Transcript
Greetings in Jesus’ name,
It’s time to begin our service this afternoon, and it’s so good to have you here with us. I send you all our love and greetings, and I hope and pray you are doing well.
That song at the opening is one of my most favorite songs. How about your heart? There is a line in there: How would you feel if your heart had a window on each side? What would people see if they could look through the window of our heart? Would we need to pull the shades, or could we be happy to let people see into our hearts? I believe that with most of us, if people could see into our hearts, they would see the love of God because that is what drives our lives. You and I, and people who have come from our background, we are people driven by great zeal and passion for God. There was never a lack of passion and zeal to serve God in the hearts of most people from our background. If anything, we were fanatical zealots, and I suppose some people might still think we are. But I have never felt bad about a passion and a desire to serve God, and I hope you don’t either. That is a good thing. And if you have a passion and a desire to serve God, it’s a good thing that you have. I want you to be encouraged in that.
We are back in the book of Ephesians today, and I invite you to turn your Bible there with me. We will be starting to examine the second half of chapter 3. I will start reading at verse 13 and go down to the end of the chapter. Paul writes:
13 So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. 14 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 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, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 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, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3 English Standard Version
Let us pray:
Lord God,
I thank you for the Bible and I thank you for the Holy Spirit, our teacher. We live in a day when there are false preachers in the world who tell us they are special preachers and they alone can rightly divide the word of truth and interpret scripture. Lord, we know anyone who says a thing like that has already given us the clear sign that we should immediately ignore everything they say. Lord, we pray you silence the mouths of such false and wicked deceivers. There is no mediator between man and God, except Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is our teacher, and we are all entitled to open the Bible and read the Word of God directly from the source. We know the entire body of Christ is a Holy Priesthood. We know that men who place themselves into the role of the Holy Spirit are antichrist, and it was never your intention for preachers to usurp the role of God. Father, we come to you humbly, and we ask that you speak to each of our hearts. May we know the truth, for we know the truth will set us free. Bless our reading today and grant us understanding. We ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Introduction
Introduction:
Well, praise the Lord!
I had someone ask me here a couple of weeks ago, when I first did the video feed, why I don’t always close my eyes when I pray. And it’s really a very simple answer. I am watching all the livestream panels on the screen, and if I close my eyes, I won’t know if everything is working or not. So, it’s really that simple. Otherwise, I would pray with my eyes closed, as that is my normal practice. But you can do as you see best. As far as I know, there is not actually anything in the Bible about praying with your eyes closed. Praying with our eyes closed is just a custom we observe, the same as bowing our head. It’s just a custom, and it’s a perfectly fine custom. And maybe I will say this: the places we come from, they are all against traditions, so they say. But the truth is, a whole lot of what we did in the places we come from really was nothing but traditions and customs—bowing your head, closing your eyes in prayer. Those are just traditional customs, and I still observe those customs today, and you are welcome to do so too. But they are not instructions from scripture; they are just traditional customs. It is a way we show respect and reverence in our culture. And so, there is a little tidbit for you before we even really start our lesson.
We have another wonderful passage of scripture to look at today. And going through the scripture like this, each passage, one after another, is a good way to approach scripture. Because when we do it thoroughly, we can’t really skip anything. We have to look at each verse and confront each verse and what it says, maybe even harder verses or challenging ones. But when you preach and study verse by verse, you have to cover them all, and that keeps us balanced. It keeps us looking at the whole scope of scripture rather than getting stuck on one point.
And that is really where fundamentalist preachers go wrong. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the fundamentals, but fundamentalist preachers end up ignoring a large part of the Bible. They have certain parts that, to them, are fundamental, and that’s all they ever talk about. And by leaving out large parts of the Bible, they end up presenting a distorted picture.
Imagine you have one hundred sermons, and 75 of them are about the second coming, and the other twenty-five are about living a holy life. Those are two important fundamental things, but so much is left out that people listening to that end up with a totally distorted view of the Christian faith. And that is exactly what has happened in the places we come from. They had zeroed in on certain fundamentalist things, and they have utterly neglected all the rest.
So, when we approach scripture like I have been doing, and like most preachers do in healthy churches, you end up looking at the fullness of the Bible instead of the fundamentalist shortlist.
In the places we come from, most of them don’t even preach from the Bible. They preach out of spoken word books. But those who do preach out of the Bible, they never just take scripture and preach it like the apostles and the writers laid it out. They always jump all over the place, or they just pick one verse and then go off the deep end with it and ignore the context of it all. And they will tell you that is rightly dividing the word of truth. But rightly dividing the word of truth has nothing to do with jumping all over the place and taking passages of scripture out of context. That is just plain foolishness when they say something like that. It’s line upon line, precept upon precept, one verse after the other, and then here a little and there a little. The jumping around, just a little of that, but most of it should be line upon line, precept upon precept. That is how the Bible even tells us to go about it.
So when you approach scripture in a straightforward plain text reading, you can line things up in a clear way, and you don’t end up with all these hair-brained ideas that these false apostles and false prophets in the world today are always coming up with.
And as we come here to the second half of chapter 3, let me just remind us all of the context of where we are overall in the book of Ephesians. The first three chapters of Ephesians are Paul dealing with doctrines. You find that in all his epistles; he starts out with doctrine, and doctrine is about the right way to think about things. Doctrine is for our mind. And then after he finishes with the doctrine, he goes to practice or practical application. In light of the doctrines, he tells us then how to act and behave. We are right on the point of transition here; chapter 4 is where Paul will transition over to practical application. But here at the end of chapter 3, Paul is wrapping up his explanation of doctrine, and as he does, he closes with a prayer, and it is a very wonderful prayer.
And we are going to start examining this prayer today, and I think it will take at least a couple of lessons to look at it. And today I want to look mainly just at the very first half of it.
Paul’s Suffering
Now, if you remember from a couple of lessons ago, the apostle Paul was sitting in a jail cell when he wrote this letter. He was locked up in some sort of a prison or incarceration at this time. For a portion of that time, Paul was locked up in a dungeon. But then, for another portion of the time, it was more like a house arrest situation where Paul was living in a home and just had restrictions on where he could go and what he could do. You can read about that in the book of Acts.
Given that Paul had paper and pen and was writing letters and sending them to different churches, it would give us an indication here that Paul was probably not sitting in a dungeon when he wrote this letter. Paul was probably during the phase of his house arrest when he wrote this letter to the Ephesians. So, in some ways, things had gotten better for Paul. I think we would all agree that house arrest is better than the dungeon.
But whatever the case, Paul was going through a bad ordeal with a lot of suffering in the months before he wrote this letter to the Ephesians. And as Paul begins to open this prayer, he gives a brief mention about his condition. And it is an important statement. Let me read verse 13. Paul said,
“So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.”
Now, we can understand why Paul would write this. No doubt, the Ephesians were very concerned about Paul. In fact, part of the reason Paul wrote this letter was to let the Ephesians know they should not be worried or be afraid because it would be very natural for the Ephesians to be concerned about this situation. Paul was in jail for being a Christian. Well, what about them? They could be next. And no doubt, that thought was going through some of their minds, and they were following Paul’s situation as best they could because, in many ways, Paul’s situation was a harbinger for what the rest of them were going to have to face.
A lot of people who were reading Paul’s letter there in Ephesus, it would only be a few years later, and they would be experiencing the same sort of persecutions themselves. And in a lot of ways, Paul is setting an example for the Ephesians, and he is telling them, “Don’t lose heart.” I like that phrase because as we read through Paul’s prayer here, he is very concerned with the hearts of the Ephesians. He is concerned with how they are feeling, and he is concerned with what is in their hearts. And he is encouraging them, and this whole prayer, at its deepest level, is an encouragement to the Ephesians and a prayer for their hearts.
Because the life of a Christian is not always sunshine and roses. Paul was suffering, he says so right there. And it is a common thing that Christians suffer in this world. They can suffer persecutions from religious fanatics; they can suffer health problems, financial setbacks, relationship difficulties. There are lots of ways that Christians can suffer. And the witness of scripture is that suffering is not something anyone is immune to. Serving Christ does not make us immune from suffering.
And we realize that as long as we are living in a fallen world, as long as there is sin in the world, then there will also be suffering because suffering is the natural consequence of sin. Sin always leads to suffering; sin always produces suffering in the world. And that is what is happening to Paul. He is suffering because of the wickedness that is in the world, and we are not immune from it either because Jesus was not immune from it.
Jesus said, “If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you too. The servant is not above his master.” And Jesus said, when he preached the sermon on the mount, he said, “Rejoice when men hate you and revile you for my sake, for great is your reward in heaven.”
And that is exactly what we see Paul hitting on here in verse 13. Paul is rejoicing; Paul is thinking about the glory to come. And notice that he is not rejoicing because he is suffering. That would be foolish. Nobody likes to suffer; no one likes hardship. I sure don’t. I tell you what; there is one thing I really hate—I hate suffering. I am sure you feel the same way. Anyone who enjoys the actual experience of suffering—I think they call that being a masochist. And that is a mental disorder. And if you enjoy suffering, you need to seek medical care; that is a sign you have a mental condition.
But it’s not the suffering itself that is making Paul rejoice here. Paul is not rejoicing because of the suffering itself, but he is rejoicing because of what the suffering means. If we are suffering for the name of Jesus, it means great is our reward in heaven. Paul is not rejoicing for the suffering; he is rejoicing for the reward.
Suffering is nothing to rejoice about, but our reward in heaven—that is something to rejoice about. And I think that is a perspective that can help any of us when we suffer in this life. Suffering is no fun, but if we see it as a sign of our reward in heaven, then it helps make it bearable. It helps keep our heart in a healthy place, which is exactly what Paul is praying for here. He is saying, “Don’t lose heart. This suffering will all lead to glory—glory in the world to come.”
When we are suffering, we can seek to put ourselves in the frame of mind that Paul had. We can try to see that light at the end of the tunnel. That, on the other side of the suffering, is glory in heaven. And seeing that light at the end of the tunnel can help us. Amen.
A Prayer for the Heart
And as we come to verse 14, we can see this is what led the apostle Paul to pray this prayer. He starts out saying,
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,
So this is the reason he is praying this prayer because he knows, as hard as it is, this suffering will lead to glory in the world to come. And Paul is humbling himself down. Instead of resisting and fighting, he is kneeling down on his knees. He is bowing himself before God and his plan. And he is accepting that, if he has to suffer for a time, then that is what it will be. He is humbling himself to accept his lot. And he is praying for people to not lose heart over the suffering that is in the world. So desiring that the Ephesians not lose heart over his suffering is what is causing Paul to pray this prayer. Keep that in mind.
And look how Paul describes God in the next verse:
15 [The Father] from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
God is the father of every family. That is what we can take away from verse 15. Every family in heaven and on earth – God is their Father. You know, there is a sense in which we only become children of God when we are saved. There is a sense in which we only become the children of God when we are adopted into his family. We talked about that back in chapter 1. And often, that is how we use the phrase child of God. We use it to mean people who have been adopted through Jesus Christ. But, as we see in this verse, there is a sense in which all of mankind and every family are children of God. There is a sense in which we are all one big brotherhood of man. And Paul here is acknowledging the universal fatherhood of God in verse 15. And I want to make sure I point that out to you. God is the father of all – even the ones who do not recognize him as father. He is still their father, in the sense that he created them.
So remember that. God is the father of all creation because he is its creator. There is a universal fatherhood of God. But that is different than the fatherhood of God that comes through the adoption of Jesus Christ. Those are two different things. Because there are a lot of people, they are God’s children. God created them. But they don’t recognize him as their father. They have not been adopted through Jesus Christ. And they still need that in their life. They need to know the grace of God so they can be delivered from their sins and receive eternal life. It’s not enough to merely be created by God. We need to know him as a father through the adoption of Jesus Christ as well.
Inner Man
Let’s read on now. Verse 16 starts to tell us what Paul is praying for. And remember, Paul is praying this prayer because he is concerned about the Ephesians losing heart over his suffering. So Paul says in verse 16,
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,
Paul is concerned with their hearts. He is asking for God to strengthen their inner being, their inner man. That is their spiritual man, their souls. We understand that as people, we have an inner man and an outer man. And that doesn’t mean we are two people in one body. But it’s two parts of ourselves. I have a body of flesh and blood, and that is me. And I also have a spirit in my body, a soul – and that is me too. The outer man is literal, it’s physical. You can see it and you can touch it. But the inner man is hidden, it’s invisible, it’s not something you can see with your eyes. It’s not even something you can really detect with any sort of scientific instrument. It is a hidden invisible part of ourselves – our spirits – our inner man. And that is the part of a man or a woman that Paul is praying for here.
Paul is praying for the inner man. He is praying for the spiritual man. He is praying for the invisible part of us.
And I think that is important to recognize here in Paul’s prayer. As much as we recognize what this prayer is, it’s important that we should also recognize what this prayer is not.
And it is a prayer for the spiritual inner man. And it’s not a prayer for the physical outer man.
Paul is not praying for good health. He is not praying for financial prosperity. He is not praying to be miraculously released from being a prisoner. Paul is not praying for anything like that in this prayer. This is a prayer for the inner man. It is a prayer for the heart.
And, of course, there is nothing wrong to pray for God for those other sorts of physical things. There is nothing wrong with asking God to give you good health, or anything like that. But I want to point out, that is not what Paul is praying for here. What we see Paul doing here is what Jesus said on the sermon on the mount. Jesus said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you.” When we put the kingdom of God first, when we put his righteousness first, the rest will just fall into place, as the Lord would have it. And we really see that thought embedded in verse 16. Paul is asking for the inner man to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit. And that takes us down the path of the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, patience, humbleness. When we read this prayer of Paul, it takes us down that line of thought. And those things are the righteousness of the kingdom of God. The righteousness of the kingdom is the fruit of the spirit. That is what Jesus himself explained several times in the gospel. And the fruit of the spirit shows forth as holiness in our lives. The Holy Spirit bears the holy fruit. And that is holiness.
It’s being Christ-like. It is developing a character that is like Jesus. It is being a partaker of the divine nature. It’s Christ in us. That is where verse 16 is pointing. Let me read it again.
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,
These are the riches of his glory. These are the riches which moth and rust cannot corrupt. These are the riches that a Christian is pursuing. It’s not silver and gold and houses and lands. But it is the riches of his glory. It is those things which never fade away. And we know that prophecy, and tongues, and miracle, and knowledge, and all things of a material possession. All those things fade away; they will all cease. But love, joy, peace, faith, hope – those things are forever. They will never cease. And that is what Paul is praying for here. He is praying for the riches of the kingdom of heaven. The riches of his glory.
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,
You see, it is the spirit that brings us these things. The fruit of the spirit – comes from the spirit. It is the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, at work in our inner being, that brings us these riches of the kingdom of heaven.
Heaven and earth will pass away. But these sorts of riches will never pass away. And they are treasures of the heart. Treasures of our inner being. And Paul brings that home in verse 17.
He says
Christ in the Heart
17 So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…
This verse 17 has so much in it; I am going to have to have a second message next week where we will look at the rest of it. But we are going to stop mid-verse today. Paul has brought this prayer down to verse 17, where he really gets right to the very nub of what he is praying for. He is praying for Christ to dwell in their hearts.
And, if we look closely at these words, that word “dwell” is the same as the word “live.” So you could say it either way. The prayer is for Christ to settle down and to dwell or to live in our hearts.
And you know, there are things which are a bit mysterious here, or at least, they are mysterious to me. There are things I wonder about this still.
But notice Paul is not saying he is praying for the Holy Spirit to dwell in their hearts. He is praying for Christ to dwell in our hearts. He is praying for Jesus Christ to dwell in our hearts. I just want to make sure you catch that. And Paul is saying that Christ will dwell in the heart through the Holy Spirit; we notice this back in verse 16. So there is a way in which the Holy Spirit – which is already in them – will bring forth Christ to dwell in their hearts too. And, I believe part of that is speaking about the transformative work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is molding us into the image of Jesus Christ. And Christ can live through us – by the power of the Holy Spirit. I believe that is a part of what Paul is saying here.
Paul’s prayer here is not a prayer for the Ephesians to receive salvation or the Holy Spirit into their lives. They already have that. This is a prayer for the power of the Holy Spirit to strengthen them so that Christ will live in their hearts. It’s something more than salvation. Paul is praying that the Ephesians receive a deepening relationship with Christ. A relationship that has come to the point that Christ is in their very heart.
And when something is in your heart – that means you love it. My children are in my heart; I love my children. My wife is in my heart; I love my wife. There are different things we can have in our heart. And that speaks of love. And that is very clear as you read the rest of verse 17.
That he might dwell in our hearts.
And bring this back to the context of Paul’s prayer. Paul is suffering. He is a prisoner, and he is going to die. He is going to be executed. And many of the Ephesian people who are getting this letter, they are not far behind. Many of them are going to be arrested and executed before much longer themselves. Paul is, in that sense, a dead man walking. And quite a lot of the Ephesians reading this letter are in the same spot. They are also going to end up executed and fed to lions and everything else before this is over with.
And that is something you and I, I don’t think we could hardly relate to it. Most of us have never faced anything near that difficult as being arrested and executed for believing in Jesus.
And Paul here is praying for them to have a deep love of Christ in their hearts. A love of Christ that will allow them to endure all the hardships and all the trials and all the persecutions that are starting to pour on them like a flood. Fixing their eyes on Jesus, letting him be in their hearts.
And it truly takes the Holy Spirit at work in our lives to bring that about. It takes the Holy Spirit working in us, bearing the fruit of the Spirit, to bring these things into our life. They don’t come immediately when we first come to saving faith. It takes time. And we can’t bear our fruit. Jesus said, “I am the vine, and you are branches. The vine cannot bear fruit on its own. It takes the substance and the nutrients which come from the vine in order to produce the fruit.” It takes having a relationship of connection with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit working through that to grow a deep love of Christ in our hearts.
And that love of Christ, the very thing Paul is praying for here because that sort of love will transform the lives of everyone who experiences it.
It takes a divine work of God for you to be able to say, “Take this whole world but give me Jesus.” It takes a divine act of God for you to be able to say that and truly mean it from deep within your inner being.
Take this whole world, but give me Jesus.
You can’t make yourself love someone or something. I don’t know if you ever have tried that, but it really is impossible. You either love something, or you don’t. And there is not really anything you can do to change your own affections in that way.
I am that way. There are things I could care less about. I couldn’t make myself love it if I tried. There are people I know, very nice people; they love ice curling. And I think that’s perfectly fine if you like ice curling; that’s a good hobby. But I don’t love ice curling. And no amount of anything I do is ever going to change that. It would take a miracle to make me love ice curling. I could go watch it; I could do stuff with it, but I wouldn’t love it. In my heart, it would just be a drudgery.
And that is really how all love is. That is a really simple example. You just can’t make yourself love something or someone. That is not how it works.
And how does that happen? What is it that makes us love? It is a mysterious thing, isn’t it? It’s not really something that we understand. Of all the men or women in the world, what is it that made you fall in love with the one you married? Or when you bring little children into the world, what is it that makes those parents love those children so much? It’s not something that you can really understand. But it’s there; it just happens. You didn’t make yourself love your children – it just happened on its own accord. You didn’t make yourself love anyone really – it always happens of its own accord, in that way.
And it’s just the same with loving Jesus. It’s just the same as having him be in your heart, in that way. You can’t make yourself love Jesus. You can’t make someone else love Jesus either. It would be like trying to make me love ice curling. It’s not going to happen. You can’t do it. It’s something that has to come of its own accord. It takes an act of the Holy Spirit to truly make someone love Jesus.
That is why Paul says in 1st Corinthians, “Above all other things, desire love.” We should desire love. Tongues, and prophecy, and mysteries, and all those things – they have their place. But above all else, desire love. That is the thing we need God to put in our heart above all else – the love of God.
I mentioned at the opening how, the song “How About Your Heart,” it’s always good to examine our hearts from time to time. And ask ourselves, is Christ in there? Is the love of Christ at the heart of our being? Is the love of Christ the center around which all the rest revolves? Because you know, that is also what the heart is. It is the center of our being. It is what drives and defines our life.
And if we look into our hearts, do we find the love of Christ there? Do we find the love there as it ought to be? That is what Paul is praying for here. Paul wants the love of Christ to be at the very heart of their being. Paul wants the Ephesians to make sure the love of Christ is strong in their lives and right at their core. Because there is trouble on the horizon. There is a great persecution about to unfold on them all. And Paul is looking into his own heart and his own life. And he sees that it is the love of Christ in his heart that has enabled him to withstand all the trials he faced.
Its Paul who said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” It is Paul who said, “I am dead, nevertheless, I live, yet not I, but Christ who is in me.”
What is it? It was Christ in Paul’s heart. It was Christ at the center of Paul’s life. It was the love of Christ that made those things true for Paul.
It was the love of Christ in his heart that allowed Paul to endure it all. And so he is praying the Ephesians will have the same blessing. He is praying that the love of Christ will be right in their hearts too. Because if it is, it will enable them to endure just like he did.
Sometimes we can make things like this really hard or really complicated or really mystical in some way that is impossible to comprehend.
But it’s not really that way at all. It’s really simple. When you love something or someone – that defines your life. Love plays a defining role in who we are and what we do.
You protect what you love. You fight for what you love. You go above and beyond for what you love. It is just the natural way of a man and a woman to do that.
And if you love Christ, if the love of Christ is in your heart, then you are going to go all the way for Christ. Not because someone made you, not because of some drudgery, but because of love.
And if we have the love of Christ in our hearts, we can do those things too.
Love and Faith
With that in mind, let me read these verses to you again:
13 So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory. 14 For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 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, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, [may be] rooted and grounded in love
Now I want to point out to you that loving Christ and having faith in Christ are not the same thing. Faith in Christ is what saves us, but the love of Christ is what grounds us and roots us. It’s two different things. Our love for Christ is like the roots of a plant; they go deep into the ground, and it’s not easy to pull up something that is rooted in. And that is what this love of Christ does; it grips ahold, and it doesn’t let go.
You might not love Christ as you ought; your roots might not be very deep yet. It takes time for roots to grow. You might not love him today as deeply as you will after you have walked with him for a few years. But it’s not your love of Christ that saves you; it is your faith in him which saves you.
John wrote that he saved us, not because we loved him but because he first loved us. You are not saved because of how much or how little you love him; you are saved because you had faith in him as your savior. If he saved us because we loved him, then we would be in trouble. But he first loved us and offered to save us by faith alone. And when we walk with him, by faith, it will produce a deepening love with time. Love is something that grows within us, and I think we can see that in verse 16. Because there, Paul talks about a strengthening, something that is already there, getting stronger. And that is exactly what is happening as we walk with Christ; that relationship and that love strengthen with time until we could say Christ is truly in our heart, Christ is truly at the very center of our lives.
And to know him is to love him. That is how it is with Jesus. To truly love him, you have to get to know him, and you don’t get to know a person in a moment’s time. There is love at first sight, but there is also a much deeper love that only comes with time. Someone who has been married a long time would understand that. If you are young, you might not be able to know what I mean because you have just not lived long enough to experience it. There are some things you can only learn through experience; you can read about it, you can mentally have knowledge of it, but until you experience it, it’s just theoretical.
But when you have walked with someone for a time and developed a deep relationship, there is a deeper love there that goes much beyond the love at first sight which some people experience. And that deep love is a powerful thing.
There is an old commercial on TV. The guy would say, “I would walk a mile for a camel cigarette.” It’s because he loved camel cigarettes so much that he was willing to walk a mile to have one. When we are grounded in Christ, we will walk a mile for him because that is what we are doing; it’s Christ who is waiting for us at the end of our journey. Our reward will be in glory with him.
And today, we are not facing a coming persecution like the Ephesians were. I am not looking or expecting us to be locked up and executed for being Christians. There is nothing like that going on here in the nation I live in. But in life, we will face hardships and difficulties; we will face challenges. And this prayer of the apostle Paul is one we can turn to.
It’s a prayer for Christ to be in our hearts because Paul knew the love of Christ would give us the strength to make it through. And as we close this lesson today, let me end with this little encouragement.
For you and me, it’s not a love of the world that made us leave the mess we came from. What made us leave the mess behind was our love of Jesus Christ. It was our love of Christ that saw us through it all, and it is still the love of Christ that motivates us today.
And it’s not vomit, it’s not mud, it’s not milk, and it’s certainly not foolishness. It is the love of God in our hearts. It is the love of truth in our bosoms, and it is a pure and honest desire to do what is right and pleasing in his sight. That is what has led us to where we are today.
The love of Christ in our hearts will get us through any trial we face because our eyes are fixed on Jesus. Amen.
Prayer
Let me close in prayer.
Lord God, I thank you for being so good to us. When we were in a doomsday cult, you had mercy on us. When we did not think Jesus was enough to save us, you opened our understanding that being justified by his blood, we shall be delivered from all wrath. You helped us to see it wasn’t a message of the hour, every hour on the hour which was going to deliver us, but it was Jesus. And he was there all the time; he loved us, even when we didn’t love him as we ought.
Lord, may I pray today the prayer of Paul that you would strengthen all of my brothers and sisters by the power of the Holy Spirit, that the love of Christ may abound more and more in their hearts and that by it, they may be strengthened for every trial and difficulty that may lay ahead. Give them peace, restore their joy, and heal their hearts, souls, and minds. I ask it most humbly in Jesus’ name. Amen.