Wisdom and Revelation
Prayers for the Churches • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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During the past few weeks, we have looked at some of the prayers of the Apostle Paul for the church, and we have looked at the great prayer of Jesus for His disciples and for all those who would believe in Him as a result of their testimony about Him.
We have seen that God has called us to ask great things from Him in regards to the church, and we have talked a bit about why we can pray with confidence for God to use the church to do His will on earth.
Today, I want us to dive a little deeper into this concept of the confidence we can have in God as we look at one of two prayers Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus.
Paul wrote this letter while he was under house arrest in Rome during his first imprisonment there, probably around 60 to 62 AD.
He had spent three years ministering to the Ephesians, beginning around A.D. 53, when he planted the church there.
As we will see, the Ephesians had a strong faith in Jesus Christ that was evidenced by the love they showed for one another and for all who had followed Jesus in faith that He is the Son of God and the one whose death on a cross had brought redemption from sins for those who would believe in Him.
In fact, unlike the church in Corinth, to which Paul had written letters that included harsh rebukes, I think the church in Ephesus was mostly doing the right things at this time.
There is no outright rebuke in this letter, though the second half does go into some detail about how the church should conduct itself and how individuals within the church should act toward one another.
So why did Paul feel it necessary to write to this church?
I think we get a clue from the Book of Revelation, when Jesus dictates his letters to seven churches to the Apostle John.
Turn to Revelation, Chapter 2, for a moment, and let’s read a portion of Christ’s letter to the Ephesians before looking at Paul’s letter to this same church.
“To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: The One who holds the seven stars in His right hand, the One who walks among the seven golden lampstands, says this: ‘I know your deeds and your toil and perseverance, and that you cannot tolerate evil men, and you put to the test those who call themselves apostles, and they are not, and you found them to be false; and you have perseverance and have endured for My name’s sake, and have not grown weary. ‘But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. ‘Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place—unless you repent.
Now, let’s stop there.
What did Jesus say He had against the church at Ephesus?
They had left their first love.
It’s important to note that the Book of Revelation was written about A.D. 95, more than 30 years after Paul wrote his letter to the Ephesians. So the situation Jesus was describing there was something that had developed over the course of about 35 years.
But what I think we see in Paul’s letter is something of a warning about what was to come.
Let me put this in terms of a marriage.
One of the greatest threats to a marriage is when one or both of the partners begins to take the other for granted.
It is a wonderful thing for us to become comfortable with our spouses, but when comfort turns to lack of appreciation, we have turned from our love.
When is the last time you told your spouse how much you appreciate them for who they are? Not just for what they do, but for who they are.
In this letter to the church in Ephesus — and especially in the prayer that we will examine today — I think Paul wants to remind the Ephesians of who God is.
Perhaps while he was under house arrest he had heard something that caused him to wonder if they were beginning to take for granted the grace that God had lavished on them.
Perhaps he worried that they were beginning to lose their appreciation both for who God is and for what He has done in Christ.
Perhaps he saw the beginnings of what Jesus would later describe as the Ephesians having left their first love.
So keep this passage from the Book of Revelation in mind as you turn to Ephesians, Chapter 1.
We’re going to read the prayer first, beginning in Verse 15, but we’ll have to take a look at the whole chapter to get the whole sense of Paul’s requests to God.
So, picking up in Verse 15:
For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
In a few minutes, we’ll look at WHY Paul prayed for what he prayed for here.
But first, let’s look at WHAT he prayed for.
First, he gave thanks for the believers in Ephesus and for their faith and love.
We should ever be thankful for our faithful brothers and sisters in Christ.
We tend to look at salvation as an individual thing, and indeed we are all saved as individuals, but if you have followed Jesus Christ in faith, you have been saved INTO the body of Christ, His church.
Paul makes much of this metaphor later in the letter, and, indeed, we even see Him mention it in verses 22 and 23.
When Jesus ascended into heaven after his crucifixion and resurrection, God the Father made Him the head of the church, which is His body here on earth.
Each of us is a part of His body, and just as a finger is of little use unless it’s connected to a hand, and the hand to an arm and the arm to the torso, etc., a Christian who is not actively and faithfully connected to the body of the church is not performing the function he or she was created to perform.
So here, Paul rightly gives thanks for those in Ephesus who have remained connected to the body of Christ.
And then, in verse 17, he begins making his supplication on their behalf.
So what does he ask God for?
He asks that God give them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
He wants them to have spiritual insight as they grow in the knowledge of God.
This knowledge is an experiential knowledge — not just a head knowledge of facts, but a heart knowledge that comes from an intimate relationship with their Father in heaven.
I can promise you that Annette knew early in our relationship that I love bacon. But that isn’t what made her love me. It was only as she became intimately familiar with who I was that she began to love me.
Paul wanted something similar for the Ephesians. He wanted them to become intimately familiar with God — he wanted the eyes of their heart to be enlightened — so that they would see God’s character revealed to them.
This spiritual insight would reveal three things to them:
The hope of His calling;
The glory of His inheritance;
And the exceeding greatness of His power.
One of the mistakes we often make as Christians is that we make our religion all about ourselves.
It is true that Jesus came to offer Himself as a sacrifice to pay the debt for our sins. And it is true that each of us who puts our faith in Him as our redeemer are saved from eternal damnation. And it is true that God sent His unique and eternal Son to do this because He loves us.
But as we shall see in a few minutes, the ultimate purpose of our salvation is to reveal God’s glory.
If your religion is simply about what’s been done for you, you’re missing the bigger picture.
We have, indeed, been given hope — the hope of Jesus Christ, Himself — through the calling of God for our salvation.
But we who have been called into a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ are described here in verse 18 as the glory of God’s inheritance.
We have been given by God to His Son so that His Son could bring glory to the Father by the evidence of His grace in our salvation.
And having been saved unto eternal life in Christ, we now can experience the “surpassing greatness of God’s power toward us who believe.”
This goes back to the prayer that Jesus prayed at the Last Supper. You’ll recall that we studied that prayer last week and that we noted the confidence with which Jesus prayed that God would keep those who followed the Son in their faith.
As we grow ever closer into an intimate relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit brings to bear the very power of God in our lives and in the life of the church.
The Spirit gives us the power to overcome, the power to walk according to God’s plan for us, the power to stand firm against even the unseen spiritual forces in the world as we put on the full armor of God.
Make no mistake about it: The power of God through the Holy Spirit gives the church the power to change the world. That’s why I said a couple of weeks ago that I want us to pray that God would use even this little church to change our city.
That wasn’t simply some church-y statement. I firmly believe that if we allow the Holy Spirit to bring the power of God to bear in the life of this church, we cannot help but see that power manifest itself in a change to our community.
We will not see that change happen by the power of the world. We will see it by God’s power. We will see it as we set aside the world’s ways of accomplishing things and embrace God’s ways.
One commentator puts it this way: “Ephesians teaches us that the way to help people the most is by dealing with unseen issues: unity, love, holiness, prayer, and evangelism. We do the church’s work much more effectively by praying than by picketing, by protesting, and by politicking. … The church must remember her heavenly calling in the eternal plan of God to realize all God purposes for her.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003).]
So Paul prayed that the Ephesians would have spiritual insight into the hope of God’s calling, the glory of His inheritance and the exceeding greatness of His power.
What do all these things have in common?
Look at verse 19.
They are all in accordance with the working of the strength of God’s might, the same mighty strength by which He raised Jesus from the dead, the same mighty strength whereby He seated Jesus at His right hand and whereby He has put all things in subjection beneath the feet of Jesus.
The point here is that our hope is in God’s calling, the riches we share are God’s glory, and the power we have been given is God’s power.
All of this is God’s doing and not our own. And all of us belong to Him and not to ourselves.
This may have been an easier thing for the Ephesians to accept than it is for us.
They lived under the rule of Rome, and so their lives were subject to the whims of the Caesar. Some of them were slaves, and so they were under the authority of their masters.
Here in America, where our forefathers fought for freedom from a tyrannical government and where we celebrate a culture of individualism, I think it is harder for us to accept that we Christians have been called to be slaves of Christ. We belong to the Father, who has given us to the Son as a people for His own possession.
If that’s what we are, then how can we live as if our only concern is for our own welfare? If we are slaves to Christ, then how can we live as if we don’t have to follow His commandments to love God with all our heart, soul, strength and mind and to love our neighbors as ourselves?
I think those questions are at the heart of Paul’s argument in this letter to the church at Ephesus, especially as he gets into the matter of how Christians are to conduct themselves in the second half of the letter.
If the eyes of their hearts were enlightened about the character of the God whom they loved, perhaps they would not take His love for granted. Perhaps they would not leave that first love.
And so we see Paul here praying for that enlightenment for them.
But as I said earlier, there is a WHY that we must answer, as well.
Why could Paul pray these things for them? He could pray for them to be enlightened about God’s eternal character because God had acted ni time to reveal His character through His actions on their behalf.
Actions always reveal character.
I mentioned earlier that Annette came to love me as she got to know who I was. And she came to know who I was by the things that I did. Some of those things demonstrated good character traits, and some of them revealed bad character traits. Somehow, she chose to love me in spite of the bad traits she saw.
Action always reveals character, so Paul started this letter with an unusual recounting of God’s temporal actions on our behalf to help frame the request that God would reveal His eternal character to those who might be in danger of leaving their first love.
We see this account in verses 3 through 14.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.
Now, this passage is packed with theological content, but the main idea is that those who have placed their faith in Jesus have been given a bunch of spiritual blessings by our union with our Savior, and that it is God who was responsible for those blessings.
What are the blessings?
Election. Predestination. Adoption. Grace. Redemption. Forgiveness. Knowledge. Sealing. Inheritance.
Verse 4: God chose us — that’s election — before the foundation of the world to be holy — set apart for Him in love.
Verse 5: God predestined believers to be adopted into His family, and He did it according to the kind intention — the good pleasure — of His will. He does not give us His grace out of His abundance of grace, but in accordance with it, by virtue of it.
Think of it like this: If a millionaire gave out dimes on the street, he would be giving out of his abundance. If he gave out hundred dollar bills, he would be giving in accordance with his abundance.
We have been chosen. We were predestined to respond to God’s grace. And we have been adopted.
And now, in verse 6, we see that God did this for the praise of the glory of His grace. Every sinner who repents and accepts God’s gracious offer of salvation in Jesus Christ brings praise for the glory of the God who freely bestows His grace in Christ, the Beloved Son.
Verse 7: We are redeemed by the blood of Jesus. To redeem something is to buy it back. In the Greek, the sense of this word is to pay a ransom for something. So a prisoner of war could be redeemed from his captors, or a slave could be redeemed from his master.
So we who were slaves to sin were bought at the price of the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on that cross at Calvary. We are no longer slaves to sin, but slaves to Christ.
And not only have we been redeemed from our enslavement to sin, we have been forgiven for our sins if we have followed Jesus in faith.
And all of this was done according to the riches of God’s grace, which He lavished on us. He made His grace abundant toward us in this work.
And then, verses 9 and 10: God gave us knowledge that even the Old Testament saints did not have — the knowledge of the Christ who had been foretold by the Old Testament prophets and through whom God will establish His eternal Kingdom in the fullness of times.
Verse 13: We were sealed in Christ with the Holy Spirit of promise. A seal was a sign of security, of authentication and approval, of genuineness, and of approval.
The point here is that when believers receive the Holy Spirit at the point of their conversion, they receive a guarantee of their eternal security.
The only way you can have blessed assurance about your salvation is for God Himself to guarantee it. If I had to wonder whether my sins might separate me from God, there would be no blessed assurance.
But because of the seal of the Holy Spirit, I can know that though my sins will injure my fellowship with God, they can never again separate me from Him.
The Spirit is given to us as a pledge of our inheritance. One commentator notes that the Greek word for pledge here can also be used to describe an engagement ring, so we have the sense that when Jesus sent the Holy Spirit, He was betrothing the church to Himself. We will be the bride of Christ, and He guarantees it with the engagement ring that is the Holy Spirit.
But what is the inheritance? Well, it’s heaven, where believers will spend eternity growing in our love of Jesus Christ and of the Father and of the Holy Spirit.
But the inheritance is also our redemption. This redemption is a different aspect of salvation from the redemption mentioned in verse 7. There it referred to being redeemed from our guilt under sin. Here, however, Paul refers to being redeemed from the very presence of sin.
“We experience redemption in three stages: we have been redeemed in Christ, we are being redeemed as the Spirit makes us more like Christ, and we shall be redeemed when Christ returns and we become like Him.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Eph 1:14.)
And once again, we see that this is all for the praise of God’s glory.
Actions reveal character.
So the actions God took for the salvation of the people in Ephesus — the actions He took for your salvation — reveal His grace and His glory.
And because we can see God’s grace and glory acting in time, we can also pray that we would recognize God’s eternal character: that we would experience the hope we have in our salvation; that we would realize that we ourselves are God’s inheritance, bought dearly with the blood of Jesus Christ; and that we would know the great power of God as a spiritually dynamic force in our lives as believers.
Have you left your first love? Have you taken for granted the eternal character of God? Have you taken for granted to price of the ransom paid for your eternal life?
Jesus said, “Remember from where you have fallen.”
In the context of this letter, we might say, “Remember whose you are. Remember the price that was paid for you. Remember who God is.”
Help us to remember, Lord.
Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. Open the eyes of my heart. I want to see You. I want to see You.