Quoting from the 3rd chapter of letter of Paul to the Ephesians, verses 1-12, this was first given at the Lynnville (IL) UMC on January 04, 2004, and again at the Hartford (IL) East Maple Street Chapel on June 07, 2009… The manuscript, by itself, was also posted on this website several years ago…

       I don’t like mysteries! Or, rather I should say I don’t like unsolved mysteries… I want to know the answer to everything! That’s one reason that I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’s stories… I can really appreciate his step-by-step observations and consequent deductions, and often try to emulate them in my own life.

For example, I remember talking to a friend one time on her cell phone when she commented that her battery was getting low. I chanced to call again some time later and she managed to tell me that she was still where she had been before the phone went stone dead. When she called me back about ten minutes later she was astonished when I answered, “Ahh, you went out to the car and plugged the phone in!” It was no great feat of deduction on my part to reason that if she was still at the same location as before she had not had a chance to charge up the phone and that it had gone dead… and that if she were talking to me just a few minutes later that she must have gotten to the nearest charger, which most likely was her car. Yet that simple bit of reasoning took her completely by surprise! As Sherlock himself sometimes surmised, the results of ones reasoning may seem astonishing until one explains how simply they are arrived at. The trick is, however, to look for those simple explanations and be open to them!

I had a couple of games that were very popular as I was growing up… one of which professed to use ultra-modern technology (For the time!) to solve ‘crimes’, while the other pretended to use ‘voodoo’ to answer various questions. I don’t remember the name of that one, but the game board consisted of a plastic cauldron attached in the middle into which you would put a stick and ‘stir the pot’, saying something like Shakespeare’s, “Trouble, trouble, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” You would then ask your question and swing this plastic skull hanging from a plastic limb around the board until it would start ‘jumping’ and finally come down to touch on one of the answers printed on the board! Mysterious, right? Well, it didn’t take long for me to determine that the ‘skull’ must have a magnet in it… and if that were the case then there must be a corresponding magnet that was moved around the board as you stirred the cauldron. With that as a clue, it took even less time to be able to ‘see’ where the piece was under the cardboard, and learn to stop it at whatever answer you wanted!

The other game was called ‘Lie Detector’, and consisted of this plastic ‘machine’ and decks of question, solution and suspect cards. A solution card was placed into the machine in such a manner so as to not let any of the players see it. Then each person would pick a suspect from their group of cards, insert it into the machine and then insert one of the true-or-false question cards. The player would then insert a metal probe into the corresponding hole in the top of the machine and press. If the answer was yes, a large needle on the machine would move and point to ‘true’… if not, the needle would point to false and a loud bell would ding… just in case you missed the needle moving! Since this was before the days of electronics being everywhere, you had to reset a spring-loaded lever to reactivate the bell each time you got a false answer… and since most of the answers were false, you had to reset it an awful lot during each game… which was a pain! So we soon learned that if you didn’t press so hard on the probe, you could see the needle start to move towards ‘false’ and stop pushing before it went down far enough to set off the bell. From that, it didn’t take much more to look down into the holes and see just what was happening. The card with the name of the guilty person, which was inserted at the beginning of the game, had a series of holes punched in it. Each suspect and question card also had holes punched in them at various places. When you inserted all of the cards into the machine and looked down into the holes from the top, you could see that some of them lined up. If you put the probe into the holes that lined up, it would go through and push on a plate that caused the needle to move towards ‘true’… if the holes did not line up, the probe would be stopped by whichever card didn’t have a hole and you would push the whole thing down until it set off the bell. Thus, with a little practice you could just put in the different cards one at a time, look down the holes to see which ones lined up and figure out who the guilty person was without ever even touching the probe or resetting the bell! Another mystery solved!

Indeed, one could say that for all intents and purposes, most of my professional life has been spent in the pursuit of solving mysteries! Before the days of plugging your car or tractor into a computer and letting it tell you where the problem is, mechanics had to determine for themselves just what the ailment might be, as well as how best to fix it… and the really good ones would also try to figure out why it did it and how to prevent it from doing it again… and I am proud to say that I was considered to be one of the really good ones. Armed with boxes of gauges, hoses and adapters, as well as all kinds of electrical and electronic testing equipment, I would soon have more diagnostic hookups to a tractor or combine than a person in intensive care! And like someone in intensive care, some problems were easy to find and repair, while others were far more elusive! And while the computers that I work on today are far smaller… and much less greasy… the same basic ideas of testing and analyzing still apply.

Obviously, I tend to approach life in a similar manner… trying to reason out all that I see around me and not accepting mysteries. And… as you might also guess… this sometimes works… and sometimes doesn’t! These verses talk about one of the more elusive of life’s mysteries.

The Life Application Commentary tells us that, “Paul had been arrested in Jerusalem and, eventually, had been imprisoned because he took a stand for the equality of Jews and Gentiles as Christians (believers in Christ). The Jewish antagonists saw Paul’s teaching as radical and destructive to temple practices. Thus, Paul was writing here that he had been imprisoned for the sake of Gentiles. The religious leaders in Jerusalem, who felt scandalized by Jesus’ teachings and didn’t believe he was the Messiah, pressured the Romans to arrest Paul and bring him to trial for treason and for causing rebellion among the Jews. Paul had appealed for his case to be heard by the emperor, and he was awaiting trial.

The noted psychotherapist Viktor Frankl maintained that people can endure any “what” as long as they have a “why.” He spoke with credibility — he had survived the Holocaust. Paul suffered greatly for his outspoken faith in Jesus, referring to himself as “the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles.” How could Paul persevere in the face of such suffering? He had a “why” for the “what.” Paul knew that his life was in God’s hands and that nothing had come into his life that had not first passed through nail-scarred hands.”

Paul then takes a moment to be sure they understand just why he is on the side of the Gentiles… a moment to briefly explain the ‘mystery of Christ!’ Quoting from Barnes’ Notes, “This does not refer to anything “mysterious” in the person of Christ; or the union of the divine and human nature in him; or to anything difficult of apprehension in the work of the atonement. It refers to the hitherto concealed doctrine that through the Messiah, the Gentiles were to be received to the same privileges as the Jews, and that the plan of salvation was to be made equally free for all. This great truth had been concealed up to this point, or, at best, only partially understood, and Paul says that he was appointed to make it known to the world.”

A mystery! I don’t know about you, but I have sometimes wondered why the world runs the way it does. I mean, doesn’t God have any better control over things than it appears? Let me read this from the Life Application Commentary; “The God, “who created all things”, has always been in control of his creation. The plan of salvation… the mystery of the church, and the revelation of his wisdom across all the realms of creation… will occur according to the eternal purpose. God’s plan did not arise as an emergency measure when Adam sinned; it did not occur because God somehow lost control. God has always been in control, and his eternal purposes will always be accomplished. The central theme of this letter is God’s great work of joining Jews and Gentiles together in a unified body — the church. God could only accept sinful people through a sacrifice that would cover their sins. Jesus Christ gave that sacrifice — himself — through his death on the cross. In Christ Jesus our Lord, God accomplished the plan he had prepared before the world began.” Furthermore, according to Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “We have not merely been saved that we might escape hell; we have been saved in order that God may present a people which will astonish the whole world.”

In verses 7 – 9, reading from The Living Bible, Paul says that, “God has given me the wonderful privilege of telling everyone about this plan of his; and he has given me his power and special ability to do it well.

Just think! Though I did nothing to deserve it, and though I am the most useless Christian there is, yet I was the one chosen for this special joy of telling the Gentiles the Glad News of the endless treasures available to them in Christ; and to explain to everyone that God is the Savior of the Gentiles too, just as he who made all things had secretly planned from the very beginning.”

In many ways, I’ve often felt that God has also “given me the wonderful privilege of telling everyone about this plan of his; and that he has given me his power and special ability to do it well.” And like Paul, I generally feel as if “I did nothing to deserve it… that I may well be, sometimes, the most useless Christian there is…”  And yet the truth is that each and every one of us has been “chosen for this special joy of telling the Gentiles… our friends and family and neighbors and co-workers… the Glad News of the endless treasures available to them in Christ; and to explain to everyone that God is the Savior of we Gentiles too… just as he who made all things had secretly planned from the very beginning!”

The Life Application Commentary says, “That the Gentiles being included in God’s grace is called a mystery. This “mystery” was a plan at one time hidden but now revealed. The mystery was hidden, not because only a few could understand it, but because it was hidden until Christ came. God had made this mystery known to Paul by revelation. A “revelation” is a direct communication from God. Paul had refused to believe in Christ and had persecuted anyone who did. God got hold of Paul and made known to him… through personal revelation… that Jesus Christ truly was the promised Messiah of the Jews… and the light to the Gentiles as well. Both Jews and Gentiles would be included in the church.”

Regardless of how hopeless things may seem on occasion… regardless of how chaotic the world might appear, or how out-of-sync things might be… the ‘mystery’ that we seem to see is only in us! There is no mystery to God! He has a plan… the same plan that He has had from the beginning of time. And even though we may not always be aware of what it is… the only real mystery is why we can’t just simply trust Him enough to believe… to believe in Him… to believe in His plan… and to believe in ourselves enough to take our part in it! After all… His Son believed in it enough to become one of us and die on the cross… just how much, exactly, is He asking you to do!!!