Why Is Ephesians Chapter 3 Often Ignored in Churches?

Hello, and welcome to Through the Bible with Les Feldick, an Oklahoma rancher and farmer. Les Feldick has been teaching homestyle Bible classes for over 20 years in Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Les Feldick's unique style of Bible teaching has made the books of the Bible come to life. When Les is teaching, it's so interesting that people say time just seems to fly by. And now, here is Les Feldick. Okay, good to see everybody in again this afternoon for another four programs, and we again like to invite our television audience to just join with us, and I guess so many of our letters express it that they just feel like they're sitting in the back of the room with us, and they feel like they not only know me, but they know all of you, and we've found it out more than once, you know, when we go to a seminar or something, why people say, well, we had Irvin and Mary with us at Minnesota one time, and people just recognized them because they'd seen them on the program. So anyhow, we always like first to welcome our studio audience. I know some of you have driven quite a distance, but we're glad you're here. And then for those of you joining us again, we always like to make it known that we're just an informal Bible study. We started several years ago, way back in Genesis, and we're just gradually creeping through. We're not walking. We're not running. We're creeping, and some of these areas we take verse by verse. Other areas we skim over, but whatever, we've come a long way since we first started, and if any of you are interested in past programs that you've missed, they're all available on either video, audio, or a little printed page, and we've put 12 successive programs on each one of these. So if you get tape, book, or audio number one, you'll get the first 12 programs in Genesis. And now we're up in Ephesians, and we are in book 37, and just watch for the little numbers on the board now, and that tells you where we are in our book series or tape, whatever. And then the one means it's the first four-hour program of it, and then the next part will be number two, and so on and so forth. So anyway, we always appreciate all your letters and your financial help. We couldn't do it, of course, without you, and we live for mail time. It's getting almost a couple-hour job to go through the letters now, but how we love them, and we appreciate so much hearing from you, even if it's just a short line or two, and we just give the Lord the praise for you. All right, now we're going to pick right up where we left off in our last program, which would be the last part of book 36, and now we're going to start in book 37, and we're doing Ephesians chapter 3, and we'll start at verse 1. Now, we're not going to get very far, because I was thinking as I was driving up again today, and I've said this before in a program, I know I sometimes wonder why I hardly say a word in the 90 miles that we drive up here, but I'm mulling all this over and over and over, and I got to thinking, I've always made the statement, as long as I've been teaching anyway, that if you can get a grasp of Genesis chapter 3 and Romans chapter 3, you've got a good share of the Bible understood. But I came up today with the thought, and Ephesians chapter 3, and so if you can put these three third chapters together, Genesis chapter 3, which gives you the account of the fall of man and the beginning of sin and the curse, Romans chapter 3 is the remedy for it, where you find the first real instance of salvation by faith and faith alone, and now we come to this third chapter of Ephesians, and it just simply explodes with things that most people never hear, and I was again just thinking in my own thoughts without even saying anything to Iris, I can't think of a single Sunday school lesson in all my years in church, I can't think of a single Sunday morning sermon in all my years of going to church that was taken from Ephesians 3, and I've got heads nodding all over the room. It's a fact, I mean, they ignore this for some reason or other, like it's a plague, or an analogy I've made before, like some unwanted stepchild, it's there, but they just don't want to be bothered with it, but here it is, and it's just so full of what you and I as grace age believers have to understand, and what it really amounts to is that all of these revelations that have been given to the apostle Paul, the apostle of Gentiles, had been kept hidden and secret in the mind of God until revealed to this man. Now people don't like that, they don't like to admit that, and it's simply because they're so much more comfortable in preaching and teaching Christ's earthly ministry, which is all well and good. I never take anything from Jesus Christ, and I think people who hear me teach know that. In fact, I probably elevate Him far above what most people do, and I've always used the expression, would to God that more people would ask, who in the world is Jesus Christ, because most church people do not really know who He is. They do not know Him as the creator of everything, the sustainer of everything, as well as, and we'll see this later in the afternoon, the person of the Godhead who stepped out of that triune God and became flesh in order to go the way of the cross. Well, all of these things, of course, come out in Ephesians chapter 3, which most people, like I said, hear nothing of. So verse 1, he starts right out, for this cause, and I always have to stop. What's he talking about? What cause? Well, everything that he had just expounded in the first two chapters, and the epitome, I think, of the first two chapters, before we even started Ephesians 1, back up to chapter 2, and you'll see what I'm talking about. Back up to chapter 2, verse 8 and 9, and these are verses, of course, that you've seen in salvation tracts and so forth, but again, this is the highlight of these two chapters that I think Paul is talking about. Verse 8 of Ephesians 2, for by grace are you saved through faith, and that, of course, is where I get plus nothing, because there's nothing after that. That's where it stops. For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. In other words, nothing you or I can do. Why? Because it's the gift of God, and how much work do you do for a gift? Nothing. And the minute you do even a penny's worth, it's no longer a gift. It's something you've worked for. All right, so it's by grace that we're saved through faith, not of ourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Well, you see, you don't see that brought out anywhere else in Scripture until we get to the Apostle Paul and his letters to Gentiles. All right, so now then back to chapter 3, so we at least get a little ways in this half hour. He says, "...for this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for..." What people? Gentiles. See, and all people don't want to admit that, that his apostleship was uniquely directed to the Gentiles. Now, he still had a heart for his Jewish people, such a heavy heart for them, in fact, that he was willing to suffer eternal doom if they could be saved. So don't ever accuse Paul of having turned his back on his own people, but God was the one who designated at the Damascus Road conversion that he was going to be sent now, far hence, to the Gentiles. Israel has had it now for over 2 ,000 years, and God dealt with the nation of Israel through the prophets and through Christ's earthly ministry, through Peter and the Eleven, but they continued to reject it. And so now God does something totally different, and that's the best word I can put on it. He does something totally different. In fact, boy, now I am going off a field, aren't I? Turn over a couple of pages to Philippians. I'll get back to Ephesians in a minute, but Philippians chapter 1, verse 10, and he's still writing to Gentiles. And look what he says, that you may approve things that are, now the King James, and I imagine most of the other translations, they call it excellent, but that same Greek word everywhere else in Scripture is translated different. Now read it, that you may approve things that are, what? Different. Oh, indeed it is. This whole gospel of the grace of God, and I'll come back to chapter 3 of Ephesians, is something so different from anything that has ever been laid on Israel, or anyone else for that matter, and it's something that is just mind-boggling that God could now turn to the whole human race without benefit of religion, without benefit of priesthoods, without benefit of temples, and He goes straight to the heart of the believer, and transforms him, makes him a new person, and then places him into the body of Christ. All right, so for this cause, verse 1 again, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles. Now verse 2, if you have heard, now I've got to stop a minute again. You want to remember that by the time Paul writes Ephesians, it's somewheres around 64, 65 AD, he's now a prisoner in Rome, that's why we call it one of the prison epistles, and if at the very stretch of our imagination he began his ministry in about 40 AD, this means that he's been out there amongst those pagan Gentiles now for some 25 years. Now that's not long, it takes a long time, we're learning this on television. Whenever we go on a new station, we've learned now it takes at least a year before you start getting any real feedback, and it just takes that long, and we're learning to be patient. Well now the apostle Paul was no different really, it took a long time to convince these Gentile pagans, not only of the Gospel, but of this whole new lifestyle that he embraced. And so this is why he puts it in this kind of language, if you have heard, it's a good possibility they hadn't yet, even though the believers in Ephesus are the ones he's writing to, yet we've got to realize that there were multitudes around these believers who of course had not heard at all. But here he puts it, if you have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God, which is given to me to you, but I'm going to stop first for the word dispensation. It's a word that I have refrained from using on the program purposely, simply because so many people have heard nothing but bad things about the word, even though they don't have any idea why, and so I've known from day one that I had to be careful how I use this word, because I'd turn people off before they even gave me minutes time to listen. But I think I've built enough credibility across the country now that people won't get turned off when I use the word, because Paul does. It's a scriptural word. You back up to chapter 1 and verse 10, he uses it there as well. And so it's a biblical word. We're not pulling this out of the woodwork, we're not pulling it out of some theological book, but it's scriptural. And he says in Ephesians 1 verse 10, that in the dispensation of the fullness of time, now we dealt with that several programs back. Now he's dealing with the dispensation of the grace of God. Well to qualify a dispensation, it's just a simple word really from which we get the word stewardship, from which we get the word dispensing. In other words, when you go to the pharmacist with your prescription, you hand it on the counter, and what does he do? He dispenses what your doctor has ordered, but along with dispensing the product, he also gives you explicit instructions. You don't just go ahead and take that medicine haphazardly, you follow the instructions that came with that dispensing. Now to bring it back into the scriptural analogy then, a dispensation was a period of time during which God laid particular dispensational instructions to the human race. Now the best way I can illustrate a dispensation from the secular world, is our own presidential administrations. And the best two I like to use are the administration of Jimmy Carter, and the one followed by Ronald Reagan. Men with two totally different ideologies, I don't think we have any trouble with that, but yet they both led the country under the same Constitution. The same Constitution, and yet they were two such totally different ideologies. Well how come? Well let's go back to the Carter years, and he builds his own administration. He appoints his own cabinet, he appoints men who have the same ideology as he does, concerning how the country should be administered, and so forth. Now it wasn't so much the four years that he was in the White House that made his administration, what made the Carter administration was the ideology that he promoted, by whatever he suggested to Congress, or however he handled foreign affairs, that's what marked the Carter administration. But it ended, and then there was a transition period, and from that dispensation of the Carter years, we went into someone with a totally different out view, and that was Ronald Reagan. And he too was under the same Constitution, and his term of office also came to a place where it ended. Now again, whether he was in four years or eight years, that's moot. But what counted was, what was the ideology that they promoted for the country? What was the ideology and their system of administrating over here? Whether it was four years or eight years, it was beside the point. And so what makes an administration is, what were they dispensing? Now whenever our President, whoever he is, sends bills to Congress, and Congress finally ends up passing it, you can say that the administration was the one responsible for dispensing that particular piece of legislation. Now you can bring that into the Scripture, and it's a beautiful analogy. When God called Moses and the nation of Israel out of Egypt, brought them around Sinai, called Moses up into the mountain, what did He give to Moses? Law, and law was a dispensation. It was a dispensing to the nation of Israel, God's demands upon the nation as to how they were to worship, how they were to live, and all these things were part of that dispensation of law. Now whether it went 1,500 years, or whether it went 500 years, that's moot. But what's important is, what did God tell Moses to tell the children of Israel? The law, and of course the law was in three parts. It was first and foremost the moral law, the Ten Commandments. It was the ritual law, how to worship and how to approach God with the sacrifices and the priesthood and so forth. And then it had the civil law, how to deal with your neighbor and how to settle disputes and so forth. That was all dispensed at Sinai. All right, but law ended. The cross ended it, of course, because that's when everything was fulfilled dispensationally of law. But God in His wisdom, and as we saw I think in one other program, I know we have some time in the past, Deuteronomy 29.29 says that the secret things belong to the Lord our God, which means that He can keep things totally secret as long as He wants to, and He'll reveal certain things when He is good and ready. And we've seen that all the way up through human history. All right, so even though all the ramifications of the law were fulfilled at the cross, yet we find after we come into the early chapters of the book of Acts, not a word has been said that you're no longer under the law. There's not a word has been said. You no longer have to go to the temple. You don't have to keep the commandments as a system. And that doesn't come until like this man is constantly saying that this dispensation of the grace of God, which is in total opposition to law, was now dispensed by not Moses, but by Paul. Now the other word for dispensing, like I said, is stewardship. So come back with me, if you will, to 1 Corinthians 4. And while you're looking it up, I'll remind you how the word is used back in the Old Testament. Abraham, when God was approaching him about beginning a nation through him. Now in order to have a nation of people, you've got to start with a child, a son, and he had none. And so what did he say to God? God, I have nothing but Eliezer, who is the steward of my estate. Now that's not word for word, but I'm just paraphrasing. Eliezer is the steward of my estate. That's all I have. But what was he saying? Eliezer was the man who managed all of Abraham's wealth. Now when he was going to manage all of Abraham's wealth, not only did he dispense orders to the servants and the slaves and so forth, but he also dispensed when to sell and when to buy. Now you want to remember, Abraham was wealthy. They have found bills of sale of things that Abraham bought and sold. So this steward, this manager of his estate, was the one who dispensed all of the things that kept things moving. Alright, now why am I saying all this? Because this is what Paul claims to be concerning the grace of God. Alright, you've got 1 Corinthians chapter 4, start at verse 1. 1 Corinthians 4, and what's your next word? Stewards of the mysteries. Now you see there again, if you're a Bible student, you'll catch on real quick that Paul is always referring to the mysteries that were revealed to him. And what are mysteries? Secrets. And who kept them secret? God did. And when God called Paul out of the religion of Judaism, and saved him on the road to Damascus, sent him down to Mount Sinai, and poured out on him for 3 years all the revelations of the mysteries. And there are all kinds of them. There isn't just one, there are a whole compilation of mysteries that Paul reveals in his writings. And since they were revealed to him, as he says over and over, he then became the steward of them. And if he was the steward of them, he was the administrator of them. And when we understand that, this book becomes as plain as a 300 watt bulb. It just lays right out in front of you. Of course this is a whole new administration. You're going to find terminology, you're going to find doctrinal things in Paul that you won't find anywhere else in Scripture. But he doesn't cancel what went before, it's just an advance on it, because we're coming from the very small knowledge that they had way in the beginning, and it's just building and building and building. And then finally the promised Messiah came, and the nation of Israel was in the promised land. They had the temple, but yet what did they do with the Messiah? They crucified him. And they continued to reject him in those early chapters of Acts. And so then God says, that's the end of that dispensation of law, we're going to dispense something totally new. Just like moving from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. Administrations and those of you who know anything at all about politics, as different as daylight and dark. Well so is grace and law. You cannot mix them, because they are so diverse. But the same God, God never changes. And all God has now done is said, instead of all of the things that the law demanded, I've already settled it on the cross, now if you'll believe it, I'll do everything that needs to be done. And oh this is what's so satisfying with our mail, when people write constantly, day in and day out letters come. Oh what freedom, to step out from under the law, and come into the grace of God. All right now I've just got 5 minutes left, and I've still got a lot to cover. Chapter 3, still going on in verse 2. So if you've heard of this dispensing of the grace of God, which is, now here again is where he's going to claim his unique apostleship. It didn't come from Peter in the 12, it didn't come from Barnabas or Silas or Timothy or anything like that, it came from this man. And look how clearly he puts it. The grace of God which is given to me, and then where? To you. See how plain that is? And I may put it in another program, I may have, and I may in the future, I don't know. But over and over when I read this verse, I have to think of the numbers of people that have sat at our kitchen table, and I've showed them this verse in trying to help them to see that our doctrines have to come from this apostle of the Gentiles. And they'll read it and say, well I don't know what you're driving at. Well you didn't read it. Read it again. And then after about the third or fourth time they say, oh, you're telling me it came from Paul to us? That's what it says, see? That's what it says, that the dispensation of the grace of God was given to this man, and he in turn gave it to us. And you've seen me put it on the board I don't know how many times since we've been on television, that at Sinai God gave the law to Moses. Moses took it down the mountain and gave it to whom? The nation of Israel. Never intended to go to the Gentile world, it was given to Israel. But now this man, from Galatians 1 we gather, also was taken down to Mount Sinai, probably for that full three years of indoctrination of these new mysteries. And he doesn't take it down the mountain to Israel, he goes immediately to the Gentile world up there in the area of Antioch and Tarsus, and then finally goes into his missionary journeys and so forth. Alright, so read it again. Verse 2, "...if you have heard of the dispensation, or the dispensing, or the administrating of the grace of God which is given to me to you were..." And then the next verse starts in, "...how that by revelation..." See? "...how that by a special revealing of the crucified ascended Lord." And oh listen, this is what we have to constantly remember. Come back with me a moment, I think maybe this is moot because we've used it so often, but come back with me to Romans chapter 11, and I guess the reason I use it often, I do, is years and years ago when Jerry Poole was sitting here first, started coming to my class, McAllister. I used this verse one night, and Jerry came up and I bet he remembers it. He said, let's use it over and over, because he said, I've been in church all my life, I've never seen this verse before. And I think that's most people. They don't know these things are in here. But look what it says, Romans 11, verse 13, "...for Paul writes, I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles." See how plain that is? Now you don't need a theologian degree to understand that. Anybody can read, can understand what he's saying, is that he was uniquely sent, not to Israel as the twelve were, but he was sent to those pagan Gentiles. And those pagan Gentiles seemingly were hungry, and they gobbled it up, and this man almost single-handedly turned the Roman Empire inside out. And it has come down all these two thousand years, and we're still reveling in this same gospel that was begun by this apostle, and that is that it's by faith, by God's grace alone. Now I always have to qualify for this one. I'm talking about salvation. I'm not saying that you're saved by faith, plus nothing, and then you just go on and drift. No, no. But for salvation, it's faith and faith alone. And then, when the work of salvation has been worked in our hearts and lives, God begins to work in and through us. And fortunately, He doesn't expect us to become tremendous saints overnight.