Mystery Solved; God’s Grace is For Everyone

A few of us hiked Mount Katahdin last Monday on that tragic day that two other hikers lost their lives. The weather was against us all the way up and half way down. Many hikers turned around. Why do we climb mountains? We want a mind-blowing experience of the vastness and variety of creation. We want to be part of it, even if it makes us feel small. We want a fresh perspective on our world and our lives. And we know that some suffering will make us appreciate the experience even more. Our passage today is Paul’s invitation to climb the mountain of God’s grace to get a perspective on the beauty of His wisdom in His eternal plan to save the world in Jesus Christ. I hope your mind is blown by God’s grace and some part of your worldview shifts by the end.

The Mystery of God’s Grace is Mind-blowing

Verses 1-7 - Paul says has has experienced God’s grace by getting the best job in the world. He uses some over-the-top language in this passage to talk about His ministry, telling the nations that God’s grace is for everyone.

Paul is blown away by God’s grace. He repeats the word three times in different ways. He says in verse 2, his job is to steward God’s grace, in other words, distribute God’s grace to everyone to whom he ministers the gospel. Then in verse 7, he says he was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace. In other words, as he ministers God’s grace to others, he is receiving God’s grace too. And in vers 8, he says his ministry of preaching Christ to the nations is grace itself.

Let’s pause on this for a moment. All of us want to receive grace. But none of us wants to experience the conditions that qualify us for grace. To qualify to receive grace, you have to be in need. Who wants that? You have to confess that you need favor from God, that you are powerless and your life has become unmanageable. Who wants to confess that?

Paul uses himself as the example of grace. Outside of Jesus and Moses, Paul was the most effective Bible teacher of all time. But in verse 8 when he calls himself the least of all the saints. Among all the Christians in the world, he puts himself at the bottom of the list. The longer Paul lived, the more he suffered for Jesus, the more grace he received, and from the top of the mountain of God’s grace, he realized how small he was. “I have received grace upon grace. I must be in deep, deep need.”

And even more mind-blowing is that Paul is writing this while locked up in prison. If you were in prison, would you say you were receiving God’s grace?

But notice his perspective in verse 1. He is not a prisoner of Caesar. He is a prisoner of Christ Jesus. He isn’t in prison because Caesar is the sovereign ruler of Paul’s life. Jesus is. And Jesus determined that Paul could serve him best in prison, so to prison he went. And Paul’s perspective is, this is for everyone’s benefit. The lessons he learned by suffering for Jesus, because of his ministry to the nations, became vital to him and all the rest of us. Paul teaches us that becoming like Jesus is our greatest glory, and that can only happen as we suffer like Jesus for the sake of the gospel (read Philippians).

That’s why Paul says in verse 13, “So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.” Preaching the gospel, that Jesus suffered to give sinners access to God, becomes much more powerful when you are willing to suffer for those people yourself. Then we are ministering not just with our lips, but with our life. Your actions give power to your words. And you become a living example of Christ to them.

In verse 8, Paul uses more over-the-top language. Christ has riches that are unsearchable/ unfathomable/ incomprehensible/ inscrutable. You cannot discover all the riches of Christ. For the Gentiles to be brought into the promises of God to give them an inheritance in His kingdom family, not as second class citizens, but with the full status granted to Israel, this reveals a Messiah who is more rich in grace than anyone had imagined.

Verse 6 - The mystery revealed in Christ is that He made the outsiders insiders. He made Gentile fellow heirs with Messiah, members of the same body, partakers of the promise that the new covenant God is establishing in Christ Jesus is for everyone.

“The promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel” is that no matter who you are or where you come from, you can be part of the body of Christ. United to Christ Jesus, God’s law no longer stands against you. You receive the Holy Spirit, and God’s law will be written on your heart. You will obey God out of love for Him and love for your neighbor. The law of Moses no longer keeps you distant from God. Now, with Christ in you, He will live out obedience in you. You are a fellow heir with Christ.

You can read in the book of Acts that when Paul and the other apostles, devout religious Jews, saw the Holy Spirit entering Gentiles who became obedient to Christ, they realized God’s grace is not just for Israel, it is for everyone! And the fact that Paul gets to spend his life sharing this news with people of every nation blows him away.

If you climb to the top of the mountain of grace with Paul, you would see a range of mountains no one knew existed. The second truth revealed to us is that,

The Mystery of the Church is Worldview-changing

Wherever we are reading in the Bible, we should be asking, what does this passage teach me about God? You can’t read this passage and not be blown away with the vastness of God. We should also ask, what does this passage teach us about ourselves? You can’t read this passage without feeling very small. It’s the same effect you get from climbing a big mountain. The mountain is big all by itself. But what we can see from there is even bigger. It changes your worldview when you see the vastness of God’s plan for our world, and our place in that plan.

From the top of Katahdin or Washington or even bigger mountains in the Rockies or wherever, you begin to see the scope and scale of God’s creation. There are other mountains. There are rich, green valleys and forests. There are refreshing rivers and lakes that invite you to dive in. You realize God is shaping a much bigger world than you could have imagined if you had stayed at home. From the top of the mountain of grace, the many varieties of God’s wisdom become more clear when you see His plan to remake the world in Christ and to use the church in the process.

In verses 9-10, Paul puts his own gospel preaching ministry in context. This is part of a much bigger plan by the God who created all things.

Creation tells us about who God is, His mind, His heart, His attributes. Think about the variety we see in God’s creation. If I told you to create birds, how many birds could you possibly come up with? On my best day, maybe three or four. God created somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 different species. There are birds that fly and never land, birds that swim and walk, swim and fly, fly and run, run only. There is such a variety, we are still trying to figure out how to categorize them all. And that’s just birds. There are 5 million insect species. God’s creativity has many varieties.

So, when it comes to the wisdom of God revealed in His plans to save and restore the world, verse 10 tells us God’s wisdom is “manifold”, which means God’s wisdom has many varieties. It is multi-faceted and multi-colored. When God wanted to remake our world that had fallen into sin, He wasn’t just thinking about one human person, or even one nation. He wasn’t even thinking about one world. Paul says in verses 9 and 10 that the mystery of Christ is that, in the church, God would make one new human out of all the variety of humans on the planet. And He did this to bring His plan to light for everyone. Not just everyone in our world, but everyone in the heavenly places too. All the angels in heaven are learning more about the many varieties of God’s wisdom.

Just think about that. The gospel of God’s grace for outsiders in Christ changes the worldview for people on earth that saw each other according to religious and ethnic categories. But it also changes the worldview of angels who have been serving in God’s presence in perfect communion for millennia. The Apostle Peter says that the gospel of God’s grace for all in Christ is something into which angels long to look. You can just picture the holy angels in heaven looking at Jesus suffering on the cross at the hands of wicked men saying, “Really, God? You would do this for them? We need to look into this.”

God’s wisdom is higher than our wisdom. Who would die for their enemies? That’s not human wisdom. God’s wisdom has so many varieties, He died for His enemies to make them friends and children. Then He took children from every nation and tribe and language and seated them all at one table to share in His grace, filled with the same Spirit. Then He left the ministry of the gospel to those children called. Like sheep going out among wolves, the weakness of the church demonstrates the truth of the gospel she preaches: salvation comes through the humiliation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

And God, in more variety of His wisdom, holds the church up to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places and says, “Just look at my love for them. Look at the perfection of my power in their weakness. Look at my eternal purpose. I am redeeming weak, fragile, sinful human beings and using them to complete my plan to remake the world. They are the body of Messiah on earth. They will do His work until He returns. And they will be beaten and ridiculed and rejected and despised, and they will bless in return, and this is how the world will come to know Jesus. And the world will see the glory of my grace.”

Read verses 11-13.

When you are feeling your weakness, your powerlessness, in that moment, I hope you can open your Bible to Ephesians chapter 3 and realign your mind to the vastness of God’s grace we learn through the gospel. God has revealed a mystery in Christ - God loves you just as you are, not as you should be. Your suffering is not His rejection of you. It is one variety of His wisdom that demonstrate you are part of the body of Christ, who suffered to make outsiders partakers in God’s grace, to give us bold, confident access to God through our faith in Him. In all your weakness, climb up the mountain of God’s grace and come confidently to your heavenly Father. He has made you a part of the body of Christ.

When you see only the weakness of that body (the church), when it seems powerless and unmanageable, look at the variety of God’s wisdom to use what is weak in the world to shame the wise, what is foolish to shame the wise, and makes things that are nothing to shame those that think they are something. He won’t use us when we have designed the perfect church. He will use us in our weakness. All we have to do is confidently access God’s presence together and then go out to share the gospel of His grace with ever more diverse people. This is our glory. Don’t lose heart.

Questions for Discussion

What is the tallest mountain you have ever climbed? Is there some other experience that has given you a bigger perspective on our world and your place in it?

What does our passage teach us about God?

What are the different ways Paul talks about grace in this passage (see verses 2, 7, and 8)? Which of these resonates with your experience of God’s grace?

In what ways does suffering help us experience God’s grace? Can you give a personal example?

What is God’s plan, according to our passage?

What does our passage teach us about ourselves?

What is God’s plan for the church? Where do you see that working right now? In what ways is it hard to see?

What are some of the unsearchable riches of Christ you have experienced?

In what ways are you experiencing the reality of verses 11-12?

How will you respond to this passage this week?

Who is someone you can share this passage with this week?