Talk 7 - Ephesians 3:14-21

0:00 Thanks everybody, thanks to Stevie and the band. You missed Keith at first service. Trying to engage with the mass of children that are here at first service, it was something to behold. It was very amusing. It was like watching a student teacher under observation unravel before your eyes. Garth McCartney was in tears with laughter. He's definitely much more comfortable in second service. Anyway, we pick up where we left off, not last week actually, but where we left off two weeks ago when Gilbert spoke in the second half of chapter two.

0:41 You'll remember the last week we talked about the fact that what Paul was saying in the early part of chapter three was a digression from his argument, from his thought flow, and now he brings himself back into that thought flow once again. So I'm just going to read the last few verses from chapter two to set the scene, to set the context for this incredible, this amazing prayer that he prays in chapter three. So beginning in verse 19 of chapter two, Consequently, you're no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. and in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit. And then we jump past his digression and he says these words then, for this reason I kneel, I kneel before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell, Christ may reside in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, there's that word again, together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

2:37 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine and according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. It's an amazing, glorious, challenging prayer. Paul started chapter three with those words, for this reason. You remember the last week, and then he goes off on his tangent, And now he comes back and he says those words again. For this reason, I get down on my knees and I pray. What's the reason? Well, as we've heard, he's just been telling his Gentile readers about God's gospel purposes in their lives.

3:31 Actually, more so about who they are now in Christ. So they were foreigners and strangers to the promise and hope of God. They are now fellow citizens along with Jewish Christians, fellow members of God's household together with God's people. They are now God's humanity, new humanity in Christ. They are now being built together into a new spiritual community in which God has chosen to dwell himself by his spirit. This is who they are right now together. Not who they might be at some point in the future if somehow they get themselves tidied up or they jump through the right religious hoops or they make some certain mark in some certain way. This is who they are now.

4:26 By the grace of God, the love of God, through the sacrifice, through the blood of Christ, Fully citizens, sons, heirs, members, sharers in the promise. Present tense. Forgiven, accepted, brought near, brought in. But here's the thing. They know this truth here. They know what Paul's saying. They know it theoretically, but they don't really know that truth, it seems, here. Otherwise, Paul wouldn't feel the need to pray this prayer in the first place.

5:14 Theoretically, this is all so glorious and so magnificent, but Paul knows and recognizes how much this isn't actually a deeply experienced and known reality in their hearts. Now let's be honest, if we picture the context that these Ephesian Christians were living in, it probably didn't feel particularly glorious or magnificent to be a follower of Christ. Think of the external pressures. Think of how difficult it must have been. The ridicule, the isolation, how they would have been perceived in the power and the riches of Ephesus. This little weak, ragtag religious sect. Group of people who worship their God, not in a magnificent temple like the temple of Artemis, but the only place they can go is in each other's homes, it seems. Whose worship is centered on a Jew of all people who not only was a Jew, but is also a Jew who was executed as a criminal on a cross by the Roman authorities.

6:31 And then the seeming leader of their little sect, Paul, is also right now imprisoned by those same authorities in Rome. Not exactly a recipe for being held in high esteem in your culture by your peers. But then also imagine the pressures and the challenges on the inside too. of being a new Gentile believer, being brought into this church, of being one of the uncircumcised, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, and a faith founded in Judaism, being part of a church community and family where the Jews that are there who have become Christians are still coming to terms themselves with this idea of Gentile inclusion in the promise and equality and membership and citizenship. And of course, hostility, and suspicion would have still been there. It had not been eradicated. That's why Paul's telling them what he's telling them. And so there may well have been this sense in them of some sort of second class citizenship, of imposter syndrome, of feeling in some way that they had to prove themselves somehow.

7:45 There was so much going on that could be discouraging them and making the truth of what Paul was teaching about the love and the grace and the kindness of God and who they now were in Christ seem so far from reality. And being a Christian in Northern Ireland in 2024 is not the same. But it is. And we've got to acknowledge this. It is deeply, deeply difficult. Being a Christian in school or university or the workplace, the loneliness of it, the isolation at times of it, being seen as part of these oppressive people or bigoted people on one side or gullible and brainwashed on the other, or just plain weirdos. and I was thinking about this week and I recognize actually that I often stand up here and I challenge out of what God's word has to say

9:01 and I don't pay enough acknowledgement to the fact that I actually working in a church live in this bubble and I don't know and certainly no longer can empathize with a lot of what you have to deal with where you are trying to be a Christian in your school or your university or your workplace. That's important for me, certainly, to remember that. But then for all of us, being a Christian in the trials of life, in the sorrows of life, with the wounds of life, with the constant failures of sin that crops up and over and over and over again. Being a Christian is not an easy life choice. It's not the easy path. and I'm sure at one time or another in the moments of discouragement or isolation or rejection or trial, we've all thought that life might just be a little bit easier and simpler if we just gave it all up and lived like everybody else. Often our experience at these times is that the truth of the gospel and who we are in Christ, it just washes over us.

10:13 It doesn't stick. It leaves us cold. We sing the songs. We read the Bible. We listen to teaching like this. It doesn't do you anything. And we question. And so many of us, if not all of us at some point do this.

10:33 We question, does God really love me? Could God really love me? Has he really chosen me? has he really got a purpose for me within his greater purposes? And Paul knows this. He's not oblivious to this. He's articulated these wonderful gospel truths to them in these opening chapters, but he also knows all of this, what's going on in their lives, the deep discouragement that they are facing. He's mentioned that just in the previous verses, And he knows that his words are absolutely necessary.

11:12 This truth is absolutely necessary, but his words on their own are not enough. He knows that the longest distance in the world is from the head to the heart. And he knows that the only one who can bring the truth of the gospel across that chasm is God himself by the power of his spirit. Only his spirit can make those words, those truths stick in their hearts, imprint on their hearts. Make this reality real in their hearts. So they can truly live in the reality of who they are. And live out the reality of who they are, both individually and as the church together, that corporate identity. so that they can be more and more who they already are.

12:13 And so out of his great love for them, what does he do? What is the mark of how much he loves and cares for them? We just see this emotion and this fervency and this passion and this compassion pouring out as we do so often in Paul's letters. He's not afraid to express how much he loves them. And then how he actually conveys that love is by saying, I get on my knees and I pray for you. And just as an aside, that isn't a normal position for a Jew to pray in. They would have normally prayed standing up.

12:58 That communicates something. The fact that he's saying that communicates something. about the passion and compassion and love that is behind what he's praying. And it's his first response, as we talked about in early September, it's his reflex response. This is what he does. I love the question. Corrie ten Boom once asked, she asked this, is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire? Is it your steering wheel or your spare tire?

13:25 In In other words, is it your first response or is it your last resort? And prayer was absolutely Paul's steering wheel. That's an ongoing challenge to me. A fixer, a problem solver, a do-it-yourselfer. Especially as someone who has the shared responsibility of shepherding this church in love. Paul praying this way for them is the mark of how deeply he loves them. And then he also prays in this way. So it's for this reason, but it's also because of the person that he's praying to.

14:05 Because he knows the one he's praying to. His good, his loving, his gracious, his kind, his powerful, his rich, his sovereign father. And he knows that in Christ, he, as he's already said, he can, with absolute freedom and confidence and boldness, approach the father, approach the father who is his father, who is their father, who is the father across ethnic divides, who is the father across even the divides of heaven and earth, he seems to say here, the perfect archetypal father who loves, as Jesus said in Matthew 7, loves to give good gifts to his children. If you hear evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, or how much more so? Does your heavenly father, is he able to give good gifts? So what does Paul pray then?

15:09 Well, again, let's notice what he doesn't pray. Like we did in chapter one, We notice that he doesn't pray anything to do with the change in their circumstances. He doesn't pray that God would make their lives easier, that God would make being a Christian in their context more comfortable for them. No, he loves them. Like I said, he cares for them. And because he loves them so much, he doesn't pray that. Talk about that one in your groups tomorrow night. He kneels before his father.

15:44 And he asks for what they truly need to stand and to grow more into who they already are in Christ in the midst of whatever their circumstances are, whatever they find themselves in. And he prays for power. Not the flashy, ostentatious power that would have been on show so much in Ephesus. It's that context is the reason he talks so much about power in this letter. But power on the inside. That's what he's interested in. Look at the prepositions just of his prayer. First he identifies the source of the power, where it comes from.

16:28 It's not something self-generated. Some sort of practice of willpower or intellect. So we so often turn our faith into, isn't it? It is out of the glorious riches that Paul's talked about over and over again. It's out of the wealth of the power of God. This is not a weak, limited power source. This is the same power that raised Christ from the dead, as we heard in chapter one. And then he identifies the mediator of the power.

17:01 As we've said, it's the Holy Spirit. Again, he's talked about the Holy Spirit a lot already. His indwelling in us, if you remember, is the seal, is the deposit guaranteeing our inheritance. He is the spirit of wisdom and revelation who enlightens. He's the one whom through we have been given access to the same father through. And now Paul prays that this bringer, the spirit of power, would deliver God's power into their life. And he very specifically gives the delivery address of that power. The location for the Spirit's outpouring of power is in your inner being.

17:47 In your inner being. The Spirit's workplace is not a public one. It's a private one. It's an inner one. It's in the hearts of those he indwells. Paul is not concerned here with outward demonstrations of the Spirit's power. but inward transformation happening by the power of the Spirit. It's in line with what he says in 2 Corinthians 4 when he says, though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

18:24 It's this renewal, this transformation, this strengthening in our inner beings that Paul is praying that they would experience and that we would experience through the power of the Holy Spirit, that it might not be just theoretical head knowledge, but deeply experienced heart knowing. And he prays all this so that he says, Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Here's the point. Here's the purpose. Here's the desired result of his prayer, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. But surely, is that not already the case? Is that not what happens whenever you come to faith in Christ, whenever you repent and believe that that's what we're promised happens?

19:10 Well, absolutely, it is. But that's not what Paul's talking about here in this prayer. What he's talking about is the power of God being brought to bear on our hearts by his spirit, transforming as he dwells in our hearts, renewing and renovating as he resides in us, he's not talking about a moment, he's talking about this renewal process. Things changing over time. So what does that mean when he says, Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith with that in mind? I was chatting on Monday night past with a young adult couple at our house who are getting married next year, and they're talking about the house that they've just bought her in the process of buying. And then they asked me about our first house when we got married. And I, as you do, started reminiscing about all these things.

20:10 And I remember back to that first house that we were just about able to buy the house. Sandra was still a student, so we had no money whatsoever. We had a little bit of help from parents, and we were able to just about buy the house, but we had no money to actually do anything significant on the inside. And so, even though we lived in it, even though we owned it, the truth was that the inside of the house far more reflected the previous owners than it reflected us. It was still their wallpaper. It was still their carpets. It was still their tiles. Even, actually, in the spare bedroom, which we really didn't go into that much, it was still their smell.

20:58 you know what I mean I don't mean they were smelly you understand what I mean each house has its smell and and that process so basically it was our house but it wasn't our house if you know what I mean and that took time we owned it we lived in it but it was incremental by incremental little bit of money by little bit of money little bit of change by little bit of change a wall painted here a bit the floor pit down there, whatever it was. And more and more over time, it became our house. It reflected us just that little bit more now than it reflected the previous owners. And this hopefully takes us some way to understanding what Paul means by Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith. That as this prayer is answered by God, as we more and more experience his spirits transforming, renewing power within our inner beings at the deepest level of our hearts, they will be becoming more and more, this process, fitting places for Christ to dwell. That my heart will be becoming less and less, and my name works very well for this, less and less Chris's house and more and more Christ's house. Less and less the previous owner and more and more the new owner's house. A place where he resides more deeply, is in control more deeply.

22:36 Where things are more reflective of who he is and where then out of that is coming more and more of the fruit of his spirit. that at the heart level I am, that at the heart level we are becoming more of who we already are. That's what Paul is praying for here, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Paul then moves on, and he continues his outpouring of prayer, connected on and following on from what he said already. We've got to understand that these verses 14 to 19 here are one sentence. Gilbert's talked about that before other areas, just this one long sentence in the Greek, building and building. And here's the second part of what he prays. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.

23:36 Again, in the original Greek, and just to be clear, I can't read the original Greek, but I can look at it and I can see the word endings and they all end in os, platos, mechos, bathos, hoopsos. You can feel this building almost poetically to how long, wide and long and high and deep and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. Do you catch that? To know this love that surpasses knowledge. Paul knows exactly what he's doing here. He knows he's talking on paradoxes. That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. This is not a small prayer.

24:23 This is not a safe prayer. This is not in the realm of please make Betty better after having the flu type prayer. This is big. This is audacious. This is expectant. This is the prayer of someone who himself knows already the glorious riches of God, who himself has repeatedly experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in his own inner being. There is a sense of autobiography about this prayer. He's experienced this.

24:54 He wants them to experience the same thing. I pray that you would be rooted and established in the love of Christ he says that you would be like a tree or plant with roots that go down deep and are secured and nourished by the love of Christ at the innermost being foundational heart level I hear the echoes of Psalm 1 when I hear him speak here and then he combines that sort of plant metaphor with an architectural one that you would be like a strong building, secured by foundations dug deep, deep down into where the love of Christ stabilized, anchored, nourished, fed, able to stand in and able to grow out of the resource of his love. However harsh the terrain is surrounding you, however stormy the weather conditions of life are, however difficult and challenging, however much of a struggle life becomes. And he prays again for power, power through the Holy Spirit that they would grasp the ungraspable, grasp the dimensions of the love of Christ and that they would know the unknowable, know this love that surpasses knowledge. Paul knows exactly what it is that he's asking God for, but he doesn't let that put him off asking it. Grasp. Know.

26:29 Look at the verbs here. This isn't about belief. This is about belief being experienced at the deepest level of who we are by the power of the Holy Spirit's work in our hearts. This is about the Spirit's power moving that belief from here to here. This is the difference if you're here at the beginning between a child trusting their parent that ice cream tastes really good to actually tasting for themselves that ice cream is really, really good. This is in those psalmist words that we read at the start or in Peter's words that follow those tasting, tasting that the Lord is good. It's that spirit-impowered spiritual experience of truth.

27:22 That's part of our Christian discipleship. That spirit-impowered spiritual experience of truth, of reality that Paul is praying for here for them with this fervency and expectancy. And as we follow Paul's leading and pray this prayer for each other, and pray this prayer for ourselves, that the Spirit would work in power in our inner being. It's important that we notice a couple of things that Paul says here that we might easily miss as we make our way through. First, this verb, grasp. It's an active verb. It's not passive. It's this idea of wrestling with someone or something, of grappling with someone or something.

28:15 It involves us actively wrestling with the truth of Scripture, with the truth of the Gospel, with what God's revealed Word tells us about His love and Christ's love. This might be a very bad analogy. I apologize if it is, but if you've ever owned or at least had a go on an e-bike, you'll know that an e-bike doesn't move by itself. You have to start pedaling, and when you start pedaling, that's when the external power kicks in. And there's something, something in that analogy when it comes to how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. It's empowered activity. It's not empowered passivity. And we often get that the wrong way around.

29:08 I mentioned Psalm 1 earlier. Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night. That really struck me again this week as I was looking at this prayer. How much space am I giving the Spirit to work in my heart? How much wrestling, grappling, meditating, seeking, searching, stopping on and being still before His Word am I doing? I was thinking about this. I was thinking about a camera and exposure time. How long am I opening the aperture of my heart to allow God by the power of his spirit to imprint the reality of his truth onto it and the reality of his love onto it?

30:11 Absolutely, we need to be praying deeply and expectantly and constantly for the spirit's power. That is key. But we also need to be actively cooperating with the spirit as we pray for his power to work in us. It's not either or, it is both and. And of course, Paul's talking about the dimensions of the love of Christ here, metaphorically, to describe something that we can never put a measurement on, Dimensions that are so infinitely beyond our finite imaginations. But I think actually he wants us to try to. I think he wants us to have a go even though we know we're never going to be able to get there. Psalm 48 9 says, within your temple, oh God, we meditate on your unfailing love.

31:10 We don't need to go to the temple anymore. We are the temple. We can do this anywhere, anytime, anyplace because we have access to the Father through the Spirit. For example, and this is something I've done myself, I'm just giving one example out of many. We can stop. And we can be still. And we can take time to meditate on.

31:37 And that's different from reading and that's different from studying. It's turning over words or a picture in our mind over and over. It's spending time in it. We could do that maybe with the picture of Christ in the garden in Luke 22. Of his love being on display in his anguish. We could stay there in that, opening the aperture of our hearts for more than a split second because we're always so busy and we're filling everything, every second of time with stuff. And we can pray that through the power of his spirit we might grasp and know and experience this deep love of Christ more in our inner being. That's just one example.

32:24 We can do that with any portion of God's word. Praying this prayer and opening our hearts up at the same time. But then the other little thing we could miss is this. little line in there together with all the lord's holy people the spirit's power given to us to help grasp and know the love of christ isn't given to us in splendid isolation from all the other members of the body it's only fully realized in community and relationships with each other in the family of the church we might want it to be another way but i'm sorry that's not the way it is the truth is that power is given to us in community we are to wrestle as tag teams if you want to continue that analogy with the truth in God's word as we talk and listen and pray with and serve with and weep with and celebrate with brothers and sisters in Christ young and old from different backgrounds with different experiences with different experiences of the power of God working in hearts. And so often, I know others will be able to say the same, so often the Spirit of Christ brings the reality and the sheer beauty and richness and color

33:52 of God's love into my heart in a deeper and more tangible way as I listen to the prayers of other people within this church family. And that's happened to me in the last month on two occasions. Once just in the weekend past, as we met together as elders on a retreat. And then also a few weeks ago, in another context, where a new believer prayed a really simple but honest prayer. and it just gave me this little angle this different little angle on the love of God as I heard it communicated through that person's experience it was like turning over a precious stone and seeing the light work its way through in a different way together with the Lord's holy people cooperating with the Spirit's work opening yourself up to the Spirit's power involves being deeply connected with, deeply involved with others in this body. And then I love, and I'll finish here. I'm finishing here, don't worry.

35:07 Again, the seemingly sheer audacity of the goal of Paul's prayer here in verse 19, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. He doesn't ask for much, does he? it reminds me of what he prays so confidently in philippians 1 and all my prayers for all of you i always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now being confident of this that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of christ that picture of completion of fullness it points us back to the Old Testament, to the picture of Moses presenting the tabernacle to the Lord in Exodus 40. Here's what it says there. And so Moses finished the work. Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud had settled on it and the glory of the Lord filled the temple.

36:15 And I say that what Paul's praying here is pointing back to Moses. The reality actually is that what happens with Moses in the tabernacle is pointing forward to us. It's the shadow of the reality of God filling us, his church, us as individual believers, but then us as his church, as his holy temple in eternity. There's a day coming in the future. That's where Paul's prayer is ultimately aimed. The day of the Lord, when Christ returns, when I will be filled in this way, when all of us who are in Christ will be filled in this way, where the fullness of God will fill us so completely together that there will not be a single square milliliter of capacity left for anything that is not of God himself. Where we will be perfect dwelling places for Christ, where we will fully and gloriously and joyously fulfill our purpose in and for God's kingdom and God's glory. Imagine how amazing that is gonna be, to be totally, perfectly fulfilling the reason that you were created to be.

37:37 But God, out of his glorious, boundless riches in Christ, out of the incomparable riches of his grace that he has lavished on us is moving us in our lives by the power of his spirit working in our inner being step by step heart renovation by heart renovation towards that place towards that destiny of fullness and beauty and maturity and that's what Paul's praying for here their progress, their growth, their maturity, their growing in Christlikeness, that movement towards their ultimate destiny and our ultimate destiny and purpose in Christ together. And that's the amazing, spectacular prayer that we are to emulate, that we're to follow. How much are you praying prayers like this? It is a mark of our love for one another whenever we have the audacity to pray prayers like this for each other. And then I'm just going to read the last little bit.

38:59 I'm not going to talk about it. And he finishes with this. sentence of praise. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. According to his power that is at work within us. Let's be very slightly careful actually with that. I'm going to talk about it a bit. Simply because we can turn that into something it's not.

39:25 Listen to what it says. According to his power that is at work within us. This isn't let's pray for a million pounds to be on the doorstep tomorrow morning in an envelope. hope. God's not interested in that. This is according to his purposes. This is about what he's doing in us. These are his gospel purposes.

39:45 These are his eternal purposes. In that sense, he can do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine. And it's all for, it's all aimed towards what he does in us individually. As I said last week, it's not so much about us individually. It's about the glory of us together, reflecting the glory of Christ and the church throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.

40:20 Let's pray together. Father, very simply, we end here with praying this prayer for ourselves. I end by praying this prayer of love over each person here. For this reason, because of who we are in Christ, I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. And I pray that out of his glorious riches, you may strengthen us with power through your spirit in our inner being so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And I pray that we, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with each person here and all the Lord's holy people to grasp the ungraspable dimensions, how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.

41:38 Pray that you continue to take us on that journey that you're taking us on to that place where we will be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. And we ask all this so that you may be glorified, so that we as your church may glorify you, may communicate your glorious wisdom, may fulfill your purposes. In Jesus' name, amen.