If you have your Bibles this morning, I'm gonna ask you to turn to the book of Ephesians chapter three. And at times when trying to limit our reading is difficult, and so I almost have no choice just to jump into the middle of one of Paul's thoughts and use that as a jumping off point for more of the text than what we're going to read. And that's what we're doing this morning. Ephesians chapter 3. I like to start in verse 5. And I'll read the verse 12, I think. Now, this is a reference back to the previous chapter where we're going to dwell primarily in today. but he's kind of getting to a summary point of some of the things he's already talked about beginning at the beginning of chapter two. And so some of it doesn't, we're jumping in the middle. That's why it may not make entire sense until we start to look at more. Ephesians chapter three, beginning in verse five, it says this, which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men as it is now revealed unto his, his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs and of the same body, partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel. Whereof, I was made a minister according to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by the effectual working of his power. Unto me, whom less than least of all saints is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ, to the intent that now, under the principalities and powers and heavenly places, might be made known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him. I'll conclude our reading this morning. And I don't really know how to begin this morning. There's just so much that's in my heart that these scriptures have stirred. I ask you to pray for me this morning that the Lord would just speak to your heart. If I could put a title on the message this morning, it would be God's Missionary Heart. God's Missionary Heart. About once a week, I stop down at our, on the hillside on the time capsule and I look at the time capsule and 2095 just seems like a long way away. I suppose in some ways it is. For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to, the church was in 2015, I think. Was that right? They put a time capsule, buried a time capsule, put a stone, and it's to be opened in 2095 by those who follow after us. And given the state of religion in America today and given the state of many of our sister churches, 2095 sounds like a long way away. for a church to survive, quite frankly. And yet, as we were singing this morning, and I was thinking about some of the things that I wanna say today, I pray that one day, before that date, that we have a dozen missionaries that get sent out from our church. We're not, struggling to hang on, but that we're going to the uttermost parts of the world with the gospel. I think we all know that, as we've studied on Wednesday nights, and self-evident to everyone that's been in church for any long period of time, that we are called as God's people to share the good news of Jesus Christ. And I wanna say this morning that it is really good news. And I'm quite sure that our Wednesday night missions committee meeting maybe have stirred some of these thoughts that I have this morning. We met and began to talk about the missionaries and how we can help missionaries and how we can spread the gospel It's just really impacted my heart since then. And in saying a moment ago that I wish we could send out a dozen missionaries, perhaps many of our minds, including my own, goes to all the logistical hurdles that would be involved in getting a dozen missionaries to the world. Let's set all that aside for just a moment. And let's consider for a moment the need of the people we're called to go to. Now, I hesitate to bring this message before you today because I felt this way at the missions conference this year, and maybe I shouldn't admit this, but I'm going to. Um, I felt like some of the missionaries got up and wagged their fingers at us and said, well, y'all need to be mission minded. And I kind of thought, well, people came out on a Tuesday night. These are the people who are mission minded. Um, and I say that partially in jest and partially in truth. I know that many of you have a vested interest in the word of God being propagated throughout the world. And I don't think that it is wise or good for necessity alone to compel us to go to the world with the gospel. What I mean is I don't think that doing it because you're just told to and that you feel guilty if you don't, is the spirit that Christ wants us to get the gospel to the world with. So this morning, I want to try and talk about the spirit within, not the Holy Spirit, but the motivation behind spreading the gospel, whether it be in foreign lands or whether it be with your own children in your home. And I think a template that is revealed to us in Ephesians chapter two as this small microcosm of the gospel that in Ephesians chapter two, it tells us the heart of God towards fallen men. And I want to say this morning that the first missionary to ever be in the world was Jesus Christ. He was the first missionary. He left home with all of His glory. with the perfect fellowship of the Father, immune from the pains and the weaknesses that His incarnation would bring. He was in heaven and God called Him, the Father called Him to come into this world as the first missionary to the human race. And He not only accomplished by His obedience the will of the Father to which our now, our redemption and our salvation is possible, but in so coming to the world in the fashion that He did, He also sets an example for all those men and women that would come after Him. as to the means and the ways to which we are to go to our fellow man and the human race that has fallen in sin, our example to follow to be a missionary in this world is Jesus Christ alone. He did it perfectly. And successfully, he accomplished his Father's will to get the gospel to the world. And there is a sense to which all of us that are saved by God's grace are called to be missionaries in this world. Or the Bible says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 that we are ambassadors for Christ and that the love of Christ constrains us. that we would not live in accordance with our own will, but live unto Him who died and rose again, and then that we would embody the role of an ambassador for Jesus Christ to go from the Father to the world with the message of His Son. And yet the means and the Spirit, the thing that compels us to go, is central to why we go to the world. You'll notice always an emphasis in my preaching is not just doing the right thing. It's being compelled to do the right thing by the right motivation that God would put into our hearts. We want to serve God voluntarily and eagerly, not out of compulsion. I'm glad that God the Father sent Jesus, and I'm glad that Jesus came of his own volition. He was willing to come. Ephesians chapter two, there's so much here, there's no way in a series of sermons you could possibly cover chapters two and three, or even chapter two, there's no way you could. But this morning I wanna point out a few things that are instructive to a people who are commanded to have our minds on how can we win this world for Jesus Christ? How can we reach the world? And I wanna see that the gospel story is a relatable template for us to carry out our commission. In other words, we can see in Jesus leaving Heaven and coming to the earth a symbol and a picture of what us leaving our church and going to the world ought to look like. And the first thing that I wanna hit on this morning and found in Ephesians chapter two, and you can look there, is that very often a restraint for people to go to the rest of the world is the fact that we don't know those people, and to be blunt, those people don't have anything to offer us. In other words, they're strangers to us. And so, so often interwoven in human nature is this mentality that, you know, we're gonna take care of ourselves first, we're gonna take care of our own next, and if by chance we can take care of those people who are kind to us, then certainly we will reciprocate in kindness. But listen, that self-seeking motivation is antithetical to the spirit of the gospel. The gospel found in God's character alone is no respecter of persons. It does not prefer those who are kin to us, those that are friends to us, those who esteem us highly, those who are receptive to the message of the gospel. But the Bible teaches us that Jesus stepped into this world knowing that the human race was enemies to God, haters of God, and yet Jesus came anyway. Ephesians chapter two, beginning in verse one, look what it says. Now notice, notice the condition of the human race that he's talking about here, who were dead in trespasses and in sins. And this word dead here, it's not meaning insensible. You know, some people say, well, a corpse is, You can't talk to a corpse because they can't respond, and it's not what it's talking about, it's saying, apart from life in Christ. That these people, we, were dead in trespasses and in sins. Our trespasses and in sins kept us apart from life in Christ, and we were adversaries to God, we were enemies to God, we were haters of God. But we weren't just that, look at verse two. born in time past, ye, walked according to the course of this world. Let's always remember that when the word walked is talking about, it's referencing our lifestyle. So this is saying, so oftentimes, I remember here about a year and a half, two years ago, I read this book by a woman who had been a former lesbian and she describes in her early accounts of her book the lifestyle that she was living. because the specific sin that she was committing had less of a hold than the lifestyle that that sin was placed in. Does that make sense? That there's a whole lifestyle that surrounds often the nature of sin. that it's not people are just escaping in the middle of the night, committing a sin and then coming back and doing good deeds and living in a righteous lifestyle. It's that very often when Paul was saying here, he said, they walked according to the course of this world, or their heart and their life and their relationships were so woven into the fabric of this world that they were inseparable from the sin that they were committing. They lived in a spirit of that. I think of oftentimes there's a culture, there's a spirit of professional athletes. There's a lifestyle involved. There's a lifestyle to business success at the corporate level. There's a whole mentality and there's behaviors and there's a whole warped lifestyle that is not predicated upon the gospel. So he says, listen, you were dead in trespasses and in sins. Your lifestyle was just according to the course of this world. But he keeps going, not just according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience. So it wasn't just in the course of this world, but you were walking in accordance with the will of Satan. What is Satan's will? Well, one of vanity, and pride and self-seeking. They had a lifestyle that was completely Enveloped in that, let's keep going in verse three. Among whom also we had our conversation, that means our behavior, our activities, our life, and times past in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. So listen, he keeps on, he starts with we're dead in trespasses and in sins. But lest we think it's just because we accidentally commit them, he says, no, no, we walk, we live a lifestyle, so it's going downward according to the ways of this world. Then he goes down again and he says, not only according to the ways of this world, according to the ways of Satan. And then he goes even a step further and he says, no, by nature, you are children of wrath. You were born a child of sin. And so he's painting for us the degree of depravity and rejection that we have had towards God, that we have repelled him and sought self at all costs, even inborn in our nature. And so the question remains before we get to verse four, why would God be a missionary to those people? Well, verse four tells us. Now listen, this is the point where I think so often well-intentioned Bible instruction goes wrong. It's then people begin to paint something that is like, you know, God had such, like there was some good still in you that compelled him to come. No, no, there was nothing, nothing about us. was worthy of God's interest. We deal with things like that every day, don't we? Things that just don't, they're so worthless to us. They just don't demand our interest. But look at what verse four says. But God, who is rich in mercy, For his great love, wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ. The nature of God is so, yesterday, yesterday I came here for a few moments and I was praying, and in my prayer, I began to try to worship the Lord a little bit. Tell him the good things about himself. And as I was praying and meditating, I began to think about this plan of God. Just God's plan for us, God's plan. And how only God could conceive of God's plan. Or in other words, it is so lofty what God has decided to do in this world for us, that human conception could not have created that. And that's why in chapter three, Paul identifies that as a mystery of the ages. that people could not, through all the prophets, understand what was God doing. And he says, but it has been revealed to us in the gospel. And part of that plan is that, yes, man would be drowning in his own wickedness and sin, and there would be nothing worthy of redemption about him, but because of God's exalted, high, great character, and the love wherewith he loved us, he of his own accord chose to come and die for sinful men. And that that Spirit of love, we find it all through the scriptures. But God commended his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. We find that at the moment between allowing those to suffer the Jew, punishment for their sin or the moment of intervening in some behalf, the compelling thing that caused God to move was His love. God is love. And he loves those creatures that he has made into his own image and went to the furthest extent that one could go in order to redeem them because of his love. So what is the spirit? What is the missionary spirit that we ought to have? as we look down through time and we listen to and read those men and women in the past who have been compelled by God to go and to minister. Listen, the moment I say missionary, you think of overseas, and I'm not necessarily talking about that. I'm talking about the person who doesn't have the gospel and needs it. What is it that compels those people You know, I love in the scriptures that, for God so loved the world. What that doesn't mean is God loved the world so much that he did this. That's not what it's talking about. It's saying, for God loved the world in this manner, in this way. Here's the evidence. What did he do? He sacrificed himself. He made a sacrifice. Jesus taught us that it's perhaps commendable for us to, commendable and expected for us to give ourselves to those who give themselves to us. But what is chiefly commendable and unexpected to come from the human race are those who give to those who cannot give back. And that our example for that is Jesus. that He gave Himself, and not just in moderation, not just cutting a little piece off the corner to hand out, not just in moderation, but He gave Himself entirely for something well beyond the humanitarian needs of the human race. Or in other words, listen, you can watch on TV and you can see children. they'll put them up on a screen that are in Africa or in some South American tribe and talk about the diseases that they're carried away with. And listen, my heart is somebody who often has a bleeding heart can be carried away with the desire to relieve the needs of those people. Yet the truth remains that we are not called just to give water to those people who need a drink or a home to those people who need shelter, but rather that there is something Christ gave himself for and that was for the souls of other men and women. We care for the eternal state of our fellow man. And if in the process of getting the gospel to them, we can do them some good, that's fine, but that is not the aim of the gospel. Listen, the measure of success for a missionary is not if he built a church building or not. It's not. Church buildings don't matter at all, not even a little bit. The gospel matters and the souls of people matter. Transportation, in the grand scheme of things, a van one day is gonna break down, isn't it? You know what matters? Those people's souls and those people becoming disciples of Jesus Christ that they too might become missionaries to their fellow men. Jesus came and what compelled him was his love for fallen humanity. And I wanna pause for a moment right here and say this. No matter how hard you try, you can't create that in yourself. Like I think far too often, it has been the well-intentioned actions of some, to have a spark of interest. Maybe a missionary comes and they give a report at a church. Maybe you become acquainted with pictures and things of need that people have in foreign lands, but you and I all know that that sort of motivation will fizzle out with certainty. Suddenly, whenever the picture stopped getting sent, or the missionary gets called to come home, or the first trial that's faced and people fall away, or the first distraction that hits our mind, very often those interests, if they're rooted in the well-intended sympathies of men, will erode with certainty. Because the compelling, rooted in love, cannot be planted in our own strength or our own grace and wisdom, it can't. God must impute to us a love for our fellow man where the streams of living water never run dry. In other words, God has to give you a love for people. For many years of my life, I would say the majority of my life being saved, my prayer was somehow wrapped up in this thought, Lord, help me to do this. Lord, help me to do this. Help me to do this. And now I recognize that so much of that prayer is rooted or is placed upon this idea that I can do something. Here's where it's changed, Lord, Do something to me. Change me. Give me, shape my heart to be more like your son, just like you made me a new creature in Christ Jesus at the point of my salvation, and thereby once and forever changed my nature. So I now need you to change my heart, change the things in my mind that I care about, because I know that if I get this rush of energy to do good, that one day it's gonna wear out, but if you will change the fabric of who I am and what I love, then Lord, I know these things will be sustained. You see, to have the heart of God, to have the heart of a missionary, it's not just that you find a group of people that you feel are compelling to love, but it's that God so radically transforms your heart that to sacrifice is a genuine desire on their behalf, not something that you have to be compelled to do and regrettably relinquish. Here. He came. The profundity of this chapter, I just can't, there's so many things I'd like to say about this. Jesus came. And let's look at the extent to which he went for a moment. You know, I think being a missionary is a big deal. It's a really big deal. It's not something you dabble in. It's not something you dabble in. Jesus didn't dabble in this world, did he? He didn't stay in his lofty throne in heaven and say, well, I really wish that that could be bettered, and I really wish those people could be helped, and I'll multiply the fishes and the loaves from here. You know what Jesus did? He became incarnate. I think that's a pattern for a missionary, don't you? I don't think it's healthy for missionaries to live 51 weeks in the year in one place and do mission work for one week in another place, do you? I just don't. Can God use it? Absolutely. But is that the pattern of the gospel? Or what do we find Paul doing here? Paul instructs us, when you're a Roman, or when you're in Rome, what are you to do? Become a Roman. When you're in Greece, become a Greek. Become those people and then he tells us why so as to win those people that you want to take upon yourself. Therefore, because what he knows is that in human interaction, trust matters. That listen, I can get up all day long in a suit and in a nice tie, and I can fly to these third world countries looking my absolute best and get up before those people in their raggedy clothing and try to preach the Gospel the best I can, but the likelihood is because I am not living as one of them, because I am not suffering the things that they suffer, that there is going to be in their heart a resistance to some degree of the message that I'm trying to proclaim. And so what do I have to do? That's why it's a big deal to be a missionary. Because when God calls you to a mission field, imagine if he requires of you, imagine if he requires of the servant the same thing that he required of the master. and of the servant above his Lord? Should the expectation of those going out be any different than the one who set the example for us in Jesus Christ? I think not. Jesus, he came and he became a man. Altogether a man. I love He didn't just come in a fully grown form. He wasn't just like, whatever the opposite of translated would be, sent down here as a 30-year-old man, said, OK, I'm here to speak. It took 30 years of knowing what it was like to be a man, subjecting himself to the cultural norms, listening and tolerating all the sin that was around him. Is there a chance that one of the reasons why when we evangelize to people and we try to be missionaries to people is that we hold back from stepping into their world because of the suffering that their world would cause us? Is the cost too great? Are sometimes we just apprehensive I don't want the commitment because then the life that I am aiming for, I could not reach if I get entangled with the people on the bad side of town, with a man in a far off place in a third world country. Jesus, he came. And He became us. They still rejected Him. Here, Jesus, in this text, I was going to go a little further here in verses 13 through 18. I'll explain it to you just because I don't have time. Jesus came. and he reconciled us, the first part of what it talks about, he reconciled us to one another. That's not the first thing he did. That's the first thing it talks about here. The Jew and the Gentile were at enemies with one another. There was a wall of partition dividing us, and Jesus came and he unified these ethnic groups that were at war with one another. Then it says that he unified us not only to each other, but foremost, he unified us and reconciled us back to God. It continues and it begins to tell us that in verse. 16, it says this, and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby, and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. So God comes from heaven, he incarnates himself, he lives like us, and he does all these things like, and he proclaims the gospel to us, and he satisfies the demands of God in accomplishing salvation for us. And then here's a part of God's plan that involves us. He ascended into heaven. And he said this, part of the gospel story is that now those who were my enemies that hated me, whom I have now unified with the Father through salvation. I have saved their souls. I have reconciled them back to God. Now, I'm not gonna stay on earth for its entire existence, but here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna commission them to go in my stead and be required to exhibit the same love that I exhibited when I came down here for them. Isn't that beautiful? that we can be partakers of God's plan by embodying the same spirit of love which compelled Jesus to come. We can do that for those that are our enemies. Don't you want to know a love like that? Like I mean this for real, like don't you wanna know, I think very often we can think if we've been saved for a long time that we have experienced the heights of what it means to be a Christian or the heights of love that we'll ever experience. But do you not think that there are heights of love that you've never explored and experienced before that God has reserved for you? And that it is found in living like Christ? So imagine, imagine the love, imagine the height of joy that Christ found when those people who tortured him on the day of his death were 50 days later calling out to his servant Peter and saying, what must I do to be saved? Because the scripture tell us in Acts 2 that Peter looks at those people on Pentecost and says, it was your wickedness, it was you that crucified the Son of God. And they return, what do we do? How do we respond? We know the accusation's true. Imagine John, who was there the day that Jesus died and didn't flee, he was there, he saw him be put to death. Imagine that same John on the day of Pentecost watching those same people who had killed God now begging for God's mercy. And imagine knowing that God was employing you as a missionary in the same spirit of Christ to reach his and your enemies. And imagine that day when John went down to the baptismal waters, he raised his hand He said, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I baptize this my brother. And he laid down that brother as a picture of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus that they had been guilty of. They had killed him. And now they were symbolically proclaiming his death and their submission to baptism. Listen, this morning, It was love that compelled those people. So what am I saying? What's the summative point? I want that kind of love. I want to love people like that. I don't. But I want to. I want to suffer loss for the souls of men that I might know what it's like to have the love of Christ I don't want to gain. I want to know what it's like to love like Christ. And I think those martyrs that are in heaven, I think they have an honorable place in heaven because they foremost know what it's like to give everything for the glory of God and for the love of their fellow men. I want the love of Christ to constrain and control us. And there is a inherent dissatisfaction in my soul from maintaining the opulent and the free and the self-seeking life while the souls of men drown in eternity. But I can't create that in myself, let alone creating that in you. I know that. I wish, I want, I want mine in your heart to be affected. What a beautiful picture of the gospel story. that the very ones that were enemies to God could be reconciled to him through his son and then become the enemies. Imagine that in politics today. Imagine if a spy against the United States doing untold damage and harm to our country, and like Paul, perhaps causing many people, many citizens to die. And then they're caught. and they're found guilty. But then the president finds repentance in their heart and they're forgiven and they're pardoned, and then they're anointed to carry out as ambassadors the will of the very nation and leader that they had been so treacherously set against. that they had caused so much damage against. That, my friend, is the story of the gospel. That's what Paul, as he's lamenting in 2 Timothy, and he can't get over all the sins that he's committed, he's saying, how could I have been so treasonous against my fellow laborers and now be called to be a leader among God's people? And he said, but listen, I'm not ashamed of it. because God did this, so that I could be used as a foremost example to all those who would come after, that what God is doing in me, God wants to do in you. This morning, God has a missionary heart. He exhibited it in his own life and he calls us to it. I want our church to change in its makeup. In other words, I want people who are not supposed to be here to be here. Don't you? Don't you want us to merge, not with another church body like us, but with the people who once were not a people, but have now been made into the people of God, and whom, because of Christ, can be merged with us, and all of us can become ambassadors for the souls of men. A lot on Wednesday night has been talked about self-denial. Oh, isn't that at the center of it? Isn't there a lot of it at the center of God's missionary heart? Which is still, by the way, intact today. God became a missionary. God is still a missionary. He's still seeking to save those who are lost in wickedness and in their sins. This morning, I don't come with a rebuking spirit at all. It may seem like that. I don't. I come with a desirous spirit that God would do something in us that only He can do. Have us love people who have nothing to offer us. I say again, Don't you want to know that kind of love? Stop for a moment. Think beyond a sermon. Think for real. Don't you want to know a type of righteousness? That's what that is. That longing is a type of righteousness. What did Jesus say on the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. What will happen? if they're hungering and thirsting after righteousness. Oh, I love this promise. They shall be filled. What a promise that if God would plant in us hunger and a thirst for righteousness, which is the spiritual well-being of our fellow men, and we seek Him for that aim. He'll answer us. He'll give it to us. I pray if you've never had that, I pray you will. And I pray that if you have had that in the past, that God would renew that spirit inside of you. Thankful for God's renewal too, aren't you? That God can renew something that has been lost. It's our message this morning, I pray. Pray that God would give us a heart as Christ had.