The Open Secret: What God Has Been Building All Along
- Daniel Lee
- 7 minutes ago
- 4 min read
from Ephesians 3
Imagine writing one of the most encouraging letters of your life from a prison cell.
That's exactly what Paul did when he wrote to the church in Ephesus. He was locked up; the Roman Empire was at the height of its power; and the Christians he was writing to were scattered in small house churches throughout one of the busiest, most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world. They were worried. Their founder was behind bars. The odds were stacked against them. The powers seemed to be winning.
And yet, what Paul writes in Ephesians 3 is nothing short of breathtaking.
The World They Were Living In
To appreciate what Paul says, you have to understand the world he and his readers inhabited.
Rome was unstoppable. Its emperors were worshiped as sons of the gods. Its Pax Romana, the so-called "Peace of Rome," was peace enforced at the edge of a sword. As one Roman poet put it, they made a desert and called it peace. Military dominance, economic control, cultural conformity, these were Rome's tools.
And the early church in Ephesus? A collection of small, fragile house churches in a city famous for the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When Paul had visited, his preaching caused such an uproar that tens of thousands of people flooded the city's amphitheater, chanting "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" for hours, because merchants feared their idol-selling businesses were finished.
One man. One message. That kind of disruption.
Now that man was writing from prison, and his question to these small, anxious communities was essentially: Don't you realize what you're part of?
The Mystery Revealed
Paul uses a word repeatedly in this chapter that we need to sit with: mystery.
For Paul, a mystery isn't a puzzle waiting to be solved. It's a divine secret that has been building toward a great reveal, something hinted at throughout history but now finally made known. He describes it like a theater performance where you can see the lights flickering and movement behind a closed curtain. You know something is being prepared. You just haven't seen it yet.
The prophets sensed it. Even angels longed to catch a glimpse (1 Peter 1:12). But the full picture was kept close.
Until now.
So what is the great reveal? Paul lands on it in verse 6, and it's more radical than most of us give it credit for:
The Gentiles are co-heirs, members of the same body, partners in the promise through Christ Jesus.
That's it. That's the secret God has been building toward since the beginning. The doors are wide open. Everyone is invited. Not just one people, one nation, one language group. Everyone.
He uses three Greek words, each beginning with the prefix meaning "with," to hammer the point home. Co-heirs. Co-body members. Co-partakers. Three times. In Scripture, when something is said three times, pay attention. Paul is saying: there is absolute equality here, total unity, and it runs completely counter to everything Rome stood for.
What the Church Is Actually For
This is where things get cosmic.
Paul writes in verse 10 that God's "multifaceted wisdom" is now being made known through the church, not just to the watching world, but to "rulers and authorities in the heavens." The powers and principalities, spiritual forces that operate through violence, division, tribalism, and hierarchy, are watching the church.
God is essentially saying: Look at this. This is what I've been building toward.
Where the empire divided people to control them, the church unites them. Where Rome maintained hierarchy with threats of violence, the kingdom of God promotes unity through self-sacrificial love. Where tribalism says "my people, my nation, my language," the family of God says there is no longer slave or free, rich or poor, insider or outsider. We are all one.
The church, in other words, is meant to be a working model of new creation. A preview of what the world looks like when God's kingdom fully arrives. When John gets his vision in Revelation 7, he sees members of every nation, tribe, people, and language gathered together around the throne, a crowd too large to count. That future is what we're supposed to be pointing toward right now.
As N.T. Wright puts it, the church is "a small working model of that new creation."
A Four-Dimensional Prayer
Paul closes the chapter with a prayer, and it begins with something striking. He kneels. The normal Jewish posture for prayer was to stand. To kneel was an act of submission, a recognition that the power he was about to talk about wasn't his own.
He prays that these discouraged, exhausted communities would be "strengthened with power in your inner being." That they would be rooted and established in love, like a tree with a deep taproot, or a building with a foundation sunk deep enough to survive earthquakes.
And then he describes that love in four dimensions, length across time and cultures, width that includes everyone, height reaching up to the throne room of heaven, and depth reaching all the way down to our suffering and our sin. There is nowhere you can go where God's love is absent.
He wants them to know this love, even while admitting it "surpasses knowledge." Head knowledge isn't enough. This love has to be experienced.
And then he closes with the doxology that still echoes today:
"Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen."
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The powers of this world operate through fear, division, and control. They always have.
But the church carries something those powers cannot manufacture or defeat, the power that raised Jesus from the dead, working in ordinary people, in ordinary communities, pointing the world toward something better.
Don't give up. The powers are panicking, because they know the truth is getting out.
This post is adapted from a sermon on Ephesians 3, part of an ongoing series through the book of Ephesians.
LISTEN TO OR WATCH THE FULL SERMON HERE: