Sunday, October 25,
2017
I am a Detroit Lions fan. In the early 1980’s, in one of the rare
seasons in which they won more football games than they lost, they were nearly
in the playoffs, but they needed to win one more game. They had it!
Down, by a point, their kicker, one of the best in the league, lined up
a long field goal attempt with just seconds remaining. He makes it, and they are in. As the ball sails through the air, the camera
pans to the Detroit head coach, Monte Clark.
He’s on his knees, hands clasped, eyes toward heaven. The
field goal went wide right, by the way, as we Lions fans knew it would. Those prayers are never answered, not for the
Lions.
What leads you to pray?
We’ve seen it over and over here in
our university town. Graduation
approaches, and what then? Our church
family’s graduates need jobs. “I’ll pray
for you,” we assure one another.
A hurricane hits Texas. And the voice on the radio says, “Our
thoughts and prayers go up …”. Then
Florida, and the somber news anchor, “Our prayers go out tonight …”. Then Puerto Rico, and the church prayer list
is emailed out, “We remember all affected by the hurricane in the Caribbean …”
What leads you to pray? He discovers your affair and even though you
cheated, you want to save the marriage.
Do you confess? Beg
forgiveness? To whom? Him?
To God?
In another family, a happier one, his wife
whom he loves and who loves him calls to say, “They found a lump. Biopsy to be scheduled.”
What leads us to pray? We have the ultimate praying holiday coming
up – thanksgiving.
So many prayers; so many different reasons for
prayer.
The question for today is what drives us to prayer? The
need to praise and worship God? It’s not
the most common response, but it is why some people pray – the driving force in
the prayer story of some. What about
others? A guilty conscience? When we pray, is it confession? Most of time, we’re praying for help or
healing or consolation. Sometimes we
don’t know why we pray. We just know
there’s a need – we need God to do something or give something.
Of the 100 or so gathered here, I am certain
some among us right now feel the need
to pray. If that number of those
compelled to prayer is 15, we will hear 15 different stories that end with you
in church not sure of much except that you really need God. No one reason is better than any other in
prayer. We come praising, confessing, or
asking – in all cases, we are in prayer and God welcomes us.
What drove Paul the Apostle, the church
planter, the defender of Christianity to his knees? What incited Paul to pray? Ephesians 3:1, “This is the reason, I Paul,
am a prisoner for the sake of you Gentiles.”
Ephesians 3:14, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father.”
We look back to what Paul radical idea in
chapter 2. “By grace we have been saved
through faith” (2:8). No matter your
birthplace, no matter your gender, no matter your cultural background, no
matter your education or work experience, this gospel is true for all. All are sinners. Jesus’ death on the cross covers the sin of
all. All who come to him in faith and
repentance and receive the gift of eternal life he gives are saved from sin,
saved from death, and saved to life in the Kingdom of God.
There, all divisions that separate people have
been shattered by Jesus. Therefore Paul
says, also in chapter 2, “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are
citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon
the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the
cornerstone. In him the whole structure
is joined together in the Lord; in whom you are also built together spiritually
into a dwelling place for God” (2:19-22).
We pray when things are bad, when we need help
or healing, or, when we need something. We
should pray in those times, and usually, some hardship or challenge is what
leads the Christians I know to prayer.
Paul looked and saw what God had done. Paul was driven to prayer when he thought
about the implications of the salvation we have in Christ. God had eliminated the division between Jews
and Gentiles. God had removed the
barrier of sin that separated people from Himself. In Jesus Christ, God had made a way for
people to be adopted as His sons and daughters.
Paul saw that and it drove him to his knees in prayer.
Think of it this way. Imagine Tychicus, as the one carrying this
document – the letter to the Ephesians. He is named in Ephesians 6:21. He may have actually written the letter. If so, he would have attributed it to Paul
because the material comes from what he heard over and over as he traveled with
Paul. So imagine, Tychicus standing
before the church with the task of sharing this letter.
Now, imagine Tychicus with the letter in hand,
transported from Ephesus, 90AD to the year 2017, Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
HillSong Church. Tychicus stands before
us, and says,
“OK, great! You are God’s church, the household of God,
the dwelling place for God. Look at
you. You’ve got worshippers here with
lighter skin shades and darker skin shades and shades in between. You’ve got people from different language
backgrounds. I see babies and teenagers
and people in their 70’s and 80’s and everywhere in between. Yes, with all your differences, you are
gathered together in Christ’s name. You
have salvation. And the divisions have
been abolished by the Gospel. You are
the household of God.”
He says that, and then he reads the prayer
Paul wrote in Ephesians 3.
“For this reason I bow my
knees.” Because of what God did, Tychicus
must pray Paul’s prayer. The Ephesian
church in the first century drew together people who had previously been at
odds with each other. Yes at times Paul
prayed for healing. Yes at times Paul asked for provision. And forgiveness. But on this occasion, Paul was driven to
prayer because a group of people who believed the message of the cross came together
and became a community of Jesus-followers.
He was driven to pray for the church.
Are we?
We begin to understand the prayer
and even more importantly, we begin to understand ourselves as the household of
God as we look at who does what. It’s in
the verbs. “I pray … that [God] may
grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through [the
Holy] Spirit.”
“I pray that you may have the power
to comprehend … the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the
love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”
Paul prays all this so that the
believers who make up the household of God “may be filled with the fullness of
God.”
There are some good verbs here
driving this story. Strengthened. One
strengthened knows himself or herself and is not swayed by temptations. One strengthened lives a convincing faith
because when others see her, in the force of her conviction for Christ they
can’t help but admire her and want what she has. The strengthened believer is a support to
others in the church and a witness to God’s goodness before the unbelieving
world. Wouldn’t you like to be
strengthened? We all would!
Comprehend. Combine strength with knowledge and wisdom in
a follower of Jesus, and you have someone ready to love the poor with
compassion, to support the discouraged with a word of hope, and to speak the
Gospel into the face of sin and death.
Comprehension and knowledge enable the disciple to see the world for
what it is and to help people move from the world into the Kingdom by showing
how God gives what we need. Wouldn’t you
like knowledge, given by God? I want it!
Strengthen and comprehend are
meaningful verbs. So too is filled.
‘That you may be filled with the fullness of God;’ that’s what Paul
prays. Anchored when the winds swirl,
the one filled with God does not sway in the face of the moral failings blowing
about in society, or break when Christian truth is seemingly reduced to one
idea among many truths from which one might pick. The one filled with God knows the truth of
the Gospel, stands on that truth, and does not move when the surrounding world
questions or mocks that truth. We all
want and need to be filled with the Spirit.
So then what must we do in the story
of our own faith lives in order to grow in strength, knowledge, and the
fullness of God? Wait a minute! That’s the wrong question. What must we do to be stronger, smarter,
wiser, and fuller? We read the Bible and
memorize scripture. We participate in
worship and go on mission trips. We can
work on relationships with Christian friends who help us grow in our
faith. We should do all those
things. An active Christian life;
spiritual disciplines; relationships with other believers; yes, all of these
should be important in our lives.
However, look at the verbs! Who does the strengthening? God.
Who dwells in our hearts? God –
that’s Ephesians 3:17! God lives in
us! Who gives us power and knowledge and
most importantly love? God is the
subject of all these verbs. God is the
one doing these things. We – His church
– are the objects. Through
strengthening, dwelling, giving, and filling, God is at work on us, among us,
and in us. God does this to us and for
us. In the household of God, one of the
things to see is God at work. That’s why
believers are called witnesses. We see
what God has done and is doing and we testify to what we have seen and
experienced.
I wondered, how do I depict the
gifted, strengthened, in-dwelt, rooted, grounded, knowing, full life? Is it the kind of thing where you know it
when you see it? To whom do we direct
our attention? Who can we look at and
say, “That’s it! That person is living
the life I’m talking about here.”
More importantly, how do we know we
are living that gifted, strengthened, in-dwelt, rooted, grounded, knowing, full
life? What can you do to ensure that
life is your life? How can I fix myself
in that life, that God-life?
Once more, we’re back to the
verbs. I pointed out that God is the
subject, and we the objects. God
strengthens, dwells in, gives, and fills.
There is one verb in this passage in which Paul put himself as the
subject. Paul said, “This is what I
do.” “I bow my knees before the
Father.” In verse 16, “I pray.” In verse 18, “I pray.” In the household of God, we – you and I –
pray, God acts, and we live in response to God in action. The church doesn’t
accomplish. God accomplishes in and
through the church. We are God’s
instruments. God makes the music. Paul prays.
We pray for healing and forgiveness and needs, yes, but also that God’s
Kingdom come, that God’s will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.
When a community is gathered in
Jesus’ name and in Jesus’ name the people pray, God acts, and the people live
in response to and as witnesses of what God has done, then that community is
the church, the household of God.
This chapter ends, and Paul’s pray
ends, with a word, ‘logos,’ of glory, ‘doxa,’ lifted to God. ‘Doxa.’
‘Logos.’ Doxology. A word glorifying God. This doxology proclaims exactly what Paul has
said about God in action and us in response.
It is how the prayer and this message concludes.
“Now to him who by the power at work
within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine,
to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generation,
forever and ever.
Amen.
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