Morning. I feel like a newcomer, so I’m amazed that some of you knew my name. That’s good. Thank you.
I’d like to read a verse before we pray and get into things. In John 17:3, Jesus says:
“And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”
Let’s pray.
Father, we do want to again thank You for sending us the Savior, the Lord Jesus. We thank You, Lord, that it was not a small thing that You did. It was not a winking of Your eye, but it cost You everything. Yet You did so willingly, and we want to thank You.
We thank You that this has brought us into Your presence now, that we can be with You, and that You can speak to us. Lord, that is what we are asking for this morning. We are asking that You would open the Word to us and that You would speak to us.
Speak words that will encourage us, words that will lead us to a closer relationship with You. But mostly, Lord, we are praying that the words will be Your words, Lord. They will not be my words; they will be words that are Yours—Your own, Lord.
We pray that Your Word would not be handled wrongly, but that it would be Your Word, as from Your mouth and Your heart to us. In Jesus’ name, amen.
First of all, I need to thank you, because I know many prayed for the retreat—or the conference—in Toronto. I cannot tell you how blessed I was in being there. I know it is because people prayed.
There was a time when one of the older fellows I grew up with in California would always say, “I can feel your prayers.” I used to think, “What a bunch of hooey. He’s just telling us he wants us to pray for him.” But you know, he was right.
You can feel the prayers of the saints that have made a way for you. I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to know that the way has been opened because people have been praying. So I just want to give you my thanks for that, and for how wonderfully the Lord met me.
It is my hope that He met all the young people there also, but He definitely met me, so it was worth my going.
I would like to continue going through the book of Ephesians. I am not going to give a review, except to say that we have covered the first fourteen verses.
In those verses, Paul has been telling the Ephesians what they have in the Lord Jesus Christ—what God has done for them in the Lord. Not only has He called them and chosen them, but He has also redeemed them, given them an inheritance, and given them a down payment of that inheritance through the Holy Spirit.
I also want to reiterate that although this is supposed to be the high-water mark of Paul’s letters—the highest of them all—it was written to people probably less educated than all of us sitting in this room.
You might say, “Well, gee, how could they understand? I mean, verses 3 through 14 are a pretty long sentence. How could they understand it?”
My brothers and sisters, it is not the intellect that brings us understanding. As we will see, it is the Lord giving us wisdom and revelation. It is of the Lord to give us these things and for us to receive them.
These people were probably less educated than us, and most of them came out of an idolatrous background. Yet the Lord saved them and spoke to them. So we want to continue with what we have come to so far.
We are going to read verses 15 through the end of the chapter, and hopefully we will cover these today.
“Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints,
do not cease 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 to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him;
the eyes of your understanding being enlightened;
that you may know what is the hope of His calling,
what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints,
and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power
which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all principality and power and might 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 under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”—Ephesians 1:15-23
That is the beginning of this section here. We are going to be dealing with a prayer. We do not want to read a lot of things into a prayer, but we do want to say this: this is Paul’s prayer. This is something he has on his heart to ask God for these believers.
It is more than just for these believers, because if we take Scripture as being inspired by God, it is the Holy Spirit’s prayer for us. These things are meant for us. These are things that God wants us to have.
Paul starts out by saying, “I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints.” After he goes through his introduction and tells them about all that they have in Christ, he comes back to say, “I have heard.”
By this time, he had probably been gone about five years from these people. If you remember, when he left there was a big uprising. The silversmiths were upset because he was preaching against idolatry, so they caused a big old ruckus in Ephesus and had to be calmed down by the magistrates.
In those five years since he had been gone, he had found out through other believers who had come through—perhaps Epaphras, or Epaphroditus—that their faith in the Lord Jesus continued. In other words, they were not falling back; they were continuing on in the faith.
Not only were they continuing on in faith, but there was fruit from that faith. Their belief in the Lord Jesus and what He had done for them had not been fruitless; it had been working in their lives. We find that they loved the saints. They loved the other brothers and sisters.
With these things brought to mind, Paul then goes into prayer. That is what we are really going to look at this morning: this prayer of Paul.
He asks for a few different things, and we want to look at what he asks for. In looking at them, we need to take a couple of things into consideration.
One is that I have looked at this in a new light since Alan Alloway gave a little exhortation in his word about “you all.” It is not that Paul is Southern, but this is a corporate prayer—a prayer for the believers.
We can look at it in two ways. We can look at this as a prayer for us as individuals, and we will take a look at that. But really, it is a prayer for all the believers. It is for all the believers in this locality here—for us.
Paul says:
“I do not cease 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 to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”
Then he asks for three distinct things—three things.
Starting out, Paul addresses God. He goes right to the Father: “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This is not saying, “Well, if Jesus is God also, then how can God be His God?” To put your mind at rest about that, you have to remember that when Jesus came to earth, He laid aside His divine privileges and became man. He was fully man.
If you remember, in John He says, “I go to My God and your God.” When Jesus was on earth, He addressed the Father as God. So Paul goes right to the Father, just as we do too. We do not have to go any other way. We can go directly to the Father for the things that we ask.
That was very different for me. Like I said, I was raised Catholic. The Catholic idea is that Dad never wants to give you anything, so you go through Mom to get to Dad. Okay? That is not true.
The Father is willing to give us so many things. Paul goes directly to the Father, and he asks this first: that He may give this whole group of people—and them as individuals—the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
The spirit of wisdom and revelation means that the Holy Spirit would give them wisdom and revelation.
Now, in the simplest terms, wisdom and revelation—okay, I am not going to go into all these Greek words, although I could because I looked them up—wisdom simply means this: wisdom is all the truth that I need to know. That is it. I mean, that is it in a nutshell.
All the truth that I need to know: that He may give you a spirit of wisdom, of all the truth I need to know. Revelation is the ability I need to receive that truth.
So Paul is asking that God would give them the truth they need to know and the ability to receive it.
He wants this so that they will be brought into a true knowledge, because the word here for “knowledge of Him” is epignosis. There is my Greek, okay? It means true knowledge or real knowledge.
What does it mean to have a true knowledge or a real knowledge of God? This is a knowledge that brings about, or inspires, faith in God. It is not just knowing about Him.
“Oh yeah, I know that He is a three-in-one. Oh yeah, that is cool. Oh yeah, I know He died on the cross. Oh yeah, okay, that is cool.” No. It is something that, when we know, inspires us to trust in Him.
Let me give you an example. You remember the children of Israel after they were redeemed out of Egypt. They wandered in the wilderness, and God did a lot of things for them.
When they got thirsty, He gave them water. When they got hungry, bread from heaven. When they had bitter water, He made the water sweet. When they wanted meat, He gave them quail. When the Amalekites were coming after them, He defeated them. He gave them everything that they needed.
But when it came time for them to enter into what He had promised them—the purpose of redeeming them, bringing them into this new land—they refused to go in.
How can that be? It is because they stopped with knowledge. It was just knowledge. It was not linked up with faith. Their hearts were hardened.
By sitting in ministry time after time after time, if we do not exercise faith concerning that ministry, our hearts get hardened. All it becomes is stuff. It is just knowledge. It means nothing.
What I mean by “meaning nothing” is this: if it meant something to us, we would walk in it. We would do something with it. But things that mean nothing, we do not do anything with. We put them in the closet—or the attic. I have a great attic that has a bunch of stuff that needs to go.
Now, an example of true knowledge is Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac. Why is that an example of true knowledge?
It is because, up to that time, what had he been learning about God? When God said, “Go out to this land that you do not know about, and I am going to give it to you,” he went out. When God said He was going to give him a son, He gave him a son.
All these things that had happened so far led up to when God said, “Give Me this son.” Abraham could say, “I can give him to You, because I know if I give him to You, You will have to raise him up because of Your promises in him.”
That is true knowledge. He had the knowledge that God would keep His promise because He had kept it all the way through. He had experienced it.
This true knowledge is experiential knowledge of God. We experience God in our lives, and that inspires more faith. We go from faith to faith, strength to strength, because we know God that much more and trust Him that much more.
Paul says, “Lord, I want You to give these people all the truth they need to know about You, and give them the ability to receive it, so that they can find out Who You really are and step out on it. Let them find You as real.”
That is the bottom line. That is what true knowledge does: it lets you find out that God is real. So Paul prays, “Give them what they need to know You as a reality.”
Then he says, “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened.” Some of your Bibles say, “the eyes of your heart.” Understanding and heart have to do with the very most inward part of your being—the place from which action springs.
Your will, your emotions, and your intellect are all there, and it is what moves them. He is saying that the eyes of your understanding would be opened.
He does not say, “Open the eyes,” but he is praying this in faith. He is saying, “Lord, I am asking this so that, when the eyes of their understanding are opened, You will let them know three distinct things.”
He is very, very specific in what he asks. First, he says, “That you may know what is the hope of His calling.”
Calling is closely linked to redemption. We learned when we went over Ephesians 1:7, where it says that in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.
So many of us stop there, saying that is our calling. We are called to this redemption, and redemption stops with the forgiveness of our sins. But that is not so.
Redemption begins with the forgiveness of our sins. We talked about that last time. That is the open door for us to go through.
So then, what is the end of our calling? What is the purpose that He calls us to? We might say, being very spiritual people, “Well, He called us to be sons.” Well, what do sons do? That is just too spiritual. What do sons do?
Let me read another verse that might help us. Let’s go to Psalm 8.
“O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth,
Who have set Your glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants
You have ordained strength,
Because of Your enemies,
That You may silence the enemy and the avenger.When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have ordained,
What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You visit him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
And You have crowned him with glory and honor.
You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands;
You have put all things under his feet,
All sheep and oxen—even the beasts of the field,
The birds of the air,
And the fish of the sea
That pass through the paths of the seas.O Lord, our Lord,
How excellent is Your name in all the earth!”—Psalm 8:1-9
We have been called to reign. That is the bottom line. We have been called to reign with Christ Jesus.
Now, I do not mean that we are all going to be little kings and have our own little domains. That is Mormonism, okay? We are not each going to have our own little planet. That is not what it is talking about.
It is like this: you remember Joseph? The Lord called Joseph to reign. The Lord gave those dreams—everybody was going to be bowing down to him. Joseph took those dreams to heart. That was the Word of God to him: “I have a calling for you, and this is what it is.”
Joseph had two things going for him in this calling. Number one, God was with him. Number two, he was faithful. Those are the two things that led him into a place where he could reign.
In reigning, what I am talking about is bringing in the government of God into your life and the area in which you live. It is bringing in His rule. It is not you ruling over other people. Can you imagine if it were that way? What a mess.
We all want to be the supervisor. Nobody wants to be the grunt. But before you can become a supervisor, you have to be a grunt. Because if you cannot be ruled, you will not be able to rule. It is just that simple.
That was Joseph’s training. When Joseph had those dreams, he thought, “Hey, this is pretty cool. I’m going to rule over you guys.” He told everybody about it. He was pretty happy.
But then he got thrown in a ditch, taken to Egypt, became a slave, and went to jail. For thirteen years, it was miserable. But God was with him in all this training, and Joseph was faithful.
Joseph did not look at it and say, “Gee, I really hate this. This is a terrible thing. I do not want to do this. Forget it. God, take me home.” He was faithful where God put him.
He was faithful until he got to the place where God said, “Now I want you to reign.” His reign was not for himself to be exalted—“Oh, this is great, Joseph”—but it was to save people.
Remember the dream he interpreted was about the famine that was coming. Then he had the ideas: “This is what you should do.” He was brought to that place so people could be saved—his family and the known world at that time, because the famine was great.
Joseph had to take a yoke upon himself. Brothers and sisters, if we are going to reign, if we have been called to reign, then we have to take a yoke upon ourselves. We have to yoke up with the Lord Jesus.
Joseph, in being yoked, had a testimony. We can say, “Yes, the testimony was that the Lord was with him.” That is true. The jailer found out the Lord was with him and put him in charge of things. Potiphar found out the Lord was with him and put him in charge of things.
But Joseph also had a testimony of keeping himself for the Lord’s purpose. Remember when Potiphar’s wife came after him daily. Finally, when she got him by the garment and said, “Lie with me,” he said, “How can I sin against God?”
When we understand the end of our calling, what response should we have? The response is this: in 1 John, it talks about how he who has this hope purifies himself.
In other words, you make yourself ready for what you have been called for.
For example, I have been called to teach sociology this year. It was not my decision. I do not like sociology, all right? But I have been contracted to teach one class of sociology.
I can do a couple of things. I can wait until September 3 and walk into the classroom and say, “Where is the book?” But that would not be good, would it?
If you have ever gone into a classroom and you are not prepared, well, you students know—it is playtime. Right? It is not cool.
Or I can start opening up my book, seeing what I have got, seeing what other teachers have done, and start preparing for it. That is the wise route, isn’t it?
That is what I will do starting tomorrow. I have been gone for a long time, okay? But I have got my book, my little notebook, and everything, and I am ready to tackle that.
But the thing is, you prepare for it. You might say, “Well, how do you prepare? How do you go about doing this?”
In Toronto, we learned that we want to exercise ourselves unto godliness. If we want to reign, we need to be ruled. We need to bring ourselves under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Let me read a couple of verses from Romans. This is Romans 6, starting with verse 12:
“Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.
And do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin,
but present yourselves to God as being alive from the dead,
and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
For sin shall not have dominion over you,
for you are not under law but under grace.”—Romans 6:12-14
Individually, we can say that we start giving ourselves to our new Ruler. We no longer rule ourselves. We no longer live for ourselves, but we say, “God has this calling for me. I want to be faithful to that calling.”
“So, Lord, I present myself to You. Here I am. Do with me what You want, so that I am ready for this calling—so that I am ready to fulfill what You have planned for me. You are planning for me to reign. That is what I want to do.”
“Teach me how to do this. Help me in doing this so I can present myself a living sacrifice.” We exercise ourselves unto godliness.
But this is also a corporate thing. How do we get ready to reign corporately?
Brothers and sisters, we take our place in the body. We submit to one another in love, the way we are supposed to. If we have gifts, we exercise those gifts—not because of some glory it gets us, but because that is what the Lord would have us to do.
It is an exercise. We are faithful to what He has us to do. If it is just to go to a Bible study, then we faithfully attend the Bible study. If it is that I am supposed to be helping people, then I am faithful in doing that. I am faithfully there.
If it is to encourage one another, if it is to evangelize, then I faithfully do that. I take my place in the body. I submit to what the Lord has for me in the body, and I do those things until He brings me to the place where I exercise what He wants me to exercise.
The first thing Paul asks is that we would know the hope of His calling. Secondly, he prays that we would know what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints—another real big mouthful.
There are two ways you can go on that. Many people say this is the inheritance we have in Christ. We talked a little bit about that last time, but I am not going to take that road. I am going to take the different road—the road less traveled.
When I read this, when it says that we would know what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, it speaks to me that He gets something. God is to receive something, and He wants us to know what it is God is going to receive by having us.
Let’s go to Matthew 13, a great parable chapter, and look at verse 44.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid;
and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”—Matthew 13:44
A treasure hidden in a field: he goes and sells all that he has, and he buys it.
Here is a very familiar passage to us, but I think Matthew 13:44 explains Isaiah 53. Starting with verse 4:
“Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
And they made His grave with the wicked—
But with the rich at His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was any deceit in His mouth.Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him.”
—Isaiah 53:4-10
This is the treasure. This is the cost of the treasure. Yet, if we look at the cost, it was not something grievous to the Lord.
It was something that pleased Him because He looked at the treasure. He looked at what He was going to get.
I am not talking about a bunch of flunkies like we are. He was not looking at that. He was looking at what we were going to be in His Son. That was the treasure.
He was looking at the man He had lost, redeemed to Himself and restored to his proper place. So, for that, it was no burden to Him to pay this price.
The church, which we are part of—the company of those who have not only been called out but have responded and come out to Him—is His treasure.
Paul would have us see that we are His treasure. If we see that He sees this treasure, how should we look at one another?
We are to see each other in Christ as God sees us. Henceforth, our treatment of each other is to be in that way.
But that is really not all. We can say that we might love one another, and that love is the perfect bond of unity that holds us together. But I think what he is really getting at is found in Exodus 19:5-6.
God is speaking to Israel and saying that if they obey His commands, they will be His special treasure, and He will make them a kingdom of priests.
I think what the Lord is really wanting, and what His treasure really is, is to have priests to Him—priests who not only serve in the holy place.
So many of us can do that part. We can go and have our prayer time, our quiet time, and our devotional time. But priests are also those who serve in the house of God. That is what the Lord is looking for.
If you remember, there is a Scripture I used way back in January. I know you all remember it, okay? It was in 1 Kings, about when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon.
When she came, she wanted to test him out. Finally she came to him and said, “I heard about you, but since I came, it is not just you. I look at your servants—how they dress, how they serve, and how they act—and I have to say it is all true.”
She saw this by looking at his servants. How much more should principalities and powers give glory to God for His treasure—for the priests serving in His house, arrayed as they ought to be arrayed, doing what they ought to be doing, out of love to their God?
There is another way I want us to look at this. It is not a real biblical way, but I want to tell you a story about my dad and my brother Mike.
My brother Mike, my older brother, is a really nice guy. Matter of fact, I think he is my daughter’s favorite uncle. I really love him.
Mike and my dad did not get along growing up. At one time, Mike had his hair so long he could tuck it into his pants. My dad would say stuff like, “I don’t know whether to shake your hand or kiss you.”
You know, it was the sixties and seventies era. My dad was a real conservative guy, an old union guy. Mike wandered around looking for what he was supposed to do.
We both went to community college together, and he was studying police science, but he just was not satisfied. Finally, he asked my dad to help him get a job.
My dad got him a job as a carpenter. Now, to let you know, my dad was a carpenter—a cabinetmaker.
When my brother got to the place of saying, “Dad, help me get a job,” and my dad got him the job, my brother found his niche. I mean, that was the thing for him. He is still a carpenter to this day, and he is a very good carpenter.
What I am trying to say is that out of this, my dad gained a son back.
When my brother would come over, he would not come over and just talk with his brothers anymore. He went to my dad. He talked to him about work. They talked about how to do things. My dad got his son back.
For me, I was jealous of that, because all I did was play basketball. My dad did not play. But my brother came to my dad, and my dad had him back.
Not only that, he had been brought back into a place where my dad cared for my brother, and my brother knew the care of my dad for him. He would share things with him, talk to him about how to do things, and tell him about certain people he was working with.
In that way, the Father gets something back from redeeming us. He gets back the fallen man that He loves, but He gets him back in a different way.
He gets him back so that he is no longer rebellious. He gets him back, but he is in love with Him and grateful for everything He does.
My brother found his calling. He found his niche. He found the thing that made him happy because he came back to his father. He found that he had a father who loved him. That was precious.
When my dad died, he died suddenly. It was my brother who was the most hurt because he had grown to love him in a way that he had never loved him before.
Instead of it being, “Get out of my room,” it was, “Why did you leave?” My brother did everything privately. I remember seeing him go off by himself to cry when my dad died.
Anyway, we need to understand how much it means to the Lord to have His fallen creation back—not just as individuals, but as a corporate whole man. To have that back for Himself is a big thing to Him. It is a treasure to Him, and He wants us to know it.
Sometimes we think that God does not appreciate us. Oh, God loves. That is the whole thing: God loves. He is so happy and so full of joy to have back what He lost, and to have it back for what it was made for.
Finally, Paul prays that we might know what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe. We are going to close up here.
When we look at the greatness of the power toward us who believe, there are so many superlatives that it can mean nothing to us. It can just sound like a bunch of words.
But if we look at the words, what Paul is saying is that the power toward us is the power shown by raising Jesus from the dead.
You have to understand that when Jesus died for us, He had on Him the weight of the sin of the world. It was not just that He was dead. He was dead because of sin—dead to His Father because of sin.
Not only did God raise Him from the dead; there is an end there. The end is that He seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principalities and powers.
We do not really understand what was against the Lord being raised to this place. It was not just all hell; it was all the heavenly beings that were against God, against Him being brought up into this place of power.
This is a place of power. He was brought to a place of power. It is not just that He rose from the dead. You can say, “Well, it was nice that He rose from the dead, but why did He not just live here?”
Why did He not just keep walking around the world and say, “Hey, here I am. This is proof”? No, He was raised, and He ascended to a place of power.
It is a power of life that we need in our lives.
When you look at this individually, you can say that we have this power—it is this new life that we have. It is a spiritual life, not a natural life.
It overcomes the law of sin and death because it is a spiritual life. It goes beyond those things.
Have you ever watched The Sword in the Stone? Remember the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone? King Arthur? Remember Merlin was changing him into all sorts of little things: a fish, a squirrel, a bird?
To have this new life is like becoming something different. If you remember, when Wart—who was King Arthur—was turned into a bird and something was after him, he just started running.
He did not realize he was now a bird. He did not realize the life of a bird, the life that was in a bird. He did not realize that he could fly.
Finally Merlin said, “You need to fly.” He flew, and he found out, “Hey, I can do this. I can do something I have never been able to do before.”
That is the spiritual life. We have been given this spiritual life that does not cower down to the law of sin and death, if we choose that life.
It is like a butterfly and a caterpillar. Caterpillars do not look at butterflies and say, “God, I wish I could fly.” You know why? Because they do not care. They are eating. They are just eating those plants.
A butterfly does not say, “Oh man, I wish I was back down there eating those leaves,” because he is getting the sweet part of the plant. He is getting something so much sweeter.
He is not looking at the caterpillar and saying, “You guys just wait. This is where you want to be.”
Here we have this new life, and we are to know it. We are to know where this life is. We are to know the principles of this life in us. It is a powerful life.
But this is also a corporate issue. This is something for the church. What do I mean by this?
Paul says that we need to know the power. In Ezekiel, you all know the story of the dry bones, right? “The hip bone connected to the…” Remember the song? Okay, Ezekiel 37. I just want to read this.
“The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones.
Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry.
And He said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’
So I answered, ‘O Lord God, You know.’Again He said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.”’”
—Ezekiel 37:1-6
I want you to notice something about this. How many of you have seen the movie Jason and the Argonauts? Remember the skeleton men? They put the dragon’s teeth in the ground, and skeleton fighters came up. Very good claymation.
The Lord does not raise up skeletons.
The power of the Lord that we should know is this: first of all, He brings the bones together into a body.
Once He has brought the bones into a place of making a body, it says He attaches them with sinews. Then it says He causes flesh to come over them. Then He breathes life into them.
Brothers and sisters, that is Ephesians 4. If you look at Ephesians 4, starting in verse 11, it says:
“And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers,
for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry,
for the edifying of the body of Christ,
till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
to a perfect man,
to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;
that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine,
by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,
but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—
from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies,
according to the effective working by which every part does its share,
causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.”—Ephesians 4:11-16
The power Paul wants us to know is that power of the Lord to make the new man out of many.
In the new man there are many places, and you have certain gifts to help the others to join in the ministry of building up the new man—putting on the sinews, knitting them together, and doing those things that make the man whole and perfect.
The Lord has power to do that. It is not just an individual power. It is power that works in you individually, but it brings you into a body.
Our Head is the One who is above everything. This is the Christ who has been given to the church. It is not just a resurrected Christ. It is not just a crucified Christ.
It is a Christ who has been crucified, risen from the dead, and lifted up to the seat of power. That is what we are: we are His body.
It says, “the fullness.” In other words, not that we make Him what He is, but that He makes us what we are.
In Hebrews 10, I think it says, in the recording of Psalm, “You did not desire sacrifice, but a body You have prepared for Me. I delight to do Your will.”
The body that He is making for Himself, that He is grooming for Himself, is the outworking of His life in us as individuals brought into a corporate expression of Him that goes out and does His will.
It is not a trophy piece. It is not something that God says, “Oh, look at this. This is just a beautiful body.” It is not like Mr. America coming here and you just want to see him flex.
What good is his flexing if he cannot lift a feather? What good is his flexing if he is too muscle-bound to walk? It is worth nothing.
God has for Himself a body so that He can do His will.
What is His will for this body, for this part of His body? Part of it is to build one another up so that we are all functioning. It takes all of us to function.
But another part of it is to save others. That is a big part of what He wants. He wants to save other people. He wants other people in His body. He is not willing that any should perish.
We cannot forget this: it says that in His body are evangelists. Brother and sister, if you are an evangelist, you need to start functioning.
Now, in closing, what are we supposed to do with all this stuff? What are we supposed to do with these things that Paul is praying for, that God starts giving? He starts saying, “This is what I want for you.” What are we supposed to do?
I am just going to say very bluntly: we are not to assent to these things; we are to attend to them. That means we are to take care.
If this is our calling, then we need to make sure we are taking care of it so that it comes about. Peter said that we can make our calling sure. Well then, we need to do that.
The things that stop us from knowing our calling are many. There is sin. There is worldliness. There is indifference.
All these things can make us indifferent to what God is trying to do. Brothers and sisters, that indifference is going to cost us.
We cannot remain indifferent. We cannot remain cold. We cannot remain worldly, and we cannot remain in sin.
We need to attend to the life He has given us. In attending to it, we should let it have its sway in us so that we are doing His will, because that is what He purchased us for.
Nothing less. Nothing less than that.
Brothers and sisters, when we look at the things Paul prays for, he prayed for great and wonderful things. But they are not just to be things.
They are to be things that are real knowledge. They are things that make us know God is Who He is.
When I see Him as able to make me reign, when I see Him as loving me the way He does, when I see Him as seated on the throne, enabling me to be all that He is enabling me to be, enabling me to function in my place, enabling the body to do what it should be doing—that is reality.
That is what we should be pressing for. We should be pressing for nothing less than the reality of what He wants.
Let’s pray.
Dear Heavenly Father, it is a wonderful thing what You want for us. Lord, I thank You. I thank You that You want high things for us. I am glad You did not call us to be something low.
Lord, I am glad You did not ask for something easy. You asked for something impossible, because You want us to know that You are able to bring us to that place if we would but be willing.
Oh, Lord, I pray that You would, in Your kindness and Your great grace toward us, help us to deal with the things that hold us from having these things realized in our lives.
Do not let us just go on the way we are. Help us to define what it is that You want and help us to do it. Lord, do not let us put things off.
Do not let us—Lord, if we are in the world, convict us and give us the power to come out of it. If we are in sin, Lord, show us and help us to repent.
Lord, if it is just that we do not care, wake us up and make us care. Show us, Lord. Shine on us.
“Awake, you who sleep,
Arise from the dead,
And Christ will give you light.”—Ephesians 5:14
Lord, we come today for no other reason than that we want Your will. We just want Your will. Do not let us settle for something less.
We ask this in Your name. Amen.