For this reason I bow my knees part 2

If you have your Bible with you this morning, I hope you do, we're going to be in Ephesians chapter
3, so if you would turn there, Ephesians is near the back of your Bible. If you get to the Gospels,
keep going, pass the Gospels to Romans, Corinthians, and on in, you'll find Ephesians. And this
morning we are wrapping up the first half of Paul's letter to the Ephesians.
As we have seen going through this book, Paul's desire is for his readers to both understand and
comprehend what God has done for them in Christ. And he has outlined for them in Ephesians 1,
2, and 3 the fact that they have a treasury of spiritual riches that are theirs in Christ.
He has shown his readers they were spiritually dead and God has made them alive. They were
unresponsive to God and God has awakened them and they're now responding to him.
They've been made spiritually alive by grace through faith. He's shown them how God takes two very
different groups of people who are at enmity with one another, divided, antagonistic toward one
another, and has made them one new family, one new society, with allegiance to Jesus as the
centerpiece of their new family, their new community. So the focus has been on all that God has
done. Here's what he has done for his people. But the question is,
why? Why did God do this?
Gone so far as to send his own son, allowing him to be tortured,
rejected, and put to death in our place. Why did he do this? What's his plan and purpose?
And so far, Paul has given us one answer to that question. It's in the middle of chapter 2.
He says he has done this because it brings glory to him to do it. He has done it so that he will be
glorified. In chapter 1, he says he's done it to the praise of his glory. And this is the
foundational answer. Why has God done this? Why has he called us into the church to display the
immeasurable riches of his grace? What he's doing brings glory to him. But there's a second reason
why God has done this, and it's what we get to in the second half of this prayer in Ephesians
chapter 3. God's purpose in saving men and women, uniting them in one family,
is certainly to put his glory on display, but he tells us in this prayer it's also... because of
his love for his people. God has done this because he loves the people he has come to save.
And this is why, as Paul gets to the end of this theological section in the book of Ephesians,
in his letter before he turns to the second half of the book and starts to talk about what it looks
like to live lives that are transformed by the gospel he wraps up the first half of this letter
with a prayer saying I'm praying that you will be strengthened in your inner being I want you to be
spiritually strong as you face the challenges you're going to face, the opposition from the world,
the opposition you'll feel from the flesh, the temptations of the flesh, the evil one who will
attack you. I want you to be strong in that. And I want you to have Jesus in permanent residence in
your lives, in control of every part of your life. Before he's done, he says he wants them to
comprehend or to lay hold of or be gripped by the immensity of God's love for them. And that
thought, that big idea that God loves his own, It's something that I'm afraid we take for granted,
that we toss it around too casually. We might not verbalize it,
but we think to ourselves, well, of course God loves me. I mean, that's his job to love people.
That's what he's supposed to do. And after all, don't I deserve to be loved? And so we...
God's love for granted instead of marveling at it. As Paul in this prayer wants us to do,
he wants us to be overwhelmed by it. He wants us to step back and go, he didn't have to do this. He
doesn't have to love you, but he chooses to love you.
And as we grow in our understanding, here's how it works.
Let me explain how this works. When we understand and comprehend, this is what we're seeing, when
we understand what God is doing, which is the gospel, and why he's doing it,
That's going to lead to a response in us of gratitude and praise.
And that's going to lead us to a life that is worthy of the calling by which we've been called.
This is the process that God has for us. First of all, here's what I'm doing,
the gospel. Here's why I'm doing it, for my glory and because I love you. And that should bring
gratitude and praise from you. And that should lead to a transformed life that is worthy of the
calling.
I want us to look at God's love for his own this morning and we're just going to scratch the
surface because this is a subject that we could plumb every Sunday until Jesus comes and we'd
scratch the surface.
Here's what Paul makes clear in his prayer at the end of Ephesians 3. that God is doing what he's
doing because of his great love for us, and we need to understand it. So I want to look at it
together. Before we do that, let's pray for our time in God's word. Would you pray with me?
Father, we need your spirit to direct our thinking this morning.
We need you to soften our hearts, give us ears to hear.
Lord, we pray that we might not just be hearers of your word today, but would you make us doers of
your word as well. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. Stand with me as we read this passage.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Ephesians 3, beginning at verse 14. Follow along as
I read. Paul writes,
he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you,
being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the
breadth and length and height and depth. and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do far more
abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power at work within us,
to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations,
forever and ever. Amen. Amen. May God bless this reading of his word. You may be seated.
The grass withers, the flower fades. The word of our God will last forever. So last Sunday,
we looked at the first half of this prayer, verses 14 through the middle of verse 17. And we're
going to pick up in the middle of verse 17. And there are really two things for us to look at this
morning. First, I want us to see the power of God's love. And secondly, I want us to see the
greatness of his glory. So that's going to be our outline. Let's look here at the power of God's
love. Paul prays that his readers would find spiritual stability as they comprehend God's love for
them. That's what he means by being rooted and grounded in God's love. He wants them to be
spiritually stable.
are surrounded by God's love, that there's no place they can go where God's love is not with them,
not present with them. He prays that they would be surprised by or overwhelmed by the reality of
God's love, that they would realize that no matter how much they grow in their understanding or
their experience of God's love for them, they would see that they've only begun to recognize the
fullness of his love. And then he prays they would be sustained by God's love. that it would fill
them up, that their knowledge and understanding of his love for them would do for their soul what a
good home-cooked meal does for your belly. You eat a good meal, you're filled up and go,
oh, I feel good. He wants that for their soul. He wants them to be filled up with the fullness of
God so that they are satisfied with the love of God and sustained by it. So I want us just to
meditate on these four petitions that Paul makes. But before we do that, I think we have to pull
back and just make sure we know what we're talking about when we talk about God's love for us.
Because most of us, when we hear the idea of the love of God, we go immediately to a Hollywood
understanding of that. So let's talk about what we mean by the love of God.
We get our ideas from romantic comedies or love songs. When you hear love,
you think fond affection or emotional attraction. You think love is something people fall into or
fall out of. But what Paul, when he prays that his readers will understand and comprehend God's
love for them, he's praying not about them understanding it in romantic or friendship terms.
I'm going to give you just a handful of characteristics of God's love for his children.
I'll give you five of them. First of all, God's love, and this is not always the case with romantic
love, God's love is unconditional. You've heard that before. Here's what we mean by that.
God's love is not based on your performance.
Our love for others is often based on how attractive they are, or how nice they are,
or how much they please us by what they do. God's love is not based on those things. His love is
unconditional. He doesn't choose to love us based on how we perform. His love is not a fickle love.
He doesn't love us when we're good boys and girls and not love us when we're bad boys and girls.
He chooses to love us because it's his nature to do so. His character is to love whether we are
lovable or attractive or not. Secondly, his love is everlasting.
The Bible speaks to the fact that his love is eternal. Isaiah 54 says this,
with everlasting love, I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer.
Jeremiah 31, God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.
Therefore, I have continued my faithfulness to you. His love is unfailing.
There's no expiration date on God's love. Nothing can extinguish his love. Nothing can separate you
from his love. His love, as one modern song says, never gives up, never runs out,
never fails.
Third, his love for his own is covenantal. This is simply to say God has pledged his love to us.
He has promised to love us. A promise that all who belong to him, he will love.
He has sworn an oath to do this and declared that he will always love those who are his.
Fourth, his love is incarnational, which means that he doesn't love us from a distance.
He comes near to us to love us. This is what Jesus did. He drew near to bring God's love to us.
And fifthly, his love is sacrificial. It's costly. Really,
at the heart of love is sacrifice. If you say you love somebody,
what you mean in that, what you should mean in that, is I will sacrifice myself for your good.
And that's what God's love for us is. 1 John 3, verse 16 says,
by this we know love, that he laid down his life for us. How do you know what love is?
Jesus laid down his life for his own. Romans 5, 8, God shows his love for us in this.
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Sacrifice and love are connected.
So these five characteristics of God's love, this is not an exhaustive list, but it does show the
kind of love that Paul is talking about that he wants us to comprehend.
It's richer and deeper and more substantive, more rugged than some emotion,
which is not to say that God does not have fond affection for those who are his own.
We should not imagine that God is stoically loving us by these characteristics, but that he has no
delight in his own, because the Bible tells us he delights in those who are his.
In fact, I love this verse from the Old Testament prophet Zephaniah. You probably haven't spent a
whole lot of time reading Zephaniah, but here's a verse that I come back to. It says, the Lord your
God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness.
He will quiet you with his love. He will exalt over you with loud singing.
God sings loudly when he thinks about those who are his own.
He loves you with an everlasting covenant. I mean, if you are God's child,
he loves you. And again, look at the list. Unconditional, everlasting, covenantal,
incarnational, sacrificial. A love that he delights in displaying.
And I need to say this as well. If you're not a child of God, if you haven't committed your life to
him, you haven't surrendered yourself to him, then the kind of love I'm describing here, God does
not have this for all people. He has it for those who are his. Now, you're saying,
but wait, doesn't God love all people? Yes, he does. but it's a different kind of love that he has
for those who are not his own. It's always been the case. God has never had a covenantal
everlasting love for the Canaanites in the Bible. He had it for his own people.
I love my neighbor and I love my wife, but I love her differently than I love my neighbor.
And I should. It's right to do that. And in fact, what does God call the church?
The bride of Christ. So his love for his bride is different than his love for enemies.
That's just one indication of the fact that his love for his own is a different, special kind of
love. And it's important to know, if you think about, well, God loves everybody.
He has to. He does. He's chosen to. He doesn't have to. He's chosen to. But he doesn't love
everybody the same. His unconditional, eternal, everlasting,
covenantal. incarnational love, sacrificial love is for his own.
Let me just say this again. We talked about this last week. Paul wants us not only to understand
the love of God, he wants us to experience the love of God.
Comprehending God's love goes beyond just understanding it. It involves experiencing it.
I said last week that Greek word for comprehending means to capture or to lay hold of.
to grab onto. Paul wants the reality of God's love for us to be... that we grab onto,
that we experience, not just understand. The difference between understanding and comprehending is
the difference between understanding marriage and being married. God doesn't want you just to
understand his love, oh, that's very interesting, yes. No, he wants you to comprehend it,
to experience the way a bridegroom and a bride experience it together. D.A. Carson.
Put it this way, he said, Paul is not asking that his readers might become more able to articulate
the greatness of God's love in Christ Jesus or to grasp with the intellect alone how significant
God's love is in the plan of redemption. He's asking God that they might have the power to grasp
the dimensions of that love in their experience.
So our text this morning is telling us that Paul is praying, verse 17. for us to understand his
love. And let's walk through what he's praying for. First, that we would experience his love by
being rooted and grounded in his love. He wants our understanding and experience of God's love to
give us spiritual stability in our lives. Here's the point. The more you understand the reality of
God's love for you, the more spiritually stable it will make you in the midst of adversity.
And he's mixing metaphors here when he talks about being rooted and grounded. So I guess if the
Holy Spirit can mix metaphors, I can too. He's using, first of all, a botanical term,
and then he uses a construction term. So when he talks about being rooted, he's talking about the
garden. He's talking about how trees and plants have roots that go down deep into the soil. Now,
what do roots do for a plant? Roots provide nourishment. for the plant,
as well as stability.
I have never thought about this until I was working on this passage, but we have oak trees in our
yard. And some of these oak trees are pretty big. Some of them go up in the air like 50 feet.
And I thought to myself, how much does that oak tree weigh? So I Googled it. A 50-foot tall oak
tree weighs between four and five tons.
between 8,000 and 10,000 pounds of oak tree standing erect in the backyard,
why doesn't it fall over? Why doesn't the wind knock it down?
Because the roots give it stability. Take away the roots. Let the roots rot.
That tree has fallen over. But the roots give it stability and nourishment.
And Paul says, I'm praying. For you, Ephesians, and for all of us who are reading this,
that your soul, your inner being, would have that kind of rootedness in Christ,
in the love of Christ, so that the love of Christ nourishes your soul and gives you the same kind
of stability that a plant has, that a tree has, to keep you from being toppled over by winds of
adversity. I want you to be rooted and then grounded. That's a construction term.
It's a word that's used for the foundation of a building, a slab that keeps the building in place
and stable. It's the same word that Jesus used in the Sermon on the Mount when he talked about
building your house. On the rock instead of on the sand, he's talking about the foundation.
Having a right foundation, a strong and stable foundation is critical. Any of you have ever had
foundation problems in your home? Know that it messes everything up, walls crack, everything gets
messed up, that your house becomes unstable. It could collapse, all because there's a crack in the
foundation.
We sometimes sing a little chorus that goes, I will build my house upon your love.
I will build my life upon your love. It is a firm foundation. I will put my trust in you alone and
I will not be shaken.
Building your life on God's love gives you spiritual stability. As you understand and experience
God's love for you, it will keep your soul from collapsing when the wind and the rains come.
If your soul is shaky or unstable or weary or weak, you need to reroute it in the love of God.
You need to understand, comprehend, experience God's love for you, and that will provide the
spiritual stability, the strength that you need. So how do you do that? How do you root your heart,
your life, and ground yourself in God's love? What does that look like?
Well, here's what it looks like for me. There are some key spiritual disciplines that help me with
this. One is worship, singing. When I sing,
like we just did this morning, hymns of praise, when I sing, he will not cast you out.
He will not cast you out. Whoever enters in will forever be with him. My heart gets rerouted in the
love of God. My heart swells up. It connects me to his love. Second way that I root my life in
God's love is through study of his word. I'm not just talking about casual reading of his word,
which is not wrong, but it's incomplete. You need to study. If you want to be rooted,
your roots have to go down deep in the soil of his word. And I am rooted in God's love through you.
my fellowship with you. When I come here on Sunday morning and visit with you and hear what God is
doing in your life and see what's going on with you, pray with you, spend time with you, that
anchors me more fully in God's love. So worship, Bible study, fellowship are ways that I am rooted
in God's love. And I will say this, specifically, meditating on and contemplating the cross of
Christ is the starkest example of the reality of God's love for me.
So when I survey the wondrous cross, it stirs my heart with fresh rootedness in God's love and
helps provide the stability that my soul needs. That's the first petition in this prayer, that you
would be rooted and grounded in the love of God. Second petition. is that we need to know and
experience what it means to be surrounded by God's love for us. Verse 18, that we might have the
strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth of
God's love. Now let me ask you a question. Paul is saying here, I'm praying for you together with
the saints. I'm praying that you will grow in your understanding and experience of just how big and
inexhaustible God's love for you is. Here's the question. When in your life,
Can you think of times in your life when you have come to know and experience the full dimension of
God's love for you, when your understanding of his love for you has expanded or increased?
My guess is that you have grown more in your understanding of the expansive nature of God's love
for you during seasons of hardship and suffering and trials and adversity than you do in the
sunshine times.
A weightlifter knows that you grow stronger in weightlifting the more weight that gets added to
what you're doing. The way we know just how much our furnace can heat our home is for the
temperature to go really low. The lower it goes, the more we see how strong the furnace is.
The way you know the capability of anything is by pushing the limits. And Paul says,
I'm praying that when your soul is pushed to its limits, you will realize that there is no limit.
To what? what God's love looks like. There's no place your soul can go where God's love cannot
sustain you. So I was thinking about this. All these songs just kept coming back to me as I was
working on this message. And this song came to me. I'm going to ask Carly to come up and play this
because I want to sing. We haven't sung this song in a long time. Some of you don't know this song.
But Keith and Kristen Getty wrote a song years ago called When Trials Come. And it's a song that
talks about how God meets us in our trials in ways that are for our good.
And so if you don't know it, Carly and I will sing it. If you know it, sing along with us. We're
just going to sing three verses of it together. But I just thought rather than quoting this,
we should sing it because it roots my soul in the love of God. So you want to play a chord for me
here? It goes, When trials come, no longer fear
Our God draws near to fire a faith worth more
his faithfulness is told his faithfulness is told
second verse may
thine peace of
God bring strength to me and new each morning mercy flows
treasure
That's what Paul is saying here. It is the love of God in the midst of trials.
That's where we will see that his love does encompass. It surrounds. In the crucible of adversity,
we experience the depth and the width and the length and the height of God's love for us.
He meets us there. He takes care of us in that moment, no matter what we're facing.
So Paul says, I'm praying that God's love would be a stabilizing force in your life and that it
would surround you in times of adversity. Third, he says, I'm praying that you will be surprised
by. God's love. Verse 19, that you will know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
I want you to know something that's beyond knowing.
Two weeks ago, we watched the Artemis II astronauts splash down, come back to earth after their 10
days circling the moon, coming back. We saw pictures. We heard their stories. What they saw was
magnificent. They were breathless. They were moved by what they saw. There are now 28 people.
in all of human history who have been in the vicinity of the moon, who have gotten near.
28 people, that's all. 12 people in human history who walked on the moon. And we know more about
outer space today than we ever did 100 years ago. We could look up and see the stars 100 years ago,
but we've gotten closer. And our understanding of outer space has expanded over the last 100 years.
But we don't know anything. The universe is immense. I mean,
I was going to dazzle you with all of the numbers about galaxies and stars and all. But it's just,
it's so infinitesimal compared to the grandeur of eternity,
of the universe, what God has made. We are growing in our understanding.
We will never plumb the depths of what is out there.
And God's love is the same. as the bigness of God's love is like the bigness of the universe.
You will grow in your understanding of it through your life, and it will be unknowable. You can
know more, but you'll never exhaust it. We sang this morning how deep the Father's love for us,
how vast beyond all measure.
God's love, like God himself, is beyond knowing. You can know him, but you'll never know him fully.
You can experience his love, but you'll never exhaust that experience. You'll never know it in its
fullness. And Paul says, I pray that you will deepen your knowledge of what's unknowable.
And then finally he says, I pray that you will comprehend God's love. You'll be sustained by it.
You'll be filled with all the fullness of God. So he's expressing this desire for his readers,
for each of them, to grow into spiritually mature men and women. To be filled with the fullness of
God means that you're spiritually mature, that God is filling you.
Paul talks in Ephesians chapter 5 about being filled with the Spirit. We'll get there in a little
bit. And he says you must keep on being filled with the Spirit. You want God to fill your life.
The idea of being filled with something means that It takes over.
It's back to what we talked about last week, Jesus filling every room in your heart. Your heart
becomes his home. He fills your heart.
Now here's a question for all of us this morning. What fills up your life?
What are the activities? What dominates your thinking? What are you filled with throughout the
week?
After you leave here this morning, you go home, what's going to fill your life?
You know, You can choose to set your mind on things.
You don't have to just be ambushed by the environment.
You can decide what you're going to set your mind on. You can choose the activities you're going to
participate in. You can decide what will fill you up, is what I'm saying. And Paul says, I'm
praying that you will be filled up with God, that you'll be filled up with the knowledge of his
love for you. I want you, the more you understand and experience God's love for you, the more
you'll be filled in your soul with that, and you'll be filled with the fullness of God. Martin
Lloyd-Jones, in his meditation on this passage, made the observation that for most Christians and
most professing believers, we are content to have him with us,
but we don't necessarily want him filling us.
We'd like him to be near, but kind of stay in the background. Available, but not intrusive.
Paul's prayer is that our experience of the love of God would bring Jesus from the background of
our lives into the forefront, that we would be filled up with our love for God.
And that's Paul's prayer, that the love of God would be so... consuming, so overwhelming that it
would give you stability, that it would see you through trials, it would surround your life, it
would fill you with the fullness of God. And then he, at this point in his prayer,
he can't help himself. He has a pyramid of praise that takes over,
a doxology that he ends this prayer with. Let me just say a word here, a little pet peeve of mine,
doxology. The word doxology means to speak words of glory.
Doxa means glory. Logos logia means to speak. A doxology is to speak praise,
speak words of glory. That's what we have here. My pet peeve is that sometimes people will say,
I'm going to pronounce a benediction, and then they give you a doxology. A benediction,
nothing wrong with pronouncing a doxology, but a benediction,
The word means to speak a blessing, to speak good for you.
So diction, to speak, bene means good. So it's a speak words of blessing.
That's different than a doxology. Those are words of praise. So when I end our service this
morning, I will end with the doxology. Most times I end with Psalm 67, called for God to bless his
people. Sometimes I'll probably do numbers this morning. The Lord bless you and keep you. Those are
words of blessing as opposed to doxology. And when a pastor says, I'm going to leave you with this
benediction, and then he speaks of doxology, it just fingernails on the blackboard for me. Okay,
that's my own issue. My rant is over now. Okay, this is a doxology.
And I said it's a pyramid of praise because of how it builds. Look at it. Here's how the pyramid
builds. It starts with, now unto him. And you could stop right there. It's really all Paul needs to
say. Unto him. Everything he's said about God, about who he is, about his glory in these first
three chapters, especially as we've read about the God who loves us with, loves his own with an
everlasting love here. You could quit right here and just say, now unto him and move on. But he
says, now unto him who is able. That's a great word, able.
God is able. Whatever you need, he is able. God is,
remember the song we used to teach to our kids, I don't know if kids still sing it, my God is so
big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing my God cannot do for you.
Did you sing that song right? He is able. God is able to do whatever.
Unto him who is able to do.
God is a God who acts, not a God who sits back. He's not just a God who's able but doesn't do.
He's a God who is able and does. He's able to do. And he's able to do all that we ask.
Now, that doesn't mean he will do all that you ask. It means he's able to do all that you ask.
Sometimes he doesn't do what you ask because whether you know it or not, what you just ask for is
foolish. It's not what's best for you. And so sometimes, like a kid who says, I'm hungry,
give me a Twinkie, you say, no, no, that's not what you need right now. So sometimes God doesn't do
what you ask him to do because what you've asked for is not what's best for you. That doesn't mean
he's not able to do it. It means he knows better than to do it. He's able to do not only all that
we ask, but it goes on to say all that we think. Because sometimes there are things we think that
we don't ask for because we think it would be too presumptuous for us to ask for that. So we think,
I wish God would do this, but I'm not going to ask for that.
Back in January, we said we've got this loan coming due. We would love to be able to retire a
portion of the debt. Many of you are generous in giving to that. Thank you again for that. But I
remember thinking, there's a number that I think might be achievable, and then there's a number
that I really wish he'd do.
But I didn't want to ask for that. I was thinking it, but I didn't want to ask for it. So Paul is
saying he's able to do not only what you ask, he's able to do what you think. Again,
it doesn't mean he's necessarily going to do it, but he's able to.
What you ask for, what you think or imagine, he's able to do it. And then to drive it home, he's
not only able to do what you ask or think, he's able to do above all that you ask or think.
More than you can imagine or think about, above that. And not just above that, he's able to do
abundantly above all that you ask or think. Wait a sec, it's not there. He's able to do exceedingly
abundantly above. all that you ask or think. You get Paul's point.
All that we think or imagine God can do is a fraction of what God can do. You have no idea what God
is able to do. Paul is overwhelmed by what he has declared to them to be true about what God has
done. And he said, there's so much more.
He's given you every spiritual blessing. He's brought people who were spiritually dead back to
spiritual life. He's united us together in his family. He has taken down the dividing wall that
separated Jews and Gentiles. He has loved us with a deep, everlasting love. He's able to do so much
more than that.
And he says, he ends this prayer saying he's able to do it according to the power that is at work
within us. That's the power of his word in the hand of his Holy Spirit.
That's the power that's at work in you. God accomplishes his purposes through us and in us by his
power, which is his word in the hand of the spirit. And Paul says to him,
be glory in the church. And just notice this for a second. Paul sees God at work in the lives of
individuals, yes, but God is also at work in the life of the church. Our spiritual lives are...
Life for God, the purposes of God cannot be accomplished just by individual Christians living
individual lives. We must do this together. We must be united together. The work of God,
the power of God is on display not just in your life but in the church and in Christ Jesus
throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. This brings us to where Paul concludes this
prayer and concludes the theological section the book of Ephesians,
when you turn to chapter four, he starts to say, now because of this, here's how you should be
living. And we're going to pause in our study of the book of Ephesians and not going to get to
chapter four until August. Yeah, I know. You go, why?
We're going to pause. Because summer is summer, and I know how summer goes, and I don't want you to
miss any of it. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to, over a 12-week period this
summer, we're going to go back to the Old Testament book of Judges, and we're going to work our way
through that period in the history of Israel when God's people were governed by Judges. We'll spend
12 weeks in that, and we're going to have a couple of messages that are just scattered messages
here and there, and then we'll get back to Ephesians. So I'll give you time to meditate on that and
we'll get back into Ephesians in August. But I'm going to let, as I was reading through this week,
it brought to mind a book that some of us went through a few years ago, a book by Alistair Begg
called Pray Big. I don't know if you remember going through that. But it's a meditation on these
verses that we were just looking at. in Ephesians chapter three. And so I pulled the book out and
I'm going to let Alistair have the last word this morning. I won't try to do a Scottish accent.
I'll just read to you what he says about this prayer in Ephesians three.
He says, when I read Paul's prayers, I'm always struck by the fact that many of the matters that
are the focus of my prayers are absent in his. In other words,
he's saying, I pray for stuff. that Paul doesn't pray for. He goes on to say, Paul was in prison,
but there's no prayer in here. Help me get out of prison. That's what I'd be praying for.
He says, as I was reflecting on this verse, it made me think, I believe in the living God who is
able to do far more abundantly than all I can think or imagine. But what do I ask God for?
How big are my prayers? And how big are my prayers for the church?
He says this, he says, we sin. when we think God's power is limited or doubt his willingness to
display his power.
We sin when we do that. Small prayers,
Paul says, betray a suspicion that we have a small God. We don't.
He is able to do immeasurably more than you can ask or imagine.
Alistair says, so ask him, as Paul did, not for health and wealth and happiness,
as though if you dig in here, you'll be able to get a home in the Bahamas and a personal jet. No,
ask him for bigger things than that. Ask him to be filled with all the fullness of Christ.
Ask him to be able to grasp the unknowable love of Christ.
Ask him to live today in the treasures of your future inheritance.
Ask for those things for yourself, but ask for the Christians you know too, that those who
encourage you, those who try your patience, those who discourage your spirit. If God can change
you, he can change them. So ask that he would.
How is all this that Paul prays for and that God wants us to pray for,
how is it supposed to happen? According to the power that is at work within us. Not our power,
his. He is able. So let's pray like that's true.
Let's pray together. Father,
you have spoken to us through your word this morning in ways that have reminded us again of your
goodness and your greatness and your power and your might and your love.
And Lord, we confess to you that we are feeble and weak and that we ask for too little.
Help us to be more bold in what we ask for, not for our glory but for yours,
not for our comfort but for the advancement of your purposes in the world.
May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And Lord, help us to understand, and not just understand, but to experience the reality of your
love for us in a deeper, fresher, more meaningful way this week. And as we go forward,
help that to be true for us. Help us to be rooted and grounded in that.
Help us to be surrounded by that, to be strengthened by that. to be surprised by that and to be
sustained by that. Lord, I pray for any who are here this morning who have never surrendered their
lives to you, never given themselves to you, who are outside of the scope of your love.
They don't know your love that is described here. Lord, I pray that they would see their need for
you, that they would turn from sin and self and turn to you.
that they would recognize the demonstration of your love for us in the death of your son who died
to forgive our sins and who rose again to give us new life.
And I pray that they would cry out to you and that you would begin to do that transforming work in
them that you're doing in us, molding us and conforming us to the image of your son.
I pray all of this in your name. Amen.