Brothers and sisters, it is wonderful to be among you.
The wonderful thing about gathering together is that our Lord has committed Himself to be with us. That is wonderful.
You know, it would be something if even the mayor of Richmond invited you to come and spend some time with him, to have fellowship or to share. I am sure some of you would be even more honored if the governor of Virginia did that, or even the President of the United States. Maybe some of you would not be so honored, huh?
But it is really marvelous when the King of the universe sends out an invitation and invites you and me to come and have fellowship with Him. Even though we are still earthbound and have to live out our lives here, He gives us this wonderful opportunity periodically to come, sit in His presence, and feast with Him—only a foretaste of what we are going to experience in the age to come.
So we are grateful to our Lord for the time that we can come and share with Him. On top of that, He is so gracious and merciful to keep on speaking to us.
How grateful we are that we have a copy of the written Word of God, and that the Lord chooses, through the Holy Spirit, to take that written Word and speak to us again and again and again. There would be no hope for us, brothers and sisters, if our Lord did not periodically—on a regular basis—call us into His presence to share with Him. If He did not keep on speaking to us, there would be no hope for any of us. We would all go our own way and go away from Him.
But in His mercy, He continues to speak to us. May that be our experience this morning. May each one of us hear the voice of our Lord in our hearts.
This morning, if you would turn with me to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, we want to read the latter half of Ephesians 1, beginning in verse 15.
Ephesians 1:15-23
For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and which ye show toward all the saints,
cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers;
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;
having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of His might
which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit 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 that which is to come:
and He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
Will you join me, please, as we ask the Lord to help us during our time in His Word?
Father, we do want to thank You for Your Son, for His finished work on Calvary, and for all that that means. We thank You that as we gather today in His name, we have the assurance of His presence with us to help us in every way possible.
We thank You for the time that we have already had together, when we could remember Him and pour out our hearts in worship, praise, and love to Him. We bless You for such a time.
And now we come expecting You to speak to us. We remember what the Scripture says:
Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
Father, we are here this morning to hear from You. We know that Your Son has the words of life, and we are expecting Him, by His Spirit, to speak those living words to us this morning.
We would take as our portion the anointing of the Holy Spirit. We would not seek to understand the truth of Your Word, nor would we seek to speak it or understand it, without the work of the Holy Spirit. So we come under that anointing, that He may empower both the speaking and the hearing, the understanding and the doing of Your Word.
So we give ourselves to You. We come to You, dear Lord Jesus, as our Teacher. We sit at Your feet and expect You to speak words to each of our hearts. We bless You in advance, even for that which You are going to speak. We do it in Your name. Amen.
For those of you who have read and studied the book of Ephesians, you realize that we are dealing with great issues when we come to this particular book in the Scriptures. It has been indicated by some that we are probably dealing with the highest of all revelations that God has given to us.
So when we come to this book, we really need to come, as we always come to Scripture, with our hearts bowed low, expecting God by His mercy to reveal to us the truth that is in this book.
Now, in this portion that we have read from Ephesians 1, what we really have is Paul recording a prayer that he was praying for his readers. It is an interesting thing that he not only tells them that he is praying for them, but he also tells them what he is praying for them.
In the previous verses, the apostle has outlined the blessings with which we have been blessed in Christ Jesus. He wants very much for these Christians to be able to understand and enter into that which God has revealed to him and which he has now communicated to them.
It is very evident, when we come to this particular portion of the Ephesian letter, that Paul is carrying a burden in his heart. I think that this burden is clearly revealed in the last two verses of Ephesians 1:
And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.
From the time that the apostle Paul encountered the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road, throughout the remainder of his life there was a deep burden that he carried in his heart. It was the burden that the Lord Jesus would have a vessel through which He could express the fullness of Himself.
We are told in the Colossian letter that all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily in our Lord. What our Lord wants to do is take that fullness of the Godhead and display it here on the earth through human beings who have been redeemed, brought into fellowship with Him, brought into right relationship with Him as Head, and brought into right relationship with others who have had the same experience of being redeemed.
But notice what Paul says about the church: the church, which is His body, is “the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”
God has taken the fullness of the Godhead and placed it in His Son. During this period of time, since the Lord Jesus ascended back to the right hand of the Father and until He comes again to bring everything into proper order, the church has been chosen as a vessel to display the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It seems to me that this is the burden Paul carries in his heart as he prays for them, as well as for the other assemblies for whom he was responsible. He prayed because of this deep burden that the church would become this vessel, this organic, corporate vessel through which the Lord Jesus Christ would have liberty to express the fullness of Himself.
So we need to allow the Holy Spirit to lift our understanding up onto God’s level. You see, brothers and sisters, the Ephesian letter is the church from God’s perspective. We need to see what it is that God had in mind in the creation of the church.
We so easily lose sight of this. We become so enmeshed in simply living out our lives and taking care of all the details involved in being the people of God that we often forget what God designed the church to be. The church has been designed by God to be this corporate vessel that would express the fullness of the life of His Son.
The motivation for Paul’s prayer, it seems to me, was first of all the revelation that he himself had received. His experience on the road to Damascus was not merely an experience in which he knew the reality of the forgiveness of his sins. It was much more than that. It was a revelation of the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
You remember that encounter in Acts 9, where a voice spoke to him from heaven. There was a conversation that followed, in which Saul said, “Lord, who art Thou?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.” Then Paul asked another question: “Lord, what wouldest Thou have me to do?”
So, in this experience on the Damascus road, it was not simply a matter of Paul knowing that he had been forgiven. He came to encounter a Person—none other than the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We find in Galatians 1 that Paul talks about Christ being revealed in him, not only to him. It was something that he carried in his being. You remember his conversation with King Agrippa: “O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” He saw the living Lord Jesus Christ, and it captured his heart. He could never be the same again.
Along with this encounter with the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul began to understand the purpose of the church. I believe this began in that conversation between himself and the Lord Jesus when the Lord said to him, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?”
Now, I do not know if you have stopped to think about that, but it is an interesting thing that our Lord Jesus, seated at the right hand of the Father, would say to a man traveling from Jerusalem to Damascus, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?”
How could He accuse Saul of persecuting Him when the Lord Jesus was at the right hand of the Father? Because the Lord Jesus was beginning to reveal to him that the church is, in reality, His body. It is the corporate Christ. To touch His people, to touch the church, was to touch Him.
So, in addition to seeing the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, Paul began to see the purpose of the church. He saw that the church, which is the body of Christ, is to be this living organism through which the Lord Jesus is to express the fullness of Himself.
Another reason Paul was motivated to pray for the Ephesian Christians was because of the church itself. You understand, it takes a special kind of church to be able to write this kind of letter to them.
You remember that in writing to the Corinthians, Paul said, “I can only write to you baby stuff. I can only feed you baby food.” Why? Because you are still babies. “I cannot give you real spiritual food to eat.”
Brothers and sisters, in my own estimation, when we come to the Ephesian letter, we are chewing on T-bone steak. We are feasting on the highest that the Lord has to give to us.
The church at Ephesus must have been in a spiritual state that allowed the Holy Spirit to use the apostle to proclaim these things to that assembly. Paul did not write this letter without hoping that they would be able to understand what he was seeking to communicate.
As we go on in this prayer, it becomes clear that he understood something had to happen to them. But he mentions two particular things about this Ephesian church that impressed him: first, their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; and secondly, their love for all the saints.
All of us here this morning would say, “Yes, we have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.” If you are a Christian, if you are a child of God, if you are a redeemed person, then you have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
But we need to allow our Lord Jesus to be all that He is and to believe in Him in His fullness. He is not only the Forgiver of our sins. He is our Savior, but He is more than that. He is our Lord. He is the great High Priest over the church. He is the Head of the church, and on and on we could go.
Apparently, the church at Ephesus had a full understanding of the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and they maintained faith in Him in light of that fullness.
Secondly, Paul was impressed because of their love for all the saints. Now, brothers and sisters, it may be helpful for us this morning to underline this by pointing out that there was a real problem in the early church, just as there is a real problem among us today, in terms of loving all the saints.
The problem was that you had both Jews and Gentiles in the church. Traditionally, the Jews would have nothing to do with the Gentiles. Yet Paul goes on in Ephesians 2 and points out that when the Lord Jesus died on the cross, He tore down the dividing wall, the barrier between Jew and Gentile, and made one new humanity—one new man.
Somehow, those saints in the city of Ephesus were able to take that truth and translate it into practical reality among them, so that their love embraced all the saints. In other words, they were not selective. They did not choose a few people and say, “We are going to love this particular type of Christian.” No, their hearts were wide open to embracing and demonstrating the love of God toward all the saints.
This further stirred Paul’s heart to continue to pray for them.
In addition to these two things, there was another thing that motivated Paul as he prayed for these Ephesian Christians: their desire to understand how to take the truth he was communicating to them and translate it into practical reality.
You know, brothers and sisters, I doubt very much if there is any of us in this room this morning who would disagree with what has been revealed, if we understood it. We would not disagree with anything that has been revealed in the Ephesian letter. But that is not really the problem.
The problem is taking that which has been revealed and having it worked out practically in our lives individually, but, in my estimation, more importantly, corporately.
Paul is praying for these Christians that they will be able to take the truth communicated to them and allow it to be worked out in very practical ways in their corporate life together.
There are two things that I find the apostle particularly praying for. One concerns their capacity to receive and understand revelation. The second concerns their ability to take the content being communicated and make it real in their lives, individually and corporately.
Let us look first at this matter of the capacity to understand.
We need to look at the dynamic of communication. God deeply desires to communicate His own heart, His own life, and His purpose to each one of His children. There are no exceptions.
As part of your birthright as a child of God, you have the right to hear from God. In other words, God wants there to be communication between yourself and Him.
Traditionally within the Christian church, we have had certain people called mystics. These are people who basically thrive on this matter of receiving communication from the Lord, and we do not need in any way to be critical of that.
The only thing I am concerned about is that somehow we relegate that to only a few people, while the rest of us get everything by proxy—secondhand, through someone else. But in reality, God has made it possible for every one of His children to be in a place where He can communicate His own heart, His own mind, His own will, and His purpose.
He can communicate to every one of His children, even the youngest one among us this morning. If you have only been a Christian for a couple of days or a couple of weeks, you already have within you the capacity to receive revelation from God—communication from Him.
In this matter of communication, there have to be two sides. There must be the sending forth of the communiqué, and then there must be the receiving of that communiqué.
We might use television as an illustration. I am sure most everyone here this morning has a television set in their home, or at least access to a television. But if there were no television tower sending out the signal, all you would have would be a piece of furniture. You would not be able to receive anything because nothing would be sent out.
On the other hand, if there were a television tower sending out the signal but you had no receiving set, again it would be useless.
So, in this matter of communication, God is continually sending forth His communiqué. It is the Holy Spirit taking the written Word of God, breathing upon it again, making it alive, and communicating it to those who have ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
There is no problem with the television tower that is sending out the message. There is no breakdown on that side. So where is the problem? The receiving sets are not working very well. We are not picking up the communiqué.
Paul is trying to communicate to these Christians that there needs to be a built-in capacity to receive communication from God.
This capacity that we have is none other than our human spirit. Before we became Christians, our human spirit was closed off to God; it was dead to God. There was no communiqué being registered in our spirit because it was dead.
But when you and I put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes and indwells our human spirit, brings it back to life again, and begins to restore its capacity to receive communication from God.
I do not know what your experience was, but I can remember my own experience, even though it was more than thirty years ago, as if it were today. I had grown up in a family where there was no talk about God. I was twenty-three years old, and I went into a little church and heard the gospel preached. I believed that gospel, and something wonderful took place in me.
I knew that my sins were forgiven, but something else happened. I just knew that I knew that I knew that I knew that there was a God, and no one told me. It was communicated to my spirit.
On the first day of my life as a Christian, God was communicating to me the assurance of His existence simply by this communiqué. I had never read the Bible in my life, but God was communicating.
When you and I become Christians, the Holy Spirit begins immediately to build within us this capacity to receive from Him.
It is my understanding that this is not only something that we should have individually. As an assembly of the Lord’s people, the Lord would build among us a corporate capacity to hear from Him.
Remember, brothers and sisters, He is the Head; we are the body. We have no right to make decisions or to act independently of Him. It means that the Lord must have a way, from His position at the right hand of the Father as our Head, by the Holy Spirit, to communicate His heart, His mind, and His will about all the things that are going on in our corporate life together.
How do you suppose the church got into the mess it is in today? How did we get so hopelessly divided as Christians over the centuries?
I think I can assure us, brothers and sisters, that it is not the result of our Lord’s work. It is not what the Lord has communicated. Somehow there has been a misunderstanding, or no understanding at all. We have taken it upon ourselves to go ahead and do something without consulting Him as Head, or without having the capacity to receive from Him what He is communicating.
In this matter of the Lord Jesus having the church as a vessel to express His own fullness, we need a corporate capacity to receive from Him the communications that are coming from Himself, by the Spirit, to us in any given situation.
Every assembly on the face of the earth desperately needs this corporate capacity to regularly hear from its Head, the Lord Jesus Christ.
In these verses in Ephesians 1, Paul prays that God would grant them a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
If I had been writing this, I would have reversed it. I would have said, “the spirit of revelation and wisdom.” But Paul has not done that, because the Holy Spirit led him otherwise. I think there is probably a reason for that.
When we take up this matter of wisdom in the Scriptures, it seems that God is interested in taking the wisdom that is located in Himself and communicating it to us as His children and to us as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Here is where we need to spend some time thinking, meditating, and working our way through some things. Wisdom is God’s way of doing things. Knowledge is what God knows, and He is prepared to reveal that knowledge to us. But we can have a lot of knowledge and not know what to do with it.
It is the wisdom of God that enables us to take the knowledge we receive and translate it into action in our lives. So before God gives revelation, He also gives wisdom so that we can take what He reveals and begin to work it out in our lives together and in our own lives personally.
In James 3, we find that there are two kinds of wisdom on the earth: a wisdom that does not come from above and a wisdom that does come from above.
James tells us that the wisdom that is not from above is earthly, natural, and demonic. In other words, there is a way that men will tell us how to live. Much is being said about how you and I ought to live our lives.
As a matter of fact, you can go to the Christian bookstore and find a whole section of “how-to” books. What you will find, for the most part—and I am not trying to be critical—is man-made methods of taking the truth in God’s Word and trying to show us how to translate that into daily living.
What you will find in most instances, brothers and sisters, is that two things are missing from those books: the indwelling Christ and the cross. They are missing because man wants to find a way to use his own energy, his own intellect, and his own ability to live the Christian life. It is impossible.
There is only one Person in the universe who can live the Christian life: the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. The only way you and I can live the Christian life is for Him to live His life through us. That is the wisdom of God.
Wisdom is the ability to take what God reveals to us and put it into practice. James tells us that there is a wisdom that is not from above, and we need to be alert to it, not fall victim to it, and reject it.
There is also wisdom that is from above. James indicates some characteristics of this wisdom: it is pure, peaceable, gentle, open to being reasoned with, and without hypocrisy. It is pure because it comes from God.
God wants to communicate to us His own way of doing things so that we are not left to our own efforts. Wisdom from above, communicated by the Spirit of God, enables us not only to know what God’s will is, but to know how to live it out.
We are told something very wonderful in Colossians 2. For the sake of time, let us look at the last part of verse 2 and verse 3.
Colossians 2:2-3
That their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, unto the knowledge of God’s mystery, even Christ,
in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.
If you underline your Bible, I think you ought to underline verse 3: “In whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.”
God has taken His own wisdom and located it in a Person. As we behold that Person, study that Person, and get to know that Person, then we begin to understand how to live our lives.
This is also true in terms of our corporate life. We need to understand that our Lord Jesus is the Head, and located in Him is all the wisdom and knowledge of God. God has given Him to us to be Head over all things to the church.
Located in Him is all the wisdom that we will need for any situation, no matter what it is that we as an assembly of God’s people are facing. In Him is the wisdom to take what we already know, what has been revealed to us, and put it into practice.
But I find that among many of us as the Lord’s people, we never go through this necessary step. Sometimes we ask the Lord, “What is it that You want us to do?” But we never stop to ask Him, “How do You want us to do it?” We assume that we know.
Just because we know what He wants us to do, we assume that He wants us to take our own understanding, our own wisdom, our own strength, and our own energy and somehow put it into practice. But we need to stop and say, “Now, Lord, this is what we understand You want us to do. How do You want us to do it?”
That is wisdom. This wisdom is located in our Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is prepared to take that wisdom which is in Him and communicate it to us as an assembly of the Lord’s people.
As an example, I think it is probably true of many of you, brothers and sisters, that you are carrying in your hearts a burden concerning how we, as assemblies of the Lord’s people, can involve ourselves in this matter of evangelism.
We would have to have our heads in the sand if we were not alert to all that is going on around us. Things are not getting better. We are not having the impact on our society that we need to have. We are losing the battle.
Some of us are beginning to feel an urgency in our spirits about the condition of the world around us—not merely because of the condition itself, but because we understand that, if things continue as they are, it is going to be very difficult for us to function and to do the work the Lord wants us to do.
The pressure is going to become so immense. We are going to be so preoccupied that there will not be time, energy, or desire to be involved. We are going to be so worn out just making it through daily experience that we will not have any desire to make inroads.
Do you think that our Lord Jesus is somehow stumped, that He does not have the wisdom? I do not think that for a moment. He has all the wisdom. He is not frustrated at all by what is going on around us.
The problem is that I do not believe we are paying the price to hear from Him concerning His way in all of this. He is the Evangelist. If He were to come among us—and He is, you know, in His own body—operating under the wisdom of God, He would find ways of breaking through into those pockets of darkness.
Brothers and sisters, that same wisdom is available to us as His people. As we seek Him, He would lead us and show us ways to be involved in getting the gospel out to those who have never heard.
Another way we see this matter of wisdom operating is in the Old Testament. You remember that when Moses went up onto the mountain, in addition to receiving the Ten Commandments, God also gave him a pattern for the tabernacle.
God told him exactly how everything was to be made. He gave him a blueprint, if you please, of all the materials and everything involved in the tabernacle. He made it real to Moses.
But in Exodus 31, God chose wise-hearted workers to take the blueprint, read the blueprint, take the materials made available by God’s people, and work them out until the blueprint was fulfilled through those wise workers.
It says that they were wise-hearted. They had the wisdom of God in their hearts whereby they could take the materials that were there and construct the tabernacle exactly as God had designed it and shown it to Moses.
We have another illustration in the person of Solomon. In 1 Kings 3, God does something marvelous for Solomon. God comes to Solomon and hands him a blank check, saying, “You fill in what you want.”
What would you do if God did that to you? What would you fill in? What would you put in that blank place? He said, “I will give you anything that you want. You just ask for it; it is yours.”
God knows us too well to do that with us, but He was able to do it with Solomon. Do you remember what Solomon requested from the Lord because of his great burden to be an appropriate leader of God’s people?
What did he ask for? Yes, that is how it gets translated in our Bible, but do you know what he really asked for? He asked for a listening heart.
In the original language, the word is Shema, from which we get the Shema:
Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.
The word Shema means to listen, to hear. What Solomon actually asked of God was not, “You have a container of wisdom over there; somehow get me hooked up to that container of wisdom.” No, that is not what he asked for.
He asked for a heart that could listen to God, that could hear God. That is exactly what God gave him. The wisdom that God has became Solomon’s wisdom.
So when the two mothers were fighting over the one baby, this was not something Solomon came up with on his own. This was communicated from God to Solomon right in the situation. He had no law books to consult and study. God revealed to him, right in the situation, what he was to do.
So he said, “I will tell you what we will do. We will take the baby, cut him in half; you get half, and you get half.” But the real mother said, “No.” It was the wisdom of God.
Brothers and sisters, that is what we need. We need hearts that can hear God in any situation.
Think about it, mothers and fathers. I am sure that most of you have fear and trembling in your hearts as to how you are going to properly parent your children in this age in which we are living. With all the things that are going on, with all the things that can lay hold of them, how are we going to parent them? How are we going to be the mother and father to them that we need to be?
Brothers and sisters, our God is able. If we have a heart to hear from Him, He will communicate to us in any given situation. Certainly we need to learn the general principles, but God is prepared to communicate to us, in any situation we are confronted with, the wisdom we need to deal with that situation.
We need to be a people who are able to hear from Him. This is also true in a corporate way.
James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God.” What is he supposed to do? Simply ask for it. God does not upbraid us; He does not chide us for asking for it.
If any man lacks wisdom, let him ask for it, and God will give liberally. It is not merely a matter of asking for revelation. We need to ask God, “What do I do with this now that I have received it? How do I translate this into everyday living?”
Again, we come back to our corporate life. Once we understand what the Lord’s will is for us, we need to take that next step and ask, “Now, Lord, what do we do with it?” Ask for wisdom. He will give it. He will not chide us for asking. He will not withhold it. He will give it.
Paul also prayed that they would receive the spirit of revelation. In verse 18, he prays that the eyes of their hearts may be opened, because there is something specifically that Paul wants them to see.
In the same way that Moses received revelation—at the burning bush and when he went up into the mountain—God is prepared to make real to us the revelation that we need.
Think of Simon Peter in Matthew 16, when he responded in that marvelous way:
Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
The Lord Jesus said to Simon Peter:
Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father who is in heaven.
We need to be a people who are on the receiving end of that which God has been pleased to reveal. It means that God takes the mysteries that have been hidden, pulls back the veil, and allows all of His children to see with the eyes of their hearts the truth that God has revealed.
This was true in the life of the apostle Paul. On the Damascus road, it was because of Whom he saw. Then we find his testimony in Ephesians 3: it was by revelation that God unveiled to his heart the truth about the mystery of Christ and the mystery of the church.
Brothers and sisters, as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, if we are going to provide our Lord with a vessel through which He can express His fullness, we need the capacity to receive from Him wisdom and revelation.
We need spirits that are alive, alert, and full—always in the place where they can pick up the registrations being communicated from our Lord Jesus Christ to us as the church.
It is an amazing thing when you read the book of Acts and think about the tremendous progress made in the building of the church in that early century. Yet they had very little in terms of natural resources. Here we are today with all the natural resources and very little impact upon our societies.
I believe it is because we are not taking full advantage of what is ours as the Lord’s people: that capacity to receive communication from our Lord in terms of wisdom and revelation.
Let us take a few moments and consider together the three things Paul prayed for these Christians. In addition to having this capacity, he prayed three specific things that they would be able to understand—not merely understand in a mental way, but put into practice.
May we go beyond the stage, brothers and sisters, of being people who simply accumulate revelation. Some of us take our revelations almost as people take little statues and put them on the mantelpiece. Well, that does not do anything for the work of God.
Praise God for all that He reveals, but may we be people who take that other step and begin to put it into practice—not only hearers of the Word, but doers as well.
Paul prays, beginning in verse 18, that they may know:
What is the hope of His calling,
what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe.
Three things: the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.
First of all, what is the hope of His calling?
Many of us, as we view our own experience with God, give our testimony in terms of when we found the Lord. But I want to ask you this morning: who was lost, and who was doing the seeking? Who found whom?
The Lord found you. He called you. He initiated the calling. Even as an assembly of the Lord’s people, it is He who called us together. It was not something that men simply got together and decided to do.
Now, men can do that. But I do not believe that is what happened in this assembly. Somehow God, by His Spirit, moved and began to move individual hearts, then called them together in His own unique way.
The thing Paul says he wants us to be clear about is not merely what the calling is, but what is the hope of that calling.
Hope is one of those biblical words that we need to get hold of. We use the word “hope” in a way that is not biblical. Someone might say, “Are you going to go on vacation next year?” and you might answer, “I hope so.” That is not biblical hope.
Biblical hope means that you know it is already a reality. It is simply a matter of experience until you come into it. It is an established reality. It is not something you hope for as though it were somewhere up in the sky. It is already real, and it is a matter of our moving into it and experiencing that hope.
What is the hope of our calling? What is it that God has established and is seeking to bring us into by experience?
In terms of your own personal life, brothers and sisters, God’s hope for you is that you will be exactly like His Son. Those whom He foreknew, He predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son.
Do you know what the hope of your calling is individually? Do you know what will be the final result of all of God’s dealings in your life—what He was after when He first called you? It is that you would end up having the same character in you that is in the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
That is the hope of our calling in terms of our personal lives. I hope that is a reality in your heart. I hope there is an ongoing amen issuing out of your heart to Him, saying, “Lord, that is what I want. I know I am thousands and millions of miles from it, but that is what You want. That is my hope. That is what You are determined to do.”
God is never going to give up. He is not going to usher you into eternity until this job is finished. You are ill-equipped to live in the New Jerusalem until the character of His Son has been formed in you.
It does not matter how long it takes or what kind of experiences He puts you through. He is going to prepare you to enter into life as He planned for us in the age to come.
God has His own unique way of dealing with each one of His children. There are no coincidences, no accidents, no happenstance for the child of God. Everything is either permitted or designed by the Lord, that He might take those circumstances and through them form the character of His own Son in each one of His children.
That is the hope of our calling personally.
But what about the hope of our calling corporately?
We go back to the burden that I believe motivated Paul to write this letter and to pray this prayer: that we would become the vessel that would contain and express the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, as I understand it, ultimately that is going to issue forth in the New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem is the hope of our calling.
I am prepared to stand corrected, but I have a question in my heart: How does the New Jerusalem get built? Who is building this New Jerusalem? Have you recently read the description in Revelation 21 and 22 of the New Jerusalem? Who is building this, and what is it being built out of? What is the material God is using to build this New Jerusalem?
I believe we are the raw material. It is Christ being formed in us and then being built into this corporate vessel that expresses the fullness of the beauty of God Himself—the glory of God.
There is no need for light, sun, moon, or lamp. Why? Because God is there, and everything in this city speaks of God—the character of God.
The hope of our calling, brothers and sisters, is that God has laid hold of you and me, then laid hold of us as an assembly, and says, “Will you please learn how to cooperate with Me so that I can use the experiences of your life as a way of forming and constructing this New Jerusalem?”
The ultimate reality in this New Jerusalem is that God is dwelling among His people. God has found His resting place. He is dwelling among His people. He is their God, and they are His people.
There is no hindrance to full, open, complete fellowship. We are able to enter into and experience all that there is in God. He becomes our all in all. This is the hope of our calling.
I know that when we first come to the Lord, the majority of our focus is upon ourselves individually. But hopefully there comes a point in your life as one of God’s dear children when you move into another dimension and realize that God has caught you up in something eternal.
God is using you as raw material, and you are also to be a coworker with Him in building something that is for the ages of the ages.
In our corporate life together, please do not allow yourself to fall down to a level where you see everything merely on a human plane, merely in terms of the problems we encounter in our life together as the Lord’s people.
We need to see it from the perspective that God is using this as a way of building the New Jerusalem. This is the hope of our calling. It is already real. If you have read Revelation, you know it is already a reality.
Our hope is real. It is not a figment of someone’s imagination. We see it there; it was revealed to John. But the work is now being worked out, and you and I have been caught up to work with God toward its fulfillment. That is the hope of our calling.
Secondly, Paul says that we might know what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.
Most of us are somewhat clear about what our inheritance is in Him, but that is not what Paul is asking here. He wants them to understand what His inheritance is in the saints—what God has invested in the saints.
Notice that he says, “What are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints?”
If you read the Ephesian letter carefully, you will find that Paul has a great deal to say about riches. He begins his letter, after his salutation, by saying:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.
God has taken all the blessings, all the riches of heaven, placed them in His Son, and then given us His Son. When we receive the Son, we receive all of those blessings. This is God’s inheritance in this age.
In Ephesians 1:7, Paul says:
In whom we have our redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He made to abound toward us.
God has taken the riches of His grace—notice, the riches of His grace—and what has He done with them? He has poured the whole container out upon us. God has taken the riches of His grace and invested them in the saints.
He has taken a tremendous risk, in my estimation. What were we before we came to the Lord? Sons of disobedience, children of wrath, sinners, rebels, enemies of God. Would you invest in those kinds of people? He did.
He took His own inheritance—we could put it this way: He took the riches of His grace and placed them in these kinds of people. Paul says, “I want you to understand the nature of His inheritance in the saints.”
In Ephesians 3, Paul says he had been commissioned by God to go and proclaim to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ. Then in Ephesians 3:16, he speaks of being strengthened “according to the riches of His glory.”
So we see, brothers and sisters, that Paul talks about every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, the riches of His grace, the unfathomable riches of Christ, and the riches of His glory. He takes these and invests them in His saints. This is God’s inheritance.
I think Paul wanted those Ephesian Christians to understand how important they were to the Lord and to the fulfillment of God’s purpose. I believe the Holy Spirit would remind us this morning of how important we are to the fulfillment of God’s purpose and to the fulfillment of the desire of God’s heart.
How very, very precious we are to Him because of what He has invested in us.
Most of us in this room this morning had little future outside of Christ. Had God not intervened in our lives, we might have made some success in the world, but in terms of what is happening in the future, there was no hope for us.
God has taken His own riches and placed them in us. He has invested them in us, and He is expecting a return on His investment. He expects that His inheritance will pay off, that He will be able to reproduce His own Son in every one of us.
As we are built together as assemblies of the Lord’s people, the Lord Jesus is given liberty and freedom to express the fullness of Himself. This is God’s inheritance.
Do you have any idea what it does to the heart of God when He looks down upon the people of God and sees the life of His Son in them? I think it is beyond our ability to fathom how God rejoices when He sees the riches of His Son deposited in and expressed through the redeemed people of God.
The third thing Paul prays is that they would know what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe.
Our time is already gone, but brothers and sisters, I hope that we are clear this morning that the God who has called us, the God who has this hope, and the God who has invested His riches in us is also the God who is able to bring it all together and make it work.
Paul says that this power—the surpassing greatness of His power—is the power God used to raise His Son from the dead. It is power over death.
It is the power that God used to bring Him out of death, raise Him, and seat Him at His own right hand. He has now become the One who has authority over all rule and power in the universe. Everything has been put under His feet.
That is the kind of power God has demonstrated in His Son, and He wants us to know it experientially as assemblies of His people.
I do not believe, brothers and sisters, that it is going to get any easier in our country to be a Christian or to maintain a testimony of the Lord Jesus in our corporate life. I think it is going to become more and more difficult.
If we do not discover this resource of God’s power, then we are going to be overwhelmed. The gates of Hades, the gates of death, the counsel of death, are out to attack us and undo us.
We need to realize in experience that there is power available to us to come against and even assault that which would stand in the way of the Lord’s work being done.
Paul says in Ephesians 3:
Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.
Do we know Him as the One who is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works among us?
Already available to us is the power of an unlimited God to do anything that He wants to do. But if we see things only in terms of human energy, human ingenuity, and human power, then we will never attempt some of the things the Lord wants to do.
But when we understand that He has called us according to the hope of our calling, that there is an inheritance He has invested in us, and that He is prepared to release power to bring it all into reality, then we can go forward.
Remember Acts 1. When the Lord Jesus was only moments away from ascending out of their presence, He said:
Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Spirit is come upon you: and ye shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
There is power available. We need to know the reality of that power—not merely something that we talk about, but something that is a living reality among us: God working and doing things that are humanly impossible.
He is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think. Paul could not find all the words he needed to express the power that he knew was available to the church.
So, brothers and sisters, I trust that the Holy Spirit will register this in our hearts and that we will not be able to get away from it: in God’s heart, He wants every assembly that names the name of Jesus to be a vessel in which the fullness of Christ abides and through which the fullness of Christ is demonstrated, displayed, and manifested.
I trust that is what is in our hearts. We are willing to settle for a great deal less than what God wants. Somehow we can get to a certain stage of being comfortable. We have enjoyed the blessings of God; we cannot get this far without enjoying the blessings of God.
But sometimes the blessings of God can turn out to be our curse, because we become satisfied at that level.
May the Holy Spirit lift our eyes up, cause us to see, and produce a heart response that says, “We need to be a vessel that contains the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ—not just a little trickle of His life, but the fullness.”
Whatever that means, all those unfathomable riches that are in Christ, may we be free—however the Holy Spirit would do it—to allow Him to express that fullness through us.
May the Lord be merciful to us. May He get us over any sense of satisfaction. I do not care how far we have come; we have miles to go, brothers and sisters.
We need to see ourselves as called by God to be a vessel to contain the fullness of the life of His Son, and then be in the business of discovering the wisdom God would grant us to take that and work it out in our practical life together as the Lord’s people.
May the Lord be merciful to us and help us to become that kind of a vessel. Let us pray together.
Father, we do this morning want to thank You that You do not leave us to ourselves. Lord, You come and remind us again and again of that which is in Your own heart.
Lord, we have to admit, if we are honest this morning, that we are satisfied with so little. It takes very little for us to become satisfied. But we are so grateful this morning, Lord, that You never give up. Even though we become satisfied, You keep drawing us on.
So we want to come to You this morning and thank You for the revelation You gave to the apostle Paul. We thank You that we have a record of it that we can read, and we thank You that we have the Holy Spirit who can take that Word again and speak it to our hearts.
Lord, if we understand what Your Word is saying, You want a vessel that will contain Your fullness, a vessel that will be liberated to allow that fullness to be expressed.
So, Lord, we ask that You will burn into our hearts the understanding of what is the hope of our calling, what are the riches of the glory of Your inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of Your power toward us who believe.
Lord, may You find among Your people a vessel that will express Your fullness. We ask it in Your name. Amen.