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[no dialogue] [music] You may be seated. (gentle music)

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(gentle music) ♪♪ ♪♪ [music]

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And God did unusual and extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, doing God's work. One of the distinguishing marks of the early Christian church is mighty works.

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Those who made up the Christian community are remembered as persons whose works were marvelous. If we would take a lesson from that early church, it is that the church is the church.

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when the family of God is doing mighty works. Church is the church. When the church is seen in the world doing the wonderful works of God.

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So God's people in the world are those who are faithful to his commands, who are called and set apart to engage in mission, that is, to do the work of God in the world. We observe the Fifth Sunday as a mission Sunday. And for so many people, that's a Sunday when the ladies of the church are in charge

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and present a special program and that's it. But mission is the task of the church. The whole church is on mission. The church is sent to the world.

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So it is ours to engage in mission, every person who claims Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. It is ours to engage in a ministry of reconciliation, of winning the world to God, bringing the loss, the separated, home again. This involves healing for the wounded, wholeness for the broken.

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Let us look at the activities of Paul as he is engaged in mission in Ephesus. As far as But as the Christian faith is concerned, Ephesus is a secular city. It is known for the worship of idol gods. Ephesus is a commercial center.

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Ephesus is a place of corruption. Ephesus is a place where evil is entrenched, where crime and violence run rampant. And it strikes me as rather significant

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that Paul spent so much time in Ephesus. He says on one occasion, I fought with beasts in Ephesus. He says again that I have decided to remain in Ephesus. There are many adversaries.

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So sometimes we must work in very difficult places where we face stiff and stubborn opposition. It seems that Ephesus is the kind of place that ordinarily most of us would like to avoid. We talk about the workplace. We talk about good working conditions.

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Everybody would like to be guaranteed good, comfortable, pleasant working conditions. the kind of workplace that ordinarily each of us would select for ourselves. But notice that this is not the kind of workplace that Paul has. He is in Ephesus. Ephesus is a city where he faces considerable difficulty, a great deal of hardship. And it's the kind of place that

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most of us would like if we find ourselves caught in it we'd like to get out of it as soon as possible. It's not the kind of place we would recommend, it's not the kind of town that we'd like to settle in, rather it's the place that we would be tempted to leave off of our missionary itinerary.

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It is Paul's task, however, to work in Ephesus. And yet, we noticed that there was so much work that needed to be done in Ephesus. God's work. God's work. It's a good thing to take a look at the kind of work that we do. There is man's work. Man's work is the work of culture. Man's work is the work of the kingdoms of this world.

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Man's work has to do with many of our scientific discoveries, our technological skills, our cultural advantages, our advances, rather, that may be used for the wrong purposes. knowledge of nuclear energy has been used in so many instances for destructive purposes. Most of the resources of the leading powers of this world are being used for the wrong

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purposes. They demonstrate man's inhumanity to man. That's man's work in Ephesus. Man's work is to exalt himself.

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It doesn't matter what we may do. When one is engaged in work and the motivating purpose of what we do is to exalt ourselves, then that's man's work. of Genesis tells of the men who agreed among themselves to build a tower that

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reached from earth to heaven and the main purpose for building this tower to reach to heaven was that they might make a name for themselves, a name for themselves and so they went to work. That's always the way it is with the kingdoms of this world. And there's so much work that is man's work that's only

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for the glory of man. Make a name for ourselves. That is the kind of work that so many are engaged in in Ephesus. So this this Tower of Babel that the man sought to build that is recorded in the book of Genesis as they continued their work God looked down upon them and and decided to frustrate their efforts so

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that their work was brought to naught. They were trying to build so to speak a a stairway to the stars for themselves. Oh, it appears to be a noble venture, but the work is designed to reach from Earth to Heaven,

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to exalt man, to make a name for themselves. So there are many noble enterprises in Ephesus, wonderful art and architecture. But these do not really serve a praiseworthy purpose.

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There are many temples in Ephesus, but they are not set aside for the worship of the true and living God. In Ephesus, man's work is magnified. In Ephesus, there is magic which is maximized

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And magic is the glorification of man, man's attempt to control the supernatural, magic. So often, so often, we resort to magic. This has been true for many centuries

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in the life of the Christian church. A great deal of attention given to the bones of the saints. "Well, if you can get the bones of Saint Peter." They said, "Well, if you had those bones,

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"then there's certain power in those bones." And in many instances, there have been so many bones that people have claimed to be the bones of some saint that if they were all put together,

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that there would be far more bones than the saint had to begin with. Some kind of magic. Something that somehow exalts man.

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And here is the kind of work that we find taking place in Ephesus, but this word lifts up the fact that God is at work in the world. And that God works unusual and extraordinary miracles

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through the hands of Paul. See God is at work in the world. He's at work. God has not just created the world

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and made everything good and left it out here alone just to operate on its laws. God is still at work in the world. He's at work.

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He's at work. Sometimes we may wonder what is God doing? But make no mistake about it. God is at work in his world.

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God is still creating and making new. He hasn't stopped working. After the seventh day when he rested there, was the eighth day, God is still working.

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Jesus came to this world, he said, I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day, for the night cometh, when no man can work.

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So the important thing here about Paul is that Paul had that openness to God so that God is able to work in and through Paul. That's what is taking place.

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Well, there's some people who think, you know, they say, well, I'm gonna just let God do it. And so what they do, they sit down, they fold their arms, and they don't do anything.

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They say, "Well, God don't do it." And they leave it to him to do everything. And then there have been those so-called Christians in every age who have withdrawn from the world.

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They say, "The world is evil. "Everybody in the world is going to hell." So they have withdrawn. They have just built for themselves some isolated place where they are going to be pure and

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let all the other people go wherever they are going to go. And God's going to set everything right in the end and God's going to work it out. That's one view of the Christian faith. Then there is another view of the Christian faith where God and man, God and the human,

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cooperate together and that we as human beings are workers together with God. That God works through us. God uses our hands as George Eliot puts it concerning Antonio's Stradivarius. He says that, "Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hands." He could not make

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Stradivarius violins without Antonio. That God uses our hands, that he has no hands but our hands to do his work. And the work of God is when the Spirit of God guides, controls, and empowers the works of our hands. That's what makes the church the church and when that occurs there are mighty works. A whole lot of work we do

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is not God's work, man's work. The church is the church when the church is engaged in performing God's work in the world and we cannot do God's work without God's spirit. In other words, if we must do God's work, we must do it. If we can follow his will, we must do it God's way.

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It must be manifested by his spirit. And God's work, you see, is developing, it's growing, his kingdom is growing like seed in the field. And when God is at work in the world, God is creating and making new.

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That's what God is about. He's in Ephesus. And where Ephesus is strong, where there is the opposition to the Almighty, God works through Paul.

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And there are those who are sick, and they are healed. There are many wonderful works that are done because God is working. God is at work in our world. A man was working on a building.

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Someone came up and said to him, "What are you doing?" as he was working there with cutting stone. And he said, "I'm working for $5 an hour." We went to another worker there,

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he said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I'm building a cathedral." They were both working, but one was just working for what he could get out of it,

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and the other was working for a ultimate purpose. So some people work just for what they can get. I've seen that in the church. I've seen people who have gotten angry with the church

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because they didn't get $3 for a benevolent gift. Said, "Well, you gave it to so and so, "and you didn't give it to so and give it to me, "and I'm a member up there just like they are."

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That they've been concerned about what they can get out of the church rather than what they can give. But Paul is concerned about doing the work of God.

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He's concerned about doing what God has commanded and God uses him. Can you visualize this man who has all kinds of problems? He's troubled by a physical malady. He's like many of us.

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He could say, "Well, my pal may have had arthritis." You could say, "Well, he may have had hypertension." He may have had any number of physical maladies, but yet God somehow uses Paul,

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and he uses him in such a way that Acts here records it. Luke tells us that somehow God uses Paul to perform extraordinary miracles through the hands of Paul.

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You know, there's some work that is the devil's work. The devil makes his appearance on the scene and it seems that the devil is pretty strong in Ephesus. And the thing about the devil's work is that the devil's work is deceptive.

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It's deceptive. The devil, you see, is the master of deception. That's been true of Satan since the very beginning. observed the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Satan always seeks to fool us. He

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wants us to think that all is well when it is not. God says that you will die, he says to Eve, Eve says yes, he said that the day we eat of that fruit in the midst of the garden that we will die. So we're not even to touch it.

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Satan said, well, you'll not really die. See, Satan seeks to work against God. So the devil's work is to oppose the good. Evil is set against good.

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And Satan's work is pronounced in Ephesus. You see, the problem with Satan here is that Satan tries to play God. And there is a group of Jewish exorcists.

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And they notice that Paul has done extraordinary work. And so they want to sort of duplicate what Paul has done. They want to duplicate it. There's so many people who see somebody else doing something and they want to duplicate it.

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They want to duplicate what they have seen someone else do, but they don't have the spirit that the other person had that was doing that work. They saw Paul. They wanted to duplicate it.

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And so Paul had cast out devils. He had wrought wonders because God was at work in his life. They noticed that Paul called on the name of Jesus. And so they too sought to call on the name of Jesus.

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They wanted to show others that they had this power. They'd been making money by performing works of magic, and so they wanted to demonstrate this particular gift. And so they too called on the name of Jesus.

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And the evil spirit in the man, say, "Paul I know, and Jesus I know, but who are you?" And the evil spirit came out of the man and ran those people out of the house. There are so many times when people try to do the works of God without the Spirit of God.

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Paul I know, Jesus I know. So, so, so many times when people want to call on the name of God but not in sincerity, not in complete dedication. Who are you?

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That if we would use Jesus Christ, we must not use him for our selfish ends. We are to use him to glorify God's will and way in the world. So doing God's work, that's when the church is the church. You know, so often people say, you know,

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I would like to support Reverend so-and-so's program. Or this is the pastor's program. I'm not with this or that. Church is really not some man's program.

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When the church is the church, it's God's program. And God's program is a program for every one of us, and that is to reach out and to somehow touch some lost person and bring that person

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into right relationship to Jesus Christ. That's why Paul was in Ephesus in the first place. To somehow bind up the broken heart and to give healing and wholeness.

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That's the work of God. That's the work of God. And God is at work. He's at work in the life of Paul.

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And the wonderful thing is that God is still at work in the world. He's at work in every life that is open to him so that we are working with him.

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So that God is at work, that he's somehow overcoming obstacles. That God is at work, just as he was when Jesus walked this earth, and opened blinded eyes and unstopped deaf ears. That God is still at work.

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He's at work through the disciples of the Master today. He's still opening eyes. He's still unstopping ears. He's still somehow causing the lame to walk.

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God is still raising the dead. God is at work in his world. God is at work. This is God's work.

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So God is working. We are workers together with God. And God does wonderful works through his disciples. disciples. So don't be afraid when you're working for God. Don't somehow

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belittle that work when you are really working for God. You know sometimes we've chosen the wrong heroes. You know we look at many of the outstanding athletes today and we shout and we acclaim what is done in professional football and other things today. And many of the things of this world, people who have positions, you know,

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you have them and you move up and then of course those you have that for a certain time, whether it's political office or whatever it is, and then that fades away. But the work that is done for God lasts. It is something that never passes away. It's the work of God and that's what the Psalmist is talking about when he takes a whole sweep of human history.

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He says, "Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations." Lord, you've been around all the time. Generations have come and generations have gone,

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but somehow you've been working well, Lord. And somehow we've been trying to work. Sometimes we've done this, sometimes we've done that. We've seen kingdoms rise and we've seen kingdoms fall.

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Then he says, "All the works of our hands, "establish thou in." All the works of our hands, Lord, establish thou in. To say that the Lord is at work in my heart,

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the Lord is at work in my life. And to establish the works of our hands, That's the kind of relationship that enables us to do mighty works in God's name. Just as I am, without one plea, as we sing, we extend the privilege of the church.

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It's the privilege to accept Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life. You can walk with him. [MUSIC PLAYING] You're the coming of his kingdom and his Lord.

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[MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (choral music) ♪ The truth that I've come to believe ♪

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♪ The stars are there to lift up my feet ♪ ♪ As they lift me up for the shield of faith ♪ ♪ God shed for me ♪ ♪ His love for me ♪

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♪ Will grow to be ♪ ♪ Oh, how I love ♪ ♪ I know ♪ ♪ Oh, I know ♪

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♪ God's hands are held ♪ ♪ And praise belongs ♪ ♪ To him I soar ♪ ♪ A song of love ♪

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♪ To him who comes ♪ ♪ His word to men ♪ ♪ From God and God ♪ ♪ And God ♪

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♪ The Son of man ♪ ♪ The Son of God ♪ ♪ This day of love ♪ ♪ This day of love ♪

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♪ And he, and he will live ♪ ♪ With love for ever ♪ ♪ Our God, our God ♪ ♪ I love you ♪

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♪ Just as I am ♪ ♪ Oh, feel divine ♪ ♪ As with your spirit divine ♪ ♪ In all I believe ♪

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♪ Will lead to wonderfulness ♪ ♪ Of God and love ♪ ♪ Of God ♪ ♪ Just as I am ♪

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♪ The will is free ♪ ♪ Till earth and heaven ♪ ♪ And heaven's grace be given ♪ ♪ Because thy blood ♪

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♪ Hath made this world ♪ ♪ And thou, thy Son ♪ [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]