Beyond Imagination

Welcome to this edition of PowerPoint with Jack Graham. A little later in the program, we'll tell you how you can get Dr. Graham's book, Angels. But first, here's his message, Beyond Imagination. So I have a message from God's Word in Ephesians, the third chapter. What we see here in Ephesians chapter 3 is a prayer, one of the greatest prayers of the Bible delivered, offered by the one I consider to be the greatest Christian who ever lived, the apostle Paul, a man who was transformed by the grace and power of Jesus Christ. This prayer is a prayer for the church, all of us together.

It is also a prayer for you, for you to personalize. And this prayer, the theme of the prayer, the thrust of this prayer is that all of us and each of us would experience more and more of Christ. That you would experience more of His love, more of His power, and more of His greatness and goodness and glory and blessings in your life. There is so much more that God has for you. Don't settle for where you are in your Christian life.

Don't get stuck somewhere in the past. But I want you to see in God's Word today as you pray, as we pray together that God will energize us with more power, more strength, more love, and more faith that we would embrace all that God has, that we would experience more than we could possibly imagine, beyond our imagination. So let's look at the prayer beginning in verse 14, Ephesians 3. For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. That according to the riches of His glory, He may grant to you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being. So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. That you being rooted and grounded in love may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.

And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. That you may be filled, here it is, with all the fullness of God. Now unto Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever.

And everybody said, Amen. What a prayer. Paul said, for this reason I bow the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ. There are many positions and really any position that we may pray. Traditional Jews in the Old Testament and even today pray while standing. It is certainly appropriate to stand in His presence, to praise Him in standing and to pray and ask Him as we stand before Him. It's also appropriate to pray lifting up our hands to the Lord. The Bible says that we ought always to pray lifting up holy hands unto the Lord. When we lift up hands it is a sign of embracing all that God would desire to give. It is a sign of adulation and adoration unto God.

Praise unto the Lamb of God. And when we embrace the greatness of God, the love of God, there are times when we just want to hold up our arms and our hands to Him that He would hold us near, that we would hold Him dear to us. There are times when we pray, when we praise that it's time for a good old fist pump. And when we see the victory that is ours in Christ, the greatness of our God, sometimes you just want to pump a fist and say thank you Lord for what you've done for my victory in the Lord Jesus Christ. Why you can pray upside down.

There are times you can, we have prayed of course desperate before the Lord. There are times that I prayed that you prayed that we just stretched out, just laid out on the floor, put our nose in the carpet and cried out to God in desperation, sometimes in brokenness before Him. But of all the postures and the positions of prayer, perhaps the most prominent, the one that Paul mentions here when he says I bow my knees to the Lord Jesus Christ, when we get on our knees, we hit our knees to invite and invoke His presence and power in our lives. That's a sign of course of our humility before the Lord.

That we honor Him, that we hunger for Him, that we surrender our lives to Him as His servants to give ourselves unconditionally to Him. This is the way Paul says he is praying at this moment. I want to remind you that Paul is in prison. He's not in the pulpit.

He's certainly not in a palace. He is in prison facing the end of his life. He ultimately died a martyr's death. And while he is in chains, in jail, he's still full of God and therefore he is free.

He is free. His spirit is free. And when you read this prayer that we've shared already today, it is filled with passion. It is filled with emotion.

Paul is excited. I can just see him there in the cell, in the chains, walking up and down, pacing up and down, praising God, praising the Lord, and then hitting his knees. You ought to hit your knees regularly. How long has it been since you hit your knees in humility before the Lord? Mark Batterson has written a powerful book on prayer called The Circle Maker.

I would advise you to read it. In the book he makes this statement, the physical posture of kneeling coupled with a humble heart is the most powerful position on earth. You are never stronger than when you are on your knees before God. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, once said in the midst of the terrible Civil War, he said, I am often driven to my knees before God in desperation.

Where else can I go? How long has it been since you hit your knees to say, Lord, I humble myself before you that I may honor you? This was the posture of prayer when Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, surrendering his will to the will of the Father, sweating drops of blood in anticipation of the cross. He knelt in prayer there among the olive trees. And he said, not my will, but your will be done. So Paul prays. He says, for this reason I bow my knee. For what reason? Well back up just a bit because the book of Ephesians, one of my personal favorites in all of the Bible, is a blessing book.