The last two Sundays we’ve taken a break from working through Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Those were Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And those Sundays are always a treat. But today we go back to the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. And that’s a different kind of treat.
If you take out the basic greeting in the first 2 verses, the chapter breaks down into two parts. The first part blesses God. It starts out, “blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and it works its way through the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Every blessing in heaven is available to us through knowing this incredible God, one God in three persons. All of theology, all of human life, flows out of the wonders of this God. Blessed be this wonderful God.
The focus changes in the second half of the chapter. Now it’s blessed be you, my brothers and sisters in Ephesus, some of whom are old friends to Paul, but many of whom I have never met. He really wants them to experience this God for themselves, fully.
And so we have this privilege, to peek into Paul’s personal devotional life, how he prays, the insight that he had into God’s heart and mind and plans.
And this is much more than a history lesson. If the Holy Spirit was inspiring Paul as he wrote this and if the Holy Spirit has saved this letter through the centuries, then I think it’s fair to say that this prayer is on God’s heart for us today. And so, as we look at it, I invite you to answer back to God and say, thank you, Lord, for what you have for me. Lord, make it happen. I dare to believe that you can do this in me.
Would you please stand for the reading of God’s word? Today’s text is Ephesians 1:15-23.
15 I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
The first part of Paul’s prayer is to thank God for the Christians at Ephesus. Most of Paul’s letters start out with thanks to God for his Christian brothers and sisters. Paul treasured the church. He risked his life to plant it. He prayed for it every day. When he saw faith in God growing on earth, he was excited. When he saw that faith in God expressed as love between the members, he just kept thanking God for it.
And it wasn’t that everybody in these churches was perfect. Read Paul’s letters and make a list of the sins they were struggling with and that will become clear. It’s obvious that in Ephesus the Hebrew speaking Christians and Greek speaking Christians were having trouble getting along. In chapter 5 he spends a lot of time warning them about sexual immorality. It’s not hard to guess why. Read any of his letters and you’ll see that Paul regularly had to deal with greed, party spirit, false teachings, lawsuits between members and arrogance. He had lots of headaches. But he could see Christ being formed in those people, and he figured it was all worth it and he even gave God thanks for the privilege of being part of it and getting to see it happen.
I hope you can feel that God is doing something precious among us. Sure, it seems to be happening slowly and sure, we have setbacks. But God is molding us into something beautiful. That’s a precious gift and it should make us all thankful.
One of the best ways to learn to pray is to take the wonderful examples of prayer that we find all over the Bible and pray them for ourselves, personalizing them. Let’s do that. I’d like to pray a prayer of thanksgiving for this church. Please join me.
Lord Jesus, thank you that you are molding this church into your very nature. We thank you for the times we have seen your love displayed, your servant heart. We thank you that you are teaching us to give your grace to one another, to practice here the sacrificial love that you demonstrated to your first disciples. We thank you that we are growing in faith in God. We thank you that we are growing in love for one another. And we give you the glory for that, Amen.
But Paul isn’t content to just leave them as they are. He wants more for them. He wants the best for them. He prays a blessing for them. And he writes it out for them. And I think the reason that he writes it out for them is that blessings of this sort need to be received. They need to be mixed with faith. The Ephesians needed to say, “Yes, Lord, do this in us. Bless us.” In ancient Hebrew custom they needed to add their “Amen.” “Lord, make it happen for me, too.”
I want to pray for these blessings for this congregation. And I want each one of us to accept the blessings, to make the choice to dare to believe that God can do it, to dare to believe that it can happen in your life, to dare to take new steps to live out that blessing, trusting that God will bring it to completion.
And what’s the best way for them to grow and be blessed? Did he pray for them to have the prettiest bell tower in town? Did he pray for them to have the biggest, most high tech church in town? Did he pray for lots of people to fill all their programs? I’d take any of those, but we all know there are much more important things. Paul prayed, in verse 18, that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened. He wanted them to see, to understand, deep down inside.
And if eyes need to be enlightened, then that means that sometimes they are darkened, that people just plain can’t see. They may know a lot of the right words to say. They may be doing a lot of the right things. But they just don’t get it. The eternal, all-wise, all loving God is here in the room, but they just don’t get it. The church is just another club to them. And they may work hard. They may contribute generously. They may speak the right words. But they’re still in the dark. And Paul wants to take them deeper. He wants the words to go beyond stimulating the mind or calming the nerves. He wants them to stir the heart.
And he’s not praying for them to get more information. I value information, but it’s much better to have a few parts of the gospel really woven deeply into your heart than to memorize 6 books of the newest and fanciest theologies.
Methodists look back to the day when John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was at a Bible study and something happened. He felt his heart strangely warmed. It struck him deeply that Christ hadn’t just died for everybody’s sins centuries ago. Christ had died for his sins. And he was changed. And Methodists have a strong tradition of affirming ‘the witness of the Spirit,’ the experience of God’s Spirit, very personally, deep down in our hearts.
Can’t we all remember times when there was a scripture that we had read 20 times before, but the day came when suddenly the light went on and we really understood it so that it moved our hearts and caused us to rethink the way we lived? Paul was praying for that kind of thing to happen a lot in Ephesus. He was praying for that miracle.
For enlightened eyes reading the Bible is exciting, prayer is a joy, Christian fellowship is precious. So that’s what Paul prayed for.
He prayed that their eyes would be opened to see three things. The first, in verse 18, was “to know the hope to which he has called you.” There’s hope! God had started something among them that was really going to pay off. He was changing them from the inside out. He was forming them together, with all their differences in gifts, all their different backgrounds, something that would be driven by love and lived out in holy lifestyles, and something that was going to be really good. And you can only sense that when God shows it to you in your heart.
And this gives us an important test for whether we are understanding the heart of God or not. God always includes hope. In the Old Testament there were times when God’s people had sinned horribly and God’s prophets had to speak very strong rebukes and warnings. And they portrayed the evil of sin very graphically and powerfully. But you never have to read very far in the prophets before you hear words of hope woven in with the warnings.
Paul prayed that their hearts would be filled with hope. Christians are hopeful people.
He goes on to fill out what that hope is. He prayed that they might know “the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” There’s really good stuff ahead for all those who are in Christ. Any investment we are called to make today, any sacrifice is worth it.
Kathy and I lived in Kathmandu, Nepal for two years. It was fascinating every day. For example, having babies was interesting there. One doctor told us that they had a Nepali woman who cooked for them. Nobody in her family had ever delivered a baby in a hospital before. They always did it at home. And he urged her to have the proper prenatal care and then go up to the hospital when her baby came due. Sure enough, one night she went into labor. She went up to the hospital. But the gates were locked for the night for security’s sake. There was a sign that said to ring the bell and the guard will let you in, but she couldn’t read. And somehow the guard wasn’t there. So she sat down on the pavement and delivered her own baby outside the hospital gate. And she walked home quite happy that she had delivered her baby at the hospital. That’s different from here.
And we got to know some of the international diplomatic community. One day one of the officers at the British High Commission told us about a strange problem they had. They owned a large compound of land on the edge of Kathmandu. And that bit of land was legally part of the United Kingdom as long as the High Commission, or we would call it an embassy, was there. And their problem was that Nepali women, as they were getting seriously into labor, would sneak onto the property at night and deliver their babies on British soil so that their children could have the rights of British citizens and some day have a British passport that would allow them to travel to Britain and have economic opportunities they would never have at home. Getting that British passport was worth all the risk. It opened doors for their future.
Your baptism and the Holy Spirit in your heart, open up for you all the doors of blessings for eternity. Treasure that gift. Never take it for granted. It’s your inheritance, a wonderful gift from God.
Parents and grandparents, if a Nepali mother will go that far to give the blessings of British citizenship to her child, how far will you go to be sure that your children receive the blessings of citizenship in God’s kingdom? Give them every opportunity, please! Kids need to be in church and Sunday school and MYF, they need your prayers. They need to learn the scriptures. God offers them all this wonderful inheritance. Make sure they receive it.
The third thing for which Paul prays is that they would comprehend “the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.”
We often picture Jesus as this wonderful, gentle healer and teacher who traveled through Israel centuries ago, helping people one by one as he met them, usually very quiet about his full identity, letting himself be beaten and slapped around and put to death. But that is not the Jesus that we deal with today. Today he is the risen and exalted Christ. Today it is to be proclaimed from the housetops, Jesus, the very Son of God, calls us to repent and follow him. Today he sits at the right hand of God in power. His Spirit is present in every place, not just one town at a time. We should expect his power to flow through us.
I’ve been told that if you take a baby elephant and tie its leg to a stake with a sturdy rope, it will try to pull away a few times and then give up. And as the years go by the elephant will get bigger and stronger so that it could easily break the rope and go free. But once it has learned it can’t do it, it stops trying. And all its strength is wasted.
Churches so easily get into a habit of saying “we can’t.” Paul prayed for the Ephesians that they would learn to say, “By God’s power, we can.” But the risen Christ is living out his life in us. There is no limit to his power.
And so I want to pray Paul’s blessing for this congregation. And as I do, I want you to actively receive the blessing. As I pray, you might say, “Yes, Lord, make that happen in me. I believe you will.”
And since this is a prayer for all the church, I want us to receive it together. I ask you to slide together, towards the middle of each pew. Take the hands of those sitting beside you. And you can also say, “Yes, Lord, make that happen in us. I believe you will.”
15 I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
