Paul Prays (Ephesians 3:14-21)

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.

Rooted and Grounded in Love

            You have a worldview.  So do I.  Everyone does.  The worldview is the lens through which we see … everything.  Often, we are unaware of our worldview or that we even have one, but we do.  How we see is colored by our family, our culture, our heritage – so many things.  It is extremely hard to change one’s worldview.  But every worldview, and there are many, evolves out of human culture which is tainted by sin.  In this sense then, we are born in sin because we are born into sinful systems – all of us.

We need to change our worldview, if we want to walk in the way of Christ.  We have help.  The Holy Spirit, the church (when it is a healthy community), the Bible, and the traditions of Christianity all equip us to see from the point of view of the Kingdom of God. 

            Imagine a 26-year-old young woman.  She has achieved an undergraduate degree in business from an Ivy League school, worked a year or two in Charlotte, and spent the last two years at the Kenan-Flagler business school getting her MBA.  Her upbringing, her socio-economic class, her education - everything that shaped her comes out of a worldview than in turn creates her worldview. 

The soil in which she has grown is Western liberal arts education.  The foundation on which she stands is the profitability of the business where she will work.  Neither is inherently evil, but the culture does not promote seeing the world through kingdom-of-God lenses.  The Western education encourages academic excellence.  The middle class American life encourages a certain standard of living.  Success in business encourages profit.  All can be good things, but none in and of itself promotes the gospel. 

            If her soil is education, business, North Carolina, what soil has produced you and me?  Family; culture; nationality?  We are rooted in something.  What?  And, on what foundation do we stand?  What’s supporting us?  What can we count on?

            The Apostle Paul wants to influence our world by inviting us to take up root in new soil and stand on a new foundation. 

His words in Ephesians 3 make up a prayer.  “I bow my knees before the Father” (3:14).  “I pray that according to the riches of [the Father’s] glory that you may be strengthened … with power through his Spirit” (3:16).  “I pray that you may have the knowledge … to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge” (from vs.18, 19).  If these prayers are answered and the riches of the Father’s glory indeed strengthen us with the power of the Holy Spirit and we have knowledge of the unmatched love of Christ, I believe it will result in us seeing everything – everything – with a Kingdom-of-God worldview. 

Paul hopes Christ will dwell in our hearts as we are rooted and grounded in love.  Agape is the word used for love in verse 17 and again in 19.  This is selfless love, put-the-other-first love.  This is love that seeks no benefit for the giver but is given freely and abundantly for the good of the other.  This love makes up the soil in which disciples are grown. 

We see it in the gospel of John with passages like “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son;” and, “They will know that you are mine by this; that you love one another.”  In the essay entitled 1^st John, chapter 4, we read God is love.  In Galatians 5 we read of the fruit of the Spirit.  That fruit grows in the soil of love.  We are rooted in love.

We stand on love.  The well-known love passage, 1 Corinthians 13 says love never fails.  Three remain, faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.  No matter what comes along in life, love drives our responses.  Fear causes overreaction.  Fear leads me to yell at my wife or become defensive or shout out curses.  Fear leads me to react and I end up hurting myself and others.  Love helps us endure difficult things.  Rooted in love, standing on love, I can respond to anything in a measured, calm way, with bundles and bundles of grace and mercy.   We can count on the love of God in Jesus Christ.  It never leaves us and always guides us.  We are grounded in love. 

Rooted and grounded in love – this is the way of the gospel.

I offer three worldviews that I think a lot American Christians have; these are undoubtedly inherited, not chosen.  Yet, these are not Jesus-first worldviews.  And any time Jesus is not first, determining how we see everything else in life, then we are not oriented toward the Kingdom.  That love Paul prays for is not driving us.  We’re driven by something else, something that ultimately ungodly.

The first of these competing worldviews is the enlightenment.  We are products of the enlightenment.  We know the Earth goes around the sun and the not the other way around.  We know of molecules and atoms and particles smaller than that.  Even people ignorant of the methods of science live by what science produces.  This is true of discoveries that lead to cures.  It is true of  the technology that is responsible for how we produce food, entertain ourselves, and fight wars.  We have grown in the soil of scientific advancement.  This has created in us a cold, unfeeling worldview– the antithesis of the self-sacrificing love we see in Jesus. 

This is does not mean science is evil.  Our church is full of people who are in different fields of science.  Their discipleship is lived out in the pursuit of new discoveries and a love for knowledge.  One way they serve the Lord is in their research.  But disciples who are scientists acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord.

When the thirst for more knowledge takes over and we become rooted in curiosity instead of being rooted in love and we stand on intellectual achievement instead of standing on love, then science becomes an idol which dictates what we can and cannot think and say.  Followers of Jesus practice the various scientific disciplines with a commitment to excellence, but stay rooted and grounded in love.  In this way we are witnesses who tell about the Kingdom He will establish.

Science produces one competing worldviews.  A second contributor is capitalism.  Our democracy is a capitalist nation.  Just as the science produced by the enlightenment contributes to human flourishing and thus can be done in service to God, our capitalistic democracy is an environment in which we can flourish. 

Our system is based on money and we find ourselves rooted in money, standing on what we have – houses, cars, insurance plans, retirement accounts.  Nothing is wrong with this, but unless it is all seen to be in service to God, ultimately owned by God, it begins to take over.  Greed becomes the soil where we are rooted.  The acquisition of more stuff and newer stuff and upgraded stuff takes over.  This constant craving for more, newer, and better becomes an idol that demands everything from us.  Faith is pushed to a small corner of our lives, which shrinks and shrinks until God has no place at all. 

We need to be wise in the ways of money.  Root and grounded in love, our capitalistic democracy affords us unique opportunities to practice New Testament generosity in our own community and around the world and we use money in this way, as a tool to advance the Kingdom.  In this way, we give witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  If we find ourselves rooted in money, greed takes over and the gospel is crowded out completely. 

We are enlightened people, products of science.  We live in a republic where democracy truly speaks and capitalistic motivations drive us.  The enlightenment would have us rooted in science.  We, rooted in love, appreciate science but in service to God, not at the expense of our faith.  Capitalism would have rooted in money.  We use money and strive to make more of it.  But we are rooted in love.  We stand on love.  Money is a tool to help us spread the good news of Jesus.  A third force that would root us in something other than the soil of love is our nation – America.

With pride I say I am an American.  We envision ourselves as rooted in freedom.  Somehow though, this has evolved and we think it means we are entitled to do whatever we want whenever we want.  Freedom has become this sense that our desires ought to be met all the time. 

What foundation supports this self-centered notion?  Power.  Rooted in a distorted sense of freedom, we stand on what we believe to be the irrepressible power of the United States.  The terrorist attacks of 9/11 shocked America, but here 13 years later; our nation still had a sense of invincibility.  We still act like there will never come a time when America is not the most powerful country on earth. 

As Christ followers, we cannot put our confidence in a government, not even the American government.  We love our country.  We vote, in serve in the military, and show our devotion in numerous other ways.  We want to be good Americans.  But our rooting is not in the red, white, and blue.  This may be the soil in which we were born.  But in our baptism, we were transplanted and transformed.  We are now rooted in the love that Jesus showed when he went to the cross. 

For too many people, Christianity is a cultural expression, not a testimony that God has done a new thing in Jesus.  In Christ, we truly are different from the culture around us.  Enlightenment thinking and discovery, democratic capitalism, and American power – these forces lead to a worldview in which we see ourselves as smart, free, and powerful.  But the wisdom of God is lacking, we are slaves to sin, and our power is an illusion.

In Christ, we live in a worldview where God is in control, not us.  God, the creator of all that is good has a plan to redeem and renew his creation.  Ephesians 3:15 says every family in Heaven and Earth takes its name from God the Father.  We are all made in God’s image.  We are all fallen in sin.  And the greatest bond humans can enjoy is unity in Christ, which only comes when Christ is first in all things.  Paul prays in verse 19 that we would be filled with the fullness of God.  Once filled, we cannot be filled with anything else.  No other love can define us. 

            A young professional woman living several states away from the town where she was raised attends worship.  In this church, she has been welcomed, loved, and made to feel at home.  On this particular Sunday morning, she hugs the older lady, the one who reminds her of her grandmother.  Her Bible study leader leads a prayer time in which she hears her classmate’s requests and her heart goes out to them.  In the worship time, one of the songs ignites flames of deep love for God in her heart.  And the entire experience is rooted in Jesus’ love.

            Upon leaving at the end, she does what she does every week.  She ask God to empower her so that in her profession, work she does very well, she can be light – the light of the Gospel.  She prays God will make opportunities for her to point people to Him.  She prays God will make her ready when those opportunities come.  She can pray this prayer because in this church, she really believes God hears and answers prayers like this.  The love of God in which she is rooted is also the foundation on which she stands. 

            Love – the apostle prays that you and I would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge and be filled with all the fullness of God.

AMEN