1. The Mystery of Paul, the Prisoner-Apostle

This is the second segment of my sermon entitled, "The Mystery of Christ".

1. The Mystery of Paul, the Prisoner-Apostle

(Eph 3:1-2) "For this reason, I, Paul, a prisoner for 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."

-An ambassador in prison? Imagine meeting Paul in the prison in Rome. Where do you usually meet ambassadors for a great monarch? In embassies, with nice clothes and honored by people. And where is Paul? In prison. He chooses the lowly things of the world to shame the wise.

Perhaps you have something in your past for which you feel ashamed, perhaps it's a circumstance over which you have no control (someone in jail, a loved one suffering terrible), perhaps you have debilitating circumstances of some kind that make you think God could never use you to reach others. God loves to choose the weak things of the world to shame the strong, and the things that are not, to shame the things that are. Paul was a mysterious contradiction like all of us. I've got my prisons and I'm sure you do too.

-Paul, once Saul, is now a prisoner of Christ for the Gentiles? God gave HIM a special stewardship to the Gentiles! Do you see the irony of Paul being chosen as an apostle to the Gentiles? He was of the strictest sect of the Pharisees! Saul who used to persecute even Jews who believed in Jesus as their messiah would not have been very fond of Gentiles, and yet the mystery of it, God chose him to be an ambassador to the Gentiles and even to suffer greatly in prison in order to get the gospel to them.

In the same way you may have been chained to some sin, before you became a Christian that you think completely disqualifies you from ever helping anyone else with a similar problem. (Maybe it was addiction to drugs, or alcohol, or you harbored antagonism to people of other races, or you were so proud and sure of yourself that you looked down on everyone else, or maybe you were so absorbed in your work that you sacrificed you family on the altar of your ambition, or whatever other kind of idolatry it was; I'm much more worried about those of you who can't think of one than those of you that can. God may want to send you exactly because you are an unlikely candidate to be a witness to other of the mystery of how he changed you. He wants your life, like the apostle Paul's, to be a mystery that points to Jesus.

-"For this reason" points back to the end of chapter 2, which speaks of the building up the church. The funny thing is that God appoints Paul to build up the very church he once tried to destroy. In Galatians Paul says that people in Judea were hearing this news about the apostle Paul, and do you know what their response was, they praised God because of him! And so I have to ask you this question. Does the mystery of God's grace in calling some of the worst people imaginable make you rejoice and praise God? Or are we more like Jonah running away from God's call because really don't want to see God grant repentance to those people of Nineveh? Is this the reason deep down that you're not sharing the gospel with that man who gets drunk down the hall, or with the angry atheist woman, or whoever it is.

-A stewardship of God's grace - Paul is not the ultimate authority, he is manifestly being broken in the service of God, chained as a criminal. He is weak so that God might be strong. This is what it means to be God's messenger, and it is mysterious indeed. As Paul says, we have this treasure in jars of clay, earthen vessels, in order to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. And this mystery is marvelously shown in the life of the Prisoner-Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul formerly known as Saul. And yet this is the mystery that has always been at work, in Joseph being thrown into a pit and sold as a slave, or think of Gideon and his three-hundred men, or that God used Samson, who didn't actually look strong because his strength was a mystery to everyone, so that it was clear that he was empowered by the Spirit of God, or in the fact that salvation came into the world through a baby born in a feeding trough in a back water town of the mighty Roman empire, and then grew up as a poor carpenter, who went to the cross to die a criminal's death.