Ephesians 3, beginning with verse 1, for this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of eugeniles. Surely you have heard about the administration of God's grace that was given to me for you. That is, the mystery made known to me by revelation as I have already written briefly. In reading this, then you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to me and of other generations as it has been made known and revealed by the Spirit to God's holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and shares together in the promise in Christ Jesus. I became a servant of the gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of his power, although I am less than the least of all God's people. This grace was given me to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery which for ages past has been kept in God who created all things. His intent was now that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities of the heavenly realms according to his eternal purposes which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord. In him and through faith in him, we may approach God with freedom and confidence. I ask you therefore not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom all the family in heaven and earth derives its name. I pray that out of its glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and I pray that you being rooted and established in love may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and how long and how high and deep is this love of Christ. And that to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do a measurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to the power that has worked within us to him be the glory in the church in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. Word of the Lord. Amen to that. We've been cruising through the book of Ephesians and we've been doing a study that we're calling deep stuff talking about several different doctrines that change your life. We've talked about predestination and adoption and several things last week. We talked about reconciliation and this week we get to talk about the church, which if you don't know is a massive topic. I told my mother-in-law I was preaching on the church today and she said that's kind of a broad topic and I said yeah, so we're going to kind of do one of those 30,000 foot views of the church. And to do this we're going to talk about what the church is, what the church does, and what the church has. What the church is, what the church does, and what the church has. Let's pray. Father in heaven, I just asked that you would send us your spirit right now Lord Jesus, help us to just learn more about you and more about what you're calling us to. We should pray that you would bless this time, help us to be better equipped to love people, to serve people, to run with the gospel to our neighbors and to the nations. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. You know it's interesting because we're in a time where a lot of people think the church is in decline and in fact in America it is. There's actually less churches open today than there was about 10 years ago and that happens all through the history of the church. We've seen times where there has been decline and so sometimes I think when we see some decline people who go to church can get a little nervous, a little worried. But I would encourage you to say like John Flavill said he was a Presbyterian in the 17th century and he said, oh, be not too quick to bury the church before she is dead. She's not dead. She's alive and well and we're going to talk about what that means today by talking about what the church is, what it does, and what it has. So let's talk about what the church is. Basically the church is all of the members of Jesus' covenant community. First thing we got to get is that it's people. The church is not a building. If you look in a dictionary you'll see it'll say church and then it'll say a public Christian worship building or something like that. Wrong answer. Okay. The church is not a building. The church is people. It's all the members of Jesus' covenant community. What I mean by that. Well, in verse 2 you saw that Paul talks about the administration of God's grace. And basically throughout all time God has administered his grace to the world through a particular group of people. And in the Old Testament that was the nation of Israel and in the New Testament that is the church. The two major differences is the Savior had not come in the Old Testament now he has. And then also that it's international. He's not administering his grace through one particular nation but through the church which is made up of all nations. And we could say that the church is all who profess faith in Jesus Christ and their children. So it's about people. And it's broken up into local churches. UPC is a local church. Down the road spirit of joy Lutheran is a local church. Lots of different denominations and traditions and all that stuff. But it's all one big church. Everybody who's a member of a local church is a member of the worldwide church. And every local church has leadership, pastors, elders, deacons, has congregation members. And so that's basically what we have. It's about people. It's not a building. It's not property. That's the members of Jesus covenant community. That's who the church is. I can spend any more time on that we could that we need to spend the most of our time talking about what the church does. So let's talk about that. What does the church do? The church carries on the mission of Jesus Christ. That's what we are here to do to be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ. He is the head. We are the body. We are continuing the mission of Jesus Christ. And probably the best way to look at that is to make disciples. Obviously there's a ton of things that Jesus came to do. The most important thing would be for him to die on the cross to pay for the sins of his people and reconcile them to God. But he came also to make disciples. Think about it. When he began his ministry, he spent three years working with those original disciples, training them, teaching them. He was making disciples. And so if you want to know what the church does, what the church is supposed to be doing, all we have to do is look at our king and see what he did. It's WDJD. What did Jesus do? And in this case, Jesus told people about the gospel. He taught believers how to obey, how to live as a forgiven and free child of God and he transformed the societies that he was in. So that's what we do. So let's talk about these things. First off, let's talk about telling people about Jesus. The fancy word for that is evangelism. And this is one of the things the church is called to do. To preach the good news, to tell people that they are a sinner, they need to be saved from God's wrath and the only way for that to happen is for them to put their faith in Christ and be reconciled to God and be forgiven. That's the message that Jesus came to preach. And he did it everywhere he went. And in fact, in the book of Mark, Mark records Jesus's first words. It's very important that he does this. He decided to show Jesus's first words as being in chapter 1 verse 15, he says, the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the good news. That's what Jesus came to say. He came to tell people the good news about himself. And therefore the disciples that he was raising up, they also went to preach the good news and tell people about Jesus. And you see that in the book of Acts, all through the book of Acts, you see all these church planting and missionary journeys and everywhere they go, they're preaching the good news. They're telling people about Jesus. One of the awesome sermons, they're all awesome, but one of my favorites in the book of Acts is in chapter 2 and Peter stands up and he preaches this amazing sermon. And one of the things he says, he talks about Jesus being crucified and he says to repent and be baptized. Every one of you for the forgiveness of your sins, he talks about the promises for you and your children. And for all who is far off and who God will call to himself, he preaches this amazing sermon about calling people to put their faith in Jesus Christ. He did that because that was what Jesus taught him to do. And so we do that today as well. And you even see this in our passage that we're in this week, Ephesians 3 verse 6. Paul says, through the gospel, the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel members of members together of one body and sharers together in the promise of Jesus Christ. And later he talks about preaching to the Gentiles. He's talking about preaching the good news to people. And so this is one of the things the church has always done and needs to be always doing. Yesterday I was hanging out with some high school kids at Denys because that's where you have to go to hang out with high school kids. And basically one of the guys was telling us that his economics teacher had made some comment about the Bible. And it was kind of an awkward and not really correct comment about the Bible. So this high school kid kind of says, well, he asked the teacher about a few things and then it led to him basically standing up and preaching the gospel to his class. That's what the church does. And out of that, you know, he's had some people talk to him. He's in a Facebook conversation with one guy. I mean, it's amazing. That's what the church does. Jesus told people that good news. So the church continuing his ministry needs to be teaching people, telling people the good news of Jesus Christ. So that's one of the things that we are called to do. How about teaching teaching believers to obey. See, once you understand that you're not saved by what you do, but rather by what Jesus has done, you are a new creation Paul says you need to be basically raised in the faith. You need to learn how to live as a forgiven and free child of God. And therefore Jesus taught his disciples. He taught them all the time. He taught them. You can see the sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 through 7. He's teaching. He's teaching. You can look at all the parables teaching. He's training these guys. But you know what he's training them to do. To be like him. That's what discipleship is all about. Discipleship being a follower of Christ and being a disciple is believing that you're forgiven and free, then you're learning how to be like your older brother and savior Jesus. That's why we do discipleship. That's why we have all sorts of ministries at this church or at any church to build up believers in the faith that you would become more and more like Jesus. More compassionate like Jesus. Have more of a servant's heart like Jesus. More loving of people like Jesus. And we see this also great. I love this verse in Luke 6 verse 40. Jesus says that a disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher. We teach you. We teach each other so that we can become more like Jesus Christ. Not so that we can be saved. He took care of that. But so that we can be who God intended us to be. The early church continued this. One of the popular famous verses in Acts 2. Verse 42. It says they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship and to the breaking of bread and to the prayers. And so basically you see it continues in the early church that people would devote themselves to the teaching. They couldn't get enough. They would get all the teaching that they could because they wanted to be more and more like Jesus Christ. That's what discipleship is. There's a show called the biggest loser. And it's awesome. It is. Hannah and I used to watch it like every week. We don't anymore. It's not that it's not awesome anymore. It's just after you watch for like nine years anyway. But we've been watching the biggest loser and we just loved it because there's this transformation that happens in these people over the period of 13 or 15 weeks or whatever it is. And these people who start out with a lot of extra weight. They're very overweight people and then over the time they are losing this weight. And it's amazing because by the end of the time they look a lot less like they did when they started and a lot more like the person who was training them. They get connected to these trainers. Bob's the best Bob fans. So I'm saying Bob is the best trainer. They get connected to one of these trainers. And then they work with them and they work them really hard. I mean, it takes a ton of effort on the part of the person who's trying to lose the weight. And over the time they just work, work, work and the pounds come off and you see more joy in their face. They're more excited because they're experiencing this transformation. And then by the end of this whole deal at the end, I mean, they look great and it's amazing. And you know what else you see. They practically fall down and worship the one training them. They're so thankful. Those are the episodes that the tears just roll in the Ryman House. Okay, it's like we just can't help it because we watch them there so thankful and so grateful for the transformation that has happened in their life because of the effort of the trainer. That's discipleship. That's a picture of discipleship. You see you and I are weighed down with all this sin and stuff that we've picked up from not being a child of God. And then we put our faith in Christ and we believe and we're beginning to be a new creation. And what has happening is through discipleship, Jesus is teaching us. He is our trainer. And we're shedding the weight of these sins that we carried with us and we become more like him. And at the end, we'll be made perfectly like him when he returns. And what happens when somebody has taken you through this amazing journey and really helped you grow. You can't help but to fall down and worship him. That's why we're here every week. To worship the one who is discipling us who is teaching us to live as forgiven and free children of God through the church. The ministry he started in person he's continuing through his church. And Paul talks about this in this, not directly, but he mentions something in verse 13. Look at verse 13, very interesting verse. He says, don't be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory. Paul told people that he loved that he was discipling not to be discouraged by the fact that he was suffering. He just didn't want them to feel bad. No. Paul was saying, don't be discouraged by my suffering because I'm not because as Paul had continued to walk with Jesus and be taught to live as a forgiven and free child of God. He learned more and more about suffering and more about how God brings good through suffering and he didn't have a problem with it anymore. He had learned. We see very similar language in Philippians 4, 12 and 13. You probably know verse 13 from Teebo's iBlack. You've seen that there a couple times that's I can do all things through him who gives me strength, but do you know what verse 12 says? This is verse 12, Paul speaking. He says, I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in every and any situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength. And this really does happen as you submit yourself to Christ through the teaching of the church, you grow. You become more like Jesus. I met a man after the first service. He came up to me and wanted to tell me his story and it blew me away. He said, remember what you said about Paul learning to be content? I said, yes, I do remember that. He said, that's me. And he explained to me that he has a condition where he's basically not able to eat food. So he has to drink liquid. That's all he can do. And he even has to take pills to make that not affect him. And also part of his condition is he can't lay down. So he's basically upright all the time. And he's also had several back injuries and he's basically suffering all day every day, but what he said is, Matt, I wake up every day with joy on my face and in my heart because I've been, I've learned through being discipled by Christ through the church I have learned to be content. He couldn't help but to worship the one who had transformed his life. That's discipleship. That's the way that Jesus would teach his followers. And that's the way the church teaches you. And I'm telling you if there's one thing the leadership of this church wants for you, it would be that you are ever increasingly more like Christ. Why? Because the next piece here, transforming societies. That's what Jesus did. Everywhere he went, when he left, it was a different place. I mean, unequivocally. There's no question about it. Look at, if you can't turn quickly to Matthew 9.35, amazing verse, great summary verse of how Jesus' life went. Matthew 9.35, he says, Matthew writes, Jesus went through all the towns and villages teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. Just think about that for a second. Imagine you live in a place where there's a lot of people who are sick and suffering from disease and a man walks through and suddenly everybody's okay. I mean, that is mind blowing that this actually happened. But it did. Yes, we don't have some of the miraculous gifts that Jesus had but the truth is there that wherever Jesus went, people's lives were changed. People's lives were affected. Poor people were helped. Sick people were helped. People's lives were changed. And this didn't stop with Jesus. He continued this. In fact, while he was still before the resurrection, he sent out people. You can look at Luke 9. He sent out 12 guys to do these things. And then in Luke 10, he sends out 70 or 72. And this is what he's doing. He's raising up these guys to go out and have an impact on their society by preaching and by showing how they've been changed and by doing things that happen. He's been able to help people and change people's lives. And it continued all through the book of Acts. You see people, you see the apostles helping people and changing people's lives. You know what's such a great verse in the book of Acts? It's actually a quote by a non-Christian. There was a person who was sort of against the church. That's about the way they were moving fast and people were believing. And this one guy in Acts 17, verse 6, he's talking about the church. And he says, he said, these people who have turned the world upside down are coming here. What a phrase. What a line. Turn the world upside down because that's what they did. Everywhere they went, they were changing people's lives. They were transforming the very society around them. And this did not stop. It didn't stop. You got amazing stories from church history where the church had an impact, a major impact in transforming cities and societies and areas. In the 4th century, there was a emperor in Rome named Julian. You can Google him or Wikipedia him or your search engine of choice. You'll see that he's called Julian the Apostate. And there's this thing about Julian. What happened was he recognized that there was a lot of Christians running around Rome. And not only were they telling people about Jesus and teaching people, but they were doing all these things and they were helping people. And he wrote this letter basically because he was feeling embarrassed because all these Christians are running around helping people that weren't even Christians. He wrote this letter and this is what he says. He says, these impious Galileans, that's his way of insulting us. It's okay, we forgive him. He says these impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also. And this guy, Alvin Schmidt wrote a book called The Social Results of Early Christianity, talking about how the rise of charity really became a thing because the Christians were helping everybody. That's what they did. They believed that they were forgiven. They'd been made more and more like Christ and then the same way Christ went to serve and to help people. They did too and they were changing people's lives. Another example also in Rome. In the first century, tragically, it had become quite common for people to practice what's called infanticide. And that's basically killing little babies. And what they did is they, Roman people wanted to have boys. They wanted to have boys because a boy could grow up and if he couldn't get a job, he had to, at the very least, he could go into the army and still bring honor to the family. So they wanted boys. So what they actually were doing, this just didn't bother them, it was just their worldview. When they had a girl, they would take a baby girl and they would go down and throw her live into what they called the Dung heap. You can imagine what's in there. So all these little girls, sweet, precious little girls. But the Christian said, no way. They knew that they knew that every child was made in the image of God. They knew that every child was so valuable that they had to do something. And so what they did is they started paying attention to when women in Rome were pregnant. And they would stick around and they would watch. And when the baby was born, they would listen and see if they could figure out if there's a boy or a girl and if they saw someone leaving with a baby, they knew it was a girl and they would follow them. And as the person would go down and throw the baby into the Dung heap, the Christians would go down after it. I mean, can you imagine? They'd walk down into the human waste and pick up the sweet little baby girl and take her home, clean her off and raise her as their very own child. Two things happened. One, sociologist talked about the fact that eventually there really weren't any more pagan Roman women. And so if the pagan Roman man wanted to get married, he had to go after a Christian. And the Christian girls were like, not unless you believe in my God, sir. And so all these guys were converting and becoming Christians. Okay, so the church exploded because all these women were all where there was and the guys were trying to marry them and this amazing thing, but you know what else happened? In fantasides stopped. It stopped. The Romans saw the Christians doing these things and realized they should probably not do them and it stopped. They transformed their society. They changed the society. And that is exactly what we are called to do. And it didn't stop there either. Where do you think invented hospitals? The church. They were basically building buildings in order to bring people into one place to try to serve them all at one place. Where do you think college came from? Not the devil. Okay. College came from the Christians. They were putting, they had these buildings in these places where they would bring people in to train them and they started training them and other things too. I mean, the gifts that God has given the world through the church is amazing. But that's what happens. When people believe and they realize that they don't have to earn their salvation, that it's given to them for free through Jesus Christ, it changes them. And as they submit to the teaching of the apostles and Jesus through the church, that changes them. And it then fires them up and sends them out to do amazing things. How? It's a good question. You think about it because everybody is supposed to be doing evangelism. It's not for some special group of people who are good at it. We should all be doing evangelism but it's scary. I know. And discipleship, part of discipleship is looking at your sin and saying, okay, I need to, you know, call on God to help me get over this. We don't like to recognize our sin. I know that's hard. I know. And doing things that can actually affect our society and change everything around us. We think, you know, I'm just one person or we're just one church. What can we do? It's hard. I know. Well, we talked about what the church is and what the church does. Let's talk lastly about what the church has. Look at what Paul says in verse 17. He talked about Christ dwelling in our hearts. And in verse 20, in that amazing doxology, he talked about God's power at work within us. What the church has is the message of Jesus, which is the gospel along with his spirit, the very holy spirit of God. And this is the one, two powerful punch that enables us to do virtually anything. I mean, this is absolutely amazing to think about this. Think about this. Paul in Romans 1 says that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation for all who believe. It is God's power, the gospel. That's why when it goes forth, people believe people are changed. But not only that, the Holy Spirit in the first chapter of Acts when Jesus was sending the guys out, he said you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and what else you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem where they were in Judea and Samaria, the surrounding areas and to the very ends of the earth. We have this unincreable, amazing amount of power through our faith in the gospel. We believe that and there's just power, power, power. And then as we, as we're thinking about it, as you're at work or you're at school and you're thinking, I'd love to share the gospel, but I'm afraid you got to think of the power of the gospel. It's not going to be your power that's going to change these people. It's going to be the gospel. You just get to be the mouthpiece. But then also you can see to yourself and I've done this. Okay, wait, the Holy Spirit of God is in me. He can give me the power to do this and that's how it happens. I'm telling you, I've never shared the gospel that we're lying on the Holy Spirit. You need that, but you got to realize he's inside of us giving us power and discipleship. I'm telling you, I know it's hard for people to point out your sin. But when you know the gospel and you're forgiven, you can look at your sin more and you can let that your show you how you need to be changing and growing by the power of the Holy Spirit, not your own power. Yes, you work really hard, but you then realize more and more that it's the Holy Spirit that's enabling you to make changes in your life. And that enables you and equips you to be more like Jesus so that wherever you go, you can be affecting things for positive change. You can be a light to the nations. I mean, it's unbelievable the privilege we have. And I'll tell you what, we have, Mike has given us a vision for this church. And so we're going to be, we're doing evangelism, we're doing discipleship, we're trying to transform our society, but we've also got some specific things. Let me just remind you, we want to be reaching UCF. That's going to take a lot of effort. We want to take a whole 60,000 students over there. We want to be raising up strong and kingdom advancing families. That's going to take a whole church to do that. And we want to care for the poor and the marginalized. We want to help people in need. We want them to feel the presence of Christ through the presence of this church and our partnerships with other churches around here. I mean, it's beautiful. And it can and will happen the more that each and every one of us realizes we're here to tell people about Jesus. We're here to teach people how to be like Jesus once they are believers. And we're here to transform this society. And that happens. And I'll tell you one thing, too. You know, the church in decline. Sometimes we're afraid about that. And we think of John Flavell's OB not too quick to bury the church before she's dead. The church is never going to die. Did you know that Jesus promised it would never die? Look at Matthew 16, 18. Matthew 16, 18. I love this verse, but sometimes we don't, I think we, we misread it. He's saying that I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Now, let me make sure we get this right. He's not saying we're on defense. He's not saying we, the hell's coming at us and we got to hold our gates up. No, he's saying the gates of hell, we're on offense. Okay, the kingdom of this world. That's the gates of hell and we're bustin' through that with the good news. We are the ones who are on offense. We are the church. We are the bride of Christ. We are the ones who Jesus died for to empower us to bust through those gates. We're on offense. So every time you're scared of the powers of hell and all that stuff, you can say they're the ones who are trembling at what they just heard, like we just say, because they can't drown out a single word because we're on offense. Nothing's gonna stop us. The gates of hell, nothing. This is what launches Paul. He's thinking about the church. He mentions it in verse 10 and then verse 20. This is what launches him into this doxology. Look at those last couple verses. He says, now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or then all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. To him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever amen. Amen? Is that not amazing? Can you just say with me we are the church? Can we say that? We are the church. That's who we are. See that again. We are the church and the gates of hell don't stand a chance. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we just want to worship you, praise you. We are so thankful Lord for all you do constantly and you sent your son to die for us and to live perfectly in our place. Lord, would you help us to own that and love that and commend that to others? Would you help us to submit to discipleship? Would you help us to want to be more like Christ? And would you help us make changes in this community that will be talked about for a long time so that they would be praising Jesus name because of his church? Lord, give us strength. Give us your Holy Spirit. Help us to realize he dwells within us, that you are at work within us. Oh, what a privilege. Empower us as we go from here so that we can do what we are called to do so we can be the church. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.