Blessed Be You

One of the best ways to learn to pray is to take the wonderful examples of prayer that we find all over the Bible and pray them for ourselves, personalizing them. Let’s do that. I’d like to pray a prayer of thanksgiving for this church. Please join me.

Lord Jesus, thank you that you are molding this church into your very nature. We thank you for the times we have seen your love displayed, your servant heart. We thank you that you are teaching us to give your grace to one another, to practice here the sacrificial love that you demonstrated to your first disciples. We thank you that we are growing in faith in God. We thank you that we are growing in love for one another. And we give you the glory for that, Amen.

But Paul isn’t content to just leave them as they are. He wants more for them. He wants the best for them. He prays a blessing for them. And he writes it out for them. And I think the reason that he writes it out for them is that blessings of this sort need to be received. They need to be mixed with faith. The Ephesians needed to say, “Yes, Lord, do this in us. Bless us.” In ancient Hebrew custom they needed to add their “Amen.” “Lord, make it happen for me, too.”

I want to pray for these blessings for this congregation. And I want each one of us to accept the blessings, to make the choice to dare to believe that God can do it, to dare to believe that it can happen in your life, to dare to take new steps to live out that blessing, trusting that God will bring it to completion.

And what’s the best way for them to grow and be blessed? Did he pray for them to have the prettiest bell tower in town? Did he pray for them to have the biggest, most high tech church in town? Did he pray for lots of people to fill all their programs? I’d take any of those, but we all know there are much more important things. Paul prayed, in verse 18, that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened. He wanted them to see, to understand, deep down inside.

And if eyes need to be enlightened, then that means that sometimes they are darkened, that people just plain can’t see. They may know a lot of the right words to say. They may be doing a lot of the right things. But they just don’t get it. The eternal, all-wise, all loving God is here in the room, but they just don’t get it. The church is just another club to them. And they may work hard. They may contribute generously. They may speak the right words. But they’re still in the dark. And Paul wants to take them deeper. He wants the words to go beyond stimulating the mind or calming the nerves. He wants them to stir the heart.

And he’s not praying for them to get more information. I value information, but it’s much better to have a few parts of the gospel really woven deeply into your heart than to memorize 6 books of the newest and fanciest theologies.

Methodists look back to the day when John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was at a Bible study and something happened. He felt his heart strangely warmed. It struck him deeply that Christ hadn’t just died for everybody’s sins centuries ago. Christ had died for his sins. And he was changed. And Methodists have a strong tradition of affirming ‘the witness of the Spirit,’ the experience of God’s Spirit, very personally, deep down in our hearts.