“I Am Heard”
(Eph 3:14-21)
What goes through your mind when you think of prayer? If I were to say at the beginning of the service that we are not going to have any music or sermon or anything else this morning, we are just going to pray together for an hour, what would you’re reaction be?
Let me put it another way. Would you like to have a real face to face conversation with the living God of the universe? If I said, today Jesus is here in the flesh and he is going to have a conversation with us. What would your reaction be to that?
My guess is that those two reactions would be quite different. Yet, in some ways they are saying the same thing. What is prayer? Well on the surface it seems like a one way conversation where the recipient of our words may or may not be listening, and certainly rarely speaks. If we’re honest, quite often when we pray, we’re not sure if anything is being accomplished, it’s often just something we do because that’s what you do when you’re a Christian. You float something up there and hope it reaches someone, and if it does somehow reach someone, you hope that they hear it and answer you or respond.
What do you usually pray? If you’re like most of us, the most common prayer that we make sure we don’t forget is before we eat. We might not do it before breakfast or lunch maybe, but usually we will do it before supper, especially if we have visitors, and especially visitors from the church.
We often pray for health, we pray for others who are struggling in some way and need God to intervene. And we pray for God to intervene in our own struggles, often to end the struggle somehow or to give us wisdom and guidance through it.
Nothing wrong with any of those prayers, and once in a while we really see them answered, but more often we don’t, certainly not in the way we were hoping for. So prayer becomes this little side thing we throw up when we think about it or when desperate, and if we’re honest, we do it without always thinking that it will be answered.
What I want us to know today is that God does hear us, we are heard by God. But I do think it’s somewhat conditional. If we look at 1 John 5:14 “And this is the confidence we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to His will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.” The condition there is that it must be according to his will.
In the Psalms it’s very clear that David is certain that God hears and answers his prayers. In 1 Peter 3 we hear that as husbands if we don’t treat our wives as precious and with understanding as God commands, our prayers will be hindered, or literally “cut off”.
Let’s go to verse 14 of Ephesians 3, which is the first verse of our text today. Now this is going to be the strongest point I make today and it has to do with how we approach God in our hearts. Verse 14 is actually a continuation of a broken sentence in verse 1. So if we put those two together we have, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ (by the way he says this again as he starts the next chapter) on behalf of you Gentiles, bow my knees before the Father, from which every family in heaven and on earth is named.” Stop there.
I want us to first of all note the posture Paul is taking. He mentions how he is a prisoner of God, in other words in complete submission. He is bowing his knees, and he is acknowledging essentially that God is creator and ongoing sovereign Lord of all creation.
I believe this is what is meant by being in His will, or even in the name of Jesus. “The name of Jesus” essentially being the character of Jesus, or how he was when he walked the earth. Which was? What would you say was the primary character of Jesus? Would it not be that he was in complete submission to God even unto death?
John 5:19, "Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing.”
How about John 12:49, “For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment—what to say and what to speak”. Jesus says and does only what the Father shows him.
When we approach the God of the universe, again really knowing who he is, and that we deserve nothing but his wrath, we must come to Him in a posture of submission. Now does that mean we have to get on our face or on our knees? Not necessarily, because it’s more about the posture of our heart than our bodies. I’m sure when we actually see him in person for the first time, we won’t be able to stand anyway.
It is the posture of submission. I am pretty sure that this means that our prayers will be heard and especially answered, to the degree that we are in His will, and being obediently submitted to Him. This doesn’t just mean that we pray something that we think or believe is in his will. No, I think this means that when we pray, we better be in His will. I think this is one explanation for why when we pray for something that is obviously something in his will we don’t always see it answered.
Obviously based on that passage in first Peter our prayers can be hindered, specifically in that case when we are not treating our wives according to how he wants us to treat them. Well I think that carries through the rest of our lives as well. When we are not living in His will according to His commandments, our prayers may be hampered.
This also explains why He doesn’t always come through when we go through some difficulties. Isn’t it true that most of our difficulties ultimately come from our own choices? At least an accumulation of our choices or behaviours and thoughts, that are out of God’s will over time.
So Paul comes to God as a prisoner of Jesus, in jail because of his complete submission to Jesus commands. I don’t think he even needed to be on his knees, but he wanted to make sure he was coming to God in the right position. He didn’t treat prayer casually.
So with this in mind, do you really think God pays much attention to our suppertime prayers? Does our food really need his blessing, are we really coming to him from the desperation and submission in our hearts? There’s nothing wrong with this kind of prayer especially if it’s more thanksgiving than anything, but we need to make sure of what condition our heart is in when we come to God, or it’s probably a waste of time and just becomes empty routine.
Next I want to look at his petitions. What is Paul praying for? Let’s look at verses 16-19 again. First he’s praying for others not himself, even though he’s in a not so good situation. But then look at what he’s praying for them. It isn’t for Myrna’s surgery, or Jacob’s job (again there’s nothing wrong with praying for those things), but he’s praying first of all that this amazing God who has all the riches of glory, might possibly grant you to be strengthened with His power in your inner being. So he’s praying for the inner strength they need to live out a Christian life, that can only be given by God.
Why is he praying this? Verse 17 - so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Now this isn’t a prayer for salvation, he’s writing to an established church of presumably born again believers. He continues this prayer asking for more grounding in love, for the strength to comprehend with all other Christians, the incredible completeness of God’s love that we can’t even really get our heads around in this life, and that they would be filled with the fullness of God.
Who do we know that was filled with the fullness of God? Jesus – in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. So in essence he’s asking God for the Ephesian believers to be completely filled with the fullness of God, which of course is perfect love for the Father and for other people, the great commandment.
Now let’s look at verse 20. This is about His power. Him who is able to do far more than we ask or think, according to the power at work within us. Wow, wait a minute! We ask for some pretty big things Paul, you say he can do more than we can even imagine? And how does he do it? Through his power yes, but in us? That’s what it says.
You see I think this is where our prayers fall woefully short sometimes. We don’t know who God is, and we don’t know who we are in Christ with the fullness of the Holy Spirit living in us. That’s why this series is about our identity in Him.
Look at what Jesus says in John 16:23-24, “Truly, truly I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have asked nothing in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete”.
“Well, that must just have been for the apostles not us, because that sure isn’t happening in my life”. Just wait a minute.
What does this “in my name” mean? Let’s hear what Strong’s concordance has to say about the Greek word for “name” here. The base word is used to express authority or character, and the definition is: the name is used for everything which the name covers, everything the thought or feeling of which is aroused in the mind by mentioning, hearing, remembering the name, i.e. for one’s rank, authority, interests, pleasure, command, excellences, deeds, etc.
What do we get from that? Our version of that is to tack “in Jesus’ name” at the end of our prayer. But really it has nothing to do with the words we use, unless those words evoke what is listed here. So in one sense it’s praying with the authority of Jesus. But in a bigger sense it is having ourselves completely immersed in the character of Jesus. We are praying with the full remembering of who Jesus is.
But the kicker there is that we are praying in his name, in his character, in his authority, more so than with his authority. To think we have Jesus’ authority just by saying his name is kind of naïve and disrespectful, especially if this prayer comes from a person who denies Christ regularly by not being obedient to Him.
Again there may be nothing wrong with using those words at the end of your prayer, but are you really in Jesus, are you really praying in His name? In some ways it may be downright insulting to say you are in Jesus’ name when you pray. This of course relates to being submitted to Him, in essence having Him pray through you by the Holy Spirit.
Now all of this, our posture, our petitions in His will, and His power, should lead us to positive expectation when we pray. That’s what we should get from verse 20 and the passage in 1 John. He is able to do far more than we can ask or imagine, and if we pray in His will he hears us and we know we already have what we asked. Wouldn’t you love to have that kind of confidence in your prayers?
But if you look at Christian people throughout history who seem to have their prayers answered in big ways, the people in Acts, D.L Moody, George Meuller and many more we can read about, they were all submitted to God’s will and were in situations because of their obedience to his will, that they absolutely needed God to act in. If you don’t know the story of George Meuller, I suggest you read it even if just on wikipedia. He raised over what would today be the equivalent of $150 million and he never asked for a cent, all he did was pray to God with expectation. That was just some of what he received in answer to prayer. There’s a legend that on the wood floor beside his bed there were two indentations that had been worn into the wood from his knees.
When Jesus says to his apostles in John 16 that they have asked nothing in his name, many think that means because Jesus is there they have not asked the Father for anything in His name. That may be true, but that passage is also in the context of him going away so that the helper, the Holy Spirit can come. I think this means that it is not possible to pray in Jesus name or character until the Holy Spirit dwells in us, because you do not have the wisdom or power to be completely submitted to God without the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit living in us is the only way we can have confidence that our prayers will be answered.
Finally this passage ends with our praise. “To him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever”. To him be the glory in the church, not to us. We didn’t and never will have ownership of the church. We will never be able to do anything as a church unless Jesus allows it. He could shut us down any time he wants, because it is his church. And one of my concerns with the North American church is that we do a little too much glorifying of ourselves in the church.
We take over, we start doing things our way, we bask in the glory of our talents, growth, new buildings and so on. But I am convinced that as soon as you start to steal some of the glory that is rightfully God’s, things start to go downhill eventually. God has never and will never share his glory, because nothing comes close, and a counterfeit demeans who He is.
When we combine Paul’s prayer here, with other prayers especially in the book of Acts and of course Jesus own Lord’s Prayer. We see some of most of these five aspects we looked at today in all of them.
If we come to prayer with the right heart posture of submission and are living a life in His will, if our petitions are most often for others and the theme is for them to know God, if we know and acknowledge his power working in us through the Holy Spirit, if we have heartfelt faith and expectation that God will answer the prayer, and if we praise Him and always give him the credit for everything, we will be heard and our prayers will be fruitful. The bible promises this, but it is not unconditional.
So Paul is teaching his church today in chapter three that he is praying for them, but he is also teaching them how to pray, and what they should be desiring from God. This is very important because the rest of the book is essentially about living in Christ and in his church. We all need Paul’s prayers and we all need the power and patience of God to make it a reality.
