At a wedding rehearsal in Concord, California, the pastor was explaining the symbolism of the unity candle. “After the middle candle is lit,” he said, “blowing out the two side candles means the two become one.”
“Oh,” someone in the wedding party exclaimed. “I thought it meant ‘no more flames!’” (Greg Asimakoupoulos, “Rolling Down the Aisle,” Christian Reader)
Don’t you wish that were true? Don’t you wish a simple ceremony would take away all the conflict so people could live together in perfect harmony?
So far, in the book of Ephesians, we’ve learned that God has brought us all together in one body. We’ve learned that the blood of Christ has broken down all the barriers between us, and that we are now ONE in Christ. But the living out of that unity is not so easy, is it? Sometimes, there is a little friction in our relationships, and there might even be plenty of “flames” at times.
So how do we make it work? How do we live out the unity that is ours in Christ? How do we put it into practice without so many flames? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to Ephesians 3, Ephesians 3, where we have a prayer for unity.
Ephesians 3:14-15 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named… (ESV)
Because God brought us together in one Body, and because God brought us together in one Family, the Apostle Paul gets on his knees before the Father. After all, when you bring Jew and Gentile together, Black & white, slave & free, rich & poor, young & old, Republicans & Democrats, and especially Wildcat & Jayhawk fans, when you bring all these people together, you have the potential for a lot of conflict.
It’s like tying two cats together by the tail. You might have union, but certainly not unity. So it is in the church. God has brought all kinds of people together in one body, but getting us to work together is going to take a lot of prayer.
And therein lies the key to living out the unity that is ours in Christ. Therein lies the key to making our differences work for us rather than against us. The key is prayer. Prayer is the bridge, which links the doctrinal section of this book (chapters 1-3) to the practical section of this book (chapters 4-6). Prayer is what turns our beliefs into behavior. Prayer is what turns doctrine into doing. Prayer is what turns the principle of unity into the practice of unity.
If we’re going to live out our oneness in Christ, then like the Apostle Paul, we must get on our knees before the Father and beg Him for all the help we can get. We cannot do it on our own. We desperately need God’s help to make our church work without going down in flames.
The question is: What do we pray for? What do we ask God for that will help us work together for His glory? Well, look at verse 16, where we have Paul’s first request in his prayer for unity. He prays…
Ephesians 3:16-17a …that according to the riches of [God’s] glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith… (ESV)
Literally, so that Christ may settle down and feel at home in your hearts. The word implies taking possession of a home or dwelling, and is actually used in some contexts of demon possession (Matthew 12:45 & Luke 11:26).
Did you ever say to someone, “Make yourself at home”? If you really meant it, that person could rearrange all the furniture, repaint all the walls, and eat all your food. When someone truly makes themselves at home, they live in that home like they own the place.
Well, that’s what we want Christ to do in our hearts. As believers, we know that He already lives in our hearts, but we want Him to make Himself feel at home in our hearts. We want Him to live there like He owns the place. We want Him to take possession of our hearts and become the controlling influence of all our attitudes and actions.
Isn’t that right? Don’t we want His love and grace to permeate all of our relationships? If that’s the case, then like Paul, we must…
PRAY FOR POWER.
We must pray for God’s strength in our inner being. We must ask God to fortify us on the inside so we can love people on the outside.
Our son, Peter, as a nuclear technician for the Navy, was for several years stationed on a nuclear sub, called the Annapolis, based in Connecticut. During those years, our interest in nuclear submarines peaked.
We were able to visit out son on base, and there we learned about one of the earlier nuclear submarines, called the Thresher. It had heavy steel bulkheads and heavy steel armor, so it could dive deep and withstand the pressure of the ocean. Unfortunately, on a test run in 1963, the Thresher's nuclear engine quit, and it could not get back to the surface. It sank deeper and deeper into the ocean where the pressure became immense. The heavy steel bulkheads buckled, and the Thresher was crushed with 129 people inside. That’s not something you want to hear about when your son serves on such a vessel.
Well, the Navy searched for the Thresher with a research craft that was much stronger than a submarine. It was shaped like a steel ball and was lowered into the ocean on a cable. Eventually, they located the Thresher at a depth of 8,400 feet: one and a half miles down. It was crushed like an egg shell, which didn’t surprise anybody. The pressure at that depth is tremendous – 3,600 pounds per square inch.
What did surprise the searchers was the fish they saw at that great depth. There, the fish did not have inches of steel to protect them. They appeared to have normal skin, a fraction of an inch thick. How then could they survive under all that pressure? How could they not be crushed by the weight of the water? It’s because they have the same pressure inside themselves as there is on the outside. The water pressure within keeps them from being crushed by the water pressure without. (Sidney Greidanus, Preaching Christ from Genesis, Eerdmans, 2007, pp. 492-493)
In the same way, we don’t have to be hard and thick skinned. We can utilize God’s power within to equal the pressure without. The Bible says, “The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world” (1 John 4:4). That means we can push against the efforts of Satan to divide and destroy us. By God’s Spirit, we can have the strength within to overcome the Devil’s schemes without. All we need to do is pray for that strength.
Phillips Brooks, a 19th Century preacher, put it well when he said, “Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger people. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.” (Phillips Brooks, Leadership, Vol. 12, no. 2)
When we pray for God’s strength in our inner being, we will marvel at His love and grace, which will flow through us in all our relationships. If we want to live out the unity that is ours in Christ, then 1st of all, we must pray for power. 2nd, we must also…
PRAY FOR LOVE.
If we want to BE the church God has called us to be, working together for His glory, then we must ask God to show us His love, and pray that we experience His love in our every-day lives. That’s what Paul prays for here. He prays…
Ephesians 3:17b-19a …that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge… (ESV)
We have been grounded in God’s love. The Bible says that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39). We are secure in God’s love.
Now, all we have to do is know it. All we have to do is grasp the depth of God’s love in our hearts.
We get a glimpse of that love in a letter from a father to his daughter that Dr. James Dobson put in his book, When God Doesn't Make Sense.
“My Dear Bristol,” the letter begins.
“Before you were born, I prayed for you. In my heart I knew you would be a little angel, and so you were. When you were born on my birthday, April 7, it was evident that you were a special gift from the Lord. But how profound a gift you turned out to be! More than the gurgles and rosy cheeks, more than the firstborn of my flesh—a joy unspeakable. You showed me God's love more than anything else in all creation. Bristol, you taught me how to love. I certainly loved you when you were cuddly and cute, when you jabbered your first words.
“I loved you when the searing pain of realization took hold that something was wrong—that maybe you weren't developing as quickly as your peers, and even when we understood it was more serious than that. I loved you when we went from hospital to clinic to doctor, looking for a medical diagnosis that would bring us some hope. And of course, we always prayed for you. We prayed and prayed.
“I loved you when you moaned and cried; your mom and I and your sisters would drive for hours late at night to help you fall asleep. I loved you when you were confused—when, with tears in your eyes, you would bite your fingers or your lip by accident. I loved you when your eyes crossed, and then when you went blind. I most certainly loved you when you could no longer speak, but how profoundly I missed your voice!
“I loved you when scoliosis began to wrench your body like a pretzel, and when we put a tube in your stomach so you could eat. We fed you one spoonful at a time—even up to two hours per meal. I managed to love you when your contorted limbs made changing ten years of diapers difficult. Bristol, I even loved you when you could not say the one thing in life that I longed to hear back: ‘Daddy, I love you.’
“Bristol, I loved you when I was close to God and when he seemed far away—when I was full of faith and also when I was angry at him. And the reason I loved you, my Bristol, in spite of these difficulties, is that God put this love in my heart. This is the wondrous nature of God's love: He loves us when we are blind, or deaf, or twisted in body or in spirit. God loves us even when we can't tell him that we love him back.
“My dear Bristol, now you are free. I look forward to that day when, according to God's promises, we will be joined together—completely whole and full of joy. I'm so happy that you have your crown first! We will follow you some day in his time. Before you were born, I prayed for you. In my heart, I knew you would be a little angel. And so you were.
“Love, Daddy.”
That’s the way God loves us! He certainly loves us when we are “cuddly and cute,” but He also loves us when we are blind, or deaf, or twisted in body or in spirit. He loves us even when we can’t tell him that we love him back. Oh my dear believing friend: let that truth grip your heart. Ask God to help you grasp in your own heart how much He really does love you.
Then you and I can live it out in our everyday lives. We can learn to love as God loved us. You see, Paul is praying for more than just a head-knowledge of God’s love here. He wants us to know in our experience what it means to love as we are loved by Christ Himself. It’s like the old song says: “I am loved; I am loved. I can risk loving you, because the One who knows me best loves me most.”
If we want to live out the unity that is ours in Christ, then 1st, we must pray for power. 2nd, we must pray for love, and 3rd, we must…
PRAY FOR GOD HIMSELF.
We must ask God to fill us with himself. Ask Him to give us the gift of the fullness of His presence. That’s Paul’s 3rd request in this great prayer for unity. He prays…
Ephesians 3:19b …that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. (ESV)
To be FILLED with God is a great thing; to be filled with the FULNESS of God is still greater; but to be filled with ALL the fullness of God, totally blows me away! But that’s exactly what we need. We need God Himself to fill us so full of Himself that we love one another simply out of the overflow of His presence in our lives.
Author, Brennan Manning, put it this way: “To me, it's more important to be loved than to love. When I have not had the experience of being loved by God, just as I am and not as I should be, then loving others becomes a duty, a responsibility, a chore. But if I let myself be loved as I am, with the love of God poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit, then I can reach out to others in a more effortless way. (Author Brennan Manning, The Dick Staub Interview: Brennan Manning on Ruthless Trust, Christianity Today.com, posted 12-10-02)
When we are filled with God’s Spirit, then we overflow with God’s love.
I’ll never forget Corrie Ten Boom’s story of shaking the hand of one of her former guards at Ravensbruck, a Nazi concentration camp. She and her sister were sent there for hiding Jews in Holland during the Second World War.
Just a couple of years after she got out, she was speaking in Germany about the God who forgives. “When we confess our sins,” she said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. And even though I cannot find a Scripture for it, I believe God then places a sign out there that says, ‘NO FISHING ALLOWED.’”
It was a powerful message on the love and forgiveness of God, but then Corrie Ten Boom saw the face of one of her former guards at Ravensbrook. All she could think about was “the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man.” He had been one of her most cruel guards.
Afterwards, he came up to her and told her he had since become a Christian. Then he extended his hand and asked for her forgiveness. Corrie Ten Boom said, “I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.” She was unable in her own strength to forgive this man. “Jesus, help me!” she prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”
So woodenly, mechanically, she thrust out her hand into the one stretched out to her. And as she did, an incredible thing took place. She said, “The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.”
“I forgive you, brother!” she cried, “with all my heart!" And for a long moment they grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. Corrie Ten Boom said, “I had never known God's love so intensely, as I did then. But even then,” she said, “I realized it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit. (Corrie Ten Boom, Tramp for the Lord, Berkley, 1978, pp. 53-55)
Are you having trouble loving somebody? Then cry out for God’s help. Pray for power. Pray for love, and pray for God Himself to fill you with all the fullness of Himself. It’s the only way we’ll be able to live out the unity that is ours in Christ.
I asked God to take away my pride, and God said no. He said it was not for him to take away, but for me to give up. I asked God to make my handicapped child whole, and God said, “No, her spirit is already whole. Her body is only temporary.” I asked God to grant me patience, and God said no. He said that patience is the byproduct of tribulation. It isn't granted; it's earned. I asked God to give me happiness; God said no. He said he gives blessings; happiness is up to me. I asked God to spare me pain, and God said no. He said I must grow on my own, but he will prune me in order to make me fruitful. I asked God if he loved me, and God said yes. He gave me his only Son who died for me, and I will be in heaven some day because I believe. I asked God to help me love others as much as he loves me, and God said, “Ahhh, finally! Now you have the idea.” (A Christmas card cited by Vic Pentz, A Twinge of Nostalgia, Preaching Today, Tape No. 88)
Is that a prayer God can answer? Yes! A Thousand times Yes!
Ephesians 3:20-21 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (ESV)
