Today from Chuck Swindoll and Chuck Swindoll. Chuck continues his study in Ephesians chapter 1, beginning at verse 15. In this passage, we're provided a model from Paul on how to pray, and to do so in a manner that reflects the promises of God. Chuck titled today's message, Praying Like We Mean It. How about the Apostle Paul saying to you people in Ephesus, I make mention of you, I make mention of you in my prayers. What did he pray?
Verse 17, verse 18, verse 19. This is what he mentioned, and he prayed like he meant it. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.
That's great. I pray, as I think about you people in Ephesus, in a culture that's idolatrous, in a lifestyle that's licentious, surrounded by the majority who are listening to Rome, and the emperor taking their cues from him, I pray that you will come to a full knowledge of God. How do I get to a full knowledge of God? How do I get to a deeper understanding of the workings of God? Look at this 17th verse, through a spirit of wisdom and revelation. A spirit of wisdom and revelation. See, I pray, I make mention of you in my prayers, verse 17, that God may give you wisdom, revelation that leads to the knowledge of him. Now, let me show you verse 18.
It goes even further. He's still praying. The first was that they would have a knowledge of him, a fuller knowledge of God. I pray then, the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that they might know, look at the word know again, I've got a little arrow pointed up to knowledge of him, and know, here it's about knowledge, that you will know what is the hope of his calling. What are the riches of the glory of his inheritance, that you may know what is the surpassing greatness of his power toward us who believe.
You know what I think? I don't think you can know any of the three without prayer. I think we need to request these three things. If we're going to get them, the channel is through prayer. Not a now I'll lay me down to sleep prayer. Not the traditional prayer you memorized when you were eight or nine and you're still using it.
Not that. This is a prayer that says in simple terms, help, help. I've lived years of my life clueless, spiritually speaking. I've been selfish. I've kept score. I've held grudges. My eyes are horizontally focused on people. I've got a list of folks that I'd be happy if I never saw again. Stop. Stop. Lord, I'm tired of living like everybody around me is living, and I pray that my heart will be enlightened so that I might know these three things and it will change me.
What are they? Well, one has to do with his calling. How is it Eugene Peterson words this? So that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do. Do you know what he's calling you to do? Don't tell me what your job is.
Don't tell me your occupation. It may be part of it. It may not. Do you know what he's calling you to do? Not if you haven't prayed. Not if you haven't had your mind and will and emotions fully open to what he is calling you to do. It may be very surprising. I can tell you from experience.
It is surprising. You just think you know, and it isn't necessarily what comes naturally or what brings you most comfort or the easiest path. That's the way we naturally walk. There's nothing divine about that.
Everybody wants his own comfort zone sustained. But he said, so that you will know, meaning you don't know. So I pray that you will know the hope of his calling.
I want you to do a little homework for me on this one, okay? Some of you have in the back of your Bibles a concordance, which is an alphabetical listing of the words in the scriptures. That's a small concordance. Others of you who are really serious about your faith, I want you to buy a biblical concordance, okay? Some of you are looking at me like, get a life, Chuck.
No, I have a life. You need to get one. You need to own, you need to own a nice heavy volume, has no pictures in it, isn't big print, a nice heavy volume called a concordance. Seriously, if you don't have one, it is next to your Bible the most important book you could own, a concordance. In it is an alphabetical listing of the words used all the way through the Bible. And if you get a good one, it's called an exhaustive concordance.
I didn't say exhausting, I said exhaustive. Every word in the Bible is listed in a good concordance. Get one.
Find the letter C. Still with me, right? Pick up call and calling and do a study on that. If you don't have time for the whole Bible, take just the New Testament. You will be amazed. He asks that we would know the hope of our calling, what it is God really wants us to do, and I don't think you can do that without a serious study of call or calling. Just a few of them. He has called us to be set apart to Him. I found that in my concordance. He has called us to holiness. He has called us to a life of freedom. Not being captured by others' opinions. A life of freedom.
Freedom to obey God. He has called us into one body. He has called us to His life of peace. And you know a surprising one in 1 Peter 5? He has called us to suffering. Wait a minute.
That's right. That means the next time you seriously suffer, you'll realize it's part of His calling. That makes all the difference in the world in your affliction. When you realize that God, the sovereign Father, who oversees every detail of your life and knows every hair on your head, cares about what you are going through, even the suffering, it will put a whole new dimension in the pain. Pain knocked upon my door and said that she had come to stay, and though I wouldn't welcome her, I bade her go away.
She entered in. The poet goes on to describe the wrestling of pain. More pain came, and she says a little later on, and I said, No, pain is here.
There is not room for more. And then I heard his tender voice. Tis I, be not afraid. And from the moment he entered in, oh, the difference he made. When the Lord Jesus enters into the pain of your suffering and sorrow, it changes your whole attitude from resistance to acceptance. Then you start to learn. Then you start to grow. I've never met a soul who was a wise individual who wasn't scarred from pain.
You going through tough times? It's the journey toward wisdom. The psalmist says he keeps our tears in a bottle.
Isn't that a great thought? For some of us, it's a jug. For a few, it's a little flask.
It's a little tube. But you're not through yet. You're called to suffering.
God didn't make a mistake. You're not out of His will, necessarily. You may be in the nucleus of His will with all the pain you're going through.
I pray that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened so you'd know that. It gives hope when you realize your calling. And you'd also know what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance.
You know what we have to look forward to? Talk about encouragement. We have an inheritance that is imperishable and undefiled and unfading, waiting in heaven for us, 1 Peter 1.4. Among that inheritance is seeing the Savior in all of His glory. It is being rewarded for every act done with a pure motive. It is being eternally delivered from the adversary and his dark, evil ways. It includes crowns that will be given to you when you stand before Him at the judgment, and you will cast them at His feet in worship. That's part of your inheritance that keeps you on the bed of affliction with a smile. There is a special reward, even the crown of life, for those who suffer for Him.
Here's a third one. I pray that your eyes will be enlightened so that you will know, verse 19, what is the surpassing greatness of His power. Look at those words, surpassing greatness. Now, you know I wasn't going to jump over that word. This is a great word. Huper ballo. We get our word hyper from it. Ballo, we get the word ball from it.
Think of a ball thrown high, thrown up, to throw over. It means immeasurably great, profoundly powerful, magnificently mighty. Paul sort of accumulates the words. It's an altogether Pauline expression.
No other writer of the Scriptures uses it but Paul. It means to go to excess. We get our word hyperbole from it. We talk about a mile high ice cream cone. That's a hyperbole. It's a ridiculous extreme to get across the point of how good they taste.
It would be so good right now. You think of his power as surpassing, meaning you can't measure them. You know how Paul uses the word? Paul's persecuting the saints when he was lost. He did it without measure.
He used huper ballo. For the abundance of the revelation God gave him in 2 Corinthians 12, it was abundance. It was so much he couldn't even measure. The stripes he received from the lash, he said, were above measure.
You know Paul was beaten so many times he lost count? Huper ballo. The exceeding riches of God's grace, huper ballo.
The love of Christ that passes knowledge, huper ballo. Here it is, the power that you might come to know his power in all of its greatness. But it's not power like, try to imagine I'm strong right now, okay?
It's not that kind of Charles Atlas. It's not that kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger power. That's a human power that's only as strong as the beat of a heart.
As soon as their hearts stop, they die. No, this is a dunamis, dynamic power. We get our word dynamo from it. The surpassing greatness of the dynamo that comes from the indwelling Christ. And some of the most soft-spoken, sweet-spirited of God's saints are like human dynamos when you get beneath the surface.
You know how they got there? Prayer. It doesn't come naturally. It's not the result of positive thinking. This is not about just mind control.
This is not about that at all. That's all human. These are gifts that come from the Father through the Son by the power of the Spirit to us. Our eyes are enlightened and we realize we're not victims any longer. We're victors. We're not helpless.
We're hopeful. We're not at the enemy's mercy. We are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
Romans 8, 31 to 39, more than conquerors. How do we tap into this? Praying like we mean it. You say, well, I'm not sure I can remember all of this.
Go to Ephesians 1 and pray verses 15 to 19. He took notes for you, so you've got them right there. Just read them back to him. Just wear the print off the page.
Just run your fingers over those words over and over again. How do you think a missionary stays on the field when nobody turns to Christ? How could William Carey stay over 40 years in India and not know a soul coming to Christ until toward the end of his life? Looking back, we call him the father of modern missions. He had the dynamo.
How could Hudson Taylor stay in inland China having buried more than one wife there? How could he do it? There's a dynamo at work in him.
How could people found these great schools and have the vision to start ministries all over the world? There is a dynamo that God gives, and it won't go to rest. It won't stop beating. It won't leave. You begin to pray like this, it transforms you.
You lay hold of God and you get a greater knowledge of him through wisdom and revelation, and then the enlightenment comes from the heart, and you begin to see your calling and your inheritance, and you tap into the power. I'm going to tell you my story again. Okay?
I know. I've told it before. When you get my age, you think, I'm going to tell a story and they've never heard this before, and you've told it several times. So I want you to know, I know you've heard it, but I'm going to tell it again because it's a story on me and on us, not your story, and so you're safe. Next Sunday I'll use your stuff, but this Sunday I'm using mine.
Nope. Let me tell you about mine. Sitting pretty in the early 1990s, ministry was going real well, Insight for Living, the radio growing, people responding. It was wonderful. Church was going great, great ministry, harmony, marvelous staff. We'd cultivated our relationships, some of them with me more than 20 years. We had been close, many of them more than 15 years. It was just terrific, and I get this letter from Dallas in 92.
I get a phone call first, and they want to know, it's the chairman of the board of the seminary, and the current president, Dr. Campbell, called me and said, we'd like you to consider coming, and I thought, get a life. Come on, you guys. No, they didn't laugh, and I said, well, that's nice thinking. I appreciate it.
That's way out of my league. I mean, I was thinking, I'm so comfortable here. I've got it put together, happy wife, for the most part, and I've got four children and all the grandchildren around, and almost everybody's living there under that area, and I'm thinking there's no way. So they called again. They wouldn't leave it alone, and I finally thought, I need to write them a letter. So I wrote a great letter.
I spent several hours on it, and two pages, airtight, full of great logic. Wrong, but it was a good letter, and I sent it to them, and they didn't accept it. They said, that's fine.
We know where you're coming from, but we're convinced otherwise. I thought, these men need more to do than that, and so I'll save you all the stuff, but I got on the search committee on the board. They put me on the search committee since I wouldn't come. They said, well, maybe you could help us find the person, and fine, I'll find him.
It's easy, you know, and so we sent out letters to our alumni, 8,000 of them, and we asked them to come back with suggestions, and my name was on most of those lists, and I thought, what's the matter with these people out there? And so the search committee said, you know, you need to probably reconsider this, and I thought, no, I'd like that not to be brought up again. Really, I said, I'd appreciate it if that would not, okay, we'll just pray. That's not fair, I thought, you know. So time passes, and I wake up in the middle of the night, and the eyes of my heart began to be enlightened. I didn't, this is not what I wanted.
That's part of the problem. Best things God has for you, you don't want right now. You don't want it. You don't want to go that way, so you write your letter. And I'm thinking, oh, I've already told them no, and I, so I've got my wife, you know, who's thinking, you need to really consider that, I think. Come on, you know, look, I mean, think of what we'd have to give up. She said, when you follow God, you don't give up anything.
Thanks, a lot, very helpful. Long and short of it is, I realized that it was right. And I realized that all of my reasoning was great logic and good human thinking, but it all revolved around preserving what I wanted, my comfort. I mean, why in the world would I ever want to leave something that great?
Because God wanted me to. The answer, it was hard to tell them. Some, I'm sure to this day, don't understand. God bless them.
I love them. But you know what? He had this in mind. Look around. I shake my head every Sunday, I'm amazed every week, not supposed to be this happy.
Fulfilled, full of dreams, a great desire, God's great desire in a whole other direction. Remember that. I am such a poor model of doing this right. So learn from the delay. When I had the brakes on and dragging my feet, I was surrounded by men and women who knew better than I because they were not selfish.
They were open. Had no idea of the people we would find to serve on our staff and where they would come from, how we would get started. I'd never done this before, never, ever done this. It's like Abraham and Sarah having a baby at 90 and 99. I mean, can you imagine them with a crib and infant seat? Who's going to carry this baby? He's got a great, great plan that you just think you know. You just think you know. You don't have a clue, not if you're not praying. But I will warn you, you start to pray and mean it, hang on.
Oh, it would be so great to get letters from you in the future and say, remember that sermon you preached when you knew that? Yeah, let's bow together. Well, we began on our seats sitting here listening to this and now we find ourselves on our knees.
It's a great way to end. We bow our knee to the Lord whom we love. And if you don't love him, you're missing out. How can you possibly restrain the magnet of his love? He's calling you to himself, come, come now, today. And you'll learn a dimension of life and a way to live that will so surpass anything you've ever known before. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose. The forgiveness of your sins and eternal home in heaven, secure in the Spirit, protected from the adversary. Right now, you're open pray.
He's got you. Come to Christ, come on. We do love you, our Lord, and we lift our voice to praise you, to thank you, to give you ourselves afresh and anew. Forgive us for wrestling with you.
Forgive us for running from you when your arms were wide open, inviting us to come on back. We do love you and we do worship you today. Amen. It's exciting to realize at this very moment, men and women around the world are coming to Christ and saying yes to His call. In taking this step toward Him, God is opening the eyes of your heart and giving you a brand new vision for your life. You're listening to Insight for Living and the Bible teaching of pastor and author Chuck Swindoll.
To learn more about this ministry, visit us online at insightworld.org. You'll be glad to know that Chuck has written a commentary on Ephesians that helps us understand and apply more of these promises of God. For instance, in the next chapter of Paul's letter, Ephesians chapter 2, God says this about His children. He says, we are God's masterpiece.
He has created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things He planned for us long ago. Well, to help you dig deeper on your own, we encourage you to add Chuck's commentary on Ephesians to your collection of Bible study tools. In fact, this particular book is paired with Galatians as well.
The format is user-friendly, providing cultural context, practical insight, and even some guidance on how to pray like you mean it as well. To purchase Swindoll's Living Insights commentary on Galatians and Ephesians, give us a phone call. If you're listening in the U.S., that number is 1-800-772-8888, or go online to insight.org slash store. Insight for Living is made possible not through the purchase of books and other resources, but through the generosity of our monthly companions and anyone who gives a donation. Your contributions are helping us reach our long-term goal of bringing God's message of grace to every country in the world through Vision 195. So to become a monthly companion right now or to give a one-time donation, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888 or give online at insight.org. And thank you for your generous support. ? I'm Dave Spiker. Join us again tomorrow when Chuck Swindoll explains how to stay connected to our God.
Be listening Tuesday to Insight for Living. The preceding message, Praying Like We Mean It, was copyrighted in 2000, 2001, and 2009. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2009 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
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