The Text: Ephesians 3
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, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.
So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in your inner being, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith — that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Introduction: The Most Unlikely Person
When God does a new thing, he tends to choose the most unlikely person to do it. In the 18th century, when God wanted to reach the smugglers of Cornwall and the hard-living miners of Bristol, he went to Oxford and took hold of a scholar — John Wesley. God has been sending white missionaries to black people for a long time; the day is coming when he will send black missionaries to England to win white people for Christ.
And when God wanted to bring the Gentiles in — those outside the pale as far as the Jews were concerned — he went for the most fanatical Jew he could lay his hands on: Saul of Tarsus, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a man who would not sit at the same table with a Gentile. God arrested him on his way to arrest Christians. And he was in custody forever afterwards — a prisoner of the Lord Jesus Christ. You can hear the chains clanking as he writes this letter.
And here is the most Jewish Jew of all, saying: to me God told his great secret. He has a tremendous sense of bursting to share it. Even his name is interesting — his parents named him Saul, after Israel’s first king, from the same tribe of Benjamin. But in Greek, Saul becomes Paul. Here is a man prepared to move from a Jewish identity to a Gentile one — an astonishing change in itself.
A Prisoner and a Steward
Paul describes himself as a prisoner for the Gentiles and a steward of God’s grace. A steward is a manager of someone else’s property — not the owner, but the one entrusted with distributing it well. Paul says: I am a steward of God’s grace. I manage his generosity. He has put me in charge of distributing his wealth.
If someone handed you a cheque for a million pounds and said, go and give that away to those in need, would you not be thrilled? That is the privilege Paul describes — and it is a privilege you can exercise wherever you are, even in chains, even in a prison cell. Paul prayed on his knees, chained to a Roman soldier who had no choice but to stand there through it all. That is why Paul could write: those of Caesar’s household salute you. You can be a steward of God’s grace in any circumstance.
The Secret
Paul calls it a mystery — but the word is better translated secret: God’s secret, which can now be told. Like the British Official Secrets Act, which held certain matters back for twenty-five years before they could be shared, God kept his secret for generations, hidden all the way through the history of the Jews. He then revealed it to the apostles and prophets of the New Testament — first to Peter, then to Paul, then to the others.
What is the secret? That Gentiles can now come to God apart from the Jews — directly, not through Israel. In the Old Testament, the nations were always pictured coming to Jerusalem to find God through the Jews. But now Paul reveals: a person seeking God does not need to join Israel, does not need circumcision, does not need to keep the ceremonial law. They can come straight to God through Jesus, who is himself the seed of Abraham — and that is all the connection to Abraham a Gentile now needs.
Paul uses three words to describe the new equality: Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the same promise. That last word — partakers — means literally to eat together. Pawson illustrates the difference between friendship and fellowship: friendship is eating separate sandwiches in each other’s company; fellowship is sharing the same loaf. Jews would not even share a cup with Samaritans — as the woman at the well discovered when Jesus asked her for a drink. Now Jews and Gentiles share the same promise, the same loaf, the same table.
Paul had to fight for this principle all his life. Wherever he preached, Jewish Christians would follow and insist that Gentile converts be circumcised. He called them dogs, and wrote the whole letter to the Galatians to defend this one truth. It was this very secret — that Gentiles could come to God without becoming Jews — that landed Paul in prison. He was in chains because he was accused of bringing Gentiles to God.
Sharing the Secret
A secret worth keeping is a secret worth sharing — that is the nature of good news. Pawson illustrates this with the joy of sharing good news with a grieving mother, and with children bursting to share the secret that a famous visitor was coming to tea. When you have genuinely good news, you cannot keep quiet about it.
If Paul had gone to the Gentiles as a Jew doing them a favour, he would have gone in a spirit of patronage. Instead he says: I am a debtor. I owe it to them to tell them. That is the true spirit of evangelism — not a sense of doing others a favour, but a sense of owing them the news, and counting it the greatest privilege to be allowed to share it.
Made a Minister
Paul says he was made a minister — and there is one career you cannot simply choose for yourself. You can choose to be a butcher, a baker, an architect. You cannot choose to be a minister of God’s grace; only God can make one. It requires two things: a gift of God’s grace and a working of God’s power — because you have neither the gifts nor the power to minister by yourself.
What was Paul made a minister to preach? The unsearchable riches of Christ — the inexhaustible wealth. Pawson recalls being asked, before a ministerial recognition committee, whether he thought he could keep up the demand of preparing two sermons a week for years on end. But the riches of Christ are truly inexhaustible: you could preach for seventy years and still have material left over, still have the problem of what to leave out rather than what to put in.
The Purpose: To Make All Men See
Why all this preaching? To make all men see the plan God has. Literally, Paul says: to turn on the light so that people can see. Preaching is lamp-lighting. And what is the plan they are meant to see? That God is uniting all people in Christ — Gentiles, Jews, black, white, rich, poor, East, West. And how is this plan being shown to the world? Through the church.
Those who talk of being Christian without the church are talking through their heads — the church is God’s visual aid, the place where people see his plan fulfilled. People who would normally never mix together become one in Christ: fellow heirs, sharers of the same loaf, members of the same body. That is where the manifold — literally, many-coloured — wisdom of God is displayed.
Three Ways the Mystery Is Revealed
1. Hidden in the Creator
Some suggest that God only turned to the Gentiles as an afterthought, once the Jews had rejected Christ. But Ephesians 3 makes clear this was always his plan — hidden in God before the foundation of the world. He went to the Jews first, then to the Gentiles, and — as Paul puts it in Romans, using gardening language — Israel has been cut off from its own root for now, and the Gentiles have been grafted in to share the same root. One day, Israel will be grafted back in, and all will be one in Christ. God has not changed his mind; he knew it all along.
2. Revealed Through the Church
The church is where the plan becomes visible — not an optional extra to Christianity, but its visual demonstration. It is where Jews and Gentiles, and people of every class, culture and colour, are seen coming together in Christ.
3. Observed by the Angels
Pawson draws attention to a striking detail: angels are watching. God is making known his wisdom, through the church, to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This is why, in worship, we join ’with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.’ It is why Paul cared about how people dressed in church — because of the angels. When the angels see Jew and Gentile, every class and culture, coming together in Christ, they understand God’s plan for the first time. We are witnesses not only to earth, but to heaven — and that should produce in us a deep sense of responsibility.
Preaching and Prayer
All of this gives great confidence. God’s plan, formed in eternity, has been realised in time through Jesus Christ. You may stop a man preaching, but you cannot stop him praying — you may shut his mouth as far as men are concerned, but not as far as God is concerned. The two great means God uses to fulfil his purposes are preaching and prayer: one declares the plan, the other releases the power to fulfil it. Where these two are strong in a church, that church will be strong.
Paul, now unable to travel and preach widely, turns to prayer: I bow my knees for this reason. This is the simple, multiplying plan of evangelism — one person tells another, then prays that the other will tell someone else. If each person brought just one other person to Christ each year, and those two did the same the following year, within five years there would not be a single unconverted person left in the town. It is a simple method: preach, and pray that those who hear will pass it on.
Praying to the Father
Paul prays kneeling — a physical attitude that helps a mental one. And he prays to the Father, not merely to a transcendent, infinite deity stacked with theological adjectives, but to Father — as a child comes to a parent. Some call this anthropomorphism — thinking of God in human terms — but Pawson turns the idea around: man is made in God’s image, so when we are most human, we are being most God-like. Every family on earth, with a father, mother and children who love one another, is a small reflection of what God’s plan for the ages has always been.
Five Things Paul Prays For
You learn more about a person from their prayers than their preaching. Paul prays five specific things for the Ephesians — worth examining when we pray for others.
1. Strength in the Inner Man
We often pray for people’s outer needs — health, food, shelter — and neglect the inner man: a strong conscience, a strong will, a convinced mind, a loving heart. The outer man will one day pass away; the inner man endures. Even outward weakness can be borne if the inner man is strong.
2. That Christ May Be at Home in Your Hearts
Not simply that Christ indwells you, but that he may feel at home there — comfortable, welcome. That requires real self-examination: is your heart the kind of home he can feel at home in?
3. Rooted and Grounded
Like a gardener carefully spreading the roots of a rose tree and treading the soil firm before the beauty comes later, Paul prays for established, lasting faith — not a burst of enthusiasm followed by chronic inertia, but a life still bearing witness forty years on.
4. Enlarged
One danger of the Christian life is becoming small and narrow — many old interests must be dropped, and new ones must grow in their place, or life shrinks. Paul prays that they may explore the breadth, length, height and depth of Christ’s love, which surpasses knowledge. A small mind learns all it wants to know in the first year and stops growing; a big soul says, I am only paddling in the shallows of a mighty ocean.
5. Filled with All the Fullness of God
Pawson recalls visiting an exhibition on atomic energy and learning that even the tiniest atom is itself a kind of universe. In the same way, God can take a tiny human life and pack into it the fullness of himself. But to be filled with all his fullness, you must first be emptied of everything else.
Exceeding Abundantly (Verses 20–21)
Paul uses nearly every New Testament word for power in this short letter — except one: violence. Every other kind of power is there, but never that one. Now to him who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.
Why do we not see more of this power at work? Two simple reasons: we do not ask, and we do not think — we cannot imagine it happening. Pawson counsels: never pray outside your faith. Ask for what you can genuinely imagine God doing, and let him stretch that faith further each time. He tells of a stagnant church that prayed specifically for a 10% increase in membership over a year — and received exactly that. Their reaction afterward: why did we not ask for 20%?
God is able to do far more, but he has chosen to work through our asking and our thinking. Many of our prayers go unanswered simply because, even as we asked, we did not really believe it would happen.
The Glory Belongs to Him
When God answers, the glory must go to him alone — not to ministers, leaders, or church members. It is his doing, however marvellous it appears in our eyes. As Christ gave all glory to the Father for everything he accomplished, so must the church.
Closing Prayer
Father, we’ve asked you for things in this place and you did them. Our imagination is so limited — we realise how closely faith is linked to imagination. Lord, as we move forward, help us ask exceeding abundantly above all that we’ve asked, and think exceeding abundantly above all that we’ve thought, that you may be able to do exceeding abundantly. And to you we shall give all the glory and the praise. Father, thank you for sharing with us your secret, and for the thrill of taking good news to others that will cheer their hearts. Help us to go out and win others, not because we have to, but because we can’t help it — because we feel debtors to those who don’t yet know that you love them. To you be the glory in Christ Jesus, and in the church, for ever and ever. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
Listen to the original teaching at davidpawson.org
© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu