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Ephesians chapter three is where we are today. And we've been doing a series all the way through the book of Ephesians. We've been in it for probably about 26 weeks.
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So those of you who are just kind of coming on board, we're in chapter three. So it's awesome. All right, we're excited about that.
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And so we do usually about a verse, half a verse if we're lucky,
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maybe two verses a week. Awesome.
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Move quickly.
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Cause we just gotta dig in and
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pull out so much of what Paul lays out in this book. So Ephesians chapter three, if you have a Bible, if you don't own a Bible, please, on your way in, grab one. It's our gift to you. Take it home and read it. Because really that's what we do here. We worship Jesus. We come in, we dig into the Scriptures. And so as you turn to Ephesians 3, let me start by setting this up by talking about what David unpacks in the book of psalms in chapter 63.
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All right, so you're gonna go to Ephesians 3. I'm gonna set up what Paul talks about in Ephesians 3 by reading from Psalm. Here's what he says. And here's the thing. Why I'm reading this is because I tend to be more drawn to men and women who have this deep, this angst filled yearning for more of God, for more of Jesus. So beyond just, here's what I can get from God, beyond getting the results of what does it mean to know him? I get this. I get this. It's people who go, okay, check that for a second at the door.
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What I'm excited about is getting to know him. Him, getting him. And that is all satisfying to me. Cause sometimes we pitch it as man, I want to get to know Jesus so that I can blank. All right? Get blessing in this life, go to heaven when I die and see Grandma, all of these things. And the Bible goes, man, the beautiful thing are people who go, I get God. And if God is all I got, then that would be enough. And so what does it mean to not go at the gifts, but to go at the giver, to not elevate gifts above giver.
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And this is what the Psalm talks about. So David says, oh, God, you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. All right? Not your stuff, not the results of knowing you, not blessings that come from knowing you. I seek you, you are what I want. And then he says, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you. As in a dry and weary land where there's no water. I'm completely parched.
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I'm dying of thirst. And yet what I want, listen to me, is not water, it's you. Because I could get water. I could get food. I could get the blessings of this life. I could get a new car. I could have health for this moment in my life. But if I get all of those things and I don't get Jesus, then I've lost.
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If I get all of those blessings, all of those things in this earthly life, and I don't get God, I can drink water.
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I'm not gonna be thirsty now for another six hours.
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Ultimately, all of this stuff that we pine after shrinks, shrivels, goes away, and we're still left going, but do I have him? And so David's going, man, I don't care about water right now. I'm thirsting for you. So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and your glory.
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That.
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That's what blows me away, is your power to change a life, your glory. And literally, what the word glory means, it means, wait. That God would drop on your life like a boulder that gets kicked off the edge of a cliff and it lands in a big pond and the water splashes. It's like, man, I want your weight to touch my life.
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So much so that it changes everything about me and changes me. That's what your power's about.
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That's what your glory is about. And that's what I want. Because he said, you. Steadfast love.
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Listen to this. Better than life. I'm not sure we roll like that.
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Like, your love, your covenant love for me is better than life. It's better than, like, think about you. And I just grasp at life. We're like. I mean, have you ever seen someone who's dying? They're like they're grasping at breath. Just let me hold on every last second. And he's going, man, getting your love.
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It's better than life.
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Cause once I get that, I can die.
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Because I get you. Is that how we function? My lips will praise you. He says,
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so I will bless you
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as long as I live. In your name, I will lift up my hands. All right, Some of you who are
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new to church, you see people worshiping, all right?
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When we're singing and they've got their hands raised, and you're like, what are these whack jobs doing? It's like a circus in here. All right? What that is, is it's an image of it. Comes from the Bible.
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It's the image of, I got nothing
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in my hands, I got nothing in
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my life that I can bring you, all right?
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I got no great religious. I'm not a good person.
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I can't earn this before you. And so I stand before you at
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a posture, and this is hard for
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us in the west coast culture who have it all together. We look so good, we feel so good, we think we have, and yet
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we stand before the God of the universe. We go, I got nothing to give you.
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The only thing I got is what you already gave me.
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The only thing I got is the righteousness you already gave me in Jesus Christ.
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So I give that back to you.
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That's what the whole hand raising thing's about, all right? It's not just like, let's wave and I don't have a flag, so I'll just do this in my hands, all right?
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We'll never have flags here at Village Church.
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So if you show up and you're a flag waiver, there's lots of churches you could go to, but this ain't one of them. All right? All right.
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We love you, but we'll confiscate it. So he says, my soul will be
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satisfied as with fat and rich food.
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And my mouth will praise you with joyful lips when I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the watches of the night. What he's saying is, when I'm in my bed at night, all right, rather than struggling with the anxiety of the next day, rather than just getting all stressed about my life and myself and staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing, about my job, about my kids, about what it's. I'm thinking about you. Me and you are having a relationship. I'm meditating upon you this in the darkness, when nobody else is looking. You still matter to me. This isn't something that I just go about to show everybody that I'm religious. This is when I'm on my bed, I'm meditating on you in the watches of the night.
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For you have been my help. And in the shadow of your wings, I will sing for joy. You gotta feel that, all right? What he's saying is it's okay to
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be joyous, all right?
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I know on the west coast it's not cool to have joy, all right?
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We're all about being dark and we're foreboding, all right? And we're all miserable all the time, all right?
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And that's cool. What he's saying is you gotta be joyous I know you do.
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Dark and miserable. Well,
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but be joyous.
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Smile, alright? I know you don't get the sun on your skin and it makes you grinchy. I don't know what that just meant right there.
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I know it's hard. But he's saying it's okay. That when you have an identity that's been shifted away from who you are and you're in Jesus Christ now, you can live a life defined by joy. Because your identity is rooted in something
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that transcends whatever circumstance you're in.
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So even if life's hard, even if it's tough, you can have joy in your life. You can smile at work and people might actually gravitate toward Jesus because you have a joy that transcends your circumstances. That's what he's talking about. We can be joyous people. We can smile. We can show people that we're defined by joy. This is what the Spirit does.
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And Paul talks about that in Galatians 5. The fruit of the Spirit is love,
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joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Joy. Yes, we can be joyous. Dark and foreboding.
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Everyone that didn't clap right there, we doing this now. Keep my rep, bro. Not clapping for that. All right, so now Philippians 3, now all that's set up, what he said is, I yearn after more of God, all right? Not after his stuff, more of him.
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So he's got this angst in him.
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He's groaning for more of God, all right?
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And constantly in the scriptures, it talks about that reality.
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Psalm 42, all right? As the deer pants for water, so
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my soul longs for you, all right? And we kind of go, the deer
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on the T shirt. And he's like, that's the deer pants for water. He's all like, bruh, you know?
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But the reality is the image.
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Have you ever seen a deer pant? All right? He's got his tongue out, all right?
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He's dying for water. That's what it means.
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I'm dying of thirst right now. I'm panting, all right? My tongue's out.
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There's a stream and I'm trying to get there. And I'm all skinny and bony and my hoof is trying to get to the water. Cause I'm just panting for more of you. I need you. That's the image. I'm panting for you. Do you wake up with that at all? Do you pant for him? Did your tongue hang out? I need more of you. Where's the Scriptures? I need more I need more.
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I need more. The point that Paul is about to make in Ephesians 3 is that their riches of Jesus Christ are unsearchable. That Jesus is infinite, and therefore there is always more of him to be had. It's bottomless. His riches, who he is, what he's done for you. It's absolutely. The riches are unsearchable. You can't search them out.
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You can't get to the bottom of them. And so there's been men and women biblically who have said, I need more of God. Historically, you look at guys like Tozer who prayed for three, four hours a day. Augustine, Martin Luther, John, Owen. These guys who saw they wanted more of God.
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All right?
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Creation, Paul says in Romans 8, is groaning in travail. Cause it wants more of God.
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Here's the problem. Biblically, people groan for more of God. Historically, people groan.
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Creation is groaning.
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Paul even says in Romans 8, we ourselves groan. But here's the problem. I don't hear much groaning, all right? In my own life and in yours, as I sit with you and talk with you, I don't feel this groaning
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in you to go, I want more of him. I'll do anything to get more of him. And what that means there, the spiritual disciplines, you're fasting, you're going to solitude, you're reading the scriptures, you're praying. All of which are extremely difficult in our age with technology, right? If you're anything like me, you hit
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a stoplight and your foot starts going, what's going on on Facebook right now? I know someone's talking about me. Better check that puppy.
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Ah, yes. Like, oh, Green, you can't even sit still.
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Good luck praying for longer than three minutes.
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Good luck just reading the text, going in solitude.
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I mean, this is a world that is extremely difficult for us. And yet Paul goes, man, this is what it's about.
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Are you groaning? Do you groan for more of him? Do you pine for more of him?
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And Paul's gonna say, this is exactly where we need to be. All right? So in order to get there, he says, Ephesians 3, verse 7. We looked at this last week. Says this. She's gonna build up to all of that at the end of verse eight. But this is how he gets there. He says of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace. So we said that.
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Paul is saying to himself, I was made a minister, meaning God moved on me, all right?
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He saved me. I was going about my life, like many of you. I was Shopping. I was paying the bills.
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I was going to school. I was living my life.
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And then Jesus came and interrupted me and saved me and called me. All right? What he's saying is, salvation doesn't work in a way where you wake up one day and you say, you know, I'm really wanting to know Jesus Christ. I'm feeling spiritually bankrupt today. I wonder if Jesus Christ is out
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there and wanting to save me.
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That's not how it works, that it works in a way that we're just
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going about our life.
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Like, some of you have been pitched this idea that if people don't know Christ, if people aren't Christians, that they're just sitting around at their house completely miserable with a bottle of Jack Daniels,
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just waiting to go, all right, they're dragging themselves around. I don't have Jesus Christ in my life. I'm a miserable person. But that's not the way it is at all. My family, who don't know Christ, they're fine. They're looking forward to Christmas, right? Your family, friends, young, old, doesn't matter. They're perfectly fine. They're looking forward to Christmas.
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They're going to party at New Year's.
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What are they? Hey, I need this.
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And so what he's saying is, God moved on me. He made me a minister.
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He interrupted my life. He knocked me down, he blinded me. And he said, paul, I want to save.
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The gospel's all about saving us from ourselves. Because here's the thing. For most of us, the culture we live in, the thing that is detrimental to you is not pain. All right?
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We don't tend to live in a culture where we're sitting around going, all this pain I'm going through. I mean, it happens when we hit a tragedy or we get sick, but generally speaking, it's not all this pain. And there can't be a God.
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The ultimate thing that comes against us
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is not the problem of pain.
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It's the problem of pleasure.
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It's the fact that you have so much pleasure in your life that you never go, I need him. Cause you've got it set. And that's the problem of pleasure. That's where the gospel is gonna come in and go, what does it mean to save you from yourself? To save you from your own satisfaction in nonsense and make you go, is there something bigger to my life than the 76 years and the 85 years that I get to live on this planet? Is there something else?
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And so Jesus saved Paul and he said, I want to use you. That's what he said, he made me a minister.
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And then secondly, the point of it
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is he made him a minister, meaning
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his vocation, his calling in life. His calling in life was to be an apostle. Paul, I want to use you. I want you to plant churches.
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I want you to write 13 books
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of the New Testament.
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I want to use you in these ways. And Paul's going, he called me to that.
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I didn't wake up one day going,
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I really want to be an apostle.
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And for some of you, what you're doing in your 9 to 5 job, all right, you view it in such
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a way as it's just a job,
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all right, it's just about your own self fulfillment. It's about your individualism. You're kind of doing this over here, but your faith is completely different. Paul's integrating it and he's saying, no, your vision of what you do for work, it needs to be about building the kingdom of God. Whatever it is you do, you own your own business. You're a teacher, you're a nurse, you're a stay at home mom, you're a lawyer. Whatever it is, is it about the kingdom of God? Do you integrate? Do you recognize that that's what makes it meaningful? He's saying, he put me here, he made me an apostle. He made you a nurse.
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He made you own your own business. He put you there so that the kingdom of God could be expanded. That's the image. It's not. You do this because here's the thing, we've got this vision in the 21st century about what work is. And that vision is it's about your self fulfillment. It's about you as an individual finding your little puzzle piece in life. And this is a messed up view.
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No other culture has had this. We've got such a sense of entitlement. My generation, we like do Myers Briggs and we're like, well, I'm not taking
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a job unless it fits my exact personality. And I'll live with my parents until I find one.
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We want you to take this job today. Well, does it fit my personality profile? Do you know how messed up that is?
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No generation has ever had that sense of entitlement.
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I was reading a book about it.
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The guy said, go ask your grandparents, go ask your grandfather how much sense
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of fulfillment he felt at his job. Go ask him. And you know what he'll tell you? Fulfillment. I had to eat, so I did.
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I went up to my grandfather and said, you worked 40 years at IBM. How is your self fulfillment? And he went What? What do you mean, fulfillment?
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Oh, you think this is about fulfillment?
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You're dumb. This was about needing to eat. Oh, interesting. See, we got this sense of entitlement when it comes to our jobs. We're gonna do this.
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We gotta.
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And Paul's going, man, God has me here.
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Do you recognize that? Whatever it is you do, whatever job you've got, it has. It's gotta be kingdom minded. It's gotta build the kingdom of God. It's gotta. And he's giving this great vision where it actually can. Like, I don't know, many of you
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have read the Chronicles of Narnia, but
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that image of the last book, the Last battle, when the kids actually show up in the new Narnia and they start looking around, it's the new heaven, the new earth. And they say, hey, there's all this stuff in this new Narnia that was in the old Narnia. Why is it here? Like, I see stuff from London and
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he says, Asna says, well, that's the
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point, is it actually got through the stuff that was good, the stuff that was godly, the stuff that was kingdom minded, what you're doing here. See, biblically, it starts in Genesis 1 with a garden. And it moves. At the end of the Bible, it's a city. And the movement of the people of God is to take the garden and make it into a city by cultivating, by doing business and tilling the fields. And that's what God lays out for us, right? In Genesis 1. He says, fulfill the earth, right? Fill the earth. Which means have a bunch of babies.
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We like that one, right?
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That's Village Church's verse right there.
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We're like, we claim that one for ourselves. We'll take that one. Fill the earth.
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We got babies popping out everywhere, all right? It's a gross image right there.
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Fill the earth and subdue it, right? You gotta cultivate it. You gotta work this thing. And this is why Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, when he talks about resurrection
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for 58 verses, then right at the end of it, he says, therefore your labor is not in vain. And I always wonder, why is he connecting? Why is he talking about new creation, resurrection for 58 verses, then all of a sudden he says, your labor is not in vain.
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Cause he's saying, what you do on
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this planet can last.
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What you do is bigger than just punching a clock.
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And that's why he's constantly giving this image.
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Whatever you do do to the glory of God, whatever you eat, whatever you drink, due to the Glory of God. Colossians 3.
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You don't work for man.
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You work for Jesus. Whatever you're doing in your life, all right? I used to do that as a mantra.
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I used to work at Canadian Tire, all right?
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I've told you about Michaels.
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Now, second confession. I used to work at Canadian Tire, all right?
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When I walked up to that door, I'm not kidding you, the mantra, the
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only way I survived was, I'm working. Not for this boss of mine because he's a moron. I'm working for Jesus in whatever I do.
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And listen, that kind of significance is
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the only thing that's gonna get you
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through the day if you got a job like that. Because stacking Kleenex boxes doesn't feel like it's building the kingdom of God.
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It doesn't feel that way. That was the kind of job where
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I would just go to the bathroom just to sit.
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All right?
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I didn't have to go.
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I just sit and just be like, when is this ending?
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It's one of those jobs.
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I won't look at my clock for a long time. Cause then the time will pass faster, all right?
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I mean, 10 minutes, you got one of those jobs. What are you gonna do?
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Paul's giving you a vision. And he's going, man, this is bigger than you, and it's bigger than punching a clock. He made me a minister. He put you where you're supposed to be.
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He gave you that job so you
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could do the work of building the kingdom of God, whatever it is you do. And then he says this, which was given me by the working of his power.
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See, here's the image. Take the word power. Some of you come at Christianity extremely skeptical. And you think that Christianity is basically God telling you to do a bunch of stuff, but then just leaving you there and watching you to see if
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you can do it.
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And some of you have been pitched. Some of you walked away from the church because you got pitched a vision of Christianity. That was that, well, you better do this. You better wear that. You can't watch this. You can only watch that. You can only speak like this. And you tried to do those things.
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But here's the key. Paul's saying, God isn't like that. He says, yes, let me lay out
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for you what a good life will look like.
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But then I'll give you the power
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to actually succeed at doing it.
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The resources. And some of us kill ourselves because we try to do all of these things, but we don't tap into the very power that God has.
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On offer for us to do it.
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So we get killed. And you read the Bible and it's a burden. It just crushes you. And if you don't function in the power of God, then, yes, the Bible will crush you because you'll have no power to succeed where it's calling you to succeed. And so you'll be a guy and you'll read Jesus and it'll go, you
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lust after a woman, boy. You're already guilty of adultery. And you're like, what? How am I going to go to Hawaii?
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Like, ever? What, have you been there? All right, listen. If you got to pay attention to Jesus in Hawaii with no power, don't go. Because you'll just be walking around like,
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hey, what's going on?
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Sorry, sorry.
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What's your name? Yeah, yeah.
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Can I get a seat? I don't see how you can roll that.
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You can't live that life. You can't live that life. So what if you tried to do that? Yeah, that'll kill you. And Christianity will be a burden.
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And you'll want to walk away from
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it because it'll just crush you. It'll remind you over and over and
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over and over and over and over
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again of what you can't do. You let him down every time. You let him down every time. Look at you. You can't do this. You're not good enough for this. What's your problem? But then Paul goes, oh, what a wonderful God. He's not the kind of God who just says, you better learn how to do this.
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He goes, I'll give you the power to do it.
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It's the word dynamis. It's dynamite. I will give you a stick of dynamite to blow you up and start you over. That's what I'll give you. I will give you power. And so some of you, you're living in your marriages, and you're completely content
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in your marriage because your marriage is good. Because the only vision you have for your marriage is to get to next year. And you think that's satisfaction, and you think that's the ultimate glory, and you think that's the highest. And God's got a much bigger vision for your marriage than that. And that's why you're gonna need power to actually succeed at that. See, as Jim Collins said in his book, good to great, good is the enemy of great. And some of you settle in your Christianity, in your marriages, as friends, as spouses, as parents, for everything's good.
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How's your marriage? It's good.
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How's your walk with Jesus.
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It's good and you settle for good. And the Bible would never let you settle for good. It goes, what does it mean to be great? I'll give you power. If you want to become great in your marriages, you want them to be great.
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You don't want to just succeed to the next year.
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That's not the mission and the vision that God originally had for marriage. I mean, we applaud it. We're like, hey, you're 20 years married. We're like, Woo, right? Yeah, 20 years miserable married. We sleep in different rooms, but we're all clapping. Hey, they got to 20 years. They got to 20 years of miserable marriage. Praise God, they're still together.
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That's our vision. That's as high as we go.
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And then God goes, well, no, my vision for marriage is so much deeper than that. And that's why in Ephesians 5, this passage that really messes us up, where Paul says, I gave the man to
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be head over the wife and to lead the wife. And we all go, ooh, it's so offensive. The reason he says that is because God has a mission in mind for marriage. And any mission beyond just surviving till the next year needs a leader. Nothing ever happens without a leader. Go back to civil rights, the Reformation, any revolution, any mission. In war, you have to have a leader. Even if that leader is 51 and 49%, it has to have a leader to take responsibility before God.
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Because your marriage has a bigger mission than just surviving. God says, listen, I want your mission to be you're gonna bless other people, you're gonna go to third world country, your house is gonna be a place of hospitality where you invite in the strangers, where you maybe you mentor young people and people who are gonna get married. I don't know. But I have a mission for your
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marriage and that's why you need a leader. And God goes, man, you're never going to be able to get there in
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your marriage without power. Can you imagine just trying to walk in your own power and be married,
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lay down your life for your wife, Forgive. He says, love keeps no record of wrongs.
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Ha. That's what marriage is built on. That's what it is. That's all you talk about any given day. Can you imagine trying to be married without the power of God to keep no record of wrongs? You wouldn't have it.
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She said this to me the other day. I'm not talking to her. He's going, I'll give you the power to be able to be married in a way that will change everything,
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that
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will give you the ability to lay down your life. Even when she trapped you, Even when he forgot what you asked for for Christmas. And he got you the wrong. How could he get it the wrong thing? He's so dumb. It's. It's so clear. I give him a picture. How hard is this? How hard is this? See, when you're a kid and you're getting gifts, you don't know what's going on.
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I mean, you get every commercial that comes up, you're like, I want that daddy. I want that daddy. I want that daddy. You ask for 6,000 things, so it's
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a total wash. What you're gonna get, you don't know.
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And that's why it's exciting when you're an adult. You just kind of hone in and you're like, I want these three things. Here's where to buy them. Here's the price point. Go, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. How hard is this? Which is kind of weird anyway, because we as adults, the whole Christmas thing, as adults, it's like, if you don't get it, you'll just go out on
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Wednesday and buy it anyways. It's like, you have a job, you have a paycheck. When you're a kid, you have no power, right? Santa either brings it or he doesn't. It's like, you can't just go out.
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Dad's an idiot. He didn't give me that board game.
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Power
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to serve. When they make mistakes, to keep no record of wrongs. The image of marriage is that you wake up every day and you wipe the slate clean. And every day you wake up. There's no last year you said this to me, and last month you did this, and last week there's none of that. You don't keep any record of wrongs
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like function like that.
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And Paul's going, that's going to be hard. And that's why God is going to give you the power to do it. And you can try to walk in your own gifting, you can try to walk in your own skills and your own power, but it's not going to happen. And then he says this in verse 8. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given. Paul is saying, let me hold myself up as an example. And even though I'm the Apostle Paul, like scholars tell us that Paul would have been famous even if he'd never written the New Testament, he was so brilliant. And I wrote 13 books of the New Testament and I planted churches and Jesus met me personally and he called me to do this thing.
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And yet Paul goes, I'm the least of all the saints. It's called humility. It's called understanding the grace of God. So much so that you go, there's nothing left in me but to say I'm so undeserving of the grace of God, I'm so undeserving of his love, of his justice toward me and Jesus Christ that I start to view myself as the least see people's problem. If you're here and you're a skeptic, you're not a Christian and you kind of look in at Christianity. I know my family, my friends who aren't believers, they look at Christianity and they say, you're so arrogant, you're so
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narrow minded,
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you judge everybody else who isn't, just like you. And that's my problem with Christianity is that you're so arrogant and you look at everybody else who doesn't look like you and think like you and dress like you and believe what you believe and you judge them and you're mean to them. And what the Apostle Paul is saying here is there's no room if you really understand grace, there is no room for arrogance, there is no room for
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judgmentalism and narrow mindedness that you start to view yourself as the least of all people, that only by the grace of God did he ever save me. See, here's what happens in Christianity. We start to think we're the man, we're the woman, we got this together. And that's why God saved me. And that's why here at village we're constantly talking about how sinful you all are, right? Where every week I'm like, oh, you're wretched, you're pitiable, you're a worm, you're like, all right, the reason, all right, the reason is it's not because we like just doing that. It's so that you see though you're, as Jesus said in Revelation 3, Wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, naked. It's so that you see that you are this, you are sinful to the core and yet by the grace of God he saved you. That's what Paul's saying.
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I was a murderer, I was against people, I was a negative person, and yet God saved me anyway. Which makes him look great because as he said, listen, I'm sinful by nature.
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He's already said that in chapter two, verse one.
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I was dead in trespasses and Sins, you were born into sin. That's the reality of your life. So how's that ever gonna be redeemed? That's your nature, all right? You didn't learn that, like in my house, all right? I don't bite my wife and steal the remote control from her. But guess what? My kids do that now. They didn't learn that, all right? I don't walk in and say, hey,
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Aaron, give me that fucking phone.
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My kids don't look at that and go, hey, let's do that. All right, Pastor Rob's kid, he's got a little kid, Luke and Bella, my 18 month old. And Luke, he bites her four times. Every time we're hanging out, I'm like, dude, you are prepping for prison. I just start, get away. Kid's ridiculous.
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I'm serious, like, train your kid, man.
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So that's by nature, all right? That's nature.
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You didn't.
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She didn't learn that. My kids didn't learn that from watching me and Aaron interact. That's their nature. That's what they do. And Paul says, you're so sinful by choice and by nature that you're dead
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in your trespasses and your sins, so that you need Jesus to walk up
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to you like Lazarus laying dead in
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the tomb and say, get up. I want to give you life. I want to save you. I want to use you. I want to call you to something greater than yourself. I want to give you a power that you would never be able to walk in outside of me giving it to you. That's the image that Paul's saying. I'm looking at myself and I'm the least of all the saints.
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Even if there's people I disagree with, I'm the least of all the saints. That's the true nature of Christianity.
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So if you see arrogant people, and
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this is Christopher Hitchens, who's one of the new atheists, one of the most kind of predominant of the new atheists. He wrote a book a few years ago called God is Not Great, why Religion Poisons Everything. And he talked about the idea that religious people and Christians in general, they get so arrogant and proud that they can start to demonize other people. And the reason I'm not a Christian
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is because of the witch trials and
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the Inquisition and the Crusades.
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How could Christians ever do that? And people, and some of you sitting
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here like that, you're like, I can't engage in Christianity.
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Look what they did.
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They tortured heretics and they did this thing. And what you have to Understand is, yes, the church is full of hypocrites. It's true.
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When people look in and say the
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church is full of people.
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Yes, it's true.
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The church is full of hypocrites.
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There's a lot of people in here
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who think they're saved and they're not. They don't know who Jesus is. They think they do because they do a bunch of religious things. Their heart hasn't been transformed. So of course they're going to be hypocritical. I just stuttered,
Mark Clark [00:35:17]:
of course they're going to be hypocritical because they're going to. They're going to, hey, I live this life.
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But it hasn't really changed and transformed their heart.
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So they just go out and live like this. And then you look into the church, you go hypocritical. I'm staying out of that place. It's like, yes, because it's full of people.
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And they're not all Christians. And so did the people who are torturing. Is that really the nature of Christianity? Pick up your Bible, read the Gospels. You'll see Jesus hanging on a cross, praying for his enemies. Is the true nature of Christianity being
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arrogant and narrow minded and judgmental?
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No, it's loving and serving, praying for your enemies, dying for them, not picking up a sword and killing them.
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Anybody can read that.
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It's people who don't understand the Gospel. And so some of you might know of Westboro Baptist Church, all right, down in the States, not connected to us. It's this crazy church down in the States and they're planning on picketing the Funerals of the 6 and 7 year old kids who were killed in Connecticut because their theology says that that is judgment of God on America. And so they'll go out with signs and pick at their funerals and say
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God killed these kids because he's judging America.
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Paul's going, I'm the least of these. What does it look like to have a humble servant, selfless, other centered posture of life? But I know the truth.
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I'll stand up for the truth.
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There's message, there's means, methods. What does it look like to be humble people who so understand that God saved us spite of who we are, not because of who we are and how that flows out. Paul wants to put forward his weaknesses and say, I'm the least. Do you put forward your weaknesses to people or are you afraid they're going to see through you?
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Right.
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You rarely walk into a job interview and put out your weaknesses. Paul's doing that. He's saying, let me tell you my weaknesses. Let me tell you where I fail, right? We're at a job interview. They're like, hey, what are your weaknesses? We're like, hmm, that's tough. I do everyone else's job for them. I work too much. We put it.
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We're afraid to kind of put that out. Paul's going, hey, you want to look at my resume? It's the difference between really believing that you earned and deserve the favor and the grace. You see, what he keeps saying is the grace of God. The grace of God, Verse seven, he says the grace of God. Verse eight, he says the grace of God. This is. Jesus gives this great image that just kind of blows this up for us. In Matthew chapter 20, he tells a story about a guy who was hiring a bunch of people into his field.
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And he hired some guys to do work at 8 o', clock, and he hired some guys to do work at noon. And he hired some guys to that come in and work at, like, 2. And then at the end of the day, he lines them all up to pay them, and he starts paying the guys who came in at two o' clock the same thing. He agreed to pay the guys who came in at 8. And the guys who came in at 8 are like, oh, sweet, we're gonna get ours now. Because look, those guys who came in at 2, look what they're getting paid.
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And he told us he was gonna pay us that.
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So what's gonna be our pay? So he, like, gives them their money, and then he gives them their money, and then he comes and he pays them the same thing that he agreed.
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And they say, hey, what about, we worked here all day. This is bad capitalism.
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And the story's going, here's the mathematics of grace. Who do you think you are? You think I owe you something? See, we start to think God owes us. I raise my kids right. I can't believe the bank account's empty. You owe me. I got sick. How did I get sick? I've been teaching Sunday school. I'm a leader at Awana.
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I give money to Kwanos. How did I get sick?
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You owe me.
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And Jesus constantly telling stories, going, what do I owe you? I was listening to a pastor down in the States who's got a brain tumor. He's in his mid-30s. He's a big church, about 10,000 people. He's got young kids. He can die any second. He's talking to a group of pastors, and he said, you know, there's Days where I will find myself hung over the toilet puking because of the chemo. And I will say to God, why not the guy who's got a church of 60?
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Like, what are you taking me?
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I got 10,000 people.
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I got young kids. I got a daughter.
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I want to walk down there.
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I got a kid I want to
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throw the ball around with.
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Why would you do this to me?
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And then he'll just hear the Lord go, you think I owe you? Who do you think you are? You think you don't deserve to die? See, Paul's going, my vision of grace is every day is a gift that I don't deserve. How does that change your posture toward the world? All right, then he wraps it up like this. The very least of all the saints, this grace was given me to what? To preach to the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ. Now, to preach. Here's what he's saying. You get saved by the grace of God. Don't keep this to yourself. Preach it.
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Tell people about it.
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Your family to the Gentiles, your family,
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your friends, your co workers, you preach. All right? Now, I'm not talking about, like, doing
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this, because that would get really weird, all right? If you're there at Christmas dinner and everyone's sitting ready to eat and you get up, all right? Open your Bibles. Hey, Grandma, if you don't have a Bible, grab one in your way. In, all right? Hosea 13. All right? That's not what he's saying. Preach, all right? Or doing that at work around the coffee table. It's not going to work, all right? What he's saying is, communicate the gospel.
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Speak it, you gotta talk it, all right?
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People aren't gonna figure out they're sinners under the wrath of God that need saving by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, by you making them cookies and cutting their lawn. You have to articulate, Preach the gospel,
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Communicate the message of Jesus. That's how people get saved.
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That's how people come to know him. And some of you, I mean, look at this room. How did you come to know Jesus? Someone told you. Ultimately, maybe it was your parents. They raised you in the ways of Christ. They told you about Jesus, like I'm trying to do with my kids. Three young girls always gather around the Bible, pray together, talking about Jesus. Take those opportunities, like Deuteronomy says, as you come and go, as you walk along, always take opportunity to put God in front of your kids.
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So I'm trying to do that with
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every opportunity, not like in a weird way, like, I have to go to the bank.
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Why would we go to the bank?
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I have to make a deposit.
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Oh, I don't want you to make a deposit.
Mark Clark [00:42:59]:
Well, it's a deposit like the Holy Spirit makes on our life. Sienna, don't worry. Right, that'd be weird.
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I mean, a more natural kind of.
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You see ambulance going, you're praying for those people. You're constantly working God into the fabric of your being, of your life and the rhythm and the pattern of your life. You're preaching Christ. That's how people come to know him. Some of you might like myself, you had someone at high school tell you about Christ and you came to Christ like I did in a woodworking class. Or some of you come to church and you hear about Jesus.
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See, when we see this, preach to
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the Gentiles, here's what happens in this room. All the new believers get excited and they go, of course. Why do I keep this to myself?
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I got cured of a disease, I'm ready to go. All my family, all my friends, you hear about Jesus, you hear about Jesus, look at my life change. You come out to church, hey, we got, I mean, all the new believers are pumped up
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and all the longtime believers are freaking out because you're not sure you even have non Christian friends. And this happens over and over. You read any book on church growth, on church dynamics, here's the principle. New people bring new people,
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new people to the faith.
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They bring new people to church.
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Here's what people who've been Christians for a long time do when they come to church.
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They come by themself. And I've seen it over and over and over. After 13 years of ministry, I'll get up in front of people and the same people will sit in the same
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seats week after week after week after week and bring no one for years because they got a rhythm.
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And they're convinced that their friends, their co workers, their family, they'll never really give their life to Christ. They'll never actually come to know Jesus. I mean, oh, come on. Nobody comes to Jesus anymore. That's a lie. It's a Myth. Last week, 18 year old kid walks forward to me after, he's like, I gave my life to Jesus. Today, 18 year old in North America, the most, the least likely person to attend a church Service is an 18 to 29 year old male.
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And our church is full of them.
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Why?
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Why? There are a whole bunch of disciples sitting around during Jesus day, going, oh, I'm afraid to tell people I don't think any of my friends will come to know Christ. I'm afraid to invite them to anything Jesus says in verse 35 of John 4. Do you not say there are yet four months? Then comes the harvest. Do you guys sit around and give yourself excuses like, well, maybe I'll do this work now and in four months from now I'll invite somebody, or I'll do this, or invite them to a
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community group or I'll do that, or
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I'll tell them about Jesus.
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Do you not say that to yourself?
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Yes, Jesus, we do. Hmm. Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white for harvest. He's going, this is the moment.
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Four months. You could be dead in four months. What are you waiting for? People are like, hey, why are people connecting in the village? Because our city is hungry, absolutely starving for something meaningful.
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Because they're sick.
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They've got money. It's not answering their questions. They've got success, they've got reputation. They got sexual exploitations.
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They've done it, and they're still left wanting. And this is why Paul goes, preach to them the riches of Christ. Preach to them. See, what we tend to do is we tend to get more focused, and this is what we do as a
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church, too, on the kind of, the
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cost of discipleship, the hard things about Christianity.
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It's gonna be hard.
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You're gonna say suffer and all that, and that's all legitimate. But what he's saying here is sometimes you got to focus on the riches. Sometimes you got to focus on the beautiful, wonderful things, the blessings that come.
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This is good news.
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Paul's saying, this is good news that
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you can sit and tell people. Look at the great joy that you
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get in Jesus Christ.
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And he's infinite, so you can never
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get to the bottom of it.
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This is the joy of knowing Him.
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Unsearchable riches. And we've got to focus on those and tell people about them. Let me end like this. Some of us. Are afraid to come to know Jesus in this room if you don't know him already, because you're not sure that he's waiting on the other side. It's a little vague to you what grace is, what Jesus has done for you in the cross and in the resurrection. And you're not sure whether there are positives to coming to know Him. And what Paul is trying to do is trying to break you out of the mode that you've listened to the preaching of the culture around you that has said your real meaning in Life is going to come from money or reputation or being a mom or being a dad or being successful or the relationship that you're in.
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And he's saying, you want to know real, unsearchable riches? Because here's the problem. As much as the church harps on truth, as much as the church goes,
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we got to hold the truth. We got to stand on truth. It's all about truth. The reality is this.
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Not many people in this room, of this room are on a truth quest in their life. You know the quest they're on, happiness. People don't wake up and go, man, I'm just really hoping for truth today. I'm hoping to get some truth. Where can I find it? You know what your greatest motivation behind every decision you make is? It's not truth, it's pleasure. That's why you're sitting beside who you're sitting beside today, your pleasure. I mean, maybe the person beside you is like, what's up? Pleasure at all. I mean, if you came with them, the reason you marry who you married, go to school, where you go to school, the greatest motivation in your life is pleasure, happiness.
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And what Paul is saying is there are riches in Christ that take all of those worldly definitions of pleasure and joy and happiness and are able to redefine them over time in such a way that when you get to see Jesus for who he really is, nothing else matters. Nothing. Most of you know, I grew up in Toronto. I was at a university. I was 19 years old, and my goal in life was to be a professor. I'm kind of a weird person because, I mean, I know you know that, but I love people. I love hanging out with people. They energize me.
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I love pastoring you and listening to your stories and meeting with you for. I love that. But the flip side of me is I could sit in a library for 10 hours and read footnotes, no problem. Like, I love scholarship. Just being alone, reading. My wife likes boots. I like highlighters. We're just different.
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Not wrong, just different. And so my whole point in life was I wanted to be a professor. I wanted to teach at a university, a college, and just write books. And so I started on that track when I was 20 years old. I wrote a paper for a class that I'd done in university. And the teacher walked up to me and he said, mark, I want you next week to do a lecture for an hour and a half to our students. I'm like, sorry, what's that? He said, I know it's your Second year, I know all the people wrote the same paper as you did, but you've got some fresh stuff in here, some original stuff, and I don't want to just steal it like most professors would and use it for myself. I want you to get up and teach it to your colleagues.
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Get up and give them a lecture
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on the paper they all wrote and
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say, this is what it really says. And I said, absolutely not. I won't do that. Thank you for the opportunity, sir. And he said, no, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.
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This is what you're doing.
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And so I got up with fear and trembling and I lectured.
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I loved it.
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All these students, teachers pat me. And then he asked me to do it again, and he asked me to do it again, and he asked me to do it. And every year he'd bring me through for these things. And then he said, I want you to do a three hour lecture on the Resurrection. I was like, okay. And I got this world. And I started working with students and a TA and marking papers.
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I was on the track, he had me, we were going.
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And then God showed up and he went, I want you to move to a rainy land. And I was like, what? What do you mean? What's the rainy land where you will know nobody, no one will care about your silly lectures. Nobody will know your name. You'll try to make friends with the waitresses at ihop. You will be lost. You will have nothing in your hands. And I'll meet you there. And honestly, as difficult as that decision was to leave everybody we ever knew, all the family, Aaron and I, because we had met Jesus, we said, of course we got to do this.
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Of course we gotta walk away from everything we ever known because his riches are completely unsearchable. And he'll meet us there. See, some of you, what's frustrating is we talk and you're like, man, why can't I grow in my Christian life? Why does it feel like heaven is brass? What is wrong with me? I try to do this, I try to do that.
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Can you give me the secret to knowing God deeper? And what's frustrating is then I dig into your life a little bit and I realize you're so safe, you take no risks. And you think that you're going to experience God. If you're living in the safe cul de sac of your life, you want to experience God? Step out, get risky. Go to a place where if he doesn't show up, you're a mess.
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He'll show up and you'll grow and you'll get to experience him. But don't sit in the safety of your life and go, why can't I get more of him? Because you're sitting, doing the same routine
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week in and week out.
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And you never step out in faith
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where if you fell, you would fall.
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You'll grow if you go to those places. You'll go. And when you go, he'll meet you there by his grace, and you will find the unsearchable riches of Christ there. You stay safe. They'll feel searchable. So we're going to do communion. We're going to celebrate this season what God has done in Jesus Christ. Dying for our sins on the cross, rising from the dead.
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If you're not a Christian, this isn't for you. You can reflect, you can think. If you're a Christian, this is about coming forward, taking the bread, dipping it in the cup, the body Jesus, the blood of Jesus, and reflecting on your own sin and repenting and what he did for you. As we worship God, we're gonna do offering first, and then we're gonna do communion. So once offering's done, just come up, partake of communion. And if you're someone who hasn't believed in Jesus, you've never kind of gone into those unsearchable riches of Jesus before. This is a great opportunity for you to do it, to say, okay, I wanna give my life to Christ. And then the table's open for you and you can partake for the first time.
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And the Bible says one sinner repents. Heaven celebrates one. Father, it is my honest prayer that our hearts and minds would detach from the things that keep us safe and the things that keep us from experiencing you deeper and deeper and deeper. And we would go to a place in our life where we would experience the unsearchable riches of Jesus. That in the midst of the cost of discipleship, the sacrifices of discipleship that we would get to experience even in the now, the unsearchable riches. And as we worship you, as we give of our tithes and offerings, to see the mission of Jesus go forward in our city, that we would do so joyously and generously. And then as we partake of the body and the blood of Jesus, that you would meet us. And if there are those here who need to partake for the first time in their life, that they would feel your stirring and you would draw them to yourself on the spot.
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This morning, in Jesus great name, we all pray. Amen.