Sacrifice For Unity

It is really hard. It’s hard to get people to sacrifice their prejudices and their animosities, especially the culture we live in, where everybody is siloed into some identity. We’re fighting all kinds of resistance on all kinds of fronts, even in the Church of Jesus Christ, to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. But Paul has an assignment from God, and that is to declare this unity to both Jew and Gentile. So in Ephesians chapter 3, verse 1, Paul says, For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus, for the sake of you Gentiles.

Now he starts to talk about something that’s on his heart. For this reason, and then he gives an incomplete sentence. He’s talking about being a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of the Gentiles, and he stops in mid-sentence and digresses with a parenthetical statement from verse 2, all the way down to verse 13, where in verse 14 he picks back up his original intention. For this reason I bow my knees before the Father. For this reason, in verse 1, I want to pray for you. I want to pray for you as one who is a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of the Gentiles.

I want to pray for you. But before he can pray for them, he stops and he says, I have to tell you more so you’ll understand. The fulfillment of the prayer depends upon your understanding the truth. There’s no sense in praying for you to live out, propagate, believe, trust, uphold truth you don’t understand. That’s why in Acts chapter 6, verse 4, those who teach the people of God are called to prayer and the ministry of the Word. I come out and speak to you to give you the information, then go back to pray that you will understand it and be able to implement it in your life.

That’s why so many times in Paul’s letters he stops to pray for the very people to whom he is giving this revelation. And he knows this is really hard, hard truth, much harder than you have thought of up to now. And when I’m done with you this morning, you’ll understand why it’s such hard truth. He wanted to pray for his people to implement the reality of this one-body unity, but they needed more information. Both are essential parts of effective ministry. You pray for the people, but you have to teach them the Word of God so that they can be obedient when the Father prompts them in response to your prayers.

And his objective here is this matter of the unity of the church. It’s a mystery of the body of Christ, all of us being one in Christ. Now this is not new and I want you to go back to chapter 2 and verse 11. This is such an issue that it started back in chapter 2 verse 11 and it actually runs all the way into chapter 4. Verse 11, remember that formerly you the Gentiles because the Ephesians were Gentiles in the flesh who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision. This was a pejorative from the Jews who were circumcised against the Gentiles who were called the uncircumcised, a demeaning way to identify them.

But remember in that condition you were separate from Christ, you were excluded from the Commonwealth of Israel, you were strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. That’s general Gentile status. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall. By abolishing in his flesh the enmity, which is the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that in himself he might make the two into one new man, verse 16, reconciling both in one body to God.

Verse 18, you both have access to one spirit and to the Father through the Spirit. You Gentiles are no longer strangers and aliens, you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God’s household. Verse 21, he says you’re a holy temple in the Lord. Verse 22, you’re built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. So Gentile salvation wasn’t the problem, it was the dismantling of Israel’s unique identity as a theocratic kingdom that belonged in a special way to God. And now the Jew and the Gentile are together on an equal spiritual basis as one new man in the body of Christ.

Paul wants them to understand this, so important to understand it. And he starts to pray in verse 1 and then he stops from verses 2 to 13 to inform them more so that there’s enough information there that they can answer the prayer. Now as we look at these 14 verses we’re going to see something of the planning of this mystery, we’re going to see something of the preaching of this mystery, the purposes of the mystery and even the privileges of the mystery. But to start with, and this is very important, we’re going to look at the prisoner of the mystery.

Look at verse 1, for this reason I pour the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles. That’s quite an amazing identification. What does he mean by that? Well he doesn’t just mean some analogy that would describe anybody’s relationship to Christ. That would be ridiculous, because none of us would see our relationship this way. I’m a prisoner and Jesus is my jailer. Really? You don’t find that analogy in the Bible. He is Lord, benevolent, protective, supplying Lord, and we are gladly his slave. But we never identify ourselves as a prisoner of Jesus Christ because that’s involuntary.

We’re not locked up by him, we’re set free by him. So what does Paul mean, that I’m a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles? What he means is this. He wound up in prison preaching this message, that’s what he means. He wound up in prison for preaching this message. The idea of unity is so hard for the Jews to accept that basically they ran Paul right into the arms of Roman authority, and the Romans took him all the way to execution. And it wasn’t about some over-defined doctrine, it was because he preached the Jew and the Gentile were one.

This was completely unacceptable to them. Now remember, Paul was a well-known leader in Judaism before he was saved. He was commissioned by the Jewish leaders to go and arrest Christians, put them in prison, and he had papers, official papers, to even take their life. He was a murderer and a blasphemer, he was a persecutor of Christians. And on the Damascus road, the Lord stops him and saves him. But his reputation is so widespread that he is a frightening figure. And eventually, after three years in Nabataean Arabia, not far away from Jerusalem to the south, the Lord spends three years teaching him and refining him before he finally goes to Jerusalem.

And when he goes, and it’s been three years since he persecuted anybody, some of the people in Jerusalem are terrified of him, and he has to have Barnabas go in to soften up the crowd, because his reputation has been so horrendous. Well, they finally accepted him. And he gave his report, and his report was all about salvation of the Gentiles. By this time he had even pastored a church in a Gentile city, Antioch, according to Acts chapter 11. All of his missionary journeys, there were three major missionary journeys. All three of them were into Gentile areas to establish churches among the Gentiles that included the Jews.

He went to whatever town he went to, he started with the synagogue to see if the Jews would respond to the Gospel. And then, once he had made an effort to bring the Jews into the knowledge of Christ through the Gospel, he would go after the Gentiles and establish church made up of Jew and Gentile. The synagogues were hostile to him. They were probably more hostile to him in many cases than the Gentiles were. After all these missionary journeys, and after his experience as a pastor up in Antioch, he finally came to the city of Jerusalem in Acts 15.

And he gave a report to the church council on the conversion of all these Gentiles. Why did he go to the Gentiles? Because when he was converted on the Damascus road in Acts 9, the Lord said to him, I’m sending you to the Gentiles. He repeats that in his testimony in Acts 26, look, the Lord sent me to the Gentiles. He is the apostle to the Gentiles, and his job is to tell Gentiles and Jews that they are one in Christ in a new man, a new being, a new entity, a new organism, the body of Christ.

He defends that unity in Galatians, he defends that unity in Ephesians, he defends that unity in Philippians, because it’s so hard to sell. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of sacrifice for unity. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].