“God’s Plan for the Gentiles” Ephesians 3:1-13
- Senior Pastor, Robert Dennison, preached this sermon on February 12, 2023
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Audio Transcript
If this phone rings behind me during the service, am I supposed to answer it?
Okay. All right, we’re in Ephesians 3:1 13 today talking about God’s plan for the Gentiles.
I begin reading in verse one. For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming you have heard about, haven’t you, about the administration of God’s grace that he gave me for you. The mystery was made known to me by revelation as I have briefly written above. By reading this you are able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ. This was not made known to people in other generations as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and the prophets by the Spirit.
The Gentiles are co heirs, members of the same body and partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. I was made a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace that was given to me by the working of his power. This grace was given to me the least of all the saints, to proclaim to the Gentiles the incalculable riches of Christ and to shed light for all about the administration of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. This is so that God’s multifaceted wisdom may be now known through the Church today to the rulers and authorities in the heavens. This is according to his eternal purpose accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In him we have boldness and confident access through faith in Him. So then I ask you not to be discouraged over my afflictions on your behalf, for they are your glory. May we pray? Heavenly Father, we want to thank you for for your word. We thank you once again that you have given it to us that we don’t live here wondering how to receive salvation from you.
We don’t have to sit here trying to figure out on our own how we’re supposed to live and how we’re supposed to look at our world, Father, and figure it out. Because you’ve given all of this as a precious gift to us. Let us continue to appreciate your word and seek that your spirit would guide us in understanding it and also applying it to our hearts. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
So Hunter’s message last week was saying that there was supposed to be no division between the Jews and the Gentiles, that God was bringing them in together as one. But the problem between the Jews and the Gentiles was so deep seated the hatred between between them, the distrust that Paul is going on in this chapter to share even more with us. I was thinking earlier today, it’s like the story of Cinderella. Everybody know the story of Cinderella. The basic plot line is that Cinderella becomes a member of a family that really doesn’t want what they don’t really want her to be a part of it.
So she has the wicked stepmother and she has the evil stepsisters, and they’re always making her do the bad things. That’s how it was here with the Jews. Last week’s message was, well, the Gentiles, they’re part of your family now. But the Jews were like, well, they’re like our stepsister. They really don’t fit in.
Therefore, we don’t have to treat them the same. Of course, the glorious thing that what happens to Cinderella, the prince comes along and rescues her and she goes to be his bride. It’s in essence, a picture of Jesus Christ. And the story is that the Jews and the Gentiles alike are supposed to be the bride of Christ. So we’re looking today at the fact that Jews aren’t supposed to treat Gentiles as their stepsister or their stepbrother.
And you may say, well, why are we looking at this today? Well, the truth is our human nature makes us, as Gentiles, look at other people that are different in skin color, they’re different in the way they talk, they live different ways that we could tend out of our human sinful nature to say, well, yes, they’re part of the family, but I don’t really need to treat them as close as I would someone else. So we’ll look at that in just a minute. But we want to go back and look at Israel’s relationship to the Gentiles. How was it that this developed?
And we want to look and see that God had been caught calling the Gentiles to him ever since the beginning. And even though it’s in the Old Testament, the Jews had just missed it that the Gentiles were important to God also. Let’s look at Israel’s call and attitude when we go to Isaiah, chapter 49, verses 5 through 6. We’re going to read here that just God reaching out to the Israelites was not enough. And now says the Lord, who formed me from the womb to be his servant to bring Jacob back to him so that Israel might be gathered to him.
For I am honored in the sight of the Lord and my God is my strength. He says, here’s the key. It is not enough. It is not enough for you to be my servant. Raising up the tribes of Jacob and restoring the protected ones of Israel.
It’s not enough that the Gospel is going to go just to the Jews. He goes on to say, for I will also make you, talking to the Jews, a light for the nations to be my salvation to the ends of the earth. The Jews weren’t just supposed to love God and benefit from his presence and his relationship with them. They were supposed to be there to spread that out as a light to all the nations, to take God’s message of salvation to to the ends of the earth. Let’s look at Exodus 19, verses 5 through 6.
Now, if you will carefully listen to me and keep my covenant, you will be my own possession out of all the people. Although the whole earth is mine. You will be my kingdom of priests and my holy nation. These are the words that you are to say to to the Israelites. The Israelites had a special occupation that they were called to a distinct occupation to be priests of God’s message to all of the earth that belonged to Him.
But still, that doesn’t mean that God loved them more than he loved the rest of the world. Because God sent His only Son into the world because he loved how much of it? Because he loved all of it. Let’s go now to Deuteronomy, chapter 2016 through 18. And we need to talk a little bit about the Canaanite nations.
The Canaanite nations were the ones that God had sent the Jews in to completely destroy. And what we see in the New Testament is that somehow God’s judgment and hatred of the Canaanites because of their evilness, the Jews understood that, but then they transposed that over to all the Gentile world. So we need to understand what was going on in the Canaanite nation. And we need to also think here about God’s wrath on sin. Because we live in a world today that we’re all good and fuzzy, that God is love.
But people don’t want to acknowledge that God is also a God of wrath, that he is going to eventually punish sin. So here we have this command in Deuteronomy, chapter 20. I’ll read in verse 17 there. That bothers a lot of people today. For God said, you must completely destroy them.
The Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites. As the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they won’t teach you to do all the detestable acts they do for their gods. And you sin against the Lord your God. We live in a world that says everything is supposed to be fair. And people are basically good.
Now, Scripture teaches us that people are basically evil. Scripture teaches us that there should be discipline for children. There should be punishment for people that commit crimes. But more and more, we live in a world where the psychologists say, don’t discipline your kids, not send everybody to jail. There shouldn’t be a death penalty.
And so evil becomes something that people are allowing more and more, because if we do enough good things, people will come out of this. Well, God had put up with the Canaanites for 400 years because, as he says in the New Testament, he’s patient. He’s not willing that any should perish. He wants everyone to come to repentance. But eventually, people get to the point where God knows they’re not going to return to me.
And the Canaanites had almost become like a cancer in the land. For 400 years, God had given radiation treatments, and for 400 years, he had given chemotherapy, but the tumor was still growing. And when you get to that point with someone with cancer, you know, the only option is to remove that from your body. So the Canaanites had become so evil, they were to the point that there was no return, that they weren’t going to come back to the Lord. And this is how it’s described by James Emory White.
These are words that he says that we know about the Canaanites from their civilization. They were ferocious, habitual, unrepentant wickedness. They were marked by the worst possible aspects of slavery. They had religious prostitution and sexual cults. And scholars have called the Canaanite cult religion the most sexually depraved of any in the ancient world.
They’d given themselves over to every kind of sexual depravity, including incest and bestiality. They had orgiastic worships of idols where they sacrificed humans, both children and adults. And then they smeared themselves with the blood that they had sacrificed from these people. God had been putting up with this for 400 years, but it had gotten to the point that he had to pour wrath out upon them. It was similar to the time of Noah.
It got to there was only one family in the world that was following the Lord. And God knew that if he did not destroy the rest, that that family would succumb to the evil. So here you have God telling the Israelites to completely destroy the Canaanites, because there’s no hope there. But what we find is then the Jews transferred that thought pattern over to the Gentiles that God still loved. But they had this deep wrath in their Hearts towards all the Gentiles.
God’s wrath. Is it fair? You know, like I said, we live in a society that wants everything to be fair. Well, there was a theologian and he wrote this. His name is Miroslav Volf and he comes from Yugoslavia.
And at first he was concerned that he didn’t understand God’s wrath until he saw what happened in his country. And this is what he wrote. I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn’t God love? Shouldn’t divine love be beyond wrath?
God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That’s exactly why God is wrathful against some of them, he said. My last resistance to the idea of God’s wrath was a casualty of war in former Yugoslavia, the region from whence I came. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3 million were displaced. My village and city were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out.
Some of them brutalized beyond imagination. And I cannot imagine God not being angry. Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 80,000 people were hacked to death in just 100 days. How did God react to the carnage? Did he dote on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion by refusing to condemn the bloodbath, but instead affirming the perpetrator’s basic goodness?
Wasn’t God instead fiercely angry with them? He said, though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being loved, but God is wrathful because God is love. The Canaanites had reached the point of no return in their evil. They were so far from God that they were not going to return.
They were like a cancer that needed to be removed. But this was not God’s attitude toward the entire Gentile world that the Jews then took on. It seems that now their attitude toward them was that we are better than they are. And because of this, the Jews became arrogant. They became self righteous.
They were despising all Gentiles as though they were Canaanites. And when the Messiah came, many of them thought, we just want him to completely wipe all these Gentiles out. It was beyond them to imagine that Jesus didn’t come to wipe out the Gentiles, but he came to do what? He came to bring salvation to them, just as he did to the Jews. But the Jews didn’t want to see that.
They were like Jonah in the Old Testament. God said, go to Nineveh. Jonah said, I don’t want to go to Nineveh. You know the story. God sent him the Nineveh.
Anyway, he preached the Gospel message to Ninevites. And what did they do? They repented and they turned to the Lord. And instead of Jonah saying, yay, God, look at your great grace. He was like, God, how can you forgive them?
They’re Gentiles, we hate them. I know I came here and preached this, but I wasn’t expecting you to forgive them. That was the attitude of the Jews for this stepsister that they had in the Gentiles and we even saw it in the apostles. Peter went to a Gentile home and he ate with them and you would have thought it was the end of the world. All the apostles called him and he explained to them that no God told me I’m supposed to do this because the Jews were not looking at the Gentiles as if they belonged with them.
And if they did, they said, well, we’re deserving of God’s grace. They’ve received God’s grace, but they’re undeserving of it. This comes out in the parable about the self righteous Pharisee and the tax collector, the one that represented the Jewish people said, God, I thank you that I am not like other people, extortionists, unrighteous people and adulterers, or even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of everything I get. Instead the sinner said, God, be merciful to me, sinner that I am. He came before God and said, I have nothing to give, I have nothing that I can do.
Whereas the Jews were saying that we have this special deserved grace because we are the people of God. And once again I reiterate, in our relationships you may not even have any Jewish people that you’re relating to, but you have people that look different than you and that act different than you and speak different than you, that you need to embrace and love them in the same way that God through Paul is telling the Jews here to love the Gentiles. Now let’s go back to our text. In Ephesians and in verse six we’re going to see that Paul says these Here are three reasons that show how close your relationship is to them. They are not your step sister or brother.
Instead, in verse six, Paul says that the Gentiles are coheirs. They’re members of the same body and they’re partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel. What is he telling them here? First thing is, he says, these gentile believers are co heirs with you Jews. In other words, he’s saying Jewish believers are not favorites over gentile believers.
It’s not like they’re the favored child in regard to the blessings of salvation. The word here, co heirs, means that they’re ones who participate in the same lot. I mean, when we talk about lot, we’re talking about rolling dice. So it wasn’t a situation where the Jews could say, well, we got three dice over here, and the Gentiles have one die on this side. And whoever rolls the highest number wins the biggest prize.
You see the disparity there? Because they thought that they were special. And God is saying, no, you are on an equal plane. There are no stepchildren in God’s family. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ.
But not only are they co heirs with you, but they’re members of the same body. In other words, he’s saying Jewish believers are not the only necessary parts of the body of Christ. Jewish believers and Gentile believers are mutually dependent upon one another. All of us, no matter what our skin color or how we look or how we act, we are all given specific abilities. We’re like the different parts in our body.
We must rely upon one another. Scripture teaches us in this that if one member of the body hurts, we should all hurt. And likewise, if one member of the body rejoices, then we should all rejoice together. We’re co heirs. We’re on a level playing field.
We’re members of the same body. We have to work together. And then he also tells us that we’re partners in the promise. And what he’s saying here is, Jewish believers do not have a separate way to serve Christ that is different from gentile believers. We all know what it means to partner with someone, and we think about businesses.
This isn’t the Gentiles having a shoe store on this side of the street, and then the Israelites having a grocery store on this side of the street. And they have some relation and they might send customers to one another. No, he’s saying, you are partners together in this promise. You’re both all owning the grocery store. You’re both all owning the shoe store.
You’re supposed to be working together. And when we are partners in the same business, there is no competition. And when we are partners, we’re stronger and we’re better in how we work together. And therefore, our job is to share the same hope of the promise in Christ. We’re supposed to have the job of encouraging one another when we are in despair.
We are supposed to bear the load so that no one is having to carry all the weight. And we also experience, I mean, we learn from each other’s experience so that we can carry out our jobs better. Coheirs, members of the same body, partners in the promise of Christ. This is how the Jews were supposed to see the Gentiles. But it should also be a great encouragement to us because we could tend to say, well, God, I feel like a stepchild.
I feel like I’m not deserving because this is my situation and God is encouraging us here. No, you are on an equal plane with all other believers in these three ways.
God’s plan for the Gentiles Paul says that he came along in verse five to more fully explain this. He says it was not made known to people in other generations as it is now. Meaning that this plan for the Gentiles, it’s not that it was unknown, it’s just that it wasn’t fully explained in the way that Paul is sharing it now. So what I would like us to do is look at an Old Testament view of the Gentiles and see where God was working and showing his love for them throughout Scripture. This wasn’t something new in Paul’s day.
We go all the way back to Genesis chapter 12. The Lord said to Abram, go from your land, your relatives and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
But it doesn’t stop there. God goes on to say, I will bless those who bless you. I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and not just the Jews, but you read it with me. All the peoples on earth will be blessed through you. All the way back in Genesis chapter 12, God is saying, I want to bless not just the Jews, but I want to bless all peoples of the earth.
So it starts there. God promises to bless all people through Abraham. But the next thing is that we find in Exodus chapter 12 and many other places that God allowed non Israelites to participate in the Passover other Jewish holidays. So in the New Testament, they’re upset about Peter going to just have a meal with the Gentiles. God had said since Exodus that not only meals, but your most holy seasons, your holidays, the foreigners are allowed to celebrate those with you.
I read From Exodus chapter 12, when a foreigner lives with you and wants to observe the Passover. It goes on to say, he may approach and observe it. He will be like one who is born in the land, to be treated just like the other Jews. God promised to bless all peoples. God allowed all peoples to participate in his worship.
But then we find in Joshua chapter 8 that God also allowed resident foreigners to worship with Israel when Joshua led them into the land. I read from Joshua chapter 8, starting in verse 30. Then Joshua built an altar for the Lord God of Israel on Mount Ebal, just as Moses, the Lord’s servant, had commanded the Israelites. And then I dropped to verse 33. All the people who would have been the Jews, all the rulers who would have been the Jews, all the leaders and the judges, all of these Jews were standing on either side of the Ark in front of the Levitical priests who carry the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord.
But then it says this. Both resident foreigners and native Israelites were there to receive the law and confirm it. God wanted from the beginning to include the Gentiles in His purpose. Then we come over to First Kings, chapter eight, and we find out that the temple was built to facilitate the worship of not just Jews, but also of Gentiles. There was a place for the Gentiles to come and worship.
And in Solomon’s prayer in First Kings 8:41, he says, Foreigners who do not belong to your people Israel will come from a distant land because of your reputation. When they hear about your great reputation and your ability to accomplish mighty deeds, they will come and direct their prayers toward this temple. Then listen from your heavenly dwelling place and answer all the prayers of the foreigners. And then all the nations of the earth will acknowledge your reputation. They will obey like you, your people Israel do, and recognize that this temple I built belongs to you.
God had it set out where the temple would be a place not just for Jews to worship, but also the Gentiles. Then we come later on in the Old Testament and the prophets mention over and over that the Gentiles were to be fully accepted by God. Let me Read from Isaiah 56:3, 7. No foreigner who becomes a follower of the Lord should say, the Lord will certainly exclude me from his people. As for foreigners who become followers of the Lord and serve him, verse 7 says, I will bring them to my holy mountain.
I will make them happy in the temple where my people pray to me. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my temple will be known as a temple where all the nations may pray. Then Isaiah 60 verses 1 through 3. Arise, shine, for your light arrives. The splendor of the Lord shines on you.
For, look, darkness covers the earth and deep darkness covers the nations. But the Lord shines on you. His splendor appears over you. And when God does that, he says that nations come to your light, kings to your bright light. And then Isaiah chapter two, in the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s house will be established at the top of the mountains and will be raised above the hills.
All nations will stream to it. And many peoples will come and say, come, let’s go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us about his ways so that we may walk in his paths. And then in Isaiah 56, we read this as for the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord to minister to them, to love the name of the Lord and to become his servants. Verse 7 says, I will bring them to my holy mountain, and I will let them rejoice in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be acceptable on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations. So the prophets prophesied that the Gentiles were going to be accepted by the Lord. The last thing that I want you to see is in Leviticus, chapter 9. Not only did God do all of this to include the Gentiles, not only did he tell the Israelites, you need to allow them to worship with you, celebrate with you, and sacrifice. But I think this is where the rub came.
God commanded the Israelites to actually love the Gentiles. When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. The foreigner who resides with you must be to you like a native citizen among you. So you must love him as yourself. Because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt, I am the Lord your God.
When Jesus gave the two greatest commandments, the first one was to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, thy soul and thy mind. And the second one was what? To love your neighbor as yourself. Not just those in your family, but to love your neighbors. To love those that are outside your comfort zone.
To love those that are outside your circumference of understanding and influence. And the Jews had not gotten this by the time that Jesus came. And they were struggling with it even after they had been taught by him. But I want to also go on and say that in the Old Testament we find that Gentile Gentiles were followers of God all throughout. Remember Rahab the Harlot in Jericho.
She was not of the Jewish race, but she was saved. Ruth was a Moabite, she was a Gentile, but she came into the faith. Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army, definitely a Gentile, but Jesus said he was the only leper that was healed by the prophet in his day. Uriah the Hittite, one of David’s followers, that he ended up having him put to death because of David’s wrong relationship with his wife. He was a foreigner, Ittai the Gittite.
There were many men that David embraced that served him because God was showing that he accepted the Gentiles. And David understood that the Queen of Sheba came to Solomon and was able to be accepted because she saw what God had provided. And Jesus even mentions the widow at Zarephath, that she was the only widow in the time of great famine, that the prophet went and provided for her needs. And it was the wicked Queen Jezebel that was so against that prophet. You know what country she was from?
She was a Sidonian. So this widow that is in the people group that the wicked Queen Jezebel lived is the one that God expressed his love to, that she might come into faith. If we go to Matthew, chapter one, verses five through six, we find some of these names in the genealogy of Jesus. That God honored people that were not Jews to be in that genealogy, including Rahab the Harlot and Ruth the. The Moabitess.
We in turn must look at all people in this way. We must not despise any or consider ourselves more deserving than they are now. Paul goes on in the chapter to set an example of this in his own life. How he’s accepting the Gentiles, he’s embracing them. And he realized that God has given him this precious gift to share this with all the Gentiles.
But we see that there’s this definite attitude change in his dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus. Formerly, he had been a Pharisee, and he’s given us his credentials in the past. He’s up there at the top. If you were going to expect somebody, he had the right parentage, he had the best training. He had done everything that he could to find, follow the law.
In the outward sense, he was the epitome of Judaism. He was proud of that to the point that he was going after and killing these Christians. But here we find him at the age of 60 years. He’s now in prison because there’s been this great change in his life. And he’s in prison, but he doesn’t see it as an awful thing.
He sees it as a gift from God. For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner, not of Rome, not of the Israelites that were against him, but he sees himself as a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming you have heard about it, haven’t you, about the administration of God’s grace. That means God’s gift that he’s gifted to me for you, that the mystery was made known to me by revelation. And he is sharing this with other people. Here we have Paul.
It’s not a negative thing that he’s a prisoner of Christ. It’s a what? It’s a positive thing. We read in other verses he said, I’ve learned in whatsoever state I am therefore to be content. And he wrote that we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Ephesians 6:20, for which I am an ambassador in bonds, that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak. He saw that his chance to be here in prison allowed him to speak even more boldly. He was under house arrest, but he had a Roman guard handcuffed to him all day long. I mean, if he took a bath, the Roman guard was there. If he went to the bathroom, the the Roman guard was there all day long.
But he took that opportunity to share the Gospel. And while he was there, he had time to write Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the book of Philemon. All these books he would possibly have not have written except God placed him in these circumstances. Instead of saying, oh, pity me, he took advantage of it and saw it as a great opportunity. It reminds us of Joseph in the Old Testament.
Thrown in a pit, sold into slavery by his brothers. He went to work with Potiphar. And Potiphar’s wife made an advance on him. And he did the right thing and fleet and fled. And he ends up in jail.
And then he helps the jailer out and he offers the right advice to the baker and the cupbearer, but they forget him for another two years. And after all of this, God places him in a situation where he can save his family that he loves. Joseph said this, Fear not, for I am in the place of God. But as for you, ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good to bring to pass, as it is to this day, to save much people alive. There are two messages here.
Paul is saying, you need to love the Gentiles in the same way that I love them. But he’s also telling us in our worst circumstances that often God is working. We need to have a positive attitude about it. There’s an article that I was reading this story about. In the Iraqi war, there was a commander and he was told to take his men across the enemy line.
The men that he were over, it was a small group compared to who he was going to be going against. There was probably certain death in his mind for them, but they were obedient. They set out across the desert and it started to rain. And it rained, and it rained for three days. Marching through sand.
They couldn’t even see where they were going. And it was so miserable, you can imagine they were complaining. Their shoes were filled with sand and water. I don’t like sand in my shoes, but they have it mixed there with water. And just to be drenched and the whole time knowing, why are we doing this?
Because there’s no way that we can get through. When they got close to the enemy line, they looked ahead and they saw in the sand all these metal discs and what the rain had done. It had washed the sand away from all the landmines that the Iraqis had planted to destroy them. Here God was working to protect them through his provident reign. But like Paul, they could have complained about it the whole way, the same way with us.
And we have difficult things happen that we need to see. You know, God’s maybe using this. I need to rejoice in this, and I need to embrace it. We go on to verse seven. Paul not only said he was a prisoner, but in verse seven, now he says, I was made a servant of this gospel by the gift of God’s grace that was given to me by the working of his power here.
He had been an elite Pharisee. He was rich, he was honored in his own country. And now he’s been relegated to the position of a slave or a servant. But he says that this was a gift from God, that he was put in this lowly position. And he says that this is something that wasn’t forced upon me.
It was given to me by his power. Because Paul was wanting to share the Gospel with the Gentiles. Then we come to verse eight, and we find that not only did he say, I’m a prisoner, not only am I a slave, but now he says he’s the least of all saints. He says, this grace was given to me the least of all the saints. One who had thought that he was the best now sees himself at the very bottom of the rung.
This was to proclaim to the Gentiles the incalculable riches of Christ and to shed light for all about the administration of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. Not only was he sharing the Gospel for the sake of the Gentiles, but the bottom line here is in verse 10. This is so that God’s multi faceted wisdom may be now made known through the Church to the rulers and authorities in the heaven. Paul understood that his greatest purpose in life was to know God and to what, to glorify Him. He was delighted that he could share the Gospel, but he was even more delighted in the fact that what he was doing was going to further expound upon the wisdom of God and make it known so that people would glorify him and not only people on earth.
But he says the rulers and the authorities in the heaven that are mentioned in scripture, we don’t really understand. But there are spiritual beings, there’s another realm out there that God is being glorified among them. If we live our lives according to the way that Paul did, we need to accept everyone not as stepchildren in the family of Christ. We are all to be united together on an equal plane. And we also need to see here that we need to accept the circumstances that God places us in, that they are possibly the best circumstances in order for us to bring about his greatest glory.
And they have the most opportunity to serve the Lord in sharing the Gospel. So we close today that we need to examine our hearts. Do we have the right attitude toward everyone? And are we dealing with our problems in such a way that we’re looking for the possibilities that we can use them to serve the Lord. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you that we know that all things work together for good for those who love you and are called according to your purpose. Father, if there’s anyone among us today that they’re struggling with a difficult situation, we don’t want to underestimate that, but help them to see that there is possibly a light at the tunnel around the corner that they’re unaware of that is going to allow what they’re going through a chance to share the Gospel or to shed hope in other people’s lives, but ultimately to glorify you more with the way we handle that situation. Father, we do ask that you continue to give our mission minded church a love for all nations and people. And as we hear about our missionaries month by month, as we pray for them, we support them. Father, they are ministering to people that are not second class citizens.
But these are people out there that are equal to us as our brothers and sisters. So we pray that you would work through them, Father, that our family might be made complete. In Jesus Christ, in his name we pray. Amen.