Enlightened Together: A New Ministry

Alistair Begg: Well, I invite you, if you have a Bible, to turn to Ephesians and to chapter three, where my assigned portion is the first 13 verses, and please follow along as I read them. For this reason, I Paul a prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me. For you how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly, when you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it is now being revealed to His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ, Jesus through the gospel of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given to me by the working of his power to me, though I am the very least of all the saints. This grace was given to preach to the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ 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. This was according to the eternal purpose that He has realized in Christ, Jesus, our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory? Well, let me begin with a short quiz. Let me ask you, apart from the fact that all of these individuals are dead, what do each of them have in common? Winston, Churchill, John Lennon, Bill Barker and Michael Jackson, long pause, understandable, each of them, to one degree or another, was hoping that by earthly means, they would be enabled to have a part in creating a world of harmony and of hope and of peace. Lenin Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do nothing to kill or die for, and no religions, too. Somewhere along there, he’s dreaming of a place, an imaginary place, where people live their lives in peace. That was 1971 in the same year, Bill Barker, whose name won’t be known to most of us, came up. He was an ad agent in Los Angeles. He came up with the Coca Cola line. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, same hope and expectation 14 years later in 1985 is a chance that we are making, we are saving our own lives. We are the world. We are the people. Here it is in a studio in Los Angeles, deep into the night and early into the morning. Many, many famous rock stars sang this refrain, the longing, the human longing, for something that is beyond comprehension, 46 years before the Yalta Conference, Churchill Stalin and Roosevelt sat together and decided what we really need is a United Nations. Part of the charter reads to maintain international peace and security, to develop friendly relations, to establish international convention and cooperation to be a center for harmonizing the actions of the nations in the attainment of these common goals. I don’t know if you read the news this morning or if you are alert to what’s going on, but clearly that longing remains a longing, and in his wonderfully helpful little book remaking our broken world, Christopher Ashe says all human community is fragile and must always be fragile, so long as it is the project of human beings without God in. Great lessons from Eden to Babel, the great lesson is that until and unless God remakes his broken world, that world cannot be healed. Now we move from there to our text and to a small Jewish man who, 2000 years earlier, from all that we are knowing, had been transformed by the power of the Lord Jesus Christ. He had been living his life upside down, and since he was turned upside down, he was now the right way up. And he’s writing in the midst of his letters to say to the listeners in Ephesians, in Ephesus and beyond, by God’s power, live to God’s glory by his enabling, so that the world might know that what the world is unable to create, Christ creates in his kingdom, reminding us that the end point of history in Christ is not in question, that God’s eternal purpose set forth in Jesus for the fullness of time is to unite all things in him, things In heaven and things on Earth, an entirely new multicultural community of the redeemed, reconciled to Christ, reconciled to one another, gathered in eternity singing the praises of the Lord Jesus, just as we have been singing praises now. Now here’s the question, since that promised future reality is exactly that. Where do we get a glimpse of that reality? And the answer, of course, staggeringly encouragingly, challengingly, is in the church elect from every nation, yet one or all the earth. At the end of chapter two, he refers to them as the household of faith. This is the family that the Father loves, and this is the place where the father dwells, the dwelling place of God. And so at the very beginning of his next chapter, although it was no chapter for Paul, as you know, and before he launches into his prayer in verse 14, following the pattern that has already been established, he reflects in a biographical way on the personal wonder that he possesses, that he, of all people should ever be, conclude, included in this amazing process from all of eternity. You will notice that he gives us a description of himself, straightforward, simple and clear. For this reason, I Paul, a prisoner of Christ, Jesus. Anybody looking from the outside would have said, I don’t know what this man did, but he’s clearly a prisoner of Rome, which he was, but he understood it differently, because he realized that his times were in God’s hands. How did he got himself into this situation while he had been preaching very clearly to the Gentiles, proclaiming this a story of redemption and reconciliation, and making it clear that they, as well as those who had believed in Jesus from a Jewish background, shared in all the benefits and all the blessings. Well, that created a great response. We need to go to the Acts of the Apostles, which we won’t take time to do. You can take that for homework, but when you go there, you discover that when he made this clear people, the Jewish people, were not pleased. I know there are a number of pastors here, probably, and every so often we might say to ourselves, or someone might say to us, was there much of a reaction to your sermon today? And, well, yeah, maybe something, but not this kind of reaction. When he finished his talk, they said, away with such a fellow from the earth. Now, you might have had a bad Sunday, but not that bad. Away from this fellow from the earth,

for he should not be allowed to live. And then as they walked away from it, we’re told by Luke that they were shouting that they were throwing their cloaks in the air, and they were flinging dust into the atmosphere. So what Paul is saying here is that I am suffering for the truth that I was proclaiming. They were unable to stand this. And yet in just in passing, notice that there’s no agitation that is apparent from Paul. There’s no sense of despondency, because he recognizes. That he is where he is by the appointing of God. He is a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and he is, at the same time, we will notice, a steward of God’s grace. The terminology is so wonderfully helpful. You probably have heard he says about the way the grace of God that was given to me for you. To me for you, what I received from the Lord. Remember he he says in First Corinthians, what I received from the Lord I deliver to you, writing to the Galatians, he said, I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you to make the Word of God fully known. And so he says in that context, and this is how you should regard us, as servants of Christ and as stewards of the mystery of God. Now we are not apostles, none of us, but to those who have been entrusted with the privilege of gospel ministry, let us take a leaf from the mighty apostles book. Here. He says, This is the end of who and what we really are servants of God and stewards of the mystery in the first Corinthians section, what after all is this one? And what after all is that one? Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything only God Toscanini, the famous conductor Italia, Arturo Toscanini, I like to mention things like that. It impresses Keith, because he thinks he thinks I’m a musical idiot. But Toscanini was known for a number of things that he held very close to the material that had been provided by the author. On one occasion, he’s preparing an orchestra for a Beethoven sympathy symphony. And he got he gathers them together and he says this to them. He says, I am nothing. You are nothing. Beethoven is everything. So stand in front of your mirror, you I am nothing, and you are nothing, but God is everything. That’s why Paul is able to do what he does, and that is to reflect on the mystery about which he’s writing. Mystery we shouldn’t think of in terms of p, d, James a detective story, but something that is hidden and to which we would never have access on our own basis, only by way of revelation could we know. And of this mystery, he then actually says two or three things. First of all, he says it was this mystery that was made known to me. And he says, in passing. I’ve mentioned this before. I take it that he’s probably referring to earlier in his letter. It’s an open secret. It wasn’t known by by for him, by investigation, nor by human instruction. He makes it very, very clear that the mystery of Christ is something that only came to him as a result of God’s amazing grace and goodness. And this mystery, he essentially says, is a mystery the source of which is Jesus, and the substance of which is Jesus made known to me, but it was not, secondly, made known to the ages of men in earlier generations. If you’re in a Bible study, you want to make a note of that and say to yourself, but wait a minute. Doesn’t the Old Testament talk about the fulfillment of the purposes of God? Don’t we read in Psalm two of the nations being granted to the Son as his heritage and so on. Wasn’t the gospel proclaimed beforehand through the prophets and in the Holy Scriptures? And the answer to the dilemma, of course, is in verse five, that it is been made known to me. It wasn’t revealed in the past, and it has now been revealed, been revealed through the apostles and the prophets. God’s plan, from the very beginning, was foretold, but it was only in the prophets, in the apostles, that the dawning reality of it came to their minds. Even if you read up to the Easter story with the apostles, it’s pretty obvious that they have got only a marginal grasp of what is going on. But once Christ has ascended, once the spirit has descended, once they have now been brought into that dimension of reality about where. They had been pondering. Suddenly, they hit the streets of Jerusalem to proclaim this very truth. And for Paul, of course, we know the story of Paul that it was a drama in his life that brought him to this. The story of Peter and the dropping of the sheet and the eating and so on, is a drama as well. Why was it so important? So that Peter would understand that what God was doing was something dramatic, something unlike anything that had happened before, that the Old Testament meant something to them that it hadn’t meant to them before because they discovered it is now fulfilled in Christ, and in that reality, Paul is changed completely. If this hadn’t happened to Paul, he would have stayed as a self satisfied Pharisee. If God’s grace hadn’t reached into your life, there’s no saying where you would be today to be the beneficiary of the magnificence of God’s bounty from all of eternity is unquantifiable. And indeed that’s essentially the language that he uses. The change in Paul is clear, I live my life now. He says that I may know Christ, and be found in him, not trusting in a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness of God that depends on faith. Now I was reading this a few times in in prospect, and as I made note of the fact that of this mystery, number one, it was made known to me. Number two, it wasn’t known in ages past. Number three, it has now been revealed by to the prophets, the part time, people in the early days and the Apostles in their long time, foundational ministry. And I said to myself, but come on, Paul, tell us what the ministry what this mystery actually is, it was made known to you. It wasn’t made known to them. Was made known to them. But what is it? Well, that’s why we have verse six in our Bibles. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ, Jesus through the gospel. Now that might not sound very revolutionary to us because of where we sit and of our background, but this is earth shattering information, and is something that the Ephesian believers are going to have to wrestle with, because everything now has changed on account of the work of Jesus. I wasn’t here for chapter two, but I assume you spent time thinking about how this wall which has separated them, Jew and Gentile so firmly from one another has been broken down in Jesus that they are now fellow heirs. They share the same inheritance. In Galatians, he says, if you are Christ’s then you are Abram’s offspring, heirs according to the promise, and notice and you are heirs of this promise as members of the body. What body Christ’s body? You see, it’s very dangerous that we read this material incorrectly, that we cherish the idea, and it’s a wrong idea, that what Paul is describing here is a kind of Jew Gentile merger,

that the way this is going to work is by Gentile people trying to be less Gentile and Jewish people trying to be less Jewish. But nothing could be further from the truth, because what he’s actually describing is something entirely new, Ephesians, two and 15. Is it? Is it there that by abolishing the law of the commandments expressed in the ordinances that he might create in himself, one new man in place of the two, an entirely new man. The early Christians were sometimes referred to as a third race. As a third race, they were neither Jews nor were they Gentiles. They were radically different from anything that had previously been seen. God created the original humanity in Adam, that humanity is destined to pass away to destruction. God then. 10 created a new humanity, when the world within the world of the old humanity, that’s what he’s doing. So when you think, when Jesus says you are not, you are in the world, but you are not of the world, what does he mean? Well, they’re just normal human beings living a normal human life, but they are an entirely different entity. It’s not something that they wear in a baseball cap that has a sign on on the top of it. They are organically transformed by the regenerating power of God, and they are no longer what they once were, but they are a brand new entity, the promised seed, Genesis 315, Genesis 12 would be the context in humanity that would bring out the seed of Abraham, namely Jesus. So that in Jesus, not only would be as individuals, a new creation. If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, but all those new creations are being put together into an into an entirely new entity, a new man. And it is in that context that they then are partakers of the Gospel, the promise of redemption, united with Christ, and the means by which that becomes a reality is the proclamation of the gospel. The proclamation of the gospel. How do people become Christians? You have that they have the gospel told to them, proclaim to them in him, first Ephesians, one in him, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed you heard it, you believed it. Why? Because somebody proclaimed it. Can I give you a quote from John Murray, one of the finest reformed theologians ever to come from Scotland and make his impact in America. Listen to this carefully, especially some of you who may struggle with the way in which you are proclaiming the gospel. The passion for missions is quenched when we lose sight of the grandeur of the evangel, it is a fact that many persuaded as they rightly are of the particularism of the plan of salvation and of its various corollaries have found it difficult to proclaim the full, free and unrestricted overture of gospel grace, they have labored under inhibitions arising from fear that in doing so, they would impinge upon the sovereignty of God in His saving purpose and operations. The result is that though formerly assenting to the free offer of the gospel they lack freedom in the presentation of its appeal and of its demand. I trust that that cap does not fit any one of us, and may we make sure that we don’t go out into the community ever wearing such a cap, the description of Paul the revelation of the mystery. And then what I want to refer to in verse seven is the his ordination to ministry, if you like, of this gospel, I was made a minister. So we have the mystery that is revealed to him, and we have the ministry that is given to him. He has been entrusted with the role, as we said, of a servant of the word. He wasn’t in this position as a result of human ingenuity. He was there by divine commission. He was there, as he says, again, using this phrase that he used earlier in the passage of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace. By the grace of God, he writes later to the Corinthians, I am what I am, and His grace to me was not in vain. No, his grace wasn’t in vain. He was a living testimony to the to the power of God that he’s mentioned in chapter one, the incredible goodness and greatness of God’s power, and as a result of that necessity, he says, has been laid upon him. He’s aware of the fact, as he says, that he was not an obvious choice. His name Paul Paulus in Latin, means small. History says that he was probably a small man. He was small both by name and by height, and he was small in his own estimate. This is not false modesty. This is not Uriah heap, no. This is Paul. Applying to himself what he wrote to others in Romans 12. Let no one among you think of himself more highly than he ought, but let him think of himself with sober judgment according to the measure of grace that God has entrusted to him. That’s exactly what he’s doing here. I was made a minister of this. I didn’t sign up for this. I was made a minister of the gospel by God’s grace, and it fascinates me, he says, Because, from my perspective, I think I can legitimately claim the high position of being the least of all of the saints. We could have a discourse now on the place of pride and contemporary evangelicalism, but I’ll leave that to you for yourself, as you’re walking. F B Meyer once said of Dwight L moody, who spoke as you know, the 1000s. Mr. Moody is a man who apparently has never heard of himself. What is to do. He’s to preach. He’s to preach. He’s to make the Word of God fully known. He’s to preach what he’s to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ.

Unknown Speaker

The task is clearly there, to preach. Who knows how to preach. I have a lot of books on how to preach. I read them. I still don’t know how to preach.

Alistair Begg

I actually figured out there are only one person who was ever really a preacher, Jesus. Because, in fact, when any one of us ever takes this book in our hands and becomes a vehicle for communication? The voice that needs to be heard is the voice of the preacher, not this preacher, the voice of the preacher. I heard the voice of Jesus say, Come unto me and rest. That’s the day. That’s the day, all those days when you could hear your pastor, or your pastor goes and goes, he prays, he longs for the day when you sitting out there somewhere hear beyond his squeaky voice, the voice of God Himself, by the Holy Spirit through the scriptures. That’s the mystery of preaching. It’s so strange. And that’s why the content of the preaching is so important. To preach Jesus in all of his glorious power, the audience is multi various. But he says, I have been given this job to preach the in searchable riches of Christ in three particular categories. Number one to the Gentiles, which makes perfect sense, because these Gentiles were alienated. They were without God. They were without hope in the world, and they were going to, by God’s grace, be made into a new people, alive and raised with Christ. That’s verse eight. In verse nine, he says that this gospel, this in searchable story, is not only given to me to preach to the Gentiles, but it’s been given to Me in order to bring light to everyone, to everyone. So if you like to the Gentiles, it is particular to everyone. It is universal that the light of the gospel, that God’s great plan from eternity, which is a dramatic intervention in human history. All from eternity, he created the universe, and then he began to create an entirely new universe, in order that in that new dimension, all things would be united in Christ Sunday morning, I used a quote from GK Chesterton that I think actually my work here because of this thought that, as I mentioned earlier, the disciples were a very interesting group of people. They had to encourage us all, because they asked dumb questions. They got it wrong. Peter, put one foot in his mouth, took it out, put his other foot in. So it was perfect, a perfect group, a very good group. And so we have them. They’re not waiting for Easter Sunday morning to sing a lot of songs. Easter comes in darkness. The fragile light of the morning begins to break in, and the people who are present there in various forms, women and so on, have really got no concept of what’s the what awaits them. This is what Chesterton says in his book The Everlasting man. On the third day, the friends of Christ, coming at daybreak to the place, found the grave empty and the stone rolled away in varying ways they realized the new wonder so. But even they hardly realized that the world had died in that night, what they were looking at was the first day of a new creation with a new heaven and a new earth, and in a semblance of the gardener, God walked again in the garden in the cool, not of the evening, but of the dawn. That is exactly what Paul is proclaiming here, to the Gentiles, to everyone, and thirdly, to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Now this is a subject that we could spend a tremendous amount of time on, but we won’t for your encouragement. How is this going to be conveyed to beings that I understand can see me, even though I can’t see them? How How are those spiritual realities in the in the in the cosmos to be made aware of the unsearchable riches of Christ? Well, I suppose somebody could go into another sphere and go up and start a small evangelistic campaign. Now it wouldn’t even be possible. How is the power grace and wisdom to be on display, not just to the inhabitants of the earth, but staggeringly, to the hosts of heaven. Answer the church. If you want to wiggle in your seat a little bit, let’s take it from church. Big seed to take church. Little seed like my little church. Am I to believe this, that what’s going on in my church, through my church, The Church of Jesus, that He said, is in that what’s going on is actually a display to the cosmic powers that the cosmic powers look down and go, whoa. Do you think any of us really have any concept of that when we come together for worship, when we come together to listen to the Word of God, that what is happening here today, and what will be the effulgence of what happens here today not only impacts the Greater Cleveland Community, if it does, but actually impinges upon the cosmic powers. It’s fantastic, isn’t it? At least I think it is. Is it does he? Is he thinking about, and this is for homework again, but is he thinking about the good angels or the bad angels? If it’s the good angels, we know from First Peter, chapter one, that the good angels are standing on their tiptoes, looking over the parapet of heaven, going, can you believe this stuff? Can you believe it? I mean, we thought that incarnation was something, but man, you should see what’s been going on ever since, but they don’t really know there’s an old like a Salvation Army hymn or something that I’ve kept in my notes goes like this, there is singing up in heaven, such as we have never known, as the angels sing of victory and The lamb upon the throne. But when we sing redemption story, they will fold their wings for angels never, ever knew the joy that our salvation brings. If it’s the dark forces that he’s going to mention in chapter six, these dark forces are made aware that Satan’s plans have been dealt a death law that his plans have been radically impacted. As the writer the Hebrews puts it through death, Jesus went and destroyed the one who had the power of death and if you ask, what is being made known to this dimension, it’s in the text, the manifold wisdom of God, the variegated wisdom of God, the wisdom of God in First Corinthians, there appears to be foolishness. There appears to be weakness that is stronger than man’s greatest strength. This wisdom of God that at the cross God was putting together, lining up all of the forces as men and women were brought to saving faith in Jesus, so the long and the short of it. And this is the challenge of it, is that the church is the sphere in which God makes His wisdom known in earth and heaven his. Eternal purpose that He has realized in Christ, Jesus, our Lord, who is the head of the church. Now, I think we ought to just let that settle on our minds for a moment. I have loved the church since I was a boy. I loved the pastor in the church. I wanted to shake his hand when I was we I thought never in the widest of notions, I could ever get myself messed up and become one of those people. But I love the church, because in Jesus, I and you have been given boldness and access with confidence through our faith in Him, that curtain has become a carpet. There’s a way back to God through the dark paths of sin. There’s a door that is open that you may go in, because at calvary’s Cross, that’s where you begin when you come as a sinner to Jesus, and our assurance of acceptance with God is in Christ alone, only in Him, not our Bible reading, not our baptism, not our attendance, not our endeavors, not our good deeds. We better start believing what we’re singing We have boldness and access into His presence, from first to last on account of what Jesus has done.

Let me use my final minutes just to perhaps make some observations. We’re seeing all of this just now outside of this building. There’s Indianapolis and there’s Indiana. And if we were to go out on the streets, all X 1000 of us and just say what we’re going to do this afternoon, just go and talk to a number of people and ask them, What do you think about the church? Do you have any notion that the church is a dramatic display, that the church is a kind of pioneer project for the completely remade new heaven and new earth. They say, No, you’re talking you’re talking junk. To me, I don’t know what you’re saying now. They say, as far as I’m concerned, the church is a hangover from the past. After all, you can see a number of buildings here. There’s 60 buildings for sale in Scotland at the moment, church buildings, because people have concluded it’s irrelevant. It’s got no part to play. But here’s the issue, what? What the Bible is saying, what Paul is saying here, is this, that the authentic local church contains the DNA of a remade world. The authentic local church contains the DNA that in the church, we have the pilot scheme for the reconciled universe of the future, so that when we gather as the people of God, when we engage with one another in worship and study and in service and so on, there has got to be some sense in which maybe just once in a while we say, maybe this is what it’s going To be like, but a lot better

in the church, we have an inkling of what God is ultimately going to do. The church is, if you like a walk through visual aid, it’s about like going to the Museum of the Bible, and you can walk through it, you’re kind of in it, but you’re not in it, but you’re like, Whoa. This is terrific. That’s what church is supposed to be like. It’s a gallery displaying little black and white thumbnail sketches that points to a multinational community in glorious Technicolor. Now, clearly not every local church is going to be marked by those things, marked by that diversity, depending on the context, but every church would be if it could be. And the fact is that Don Carson, whom we all miss being present drives this home. The church is not made up of natural friends. It’s made up of natural enemies. Think about it. Do you sing that song? I’m so glad you’re part of the family of God. We sing I’m surprised you’re part of the family of God. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common accents, common jobs or common anything of the sort. Christians come together now because they come they form a natural coalition, not. Because they form a natural coalition, but because they have been saved by Jesus Christ. In this light, they are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus sake, that I think helps me. And isn’t it touching how Paul finishes? Paul is a pastor. You know he’s an evangelist, but he’s a pastor. He cares. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I’m suffering for you, which is your glory. Now, if we had a seminar to follow, I would like to discuss with you how this material in Ephesians, chapter three, directs us in having to say no to individualism, to isolationism, to Christian nationalism and to defeatism, but That is for us to consider at another time, please pause as we pray Our Father, we thank You that Your word is fixed in the heavens, that it is food for our souls. And so we pray in light of what we sang before we studied. Take your truth, plant it deep in us, shape and fashion us in the likeness of the Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.