Take Hold of the Gift
Prayers for the Churches • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Have you ever considered what sets the city apart from the country?
I’m sure you have, since this is a country church, and most of our members live in the country by choice — and proudly so, judging from all the negative comments I heard over the years as editor of Suffolk’s newspaper about the metropolitan area known as North Suffolk.
Most of you would say that what sets the city apart from the country is traffic, population density, crime, tightly packed buildings or something like that.
But really, all those things are simply different in scale.
Look at that road: We’ve got traffic. We also have people living near here, even if there are fewer of them than in the city. Same for crime, and same for buildings.
I’d like to suggest that what sets cities apart from the country is sidewalks. Now, there are surely places with sidewalks that you would not call cities, but I think you cannot have a city without sidewalks.
And whenever I visit my friends in Washington or New York, they are always amused by my approach to sidewalks.
I simply will not walk across those grates that are used for utility access or at the entrance to steam tunnels.
I just cannot bring myself to trust that those grates will support my weight as I cross, because I do not know the people who installed them.
Conversely, in the home that we just moved from this week, one of the bedrooms has a loft about eight feet from the ground floor with a narrow, steep set of stairs leading up to it.
I am careful climbing those stairs these days, but I have never been concerned about standing, sleeping or doing just about anything else in that loft.
That’s because I know who built it. It was my father, and he built it so I’d be able to have a large bedroom in the house that he designed for us when I was 12 years old.
Knowing something about the character of the builder — and especially knowing that the builder was my father who loved me very much — puts me in a different emotional position than I am in when I encounter a grate in a sidewalk installed by some unknown person.
I can walk past one of those grates and admire the engineering involved in its construction. I can intellectually grasp the fact that it would be perfectly safe — at least 99 times out of a hundred — to walk, run, or even hop across the grate.
But the fact that I do not know the character — the work ethic, the conscientiousness, the commitment to personal responsibility — of the workers who installed it means that I am unwilling to put my weight on one of those grates, and that means that I’m always walking through the city doing a sort of dance along the sidewalk, much to the chagrin of my citified friends.
But I know a lot about my father’s character. He had a strong work ethic, he was all about personal responsibility and his conscientiousness in building our home was rooted in a desire to keep safe those he loved.
So I’ve never been afraid to be in that loft, not even after I sleepwalked over the edge of it one night when I was 16.
(Dad began building a railing and new ladder the very next day.)
Well, last week we talked about the Apostle Paul’s prayer that God would give the church at Ephesus revelation or spiritual insight into God’s eternal character.
He prayed that the the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened — that they would be opened to the hope of His calling, to the glory of His inheritance, and to the exceeding greatness of his power. That enlightenment, Paul hoped, would encourage them to hold onto their first love, Jesus Christ.
This week, as we continue this series on Paul’s prayers for the church, we will consider his second prayer for the Ephesians, which you’ll find in Ephesians, Chapter 3.
Whereas Paul’s prayer in chapter 1 was for enlightenment, this one is for enablement.
Warren Wiersbe puts it this way: “It is not so much a matter of knowing as being—laying our hands on what God has for us and by faith making it a vital part of our lives.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Eph 3:13.)
You see, it’s one thing to know the character of your father, but that knowledge should make a real difference in your life.
Simply knowing that my father loved me enough to build that loft space where I could sleep was not the reason he built it. He built it so that I would use it and experience the abundance it would add to my life.
In the same way, simply knowing who God is and what He has done for us in Jesus Christ — knowing that Jesus said He had been sent by His Father to give believers life and to give it to them abundantly — isn’t God’s goal for us. His goal is that we actually experience this abundant life.
As we do, we will be less likely to leave our first love. We will be more likely to persevere in our love for the Savior who gave His life on a cross as atonement for our sins.
So that’s the message today. I don’t normally show my whole hand up front, but I want you to be thinking about how knowing should lead to being as we study what some commentators consider the greatest of Paul’s prayers for the church.
I especially love what the 19th century Scottish preacher Alexander Maclaren had to say about today’s passage:
“In no part of Paul’s letters does he rise to a higher level than in his prayers, and none of his prayers are fuller of fervour than this wonderful series of petitions. They open out one into the other like some majestic suite of apartments in a great palace-temple, each leading into a loftier and more spacious hall, each drawing nearer the presence chamber, until at last we stand there.” (Thomas, W. H. Griffith. The Prayers of St. Paul. Scribners, 1914. 111)
Now, let’s pick up in verse 14 of chapter 3.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Last week, we started with what Paul had prayed for and then moved into why he could pray for it.
Today, we’ll start with the why and then move to the what.
“For this reason.” That’s the way the prayer starts.
So what is “this reason?”
Paul has been describing in the previous portion of this chapter the great mystery of the church.
The mystery of the church is a theme that he returns to in at least three of his letters, and there are at least four different aspects of the mystery.
The doctrine of Christ dwelling in every believer is described as a mystery in the Book of Colossians. The mystery of the church as the Bride of Christ is described later in the Book of Ephesians. The rapture is called a mystery in 1 Corinthians. And in the first part of our chapter today, Paul writes of the mystery of Jewish and Gentile believers united into one body, the church.
Now, we need to understand that this word, “mystery,” didn’t have the same meaning for the recipients of this letter that it does for us today.
“‘Mystery’ in the New Testament refers to ‘a truth which was once hidden but now is revealed,’ ‘a truth which without special revelation would have been unknown.’” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Eph 3:5.)
The idea here is that these concepts were partially or wholly unknown to the Old Testament writers. God had not revealed this part of His plan to them in a way that they could understand.
Paul, as he writes in verse 3, received a special revelation from God through the Holy Spirit about this mystery, and he is clear in verse 6 about the content of the mystery.
to be specific, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs and fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel,
You see, in Old Testament times, God created the nation of Israel to be a blessing to the nations by demonstrating His character to those Gentile nations.
But from the beginning, Israel wanted to be just like the other nations. God knew, of course, that they would fail in their calling.
So from the foundation of time, His plan was to send to us His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God, to show us the very character of His Father.
Jesus would take on the flesh of man in the person of the baby born to the virgin Mary, but even in His incarnation, He was still God.
And so, as he gave Himself on a cross to pay the penalty for the sins of mankind, Jesus did what no one else could do: He offered reconciliation with God to those who had rebelled against the One who had made them in His image.
His death, burial, resurrection and ascension back into heaven are the reason that those who have faith in the sufficiency of His sacrifice as the Son of God can have hope for eternal life.
We who were dead in our trespasses — separated forever from the love of God — can have life abundantly and forever by God’s grace through our faith in His Son.
And, having been saved from the eternal condemnation that we deserve, we followers of Christ are then saved INTO the body of Christ, His church, where as we saw last week, each of us has a role to play in building God’s Kingdom.
And so, what Paul is saying in the first part of this chapter is that this mystery of the church — a new dispensation in God’s way of dealing with man — has now been revealed.
And what is the church’s role in this dispensation? Look at verse 10.
so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.
In the Old Testament times, Israel was to reveal God’s glory to the nations. In His incarnation, Jesus revealed God’s glory to Israel and to the nations. Today, during this dispensation, the church is to reveal God’s glory not just to the world, but even to the angels in heaven.
I get very impatient with Christians who talk about heaven as if it’s just going to be a nice, long family reunion. It will be wonderful to see Christian family and friends who have gone on before me, but what will be truly glorious is learning each day just how much more there is to know about the grace and glory and love of God.
If the angels who stand in His presence learn something about His grace and glory from the unity of Jews and Gentiles as the body of Christ, how much more will there be for us to learn about our Father?!
So with all this in view, Paul bows his knees before the Father — the source of all spiritual life in heaven and on earth — to make three requests on behalf of the Ephesian church and by extension on behalf of the eternal church.
First, Paul requests that we be strengthened with the Holy Spirit’s power to enable us to make Jesus the center of our lives.
If you have placed your faith in Jesus, then you already know that’s what you’re supposed to do.
But the simple fact is that most of us fail in that regard more often than we’d like to admit here in church.
We live in time and on earth and so we tend to live as if our time on earth is what’s important.
But if you have been saved by the blood of Jesus Christ, then you are already a subject in His Kingdom, and therefore you are called to other-worldly pursuits, rather than to worldly ones.
Luke recorded what Jesus had to say about this:
“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.
The point Jesus was making was that following Him means putting Him before everything else, even your own life. In contrast to loving Him, it would look like hating all the rest.
That’s a hard thing for us. It was a hard thing for those who were following Jesus at the time, and it was that kind of statement that caused many of them to turn from Him.
So what Paul is praying here is that God would empower the Ephesians to do what Jesus had said was necessary to be His disciple.
Paul prayed that we would be empowered to walk in the Spirit, rather than walking in the flesh, so that we might experience true fellowship with God and with one another and so that we might experience true abundant life.
If you have been strengthened with power through the Holy Spirit to walk in this way, then what will happen?
Verse 17: “Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith.”
Remember that this letter was written to believers, so the mystery of Christ’s indwelling presence in believers had already been revealed to the recipients of the letter.
But there is a deeper sense of dwelling that Paul has in mind here.
The sense of this word, “dwell” is to be at home.
Jesus “indwells every Christian, but He is at home in the lives of those believers who let Him be first in their attitudes and activities.” (Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), Eph 3:17.)
Do you have a guest bedroom in your house? Have you ever stayed in someone else’s guest bedroom? If you have, then you’ll know that you never quite feel completely comfortable there, even if they’re you’re closest friends.
Jesus is not looking for the guest bedroom in your heart. He wants — and deserves — access to the whole house. He wants to be at home there, not just a guest.
Now if Jesus Christ is at home in your heart, then you have truly been rooted and grounded in love. Love is the foundation of our salvation and the roots from which we grow in Christ and eventually bear fruit.
And with that foundation in place, Paul can then pray that we will comprehend its breadth and length and height and depth.
The Greek word translated here as “to comprehend” is katalambano. It means to lay hold of something as to make it your own.
So the idea is that we are to take hold of this boundless love of God through Christ and make it something experiential, not just a concept that we talk about and sing about but something real and tangible that changes our lives.
It’s the difference between knowing there was a loft in my bedroom and actually sleeping in that loft.
But what we’re talking about here isn’t some 8x8 loft.
What’s amazing here is that Paul is praying that we be enabled through the power of the Holy Spirit to comprehend — to lay hold of it so as to make it our own — the unfathomable greatness of God.
Here’s what one of Job’s friends had to say about God’s greatness:
“Can you discover the depths of God? Can you discover the limits of the Almighty? “They are high as the heavens, what can you do? Deeper than Sheol, what can you know? “Its measure is longer than the earth And broader than the sea.
And yet, we who follow Jesus Christ are God’s children, and He is our Father, and so we can claim Him as our own in all His greatness and in all his unfathomability.
As the Scottish preacher Alexander Maclaren wrote, we step from one lofty and spacious hall into another even greater as we proceed through Paul’s petitions in this prayer.
And so we come to his third petition, which leads us to the greatest and loftiest hall, what Maclaren called the presence chamber in verse 19.
This verse hinges on two different words, know and knowledge.
The first comes from the Greek, ginosko, which describes a familiarity that comes through experience with someone or something.
The second, knowledge, comes from the Greek word, gnosis, which is a general comprehension or understanding of something or someone.
Again, what we see here is the difference between knowing something from deep personal experience and knowing about it from books or by some other teaching.
So Paul prays we would have an intimate and personal experience with with the love of Christ, a love that passes all human understanding, so that we might experience the boundlessness of life in the Father through the Spirit and by the Son.
It’s one thing to know the facts about the eternal character of God. It’s one thing to know the promise of abundant eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ.
It is an entirely different thing to live in the faith that what you know is true. When you live in that kind of faith, then everything else of this world pales in significance. When you live in that kind of faith, by contrast you will hate your own life, because you will have put Jesus before it and everything else.
When you live in that kind of faith, the incredible things that Paul prays for here begin to seem a little less incredible.
When we sing “Open the eyes of my heart, Lord; I want to see You,” we are praying that God would reveal His great and unfathomable glory to us, that He would make us truly know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
And guess what? Paul says in verse 20 that God is able to do far more abundantly than even that as we walk in the power of the Holy Spirit.
These are not small requests. And yet Paul says we should not limit ourselves to asking even these great things, because God is able to do far more abundantly beyond even these things.
So I find myself asking the same question I asked a couple of weeks ago: Why do we ask for such small things?
Let us pray that the church — even THIS church — might be the catalyst for reconciliation with our African-American brothers and sisters who have been given so many reasons to believe that this nation considers their lives to be unimportant.
Let us pray that God would use the church — even THIS church — to bring an end to the travesty of abortion and the fear and hopelessness that leads so many women to pursue it.
Let us pray that God would use the church — even THIS church — to help break the chains of addiction that bind so many people in our city.
We have a big God, so let’s pray for big things.
to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Let’s pray.