"The Gift of Evangelism" Ephesians 3:7-10 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Ephesians chapter 3 7 through 10.

Ephesians 3 · chapter mention

That's where we are this morning.

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.

To me, though I'm the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ.

And to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

Earlier we just sang, I'd rather have Jesus.

That song was originally a poem written by a lady named Rhea Miller, and she said she wrote it to chart the course of her life.

It was not a popular poem.

There'd been some copies of it made, I'm not even sure where all it was published, and it was made its way in a few households around the world.

Many decades after writing it, George Beverly Shea sat down at a piano.

I believe it was in his parents' house while he was considering a job offer he had just received to travel to New York City.

This is in the early 1900s where that was a big deal.

And to be a musician for NBC, the new, newly started TV network.

They were willing to pay him to be their in-house musician.

More money than he or anyone in his family had ever even imagined possible.

And as he toyed around on the piano that evening, he was rifling through music, trying to decide what to do, and came across, not even set to music, came across that poem.

I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold.

I'd rather have Jesus than riches untold.

I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause, even.

For a musician, that's a that's a hard line to make your way through right there.

I'd rather have Jesus than applause.

Well, he made up the tune to the song on the spot right there.

Made up the music, uh, which makes sense because he was almost a professional musician.

And he decided, as he was making up the music for that song, that he would rather live it than merely play it.

He turned down his offer for NBC and instead ended up doing evangelistic outreaches and eventually got swept up with the Billy Graham Crusade and then got to play that song at the Crusades, using the music that you wrote that night that we just sang right now.

And it's worth asking yourself, did he make the right choice?

Is our world better for having George Beverly Shea as a musician and an evangelist than it would have been having him do soundtracks for TV sitcoms in the 1940s?

I think having the approval of Christ is a more noble pursuit than the approval of man.

Of course, you can have the approval of Christ if you are producing TV shows or doing the soundtrack for movies.

Of course you can.

But it is interesting that when God calls someone to ministry, he calls them to ministry through their hearts and through their desires in a way that leaves them unsettled in the secular world and drives them full speed into vocational ministry.

That's what happened to George Beverly Shea while he was playing an old poem on his piano.

That was not the introduction I had planned.

I was just thinking of it as we were singing that song.

What I have planned for this morning is from Ephesians 3, or I just want to point out to you this morning that the kind of leadership that's displayed in Ephesians chapter 3 is the opposite of the kind of leadership that is displayed in the world.

Ephesians 3 · chapter mention

Christian leadership is really on its head from what the world esteems as leadership.

And that's why the George Beverly Shea illustration, I think, fits it perfectly, because what would a worldly person say to that choice?

Do you want to be one of the first paid musicians for television, or do you want to be an evangelist telling people about Jesus in parks?

What do you want to do for your family?

Jesus turns leadership upside down in his life and in his ministry and of course in his church.

And there's no better example of this than when he washes the disciples' feet.

Because you remember what the disciples were arguing about when he washed their feet.

They were arguing about the seating arrangements for dinner, which were a big deal to them.

Who got to sit closest to Jesus?

Who got the seat of authority?

Who got to demonstrate, it's only the, you know, the twelve of them.

And perhaps the women who were serving them.

Who all would know the position of prominence here?

It's not like they're on display for the world.

They're in a secret room to avoid persecution.

But they cared about where they were sitting in that secret room.

And Jesus goes and washes their feet.

The disciples were jockeying for key positions in heaven, haggling over seating assignments on earth.

And Jesus responded by telling them that the greatest person in heaven will be the greatest servant on earth.

Matthew 18 and verse 4.

Whoever humbles himself as a child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

The narcissist elevates himself to display his own greatness.

The Christian elevates others to display the greatness of Christ.

The narcissist builds a brand, the Christian builds a kingdom.

The narcissist wants control to demonstrate his capacity to lead.

The Christian wants humility to demonstrate his capacity to serve.

And of course, the narcissist will end up disgraced, and a Christian will share the narcissist's ends.

He also will likely end up disgraced in this world.

But he can fall back on the reality that he will be the greatest in heaven.

When Paul describes himself in Ephesians, or anywhere in the New Testament for that matter, he does not do so as the narcissist.

He does not do so building a brand, planting a network of churches called the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Paul's Fort Belvoir campus, the Apostle Paul's Ephesus campus.

This is our Thessaloniki location.

You can watch me on the screen.

He introduces himself not as someone who's putting himself forward, as someone in a position of authority or even leadership for that matter, although certainly he is exercising leadership by writing, you know, the New Testament, but he puts himself forward with humility.

While he certainly is an apostle, he is an apostle to the Gentiles, he is perhaps the leader of the apostles.

You could make that kind of argument with the authority he displays in the church.

Nevertheless, he hardly ever introduces himself that way.

And when he does, it has so many footnotes to it.

But when he gets to who he really is, he describes himself as a prisoner, the chief of sinners.

An under rower, he says in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1.

1 Corinthians 4:1

Not even the rower on top, not even the rower barking the commands through the bullhorn, the under rower, the galley slave.

That's who Paul is.

Peter takes that term and turns it to an under-shepherd.

That's how these apostles describe themselves.

Even Paul's leadership among the apostles is noteworthy.

He certainly exercised, I would argue, more leadership and influence among the band of the apostles than any of the others.

You see this beginning in Acts 15.

James certainly was the leader of the apostles in Acts 15.

He was the chair of the committee, so to speak, but it was Paul's voice that carried the day, and Paul exercised his leadership and influence in the church, not by being the one who is putting himself out front, but by being the one who is coming under the authority of the others.

It's a profound difference how leadership is exercised in the church than in the world.

You see that in this passage here.

Verses 7 through 10 is what we'll look at today.

In this passage, we see the three ways Paul does describe himself.

Paul sees himself as a pastor, as a preacher, and as an evangelist, and we'll go through these one at a time.

He hits these same words, by the way, later on in the book in Ephesians 4, verse 11.

Ephesians 4:11

We'll look at them again there when we get to Ephesians chapter 4, but for now, let's just draw our attention to it.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

He describes himself as a pastor there in verse 7.

He uses the word minister.

He describes himself as a preacher there in verse 8.

This grace was given to him to preach to the Gentiles, and he describes himself as an evangelist in verse 9, to bring to light for everyone.

Speaking of not believers, but the whole world.

That's how he views himself.

Now it is a tight-wire act to for a pastor like me to preach a sermon on being a pastor that highlights the humility of being a pastor.

I recognize it is a difficult needle to thread, but Moses in Numbers chapter 12, verse 3, could declare that Moses was the most humble person who had ever lived.

Numbers 12:3

He wrote that with his own pen and he just moved on.

So I'm going to preach this morning about the joys of being a pastor and a preacher and an evangelist, knowing that I am those things, and trying to persuade you that those are great and noble and glorious things, especially when they're marked by humility.

And we'll just leave it there.

First, you see that Paul views himself as a pastor.

The point of being a pastor, of course, is to serve Christ.

He says this in verse 7 of this gospel.

We looked at the gospel last week, the content of it.

I was made a minister.

It's worth reviewing what the content of the gospel was from last week that people fell into sin because of Adam and Eve.

You're born into sins and trespasses.

You come into this world loving sin.

That's the way you're hardwired, is that you love sin.

That's your default condition.

Because you're a sinner, you stand guilty before God of your sin.

God will demand a punishment for your sin.

That punishment will be eternal because God is an eternal being.

He is high and lifted up.

There is no amount of temporal punishment that could rightly take away the wrath that you deserve because of your sin.

For those reasons, it's impossible for anyone to have their sins forgiven.

There's nothing you can do to have your sin atoned for, to have your sin removed from you.

Your hands are as dirty as anybody else's.

And yet, God makes a way for there to be forgiveness of sin by himself coming to earth.

That God sends his son to the earth, who is born with a human nature, born to Mary, and Jesus leads a sinless life, fulfilling all the commands in the Bible, obeying the scripture perfectly.

He's the only one that was ever born that didn't lead a sinful life.

He never sinned a single time.

And at the end of his life, God gives to him our sin.

And Jesus on the cross, where he was betrayed by one of his apostles, where he was really murdered by the Jews, executed by the Romans, God is the one who strikes him down by pouring our sins onto him and his wrath onto Jesus.

And Jesus dies bearing the punishment for our sin.

He rises from the grave three days later, having fully atoned for our sin, demonstrating that whoever believes in his death on the cross will likewise rise from the grave when we die.

Though our body may go to the ground, our soul will go to him, and we will be united with our Savior in heaven forever.

That's the gospel.

And Paul says, of this gospel, I was made a minister.

The word minister here is diakono is the Greek word.

It means a servant.

It means a waiter.

It's the word that we make as kind of an official term for a deacon.

We recognize our deacons at our evening service tonight.

That's what we're talking about here.

It's the word for servant.

The most common way this word is used in the Greek world, not just in the New Testament, but in the Greek world, is that of a waiter, someone who brings food.

And there's even a more particular nuance to it than that.

It's particularly a waiter at a wedding or a banquet hall.

It's a different kind of waiter, isn't it?

We even have the distinction in the American worlds.

You know, the waiter who's working at the restaurants is working for tips, and you know, the higher value the the meals are, the more likely they are to get higher tips, and there's a whole kind of pecking order in the food industry.

And wait staff at a wedding is a little bit different.

They're not working for tips.

It's high intensity for just a couple hours, it's very much servant-oriented.

Um there they have to move fast, and it's it's not about them in any way, shape, or form.

You know, you might go to the restaurant because of the good service, you don't go to a wedding because of the waiter.

Right?

You might have your a restaurant you appreciate because of how well they serve you, and you know, you expect the waiter to know the menu and you can ask them questions and that kind of stuff, you know, which soda pairs best with this fillet kind of question.

Not at a wedding, not at a wedding.

They really are, in a sense, anonymous.

Anonymous.

That's the word.

And the Greeks had that concept as well.

That's the word that is used here.

Paul says that's what he is in the church.

That's what he is to believers.

He's a pastor, and a pastor is first and foremost a servant, someone who's bringing the food.

It is not, as I mentioned, a noble term.

It's not something you would say you wanted to be when you grow up.

What do you want to do when you grow up?

I want to be a bus boy.

It's not something you say.

And I do not mean to disparage that at all.

I mean, I say this sincerely.

I really think that every teenager needs a job in food service.

It will just make them better people when they grow up.

You've heard the expression that it, you know, the person who is a nice person but is rude to the waiter is not a nice person.

And working in a restaurant will help.

You learn that.

My my mom growing up, my mom was a bartender, she was a waiter, she was a busser.

That was the job she had all the way through.

My time in high school.

So when I say this, I'm not disparaging that at all.

I'm just noting the reality of it, is it's not what we would consider an exalted position in society.

And that's the term that Paul takes and ascribes to himself for what he's doing in the church.

What does Paul do for believers?

He serves them.

Why does he serve them?

Because he loves them.

This becomes a very common New Testament word for Christians.

We're called servants of Christ.

Matthew 20, verse 26.

Matthew 20:26

2 Corinthians 3, verse 6, Paul describes himself as a servant of Christ, a deacon of Christ.

2 Corinthians 3:6

Now, it's such a low word that when we recognize deacons of the church, we don't call them that.

We don't call the deacons, you know, the deacons that serve in the children's ministry or in the you know the parking ministry or the security ministry.

We don't recognize them as the servants of those ministries, although they are.

We smith it up.

And we don't even smith it up by inventing a new word.

We just take the Greek word right on into English.

They're the deacons around here.

The deacons.

But that's what the word means.

It's related.

The root of it is the same word for doulos, which means slave.

It is a different word than a slave, but it's the same root word.

A slave is someone who is owned, which is the most common New Testament description of a believer.

The most common way the New Testament describes Christians is that of a slave, being owned by Christ, who is our master.

We've been redeemed from the marketplace of sin.

We're now owned by Christ.

But this word that Paul is using here, it's not slave, it's servant, which is different.

All slaves should be servants in the Roman world.

Every slave is a slave so they can serve their master, but not every servant is a slave.

But that's where Paul goes.

He was a servant, a minister, a waiter of the gospel.

Now, if the gospel represents who he's working for and what he's serving both.

When he comes out of the kitchen to you, he's bringing to you the food, and the food is the gospel.

That's what he's serving.

The gospel prepared him for this, and now the gospel is what he is serving for others.

And he he drives that home.

It'd be very easy to miss unless you're looking at this very closely, but it's a passive voice that he uses here.

Of this gospel, I was made a minister.

We don't usually speak of our own jobs or occupation in the passive tense, do we?

You don't say, you know, what's your job?

I was made a lawyer.

Reluctantly?

You know, they saw you graduate and they just made you go work for them.

I guess if there was a draft, you could say, I was made a soldier.

You might even hear this in the political world where politicians try like a fake humility, right?

I didn't want this, I was elected.

It happened to me.

Which is a way of blaming you.

You know that, right?

That's what Paul says here.

It happened to me.

There I was minding my own business, and God did this to me.

It's like his salvation.

It's very parallel to his salvation.

He was riding off to Damascus to persecute believers, and God struck him with a light, blinded him, revealed himself to him, and then converted him, and then told him he was going to be a minister to the Gentiles.

So that's how Paul became a pastor.

It happened to him.

He's the recipient of this enabling power.

He's not the cause of it.

And this should be true, I believe, of every pastor.

Every pastor.

Not saying that every pastor should be struck off of a donkey and blinded by light, although it might help some of them.

But the idea that every pastor should have a sense of calling to the ministry.

To recognize that salvation is by grace and the calling to ministry is by grace.

Going into pastoral ministry is not something you can, in a sense, earn.

Paul definitely says he disciplines his body for godliness, he trains his mind, he's a student of the word.

All those things are true.

But the desire and the effort and the energy behind all those things is something that God has done to him.

God gave him that discipline, God gave him that desire, God gave him that intensity and that focus.

That's something that happened to him.

Spurgeon used to say that no man should go into a minister if he could be happy doing anything else.

That's in his lectures to my students.

He tells that when he spoke at seminary, I believe chapter two.

He tells people, if you could be happy doing something else, then go do something else.

Now that might be too high of a standard, too high of a bar.

Because I would like to think if somebody could be capable in pastoral ministry, they would be capable in doing other things and that they would derive joy from their life in other fields of their life.

That I think would be a sign of competency at least.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate Spurgeon's point.

And it is a point that is personal to me because when I got saved, I had no desire to be a pastor.

I didn't really know what a pastor was.

I heard the gospel from a pastor at church.

A friend of mine had invited me to church.

And my first time there, my friend had been witnessing to me for forever, and I hadn't believed, and I hadn't believed, and I finally came to church with him, and it was actually a lay leader in the youth ministry, an elder there who is not on staff, who presented the gospel to me and told me that God could change your life and that rocked my world.

That's not when I got saved.

I got saved about an hour later in big church when the pastor, fully trained at Dallas Theological Seminary and everything.

I didn't know this at the time.

Takes the pulpit and preaches the gospel, and I get soundly converted.

And I left there without any idea that that guy was like legitimately paid for his job.

It would not have occurred to me to be a pastor at all.

Years later, I was working at a church.

I understood what a pastor was then.

I was working at a church as uh in their short-term missions department, and I recognized I needed more training.

I'd spent a couple years, much of it overseas, and I recognized actually when I was in the Philippines is when this really hit me that I didn't know what I was doing.

People were asking me theological questions.

Pastors in the Philippines were asking me theological questions, and I did not know how to answer them.

I was totally underprepared and ill equipped, and so I came back to the United States.

I came to my pastor, the one who preached the gospel to me when I got saved, and I told him, I think I need to go to seminary.

Because I need to know more about the Bible.

I need to.

I'm gonna be a missionary.

I need to know more stuff, which I thought was a pretty compelling argument.

And he told me, oh no.

Go do your second choice for two years.

And if at the end of two years you're happy doing your second choice, then stay there.

Now that is the opposite of the sales pitch that like the seminary rep is supposed to give, you know?

They're supposed to lean in to you.

But he's like, no, go go do something else.

So I did.

I went and suffered as a high school Spanish teacher for two years.

And believe me, I was not happy doing that.

But in all seriousness, my while I was doing that, I actually got a job with Major League Soccer, and that became my real job was working for Major League Soccer, and I just got more and more convinced I wanted to go to seminary.

And I remember very clearly my dad, who's who's probably listening to this, before I moved out to seminary in Los Angeles, took me to dinner in Albuquerque, and he made an appeal to me to not do this, to not go to seminary.

Because he recognized it would be walking away from soccer.

And I had wanted a career in Major League Soccer my whole life, and I was, I was, I had it.

And he understood, he understood something that I was only barely grasping at the time, that if you go into pastoral ministry, you're not going to be able to be a referee in Major League Soccer and a pastor at the same time.

For one basic reason.

Like a lot of the games are on Sundays.

There's a conflicting desire there, and you have to work through that what you want the most.

And my dad, who drove me all over the world chasing soccer dreams, all over, I can't even count how many times he schlepped me from Albuquerque to Arizona or Albuquerque to Denver or Albuquerque to Texas.

He brought me all over the place in the car with my friends to go chase the God of Ball, or Bale, however you pronounce it.

At some point, I know exactly the point.

I was asked to go pray for a guy that I coached.

I was coaching a high school soccer team, and the Lord definitely used me on this high school soccer team, several of the school I was teaching at, uh, a public school, and several of these guys got saved, and they're still following the Lord to this day, decades later.

But one of them in particular asked me, got a scholarship to go play college soccer, and he asked me to go introduce him as his coach at an assembly at the school that was recognizing all the athletes that got to go off to college.

And so I go there and I introduce him to the school, and of course the school knows him, and then I prayed for him at this public school.

I doubt this has happened today, security would take you down right away, probably, but I got to pray for him at the school and send him away to go play college soccer.

And I remember leaving that with all these other high school kids asking me questions about the gospel and just kind of impressed that this guy, this soccer player, loved the Lord.

They were so interested in that.

And that made a huge effect on me.

I remember getting in my car that night and saying, I kind of don't want to chase the soccer ball anymore.

I would rather be the guy that prays for the guy chasing the soccer ball than the guy chasing the soccer ball.

That was the distinction in my mind.

Now, that is not something I set out to pursue.

It's something that happened to me.

Not the Apostle Paul, who was blinded by light, who had his own story.

But I can certainly relate in verse 7 when he says, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace.

It's all a gift.

It is a gift.

Now God gives this grace.

It says at the end of verse 7 to the working of his power.

That word their power, it's dynamite.

It is the Greek word.

It means we get the word dynamic from it or even dynamite from it, potency.

It's a Greek word that means potential energy.

We have the you know the kinetic energy versus potential energy.

This is the latter of that.

This Greek word has this idea that there's energy that is held back, but ready to blow at any moment.

And this is what God puts in Paul to make him a minister of the gospel.

It's the potency that has the power to convey the mystery.

God plants it in his heart and makes him work through it.

That's why he can say that ministry is a gift.

For ministry to be effective, it has to have power behind it.

The power cannot be in the man.

It has to be in God who places the gospel in the man.

This is why I am, I said earlier and I meant it so sincerely, I'm so thankful for my dad taking me out to dinner and saying, Do you really want to do this?

Because I can look back at that and say, the Lord put a marker in my life.

Had I just stumbled through that and gone off to seminary, I don't know if I would have been able to say that I made that conscious decision.

Paul says, Listen, this is a power that is placed in you by the Lord.

It is power that can do anything.

The Lord has infinite power.

He made the world with his voice.

He can certainly make somebody who is a slacker, loser, villain into a pastor.

And that's what Paul says happens to him.

Notice in verse 8, to me, though I'm the very least of all the saints.

Paul says, I'm hopeless.

I'm the least of all of the saints.

There's no word that's bigger than that.

I mean, if words mean anything, it's impossible for anyone or anything to be less than the least, right?

Paul says, I'm the worst Christian, the worst one.

And yet the Lord used me to place me in as a minister, as a servant, as a waiter.

So notice how Paul is esteeming the office of serving.

He says, I'm so horrible, I don't deserve to be the servant.

I should be fired.

I should be cleaning the dishes in the back.

I should be scrubbing the barbecue grease off the floor.

That should be my job.

I shouldn't have, I shouldn't be the one that gets to bring out the food to the table.

But it happened to him.

I just even noticed here, he says, he's the least of all Christians, least of all saints.

Saints is another word for Christians here.

He's the least of all saints.

He doesn't say least of all the apostles, because that wouldn't be very encouraging for us, right?

If Paul says, I am the least of all the apostles, you're like, yeah, you still outrank me.

No, he says, I'm the least of all of you.

And the right response to that is not to argue with Paul, but to say, I don't mean to argue with Paul, but can you move over one spot?

If you're in the lowest seat, there's only one lowest seat, I would like that seat.

I think it belongs to me.

But perhaps it didn't belong to Paul after all.

He had set out to persecute Christians, to put them to death.

He oversaw the death of Stephen, the first martyr, he had it in his heart to persecute believers.

He blasphemed God, he persecuted Christians, he was unworthy to be a believer, and yet God saved him, and he was certainly unworthy to be an apostle, and yet God made him one of those.

And notice that when he's saying this, he's not elevating this position to some exalted place.

He's reiterating it is above all a minister.

A minister.

I received early on in my time at Emmanuel, a Emmanuel has something called the um, I don't even know if you still have it, but it was called the POD line, where we had this rotating phone number that got transferred to every pastor's cell phone on a rotating basis.

So if you called the 1-800 number, or 1-800 number, the church's phone number, and you would press a button if you needed to speak to a pastor, no matter what time of day it was, and and then it would ring to different pastors' phones.

And I got this phone call one time, and uh, and it was this lady who was upset about something, and uh Ann was her name.

She's in glory now, so I can tell the story.

I double checked to make sure she is actually in glory now before I told the story.

Uh, but she is in heaven, so she won't mind the story.

She was upset, uh, particularly, I think, about Bob Hartman in the library, closing the the school, the church library was up, she was upset about it.

I told her, this is I can't I can't help you with this conversation.

She called right back, I sent her the voicemail, and she yelled in voicemail, Ministry, do you have any idea what that even is?

Click.

I cannot tell you how many times Dider and I have played that voicemail message.

I love it so much, so much.

Uh it's such a helpful reminder to me.

I ask, I know many of you know Ann, the ones that are laughing the loudest.

I ask myself that repeatedly.

Do I even have any idea what that is?

It's serving, it is being the least of all.

Jesus says, Matthew 23, verse 9, call no man on earth your father.

Matthew 23:9

For you have one father who's in heaven.

Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor who is the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah.

The greatest among you shall be your servant.

That's what ministry is.

The greatest among you shall be the servant.

It was Isaac Watts who wrote his famous hymn that begins, Alas, and did my savior bleed, and did my sovereign die.

Would he devote that sacred head?

And the word is for such a worm as I, although a lot of American versions change it, for such a sinner as I.

For such a worm as I.

The Puritans used to have a phrase, self-loathing, they called it, and we have a phrase as American self-esteem.

It's the opposite and way less healthy.

We live in a world with people who seek self-importance and Jesus preached self-denial.

And you see this change in the disciples, don't you?

They were always after their own importance throughout the Gospels, and then in the epistles, they are all about service.

The preeminent virtue that Jesus preached for the kingdom is not of power, but of slavery.

And this is something the apostles did not realize when Jesus was alive, but once he ascended and they were sealed with the Spirit, they certainly lived it out.

They understood that they did not understand when he was with them that the key to greatness is service.

And so you have to note the irony.

With James and John flanking Jesus and Peter on his side arguing about who is the greatest in heaven, Jesus enters his kingdom surrounded by two thieves.

That becomes the model for ministry.

There's nothing as noxious in churches as self-promotional leadership from their pastors.

Pastors that think the church exists for them or to spread their own name.

It's not confined to churches, of course.

Narcissism is a cancer on American society.

I mentioned this earlier, but an arrogant leader makes everything about himself in order to leverage any circumstance for his own advancement.

Psychologists have a phrase for it.

Psychologists say that narcissism is a personality disorder.

They say a person is a narcissistic personality disorder when they are incapable of self-reflection.

So everything ironically becomes about themselves.

That's a great line, isn't it?

Let me say it again.

A narcissist is someone who is incapable of self-reflection.

So everything ironically becomes about themselves.

They can't see their error in their ways, and so everything becomes about how they were right and everyone else is wrong.

Psychologists call it a personality disorder, as I mentioned, but the Bible calls it the flesh.

And pride goes before destruction.

Solman warned that in Proverbs 16, verse 21.

Proverbs 16:21

Romans says, Well, we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions were work in our members to bear the fruit of death.

The kind of leader that makes everything about himself should be a foreigner in the church.

I say this often.

But in church you shouldn't hear about pastors with their own visions or their own plans or their own schemes.

I think of how many pastors who try to build a platform or a following chasing some kind of fame, which is so twisted as if there could ever be anything like a famous Christian.

This week Deedra learns that a lady named Frances Craig died.

She was in her 90s back at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles.

When Dee Dra was in third grade, Mrs.

Francis was her teacher in Sunday school.

They also did the alternating kind of week thing.

Back there, 1980s, Grace Church in Los Angeles.

Mrs.

Francis befriended these third graders.

When they completed their Iwana book, she bought them their own Bible.

Deidra's first leather Bible was a gift for Mrs.

Francis.

She took them out for coffee.

When they got into middle school, she took them out to, well, hot chocolate, I'm sure, for them, France, coffee for Francis.

When they got into middle school, she took them to Six Flags.

She took them to, you know, amusement parks kind of thing.

They did sleepovers with her daughter and their daughters together.

Nobody would ever know her apart from that handful of third grade girls.

And she did this for years, years, decades, teaching the little kids a grace church, and she died.

Recently this week, not COVID-related, you have to say that now.

But just being in her 90s related.

And I think how much more famous will she be in heaven than the pastors who spend their time trying to build up their own following and build up their own influence.

The economy of God's kingdom is not based on power and control, but on service and giving.

Because the ethics of the kingdom match the ethics of redemption.

You're saved by God saving you.

You're made a minister by God making someone a minister.

Every pastor is an example of creation ex nihilo.

God takes nothing and makes something out of it.

Well, this is way later than I thought I'd see the clock say.

A pastor's job is to serve Christ.

A preacher's job is to proclaim Christ.

The content of preaching is Christ.

Specifically, it says in verse 8 the unsearchable or unfathomable is the NAS's translation there, riches of Christ.

I like unfathomable.

Unsearchable is this idea you can't find it.

No, you can find it.

You can spend your whole life swimming in the pages of Scripture.

You can definitely search out the riches of Christ.

You just won't be able to understand them all.

It's unfathomable.

It's beyond your capacity to understand it.

And nevertheless, notice what Paul says.

You can't understand it, but he is supposed to preach it.

1 Corinthians 1 verse 17.

1 Corinthians 1:17

Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel.

And not, by the way, with words of wisdom, lest the cross be emptied of its power.

Notice what he says there.

Paul says, God gave me to the church as a servant, as a minister.

The way I'm a minister is I'm preaching the gospel.

And by the way, I'm not supposed to preach it that eloquently, or you'll think the power is in the words and not the person of the cross.

This is one of the unique components about church.

And it's, if you grew up in church, it's so easy to overlook how unusual it is what's happening here right now.

Like you guys got up early and you came here.

You put on nice clothes.

And you came here to listen to somebody open a book and tell you about what's in this book that was written 2,000 years ago.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to people.

It's hard to explain to other people what you're doing on your Sunday mornings.

It's the way God designed the church.

It's the way God designed it.

Because it demonstrates the power is in God, revealed through Jesus Christ in his word.

And so understand the progression there.

This is infinite power in God.

He bestows it in Jesus Christ as his incarnation.

Christ, who is the word, gives us his word, which is a book about him, which transcends time and transcends cultures.

It transcends nations and languages.

And so now it's proclaimed to you.

The power of God goes through Christ, to his word, to you, in your own language, in your own culture, through a book that wasn't written in your own language or in your own culture.

That's the whole system here.

Because God is more magnified that way than by, you know, me preaching one of the top ten Christian best-selling books.

Something from your culture for your culture.

That wouldn't magnify the unfathomable riches of Christ.

That would bring Christ low, not bring you up.

And so, Paul says the best way he can be a minister of the gospel is to be a preacher of Christ.

John 14, verse 8.

John 14:8

Philip says to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father, and that'll be enough for us.

Jesus said to him, If I've been with you so long, you want you don't know me, Philip?

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say, show us the Father?

Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father, I am the Father, and the Father is in me?

Jesus rebukes Philip.

How can you say that?

Show us the Father.

The content of Christian preaching is Christ, which reveals the Father, because the content of the Word is filled up by Christ.

Jesus is the Word of God and he is the revelation of the Father.

1 Corinthians 1, verse 22.

1 Corinthians 1:22

The Jews demand signs, the Greeks demand wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and a folly to Gentiles.

But those to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Paul was determined.

Would keep him from preaching the good news of Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen.

Romans 15, verse 20, one of my favorite verses about the Apostle Paul.

Romans 15:20

I make it my ambition, he says.

Now it's active voice, I'm making it my ambition to preach the gospel.

Not where Christ has already been named, he says, lest I build on someone else's foundation, but as it is written, those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.

So Paul is saying, My ambition is life in life is to preach Christ to people who don't know about him.

That's all he wants to do.

This is what it I have these two together on your screen so you see the connection.

The way you serve Christ is by serving his church.

The church is the body of Christ.

So by serving the church, you're serving Christ.

And the way a pastor serves Christ is by proclaiming Christ.

It's all about Christ.

And the best way I know how to proclaim Christ is proclaiming the Word of Christ, namely the Word of God.

So Paul saw himself as a pastor serving Christ.

He saw himself as a preacher proclaiming Christ, and finally he saw himself as an evangelist revealing Christ.

This is verse 9.

To bring for light everyone.

What is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages?

Paul wants to reveal this to everyone.

We've mentioned this last week.

All last week's sermon was on this, but the mystery is this concept of something hidden in the Old Testament, now revealed in the New Testament.

Mystery is not something you need to be a detective to investigate, it's something that God Himself revealed.

In the Old Testament, there was a mystery.

How can God be both just and the justifier?

How could God be holy and yet forgive sinners?

There is a mystery, how could the Savior be David's descendant and yet David's Lord?

There is a mystery, how can Abraham's seed be a blessing to the nations when Abraham is walled off to the nations?

All that mystery is revealed in the New Testament.

God is just and the justifier by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ and forgiving sin by bearing the penalty in his own body.

The Savior is David's descendant by being in the line of Christ, but he's David's Lord by being God incarnate.

That's the mystery.

Jew and Gentile can be reunited in Abraham's seed, which is Jewish, of course, because the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile is broken down, and God creates something new in its place, the church.

So that's what Paul says my goal is in verse 9: to bring to light for everyone in the world what is the plan of the mystery, namely the church plan, which was hidden for ages.

So throughout all of the human ages, it was hidden in God who created all things.

God did this.

He created all things, obscured the church, obscured the truth of the Savior until the birth of Christ and the revelation of Christ to the world.

But now, verse 10 is a huge change.

It was obscured in verse 9, it's revealed in verse 10.

Through the church, this manifold, this multi-layer, multifaceted, complex wisdom of God might now be revealed, made known, enlightened to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

I mean, that is just a complex sentence that, well, I feel good because at the beginning of the sentence it says it's unfathomable.

But he says, in the church, all the multifaceted beauty of God is revealed.

And it grieves me to hear people dissing on the church and talking about how the American church is this, that, and the other thing, they're wrong in this way and they're wrong in that way, and they're wrong in all these other ways, and it just makes me sad because the church reveals the glory and the majesty of Christ.

Yes, churches have problems.

Yes, if you ascribe the word church to a political movement, and you're gonna have all kinds of problems with that, of course.

Narcissism being one of them.

But the church is the place where the wisdom of God is revealed.

Just in this basic format.

Jew and Gentile are together, people from different nations, different languages are together with a shared faith in a Savior, Jesus Christ, who is God and man.

So God can be just in the justifier.

This is something that is unfathomably complex and yet revealed in the church.

I love that Paul builds towards evangelism here.

He sees himself privileged to be a servant.

He sees himself privileged to be a preacher.

But most of all, here he sees the point of it is to reveal the glories of the gospel to everyone in the world.

The Puritan William Perkins, in his book The Art of Prophesying, which is not a charismatic book, but a book about preaching, says the greatest privilege given to either man or angel is evangelism, because it is clearly a commission to go and deliver people from the power of hell, to redeem them to be God's children, and to make them heirs of heaven.

This is where the application goes from the pastor to the people that you all are privileged to have the greatest news imaginable, to go into the world and persuade other people to believe the gospel.

And when you do that, notice what he says at the end of verse 10.

Rulers and authorities in the heavenly places are astonished.

Angels are gobsmacked over what you do when you evangelize.

He's talking about angels, rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

That's angels.

The layers of angels.

The angels have their own hierarchy.

The structures of angels are amazed at the manifold wisdom of God as revealed in the church.

Peter says they long to look into it.

In the Old Testament, the angels are watching the prophecies too.

In the Old Testament, the angels, angels see the Old Testament prophecies about the Savior, and they don't connect all the dots.

They're going, I don't know how this is going to turn out.

Michael, do you know?

No.

Gabriel, do you know?

No.

Got to go deliver a message to Mary, they'll see you in a few.

I mean, that's the angels.

They're trying to figure it out and they don't understand it.

And then they see the gospel and they see the church and they have the manifold wisdom of God revealed to them, and they rejoice.

Jesus says it this way: there's rejoicing by the angels in heaven when a single sinner repents.

That's what Paul is going for here.

They rejoice when they see people come to faith in Christ.

This is what motivates me as a pastor in my preaching.

Try to draw you in week after week to the reality that this book displays the wisdom of God on the cross of Christ in a way that you cannot experience in any other setting than being drawn together around the Word of God.

This is why every Sunday we come together to open the Word of God and preach from the Word of God.

And people come to faith in Christ through the Word of God, and angels are stunned by it.

2 Corinthians 2, verse 15.

2 Corinthians 2:15

We are fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.

To one the aroma of death, to others the aroma of life.

And who is adequate for these things, Paul says?

A verse I often meditate on.

Through the preaching of God's word, people come to faith in Christ.

And people harden their hearts to Christ.

Both happen.

Who is adequate for that?

Who is adequate?

Nobody.

Nobody.

Paul says, we're not like many peddling the word of God, but we preach from sincerity because we preach Christ in the sight of God.

Recognizing that God is watching all of this.

One of my pastoral heroes, Dr.

Martin Lloyd Jones, had every option in the world before him.

If you know his story, he was a minor celebrity.

He was a doctor who was noteworthy in London.

Picture, I say minor celebrity, picture like kind of Ben Carson kind of thing, like a famous doctor in your country.

That's what we're talking about here.

And he gets converted and he has his heart settled on ministry and the call to ministry.

So he resigns, being one of the leading physicians in London, to go into the pastorate.

And when I say he was a minor celebrity, let me convey it to you this way.

The news of his resignation and his call to ministry made the newspapers, okay?

That doesn't often happen.

But rather than stay in London and preach to the largest congregation available, he stead and chose to move back to his homeland of Wales.

That would be like somebody moving from Washington, D.C.

back to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And he didn't just go back to Wales.

He went back to a very rural, financially impoverished, spiritually impoverished, theologically impoverished place, to the worst church he could find, basically.

A church so far removed from success that the previous pastor resigned because he was battling depression about the failure of his ministry.

That's where Lloyd Jones went.

Why would he go there?

All conventional wisdom would say stay in London, maximize your impact, take advantage of your connections and your notoriety for Jesus' sake, kind of thing.

That's not what he did.

He went to Wales because he wrote he wanted to go somewhere that would make him dependent upon God's power.

The only explanation for success of the gospel in a place like where he went in Wales would be that God was at work.

He didn't want people in his ministry to trust him or to note the success of his ministry coming from him.

He wanted them to note the success of his ministry as coming from Christ in Christ crucified.

He, ever the physician, went not to the healthy, but to the sick.

As you think about what you're doing with your life in the church, I want you to remember the line.

I'd rather have Jesus in silver and gold.

I'd rather have Jesus in riches untold.

I'd rather have Jesus in men's applause.

I want you to think, how am I using whatever power, whatever gifting God has given me, how am I using it to reveal the riches and the wisdom of Christ to a world that is in darkness that does not understand the mystery?

Lord, we're thankful for the gospel.

It is the treasure of God.

The mystery of the kingdom has been given to us.

It is the pearl of great price that we have found not by our own searching, but by you revealing it to us.

You've planted it in our hearts, and so now we pray that you would use us to go into the world, revealing the gospel of Jesus Christ to those who don't know it.

I pray for anyone who is here today as we begin our service.

I pray with anyone who is here today that has never believed in your death and resurrection, I pray that today they would place their faith in you, they would commit their lives to you, that you would save them and glorify yourself through their conversion.

I ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.

If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you to seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.