“Far Beyond All We Could Ask”
Ephesians 3:14-21
The main theme of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is that there is no nation, no family, no person—no matter who they are, what they have done, where they come from that is beyond the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!!!
This might sound like an obvious claim to some, to be said in a church on a Sunday morning.
But, maybe it isn’t as obvious as it seems.
For some of us here, this could very well be a difficult concept.
There might be folks in this room who are dealing with any number of secret hurts, private shames, and lost hopes.
Some of us may be struggling to trust in God as we age, our hair turns gray and our faces wrinkle.
Others, may have a difficult time because of the temptations they face.
Young people might feel such pressure to “fit-in,” and may be dealing with such low self-esteem due to bullying and “buying into” the falsehoods others heap upon them that the Loving God may seem too far out of reach.
What are you dealing with this morning?
What is attacking and choking your joy?
What is causing the air to deflate from life?
What is making it hard to be joyful?
I was speaking with my sister Lisa recently, and we were discussing the “aging issue.”
Lisa said, “I like being older because I don’t have to deal so much with insecurities.
I used to feel as if other people had ‘one up’ on me.
Now I know that is not true and we are all in the same boat.”
In our Scripture Passage from Ephesians, Paul says that in his prayers for this young church he asks God that “Christ will live in [their] hearts through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love.”
And this is sort of a way of confessing the truth—to God and to one another—that we are really at risk of living lives that are rooted and grounded in fear and self-preservation instead.
And to live lives like that is miserable indeed.
You could say that Paul’s prayer for the Church in Ephesus, is a prayer that they would be taken over by Christ!
He prays that they will be strengthened in their “inner selves”—from the inside out—by the power of God’s Spirit.
This isn’t a matter of them making themselves stronger, but becoming stronger by having Jesus Christ live in their hearts.
Paul prays for them to understand something which is beyond all knowledge—the vastness of the love of Jesus Christ—so that they may be filled with all the fullness of God.
So the entire issue boils down to allowing Jesus Christ into our lives to change us.
And having Jesus Christ live in our hearts is kind of similar to having a new person move into your household.
Think about it, if someone is just visiting, it’s a pretty easy situation.
You just be hospitable for a bit and have good manners.
Then you can go back to life as usual in a couple days after they leave.
But if someone moves in to stay, everything changes!!!
Sure, at first you might try and hold onto your normal patterns of living and routines, and the new member of the household might work hard to stay out of the way.
But eventually they make their mark.
Conversations start to change.
Relationships realign.
Household tasks change and responsibilities shift.
And this is what it’s like when Jesus moves into the hearts of people.
It’s not just a matter of tweaking old ways of living; everything changes!!!
Eugene Peterson’s The Message puts it like this: “I ask [God] to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in.”
Writer Anne Lamott tells about her profound experience of having Jesus Christ come and live in her.
She was unmarried, pregnant, and decided to have an abortion.
She coped with pain in her usual way, by smoking dope and getting drunk.
But when she started hemorrhaging a week later, she sobered up fast!!!
And it was that night that she became aware of Someone in the room with her.
She writes, “The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there—of course, there wasn’t.
But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.”
She says that in her circle of family and friends, nobody was a Christian.
They were all kind of like the people living in Ephesus: worldly, sophisticated, and in need of no one but themselves.
But still, writes Lamott, Jesus stayed in the corner, “watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing Him with.”
Lamott started going to church for several Sundays; she was drawn in to a funky little church mostly because of the music.
Each Sunday she went back.
She writes that she couldn’t escape the feelings.
“It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it washed over me.”
She says that one Sunday, when she got home, she opened the door, and said out loud to Jesus: “All right. You can come in.”
Have we let Jesus Christ live in us?
Have we tasted the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ?
It’s been said that even if persons have let Jesus into their lives, they may only be offering Jesus a guest room or the couch.
In the Harry Potter novels, Harry’s aunt and uncle make their poor nephew live in a cramped cupboard under the stairs.
How much room are we willing to give up for Jesus Christ, and for other people, people that Jesus loves?
Again, Paul’s prayer in Ephesians is full of hope.
He prays that Jesus Christ will take over these people, and strengthen them by God’s own Spirit.
He prays for both power and love; power to grasp the breadth, length, height and depth of Christ’s love, which is “beyond knowledge” so they can be filled with the fullness of God.
But it seems like kind of an oxymoron, does it not, to know something or grasp something that is “beyond knowledge”?
How in the world does that work?
One way it works is that the knowledge of the love of Christ isn’t just “head-knowledge.”
It’s also, and maybe mostly “heart-knowledge.”
It’s been said that Christian “knowledge” is always something more than belief, something more than what our intellect can fathom.
Our hearts have something beyond the mind, or as Paul says in Ephesians, for those in whom Christ lives there is a “power at work within us…able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.”
How many times have you found yourself doing something that you could never or would never have done on your own—without the power of Christ living in you?
Have you ever been able to overcome something you never thought you could overcome?
What was it?
A divorce?
The death of a loved one?
An illness?
A weakness?
“Glory to God, who is able to do far beyond all that we could ask or imagine by his power at work within us.”
In her book The Hiding Place, Corrie Ten Boom, a Christian who helped hide Jews from the Nazi’s but ended up in a Nazi concentration camp herself—where her entire family was murdered—writes about a time she was speaking in a church after the war.
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him,” Ten Boom writes, “the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door…and suddenly it was all there—the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing [my sister’s] pain-blanched face.”
“He came up to me,” writes Corrie, “as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing.”
“How grateful I am for your message,’ he said.
‘To think that, as you say, [Jesus] has washed my sins away!’
Corrie continues, “His hand was thrust out to shake mine.
And I, who had preached so often to the people [about] the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.
Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?
Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.”
Corrie continues, “I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand.
I could not.
I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.
And so again I breathed a silent prayer.
Jesus, I cannot forgive him.
Give me Your forgiveness.”
Then she writes, “As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened.
From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His.”
Scholar N.T. Wright has noted, “We are not to be surprised if living as Christians brings us to the place where we find we are at the end of our own resources, and that we are called to rely on the God Who raises the dead.”
How fitting that Paul ends our Scripture passage for this morning with, “glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus for all generations, forever and always. Amen.”
Beyond our small hopes, beyond our small lives, beyond our meager imaginations, God is at work, fulfilling God’s plan laid out for you and for me for all of eternity!!!
How can we not “kneel before the Father”?
How can we not desire to have Christ take over our entire lives…
…not just the couch or the cupboard under the stairs!!!
How can we not want more than anything in the world to have “the power to grasp love’s width and length, height and depth…”
…and to “know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that [we] will be filled entirely with the fullness of God”?
The alternative is miserable indeed.
Amen.
