[Transcript represents full sermon's text]

       Today we are finishing up Ephesians chapter 3, so we'll be covering verses 14 to 21. This will also be the final message before the holiday break, and I will be back after Christmas and New Year's in the second half of January to continue our journey through the book of Ephesians.

       We arrive at the second of Paul's prayers. The first prayer was at the end of chapter 1, and now we're at the second prayer. And let's go ahead and get into the text, verse 14. Paul says, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (ESV).

       The first thing we can note is Paul talks about bowing his knees. He says, “I bow my knees before the Father.” Does that mean that when we pray, we're supposed to bow on both our knees or on one knee? Or how does that work? Well, I think it's more of an expression that Paul is relaying to us. However, I'm sure at times he did get down on his knees, just like at times we're going to do that, right? I don't think any of us would say that's something we always have to do. We know Jesus would stand and pray. We remember that from the Gospels, like when he would give thanks before a meal, he was standing. It's definitely not wrong to be standing or sitting to pray, but it is a good practice at times to bow our knees before the Father. I find that I generally do it personally if I'm really happy about something or have something really urgent on the prayer request list. That's generally when I find myself on my knees praying.

       Anyway, the probably bigger thing that popped out at us as we read verses 14 and 15, Paul said, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (ESV).

       So from the Father, “every family.” Well, I will admit that I am not quite the fan of the ESV translation when it comes to this verse. In fact, I'm going to reach behind me here and grab my King James Bible. Because I think the King James Version words this significantly better. If I turn to Ephesians. Verse 15 from the King James: “of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” That, to me, insinuates that it's talking about Christians. It's talking about even those in the Old Testament, those who died during Paul's time, everyone who is a true believer, who's believed in God, is included in the whole family, using the King James words. So that, to me, makes better sense of what's going on . It's not that idea of universalism where everyone is a child of God, and then everyone is going to believe at some point. I don't think we can derive that from this verse.

       Now, there are certainly Christians that think that everyone is a child of God. The Roman Catholics come to my mind for some reason on that. And then it's also true that in the general sense, we are all children of God because we all bear God's image, right? We're all made in the likeness of our creator. So in that sense, yes, we all are children of God. It is his world in that sense, but we do not all know God. We are not all in personal relationship with God. We have to be reconciled back to the Father or reconciled to the Father or brought into relationship with the Father and however you want to phrase it, that's what has to happen.

       But notice the emphasis on family versus the individual, and that's been a common theme. Throughout this whole book of Ephesians, we've been running into it time and again. It's the idea of the collective versus the individual, and we've seen that Paul's emphasis is mostly on the collective. So far, that's been his emphasis. Now, we tend in the United States to read into the text with individualistic lenses on. We seem to read as if Paul's talking about us individually, sort of with a “ getting” mindset, perhaps, on our part of how does this affect me? What does this mean for me personally? But Paul's focus, most of the time so far, has been the church collectively. But the point of verse 15 is that everyone who has a relationship with God is named with God. They have that inheritance. Remember that Paul has already gone over. We talk about that a lot in chapter 1. That inheritance that we have, that we are members of God's family, that we are co-heirs with Christ. Remember, that's something that wasn't talked about specifically in this text, but the idea is the same.

       Verse 16, “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being” (ESV).

       So, there are some interesting things going on. Again, the focus seems to be on the church, that the church is what is strengthened with power through his Spirit and our inner being. It says your inner being, but it seems to be talking about the church. One verse we can look at, or a couple of verses, is in 1 Corinthians chapter 3 and verses 16 and 17, to get an idea of how the Spirit indwells the church collectively as a group. Tapping over to 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 16 says, “Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and you are that temple” (ESV). So that is talking about the church collectively. That does not seem to be talking about the individual person, though Paul elsewhere in 1 Corinthians in chapter 6, namely, will be talking about that individual dwelling, but it's the collective idea. And the point is that Paul does talk about our indwelling by the Spirit and the collective sense, not just the individual sense. That's why I wanted us to take a look at that.

       But in conjunction with this verse, let's go back and read it again just to get our minds refreshed on it. He said “that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” So what is that in contrast to? Well, it's in contrast to what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4, in verse 16. If I pull that one up, he says there, “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day” (ESV). So that's renewing by the Spirit. And the outer self wastes away. Why? Because we're getting older. We get diseases. Our bodies are not going to be around forever, right? All of us, no matter who we are, it's guaranteed that we're going to pass away. Either we're going to die or experience the rapture. For the few of us that are fortunate to experience that, but most of us are going to die. And so that's why. But the Holy Spirit, dwelling within the collective body, but also within each of us individually, renews us as we grow to become more like Jesus, as we are practicing out our faith, our living faith, not just doing Sunday church stuff, but actually being obedient to what the Bible says, actually taking it to our minds and hearts, actually living it out. As we do that, the Holy Spirit helps us collectively as a group, but also internally, individually to accomplish that, because that's what God wants.

       Let's go ahead and go to verse 17. I'm just going to read the first part of 17 and then we'll get to the rest of it: “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (ESV).

       Wow. As I was just articulating or trying to articulate, we always want to have everything that we do in our lives filtered through Christ, through what God would approve of. If we're not certain about something, we run that across before God the Father. We try to see what we come to believe is God's will in that particular situation. By having Christ as our filter through which everything flows, that makes our lives more and more pure, more and more righteous, more and more good. And Paul will actually put this another way later on in our epistle to the Ephesians, when he says in chapter 5 and verse 1, to get a little taste of that, he says, therefore be imitators of God as beloved children. Same thing. He's saying the same thing. It's just a different way of saying it. That's our ultimate goal, is to be full of righteousness, to be like God, and that we are righteous as he is righteous. He even said that in the Old Testament.

       Now let's jump into the rest of verse 17, and we'll read through verse 19: “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” (ESV).

       Really, what we can garner first right off the bat is that the verses are telling us that God is love. We're familiar with John's famous verse there over in 1 John, but this is saying the same thing. It just doesn't come out and directly say it quickly, but that's what the essence of the verse is, the verses. As God is love, we ourselves, we're supposed to be full of love ourselves. Well, at this point, it would probably be a good idea to have a definition of love. What is a good definition of love? Well, love is something that is unconditional. It is a caring, an adoration, an affection, a selflessness towards someone else that's unconditional. Generally, 99% of the time, we as humans love conditionally. And that is the difference between God and us. God has that ability to love unconditionally. If we think about God for a second, we remember John told us, for God so loved the world. Remember, so God loves the world even after they had done, we have done, All of us have done so many different bad things. That did not deter God's love. He loved the Israelites, still loves them to this day, even after everything they've done, after their rejection of Jesus face to face, after their crucifixion of Jesus, after all the negativity, their killing of his apostles and prophets, all of that, God still loves them. God is still faithful to them. It's really, it's mind-blowing when you stop and think about that.

       Here in the United States, in our American mindsets, we have a big emphasis on justice. And we find it difficult to try to understand love and justice at the same time. I heard a pastor a couple of months ago say that it's a balance that God loves, but he also has justice, and he has to balance them out as if they're opposed to each other. Well, I would say safely that's not correct. That's not the answer. That misses the mark. And the point with love is that no matter how much God loves people, no matter how much we love somebody else, we cannot force that person to do what is right. If you try to force someone to do what is right, that's not love. I think most of us would agree with that. The point is that no matter how much God loves, he cannot force people to do what they should do because that's what the best thing there is to do in existence, in the universe, in reality as a whole. God can't force people to act in those ways. We all sinned. We all have that sin nature. And we can choose a different way. We can choose to do things through a non-loving way. A way that's away from the direction of God.

       And I've even seen it in person, in my own personal experience, of people at church. I remember one particular instance where a pastor thought that I held a certain doctrinal position, and that had not even been confirmed. I had not told anybody that I held this particular doctrinal position, but it was one he opposed and that he thought was air. And he went off , say, and assumed that I did hold that position without even asking me. And he and his wife basically condemned me. They turned the other direction against me. And see, they would say, well, that's love. That's what I'm supposed to do. And, but see, that's not the true essence of love. That, for starters, he didn't know for sure because he didn't ask me. He assumed the worst, which is not love. Remember, Paul tells us what love is in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, that it assumes the best when there's a lack of knowledge. Well, he didn't do that. He was more concerned about justice. He saw love and justice as opposing forces. He was more concerned about justice than he was about love. And it's just not a true picture of what love is. But I just remember being startled by that ability, especially of his wife, to be able to turn a 180. You know, that person who had been really welcoming of me when she thought I believed this certain doctrinal position was able to just totally turn the other way, like a light flipping the switch from on to off. Just flip that switch. I mean, that's not love. That's something else.

       We've all had those kinds of experiences. I'm sure that in your life there's been one, two, three, maybe more situations like that where somebody thought they were practicing the righteousness of God, but really it was something else. And even if we can't put our finger, even if we can't explain that, exactly what it was that they were doing, we know what's not love, just like we know what is love. The point that Paul's trying to make is that God's love is far and wide. And this is why some people within the church, a few in the Evangelical church, hold to that position of Universalism. We talked about this several weeks back, and I brought up that book I read about that subject, and there are some people usually secretly that hold that position because they think love is so far and wide and so encompassing and surpassing and all that that how could it not be that? How could it not be that everyone ends up saved? And I would say in response to that I think it's because of people's free will choice because again no matter how much god or us or any one of us loves somebody else they still have the ability to take an opposing position to what the truth, what the best thing is, and the nature of existence. They have the ability to reject that.

       But Paul says that Christ's love surpasses not much. That's just such an incredible thing. It's such an encouragement for us to hear that, to believe that, even if we can't articulate what that means. I mean, it's something that we can't explain, right? It surpasses us. Paul parallels this concept in Romans chapter 8. We might even have it memorized at the end of Romans chapter 8, tapping over there, verse 38: “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (ESV). There, he's talking about the Father's love and how no external being, nothing that happens, no force in the universe can separate us from God's love. I mean, that's incredible. That's a tremendously wonderful thing to believe because it just, for that moment there anyway, when you think about it, it wipes away all anxiety. Because you know that you are in that permanent relationship with the Father and nothing can touch that. That's the most important thing in the universe that there is. For each and every one of us, for the church, and nothing can touch that.

       And, of course, this whole idea of love on a basic sense being unexplainable is why some people, when we talk about romantic love between a man and a woman, have tried to go so far as to say, well, that marriage relationship that's full of love is actually eternal. It's got to be eternal because that love that we share with another person is so powerful and surpasses understanding sometimes that that has to be eternal. Well, given that idea, there are two different groups of people that come to my mind that do believe in the eternal marriage, and that would be the Eastern Orthodox Christians and then Mormons also believe in eternal marriage. Well, as evangelicals, we do not believe in eternal marriage. And as far as romantic love, and I'm bringing this up because in a lot of our minds, romantic love is what comes to our minds when we're thinking about love. While that is very powerful at times, I just don't think it really compares to the love that we have with God, the love that God has for us and that we have in return for him. I don't think we can really compare that. Even as powerful as romantic love is, and really that's an encouragement because that tells us that a lot of us have that personal experience of the power of romantic love.

       So if God's love is way beyond that, if our love for God will go way beyond that, that's a great thing. That's awesome. Because, and of course, don't get me wrong, the marriage relationship shows that love, right? That relationship between a husband and wife models Christ's love for the church. Paul's going to talk about the marriage relationship in the epistle to the Ephesians. But the point is, is it really the love? While we think romantic love is powerful, at the end of the day, it doesn't really compare. Anyway, the whole thing about marriage being eternal, that's an overvaluation of the romantic love that people feel and experience. That's putting it on a pedestal too high, I would say. We know people can fall in love, but they can also fall out of love. People get remarried, second, third, maybe even a fourth time. That love is temporary to this earth.

       But Paul also emphasizes for us, as we wrap up this discussion of love, that love equals false, because he says there at the end that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. That's a mind-blowing verse, and we really don't know what that means, but we can say that love equals fullness. The more we grow in our loving relationship with God, the more full, complete, whole, whatever word we want to use there, the better we become in becoming like God, in becoming imitators of God, as Paul's going to tell us in a little bit. So that there again, and I talked about this two, three weeks ago, however many weeks ago, that's why it's important to be growing in our relationship with God. Because the more mature we are, the more we love. It's just one plus one equals two. That's the way it works. A lot of us experientially understand that, but again, there are some Christians who've kind of halted Paul’s growth. They don't see growth as a big deal. Well, it is a big deal. You want to be growing because the more you grow, the more you are expounding and expanding in your love for others, the more you are loving yourself because you're doing what is right. The more you do all that, the more you're loving God. It’s this circle that goes in different directions. It's kind of hard to explain. But you get the point. It's circular and just gets bigger and bigger like a snowball.

       Let's go to verse 20. “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (ESV).

       Again, another huge verse. I'm just going to state some things, and we can work through them. One way this is accomplished is God doing things that are far more abundantly than all we ask or think is what we see happen in other people's lives and perhaps even our own life. We've all witnessed those dramatic transformations that occur in people's lives, where they're totally opposing God, and then they believe, and now they're totally for God. That's an example that Paul himself modeled. He was totally against the church. He was against the true essence of God, though he thought he was for God. And he believes in Jesus after meeting him there on the roadway, and his whole life is transformed. Think about that for a second. Most people who knew Saul before he was Paul that were Christians would have never thought that was possible. As a matter of fact, we know that's true because there in Acts, when God approaches that guy to go heal Paul's eyes, remember he's like, “ I think you got something wrong.” “ “I don't think this is right because this guy Saul's a bad guy.” So they would have never dreamt something of that magnitude happening. And that's what we're talking about. That's the magnitude of what God is able to accomplish.

       The verse comes to mind that we're all familiar with, where Jesus said greater works than these. Well, some people do. Some people are able to do more in this worldly life than Christ himself accomplished during his earthly ministry. Again, that's how God works. He works through individuals. He works through churches. You know, churches going on missions trips, providing that benefit, that aid, that word of God to people who don't know God. And they are not only provided, the people that they go see are not only provided with physical needs that they would have never thought possible, but they also have their lives transformed in a way they didn't even know existed. It's incredible.

       Again, this gives us glimpses into what God is able to accomplish in his great path. And we talked about—when we talked about God's riches toward us earlier on in the epistle to the Ephesians —we talked about how those riches that God has toward us, that many of those we can't even see now. We don't even know what they are. We don't even know what they are which exist that are coming for us. Okay? Many in the next life. All we see is what's in front of us. All we see is what's in our eyesight and what's in our past. But that's so limited. We don't even see in the spiritual realm. We can't see God's angels. We can't see God's workings. We can't see the discussions that take place. We can't see what Jesus is preparing for us, what he's building right now. We can't see any of that. Most of what God's doing, we can't even see it. It's just when you really start to tackle the essence of these types versus try to tackle them, it really starts to make you realize how much you don't know. And it makes you realize that, oh yeah, this power Paul's talking about, it's at work within us. It's pretty powerful. It's pretty great. It's pretty amazing.

       Of course, we don't want to forget we can talk about prayer. And that all ties into this. We pray for things and we have no clue how those prayers are helping people that we don't even know. Helping the leaders of our country. That's an easy example when we pray for the governmental leaders. I mean, we might see things come about in the news, and we might try to attribute that to our prayers. But really, it's way more than that. Most of the things we pray for, like as pertains to our leaders, we never even see what God is doing. By that, I mean we never see it because God's doing one good thing after another in the higher-ups. And because most of us aren't in the higher-ups, we don't see the activities that are going on that are a result of our prayers. That's what I mean. It's not that we don't see it because God's not doing anything. But that's the amazing thing, is that God's doing so much.

       And that, as Paul said, verse 18 again: “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 that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (ESV). Just incredible stuff, guys. So verse 21: “to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (ESV).

       The point of all these things that we've been just talking about is that God gets the glory from all these successes. And he talks about the church, which we all just went over the good things that we do through prayer, through our works that bring God glory, that allow God to manifest his love and power. But it also says, “and in Christ Jesus.” Well, when Christ was here on the earth, he succeeded over Satan. He had success over Satan. That is to God's glory, to God's grand love and greatness. And that God was loving enough to send his own son to die for our sins and to gain victory over Satan. To give us the ability to have life now and forever in the future. I mean, just incredible stuff. It shows how great and wise God is. It shows his tremendous love for us, not only now, but it's always going to. That defeat over Satan that Jesus accomplished is forever and ever. So, none of this is temporary. It doesn't stop now. It only gets better and better.

       And the beautiful thing is that anyone today who's listening to this that feels excluded from that, who feels excluded from all this, who doesn't know God, can in fact come into a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ by believing in the work that he accomplished, his death on the cross, his rising from the dead, by putting their trust and faith in that. You, anybody, can become born again, can become a new creation in Christ, can come into a personal relationship with God. Anyone can have that today. If you will just simply believe and experience God's love to its fullest potential.

- Daniel Litton