Heavenly Father, we want to thank You that we have been in heaven today. We have been with You. I want to thank You, Lord, that we knew our sins were dropped away and we were in Your presence. And Lord, we thank You.
We just do not want to stop with that. We do not want to be satisfied with just a good time of worship. But Father, we come to You that You might minister Your Word to us. And Father, it is Your Word. I pray that it would be unadulterated and pure as it comes forth, and that it would come with a power that there is an errand in it because it is Your Word. Let it be spoken to us, my Lord, engendering in us faith to believe the things that You are saying.
Lord, this power is not in my ability, but it is Yours. So I ask, Lord, that You will take Your Word by Your Holy Spirit and minister it to us—not, Lord, to our minds only, but to our innermost being. And there, let it not be merely planted so that it can be plucked away, but let it be held by the power of Your Spirit, that it might do what it is intended to do, to Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen.
This morning, I am finishing chapter 3, Lord willing. I promise I will not keep you past 1:30.
This is the second prayer of Paul in this letter. When you come to something like this, you cannot really exposit it. You cannot. It is a man’s prayer. It would be like us sitting at prayer meeting and saying, “Oh, well, what that brother meant by that prayer is this and this and this.”
So, for me to say that these are the things Paul had in mind—we just have to trust the Lord that He could make real what was on his heart, because this is a prayer breathed by him. That is what we want to see.
This prayer comes at an important portion of the letter. We are just on the verge of a transition. Most people, when they are explaining the book of Ephesians, or expounding the book of Ephesians, or writing a commentary on it, say the first three chapters are doctrinal. They are all up here. The last three chapters bring it down to earth.
This comes where we have been up in the heavens. It is like our brother was sharing about being on the Mount of Transfiguration. We see the Lord. We have seen who we are in the Lord, and that is wonderful. But now we have to go down to earth.
And down to earth, if you read in Luke, waiting for you is a demoniac. What good is seeing the Lord if it does not translate into dealing with the demoniac? That does not deal with your real life.
So here we have this transition that Paul is coming to, and that is what we want to look into. We want to look into his prayer, and, Lord willing, we are going to finish it today.
There are things here that people wax eloquent about—where it talks about the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth. People can wax eloquent. I am not an eloquent person. Okay, I am simple. So I am not going to wax eloquent, but I am going to bring out from my studying the things that I saw and that I think are true to the Word. The Lord help me in that.
Let us go ahead and read the last eight verses of chapter 3, starting with verse 14. Paul begins:
For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father,
from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,
that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory,
to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend with all the saints
what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge,
that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think,
according to the power that works within us,
to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
to all generations forever and ever. Amen.
First of all, I want to say that this is not a pattern to pray. I am not going to say, “Well, this is how we should pray.” But I will look at this prayer and say a couple of things.
First of all, everything Paul asks for here is spiritual. It is just spiritual. It is a spiritual prayer. The things he is asking for are spiritual things.
Secondly, another thing we can see in all these prayers is that he asks for things that are very specific. If we look at this, he says, “Lord, I am asking that You strengthen them in the inner man. I am asking that Christ may dwell in them. I am asking that they be rooted and grounded in love. I am asking that they be able to comprehend. I am asking that they know the love of Christ. And I am asking that they be filled up to all the fullness of God.”
Those are very specific things.
We might look at them and say they are very grandiose, and we might say they are beyond us. Brothers and sisters, that is true. They are beyond us. And He is not asking that we be brought up to the place where they are not beyond us. He is asking that those things which are beyond us would be ours.
He is not saying, “Bring them up to this level.” He is saying, “No, You bring this down to them.”
Thirdly, we find that the prayer begins with worship and ends with worship. The other thing you can garner from this is that what Paul is praying for is actually God’s will for these people. It is not something he is thinking would be a good thing for them. This is actually God’s will for these people.
I want you to understand that the majority of the church of Ephesus at this time were probably uneducated slaves. Although these things may seem very grandiose, he does not say, “Lord, I am praying this for the leadership of this church.” No. He is praying that they all have these things—not just a certain few of them. It is for the whole company.
We can translate this: this is the prayer of the Spirit for God’s church today. This is no different. This is an eternal prayer. Although we might say, “Well, he is speaking for the Ephesians,” no, this is Spirit-breathed for the whole church—for the church universal, for members yet to come, as well as for those of us who are present, and for those who came before us.
This is the Lord’s heart. Not just the Lord’s heart—this is the Lord’s will for all of us. It is not His goal; it is His will. This is what He has planned. This is what He has purposed: these things in this prayer.
Now, I talked about worship. How do we know he is worshiping? At the very beginning, we know he is worshiping. First of all, this is a spontaneous thing. It is not to say that worship always has to be spontaneous, but at this moment it is spontaneous, because he starts out, “For this reason, I bow”—he drops right there.
He drops because of a couple of things.
First, because he knows whose presence he is in. If you look down at verse 20, it says, “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all we think or ask.” He knows he is in the presence of Almighty God—the One who can do anything, the One who has created everything. There is nothing beyond His reach or scope.
He drops to his knees, not because that is the proper way to pray, but because I believe he realizes whose presence he is in. It is his way of saying, “I have come boldly to You, Lord, but I am not coming brazenly. I know Who You are. I know how much greater You are than I am, that I am nothing in Your sight.”
But that does not stop him from praying. His idea of who he is does not make him say, “Oh no, I cannot pray. How can I utter these words?” God has given him the Spirit who cries, “Abba, Father,” and he cries out at that moment for these brothers and sisters of his in the Lord.
So first, he knows Who he is talking to. He knows Who he is addressing. He knows his place.
He also knows that the One he is addressing is not just Almighty God, but His Father and the Father of all believers. Some speak of this as the family of God, and some say it includes the angels. It is not, however, some universal fatherhood of God over all creation. It is specifically talking about believers.
I believe it is talking about the family. I do not know about the angels, but I do know that in chapter 2 he was talking about how the Jews and the Gentiles were now one. For Paul to come to this place where he says He is our Father—for Jews to come to the place of saying, “He is our Father”—that is a big thing.
But he is saying, “He is not the Father of the Jews only, and we are stepchildren.” No. He is our Father. He is our legitimate Father. We all are born again of Him. He is our Father.
The scepter has been pointed to us. We talked the last time I spoke about Esther. Remember when her husband, the king of Persia, pointed the scepter? It meant she could speak freely with him. Paul knows that the scepter has been pointed to him and that he can come in boldly, not brazenly, knowing his Father and even asking things that are great.
I think sometimes when we come to praying for ourselves—I am not talking about praying for other people; we pray great things for other people—but when it comes to praying for ourselves, we figure, “Lord, I am just not going to ask much for me.” We play kind of the martyr in prayer.
But brothers and sisters, we need to start asking for big things. We need great things. We need great deliverances. We need great things from God, and God is not above giving those things to us if we come to Him as Father and in faith.
Now, he begins to pray, and he has some petitions. Really, I think there are two petitions. You can say, “How many do you think there are?” I could say there are four or six, but I am going to say there are two.
The first petition is this: that we would be strengthened. Notice I said we. That we would be strengthened in the inner man.
There is a reason for that strengthening, because it goes on: “so that Christ might dwell in us.” But the first prayer is, “Strengthen, so that.” Then the other petition is, “Rooted and grounded, so that.” That is why I say there are two petitions.
The first thing he says is that we be strengthened in the inner man. You remember when the disciples were praying with Jesus in Gethsemane and they fell asleep. The Lord came back and said to them:
The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
The spirit—that is the inner man. The spirit of man is the part that has been regenerated. Before we were born again, the spirit was dead. There was no spiritual life in us. That has been regenerated.
But like anything that has been generated, that has been begun, it starts out as a babe. It needs to be strengthened.
I remember Barb and I, a long time ago, when the kids were toddlers, were watching something on PBS about child development. It is so interesting to watch children develop from little kids. They grow so fast. They change so fast.
But a baby’s head is so big, and because it is so big, their neck muscles cannot hold it up. So they flop. When you are holding a baby, you are always kind of holding its head so it does not flop back. That is true, right? The thing is, it is not strong enough to do that yet.
Why does a baby not just start walking when it comes out? Why not? Horses do. We do not, because we have to be strengthened.
So Paul prays, “I am asking that that spiritual man, that inner man, be strengthened, that the willingness that is in that spirit would have the power to overcome that which is flesh.”
By the flesh, I mean the sin nature that we have—the one Paul cries out about in Romans 7. He says that in the inner man he agrees with everything that God wants, but in the outer man, in the flesh, he does not do it:
Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me?
Paul’s prayer is, “Lord, strengthen him in the inner man so he is able to overcome this sinful flesh.”
In looking at this, first of all, he calls for something to be behind that strengthening. If you look at it, it says:
That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened.
What does that mean? One thing it means is this: when we think of glory, sometimes we think only of a bright light. That is all we think it is. That is why people have halos, or what is the New Age thing? Auras. They think of that as glory.
But listen to this definition of glory: it is the summation, or the adding together, of all of God’s attributes.
So when he calls that you be strengthened according to the riches of His glory, he is saying, “I am asking, O Lord, that You spare nothing of Who You are to strengthen these believers. Nothing. Use all Your resources of Who You are—Your omnipotence, Your omniscience, everything that You have. Use it in strengthening the inner man of these brothers and sisters, of these redeemed ones, these ones that You sent Your Son to bring to You, to be His body, to glorify You forever.”
Then secondly, he says, “Strengthened with power through His Spirit.” Again, it is not our trying to overcome.
It is New Year’s; people make resolutions. I do not do those anymore, because I know my weakness. I know I am good for a week—if that—on something. Maybe longer on some others, but I know in the end they go the way of all resolutions.
We have the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, to dwell in us, to strengthen us. What you have to understand is that everything he asks for has been provided for us to be strengthened in the inner man. There is nothing that has been left out. It is not that God has overlooked something. Everything has been given.
It is like getting those toys and all the pieces are there. The only thing left is: how do you strengthen something?
There are two ways I know to strengthen something: diet and exercise. I know we hate to hear those words after the holidays, right? Diet and exercise—oh man. But it is true. You want to be strong? You have to watch what you eat, and then you have to exercise to keep strong.
If you do not exercise, then you wind up like me. You wind up with flab. Let us be honest. There is nothing worse, I will tell you, than spiritual flab.
Spiritual flab is that baby with a big head. I am sorry, the head is big, but the rest cannot hold it up.
You have to exercise the body. You have to exercise the inner man. Exercise is hard. These things are conditional.
Paul prays a prayer that he knows is the will of God, and it is going to be answered. God is saying, “I will bring everything that you need for this.” But brothers and sisters, we also have a part to play.
We have no part to play as far as our salvation in that sense. It has been bought. Our sins have been forgiven. That is all taken care of. But as far as how far we go in that salvation, and what we appropriate, that is up to us.
You remember in Joshua: they could only have the parts of the land that they took from the enemy. The rest, sorry, you do not enjoy. Like Abraham, when God took Abraham, He said, “Everywhere your foot touches is yours.” Your foot has to touch it.
For us, if we do not exercise the inner man, then all we have is knowledge of what is ours. In the end, that is only misery—only misery.
But if we exercise, we will find that these things can become ours, as much as we exercise. Like I said, exercise is hard. We want the magic-wand treatment, do we not? We want spirituality in a block: just add water. Take a couple bites and—ping—you are all there. I am sorry, it does not work that way.
The Lord says, “I have given you something, and behind it is all My power. Here is My Word. Take My Word and eat it. Eat My Word. Read it.”
We will use our minds for everything except when it comes to reading the Scriptures. We have some idea that some bright light is going to shine on it and something is going to happen, or that it is just boring to us—something we have to do.
Brothers and sisters, if you want water, you have to dig for it. You have to dig. You have to read using your mind. What do you think God gave you a mind for? Use it. You are not brain-dead. You use your mind in these things.
Some things we can do unconsciously, like move our fingers and stuff like that, but other things we have to do using our mind.
I hope you do not read your textbooks, those of you who are in school, without thinking about what you are reading. Even when you are reading textbooks, you are looking for answers. I know the way students read. They do not read for the context of it. They look, “Where is the answer?”
Brothers and sisters, when we read the Scriptures, we should read that way: “Lord, where is the answer? I know it is in here.”
A lot of times things do not come to us right away, and they are not meant to, because God is drawing us out. “How far will you go? How far will you go to meet Me? Draw near to Me, and I will draw near to you.”
When we are babies, we get everything right away, do we not? We scream and holler. But as we grow, pretty soon we do not get fed every time we cry. The Lord says, “No, you will not.” Just like your parents do, you have to wait. It is part of exercise.
Meditating, brothers and sisters, means holding the spiritual thought.
Some of you guys who were in the youth group last night were talking about memorizing Scripture. If you do it the way most kids memorize Scripture, when are you going to start memorizing it? Friday night—the day before. Brothers and sisters, memorization is an exercise.
It is something you take hold of and think about until you drain the meaning out of it, with the help of the Holy Spirit. It is not your mental gymnastics to see what you can see of it, but you are thinking about it until God enlightens you and says, “This is what is there. This is the reality that is in the Scripture for you. This is the reality, what I meant for this time.”
It is something you take hold of.
We can sit here today and listen to a message, but once we get home, do we hold on to what the Lord has spoken to us? Or is it lost in the football game? Or is it lost in playing computer games?
Exercise is hard work.
And then praying. I am not talking about praying for people around you, but I am talking about praying for your own spiritual growth. Your own spiritual growth is something that needs to be prayed for—seeking to understand something in prayer, seeking God’s will for you, seeking for revelation. “God, reveal this to me.”
Something about exercise is that it is slow. I know, because I told the kids in Toronto I was going to join the gym, and I did. I joined the gym. I have been walking on those treadmills. Now, the last two weeks I have been on vacation.
But when you start out exercising, you are on that treadmill, and you are going, you are going. “Man, I am working, I am sweating,” and you look at the clock: “I have only been doing this two minutes.” And you are there for half an hour. “Oh my gosh, am I going to make it through?”
But that is the truth. We can sit in front of the television, or sit playing computer games, and boom—two hours are gone. But if you sit to read your Bible, or you sit to pray, “Oh man, it has only been three minutes.”
That is not because exercise is always like that. It always hurts to begin with. It is always slow to begin with because you are not used to it. You have to become accustomed to it.
Brothers and sisters, if you do it for a few days and then stop, you have to start all over again. It has to become a habit for you. It cannot just be something I do now and then. It has to become a life.
Exercise and diet are a way of life. That is what they tell you naturally speaking: you have to have this as a way of life. Brothers and sisters, it is the same way spiritually. You have to read the Word. You have to pray about what you are reading. You have to look at it intellectually, as a practice, as a habit. That is something you have to do. It is not something you can do without.
Why do we have to do this? Because there is promise to it. There is power to it. Look at Psalm 1, for example. I just want to read a little bit of Psalm 1. What is the result?
You know those commercials where they show people with pants way out here and say, “Look, I have dropped 150 pounds”? I hate those things. You wonder, how long did it take them? What was it like for them? Did they cry about it? You see them smiling, but it does not show them crying, “I can only eat celery.”
Brothers and sisters, we think we are being robbed sometimes by things we cannot do because we need to read the Word or spend some time in prayer. It hurts. It hurts the flesh. And the flesh must be put to death. It must be crucified. This is one way you crucify it.
Now, what are the results? Here is your result—Psalm 1:
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stand in the path of sinners,
nor sit in the seat of scoffers!But his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and in His law he meditates day and night.He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in its season
and its leaf does not wither;
and in whatever he does, he prospers.
That is what the inner man is to be: a tree planted by water that bears fruit in its season, when it is supposed to. It is not stunted. It is not stunned. It is full, and it is free.
I think a lot of times we think that to do these things means we are not free. Brothers and sisters, in the flesh we are not, but it opens up a freedom in the Spirit that I cannot tell you about. It is something you must experience to know.
Why are we to be strengthened in the inner man? The reason is that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.
Now, you may say, “I thought Christ was already in us. If you are Christians, is Christ not already in you?” Well, the idea of dwell here means to take up a residency, but not a residency as a guest.
If you came and visited my house, I would not mind it, and I would treat you like a guest. But once you started to say, “You know, I think this chair looks better here,” I might humor you, and when you leave, I will move it back. But really, you are crossing over.
What it means that Christ might dwell in your heart by faith is that He dwells as Master of the house. He is the head of the household in your life. Nothing short.
The inner man has to be strengthened, or else it cannot happen, because the flesh wants nothing to do with it. The flesh will say, “Jesus, here is the guest room. You stay there. I will bring food up for You once in a while. We will take care of You.” That is what the flesh says. “When I feel guilty, I will go up and talk to You. Make me feel better.”
Brothers and sisters, the will of God is that He is Master of the house. Like our brother said, He is not going to force it on you. You have to give it to Him willingly, and it takes a strong inner man to do that.
This is what Peter says in 1 Peter 3:15:
Sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.
And this is what Paul is talking about in Galatians 1:15–16:
But when God, who had set me apart, even from my mother’s womb,
and called me through His grace,
was pleased to reveal His Son in me
so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles,
I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood.
He revealed Christ—how? In me. That is what we want to say. The natural thing would be, “He revealed Christ to me.” But that is not what Paul says. He says that He revealed Christ in me.
That is a lot different than “to me.” It is Christ in me. In other words, people around saw Christ in him. They did not see Paul; they saw Christ.
When the Lord tells you to do something and you go do it because you are obeying Him, they see Christ. When the Lord has you as Master of the house and He says, “I want you to go to that person over there, and I want you to buy them lunch because they are hungry,” you may say, “Why, Lord? I have never seen them before.” He says, “That is fine. You just do what I say.”
You go do that, and they see Christ.
Paul says in Galatians 2:20:
I have been crucified with Christ;
and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me;
and the life which I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
Brothers and sisters, Christ is to live in us. He is to live in us as Lord. As He is Lord in us, and we go about doing what He leads us to do, Christ is magnified. Christ is manifested to those you are serving.
The Lord will not let you see a lot of what He shows other people, because if He did, our heads could not fit in this building. But He lets others touch Christ, and that is a wonderful thing.
It is faith. First of all, we see it as a possibility, and faith takes hold of it. But also, it is an obedience out of that faith, of Him living in us, that comes out and manifests Him in the church and in the world. That is what needs to be seen, and that is what Paul is praying for.
Okay, I have to hurry up here. You guys need to listen faster.
Our next petition: again, here we have a prerequisite. It says:
That you, being rooted and grounded in love.
Actually, the Greek is “having been.” In other words, it is like Paul is saying, “Lord, I am trusting that You are going to root and ground these people in love.”
People and translators have different ways of looking at this. Some say this is talking about the love of the saints. Some say this is talking about the love of Christ. Some say it is a little bit of both.
But I will say this: it has to start out being the love of Christ, because there is no love in us that can match. It starts with the love of Christ.
Then we have two words: rooted and grounded. One is a pastoral word; it has to do with trees and plants. The other has to do with buildings and engineering.
So, rooted. We look at a tree: what is the purpose of a root? Some of you might say, “Well, it holds a tree in.” No, that is a secondary thing it does. The root’s first job is to feed the tree.
To do this, it will dig deep. It will go deep—real deep. Those things that are not planted by a stream, like we read in Psalm 1, their roots really have to go to the source of water.
But the source of food is the love of God for us. That is what it is.
You can watch this in children. Being a schoolteacher, you see this. Children flourish when they are in an atmosphere of love and acceptance. I am not saying by acceptance that you just accept everything they do and do not discipline them, because part of love is discipline. But when they are in that atmosphere, when they know they are loved, they flourish.
They are the happiest of kids because they know they are bound. They know that whatever they do—when they mess up—their parents are not going to do away with them.
The roots draw life, and in turn they lead to life being reproduced. Love is the first fruit of the Spirit, and all other fruits of the Spirit are reflections of love. Go look at them. Go look at the list of the fruits of the Spirit. What is patience? It comes out of love. What about consecration? It comes out of love. If it does not come out of love, it is a consecration that is hard to bear.
What we get from God goes back to Him. What I mean is this: love begets love.
Love is returned in worship. We worship the Lord for what He did for us. Why? His great love for us. We cannot help but tell Him what that means to us. That is love.
Love is returned in doing as well:
If you love Me, keep My commandments.
His commandments are not grievous if you love. Love the brethren. If you love God, you love the brethren. Then, in loving your neighbor, like the Good Samaritan, you love people who are outside.
I think some of us, especially you younger ones who are thinking, “I want to go out and share the Lord,” look at the world as something sinful—and it is. But you do not have to touch the things of the world. Touch your neighbor.
We are not bound to Him by commandments. We are bound by love. I am going to read the first verse of this song by James Small:
I found a Friend, O such a Friend!
He loved me ere I knew Him;
He drew me with the cords of love,
And thus He bound me to Him;
And round my heart still closely twine
Those ties which nought can sever,
For I am His, and He is mine,
Forever and forever.
We are not bound by commandments, brothers and sisters. The obedience of commandments comes out of our love for Him. Is that not what the bondservant is about? “I love my master. I will not go out free.”
That is another song, incidentally.
Grounded—well, this is an engineering term. I am not an engineer. I do not drive trains.
Took a while, huh? I told you, you have to use your intellect.
Let me read a verse from Luke—Luke 6:47–48:
Everyone who comes to Me and hears My words and acts on them,
I will show you whom he is like:
he is like a man building a house,
who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock;
and when a flood occurred,
the torrent burst against that house
and could not shake it,
because it had been well built.
What do we mean by grounded? According to this verse in Luke, it means built so as not to be moved. That is what it means to be grounded. We have been planted so as not to be moved.
In other words, we are knowing that God loves me, whatever I have to go through—that His love will not change. His love will be constant. It will not wear out. It will not wear thin. It will be there, whatever happens, whatever I have to go through, or whatever I make myself go through.
The structure of our spiritual life is not built on the things that we do. It is built on His love for us, and it goes out from there. Because He loves me, I can do this. Because He loves me, and His love for me is the springboard to my going on with Him.
Psalm 23 says, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” Brothers and sisters, you are going to go through hard times. I am sorry to tell you that, but you are. You will go through hard times.
But take heart. His love will not fail you, nor forsake you, and will not leave you. “You will not leave me for dead.” That is a wonderful part of Psalm 16: “You will not leave me for dead.”
Sometimes that is what we do: “Oh Lord, just go on without me.” The Lord says, “No. I will not go on without you, because I paid for you, and the price I paid for you is precious to Me. I cannot let it go by.” That is how much His Son means to Him.
Let me wrap this up with another verse of that song:
I found a Friend, O such a Friend!
So kind, and true, and tender,
So wise a Counselor and Guide,
So mighty a Defender!
From Him who loves me now so well,
What power my soul can sever?
Shall life or death, or earth or hell?
No! I am His forever.
Grounded in love.
Why do we have to be grounded in love? Why do we have to be rooted in this love? So that we are able to comprehend—so that we are able to see, to understand.
Now, this next part, and I am going to hurry up here. I am sorry. I said people wax eloquent about it: the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth. Some people attribute this to the love of God. Some people attribute this to the church.
I am just going to say this: I think it has to do with the church, because in chapter 2, before he got into this prayer, he was talking about being built up into a spiritual house, a temple. I think it has to do with that.
What about this breadth and length and height and depth? What does this mean? It means that the purpose of God is not one-dimensional. You have to have a hold of His love before you can even see that.
It is not the Baptist way that is the only way. It is not the charismatic way that is the only way. It is not the home-church way that is the only way. It is so great. It is not one-dimensional. It is not just groups like us.
We need to understand that. We do not just decide that this is the way to meet, or this is the doctrine we are going to hold about the coming of the Lord. It is multifaceted. He is multidimensional in what He is doing. It is greater than what we conceive of.
Unless we know the love of God, how can we even understand what He is doing? If you read in Revelation, He says He took men of every tribe and tongue and nation. We can be so xenophobic, so that we are the only ones.
I think I told you the joke before about the Catholic Church. Saint Peter was taking people through heaven and said, “You have got to be real quiet here.” They asked, “Why?” He said, “I will tell you a little later.” When they got past, they asked, “Why did we have to be so quiet?” He said, “Those brothers think they are the only ones up here.”
That is not true. Every tribe and tongue and nation—it is big. His love makes it inclusive, inclusive of all those who would believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and what He has done. Inclusive of all those.
There is no Jew. There is no Gentile. There is no man; there is no woman. There is no Greek; there is no Scythian. It is all Christ. We have to understand that. We have to agree with that. We have to say that. It is not just one group of people; it is everybody. Otherwise, why would we have a burden to go out and evangelize?
He wants all the saints to comprehend this. Brothers and sisters, everybody needs to see this. It is not for the chosen few; it is for everybody.
Then he says to know the love of God. Brothers and sisters, if you can see that, then you will know the love of God is beyond comprehension. You can taste of it here and there, but it is bigger.
God so loved the world. To love the world—that is great. He loves the Samaritan. He loves the leper. He loves the Jew. He loves the Gentile. He loves me. He loves you.
It surpasses my knowledge. How can He love people like that? I do not know, but He does. It surpasses my knowledge.
Then, to be filled with all the fullness of God. That does not mean we become some kind of deity. What it means is that we are filled to our capacity.
There is a nice little story in 2 Kings 4 about Elisha and a widow. She is broke, and her creditors are going to come and take her sons as slaves. Elisha tells her, “This is what the Lord tells me to do. You get all these vessels. You go to all your neighbors and get vessels. You get big ones; you get empty vessels. Go in behind your door, take what you have of oil, and fill all these vessels.”
Brothers and sisters, that is what he is talking about: filled to our capacity. You might say, “Well, I do not have much of a capacity.” Have you not seen that all these things God is doing are for enlarging you?
When the inner man is built up—when you see a man, those Mr. America or Mr. Universe guys—those guys have been expanded. Their skin has been expanded to the max.
All these things—to know the love of God, to be rooted in the love of God, to be grounded in the love of God, to be expanded in what you understand about His love for you—you have been enlarged so He can fill you with more than what you think you are capable of, and fill you to the brim, even to overflowing.
That is what it means.
This is what His prayer is: “Lord, this is what I am asking for these brothers and sisters of mine—that they be filled to have everything that You have purposed for them in their lives. Let this be. Let these things that have to take place be, so it can come about.”
Then he ends with a wonderful prayer:
Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think,
according to the power that works within us,
to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
to all generations forever and ever.
To Him who is able—that is the key word. It is not just that we want to look at the superlatives. The whole thing is: He is able.
When Sarah and Abraham were promised a child, they did not look at Him as able at first. “Oh, I do not know. I am old. Sarah is old too. What are we going to do? Well, here is my slave. Try her. Maybe that will work out.”
But you read Romans 4, and Abraham came to the conclusion that even though he was as good as dead in body, God was able. He believed that He who promised was able.
Or look at Moses when he came to free the Israelites. They had the Passover, and they got to the Red Sea with the army behind them. These were not trained people to fight. God delivered them by opening the Red Sea. Who would have thought of that? God.
Or how about when He raised Jesus from the dead, Who had the weight of the sin of the world—of all the sin of the world, from time’s beginning to time’s end? God was able to raise Him from the dead.
Oh, brothers and sisters, we look at these things and say, “Oh, I am not able to do these things. I cannot do these.” Brothers and sisters, you are right. You are not able. But God is able to do more than what you think. “Well, maybe You can do this.” He can do more.
Can you believe Him for that?
It says, “Glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.” Glory in the church and in Christ Jesus is not the church only. The church and Christ Jesus are inseparable. They cannot be separated.
So it is glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, forever in all generations.
I see history as linear. I have been reading Sparks, and he talks about eternity past, and it is mind-blowing. But thank the Lord, I am a history teacher. I start going, “Oh, okay, from here to here, I got it.” It is something that goes.
The songs at the beginning robbed my message. “He giveth more grace”—whoever called that stole my message.
His grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men.
That is what it says right here. His power has no boundary known unto men.
Praise the Lord Almighty. “Hast thou not seen how all thy longings have been granted?” What He has ordained—our longings to be everything He wants us to be—have been granted.
In other words, brothers and sisters, to this prayer God says, “Amen.” It is not just the brothers and sisters; it is God Who has said, “Amen.”
You know what amen means? It means, “Let it be so.”
Now the question is: shall we amen it too? I am not talking about the amen of words. I am talking about the amen of a life given to Him, so that the inner man can be strengthened, so that we can be rooted and grounded in His love, so that He can be reciprocated.
That is the amen that we need to give.
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, I pray that I have not wearied Your people. I ask that those things that were good seeds and good things, Lord, You would quicken to us.
Lord, I thank Thee that You have said amen to these things. O Lord, give grace that we can say amen also. For yes, this is my amen. Amen.