I¡¦m sure that many of you this week followed the bizarre story of NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak. Nowak, a 43 year old married mother of 3, apparently had a romantic interest in a fellow astronaut with whom she had trained together. Jealous of another woman who she believed also had a romantic interest in the other astronaut, Nowak, wearing diapers so she wouldn¡¦t have to stop, drove 900 miles from Houston to Orlando so that she could be there in time to intercept the other woman when she got off her plane flight. Then Nowak, wearing a disguise, followed the other woman and confronted her in her car and sprayed her with pepper spray. When captured, Nowak had a BB gun and police later found pepper spray, an BB gun cartridge, a knife, copies of emails between the male astronaut and the other woman, maps and directions to the other woman’s house and latex gloves.
Obviously this is not normal behavior. Something must have snapped in Nowak. But you’ve got to admit one thing - this woman was passionate about her love for this fellow astronaut. We can see that same kind of passion, obviously directed in a much healthier manner, in Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus.
For the past month now, we’ve focused our attention on the longest sentence in the New Testament. In verses 3-14, Paul has written about our spiritual blessings in Christ. It’s almost like Paul was so excited and so passionate about all these blessings that he took one big breath and just started writing, and he kept on writing. He wrote about how God the Father chose us before the creation of the world and how he predestined us to be adopted as His children because it gives pleasure to Him to bless us in that way. He wrote about how God the Son redeemed us from a life of bondage to sin and freed us to live an abundant life. He wrote about how God the Holy Spirit comes into the life of every believer as a seal and as a down payment to guarantee all these spiritual blessings and insure our future inheritance.
And then it seems Paul paused for a moment to catch his breath and then he began writing again. And his passion spills out into another long sentence, one that is not quite as long as his previous one, but long nonetheless. Although we’re only going to focus on the first few verses of that sentence this morning, let’s read the whole sentence so that we can look at those verses in context.
Read Ephesians 1:15-23
This morning, we’re just going to focus on verses 15-17, which also happen to be your memory verses for this week. So before Dave puts those verses up on the screen, let’s see how well we remember them.
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
Ephesians 1:15-17 (NIV)
For 12 verses Paul has been describing all these spiritual blessings that we have in Christ. And now Paul is going to respond to those blessings. What he writes in this next section is connected to the previous section by these three words; "For this reason". In other words, Paul says that the motivation for what he is about to write next is the spiritual blessings that he has just described for us in the previous sentence.
To me, the verses we’re looking at this morning, and especially verse 17, represent the very heart of the message that Paul is communicating to his readers in his letter. So, if you’re struggling with memorizing Scripture, let me suggest that if you can only memorize a few verses, these would be the ones to focus on. Because in these verses, Paul gives us some great insight in how we ought to respond to all these blessings that God has poured into our lives. I’ve already touched on a few of these as we’ve looked at the previous section of Paul’s letter, but this morning I think Paul will help us to bring into even sharper focus how we ought to respond to the fact of these spiritual blessings. There seem to be four main things that we need to do in response to what God has done for us.
HOW TO RESPOND TO GOD’S SPIRITUAL BLESSINGS:
Persist in prayer
I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking...
Paul’s first reaction to the spiritual blessings of God is to go to God in prayer. And it is not just some quick little prayer, either. In just these few words, we sense Paul’s persistence in prayer. First, he writes that he has "not stopped" praying and giving thanks to God for pouring out His blessings into the loves of these believers. If that’s all we had, we would certainly get the picture that Paul was persistent in his prayers. But he doesn’t stop there.
He also writes that he is remembering his readers in his prayers. That phrase could literally be translated "I keep making mention of you" in my prayers. The verb "making mention" is in the present tense, which indicates that it is a continuing action. So Paul is making mention of his readers in his prayers over and over and over again, which means that Paul is praying continuously. No wonder that he had previously exhorted his readers with these words in one of his earlier letters:
...pray continually...
1 Thessalonians 5:17 (NIV)
The words "I keep asking" are not actually found in the original language. But when we look at this passage as a whole, especially with all the present tense verbs, that translation certainly captures the essence of what Paul is communicating here. He keeps on praying for his readers. Later on in this letter, Paul is going to encourage his readers to exercise that same kind of persistent prayer life:
And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.
Ephesians 6:18 (NIV)
As we’ll see in a moment, Paul’s prayer has two major aspects to it. First, Paul prays and gives thanks to God. And then he intercedes on behalf of his readers. And that is exactly what we would expect as Paul responds to God’s sovereignty, which he has so clearly described in the first part of this chapter. God is sovereign and He chooses whomever He wants and He also determines the means by which people can be made right with Him. That’s what makes Him God. And our natural response to that revelation ought to be that we come before God in prayer, first of all giving Him thanks for choosing us, and secondly praying that God would reveal Himself and draw others to Himself, too.
As we look at these next three aspects of our response to God’s blessings, there seems to be a progression. Paul is thankful because his readers have excelled in the first two aspects of their response. But he prays on their behalf because they haven’t quite mastered the third. One of the reasons that this is such a significant passage for us is that I think we’re a lot like Paul’s audience. We’ve done a pretty good job with the first two aspects, but we have a ways to go on the third. So what I want to do is to just briefly look at the first two and then spend most of our time focusing on the area where we still have the most room to grow,
Focus my faith
...your faith in the Lord Jesus...
The first thing that Paul is thankful for is the faith of his readers. But notice that is not just faith in general - it is faith in the Lord Jesus. Once again, that shouldn’t surprise us because time after time Paul has already used the phrase "in Him", "in Christ" or some similar phrase over and over again while describing our spiritual blessings.
I think it’s fair to say that we can’t ever overemphasize the fact that the only way we get all these spiritual blessings is through faith in Jesus Christ alone. That’s God’s one and only plan and since that is what he has determined, that’s the way it is, whether we like it or not. And so, as the writer of Hebrews makes clear, we are to focus our faith on Jesus Christ alone:
Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Hebrews 12:2 (NIV)
Lavish my love
...your love for all the saints...
The second thing that Paul is thankful for is the love that the believers have for one another. When we realize just how much God loves us and how much He loves His other children, then how can we help but love those people.
In fact, both Jesus and John make it crystal clear that our love for other believers is the ultimate test of whether or not we are truly God’s children:
By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
John 13:35 (NIV)
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.
1 John 4:20 (NIV)
So, we need to lavish our love on other believers in the same way that God has lavished us with His grace.
As I said earlier, we’re certainly not perfect In focusing our faith and lavishing our love, but I think that we do a pretty good job of that overall. So what I¡¦d like to do right now is to just pause and to pray for all of you and to thank God for your faith and your love.
[Prayer of thanks for the faith and love of the believers in our church]
But even though Paul gives thanks to God for the faith and love of His readers, there is a third area of their response to God that still needs some work. So Paul prays to God on their behalf.
It¡¦s really interesting to look at the prayers of Paul. And the more I read those prayers in his letters, the more I realize just how much I need to deepen my own prayer life. It’s OK to pray for my own physical needs and those of others. In fact, we’re encouraged to do that in Jesus’ model prayer when he taught his disciples to pray for their daily bread. But I’m impressed with Paul’s prayer life because he goes so much deeper. And in this prayer, I’m convinced that Paul really gets to the heart of the matter. And this prayer is a prayer for me to...
Relish my relationship
...may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better...
Had I just looked at these words on the surface, I might have been tempted to label this principle "Wish for wisdom" or "Kneel for knowledge", or maybe I could have even had a five point sermon instead of a four point one and used both of them. But there is something much deeper that Paul is praying for here. Paul¡¦s ultimate goal for his readers is that they would come to know God better.
In English, we really only have one word for "know." For instance, I could say that I know President George Bush. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have personal relationship with him. It just means that I’ve read and heard about him so that I know something about him. Or I could say that I know Lute Olson. I’ve watched hundreds of U of A basketball games. I’ve been in the same building with him many times. I’ve read about him on the newspaper and even talked to him briefly a couple of times. Or I could say that I know most of you here this morning. I’ve talked to you. I’ve observed you. I’ve prayed for you and been involved in your lives to varying degrees.
Or finally, I could say that I know my wife. I’ve dated her, been married to her for nearly 30 years. I talk to her and spend time with her. I’ve come to know her intimately and personally. I often know her thoughts and she knows mine. I know that when I ask her where she wants to go out to dinner that she’ll either answer "I don’t know" or "I don’t care". I always thought that someone ought to open up a restaurant and call it the "I Don’t Know" or the "I Don’t Care" because so many people want to eat there.
Obviously those represent quite different levels of knowing someone. I sure know my wife much deeper than I know George Bush or Lute Olson or even any of you. But I use the same English word "know" for all those relationships.
But in Greek, there are several different words for "know". There is a word that means to know from learning, what we might call "book knowledge" or "head knowledge." That’s not the word that Paul uses here. There’s another word that means to know through experience. Paul uses a compound form of that word here. The word he uses means to know by experience, but in a much deeper and more intimate way. And I think the reason that Paul has to pray for his readers to know God in that way is that they, like many of us have settled for something less.
We’ve settled for something less:
o Very little knowledge
These are the kind of people that the writer of Hebrews wrote about:
You have been Christians a long time now, and you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things a beginner must learn about the Scriptures. You are like babies who drink only milk and cannot eat solid food. And a person who is living on milk isn’t very far along in the Christian life and doesn’t know much about doing what is right.
Hebrews 5:12, 13 (NIV)
Maybe some of you fit in this category. The extent of your Christianity is that you come to church on Sunday morning. You don’t read your Bible during the week. You don’t pray. You don’t memorize Scripture. You basically just depend on someone else to feed you. As one commentator put it, these are Christians whose theme song would be the refrain from the hymn "No Other Plea":
I need no other argument,
I need no other plea;
It is enough that Jesus died,
And that He died for me.
That might be a good starting point for our faith, but if that’s still the extent of our knowledge after many years of being a believer, it certainly falls short of what God wants for us.
o Knowledge of the Bible
Obviously, knowledge of the Bible isn’t a bad thing. In fact, one of the reasons that I’m encouraging you to read through the Bible this year is so that you know what’s in there. And it is in the Scriptures that we primarily find God’s revelation of Himself to us. But mere knowledge of the Bible itself is not enough.
Over the years, I’ve read the works of a great many Bible scholars who have tremendous knowledge and intellect. But when I read their writings, I often come away very sad, because it is obvious they don’t know the God of the Bible. Paul doesn’t pray for knowledge of a book about God. He prays for knowledge of the God of the book.
o Knowledge about God
These are the people who can tell you all about the attributes of God. They are great theologians, but the problem is that it is possible to be a great theologian and still not be a Christian. Jesus made that really clear as He spoke to His followers the night before his crucifixion:
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
John 17:3 (NIV)
Knowing about God and really knowing Him are two different things. And Jesus made it clear that we must really know God, not just know about Him. So that leads to the crucial question:
How can I know God?
There are many aspects of knowing God, but this morning we’ll focus just on two important principles that Paul writes about in this passage:
o Have a heart that seeks God
Although Paul doesn’t address this issue directly in this passage, it’s certainly implied. If I really want to get to know God, then I need to have a heart that seeks after Him. The prophet Jeremiah wrote about having that kind of heart.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
Jeremiah 29:13 (NIV)
Lisa Nowak certainly knows what it means to have a heart that seeks. Obviously her obsession was a little unhealthy, but wouldn’t it be great if we wanted to get to know God that badly? Wouldn’t it be great if we were willing to sacrifice our own comfort for the purpose of getting to know God better? But frankly, we can’t always work up that kind of passion on our own. So that’s why Paul prayed for his readers. Which leads us to our next principle:
o Ask God for a spirit of wisdom and revelation
You’ll notice that in the NIV translation, the word "Spirit" is capitalized, which would obviously be a reference to the Holy Spirit. But in other translations, the word "spirit" is not capitalized, so it would refer to our human spirit, or possibly even to an attitude.
The problem is that the Greek word for spirit is never capitalized in the New Testament. So the Bible translators have to look at the context of the passage to determine whether the writer is writing about the Holy Spirit, in which case the word is capitalized, or if it has some other meaning, in which case it is not capitalized. In most cases, that distinction is pretty clear, but this is one of those passages where it’s kind of a 50/50 proposition. I read a lot of commentaries this week that make convincing arguments for both positions here.
But perhaps Paul left it kind of ambiguous here because there is an aspect of both the Holy Spirit and our own spirit involved here. On one hand, we know that one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to make God know to us. Jesus revealed that to His disciples shortly before His death:
But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.
John 16:13-15 (NIV)
There is a sense in which the only way we can really know God is as the Holy Spirit reveals Him to us as we read the Bible, pray and see God’s revelation of Himself in nature. But I think that Paul is also asking God to impart to the human spirit of his readers an understanding of God and of divine realities. So it seems that both the Holy Spirit and the human spirit are involved in that process.
In verses 8 and 9, Paul has already written about this spirit of wisdom and revelation as it relates to God’s spiritual blessings. In those verses, the focus is on how God has revealed His plan to make us part of His family through Jesus Christ. But here, Paul seems to be asking that God would give an even more complete and deeper understanding of that divine reality.
In particular, Paul asks that God would give us wisdom as we seek to know Him better. Over the years I’ve seen all kinds of definitions of what wisdom is. But I think my favorite has to be J.I Packer’s:
Wisdom is the power to see and the inclination to choose the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.
-J.I. Packer in Knowing God
It seems to me that is exactly what Paul is asking God for here. He is praying that God would give his readers the ability to see God as he really is and then be able to appropriate His purposes and ways into their lives. That’s how we get to really know God.
So my question to you this morning is this: Do you know God better today than you did yesterday? Or a month ago? Or a year ago? Or 10 years ago? If not, it’s not God’s fault. He wants you to know Him better, but the process of knowing Him better doesn’t just happen automatically. It begins with developing a heart that truly seeks to know God. It means developing a Lisa Nowak-like passion to seek God with all our hearts. And that kind of passion can only come from God as His Holy Spirit gives us the wisdom to understand God and follow Him as he reveals Himself to us.
