Introduction – Mr. Holland
One of my all-time favorite movies is “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” It’s the story of a musician who really just wants to be a composer. Rather grudgingly, he takes a job teaching music at the local high school, supposing it will give him time to write music while providing an income for he and his wife.
One of his students is a very serious red-headed girl who plays the clarinet terribly, even though she practices constantly. As Mr. Holland works with her to try to help, he learns that she is the youngest in a family where everyone excels – except her. Because she has tried so hard and failed, she considers herself a failure, too.
One day she comes into the music classroom and tells Mr. Holland that she’s going to give it up and if he knows anyone who wants her clarinet, he can give it to them.
As she walks away, Holland asks her, “Is it any fun?” With a shrug, she answers, “I wanted it to be.”
“You know what we’ve been doing wrong, Miss Lang? We’ve been playing the notes on the page.”
Confused, the girl asks, “Well what else is there is to play?”
“There’s a lot more to music than notes on a page. Playing music is supposed to be fun. It’s about heart. It’s about feelings and moving people and something beautiful and being alive and it’s not about notes on a page. I could teach you notes on a page. I can’t teach you that other stuff.”
He takes away her music and tells her to try it. She tries a time or two, each time coming to a point where she her clarinet squawks and squeaks and she starts to kick herself for her failure.
“What do you like best about yourself?” he asks. With a shy smile she says, “My hair – my dad says it reminds him of a sunset.”
“Play the sunset.”
And she closes her eyes, and she begins to play – really play, not just the notes, but the music. She is so amazed when she does the hard part perfectly that her eyes pop open and she stops. Mr. Holland shares her amazement and says, “Don’t stop!”
And so, on she plays: eyes closed, head beginning to sway with the rhythm of it. And we know that this time, it’s fun.
Sometimes I wonder if some of us aren’t guilty of doing the same thing when it comes to our relationship with God.
We try to get everything right. We follow the rules, try to do what the Bible says, go to church – thinking maybe if we do it all right, maybe God will think we’re OK. Most of us know that it’s not our works that win us God’s approval, but we also know the Bible talks a whole lot about obedience.
And it’s true, God wants us to obey His Word. But just like music is a whole lot more than notes on a page, the Christian life is a whole lot more than obeying rules.
The verses I just read are the closing words of a prayer Paul offers on behalf of the Ephesian church. Paul is not so much teaching us about God as much as he is breaking out into a doxology – a song of praise to God.
In doing so, he tell us something very significant about the character of God. And he tells us something significant about us, too.
He has asked God to grant the Ephesians some staggering things. In a sense he asks God to enable people who have been trying – not always successfully -- to play the notes on the page to play music. He is asking God to take musical dropouts and make them into virtuosos.
How’s your prayer life? If you were to rate yourself from 1 to 10, what would it be? More importantly, what would you base your rating on?
How much actual time you spend praying?
How consistent you are on a daily basis?
How organized your prayer list is?
If organization is anywhere on the list, I’m in trouble!
What if the rating wasn’t based on any of those things? What if it was based on how big your prayers were? I don’t mean how long they were, I mean how big.
We’ve just passed through the Christmas season, which is a time when, especially if you’re a parent, you hear a lot of requests, “Mom, I want this! Dad, I want that!” Kids know Mom and Dad (and others) will be buying presents and they want to just help them out a little so they get the right ones.
If you were a child in a desperately poor family, what would go on your Christmas list? Probably not a Sony Play Station 2 – this year’s hottest new video game system. You would know that was impossible for your family. Past experience would have taught you that was just not the scale of things you got. So you might ask for warm socks, without holes, or a coat that fit. I read something about a child in a very poor country who just wanted his own toothbrush.
But what if you were a child in a fabulously wealthy family? You wouldn’t ask for socks and you certainly wouldn’t ask for a toothbrush. You would ask for things that are in keeping with the wealth that Daddy rakes in.
Sometimes I wonder if our prayers are not more in keeping with the poor child’s than the rich one’s. What are the kinds of things we pray for? If prayer requests in church and the prayer chain are any indication, one of our most frequent and fervent requests is for physical health for ourselves and for those we love.
Please hear me when I say, that is absolutely a valid thing to pray for. We should pray for healing. We should bring before God any request, large or small that is on our heart. We are commanded to do so. As Paul says in Philippians: “in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”
But don’t just pray for the details, pray for the big things, too.
What are the big things?
Last summer I was praying some pretty big things: Lord, heal my Mom. Make the radiation work. Let her be able to come live with me. They all felt like pretty big prayers. And they were. And it was hard that the Lord said no.
What if God had answered my prayers? I certainly would have been incredibly thankful. It would have been a huge answer to prayer. But would it mean my 84-year-old mother wasn’t ever going to die? No, ‘fraid not. Even though it would have been huge to me, it really was a prayer that would have encompassed just a few years – at best maybe 15 years. In that sense, in the “grand scheme of things,” from an eternal perspective, it was a very small prayer.
Again, please don’t think I am saying, “don’t pray for healing for your loved ones.” Or that praying for healing is some kind of lower grade of prayer. It is not. By using the example of my own Mom, I hope you know that I know how it feels to watch someone you love battle death. I know how desperately important that battle becomes. I know the fear that clutches your stomach when they take a turn for the worse. I know how heart-wrenching it is when they lose the battle.
But can you see that in light of eternity, asking for my Mom to be healed was a small prayer? A bigger, eternal prayer is that she would know Christ, that she would receive the free gift of eternal salvation. Because that means that even though I’ve lost her for a time, I have not lost her forever. That’s a big prayer.
It’s not the only kind of big, eternal prayer. There are all kinds of big prayers out there: life-transforming prayers, community-transforming prayers, nation-transforming prayers, world-transforming prayers, prayers that will impact lives for eternity – even prayers that impact what happens in the heavenly realms, according to this very chapter a few verses earlier.
But Paul says, we’re not praying those prayers. Vs 20 literally says, God “has the power to do exceedingly abundantly more than what we are asking for or what we are [even] thinking” – what we are even imagining he might do. We have a God who wants to do great things among us.
Billy Graham who said like “Heaven is full of answers to prayers we have never prayed.” Don’t you just see it? This big huge roomful of answers to prayers waiting to be prayed. We need to ask God to even guide us in our prayers that we might pray for these great things he wants to give us.
We need an expanded vision of who God is and what His purposes are, that we might begin to pray for those things to be fulfilled in our midst. How many of us start our day with a prayer something like, “Oh Lord, get me through another day? Just get me from one end of the day to the other.”
Have you seen the prayer that says, “Oh Lord, I thank you that so far today I haven’t been angry, or irritable, or unkind to anyone. But I’m going to get out of bed soon, Lord, and I’m going to need some help.”?
What would your life look like if instead of praying, “Oh Lord, get me through another day.” You prayed, “Lord, do something today that is above and beyond what I can even imagine”? I don’t know how your life would change, but if I were the betting kind, I’d be willing to bet it would.
The power God uses is already in us. Paul says God does those great things, “according to His power which IS WORKING among us.”
If you are a follower of Christ, then the very spirit of God dwells in you. That probably is not news to you. But think what it means: the spirit, the essence, the being of God lives in you and in me!
That’s like putting a jet engine in a Ford Fiesta. It wouldn’t be amazing that it runs fast. What would be amazing would be if the chassis didn’t melt off it. The power of God that raised Jesus from the dead is at work in us.
And while it is true that the Holy Spirit is at work in each of us as individuals, what Paul is really getting at is that God’s power is intended to work among us – as a body, as a church.
Look at our stained glass window here – it’s Jesus coming in glory! We expect that. We think of Jesus as being the glorious Son of God. We expect that when Jesus comes He will show people God’s glory. But Paul says God demonstrates His glory not just through Jesus Himself, but through His church. That he demonstrates His magnificence, His power, His awesome, radiant splendor through the church. Like…us!
To pray for that would be a really big prayer, wouldn’t it? But guess what? It’s a prayer that God is longing to answer.
What does it look like when God demonstrates His glory in and through His church? Well, I don’t know all the details, but I know that it means people would start coming to Christ. It means people’s lives would be transformed. It means there would be hope where there once was despair. There would be life where once there was only the stench of death.
God wants to do things in and among us that we cannot possibly do ourselves. And when people start doing things they can’t possibly do by themselves, people begin to take notice. They are no longer impressed that you’re such a good Christian. In fact they cease really noticing you and what you’re doing at all and begin to say, “Whoa! There’s something going on over there at First Baptist, and I don’t know what it is, but I want it.”
As today’s thought on our worship theme says: [God’s assignments] are always beyond what people can do, because He wants to demonstrate His nature, His strength, His provision, and His kindness to His people and to a watching world. That is the only way the world will come to know Him.”
You see, if we just do nice Christian things, people just think we’re nice Christian folks. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, God wants them to have your life cause other people to see the power and the glory of God. And we’re not just talking about your individual life, but God wants to have what happens in the life of our church demonstrate God’s glory and power and majesty, as well as His grace, His mercy and His love.
When we allow God to do through us what we can’t possibly do ourselves He gets the glory.
Conclusion
I started out talking about a young woman who worked herself into self-hatred by trying to play notes on a page. But as her teacher put her focus on something in her that was bigger than that, she was able to do more than that. She was able to do exceedingly, abundantly more than she could have asked or even imagined. She started playing music, not just notes on the page (although she was playing the same notes, it became something bigger, something grander.)
We, too, as followers of Christ, have something in us that is bigger than we are. That is the Holy Spirit of God. And by His power, he wants to do exceedingly, abundantly more than we can ask or even imagine. It’s not that we aren’t to play the notes on the page, but that we are to play so much more than that. By God’s spirit, let us play the grand and glorious music of the King of kings.
