“I Am Appreciated”
(Ephesians 1:15-23)
In a series called “I Am” when we’re talking about ourselves, I realize there’s a danger of our egos getting involved, especially when the title is “I Am Appreciated”. But remember Paul is talking to people that he sees as saints who are completely faithful and love each other. The point being that when Paul says he appreciates you, or when God says it for that matter, it is only because you are faithful to Christ and are bearing his image. It really has nothing to do with you other than the fact that you are his creation, rather it’s about who you are wearing and who lives in you. When you claim and live out this identity, when you are in Christ, then you are appreciated.
So Paul in his continued excitement that we saw last week gives us another long run on sentence in the Greek. Many call this Paul’s prayer of thanksgiving and it shows Paul’s love and appreciation for the Ephesian believers, who we now know he considers to be saints. He’s still giddy, still talking without taking a breath and he says, “I don’t ever stop thanking God for you and praying for you”. And Paul I believe. When I say I’m always praying for you, or someone says that to me, it has some merit, but I know for sure that when Paul says this, especially as he sits in prison, that he is constantly praying for these people.
Why is he so appreciative of them? And of course as an apostle of God he represents God’s appreciation of them as well. It seems to be because he has heard of their faith and love toward all the saints. This gives us an insight into what God finds important in his saints. We talked about this a couple weeks ago. Two things specifically that are to distinguish us as God’s saints are our faith and total dedication to follow Jesus, and our love for each other. It’s not just because we said a prayer to accept Christ’s forgiveness. Clearly God has little use for unfruitful Christians, they get pruned and cut off the vine.
And today we are going to see what he is praying for these people. We see how much he appreciates them, we see why he appreciates them, but what does he want for them, and what does that make them? He says he prays that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you these things, and I believe that Paul would know the truth from experience, of what Jesus meant when he mentioned in Matthew, Mark, and John that if you believe, whatever you ask God for in prayer, in the name or character of Christ, it will be given to you.
So let’s get right into the first thing he mentions in verse 17.
Appreciated People are Given Wisdom (v. 17a)
First look at how the trinity is included here. Some people have a problem seeing the phrase, “Father of Glory, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ”. But isn’t Jesus God? Yes, but in regard to position especially when he took on human form, he is in submission to the Father. Jesus is the perfect image of God on earth, therefore he will only do what the mind of God says. Then the third member of the trinity is mentioned as the Spirit of wisdom. God blesses us through Christ, by the Spirit.
This wisdom is clarified in Colossians 1:9 as referring to Knowledge of His will. Real wisdom is practically knowing what God’s will is in every situation and how to apply it. And it’s only possible by His giving of the Holy Spirit. What does Paul say in 1 Corinthians 2, “No one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God…” and he finishes that passage with, “We have the mind of Christ.” As Christ had the mind of his father.
Now all of this is really saying that:
Appreciated People Know God (v. 17b)
By the giving of the Holy Spirit we are able to know God because He is revealed to us when we receive the Spirit of wisdom. In verse 18 we see a very interesting statement that we have the eyes of our hearts enlightened. We don’t see God or spiritual things with our physical eyes, but with our hearts. The book of Hebrews talks about this enlightenment and another verse 18 in Acts chapter 26 records Jesus saying when he zaps Paul, that he is actually sending Paul to the Gentiles to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, in other words repent.
We may spend a lot of time and energy doing “Christian” things, but the most important thing is to know God, and the primary place that God is revealed is in his word, and the Spirit helps us to understand and know Him from that word. So let me just say this. If you are a Christian, you should really be spending more time studying with prayer the word of God, the Bible, than all the other things you do like serving and going to church and whatever else you do that you wouldn’t be doing if you weren’t a Christian. You should be spending at least as much time in the bible than all those other things combined, because Knowing God, knowing Christ and His will is the most important thing, and our actions should stem from that.
I’m telling you this because I feel that that is what is lacking most in Christians today, a deep knowledge and intimacy with God. I say this from counselling people. Christian people come to me struggling and having difficulties in their lives, and when I ask how much they are taking in the Bible, learning from the great counsellor, the answer is always very little if at all. When things are not going well we often go to the Bible less rather than more.
And the other thing I see is in churches that are struggling. The primary reason is usually that they are not following what the Bible says. I have been in prayer for our old church back in BC who are going through a very difficult time right now, and though the pastor is a great teacher of the Bible, he and the leadership have not been consistently living and leading by biblical principles, and it is causing very deep problems in the church. In the church of all places, we have to be submitted to God’s revealed will in His word.
The Bible has everything we need, and every evangelical church I know has listed somewhere that the Bible is to be used to direct all practice in our lives and in the church. But unfortunately often that’s just lip service and when you look at actual practice, that is not the case. We cannot go by man’s will or wisdom, any other guidebook or constitution unless they are in complete and obvious agreement with Scripture. And we should know better.
So we have wisdom and knowledge of God through the Word and the Spirit. And through this we know the hope that we are called to.
Appreciated People Have Hope (v. 18a)
And what is the specific target of this hope here? It is “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints”. Now that’s a little confusing, his glorious inheritance in the saints. This is not our inheritance that we spoke about last week in Christ, but the inheritance of Christ in us. What is he inheriting? Us. In Colossians 1:27 Paul says, “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.” So:
Appreciated People are an Inheritance to God (v. 18b)
The church is Christ’s inheritance, his bride. Even in the OT in Deuteronomy 32:9 it says that the Lord’s portion is his people. This again is a picture of his love. All he wants is us, because he has everything else. We are the only thing He created that can choose not to be His.
Look at Psalm 2:7, it’s one of those passages that sounds like God is talking about David but it’s actually a double message that is also speaking of Jesus. It says, “You are my son, today I have begotten you. Ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth shall be your possession.” That refers to people as well as geography.
So do you see how even though this is His inheritance it gives us hope, because he wants us? He has called us to be Christ’s inheritance. We’ll go into this in more detail in chapter 4 where he also mentions the hope that belongs to our call.
So this is about being His possession. Does that give you hope? Does it give you hope that you are called to be his image, his body in the world? Or is all your hope tied up in life after death? I wonder if for some of us we like the idea of the hope of eternal life, but we need to realize that we don’t have that hope if we don’t belong to him now. And he says that belonging to him has incredible riches - obviously.
Scripture tells us that Jesus will hand over the kingdom to God the Father at the end (1Cor 15:24). Jesus’ inheritance becomes the inheritance of God, which yes, is really the same thing. But I think this denotes the unity and oneness that will be characteristic of eternal life when all things are restored. In chapter 4 we will see this when it says in relation to all this, that the hope that belongs to our call is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
Perhaps this will be similar to what the new agers believe, that here today God is everything including us. That is not true yet, but it does seem that there will be that kind of oneness in eternity. He will be over all, through all, and in all. And he is all in all. He will permeate everything and everyone in the new heaven and earth.
Another thing we should know of this hope and riches is that:
Appreciated People are Powerful (vv 19-20)
Now remember how excited Paul is when saying this, listen to the exclamations he makes in verses 19-20, “ and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward (better translation is “to” us or “into”) us who believe, according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but the age to come.”
The all powerful, almighty God gives us his power that raised Christ from the dead (is there a higher power than that?). In case you’re not sure of that from this passage, try these: Jn 1:12-13, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become sons of God.” For some reason newer translations have taken out the word “power” and replaced it with “right”. But 98 out of 103 times that word appears in the NT it is power or authority, and only twice is it “right”, so I think power is the correct translation. King James got this passage right.
2 Peter 1:3, “His divine power has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence.”
And 1 Timothy 1:7, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
So God’s people are given power and wisdom, but only if the next thing is true, that:
Appreciated People are Under Authority (vv 21-23)
We read in verses 20 and 21 that God has given Christ all authority. Jesus himself confirms this in the Great Commission. Nobody else in the whole universe has any authority above Christ in anything.
Continuing, it says that “all things are under His feet, and he is head over all things to the church which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all”. See how Christ is equated with what we just heard about God being all in all.
Now think for a minute, what would happen if your mind no longer controlled your body? This happens sometimes when there is neurological damage such as in paralysis and such. What happens to the body when the brain or mind no longer has control of it? It becomes ineffective and doesn’t work anymore, it loses its power, and it atrophies and eventually dies.
This is exactly what happens to a Christian or a church that is not living under the complete authority of Christ our head and source of power. It’s the whole vine and branches metaphor.
Jesus talks a lot about the body, and he heals bodies. He says the eyes are the lamp of your body so we need to be careful that we don’t set our eyes upon darkness and let darkness fill the body. If parts of the body cause you to sin, get rid of them. He sacrificed his body so we could be his body.
Paul talks about not letting sin reign in your mortal body, but be ruled by the Spirit. That doesn’t sound optional or partial. That the body of Christ has many parts with different functions but we are all part of the body. First Corinthians 12 talks at length about the body of Christ as the church.
And in chapter 4 of Ephesians which we will see later, Paul talks about the body and says walk in a manner worthy of your calling, and its here we see the idea of God being in all, over all, and through all. Walking in the Spirit of God is the only way to walk in a manner worthy of your call.
And he exhorts the leaders in the church to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God. There’s that idea of knowledge of God again.
The leaders need to be under the authority of Jesus and his word and should be focussed on equipping others by His word, and then it says the outcome of this is building up the body in unity and love when each part is working properly.
That phrase working properly is a tricky translation. It literally means “energy meter”, and what it refers to is that each part is working with the supernatural power that was given to the degree or measure that it is given by God. That you are using all the grace and power that God has given you. How many of us can honestly say that?
That’s exactly what Jesus did when he was in his human body on earth. He did everything with the full power that was given him, to show the ultimate love.
Now I just want to say in closing that the Ephesian church is appreciated by Paul as he writes in about 60 AD from what he hears about them. Remember he started this church, His spiritual son Timothy is essentially the lead elder of this church. The Apostle John was an elder in this church later in his life. This was the mother of all churches back then with superstar leadership.
If we look at Paul’s letters to Timothy which are written 2-3 years after he writes Ephesians, we see that there are problems brewing in the Ephesian church. The leadership had some false teachers rising in the ranks and living as poor examples. And Paul is strongly exhorting Timothy and this church to be faithful and stand in the truth.
Then in Revelation, Jesus himself says that this church has not tolerated evil in a very evil city, they have patiently endured with sound doctrine, but they have become a church of the head and not the heart. What Jesus has against them is that they have lost their love that they had at first.
Do you remember how Paul commended them at the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians? He commended them for their faith in the Lord Jesus and their love for each other. Paul later had to address their declining faithfulness in his letters to Timothy, and now Jesus addresses their losing the love that once characterized them. They went from appreciated to not so much in a span of a few years. And that can happen so easily.
That’s why all the churches in Revelation except one or two, are instructed to repent and to overcome or prevail. And I think the two areas where churches will be under attack the most is in staying faithful to God’s word, and continuing in love. What happens when a church falls apart? Typically they stop doing everything according to the Bible and they start fighting.
To remain appreciated in the eyes of God we must strive to stay faithful to the word of God and to continue to love radically. The consequences of not doing so will be to have our lampstand taken away, which at the very least means that the church would lose its effectiveness, or possibly even cease to exist.
What does Jesus give as the solution if we are not walking in a manner worthy of our calling so that we can be appreciated? It is to remember from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.
So that is what I would encourage all of us to do. What were we doing when we first believed, that God would have appreciated? Have we stopped doing some or all of those things? And if so, let’s commit to repenting and starting to do those things again. This applies to individuals as well as the church as a whole. As elders in this church one of the things we will be focussed on this year is a vision for the church, and we will be asking these kinds of questions of ourselves and the church.
Perhaps you look back and don’t see that you were doing anything to be appreciated by God back then, and you still don’t. This might be a time to evaluate your salvation and ask if you are really saved. Is this a church of saved, appreciated believers? That will be the topic for next week as we continue in Ephesians chapter 2.
