The Manifold Wisdom of God

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Well, let me, if your family has not told you Happy Mother's Day, that's probably bad news that I'm the first one saying it, but Happy Mother's Day. We are glad that you guys are here. And, you know, mothers, there's a saying among mothers that I've heard in hush whispers and, you know, not for my ears, that the days are long and the years are short, and that in being a mother, that there's a sense in which, you know, there's like, is it 1030 already, you know? Is it 1030 at night? Like, it feels like the, or 1030's more, it feels like the day is so long, it feels like it's kind of just been dragging on, but then before you know it, you know, you're bringing them up here for Senior Sunday and you're praying over them. Like, it's a very quick, quick time. So, happy, Happy Mother's Day. We have a gift for moms. We have all of those flowers that are out there. They're all fresh cut flowers, they're all beautiful.

If you are a woman at all, okay, we want you to have a flower, okay? So, if you are a woman, if you're a guy, you should not get a flower, okay? Don't do it. If it's for a woman, you can do it, but just be careful, okay? Don't, make sure everybody knows you're doing it. And so, Happy Mother's Day. We're excited, we're glad that you're here. Let us turn to Ephesians chapter three, where we're gonna be today.

We are gonna continue our series on Ephesians. We're going through the whole year on Ephesians. Last week, we talked about God's provision. Talked about God's provision kind of a couple of different ways. And one of the ways we talked about it was that it was mystical. And so, sometimes when we talk about God's provision, God will provide things for us. He'll provide strength for us. He'll provide words to us. He'll provide healing for us. And these things cannot be kind of quantified or measured in any capacity. They're just kind of given in the moment at the right time. It's not about prep. It's not about, it just happens, okay? God provides mystically. God also provides, we talked about this last week, he talks about, he provides, and how we are created. So he talks, he provides for us in how we are created. So he provides for us in our personality type, in our life experiences, in our particular histories,

in our proclivities, in our perspectives. God provides for us in those ways, okay? And in doing that, in looking at how God has made you, it helps you understand what he has created you to do, or specifically, how he has created you to do it, okay? And there's another category of provision that I wanna look at today that God gives, and we touched on it just a little bit last week, but I wanna jump into it further this week, and we can see it in Ephesians chapter three, verse 10.

So we've been talking about God's provision. God kind of, he provided all these things. And then here we have a so that. So that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, okay? There's a lot in this verse. I'm gonna be talking a lot about this verse. We're gonna get to the next couple of verses in a minute, but in Ephesians 3:10, there's just a whole lot to unpack here, and I wanna begin with this idea of manifold wisdom, okay?

This word, manifold wisdom, it's actually a really interesting word. I don't bust out the Greek every time, but I will bust it out here. It's polypoicalos. Polypoicalos, it's a very interesting word. Normally in the Greek, you have a ton of words that are just poicalos, right? So the word poicalos appears in the New Testament half a dozen times, maybe a dozen times. And it means that it is multifaceted or diversified or complicated or deep, okay? That's what poicalos means. Polypoicalos means extremely complicated, extremely multifaceted, and it's only, that word, polypoicalos, is only used once in the New Testament. It's used here, and it's translated in, Ephesians 3:10, as manifold, okay? Many-layered, deep, okay? Multifaceted, it is a wisdom of rich variety. It is infinite, it is boundless, okay? So we're talking about the infinite wisdom of God. When I play a board game, okay,

when I play a board game, if somebody says, hey, we're gonna play a board game, it's gonna be a lot of fun, and I'm learning it, and I did actually this weekend, I learned a board game. And if somebody has, if we're starting to learn that board game, and somebody brings out a book that's more than like four pages, I'm out. Okay, instantly, I'm out. I'm like, okay, I didn't, this is not English Lit, okay? It's a board game, and that's all I want. I just wanna play a board game. And admittedly, that is a pretty low tolerance, okay? I know other people, you know, they're six or eight pages and they're still fine.

But if it comes in a packet, right, if I have to take a class to learn how to play the board game, I am immediately out. And some of you out there, God bless you, you wanna read every single rule, you know who you are, you want, I mean, some of you, your spouses are looking dead at you, your family's looking dead at you, you feel it, it's okay, you are guilty.

You need to read every rule, that's not me, okay? Now when it comes to spirituality, when it comes to spirituality, sometimes we can be very similar, right? If you can't explain it to me in two minutes, if you can't show me a YouTube, if there's not like a Bible video on it, then you're out, right? It's too complicated, it's too sorry, it's just too much, I can't really do it. And what's running in the background of that is insecurity, like it's just so, it's too difficult, I don't wanna look dumb, I don't know as much as you Drew, or whoever's kind of talking about this complicated thing in scripture, I don't wanna know about that, I can't know about that, you kind of shut down, kind of like I do with a lot of instructions in a board game. And so the question then becomes like, if this is God's polypoicalis wisdom, his many-sided, extremely complicated, very deep wisdom,

how is that going to be made known through the church? How's it gonna be made known through the church? And if you've been reading Ephesians, right, one through three 10, right, if you're kind of reading through the book of Ephesians, it might come as a surprise to say that God is gonna have his manifold wisdom, that he's gonna kind of push that through the church. But it's actually many other places in scripture. Jesus, whenever he's praying for his disciples in John 17, it's a very interesting prayer. Look at verses 20 and 21, it's up here. It says, I do not ask for these only, meaning the disciples that are physically in front of him. Okay, so he's saying, I'm praying, I'm praying but not for these only, but also, look at who, for those who will believe in me through their word, that's me and you. Okay, so not just for the disciples that are in front of me,

but for the people that they will disciple, and the people that they will disciple, and the people that they will disciple, okay? So Jesus is praying for us, right here, verse 21. What's he praying? That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are, and me, and I, and you, that they also may be in us, look at why, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. God wants to reveal his manifold, polypoicalis wisdom

to the world through the church. In Romans 10, we have another, we have a set of rhetorical questions that are making a point. Romans 10, verses 14 and 15, these are rhetorical questions, but it's meant to kind of bring you along a train of thought. It says, how then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? Okay, so the question, the series of questions is, how are these people who've never heard of God, how are they gonna call on God? How are people who don't know the Lord going to get to know the Lord? That's the question, right?

He says, how will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And normally that's the end of it for us. Look at 15, and how are they to preach unless they are sent? Who is sending people to preach? The church. How are they gonna hear unless somebody is sent? So Jesus here in John 17 praying for churches, he's praying for churches to be united and mature so that others may come to faith. Why? In Romans 10, Romans 10 has drawn this clear line between people coming to faith and a church willing to equip and send people out. Why?

It seems very peculiar, but there really is no other explanation that when God wants to make his deep wisdom known, his overly complicated, polypoic coloss wisdom, when he wants to have that known to other people, he is insistent, downright mean about it. He really wants to do that in collaboration with a church. Really, really, really, really, really, really bad.

That he doesn't go through the trouble of writing a message in the sky, although he could. He doesn't make it appear as the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, although he could, okay? He doesn't just put direct thoughts like lightning bolts in people's minds, although he could. What does he do? He uses the church to reveal his deeply complicated wisdom to the entire world so that the world would believe, so that people would understand what it is to follow the Lord. You realize there's people out there, people in Burleson, Texas, who have never heard of the word gospel. I swear to you, I realize it's a category of music, okay? I understand this word is extremely popular and that you hear it and say it potentially, hopefully, like once a week, okay? You hear it all the time, but there are people, not people that have been living under a rock, people that work at coffee shops, for example,

that have never heard the word gospel. They don't know what it is. How will they understand the gospel? How will they hear about the truth of God's word? How? How will they do it? Through the church. They're gonna do it through the church. As a church, it's not just a good idea for us to make God known. It's not something we're gonna get a really double gold star for, okay? That didn't need to be our thinking. It's not a really high achieving church that makes God's polypoycholos wisdom known.

It is core to our existence. It is our birthright as a church. For people to know God, the church is plan A, and there is no plan B. Let me say that again. For people, the people that you know, the people that you see, the people that cut you off in traffic, the people that you see in line at Starbucks, the people that you work next to, the kids that you teach, all of these people, they do not know the Lord, and God's plan for them to know the Lord is for the church to reveal the manifold wisdom of God. And if that's true, then we must see our third type, our last type of provision here, and that is the church itself. Our church is God's provision to us. Our church is God's provision. So God provides, kind of mystically, he provides in how we are created personally, kind of how we fit in there, but then also with us collectively as a whole. The church, our church is God's provision.

Now I'm gonna get very practical with you, extremely practical, okay? Some of you just got real excited. I'm gonna get so practical with you and how God provides for us with our church, but I need to make something else very clear first. I wanna go back to Ephesians 3:10. It says, so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

So, and I think I've stated this well enough, but let me just say it again. This is really, God's wisdom here is really, really complicated. This is not like, this is not one YouTube binge away from you understanding it. Do you understand what I mean? Like, this isn't something where you're like, I'm really gonna learn this and I'm gonna spend a year and now I'm really gonna know God's polypochloss wisdom. Like, that's really going to happen. It's wisdom that is so deep, so unfathomable that you can never get to the bottom of it. You can never, it's so large, you can never wrap your arms all the way around it. It's when you think you're kind of understanding something over here, there's this whole other wing that you haven't even explored. It's so big and vast. God's wisdom is not ours to simply explain to people. And we must see that, we touched on this last week,

we can and we should explain the gospel, okay? I was meeting with somebody for a baptismal candidacy this week and we were explaining the gospel and I was drawing three circles on a whiteboard, right? We're doing three circles, God's design, brokenness in the gospel, right? And we're working through and I'm just making sure that this person who wants to be baptized understands how to share the gospel and how to share the gospel and what I'm doing is I am taking God's manifold wisdom and I am boiling it down to three circles, okay? Sure, I'm missing a few things, okay? Admittedly, I am missing a few things. I'm not pretending like that what I'm writing on a whiteboard is somehow gonna be the explanation for the universe, okay? What I'm doing whenever I'm sharing the gospel or I'm explaining how to share the gospel is I am taking so much liberty. I'm getting all of this and I'm boiling it down

to these just rudimentary shapes and words that I just have to hope, just attach a bunch of meaning to those words and shapes, okay? For God's wisdom, if we think, hey, we're going to explain all of God's wisdom, you cannot do that. It is not ours to simply explain, okay? You should share it, you should explain it. We cover that in gospel course. We encourage you to do that all the time. However, it is not ours to simply explain. For people to see the gospel, for people to see God's manifold wisdom, we must embody it also, to embody something, to incarnate something, right? We need to put skin on it. People have to see it. This wisdom, if you were given a lifetime, you could not learn it much less, explain it all.

With that wisdom, a picture is truly worth a thousand words. You can explain God's love to somebody all day long until you're blue in the face or you can deliver a meal to them whenever they've gone through surgery, okay? One of those is probably better at demonstrating the manifold wisdom of God, okay? This is God's provision for us, right? So this is how we do it. The Holy Spirit's given us words and strength and boldness. God is equipping us with our talents, our backgrounds, and our life experience. That's good so we can see how we kind of fit in that plan. But look, this is why, this idea that we need to embody, this is why Jesus came in the flesh, right? This is why God is not simply in the business of injecting thoughts in your head. This isn't the matrix. You're not Neo and you're like, whoa, I know Kung Fu. Like that's not what this is like. We need to see it and experience it ourselves.

We need to embody it. In fact, we need that so much that God sent himself in a person to this earth. So that we could see it. I mean, God's not just satisfying a curiosity of like, I wonder what it would look like as a human. Like that's not why Jesus came. Jesus came so that he could embody what he's talking about. And what did he say when he got here? He said, he said, repent for the kingdom of God is near. We talked about this last week a little bit. That's not near as in time. That's near as in proximity. Jesus was demonstrating embodying the kingdom of God in his person as he was teaching, as he was healing, as he was explaining, as he was telling parables, as he was loving these disciples. So much so that he could say with utmost confidence, like I want you to love people like I loved you. You wanna do what I told you to do? You go love people like I loved you.

Man, what confidence? The Lord God in heaven became a person and loved people so well that he could say, you know what I did to you? Do that to other people. This is why whenever Jesus came to this earth, he discipled ordinary people to do the exact same thing. This is also why we have a church. This is what churches are for. This is how God provides for us with our church. It's through what we do together. It is how we embody the gospel together. I could talk for days on this. I will talk about two things. Promise not to go as long as I did last week.

If you were here last week, you know what I mean? Okay, God provides through our church. He provides us as a church, with our church, through our church. I'm gonna talk about two things. The first thing I'm gonna talk about is home groups. God provides our church with a spiritual family where we can embody the gospel through a home group. And this is crucial to seeing the gospel work out. Let me just say this too. Look, I can assure you that I did not come here five and a half years ago just to do what churches do. Not my goal. If I wanted to do that, I would have stayed where I was. No shade on where I was. It's a great church. I love the Lord. It's awesome. I am not in the business. I didn't come here. I don't feel like the Lord's call in my life is this. To just do what we're supposed to do or what's expected as a church. We don't have home groups because we somehow have to check

in with the other churches that we have a small group ministry to. This isn't like steeple envy. We're not trying to be some other church on this front. We are doing something out of conviction. It is crucial to seeing the gospel work out. And let me tell you how. On one end, you have space where you can open up. You can study the scriptures together. You can ask questions. If you're just having a really bad day, you can go there and you can just say, I'm having a bad day. And I just need to say, I'm having a bad day. On the other end, it is a space for you to listen to people, for you to encourage people, for you to forgive people. Space for you to sacrifice for other people. It is no wonder that what we see in Acts two right after Jesus gives the Holy Spirit to the disciples and the disciples start preaching and 3,000 people become Christians in the same day.

What happens? Do they set up a conference? What happens? They get in homes. Isn't that wild? They automatically like, yeah, we should break up into smaller groups and figure out how to love each other and talk about what's going on and encourage one another. And sure, yeah, they had a government that was coming after their throats, but not yet. That hadn't happened yet, just getting your timeline straight. When Jesus gave the Holy Spirit to people, the first thing they did was get in community, smaller community. Why?

Because God is incredibly insistent on working through a community. God's so incredibly insistent on that that whenever he came in the flesh, what did he do? He gathered a community. 12 disciples, there were probably 100 people that kind of walked around with them, right? The estimates, you know, can kind of fluctuate. Practically, let me be very practical with you like I promised. Practically, look, you need to make time to meet with the home group, man. You need to make the time to do that. We meet for eight weeks at a time, four times a year. The reason that we do that is not so that you don't get burned out or something like that. The reason that we do that is so that four times a year we have kind of these open doors for people to just walk in and like, oh, okay, this is when I can jump into something. This is whenever I can become a part of a home group.

Okay, and we do that for that reason. It is not for our entertainment. It is not so that we feel good about ourselves. It is not so that we can somehow say like, oh, we have a small group ministry and we have X amount of people that are involved in it. It's not about the numbers. It's really about understanding that as a church, in order for us to be healthy, we need to embody the gospel and we need to do that with each other. We need to do that with other people in homes and it is a way that you cannot embody the gospel on a Sunday morning. And you guys know what I'm talking about, man. On a Sunday morning, there's just, and I realize this is definitely meta talking about it, but on a Sunday morning, man, there's just, there's just a little bit of like internal pressure to smile more and to just be okay and to, and you know, it feels good. It feels good to see everybody, right?

I mean, it is, it's good to gather. I'm glad that you guys are here. This feels like a family reunion every week. I love it, okay? I really can't get enough of this. But I do understand it's not the same as being in a community with people where I can just kind of go in and go like, man, I'm just not right today. I'm just not feeling, I need prayer. I'm in a home group with some other guys and I've gone to that home group before and I'm just like, this week's been horrid. This week's been tough, I need prayer this week. And those guys have come and just said the same thing. And sometimes those guys come and I've come and I'll be like, it's been a stellar week. It's been awesome and they know enough about me to celebrate that with me. That's good. Know enough about them to celebrate that with them. Practically, practically,

you need to make time to meet with a home group. Set another way. God's deep wisdom comes to life whenever you receive people into your home, whenever you give your money away, whenever you sacrifice for people, when you care for friends, when you listen to someone cry for two hours, when you walk someone through something very frustrating or something very kind of crisis-oriented, when you are loving somebody in that moment, you are, that is good, that God's wisdom in a way that you can't even articulate, like comes to life in you and in them.

God provides for our church through home groups. He also provides us with a church through ministry teams. Ministry teams, I'm gonna say just a little bit about it. Ministry teams, they are about embodying service without strings, okay? Service without strings. I don't know if you've ever seen a license agreement, like a EULA, you download an app and you have to scroll through this whole thing and then at the very bottom you click, like yeah, I've read this when you definitely didn't read that and if you did, we can talk later. You click at the bottom, you haven't read it, right? You haven't read it, you've agreed to it. Some of you read it, that's amazing. I'm not you at all. The reason that you have to read all that

is because there's strings involved, man, okay? The reason that you have to check off at the bottom is because they're doing something that you probably aren't super excited about but they're gonna bury it in with a whole bunch of other junk that you are excited about, right? That's the way the world works, man, okay? You've heard it before, well, my wife and I will say this to each other and we said it to our kids.

If the app doesn't charge any money, the thing they're selling is you, right? So if you download an app for free on your phone, like that's great, oh, I got a free app on my phone. Well, they're definitely selling your information, okay? Like that's, come on, that's strings attached. Those are strings that we are very comfortable with. We understand that, I'm downloading a free app, you're selling my information, okay? It's a Monday. However, when a church operates that way, it's sick. When a church operates that way, it's sick. We don't need strings attached. If you have to trick people to come to a worship service, what's that say about your worship service? What's that say about the gospel that you're preaching? Right? Like, let's think about that a little bit. When you serve people with strings attached, when you say, I'm gonna do something but I'm gonna make sure you do something,

are you serving them? Are you just serving yourself by serving them, right? This corresponds to the stewardship of grace that we've been talking about for the last couple of weeks. We've been given this grace freely and part of being good stewards of that grace means freely, no strings attached, giving that grace away. This is what our ministry teams are about. They are about us being one body in our gifting, ministering to each other's basic needs. So we have frontline team, they welcome people, they're feeding people. We have preschool team, they're caring for and teaching our kids. Grade school, they're helping grade schoolers. I mean, like all the grade schoolers like, leave back here. Did you know in grade school, it's one of my favorite things. I am biased because my wife runs grade school. Did you know every week they do rate your week? And man, it's tireless.

Like it's so great to hear about it but like my wife comes home and she's like, we did rate your week and kind of here's what we did. And I've seen her like draw these things up. Like on the left, it'll be like one ice cream scoop and on the right, it'll be like four ice cream scoops. And so they come in and they're like, rate your week. Like they're really excited to talk about their week. That's really good. That's no strings attached. Like we're not telling them like, hey, if you, you know,

I don't know how you would manipulate grade schoolers. I'm sure you could, I'm a creative guy but I don't really wanna be that creative. Okay, so there's a way to do that with no strings attached and that's what we strive to do with our grade school. That's what we try to do with our preschool. It's what we do with our frontline, what we do with our mowing team. Let me just ask you a few questions and you can answer heartily, loudly. Did you enjoy breakfast this morning? Yeah, okay, I'm not gonna do it.

Did you like having a clean building to walk into? Yeah, I did for sure. It is, is it a deep comfort to know that we are, we are serving and building the next generation of like people, Christians after we leave? Is that really comforting to you? Yeah, it should be, yeah. These are our ministry teams at work. This is, this is what it is to serve. If you enjoyed that breakfast, it's, sorry, Danny, Drew, I'm just gonna say it. It's because Danny and Drew are having like woke up early on Mother's Day to make it happen, right? Like don't stare at them, it's weird, just they're fine. They hate it in the first place. But it just helps to have a face with an aunt. That's who did it this morning. But it's not just them on the baking team. Other people bake, right? It just happens to be their morning, they get to be embarrassed. But other people, man, like it's people that are actually waking up early and sacrificing

for everybody to have a great Sunday. And that's not just in baking, that's also in preschool where Shel's the team leader. That's also in grade school where Chrissy's the team leader. That's in cleaning team where Levi's the team leader. That's in mowing team where Aaron Peltier's the team leader. This is the deacons working together. This is our church kind of coming together to do ministry for the things that just need to get done. And so this is not me recruiting you to free labor. This is not me begging, promise. This is an invitation for you to freely serve with no strings attached as you have been served. And not just by God in heaven, but by this church. As you have been served, freely serve. Look, I wanna encourage you, I'm gonna give you just a direct thing to do here. If you're interested in serving or in being part of a home group, you can text the word serve or group

and your name, because we might not have your number, and your name to that number. That's our church cell number. If you ever wanna text the church anything, you can text that number right there. 817-295-0971. The reason I want you to do that, if you're not serving anywhere, and it's okay, you don't need to be a member to serve. You can serve in a lot of capacities. Some things where if you're gonna work with student ministry, for example, there's an interview process, it's a whole thing. But you can still serve a lot of places. And I wanna tell you about a meeting that Daniel Oster and I had this week. When did we meet Oster? Pastor Daniel Cinco de Mayo, that's right. We met at Fuzzy's Tacos, just for, you know, festivity. And there is Pastor Drew Pastor Daniel sitting down eating some tacos. And the reason that we met was because we had so many things to just sift through.

There was so many, I think we had like 14 things. It was a lot, it was too much. And we were just kinda backed up. But something that we wanted to do, we called the big rocks meeting. And just like, what's going first? How do we get these things in line? What's big, what's little? What matters, what doesn't for right now? Like, what are we gonna solve, what are we not gonna solve? And we're there for probably 20 minutes. And we're just talking and talking. We just go through all these things, right? Like renaming our church, children's ministry safety, building renovations, you know, just all of this stuff. Just good, busy things. After about 20 minutes, our heads are spinning. It is not okay. We're just, I'm sure we look beat down. I'm sure if somebody would have taken a picture, it would have been like. And so I just kinda walk around, clear my head.

And it was fine. It wasn't an intense meeting at all. We were just tired. It was just a lot, that's all. And so I'm just kinda like praying and just trying to figure something out. And finally, I feel like the Lord kinda just directed me to ask a question. So I finally just ask Pastor Daniel. I just said, look, if it's you, what are you doing? And then that really changed the conversation for us. And we just started talking. And here's what we're convinced of. We're convinced of the most important thing that our church can do over the next six months

is not VBS, although VBS is very important, and we're still doing VBS. But it's not the most important thing. It's not even Sunday morning. It's not family meetings. It's not Lord's Supper. It's not any other event. It's not National Night Out. It happens in October. It's not Christmas Eve. It's not any of those things. What's the most important thing that we're gonna do over those next six months?

We're gonna do home groups, and we're gonna do ministry teams. In those two programs, for lack of a better word, that's where you find your family. That's where you figure out how you are a part of this church. By serving and by being in community that reflects Jesus. It's the most important thing we can do. Over these next six months, man, I just, I wanna encourage you, if you are not serving anywhere, and like I said, it's okay if you're not a member. It's okay if you've been here like a month and a half. It's fine. I want you to consider serving somewhere. If you're a teenager, if you're not a teenager, it's been a long time since you've been a teenager, I want you to consider serving. And it's, look, it's not because we're desperate for bodies or we need people or blah, blah, blah. It is not that at all. We're doing just fine. We can always improve. Of course, we're a church full of sinners.

We can always improve, okay? I'm saying this because this is how we embody the gospel together. This is how through the church, the manifold wisdom of God will be made known to everybody. As if we are sacrificing for one another in hung groups and if we are serving without strings in ministry teams. I want you to consider that. I want you to consider how you're made. I want you to consider texting serve or group to 817-295-0971. Quickly, let's read the last three verses. Verses 11 and 12 in Ephesians three. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. The this that is at the beginning is talking about God revealing his deep wisdom to other people through the church, explaining and embodying that wisdom, okay? And so it's saying that in Jesus then we have a boldness

and a confident access through faith. And without a church, without a church that embodies that deep wisdom, you can get off track. You can grow spiritually stale where nothing's really new anymore. You've heard all the stories, you know all the answers, you've sung all the songs and you're just like, ah, it just doesn't feel like it used to. I've heard this many times. And here's the reality, here's the actual problem. Let me just kinda say it this way. You and I were made to be in situations where we need boldness and confidence. Let me say it again. You and I are made to be in situations where we need boldness and confidence. And without these situations, without being in a situation where we have to embody the gospel, we have boldness for nothing.

We have confidence for nothing. This would be like having a really maxed out truck, okay? Like heavy duty, like you got like a 350, I mean you are killing it, but you never haul anything in that truck. I don't, I'm trying not to step on toes here, listen. I mean, you know, you could be like an SUV and never pulling anybody out of a ditch, I don't know. You know, you could do the same thing, okay? I'm not just picking on truck owners here. Or it's like having a really great kitchen, I mean a tricked out kitchen, like really nice. You got like double oven, you got the whole thing going on, but you always order out. You never use it. That's what it's like to, you have all of this boldness. I mean this boldness, this confident access through faith, man, I mean it is just teeming. I mean it's just pouring out of you. You just got so much, but you're not in a situation

where you are actually having to care for another person. You're not in a situation where you're trying to disciple anybody. You're not in a situation where you're like, I should pray about this. I don't know what to do next. You don't put yourselves in that situation so you don't need the boldness. You don't need the confident access. You're like, I'm doing fine, I'm bold enough. But you're not really in situations.

The church in the area of Ephesus that is receiving this letter, we're in those situations. And because of that we got verse 13. It says, so I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. Today, you and I, we lose heart. And let me just, let me break it down very quickly. We lose heart because we are in a double uphill battle. We're in a double uphill battle. Let me explain myself. You can have one bad experience for two completely different reasons. Let me kind of break this down for you. When you minister to people, when you are discipling people, when you are sharing the gospel with people, when you are in it with people, there is an internal uphill battle. You have an internal struggle where you can lose heart because you messed it up somehow like,

I don't know, you messed it up. If you're sharing your testimony, maybe you're like, oh, I just left out that part or I made the gospel sound super complicated or maybe you chickened out of the really hard part of your testimony or the part of the gospel that you knew would be convicting somebody. You just have all of this, maybe you're ministering to a kid or to a teenager and you feel like you said the wrong thing. You're like, oh no, do they misunderstand now? Maybe as you were cleaning, as you were mowing the church grass, you had resentment in your heart because you were the only one doing it. You have this internal uphill battle where your flesh is telling you you're either doing it wrong or somebody's not noticing or something because you're a sinner, you got problems. And so when you are doing something, when you are actually ministering to somebody, when you were trying to move forward

in the kingdom of God, you have an internal uphill battle where you don't trust yourself or you don't, you got resentment, you got some kind of problem going on. But that's not the only uphill battle you face. You have an external uphill battle. It's not just what's going on inside, it's what's going on outside, right? Because not every person that you invite in your home is gonna be super happy to be there, right? Not every person that you serve is gonna be like, oh, thank you so much. This really changed my day. This is really so good, thank you. Sometimes they just take what you give them and they move on. Sometimes whenever you start telling your testimony, they'll just stop you, they'll be like, no, no thanks. I've heard it before.

Now, they haven't heard your testimony before, but they think they have and they're shutting you down. Is that very nice? No. But that is what it is to minister to people. That's what it is to disciple people. People are not going to always recognize the back-breaking work that you put in to whatever event or whatever church cleaning or whatever mowing or however much you organize something. People will not see it. Smirks. You guys did an amazing job for Easter. I'm gonna say you could probably count on one hand the thanks you got and that's not to just sit there and just heap a ton of praise on you. It's just to say it's not on a lot of people's minds whenever they walk in and Easter's done. It just doesn't occur, it doesn't even occur to me very often to just say, oh, somebody spent hours, hours, yes, somebody spent hours on that. Like, I'm embarrassing people today, I'm sorry.

Serve, if you serve, I will not embarrass you like this all the time. I'm just on one right now, okay, sorry. So the external uphill battle is that people will not recognize what's going on. So you got two battles. Internally, am I screwing this up? Externally, people don't appreciate it. People shut me down. People don't see it. People don't understand. Kids these days, whatever you're saying, right? In both of those uphill battles, we lose heart. Because sometimes the internal is so right and the external is so jacked up. And other times, the internal is all wrong. Your motivations are terrible. Your life is terrible. But the external is picture perfect. And it's uphill both ways and sometimes, sometimes in a little sliver of time, it like aligns. And you're like, I really wanted to do that and people recognize it and it was a huge blessing to whoever, like, I mean, that's like

one of the World Series, man. That is great. It just doesn't happen very often. Because we're people. Disciples and people and ministering to people's needs is frustrating. It's a slow process. Seeing someone actually come to faith, actually crossing that threshold of faith is rare. It's rare. I've been doing this 25 plus years. It's rare. Because the journey is often very slow and very hard to map out. And if you just think for five minutes about your own journey and how difficult that is to qualify or quantify or map out or something like that, like, it's really difficult to do. Even with your own journey, how are you gonna do it for somebody else? How are you gonna help somebody else do it? And yeah, you have people that complete a course, join a church. You have people get baptized. You have people do these kind of these markers, these things that are good things.

They're not bad things. But if you can't sit there and measure yourself, you can't justify them. Ministry is difficult. Disciples people is slow. It goes unnoticed. It is assumed. So where's the hope? The hope is not that we can rest on success or recognition. Our effort. Here's the hope. Here's what we can rest on. The fact that God sees and God rewards. That's our hope. If your hope is that other people will see and reward, that's a false hope. That's gonna frustrate you every time. You're gonna quit doing what you're doing. Spoiler alert. But when your hope is that God will see and reward, that God has planned this all out, that God insists on cooperating with a church. He insists on it. As a church, we don't need to sit around and wonder, man, what do we need to do? It's not what, man, it's how. We know what we need to do. We need to disciple people. We need to minister to people.

It's just how. We can rest on the fact that God provides us with a church through which and from which we can minister. We can rest on the fact that God is preparing your life to be a life of service. When God came to this earth, what did he do? He served people. To the Son of Man, this is Mark 10:45, Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. That's us. We're the same. A student is not above his master. The reason I'm telling you to text, serve, or group to the number, the reason I'm telling you to do that is not, again, it's not because we're trying to hit some goal or like we wanna be some massive church or anything like that, man. It's because it's because it is what we are supposed to do as a church. We are supposed to embody the gospel together and we can't do that just once a week on a Sunday morning. We're doing that in community with other people.

We're doing that as we serve other people without strings. And so I want you to go ahead and text if you have not already, if you're thinking about it, I want you to do, I want you to start the journey of finding your family here at South Burleson and I want you to see God work slowly as it is. I want you to see God work in your life and the lives of people around you. Let's pray. Lord, we know that your plan is perfect, that you have it all timed out, mapped out. There's not a way that we are, there's not a way that we're earning it or that we're out here kind of making A's.

Lord, you earned all the A's for us. You've done this race. We are just walking in the wake of your victory. Lord, help us to rest in your victory, what you've done for us, in us, on our behalf, in the lives of other people while we're sleeping, you're ministering. While we're resting, you're working. Lord, you know the things that we need. You know the callings that you've given us. Lord, help us.