Prayer for the Church

We extol you. We say collectively that you are good and holy and righteous and true. We stand in your presence today asking for your blessing. asking you to guide us. to direct us into all truth.

Seeking your face, we are here because we want to hear from you in your word. We want to worship you. We want to proclaim you as true and holy and good. And Lord, as we gather collectively, I pray that you'll encourage our hearts in you. Bear the burdens that we are weighed down by in our bodies, some with sickness and pain and malady, walk with them, strengthen them, families with emotional burden, trauma, and difficulty, alleviate that.

I pray for strains in relationships this morning that you would heal them. For inner lives that are stalled, that you would start them, that you would be lifted up and glorified in every heart this morning as we turn to you in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thanks for gathering with us.

If you're our guest, my name is Brian. I'm the lead pastor here. We've been studying the book of Ephesians, so we're going to get there in just a minute. You can take your Bibles and turn there. And if you don't have a Bible, They're in the racks in front of you.

Grab it. If you don't own one, keep it. I want to make sure you have a copy of God's Word. We'll be in Ephesians 3, verse 14. Two quick announcements before we get there.

One is we have a need that we need some immediate attention to potentially. And if I don't know who can help us with that, but maybe you are here. We have a summer internship. We have three interns on their way, and we need another house that will host one of those interns for the summer. If you are open and interested to that, your responsibilities are to provide room and board for them.

So you feed them. and they're college students, so they probably eat a lot. And you welcome them and you care for them. There's some other pieces too, just some private space for them, things like that. And Len has all the information.

Len, just raise your hand or stand up. Stand up. There you go. See, I said raise your hand, but you wanted to stand and have everybody. All right.

Len, who directs our internship for the summer, has all the information about that. And he's got all the details on it. But we need at least one more, potentially more, but we would love for you to consider that. It'll be a great blessing. And I think there are some people in here who've done that enough before.

And I think if you talked with them, they'd bear witness to the fact that it was a real blessing for them and their lives. And so just think about that, pray about that. Talk to Len if you've got questions. And then the other is, I just want to give a plug. It's a long ways away.

And I know, and often you men wait to the last minute, but we do have a men's retreat every year. And that men's retreat this year, it's always the weekend after Labor Day.

So it's the weekend after Labor Day. I think that's like the sixth and seventh or something like that. Speaker this year is a guy named Dennis Keating, and it's completely self-serving why we have Dennis Keating. Since I get to pick our speaker each year, I decided I think I'm just going to pick a guy that has meant the world to me and has had great ministry in my life. And Dennis is a retired pastor of a larger church in the San Diego area.

He now has a ministry called Grateful Shepherd Ministries, and he supports pastors, he speaks at conferences, all this stuff. He's a guy that teaches up at E. Cola with me, a Bible college I teach at up on the west coast. But he's just a total Christian stud. And I can't wait to get him out here with you guys.

So I would encourage you, you will really, really enjoy just interacting with Dennis. Put that down men and get dialed up and signed up for that. And get the early bird rate. The way that we sign up at the end of stuff, I think we're going to start charging like quadruple and then just give like a 75% discount if you come early. All right?

You're in Ephesians with me, and we're going to talk about this. It's not exactly the sexiest title ever, Prayer for the Church. But it is exactly what this text is. Probably of any text in the New Testament, it models what to pray for your church. If you open up the hood on a car, And you asked me to stand there and talk to you about what I'm looking at.

I have nothing to offer. Not one thing to say to you. I can tell you the colors of the caps that you take off to fill. I don't even know what goes in the different holes. All right?

I'm a disaster. When it comes to that. But when I stand with somebody next to me, right, who knows cars, my friend in here, Chad Vando, he knows cars.

So if I stand there next to my friend Chad, he looks, he can tell me what everything does. And it can make me feel really stupid. He never does that, but he could make me feel really stupid in a moment. Um sometimes Our lives Are kind of like of that. And what I mean is, our lives and the life of the church.

They're like a car. We are in the church. We're living our lives in the church. But outside of what we're supposed to do... We're not certain how it all works.

And so we can kind of look at something, and we might not know how to pray. For it, because we might not know what it is that is actually happening in its engine and what it is that's actually making it go round. And oftentimes, that can be something that's quite misunderstood and we can misappropriate.

So, what we want to do is think about prayer for the church and just look at a guy who was a master at praying for the church, what he prayed for a local church, and why that is the central piece to pray for the church. And I should say pieces, because as you'll see, this text is kind of like a cascading waterfall. In fact, that's how we're going to unpack it in tears, because not in tears, as in weeping, in tears, T-I-E-R. It just kind of goes from one thing to the next. It's a clause that leads to a clause, that leads to a clause, that leads to a clause.

And it builds, it's almost like we go deeper and deeper and deeper, and we go further down, deeper in, further down and deeper in. as the text goes along.

Okay.

Now As we do, let me just give you a reminder because we've taken a little bit off and so we're back on a page with Ephesians. Remember that in Ephesians 2, verse 1 through 10, the focus was on our individual salvation, and then verses 11 through 22 focused on the church as a whole and how God brings together disparate peoples. The specifics of Ephesians 2 are about Jews and Gentiles and disparate ethnic backgrounds coming together in one body, even though they had animosity toward one another. They come together in one body. And then in verse 1, let your eyes go to chapter 3, verse 1, it says, for this reason, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles.

And then you probably have something like a big dash, and it says, assuming that you. And that's Paul getting on a rabbit trail. And he got on a rabbit trail from verse 2. through uh verse 13. And now, in verse 14, when he says, for this reason, he's going back to what he said.

He's coming back now.

So what we had in the last couple of messages was largely an aside, not that it was irrelevant by any means, it's central to his mission, but exposing and talking about the mystery of this Jew-Gentile coming together in Christ and how Paul was a minister of that. And now we're getting back to building on what he left off with in verse 22, and particularly verses 11 through 22.

So when you read for this reason in verse 14, if you were drawing an arrow for the sake of connection, you would draw it back to 2.11 through 22 because that's where he's picking up his thought.

Now, The whole prayer Goes from verse 14 to 21, and we could kind of lay it out something like this if we wanted the structure of this prayer. It would lay out in what's called a chiastic structure, where it kind of moves. You can think of it as like if you were outlining it, it'd be A, B, C, and then it'd be C, B, A, and it works its way out, right?

So he has this kind of it's like a thematic approach to it.

Now, we're not going to look at all of it this morning. We're going to look through verse 19, and then we're going to come back and just isolate on 20 and 21 next week. But we're going to look at this first part of it, but it moves from glory to power to love to love again, power and glory.

Now, that middle section of love is quite important because one of the things we learn, even from just glancing up here, which you'll see in today's message, is that if there is a central ethic of what characterizes the church, the ethic is love and what that means and what that means. That effects and what it gives result to, and how different kinds of loves and even directions of loves give a kind of synergistic energy that makes the church move forward.

So, a church without love will be completely stagnant. It will be utterly ineffectual. Any notion of power will be vacated, and any concept of operating from or moving toward the glory of God will be sacrificed if love is not at the center of what is supposed to take place.

So, very important that we note that. As we begin, we'll get to these six tiers in kind of a cascading part. And you've got some notes pages there in front of you, but we need to start in verse 14 and 15. We'll get to the prayer itself in verse 16. And just two preliminary comments from verse 14 and 15.

For this reason, Paul says, I bow my knees. Before the Father. The first comment we have to make is just this, it's in language, it's called a metonymy. It's where you use a particular figure of speech as a sort of a placeholder or a pointer to what you mean. He could have just said, for this reason, I pray.

But instead of saying, I pray, He gives a picture. Of how he does it. And as he gives that picture, one of the things you and I should note historically speaking is that Paul, as a Jew, wouldn't normally pray this way. It's not the normal posture for Jew praying. The normal posture is standing up.

And so he is Bowing. Here, if you go to the wailing wall, I've been a couple of times in Jerusalem, you'll see Orthodox Jews there. And as they are praying, most of them, if they're not seated because they're there for a prolonged period at a desk doing some scribal work, they're standing at the wall because that's the normative posture of prayer. But Paul says, I bow.

So this is unusual.

Now, we should note it because there's this level of intensity that's intended by the statement, I bow my knees, instead of him saying, I'm praying. He wants to immediately draw their attention to the idea of an intensity and an intentionality, an intensity of emotion, an intensity of full presence, and an intentionality of focus as he is praying. And he says, I bow my knees before the Father. And then this verse that is perplexing. from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.

What is that? Mean? Does that mean that whenever you that child came out and you the doctor whacked him on the fanny and you said we're calling him Jimmy. That that was the Lord said you call him Jimmy. You called him Jimmy.

Now he's named. Or did the Lord say, thou shalt be the Hurlbut clan? The clan of hurlbutts. Is that the point? That's the naming that's taking place?

There's a play on words in the Greek. Every father, pater, in this case, the way it case ending is, is patera. from which every patria Is the word for family.

Now the word patria, obviously, think paternal. Right? Patristic. Patriarchy. The idea here is an emphasis of family with a view to father.

So you have three options interpretively when we look at this. Because the word is actually in Greek it's pasa, which can mean all, every, or whole. Patria, family, but with an eye to the lineage from a father.

Okay?

So some have taken this to mean fatherhood. I'm not sure that's the best translation. It'd be an unusual translation because that's not how the word's normally translated. It's normally just translated family.

Some say it's every family.

So that would mean your family molecularly, this family molecularly, this family molecularly, each, every one in a sequence. Or it could mean the whole family. in heaven and on earth.

So I think What he's referring to here is the whole family, and the idea is that the people of God. on heaven and on earth. And we might even say that sovereign community that is part of his kingdom, he mentioned angels in the previous text we looked at in 10 and 11, that all of those within the kingdom of God find their allegiance, find their paternal, as it were, authority and lineage from him. The whole family.

So it's a starting point of God's sovereign and God's fatherly felt filial sense of his role over the church. And Paul says, it's in light of that, that's why I'm coming to the Father with a level of intensity here, because I'm coming to him.

Okay?

Now, one little side note. John Stopp makes this note. And I will just say this as a side note, and it'd be fun to talk about this for longer, but we'll be here for too long if I do. And that is that if you saw this as fatherhood, What you should note is that there is something to be said for the fact that fatherhood itself is derivative. of the fatherhood of God.

In the linguistic language, how it plays itself down in this patera patria kind of notion. The idea is that as a dad, you fathers in here, you're very much deriving the dynamics of your role. From God.

Now, that doesn't mean that you walk into the living room and you say, y'all get this right. As far as you're concerned, I'm God. You will be killed probably by lightning. But what it does mean. Is that in a very real sense, if you want to know what it means for you to be a father, You are to look to the character of your Heavenly Father and to recognize that He has asked you to take hold of that role.

So, if your Heavenly Father vacates. His role in your life. then you're free to vacate your role as a father. He never vacates his role in your life. Ever.

He is always present. He is always faithful. He is always on. He is always engaged. He's never so offended that he goes back in and has his hurt feelings in his little pity party for a season.

He doesn't do any of those.

So, sometime when we have time, maybe we'll just have a whole message on being a dad in light of the fatherhood of God. But just take a side note: take your script of being a father from God the Father, who's always loving, always present, and brings the full breadth of his virtue into every space he ever enters.

Okay?

Now You might want to close in prayer, but we're not going to. Verse 16, we begin the cascade. Here's his prayer. That according to the riches of his glory. According to the riches of his glory.

So let's just talk about the phrase, riches of his glory, just for a sec. This is forms the basis of praying. For the church.

Now, when we typically talk about the glory of God, we talk about it in a couple of ways. One is we talk about it in terms of the glory of God is put on display and we worship Him. Right? We see in the biblical text, we've seen his glory. And it brings us to a place of worship.

Vision of wonder, majesty. We also talk about glory as in, we do this, whatever this thing is. For the glory of God, it's the end, it's the goal. But what do we actually mean? Like, if somebody said, What is the glory of God?

What actually It.

So here's the dictionary definition that we can place in some of these different contexts for the glory of God. It's the magnitude. Or we could even maybe use the word, if we didn't mean it by way of physicality, we could use the word weight. Like, how you feel a weighty circumstance, how you feel the weight of existential emotionality, that kind of weight, the gravitas, that kind of, when we use that word, the magnitude or the weight of his perfections. That's what we mean.

When we say the glory of God.

So, to do everything to the glory of God means that we're trying to make those perfections look. amazing to people who don't have eyes to see it. We're trying to clean their lenses to see a vision that never changes. It's not that we make God more glorified in some way. To bring glory to God doesn't mean we jazz him up.

We go now, okay, Lord, you're great, but let's clean you up a little bit for this world and get you looking really sparkling. and put sprinkles on you and stuff like that. That's not what we do. It's rather that we help people begin to see by the way we live our lives the reality that is the magnitude, the weight, the gravitas of his perfections. That actually is...

in a dictionary sense, how this is being used, but not in the same direction. Here, he bases his prayer on this. He's not praying. At this point. At this point, he will, but not at this point.

Praying that God gets the glory in the sense that God's perfections are put on display by the ethical life of the church. That's not what he's praying, he's actually working the other way. What he's saying is the standard, to have it according to, means by the standard of. Your magnitude, amazing, weighty, gravitas feeling. perfections I am going to appeal to you.

Okay.

So here's the idea. When you pray. to God. When you come to him, You're asking God to do something. based upon the full weight of what it means for him to be utterly perfect.

And put on display in majesty and glory. And it's from that basis that you're saying, now you can do anything. You can do all things. I don't come to you as a big brother who sort of has to roam in and somehow, darn it all, you'd love to get there to help me, but you know, it's hard. There's a lot of people you got to help.

Like Santa Claus dropping gifts from on rooftops. Instead, The basis of it is the wealth or the riches. There's another text that. Let me go back. There's another text of scripture Where this term shows up in Philippians 4:19, I want to read it to you.

And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus. Same phrase.

So when I appeal to God to say, can you provide for people? What am I appealing to him for? I'm appealing to him to say, you have everything. You're all glorious. You're fully majestic.

Your glory is in the magnitude of your perfections is so infinite, this would be literally a drop in a bucket for you. Will you do this the basis of the fact that I go to God in prayer rather than I come to you with a question? is that my assumption is God is the one who has all the resources to be able To do it.

So the next time you have a surgery that you're afraid of having, You can pray that the doctor has wisdom. That's great. You should pray that way. It's great. Pray that you're kept through the anesthesia.

Pray that you have a great recovery and all that stuff. But don't forget to appeal to. to the reality that there is a God who can take you through that even if that doctor's a total loser. Yes. That he can heal a relationship you have, even if the person you're relating to is a complete schlep.

He can do it. Like, like, so don't limit the scope. Paul doesn't come here with a small God mindset. He comes with a huge. Glorious.

God mindset. He thinks in these terms. I just listed a bunch here for you, and we could go on and on, but he thinks about the goodness. The beauty, the love, the justice, the kindness, the mercy, the grace, the omniscience, the omnipotence, the omnipresence, the holiness, the sovereignty, the infinity, the immutability doesn't change the self-existence of God. And he appeals on the basis that he has all of those.

To an endless degree. And so he can do. anything. That we ask him to do. That doesn't mean he'll do everything we ask him to do because we don't know what we're asking for half the time.

Mm-hmm. But he can do anything. And we need to recognize that. The basis of praying for the church is in the glory of God. Look at your text.

That according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power. Through his Spirit. in your inner being, long point, the starting place for a healthy church. Is in the inner lives of believers powered by the Holy Spirit. The starting place for the church is not in its programs.

The starting place for the church is not in the strength of its preaching ministry. Everything rises and falls on leadership. I hear that all the time at conferences. No, it doesn't. It rises and falls on God.

On God. It doesn't rise or fall on leadership. I understand what they're trying to say. Leadership matters. Yeah, so does preaching.

Yes. So do good programs. Yeah. Doesn't mean they don't matter. But the point is, the starting place: if you got one thing you need a healthy church to have, it's people who the Spirit is alive in.

That's what you gotta have. You've got to have people who get convicted of sin. You gotta have people. Who have eyes that the Spirit has given them to see hurting people? You got to have people.

Who are comforted in anxiety, depression, sadness, grief, trauma by the power of the one who comes alongside the Holy Spirit? You gotta have those kinds of people. Life's too hard. Too difficult, too weighty. It's the starting place.

We'll just look at the text itself and we'll make a couple observations. You see where it says. That He may grant you, this is what He does, to be strengthened with power. You get two words for power right there: power. And we've seen this earlier in Ephesians, multiple words for power.

But by way of reminder, here you have the word power that's translated in English is dunamis. That means Potential. Power. It's the idea of this thing has something that boom. It that can it can it can emerge into.

So it's about capacity.

So all this capacity is there. It's why he says strengthened with all that capacity, because the word for strengthened is another word, krataois, and that means, and it's like extra-biblical usage.

So only extra-biblical usage is philo. Philo uses it of strengthening with exercise. Think of going to the gym.

Okay, going to the gym. Yeah. So he tells you, be strengthened, right? By the power of the Spirit. By the capacity, the potentiality that's here, you're strengthened.

And there's two things I want you to note about this word strengthen in addition. One is to grow in strength means. that it's progressive. Secondly, the word in Greek is a passive, which means you're not strengthening yourself. But rather, the Spirit is strengthening you.

So, what happens is, you are going into God's gym, as it were, and the Spirit is exercising you in your life. And as the Spirit exercises you with the resistance training of the world, you are progressively gaining and garnering more strength where your text tells you, where does it say? Look at it, in your inner life. Being. Your inner being, like quite literally, your inner person or your inner man.

Down in what Rocky Babo called the basement. That's where your training is happening. Why is it that your training happens there?

Well, your training happens there because as scripture says. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

Now, heart today. For you and I, means this nice little thing, an emoji that you send when somebody sends you something that's an encouragement. Literally, before I came down here, someone sent me two praying hands that they were praying for me. This is how we communicate now. We don't communicate with words, it takes too much time.

And they sent me two praying hands, and I responded with a heart.

Okay.

Now What does that mean? Right? That was my way of saying thank you. to them.

Okay.

But the heart has become a symbol of affection. That's not primarily what's happening in the biblical usage, particularly in its Old Testament usage.

So, not all the time, but when you see the word heart, what you should note in the mechanics, if we could lift up the hood on your inner being. And we're to lift it up. We could look at it and we could call it A number of things. and we might mean them as placeholders for the whole. Like, so it while it technically might not in some ways be the whole.

So, for example, I can pick up the hoodie and go, look at that engine.

So you go, well, not everything is the engine technically, and there's houses that run off and whatever. Hey, look at that motor. I smell the motor. There's fire reasons. I don't care.

You know what I mean?

Okay?

You know what I mean?

The heart, that's kind of sometimes how the term heart's used. It's used just as a placeholder for the inner life. In fact, it's used often in the Old Testament, not just as a placeholder for the inner life, but a placeholder for the inner life, with an emphasis, with an angle toward the capacity for wisdom and rationality. It's almost used the way that we would be more inclined to use the word mind. in some ways.

But it's used this way in sort of a so when we speak about heart here, think of it as keep your inner life. Keep your inner life. Keep your motor. Keep your engine. Keep that thing that's making your world go round as it were Keep it, guard it.

That's the idea. With all vigilance, you got to stay on it. Why? Because you're prone to wander and because the world's prone to eat your lunch. For from it flow the springs of life.

Another version, NIV, says guard it, for out of it come the issues of your life. But the idea is Who you are. Who you are in any given situation. is reflected in and from your inner being. The guy cuts you off and you go, yeah!

Huh? You got an inner life issue. You do. And you go, no, I don't. I just live in Utah and they're crappy drivers.

You're right, they are, it's true, and you are a sinner. Both are true at the same time. You got an inner life issue. You you you are a lust bucket. You got an inner life issue.

Right. You're always down in the don'ts. You're using other people's emotions. As Your drug. There are people like this.

How you doing? Mm okay, under the circumstances. It's very difficult being me today because if you understood what it was to be me, you would understand it's very hard to be me. Would you pray for me, please? that I would have the joy of Jesus Christ in my life.

Eeyore on steroids. And then somebody says, Oh, I feel so bad for them. And they spend five months encouraging you, and six months later, you go, How are you? I'm okay. I'm just trying to live in the joy of Jesus.

Because other people's emotions are your drug, you want their attention. It's not overt manipulation. It's just that the space in your hole of joy has not been filled up by Christ. And right now, you're using other people as your little pseudo-Jesuses to fill you up.

So, what we have to recognize is that in life we have inner life problems. And it's the spirit. that we have to appeal to. We have to appeal to to strengthen us. To strengthen us so that we can grow.

It's why the disciplines of the Spirit matter. It's why you read your Bible. You don't read your Bible because you check off a box. You don't read your Bible because it's magic pill for the day. You read your Bible because it opens you to the Spirit of God so that He can grow you more and more and more.

That's why you pray. That's why you serve. That is why you get alone. That is why you sit quietly. That is why you fast.

Pick your spiritual discipline. It's to these ends. They're disciplines of the spirit. It's why diligence in them matters. It's why determination in them matters.

Now Watch the cascade. Yeah. 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 that.

Now we drop down another tear.

So that the fruit of the Spirit's power is the indwelling permanence of Christ in us.

So We'll get really theological, and if you get lost here, just come back and rejoin me in a moment. But I hope you'll stay with me. God exists eternally as Trinity, and we believe that for multiple reasons because we see scripture that says God is one, and because we see scripture that says that there is a divine person of the Son, a divine person of the Spirit, and a divine person of the Father. We see all these things.

Okay.

So as we see them, that means that God exists eternally as one essence in three persons.

Okay?

Now, there's all kinds of mystery that takes place with that, but what that doesn't mean is that there's one God who has three faces. Doesn't mean that. It's not three faces, it's three persons that communicate with one another. And yet it's not three gods that have are just like three players on a basketball team who are all on the same team. It's not that either.

They have a shared attributive essence in a mysterious way. way so that when one thinks The other thinks and the other. And we go, poo. But that's the idea.

Now What makes for one thinking and the other thinking and the other thinking and the thoughts being collectively the same? What makes for that? It's a doctrine that is known as perichoresis. Pericoresis. And that doctrine means mutual indwelling.

And it's the idea That the Father is indwelt by the Son and the Spirit, and the Son is indwelt by the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is indwelt by the Father and the Son.

Okay.

Now that's important to note because you see A couple of times in Scripture, the Holy Spirit referred to as the Spirit of Christ. I'll give you another verse outside of this one right here. You, however, Are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you, anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to Him.

So that when the Spirit shows up, This is why Paul can refer to the mystery as being in Colossians, he says it's Christ in you, the hope of glory. It's because the Spirit. Showing up brings the person of Christ. To live in you. Not just to live in you, which is sort of an interesting deal.

You have to zero down here and focus on this word, dwell. See it?

So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. There's different words. Paraoikeo is a word that means like temporary dwelling. But this is a word, kata oikeo, which means, okeo is the word for oikas or house. And to put the kata on the front means to dwell down.

So here's how you should think of it. What we mean when we say the word phrase, we're settling down. That's what that word means. You're settling down. The idea is permanence.

I'm no longer going from here to here. It's no longer a temporary dwelling. It's a kind of permanent dwelling.

So when you read this verse, His prayer is that the Spirit will empower your inner strengthen your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

Now, if you're a believer, does Christ dwell in your heart? The answer is yes.

So why does he pray for this? He's praying clearly for people in the church. He's praying that the Spirit. Who is alive in you, strengthening you, would now have Christ dwell in you. But does it seem superfluous?

Is he asking for something you've already received? And the answer is no. And the reason is this: because his emphasis here on this dwell-down idea is not so much just that Christ would take up residence. But rather, it is that he would dwell in you in the sense of he would begin to progressively control. All of your life.

That's why the phrase says through faith. That you, in altering and happening to the belief structures of your heart and life, would begin to trust His indwelling presence more and more and more and more, and the vitality of the life of Christ would saturate more of your thoughts. More of your actions, more of your feelings, and more of your desires as you go throughout your life.

So Paul, notice the direction of his prayer. His prayer is actually not That Uh the wonderful outreach event goes smoothly.

Now I'm not saying we shouldn't pray that the outreach event goes smoothly. But I want you to see, that is not where he starts. He doesn't teach us that that's the direction we pray. He doesn't Teach us. to pray.

about particular artifacts. External. He doesn't actually teach us to pray that all of our bills will be paid as the church. I mean he teaches us to pay our bills. But it teaches us to pray about that or to pray about these kinds of things.

Instead, he. Teaches me to pray for you and for you and for you and for you and for you and for you and for you and for you, and for you to pray for the people that you are around as individuals that they would come to such a belief structure in their heart that Christ has so much real estate in their immaterial being that they cannot any longer restrain his overwhelming power through the Spirit in their life and they can't help but grow. That's what he wants us to pray. Because here's what will happen. You'll have a great outreach event, I promise you.

If you've got 50 people. Who are just Jesus-loving fools. From the inside out. That it is pouring out of them because he so saturated their life. You'll never hear me ever.

I'm telling you, you'll never hear one of us get up and go, you know, we got a budget shortfall. Because we're just Jesus-loving fools. Most of the things we had to pray about, you'd go, man, I guess I got taken care of. How did it get taken care of? Because Christ was alive in believers.

Christ was alive in saints and they just he just owned all the real estate. He colonized us. That's kind of the idea. You know, colonization, like, it has this negative connotation history of taking away others' culture.

Well, guess what? That's what Jesus wants to do. He wants to take away your culture. He wants to re-enculturate you. He wants to colonize you.

He wants to make you look just like him. He wants you to lose you.

So you can gain him. in that way. How do I know that that's what this word dwell is? Is implying.

Well, I'll just look at its other. I'm going to give you two of its other usages in a parallel epistle. This is Colossians 1:19. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased. Same exact word.

Same structure. Kata oikeo. to dwell. The fullness of God dwelled perfectly. permanently.

in the person Of Christ. For in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells permanently. Is there any part of the person of Christ? That isn't deified. Is there any part of the person of Christ that is not God?

No. Deity owns all the real estate. And he's saying, listen, that's what we got to pray for each other.

Okay.

We got to pray that Christ would so own us that the surety the vitality of what it means for us. to have this sort of settle-downness. of Christ in us would come alive. Not tier number four, The consequence of Christ's presence is our love for one another. This is what he prays.

It's the next that, verse 17 again, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

So the Spirit's presence yields Christ's presence permanently, that you being rooted and grounded in love. The con it's just this is like almost an aside. It's two, but are perfect, passive participles. A perfect is a verb that starts in the past time and is continuing. Its effects are continuing in the present.

You were rooted, you remain rooted. You were grounded, you remain grounded. A passive is something that is happening to you.

Okay.

Well, it's happening to you because of the presence of Christ. He has settled down in you. And in his settling down in you, what is it that he's brought? He has brought a rooting. I love the metaphor because it speaks of nutrients and supply from the soil of Christ for your life.

Grounding speaks of, it's actually an architectural metaphor, is what the word is used for. It's the stabilization of a foundation or a building. And he has rooted and grounded you in what? See it?

in love.

Now the love here is not His love for you. The love here is not God's love. That comes later on. You'll see that in a moment. When I put up that initial kiostic structure for you on the screen.

Glory, power. Why didn't we just say love and then go power, glory? We said love, love, because there's two kinds of loves that the text is talking about. You'll see them, they're boo-ended. The first one is that you would horizontally, so to speak, here love each other, and this, that you'd be rooted and grounded in it.

Here's what that means. That means That for me to live my spiritual life to any long-term effect, I have to have you. That's what it means. I have to have you. If you are isolated, you are rootless.

You are groundless. I have to have you. It's that old illustration of the redwoods, right? These huge, huge trees with shallow root systems, largest trees on earth, shallow root systems, and they stay up because they spread out laterally and interlock with one another. And it's a beautiful picture.

of what it means to be the church. I get rooted and I get grounded because I am built up and strengthened by your love. 1 Corinthians 8:1.

Now concerning food offered to idols, we know that all of us possess knowledge. This knowledge puffs up, but love does what? Ah, because why? Because, see, you're operating now in my best interest, and I'm operating in yours, and you're operating in one another's best interest. Ephesians 4, later on, I'll say this: rather, speaking the truth in love, we're to grow up in every way into Him who's the head, into Christ for from whom the whole body held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it, what does the body do?

It builds itself up in love. He's saying something amazing. Your presence Your presence, your presence, my presence all together in the context of community means we got all the resources we need right here. Not because you're you. And I'm me, and I express myself, and you go, WOW!

Wow, he's awesome. Get back. Not because of that. But because you have Christ settling down in you. And you have Christ settling down in you.

And you have Christ settling down in you. And that same Jesus. With a glorious plethora of wonderful attributes that are His alone, manifest the power of His presence in and through your life, and then you are His tool to share life to another. who gets rooted and grounded. In love.

So, who needs community? Everybody does, and to reject community is to reject Christ. Very clear in the scripture. It's not rocket science.

So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted in ground and love, verse 18 may have, we get another consequence, the water keeps falling, may have what? Strength. Comprehend.

Now Interesting word. The word is related to another form of its root word, which means to overcome. Here You want to think of this in kind of an intellectual or a kind of existential overcoming. I don't mean overcoming obstacles. What I mean is overcoming in the sense of understanding.

The idea is something that you didn't grasp. That now he is praying, you'll be able to fully grasp. To go beyond your limitations with all the saints. What is it that he wants you? With all the saints, please note that.

What is it that he wants you to grasp? What is the breadth and length and height and depth? Of what? It's in verse 19. And to know the love of Christ.

The love of Christ. To know the love of Christ. that surpasses, he says. Knowledge. Um This reminds me that comprehension of Christ's love comes from the reality of his presence and the love for the saints.

So let's think about this. Christ dwells in you. Through the power of the Spirit. Christ dwells in you through the power of the Spirit, you through the power of the Spirit, you through the power of the Spirit. And we're in community.

Now as we exist in that community We are All of us set apart to God. That's what it means to be a saint. It doesn't mean we're perfect, but it means we are for a purpose.

Okay.

So we are for a purpose, and that purpose is to exude. And root and build and ground one another. in love.

What he's saying is As you do that, You begin to experience more and more reciprocally the love of Christ in your own life. My time with you helps me love Jesus more. Because Christ is alive in you. This is the reciprocity that he's talking about. And then he uses language of surpassing.

It surpasses knowledge. The word for surpass here means hooper ballo, it means to throw beyond. What does that even mean? To throw beyond knowledge. Here's what he's saying.

Lord, would you help? Lifeline community. Would you help every individual in Lifeline community? exist in their daily life. before you with the power Of the Holy Spirit growing more and more, so they feel and sense the indwelling Christ in them and all His virtues.

just radiating out of their life so that they could love one another in such an effective way that that communal life would in turn make them feel and sense the love of Christ to such a degree that left to their own devices they'd never be able to obtain. To go beyond.

So here's the irony of it. And this is why I get probably more little, negative is too hard of a word, but more little prickly feedback from people on this issue than about almost any other in our church, in terms of my teaching. And that is about my views of the sovereignty of God. Let me tell you what this text is teaching. It's teaching us in its language.

that you need God to get to God. That is what it's teaching you. You won't be able to experience the fullness of him without him. It's not that God's here and I approach him. It's that God comes to me and moves in me and he moves in you so that we can reflect him to one another and that draws us even then up to him.

Yeah. Let me A verse up, famous verse, but it illustrates the dimensionality here. For I'm sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers or things. present or 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.

This height, depth, this surpassing knowledge. I have ministered to my own children in a very real way with something, and I'll share it with you, because I often find it to be the case in all of our lives. I find it the case in my own life, so some of my ministry to them is just a ministry to me. Mm-hmm. And that is that You can feel like God's quiet for long seasons.

I pray and I pray and I pray. I don't hear anything back. You can feel like God might be existentially distant. Here is what this Text teaches me. It teaches me.

That I have created a false bifurcation. I have illegitimately separated two things that should not be separated when you come and encourage me, and I don't hear that as the voice of God. That's what it means. It means that I'm supposed to realize. That it's not just you loving me.

But it's God in Christ through the power of the Spirit that is loving me. He's speaking. in that. He's ministering. Yeah, but no, there's no butts.

There's no buts. This is old. Old, old illustration, I guarantee everybody's heard it before, but this old illustration of this guy that's on a rooftop in a flood and he's going to be drowning, right? You've heard it before, he's drowning. Along comes, he's praying, Lord God, rescue me, rescue me, rescue me.

Along comes a boat, and the guy says, Hop on. And he says, No, I've been praying to God, He's going to rescue me. A helicopter comes and hovers over top to airlift me. He says, Nope, I don't need you. God is going to rescue me.

He dies, goes to heaven, and says, Lord, you don't answer a prayer. I prayed that you'd rescued me. And he said, You're an idiot. I sent you a boat and I sent you a helicopter. Pay attention.

Okay.

Do you understand? That the Lord is ministering through his people, not because we're looking to go, well, yeah, you're right, I guess he doesn't speak, so somehow we've got to figure out a way to cobble up a way in which we can conceive of God manifesting himself to make us all feel better. No, because in his word, it's exactly how he tells us we're going to experience him. This is how he's telling us you're going to experience him.

So This morning you're going to leave here. Tell somebody what you love about them. Before you walk out. Just poem, just tell 'em. Tell them something encouraging.

Build them up in their life. Take him aside and pray for him. for crying out loud. You're not the loyal order of water buffaloes. You're the church of the living God.

This is what we're supposed to do. When we gather. It surpasses knowledge. And then we conclude, the loving character of God grows in us as a result of all this. That's why it closes.

And to know the love of Christ that passed knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. to be filled with all the fullness It it it's uh it's in context here, it's his loving character. The fullness of God.

Well, that's a pretty high goal, Brian. I know. I know. 1 Peter 1, 15, he he tells you that you're supposed to pursue holiness to be holy because he himself is holy. You know, I played basketball in college and and was a big part of my life for most of my younger life and I would always go to the free throw line and practice and practice and practice.

And do you know that I never intended to miss? I just intended to make. I didn't always make it, but the more I practiced, the better I got, and the better I got, and the better I got, and the better I got.

So don't have as your standard kinda holy. Don't have as your standard Sorta loving. Don't have as your standard not a jerk. Like like like Set your sights a little higher. Because the text says...

Why don't you look at the character of God? And move that direction, and I'm going to give you the resources. to move. Christ in you the hope of glory. Father, I pray that you would bless us as your people.

To live according to the standard of your holiness, Lord God. Your goodness. I pray that you would help us to love one another well, to be your church and your bride in this place. And Lord, I do pray, I pray that your spirit. would inflame the hearts.

of each one here. To experience your love for them in such a way that they love one another. And in turn, experience more and more. of your love, and that the cascading waterfall of your good grace would pour on lifeline community in such a way that we would never be the same because of the power. that you have in your glory in Jesus name.

Amen.