EPHESIANS 3:2

You must preach the grace of God. The Apostle Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:2, “If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God which is given me to you-ward.” Paul said that he was given the dispensation of the grace of God. What is the dispensation? The word “dispensation” means administration, stewardship, or responsibility. Only Jesus and Paul used this word in the Bible. Jesus was the first to use it, and where He used it, it is translated as stewardship. A master went on a journey and left his prized possessions in the hands of a servant; and the master gave to that servant a charge, a responsibility, a stewardship. The master says to the servant, “This is my prized possession. Take care of it. Watch over it. And remember that this possession is meant to be shared with others. It needs to be dispensed to the whole world. I am giving to you the dispensation of grace.” The way that the grace of God gets shared with others is through preaching it, and through the believers spreading the truth of the grace of God through faith in Christ.

Everyone needs grace. Sinners need grace or else they cannot be saved. “For by grace are you saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God.” No wonder that God wants us to be responsible for preaching the grace of God. How else shall the world be saved? It is not only sinners who need to be reminded of or informed of the grace of God. It is also saints. We need serving grace that also comes from Christ. When Christ ascended into heaven, He gave gifts unto men. That is grace. Paul gets on this subject in verse seven where he writes, “Whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me.” Everyone has at least one gift. One of the keys to serving God in this world is to find out what your gift is and then to look for opportunities to develop that gift and to put it into use for the glory of God. Paul wrote to Timothy, “Neglect not the gift that is in thee.” That is how you have the power of God, because then the work that is being done is not you, but is Christ in you. That is why Paul said at the end of verse seven, “by the effectual working of his power.” There is no power when there is a Christian trying to do something for which they are not gifted. I went to a Sunday school class for a short time once that was being taught by a man who did not have the gift to teach. He had the gift of administration, but he thought that it was important to teach and he wanted to teach. It did not work. There was no power there. Paul had power because he preached the grace of God. That is the right message to preach, and he preached it with the gift that God had given to him. Being called to preach was a gift, and he valued that gift. Paul knew that to do what he did was a gift of grace from God.

Why did Paul value grace so much, and why did he emphasize it so much in his preaching? For one thing Paul understood just how much he himself was indebted to grace. Grace is when God gives you what you do not deserve and cannot earn. It is the unmerited favor of God. You deserve to be punished, but instead of being punished you are blessed. It all happens because of Christ and through Christ. Paul knew that he had been given grace, both in his salvation and in his ministry. He wrote in Ephesians 3:8, “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given.” How could Paul call himself “less than the least of all saints?” There are at least two reasons that he could do so: First, he really believed it. Second, neither you nor I had been born yet. I hope you really believe that. If you do not, then you will not emphasize the grace of God the way that Paul did.

Let’s talk about the grace of God for a moment. It is the grace of God because it comes from God and because it belongs to God. It is His prized possession, and He puts it into our heart and into our hands and makes us responsible for it. In the phrase “the grace of God” we know what grace is: it is the unmerited favor of God given to us freely through Christ. Faith in Christ is what connects a human being into the grace of God. The emphasis is on Christ. When we speak of God, we are speaking of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; but when we speak of the grace of God the emphasis is on Christ. That is why the companion phrase to “the grace of God” is the phrase “the grace of Christ.” They are one in the same. In order to preach the grace of God, you must preach Christ. There once was a young man who went off to Bible college to study the Bible. After his first year in college he went home for the summer. Of course, people knew where he had been, and he began to receive invitations to preach. On his very first opportunity to preach he went to the church to preach the first sermon that he had ever preached from a pulpit. When he got behind the pulpit to preach that sermon, he noticed that the wise old pastor had an old tattered sign there at the back of the pulpit that only the one preaching could see. The sign said, “Preach Christ.” It is too bad that more preachers have not seen that sign. They should have seen it. They should have seen it in passages such as this one. They should have seen it when they read that John the Baptist said, “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world.” They should have seen it at the Mount of the transfiguration when the Father spoke from heaven and said, “This is my beloved Son, hear Him.” They should have seen the sign to preach Christ when Jesus taught about the Holy Spirit and said, “When he is come, he will testify of me.” We can, of course, find many, many places in the Bible where the sign has been written very clearly: Preach Christ. Let’s mention one more. How about when Paul wrote to Timothy and said, “Preach the Word.” The Bible is the Word, the written Word. But do not ever forget that Jesus is the Word, the living Word. Just because someone takes a text from the Bible does not automatically mean that they are preaching the Word. They are only preaching the Word when they are preaching about the written Word and the living Word.

Paul preached Christ when he preached about the grace of God; and Paul preached the mystery of Christ. You must preach what Paul said in verse four is “the mystery of Christ.” Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:4, “Whereby, when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ.” What did Paul mean about the mystery of Christ? The answer to that he gives very clearly in the next verse. Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:5, “Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.” In the Bible a mystery is something that once was hidden, but now is revealed. It is no longer hidden. It has been revealed by the Spirit so that people would know about it. If God wants people to know about it, then he wants you to preach it.

When this verse says, “in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men,” what ages is it talking about? It is talking about all of the other ages that took place before the New Testament age: all of the other ages that took place before this dispensation of grace, this stewardship of grace, was given to preachers. In other words it is talking about the Old Testament. In the Old Testament you will not find the details about the grace of God and the mystery of Christ as we now know it. More has now been revealed. This is an important fact for knowing how to use the Old Testament and knowing how to preach from the Old Testament. We now know things they did not know, and the things that we know are important things. They are things that must be the focus of our preaching.

These things that we now know Paul called the mystery of Christ. Paul said that this was a new revelation given to him. It was not known in the other ages. Therefore, when we take the part of the Word that was written in the other ages, when we journey back into those ages we must take the revelation of the mystery with us. We must preach Christ. That is what Paul did. His text was often the Old Testament. Do not ever take an Old Testament text and preach it as if the New Testament was never written. I cannot image that the Apostle Paul would open up an Old Testament text, preach a sermon, and never mention the name of Christ. That would be impossible, unimaginable. When you go into the Old Testament, the name of Jesus Christ is not there, so take it with you when you go there. When you preach about law, make sure that at least you mention that now the law is our schoolmaster that brings us unto Christ. When you preach about Abraham, make sure that at least you mention that the great promise made to Abraham is fulfilled in the Lord Jesus Christ. When you preach about David, make sure that at least you mention the fact that the throne of David will be occupied one glorious day by the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Surely in every sermon that you preach, some how and some way you can remind people of the grace of God that is in Christ Jesus.

Let’s look at an example text from the Old Testament that is often used as the text for a sermon. I have heard many sermons from this text, and by the way, they have all been good sermons. It is such a great text that you cannot help but make a good sermon out of it. It is the incident of David and Goliath. It is a great example of faith and victory and the power of God. Even though all of the sermons that I heard were good sermons, in a couple of them the name of Christ was not mentioned even once. That should not be. I do not say that to judge others or their sermons. I say it to judge mine, and for you to judge yours. Preach Christ. You must preach the mysteries of Christ. Take the name of Jesus with you, child of weakness and of woe. Preachers, take the name of Jesus even into the Old Testament texts that you choose for sermons. Do not leave the name of Jesus only in the New Testament. For example, in the incident of David and Goliath, find a way of applying it to the Christian life. The Christian life is a life of following the Savior: the One who died for our sins, the One who won the victory for us that we could not win. He won the victory over sin, the flesh, and the devil. Jesus is my David. Jesus defeated Goliath when I did not and when I could not.

You must preach the mystery of Christ and you must preach the riches of Christ, if you are going to preach the sermons that Paul preached and if you are going to have the ministry that he had. Remember that he said, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.” One of the elements of the preaching of Paul was that he preached the riches of Christ. Therefore, you must preach the riches of Christ. Notice in verse eight that the Bible says that these riches of Christ are unsearchable. Does it mean that we are not to search out His riches? No. Does it mean that if we search for them, that we will never find them? Of course, not. Jesus Himself said, “Seek and ye shall find.” Or think of the verse that says, “Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you.” What it means is that no matter how much you come to know about the risen Christ: His power, His love, His presence, His promises, there is always more to discover. Paul knew Jesus probably far better than any of us and yet he cried out, “That I may know Him and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable to His death.” No matter how much you find out about Christ, there is always more to seek out, and to experience, and to discover. To preach these unsearchable riches of Christ, you yourself must find them out. Of course, if you do not seek them, you will not find them and you will not have them to preach.

Paul called them the “unsearchable riches” of Christ. If you consider the things of Christ to be riches, then you will seek them. Paul used the word “riches” here in order to emphasize just how much he himself valued the things of Christ. The people of the world know how to value something when they find something that they consider to be riches and they go after it. I remember hearing an interview that a sports broadcaster had given some years back with a well-known professional golfer. This golfer had become very successful over the course of his golfing career. He had won many tournaments and several major golf championships. But one thing that had happened to this man over the course of his life was that his wife had divorced him, and his children had become estranged from him. He said that he knew that his family life had been destroyed because of all those years of golfing, where he spent every available hour on the golf course. That was the reason that he lost his family. He had no time for them, ever. The golfer said that looking back at what had happened, if he had the chance to do it over, he would do exactly the same thing. That is how much he loved golf, and that is how much he valued becoming successful at it. If we truly valued knowing the things of Christ, we also would gladly pay whatever price we had to pay to seek and to find more about Christ. The Apostle Paul said, “What things were gain to me, those I counted loss that I might win Christ.”

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