Living Beyond Our Means

Text: Ephesians 3:1-13 (The Message)

Focus: How the Holy Spirit draws us to Christ and empowers us.

Function: To get people thinking about the Holy Spirit IN THEM

Form: expository (sort of)

Intro:

If you get a chance to take a course such as “Introduction to the New Testament” in a Bible college or a seminary, you will learn that the book of Ephesians is placed into the category of “Prison Epistles.”

They were written by the Apostle Paul during one of the times he was in jail because of his faith.

In this chapter, Brother Paul is trying to comfort the Christians in Ephesus about the fact that he is in prison.

Paul is like their father. He has suffered much on their behalf. There have been many times, when after he laid his own life on the line for them that people became petty or jealous or legalistic and abandoned him.

Yet he kept on with his work and here he is, in prison, writing a letter to one of his favorite churches and although he is suffering, he is more concerned about how they are doing that his own plight.

(SHOW) The Holy Spirit gives us power to love.

I find that love and devotion to be incredible. Most of us, if we were in prison because of the politics of religion would want, or be tempted to be bitter, angry, sullen and depressed. I find this out about pain, sickness and suffering, when a person has a nagging condition, a headache, a backache, a toothache, the pain keeps us from focusing on what we are doing. It distracts us and causes us to think more of ourselves than we normally would.

So, for this man, this leader, this apostle, the “sort of” father, to these people to forgo complaining about his own condition and to work at comforting them is really pretty amazing.

Actually, he is living beyond his means. I don’t mean he is spending more money that he actually makes, using credit excessively and is headed for a financial breakdown. No, I mean, He is living beyond human ability.

In this context only, for the sake of this sermon: (SHOW) “Living beyond our means” means that we are living beyond our human ability by the power of the Holy Spirit

By walking with God, he is able to do much more than anyone can do by themselves, in their own power.

So, let’s look at this passage and see what God did in him that God also wants to do in us. There are several things:

(SHOW) The Holy Spirit reveals mysteries to us:

• In verse 2 he tells them that they remember the fact that all this theology, this understanding of the Christian faith, the way that everyone, not just one race are also included into God’s family came to him by a divine revelation from God.
• Moses was not God, but he went up onto the mountain for 40 days and God dictated to him the law. Then, as a proof, God wrote the 10 commandments onto a piece of stone.
• We don’t know what it must have been like for him. We know he was there 40 days without food or water and he came down the mountain healthier than he went up it.
• The bible says that when he came down, he radiated the glory of God on his face.
• I remember there was this one televangelist who used to paint a silver sheen across his face so that people thought that he too had this divine aura about him. That evangelist turned out to be a major fraud.
• But it was real in Moses.
• Paul didn’t have the shining face, but God gave this revelation to Paul. Moses told the people that Jesus would come and establish a new covenant with God’s people, a New Testament. And Jesus told the apostles in the 14^th chapter of John that there was much more truth they needed to understand and teach and the Holy Spirit would come and teach them.
• God was speaking through the authors of the scriptures to reveal the mysteries of His nature, will and power to us.
• And the Holy Spirit still does that today: (SHOW) “…you'll be able to see for yourselves into the mystery of Christ. None of our ancestors understood this. Only in our time has it been made clear by God's Spirit…”
• The mystery of it all is wonderful.
• We may not get all the answers, but we understand that in mystery, it is the work of God.
• Last Sunday afternoon, mom asked me something, a question raised in her Sunday school class.
• She asked me about what happens to be one of my favorite verses in the entire bible, from 2 Corinthians 5:
• “He (Jesus) who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ.”
• God is a person, a being, a real live spiritual, and in the case of Christ, physical entity.
• So how can a person: Jesus, become a thing: Sin?
• As we understand it, it is impossible but then, we are not God.
• Jesus Christ became sin for us.
• When Jesus died on the cross, sin died.
• Well why does sin still exist?
• I don’t know, but I do know this, its power over believers is broken. Jesus’ death has forgiven our sins, all of them, the ones in the past, the ones today and the ones we have yet to commit.
• Sin’s only power is death. God said to Adam before Eve was created, don’t touch the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. The very day you touch it, you will die.
• Well, they ate it and didn’t fall over dead. Was God lying? Or faking them out?
• No. They did die. Because on that day, they became sinners and there was no escaping the destiny of death for them.
• The Bible says, we are born “dead in our sins”
• And 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that the power of sin is death and that its power is broken when Jesus rose from the dead.
• It’s a mystery, it is hard to understand but the Holy Spirit is there to make us see it.
• The passage says that the ancient people didn’t comprehend what it all meant, because the Holy Spirit was only in the prophets. People didn’t understand it.

(SHOW) The Holy Spirit works inside of us to bring others to him.

• He makes 2 references to the mystery: the first, we understood that we cannot save ourselves and that God did it for us.
• “The ancestors” didn’t get it and failed miserably at keeping all the commands of the law.
• The second is that God was using him beyond his means, beyond his human ability to share the good news with people who were from cultures, religions and philosophies very different from his own.
• We know that he was a real academic scholar in the Jewish Law.
• I had a parishioner who actually memorized the entire New Testament.
• Don’t be ashamed, or amazed, he had a mild form of Autism that gave him that ability.
• But it was common for those ancient scholars to memorize the entire Old Testament. The OT is well over twice the size of the New Testament.
• Paul was steeped only in the culture of his people, which was really all that he cared about when he was growing up.
• Before God got a hold of him and changed his plans, he meant to serve the people by becoming an expert in their religion.
• But look at verses 7-8: (SHOW) ^7-8”This is my life work: helping people understand and respond to this Message. It came as a sheer gift to me, a real surprise, God handling all the details. When it came to presenting the Message to people who had no background in God's way, I was the least qualified of any of the available Christians. God saw to it that I was equipped, but you can be sure that it had nothing to do with my natural abilities.”
• He was living beyond human means in the power of the Holy Spirit.
• Several people in my last church in Lancaster County, PA were raised either Amish or Horse and Buggy Mennonite:
• One of my favorite parishioners, Ralph Auker, a kind, gentle, short in stature, peaceable fellow told me several stories of how God, by the power of the Holy Spirit moved in his life beyond what he grew up learning.
• When he turned 16, his father bought him his own team of horses, his own brand-new buggy and 2 new changes of clothes so that he could go courting an Amish gal.
• He took the horses and the buggy, sold them and bought a motorcycle.
• That landed him out of favor with the order and he came to our Church were he received Christ as his personal savior, got saved, and then led his brother’s family to the lord in that church as well.
• Ralph was 5’4” and went from an horse and buggy plain person to a semi truck driver.
• One of the things from the old tradition he was raised in was that he continued to wear the special hat. In their order, and Matt Fahrnbach would understand this, it would be called a “bowler” with narrow upturned rim.
• So, although he wasn’t plain dressed, he was noticeable.
• He was sitting in a Pilot truck stop, the biggest one in the country on Highway 80 just as one crosses into Iowa from Illinois. He was drinking coffee with some other truckers, he often introduced himself to them because he worked with “Transport For Christ” a ministry to lonely truck drivers.
• So one day, while talking with a bunch of truck drivers, a motorcycle gang came into the truck stop.
• They were a rough and scary looking group of guys.
• The truckers all looked down on them, but Ralph went over the biggest and meanest looking one of them, sat down, bought him a cup of coffee and shared his faith in Christ with him.
• He told me that afterwards, the other truckers told him they were just snickering at what they saw because he was this small, timid and plain looking fellow sitting in the midst of danger and was as calm and collected as could be.
• I don’t know if the biker got saved, but eventually, many of these truckers came to know Christ because of his witness.

(SHOW) This is not natural for us. It is beyond human ability.

I think of:

• Zach Patterson, right now he is in Liberia, out in a remote place in a completely different culture sharing his faith with strangers and I realize that this is what happens when the Holy Spirit comes inside a person.
• The man that lived across the street from my last church was a non-practicing Roman Catholic:
• One day, he asked me about my hope and I explained to him what the scripture says about being transformed, being “born again.”
• My friend added a personal relationship with Jesus Christ to his Catholic faith.
• One day he called me, very excited because he was at the garage that he rented with 4 other friends and the subject of Jesus came up.
• And he said, “all of a sudden, I felt something inside of me and I just started talking to them about what Jesus had done for me.

Brother Paul said it like this in the passage: (SHOW) “…it had nothing to do with my natural abilities…. …All this is proceeding along lines planned all along by God and then executed in Christ Jesus. When we trust in him, we're free to say whatever needs to be said, bold to go wherever we need to go.”

(FIRST SERVICE) We are empowered to go.

(SECOND SERVICE) We are free and empowered to go. Earlier, we sang the song: “All For You” everyday, I want to be the reflection of your love…”

(BOTH SERVICES)

Paul certainly demonstrates it in the way he cares for them while in prison, and the way he cares for others by faithfully sharing his faith.

We have the same power of the Holy Spirit in us and God expects us to use it for him.

You/we don’t have to be high and mighty, just available to God.