I’m convinced that too many people have way too much time on their hands. While doing some research for my sermon this week on the internet, I ran across this “Ad Slogan Tournament” by Slate magazine, which was posted on March 12 of this year. It’s an NCAA format bracket that asks readers to pick their favorite ad slogans in head-to-head battles that will eventually allow them to pick the winning slogan. For instance here are some of the first round matchups. Let’s see if you can help me finish these ad slogans:
• A diamond is [forever]
• It takes a licking and [keeps on ticking]
• Got [Milk]?
• Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, [oh what a relief it is]
• Have it [your way]
• You deserve a [break today]
• Reach out and [touch someone]
• Be all that [you can be]
That last slogan, which I’m sure all of you recognize was the slogan used by the Army in it’s recruiting for many years, is a pretty good summary of our passage from Ephesians this morning, so I’ve borrowed it for use as my sermon title today. By the way, can anyone guess which ad slogan won the contest? – Just do it (Nike)
Let’s begin this morning by reading our passage together:
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17b-19 (NIV)
As I look at this passage this morning, it seems that Paul has laid out a very easy to follow roadmap for us to follow. He presents Biblical principles in a very logical order. But I’m actually going to start with the end of the passage and work our way toward the beginning. That’s because Paul reveals our destination at the end of the passage and before the roadmap is going to do us any good, we need to know where we’re headed. So let’s begin by identifying our destination:
OUR DESTINATION: TO BE SPIRITUALLY MATURE
…that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
God’s goal for the lives of His children is that they might experience a life that is filled to the very brim with the fullness of God. In fact, Jesus indicated that was the very purpose for which he came to earth:
…I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
John 10:10 (NIV)
But what exactly does that mean? In one of his other letters, Paul indicates that when we make the decision to be a follower of Jesus Christ, God imparts His fullness to us in Christ:
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority.
Colossians 2:9, 10 (NIV)
Remember that Paul is writing to believers here in Ephesians. So if those believers already have the fullness of God in their lives as a result of their union with Jesus Christ, why would Paul pray that they might be filled to the very top with the fullness of God? It seems to me that what Paul is praying is for his readers to become what they already are in Christ – in other words he wants them to be all that they can be.
I know that may not make a whole lot of sense, so let me see if I can’t illustrate it for you. Let’s say that I want to become a doctor. Right now Mary is back there thinking “not another new career!” But believe me, this is just a hypothetical. If I wanted to do that I’d have to go back to school and take a whole bunch of science classes. Then I’d have to go to medical school and do my residency. And after a number of years of long days and hard work, I would officially be a doctor. And when I got to that point, let’s suppose that one of you here needed open heart surgery. So you came to me and I said, “I’ll be happy to do that for you. I’ve studied how to do that and even assisted on a few surgeries. When do you want to schedule it?”
Even with your bad heart, you’d probably run from my office and go find a doctor with a whole lot more experience wouldn’t you? Why? I would have those same two letters behind my name – M.D. – as any other doctor. I would be just as much of a doctor as any of them. But I certainly wouldn’t consider myself to be “filled to the measure with all the fullness of being a doctor.” It would take many years before I could be all that I could be as a doctor.
I think that’s a pretty good picture of what we’re like spiritually. When we make the decision to become a follower of Jesus Christ, we get all of Jesus we’ll ever get and in Him we get the fullness of God. But we don’t experience the entire impact of that fullness right away. In fact, none of us will be able to know all that fullness in this lifetime here on earth. But as we mature and develop our relationship with God, we are able to experience more and more of that fullness operating in our lives.
Paul is going to address this whole idea of spiritual maturity in much more detail in chapter 4. Let’s take just a quick glimpse at a couple of verses this morning:
...so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.
Ephesians 4:12, 13
What I’d like you to notice this morning is that Paul makes a clear connection between attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ and our spiritual maturity. So the destination that God sets out before us is our spiritual maturity. But this is a different kind of destination, because it is one that I can never reach, at least not while I’m here on earth. That idea is foreign to our natural minds. We would never get in a car or on a plane and start out toward a destination we knew we could never reach. But God has determined that our spiritual journey will never come to a point of completion. If there was anyone who could have ever completed his spiritual journey here on earth, it had to be Paul, But even Paul, as he approached the end of his life, recognized that he still hadn’t gotten there. And yet, he still kept striving to reach the final destination. We will never arrive, but the more mature we get, the closer we come to being all that God intends for us to be.
And what really breaks my heart is to look around and to see all of the Christians who want to settle for just getting by. They don’t seem to want to do the hard work that is needed to get on the journey toward spiritual maturity. They could have the fullness of God in their life, but they choose to settle for the cheap imitations offered by the world. It’s kind of like sitting in the garage with the engine running, but never leaving the garage to actually go anywhere.
So how do we get to our destination of spiritual maturity? Let’s see what Paul has to say about that:
OUR VEHICLE: TO EXPERIENTIALLY KNOW THE LOVE OF CHRIST
...to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge...
Paul writes that the way we get closer to our destination of spiritual maturity is by grasping the love of Christ. This is one of the places where the NIV translation probably does the best job of conveying the meaning of what Paul is writing. Other translations speak of “understanding” or “comprehending” the love of Christ. But the word that Paul uses here is much stronger than that. He truly is expressing the idea of grasping, of being able to grab and hold onto, the love of Christ.
But there is an interesting paradox here. Paul writes that Christ’s love is wide and long and high and deep and that it is the kind of love that surpasses knowledge. Then he turns around and prays that his readers would be able to know this unknowable love.
The word Paul uses for “know” is a word that means to “know by experience.” Literally here is what Paul is praying for his readers:
[I pray for you to] know experientially this love that surpasses the ability to be known experientially.
On one hand that seems impossible. How can we know something that is beyond knowing? But it must be possible or else Paul wouldn’t have prayed for his readers to do that. It seems to me that Paul is emphasizing for us that this kind of knowledge we can’t figure out on our own. Only God can impart that kind of knowledge.
Paul has certainly described the love of Christ in the first three chapters of his letter. He has written about how we have been redeemed from an empty way of life by the work of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection. But Paul wants us to realize that we can never know that kind of love just by reading about it. Obviously reading about the love of Christ in His Word is the starting point, but that is inadequate on its own. We have to experience its operation in our lives in order to really know it in the sense Paul is writing about here. And that is the only way that we can move toward our destination.
Experientially knowing the love if Christ is the key to being all that we can be. But how do we do that? Fortunately, Paul gives us a roadmap to our destination.
THE ROADMAP:
1. Put down roots – Meditate on God’s Word
...being rooted...
As has been the case throughout his letter, Paul once again uses passive verbs here. Notice that we have been rooted – we didn’t root ourselves. We have been grounded. We didn’t ground ourselves. Obviously only God can do that. It is God’s work in our lives that provides the means for us to be rooted and grounded. But I’m convinced that Paul would agree that doesn’t mean that we have no role in the process. What we do in our lives can either facilitate or inhibit God’s work of rooting and grounding us in Christ’s love.
When Paul writes of being rooted in Christ’s love, I can’t help but think that he might be reflecting on the picture given by the Psalmist in the very first Psalm:
Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.
Psalm 1:1-3 (NIV)
The Psalmist gives us a beautiful picture here of the righteous man who is like a tree planted by streams of water, where the roots can go down deep and provide stability and allow that man to produce fruit in his life season after season. I think we’d all like to be like that man. So how can we develop those deep roots?
The Psalmist indicates that the key to putting down deep roots is to meditate on God’s Word day and night. Unfortunately, because of some of the new age religions, we’ve developed somewhat of an aversion to meditation. I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word meditate, I think of someone sitting cross-legged on the floor, chanting some mantra. And frankly I don’t want any part of that, because even if I ever could get in that position in the first place, I’d probably never get up again.
The Hebrew word for meditation comes from a root word that means to speak or utter. Meditation, as used here, means to speak God’s Word to yourself and to speak to yourself about what it means and how to apply it on your life. That act of meditation takes place in the heart, or in the mind. And you’ll notice that the Psalmist wrote that the man who is blessed will delight in meditating on the Word of God day and night.
So if I want to put down deep roots of the love of Christ, the first place I have to start is to delight in His Word to the point that I constantly think about it and how it applies to my life.
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? I do, because I’m still in love with that very same person. And that love that I have for Mary means that I think about her often. When we’re apart, I’m already thinking about when I’ll get to see her again. And because I love her, I think about what I can do make sure that I meet her needs and how I can be the person that she can trust and respect. Although that certain requires some effort on my part, it is also my delight.
When we fall in love with Jesus, we ought to have that same kind of attitude. We ought to delight in getting to know Him through his Word and thinking about how we can take and apply what we’re learning so that our lives can be pleasing to Him. That leads us to the second section of our roadmap:
2. Build on the right foundation – Practice what Jesus preached
... and established...
Paul loved to mix metaphors, so we shouldn’t be so surprised that he turns from an agricultural to an architectural picture. The word “established” literally means to have a firm foundation laid. Perhaps Paul was thinking back here to the words of Jesus. Although he hadn’t heard the Sermon on the Mount firsthand, he was undoubtedly familiar with these words of Jesus:
"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
Matthew 7:24-27 (NIV)
Most of us are pretty familiar with this passage. Jesus gives us an excellent picture of how we can make sure we are building our lives on a firm foundation. It’s not enough to just think about and meditate on the words of Jesus. If we really want to build a firm foundation, we have to also act on those words. We have to put them into practice in our lives.
If all I ever did was to think about Mary and how to meet her needs, but I never acted on those thoughts, that wouldn’t go very far in establishing a good foundation for our marriage. The same thing is true for us spiritually. If we truly want to experience the love of Christ in our lives, we have to be grounded in Him by practicing what he preached.
There is one more section to our roadmap:
3. Experience Christ’s love in community with other believers
...together with all the saints...
Although the things I need to do to allow God to root me and ground me are personal – no one else can do them for me – God never intended for them to be carried out in isolation. So Paul emphasizes once again the idea that we are to experience the love of Christ with other believers in this community we call the church. Because we have seen Paul make this point over and over in our journey through Ephesians, I’m not going to belabor the point. However, I also don’t want to diminish its significance.
In the book of Acts, we have very vivid description of how the believers in the early church understood the importance of community and what that should look like:
They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people…
Acts 2:42-47 (NIV)
Unfortunately, the church doesn’t usually look a whole lot like that today, does it? We’ve been so influenced by this individualistic culture that we often retreat into our own shells and try to live out our faith on our own. But that’s not how God planned it. So how can we restore an atmosphere where we can experience the love of Christ in community with other believers? I don’t have all the answers, but it seems to me that it starts with being real with other believers.
Most weeks we have a greeting time during our worship service. And I think most of us really enjoy that time. But based on my observations – and I’m as guilty as anyone here – most of what happens during that time is very superficial. Our conversation tends to go something like this:
“How are you?”
“Fine, how about you?”
“Fine.”
“Did you get any rain last night?”
“Just a sprinkle. How about you?”
“We got half an inch.”
“Wow.”
“Have a good week.”
“You, too.”
Not a whole lot there to allow us to experience the love of Christ, is there? But what if the conversation went something more like this:
“How are you?”
“Man, it’s been a really tough week. I got to work on Monday morning and was told that our company was going under, so that I needed to pack my stuff up and go home. Then on the way home, I got a flat time and had to change it in the 100 degree heat.”
“I’m really sorry to hear that? How are you holding up under all that?”
“You know, it was really tough, especially at first. I was mad at everyone, even God. I’ve worked hard for this company for 15 years and then they just tell me to go home and I’m not even going to get my last paycheck. But for some reason, God kept bringing to mind this verse: ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’ I’m still not real happy about the whole situation, but I’m beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s hard, but I’ve got to trust that what God said is true.”
“I don’t know how people can cope with situations like that without a relationship with God. Is there anything I can do for you?”
“No. we’re doing OK. Just pray for us to see God’s direction in this whole situation.”
“Why don’t you join us for lunch after church – my treat. Maybe we can talk some more then. And I will pray for you this week, but can I just pray for you briefly right now.”
Now I can see people experiencing the love of Christ in that kind of interaction, can’t you? So I want to encourage you to work on being real with others and taking time to share how God is working in you life. That will go a long way toward helping us together to know the love of Christ and get closer to our destination of spiritual maturity.
[Communion]
