, would you live as a missionary?

• You’re at Wegmans getting groceries and it’s the same lady ringing you up, that rang you up at 10pm the previous night and the night before that because, well, that’s just about the time you remembered you have no milk for the kids every day. She just lost her husband of 40 years. Would you say an encouraging word?
• What about that dad you see at the playground every time you’re there with your kids. But his hope for some godforsaken reason is in the Redskins, I mean the commanders, winning the superbowl. Would you pray for that guy?  
• The neighbor that lives next door who seems to have it all, money, well adjusted kids, a loving wife, a mistress. Would you confront the neighbor for the sake of his family?

Look around, you’ll find just about everyone: the atheist, the mocker, the scoffer, intellectual, the ignorant, the foreigner, the orphan, the widow, the very people who need Jesus. The mission field is supermarket, schools, offices, playground, restaurants, the pool you go to every single day. Our routines are filled with unreached people who desperately need God’s grace, and we are specifically called to be God’s missionaries there.

Big Idea: We are stewards of God’s grace to all people

Who is it that you need to get to know in your daily routine so you can steward God’s grace to them?

Let’s dig into this passage.

¹For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles— ² assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, ³ how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly.

When Paul was writing this letter to the church in Ephesus, he was chained to a Roman guard, as a prisoner awaiting trial before the emperor. You can read more about that in Acts 25. But in reflecting upon his current life circumstances, he points instead to the spiritual reality of his imprisonment. At the end of the day, he wasn’t jailed for a moral failing, or some type of treason. He was arrested because he was proclaiming hope to hopeless people.

Paul was a prisoner for doing the will of God, living in the purpose God gave to him. Look at how he tells the church in Ephesus to react to his imprisonment in verse 13: So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. To Paul, being imprisoned was God’s plan manifested and that truth is the glorious. Church we are prisoners to God, so we don’t lose heart over temporary circumstances and sufferings, it is for the glory of God, something to worship God for.  

In calling himself a prisoner of Christ, Paul shifts the traditional paradigm of living in wisdom or succeeding in life to a post-truth paradigm of living in wisdom. Traditionally, living in wisdom followed this sequence: It’s true, so I believe it, and so I live it. In traditional wisdom, truth is anchored in something authoritative that was universally believed and therefore lived out by everyone we knew. So we live the way we do is because there is a truth behind it and we believe in that truth. For example,

• Growing up the truth was if you didn’t obey your parents, you’d get a beating.
• If you grew up in that era, you knew how to live in order not to get a beating – yes, in obedience to your parents.

However, in a post-truth paradigm of living in wisdom, you live, and if it’s working out for you, it is your truth. So your beliefs are truth until they aren’t. Let me give you an example.

• When you’re under 18, you are forever young and beautiful because it’s true right now you are young and beautiful.
• You can go spend an entire day outside without sunscreen, eating white castle and slurpees, and go without sleep.
• Life works out great, you have fun with your friends, and then you get picked up by mom or dad at the end of the day.
• To quote the scholar, Tyler Durden, “Now that you’re on the wrong side of 30, how’s that working for you?”

The, I live doing me, world we currently live in not only post-truth, it’s post-modern, post-tolerant, post-Christian, hyper-individualistic, and hyper-antagonistic. Everybody hold different versions of truth, but we oppress, fight, and diminish others who don’t share our version of truth. That’s why you fight with your parents and vice versa, why you fight with your kids. It actually explains a lot of what is going on in our society today. But this is not a new phenomenon.

Don’t get confused, don’t be misled. In fact, wherever we see a melting pot of religions, cultures, and ethnicities, we see post-truth paradigms of living in wisdom. This is exactly the context Paul is writing to in Ephesus. What prevented many of us from experiencing this before wasn’t because America was less secular, it’s that most of us grew up in homogeneous communities and enclaves with dominant cultures and worldviews and were sheltered from the reality that everybody holds different truths. In fact, the only reason we find it so polarizing now is because we’re living in the cultural whiplash of heterogeneous truths becoming more pronounced in the dominant culture due to the onset of social media and global news.

If you don’t recognize this world because nobody else seems to hold the same truths as you anymore, there’s good news. The good news is that we live in faith. Faith, according to the Bible, isn’t a vapid philosophical exercise. Faith is living with the belief that our truth is anchored in the reality of a crucified savior. Here’s what that means practically in our daily lives:

• We live every facet, every thought, every action of our lives surrendered to Jesus’ will because we are his prisoners.
  • Prisoners don’t do what they please, they do what pleases their captors. In our case, that is Jesus Christ. He captures our hearts, minds, and bodies.
• So our interactions with our spouse, our kids, our neighbors, co-workers, and friends must be pleasing to Jesus.
  • Because our captor, Jesus, who imprisons us with his sacrificial love, grace, and mercy puts us in relationships with those specific people for their sake. How about that for a truthful reality?

Paul said he is a prisoner to Jesus is for the sake and benefit of Gentiles. Remember what a gentile is? It’s somebody who doesn’t know God, who are not God’s people. Our lives must be lived imprisoned to Jesus for the sake and benefit for people who don’t know Jesus. That’s what being a missionary is about. It’s not necessarily about going to far off lands or cultures. It’s about living imprisoned to Jesus for the sake and benefit of people who desperately need to experience life believing the truth of Jesus.

Surrender your life to the mission of Jesus—to reach people who don’t know the truth of God, as his prisoner, as his missionary. That’s “the stewardship of God’s grace given to you for your neighbor, your coworker, your family.” It’s not chance you are living here with the friends, neighbors, and co-workers you have. You have a responsibility to live out what you believe and hold to be true by the grace of God.

This is important: most of those people outside of these four walls don’t even know why they even need to believe in the God of the Bible. Their lives are working out for them, they don’t need to believe in any other truth. But we know life doesn’t work out without the truth of the gospel being real in their lives.

That’s how you came to faith, you saw that your life wasn’t working out for you, your truths, you beliefs in those truths failed. Until you encountered a prisoner of Jesus who shared with you, the same thing Paul encountered in verse 3: “the mystery made known to me by revelation.” The mystery unveiled by revelation is the truth ofJesus saving us for a new life with him, paid by his blood, shed on the cross for our sins and trespasses against God.

I was a pastor’s kid, growing up without regard to God until one day a friend of mine, shared the gospel with me, not in elegant words or convincing arguments, the guy was Christian maybe a week before I was. But he was living in faith. My life was radically changed that day, the Holy Spirit showed me that my life wasn’t working out. I couldn’t save myself from my sins. The truth of Jesus’ redeeming work on the cross for me was revealed to me. And I grew up Christian! This was a God ordained moment because somebody who had a relationship with me submitted himself as a prisoner to Jesus for my sake.

Are you living as a prisoner of Jesus Christ because God unveiled his gospel to you for the sake of people who don’t know him? If not, it’s time to be a steward of God’s grace for all people because

Point 1. The gospel is for everybody to receive

Verse 4.

⁴ When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, ⁵ 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. ⁶ 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.

Christian “mysteries” are truths that have been revealed by God and now openly belonging to people who live in Christ. Christian “mysteries” are not things held in dark secrets and restricted to a certain few. The mystery of the gospel is the truth we live by. We were once dead in sin, BUT God, in his immeasurable mercy, saved us by grace, in faith through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, his only son.

When non-Christian look at our lives, it may be a mystery to them why we live the way we do, but when they start believing there is something about the way you live, they will start to believe in the truth that there is a God who loves them and is ushering them to live a new life with Christ.

In verse 5, Paul says the lives, and teachings of the apostles and prophets of the church that make the unveil the mystery of the gospel for everybody. Their way of life allowed the gospel to move to all people. We cannot read this and not ask ourselves: are my beliefs and truths lived out in the open so God can bless people in our lives with the gospel?

When we live as missionaries, like the apostles and prophets of the early church, with an interest in people’s welfare and their lives, the Holy Spirit will move. The mystery of the Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection will be unveiled to them so they too can become “fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise.”

It’s time to live our faith out in the open. Don’t be afraid of the judgment of dead people. If truth is relative in our culture, then what matters most is that we authentically live in a way that reflects our beliefs and truths. Authenticity gives us the credibility, whether or not they believe in our truths, that allows us to share our way of living with them.

Verse 7. Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. ⁸ To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, ⁹ and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things…

What Paul is referring to is his previous life. Paul once persecuted Christians. We see this in Acts 8 and 9, the Bible says Saul/Paul (It’s the same person, Saul was his Jewish name, and his Greek name was Paul) made the point of his life to persecute the church in Jerusalem, dragging men and women to prison for living in the truth of the gospel. Then on his way to Damascus to continue his persecution of Christians, he encounters Jesus. Jesus says to Paul, “why are you persecuting me?” And then blinds Saul. A few days later, in Damascus, a man named Ananias is sent as a missionary to Saul to minister the gospel to somebody who was violently opposed to God. Let’s pick up the story in Acts 9:10.

¹⁰ Now there was a disciple at Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” And he said, “Here I am, Lord.” ¹¹ And the Lord said to him, “Rise and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul, for behold, he is praying, ¹² and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” ¹³ But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints at Jerusalem. ¹⁴ And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who call on your name.” ¹⁵ But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. ¹⁶ For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” ¹⁷ So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” ¹⁸ And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight. Then he rose and was baptized; ¹⁹ and taking food, he was strengthened.

For some days he was with the disciples at Damascus. ²⁰ And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” ²¹ And all who heard him were amazed and said, “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem of those who called upon this name? And has he not come here for this purpose, to bring them bound before the chief priests?” ²² But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ. (Acts 9:10-22 ESV)

When I read this passage, I often ask, why was Ananias chosen and not one of the other apostles to reach Saul at this moment. I don’t think he had the right qualifications. But then I come to the conclusion that Ananias was specifically located where Saul happened to be and he had access to go places to find Saul to minister the gospel in a way other people couldn’t. That’s why God used him here.

Point 2. We receive the gospel to minister the gospel of Jesus

But many of us don’t live that way. We live with the belief that we are not qualified to minister the gospel to anybody, Ananias wrestled that same way, doubting his ability to reach Saul. So we shrink back in faith and live the secret life of a Christian. I think we hold that belief for two reasons:

1. We don’t have it all together in our lives. So, we feel like we lack the credibility required to share the gospel.
2. We don’t think we have the right vocabulary to share the gospel. I mean, you hear it at church every week, so you know the words, but you couldn’t explain the hard theological questions to a skeptic.

Let me clarify things, ministering the good news of Jesus doesn’t mean we are responsible for them accepting the gospel. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit. We are simply called to live and speak what we believe and the truth of our hope. When we willingly minister the gospel to people God calls us to, God will work to bring hope, healing, and redemption into their lives. The qualification we need to be a missionary is to live in faith.  

God raises each of us up to new life to be a minister of the gospel you receive. You have access to places and people through your gifts, experience, and influence that allow you to minister the gospel you received. Nobody else can reach those places and people like you can. That’s exactly what Paul does when he receives the gospel message from Anainas. He turns around and starts to minister the gospel in a way that only he can, and it causes people to turn their heads and look at his life.

• If you’re a stay-at-home mom, then minister the gospel.
• If you’re a plumber, then minister the gospel.
• If you are a bureaucrat, then minister the gospel.
• If you’re in student, then minister the gospel.
• If you’re retired, then minister the gospel.

Every single person is gifted in a way that makes them uniquely capable of ministering the gospel to people they are in relationship with.

Our sins past, present, and future, were terminated through Jesus’ death and through that death, we became reconciled with God as members of his household. This new life we have with Jesus in his resurrection is filled with the presence and power of God. It’s the same presence and power in us, as we live, that spoke the world into existence, that flooded the earth, that parted the red sea and empowered Jesus to preach, heal the sick, raise the dead, and cast out demons. We have the power that overcomes Satan, sin, and death in our new lives. We live believing that is the truth of our brand-new lives in the gospel.

Verse 10.

¹⁰ so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. ¹¹ This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, ¹² in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.

Point 3. The church points the world to Jesus

The Apostle Paul tells us that there are serious implications to the spiritual realm when collective individuals gather as a church as missionaries. The church announces God’s plan of making both Jews and Gentiles into one new society, incorporated together, as equals, as inheritors of God’s grace through Jesus Christ—that’s the absolute truth. That’s what happens at the end.

We announce the truth of God to a world living who needs to know that their truths don’t work out for them at the end. At the end, the only truth that works out is the source of truth, Jesus Christ.

As the church, we represent the truth of God working out in a diversity of stories, colors, cultures, and ethnicities. Every single one of us have been called, redeemed, forgiven, made alive, and are now united in Christ and with each other to minister good news and truth to all who enter into the realm of our lives. We point the world to truth of Jesus because we live believing him as the source for life.

Our church points the world to Jesus by

• BRINGING the good news about Jesus Christ to those who don’t know him
• BECOMING radical Christ-followers, living as Jesus lived
• BRIDGING the gap between church and community by expressing Christ’s love through service

That’s the purpose of our church. This is how we live. We are undeniably missionaries of God truth to the world.

• Missionaries who bring the gospel to people we’re blessed to be in proximity with.
• Missionaries who become sanctified to be more like Jesus in our righteousness by living the way our redeemer lived.
• Missionaries who bridge the gap between the collective body of Jesus with those who don’t know God by serving them however we are gifted to.

Decide today, how will you be a missionary for the gospel of Jesus this week.

• Whom will you share the good news with?
• What spiritual disciplines will you practice?
• Where will you serve?

Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, we want our lives to reflect your radical truth – that we were once dead, but in your great mercy, you give us new life with your son Jesus. Let us be your missionaries to this world, proclaiming and living that truth to this world. Fill our lives with the unsearchable riches of the gospel for the world to know your glory. Help us live in your truth. Give those we are ministering the gospel to the confidence to live with you. Give them access to you through your son, Jesus. Bring those who are far from you, close with your love. Let our faithfulness to your truths in our daily routines be our testimonies of faith. Lord, let people believe that you offer hope that unites them with you, for their sake and for your glory. Let the rulers and authorities that stand at odds with you and your ways retreat at your truth.

Help us see with your spirit and be empowered to work and speak of the unsearchable riches and mysteries that can only be found in you. Let your Holy Spirit fill our lives with your power and presence, so your truth would become evident to the world we occupy. We thank you  for that faith and that grace. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Benediction

We don’t know what the next 7 days may hold, but until we see you again, do not lose heart, for you have boldness and access with confidence through faith to the mystery made known to you in the unsearchable riches of Christ. Amen.