Pastor John Guest from England tells the story of coming to the United States many years ago to speak at a youth camp. He arrived after dark and was shown to his room where he quickly fell asleep, extremely tired from his long journey. Later that night, John was awakened by the camp director who asked him to put on some clothes and come with him immediately. John did so and he was then led to the camp office. As John walked through the doorway of the office, he saw a teenage boy sitting in a chair at a desk, slumped over, hand trailing at his side, with a pistol. This teenage boy had taken his own life. On the desk in front of the body was a note. On the note were written the words from the Beatles’ song: “All you need is love,” and then the words, “Somebody help me.” The tragedy of that young man’s life was that he didn’t wait around for the help. That teenage boy was handsome, athletic, very popular in school, but somewhere deep inside, he didn’t feel loved.
To love and to be loved is the greatest need of the human heart. I believe that God’s vision for the church is love. I believe God wants us to experience his love and share it with others.
This vision for the church, this vision of love, is expressed in the prayer of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 3:14-21. Listen for God’s word to you…
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
As I said a few moments ago, I believe that God’s vision for the church is to know his love and to make it known to others. But how do we realize that vision? I believe that Paul’s prayer gives us a clue. The first step to realizing God’s vision for the church is to pray.
Last week we looked at Ephesians 3:13 where Paul says, “I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.” As we have seen in our study of Ephesians, at the time of writing this letter, Paul was in prison in Rome because of his testimony for Christ. And Paul knew that his Christian friends in Ephesus were liable to be discouraged because of his imprisonment.
There are all sorts of reasons, I suppose, for churches to get discouraged and to fail to fulfill God’s vision. When churches do get discouraged and fail to carry out God’s vision, they go into decline. I believe the first step in church recovery is prayer.
But what are we to pray for? Paul prayed first that God the Father, out of his glorious riches, would strengthen the Ephesians with power through his Spirit in their inner being. I believe that’s what we need to be praying for as a church for ourselves and others.
I believe that God wants to work in and through us from the inside out. God is not asking us as a church or as individual people to measure up to some impossible standard of his by our own power.
A couple of years ago, the leaders of our church read Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Church. In that book, Pastor Rick Warren tells how Saddleback Community Church in Southern California grew from nothing to over 10,000 people in seventeen years. Now, it would be easy for us to read a book like that and say, “We can never be like Saddleback!” And that’s true, we will probably never grow to be the size church that Saddleback is because we exist in different circumstances. But what is also true is that we serve the same God who Rick Warren serves. And our God has power to do great things through us just like he did through Saddleback Church. All God wants is for us to let him into our lives so that he can change us and work through us by his power.
Do you think, maybe, the God who had power to make the universe and raise his Son from the dead might also have just enough power to revitalize us and our church? I believe he does. So, the first thing we need to pray, following Paul’s example, is that the Father would strengthen us with his power.
Secondly, we need to pray that Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith. It is through trusting our lives to Christ’s care that he comes to be at home in our lives.
Jesus says in Revelation 3:20, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.”
The interesting thing to me about this statement in the book of Revelation is that Jesus is talking to people in the church. He is not talking to people who have never known him. He is talking to people who do know him, and he is saying, “You are trying to shut me out of your life. Please let me in!”
I invite you to close your eyes for a moment. I would like you to picture your life being like a house. Now picture Jesus coming into the house of your life by the front door. Picture him standing there in the foyer, or whatever the first room of your house is, inside the front door. Would you let a guest in your home remain standing there in the foyer forever? I don’t think you would. You would invite them in. You would take their coat. You would invite them to sit down and stay a while. Now, picture yourself having that kind of conversation with Jesus. Now, what if Jesus asks to see the rest of your house? Will you let him?
Now you may open your eyes. I would suggest to you that Jesus wants to do what you have just pictured. He wants to come into every room in your life, and he wants to be your Lord and Savior in every area of your life. We don’t have to worry about getting each room in our life presentable for Jesus to see. He already knows what each room is like, and he is better equipped than we are to clean house and rearrange things.
If we want to be on the road to recovery as a church and as individuals, then we need to pray that Christ would become more and more at home in our hearts. We need to open all the rooms of our lives to Jesus’ presence and to his life-changing power.
The third thing we need to pray for is that we will be rooted and established in love.This is an interesting statement to me because it seems that Paul is mixing his metaphors. Trees need to be firmly rooted in good soil if they are going to grow effectively. Houses need to be established on a firm foundation if they are going to withstand the storms of nature. Paul seems to be using two different metaphors to say exactly the same thing: our lives need to be firmly rooted, and we need to build our lives on a firm foundation. But what is the soil we need to be rooted in? What is the foundation we need to build on? The soil and the foundation are the same—the love of Christ for us. That is where we must start in the Christian life and that is where we must always return. If our lives are not firmly rooted and established in Christ’s love for us, we will never grow healthy, productive, happy lives, or a healthy, productive, happy church.
I remember when I first understood the love of Christ for me. Many of you know my story. I grew up in a Christian home but there were a few years when my family didn’t attend church. I would watch church on television with my mother. One day, when I was about twelve or thirteen, we were listening to Robert Schuller deliver a message on forgiveness. It was the first time I understood that Jesus died on the cross for me. I felt his love flooding my soul that day.
We all need to sink our roots deep into the love of Christ. And we need to constantly return to his love as the foundation for all we are and do.
When I was in seminary, I had a verse framed and hanging above my desk, the words of Jesus from John 15:7… “Remain in my love.” That was a good reminder to me whenever I was tempted to give up.
The fourth thing we need to pray for is related to the third. We need to pray along with Paul that we may have power, with other Christians, to grasp the magnitude of Christ’s love.
If the love of Christ is the foundation of our lives, then we cannot live in isolation. God wants us to begin to try to grasp the magnitude of Christ’s love for us, and we are made to do that in community. That’s part of the reason why we come to this place to worship. Yes, we can worship God alone. But we need the fellowship of the church to help us grasp his love. And we need that fellowship not just on Sunday morning, but throughout the week. That’s one reason why we have Bible studies and small group gatherings where we can grow in our fellowship with one another. I hope that everyone involved in this church will plug into some kind of small group, whether it is a Bible study, a service group, dinners for eight, or whatever. Plug in somewhere. You are needed and wanted.
I will confess that Paul’s prayer here in Ephesians is a bit mysterious. He is praying that we will be able to grasp something that is, truly, unattainable. He prays that we will know the unknowable. The love of Christ for us is so great that we can never see the end of it or truly measure its width, length, height, or depth. Nonetheless, I believe God wants us to try, so that, in the process, we will, as the hymnwriter says, get lost in his love.
A. W. Tozer sums up the paradox of the Christian life this way…
A real Christian is an odd number, anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen; talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see; expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another; empties himself in order to be full; admits he is wrong so he can be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest and happiest when he feels the worst. He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible; hears the inaudible; and knows that which passeth knowledge.
The fifth thing that Paul prays for and that we need to pray for if we are going to be revitalized is that we will be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God.
Why is it that we need to be filled to the measure with all the fulness of God? Blaise Pascal explains why we need God in this way. Pascal writes…
What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself. God alone is man’s true good…
I believe that every human being experiences this emptiness. We are all born with a spiritual void and we go through our lives trying to fill that emptiness with things and people that simply do not satisfy. Things and people don’t satisfy because we have a God-shaped vacuum in our hearts. Only God can fill the hollow place that exists in our souls.
The good news is that God wants to fill our emptiness with himself. We can pray that we and others will be filled to all the measure of the fulness of God … and God will answer our prayer.
But that is not the end of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3. He does one other thing here in prayer and it is something we need to do too. Paul gives God the glory. He prays…
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Why should we give God the glory? Because he is able to do more than we can ask or imagine. If we settle for only what we can accomplish in life on our own human power, then we will be impoverished people indeed. Because God can do more than we ask or imagine, we should come to him with large requests. As John Newton once wrote…
You are coming to a King
Large petitions with thee bring.
Do you have great dreams for your life? How about for our church? I am here today to tell you that God’s dreams for your life and mine and for our church are greater than any of our dreams. That’s one reason why he deserves all the honor and all the glory.
But secondly, we should give God the glory because he wants to receive glory through the church. It’s amazing to me that Paul would say, “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.” I can understand how Jesus gave glory to the Father through his life, death, and resurrection. But the church? Sometimes I wonder. The church often seems so weak, such a failure. Nonetheless, I have a sneaking suspicion that Paul’s prayer and ours will not go unanswered. Even though Jesus is a hard act to follow, I truly believe that if we ask for God to receive glory through the church, then he will… and not just on one occasion, but throughout all generations, forever and ever. We need to remember that we are not alone. We are part of a worldwide movement of Jesus Christ that spans the ages.
A pastor I once knew had a postcard sitting in his office. On the postcard was a picture of a church pew from one of the great cathedrals in Europe. The pastor had that postcard on his desk as a reminder. He learned, when he visited that cathedral, about the amazing process that the medieval craftsmen went through to create many of the pews in the cathedrals of Europe. I don’t remember anything the pastor told me about the pew-making process except this one thing… the craftsmen who made those pews and built those cathedrals made stuff to last. They built cathedrals that they knew would outlast them. And it worked. People are still visiting those cathedrals and sitting in those pews today.
If God is going to receive glory through the church, not just for centuries, but forever, then the church needs to be built on the right foundation. And the only spiritual foundation that will truly last forever is the love of Christ for us. If we build on that foundation, then we, with God’s help, will be building a church that will last, and that will give him glory from generation to generation…
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