Pursue Understanding: Jesus Is Your Reward
Pastor Jim Luthy
Ephesians 1:15-23
"I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, will give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better."
As I shared the message that we are blessed, the people of our church began to hear from God:
"God has shown me the way that he loves me."
"I will be more like Christ as his grace enables me to see the many blessings he has brought into my life, and to be more thankful for those many blessings."
"God has shown me that I am blessed and one of his children who does not deserve this blessing but I am grateful for this eternal gift of grace and love."
"God spoke to me in great heights and depths tonight. Boiling it all down I learned that I am blessed…greater than my little human brain can fathom."
"God has shown me how I accept grace from God, but I don’t extend it to other people."
"God has shown me our blessing is drastically different from the worldly blessing."
"God has shown me that there is hope."
A similar experience happened to a compulsive fisherman from Galilee:
"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," Peter realized.
Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven."
When the people in our church began to hear from God, they received the same Spirit that opened Simon Peter’s eyes to understand that Jesus was the Christ. That same Spirit visited our church! That’s the Spirit Paul prayed would come to the church in Ephesus—the Spirit who comes to impart wisdom and revelation. The Spirit who brings wisdom and revelation is the Holy Spirit. It is God himself visiting us to give us his wisdom, and to give us revelation. Why? According to Ephesians 1:17 it’s so that we may know him better.
I heard Chuck Swindoll on the radio say that wisdom is "the ability to take spiritual truths and apply them to practical everyday situations." That’s pretty good, but I would go even farther. Wisdom is also the ability to take spiritual truths and apply them to situations that aren’t of the everyday variety. After all, it’s not every day that you’re trying to decide whether to get married or a spouse asks for a divorce or a child is flunking out of school or your employer lays you off. We need wisdom everyday because not everything we face is an everyday situation.
Isn’t it amazing that one of the roles of the Holy Spirit for those who live on another level is to come and place in you the wisdom of God? Can you think of any better way to live wisely than to have the ability of God to understand how to apply the word that originated in him to the specific situations you face? That’s what happens. In Colossians 2:2-3, Paul writes that Jesus is the treasure chest of wisdom and knowledge. When we receive Christ into our lives by faith, that treasure chest of Jesus is planted in us by the ongoing sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. When that is done, you have received the Spirit of wisdom. It really is an encounter with Christ.
That’s why the person who has been blessed and is living on another level will often say, "I don’t know how I knew what to say, I just knew it," or "the Lord reminded me in his Word that…" Nobody knows where the wind blows from or where it is blowing, but once it’s blown through you, you say "That was God! Thank you Lord!" You see, you’ve just encountered Christ. You’re living on another level. The world doesn’t experience that!
That same Spirit also gives us revelation, which is a little different than wisdom. That word "revelation" is also translated "appearing" or "coming" or "manifestation." It is specifically the glory of God, an illumination of Jesus, like the one Peter received, like the one the two men received at the end of the road to Emmaus, like the one Saul received along the road to Damascus. The Spirit of revelation is the person of God made manifest in your experience. To know him means to encounter him. It is the difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing him experientially. When you have the Spirit of revelation, Jesus is made real to you.
Notice Paul did not pray that the church would be scholars of the Bible to know him better. Paul did not pray that the church would graduate from seminary or complete some discipleship program so they would know him better. Paul did not pray that the church would develop a strategic Sunday School or catechism so the children would know him better. These are good things, tools in the hand of God to help us catch glimpses of him, just like any spiritual discipline—fasting, prayer, meditation, solitude--but these things are not necessarily spiritual and are definitely not an end in themselves. The point of all these things is the goal. Jesus is the goal. We want to encounter him. We want to be, as Tommy Tenney describes it, "God Catchers."
And here’s the good news…that Spirit is for us all. The purpose of the Spirit of wisdom and revelation is for us to know him better. It’s not just for the preacher who preaches to the congregation. It’s not just for the teacher who passes on information to the students. It’s not to make the prophet the only one who receives revelation. It is the Spirit of God, meant for the children of God, so that the children of God may know their Father.
This is why I believe anyone in our church can become a cell leader. You don’t have to be a scholar. You don’t have to know the original Greek or Hebrew. You need to read your Bible and you need to study your Bible to understand what it says, and not what you want it to say. But in the cell group, our prayer is that the same Spirit of wisdom and revelation that led you to put your faith in Christ will come upon you so that others can receive that Spirit too—so that everyone in the cell will know Jesus better. We’re all on a journey and none of us have arrived. The cell leader’s responsibility is not to teach, but to facilitate the sharing of what we’ve learned through our experiences with Christ and in this world. The cell leader most needs to be prayed up and covered in the blood of Jesus so that nothing will hinder the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. Let me tell you, that has a lot more to do with humility and faith than it has to do with scholarship. And I say to you all, that you can do that! Where you are weak he is strong. Where you are unprepared, we will prepare you, but we want you to know that you can lead a dynamic TLC Group. We want you to prepare for that today.
If God has taken hold of you, he simply wants you to share with others out of your knowledge of him. As you continually receive the Spirit of wisdom of revelation, you know God better. He becomes familiar to you. When you are living on another level, your reward is the manifest presence of God! How has Jesus been manifest to you? If you have the Presence, whether you’ve been saved 30 seconds or 30 years, you can influence others because you can do all things through Christ.
But you’ve got to have the Presence.
Moses knew the importance of the Presence (Exodus 33): The Lord had been leading the people out of slavery in Egypt to a land he assured them was full of milk and honey. Now the Lord is telling Moses to go up into that land, "But," he says in verse 3, "I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people." You see, for the Israelites, the promised land became the goal. They became more interested in the milk and honey than in the presence of God.
Have you ever been more interested in the milk and honey than the Presence? About a year after I had gone into ministry, my wife and I were facing some struggles. Tammie felt uncomfortable with my being in ministry and I was very uncomfortable with her being uncomfortable. I was ready to quit. We wanted the milk of peace and the honey of contentment. The crime lab in Pensacola, Florida opened their arms to me and we began to consider moving. They opened up a spot for me to come to work for them and sent us information about housing. We looked it over real close. Then we realized (Tammie realized it first), that if we went to Pensacola looking for milk and honey, we were going to find ourselves there without the presence of God.
Have you been tempted to grab the promises of God without the presence of God? Have you ever tried to bear the fruit of faith by bypassing the act of faith? Have you ever gone ahead of God, failing to hear the prophetic voice say "wait on the Lord?" If you have, then you know what the Israelites were faced with. When you think about it, that’s the essence of sin and temptation. When we give in to temptation, we have exchanged the fruit of that temptation for the presence of God. That’s what sin does, it separates us from the Presence.
Let’s return to Exodus 33. "When the people heard these distressing words, they began to mourn…" Moses goes to the tent of meeting outside the camp, and as he goes in (notice the significance of entering in—another plug for spiritual disciplines), the presence of God came down in a pillar of cloud that landed at the entrance of the tent.
On the outside, the people began to worship in the presence of God. Have you ever seen a bunch of stiff-necked people worship? I have. You look around a place like that and you say, "Where’s the Presence?" But even when stiff-necked people come in contact with the presence of God, it’s a different dynamic.
On the inside of the tent, Moses spoke to God face to face:
"You have been telling me, ‘Lead these people,’ but you have not let me know whom you will send with me. You have said, ‘I know you by name and you have found favor with me.’ If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you (notice the connection between receiving wisdom and knowing God) and continue to find favor with you. Remember that this nation is your people."
The Lord replied, "My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest."
You know, that would have satisfied me, but for some reason, that didn’t satisfy Moses. You would think he just received the answer he was looking for. God said his presence would go with him. If I were Moses, I would have jumped up and down like I’d just been told I was the new starting point guard for the Lakers. "Whoohoo!" Then I would have run outside to tell everyone, "Hey you guys! Don’t sweat it! He said he’ll go. He said he’ll go! Yes! All is well."
But Moses, without getting ahead of himself like I would have, pressed the conversation. This is where you have to really admire Moses. He stood in the gap for his people, even though they were whiners and complainers and a bunch of sticks in the mud—they must have been driving him crazy—but he stood up for them. What a great picture of leadership. I’ve concluded that Moses continued in this dialogue because God had conceded that he would go with Moses and be present with Moses, but I’m not sure Moses believed he would go with all the people.
Then Moses said to him, "If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? Then Moses says something that ought to give all who intend to live on another level pause…
"What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?"
What Moses was saying was, "without you, Lord, we’re nothing—the milk means nothing, the honey means nothing, all that fertile land means nothing. Our freedom means nothing without your presence."
You see, we can build a big building and have all kinds of activity going on. We can meet together in our homes, have great big potluck dinners, come to church on the weekends, feed the hungry and shelter the homeless and do all kinds of wonderful things FOR God, but the truth is we are nothing and our message is meaningless unless we do these things WITH God.
Do you want to know why the church has lost its relevance? We’ve lost the Presence. We’ve focused on better families and recovery and financial freedom; we’ve focused on the milk and honey. Those things have become the goal, and we’ve lost our desire for the presence of God.
I believe, though, that God is making the church thirsty for his presence again. So we pray for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation that we may know him better.
Church, what else will distinguish us from all the other people on the earth? What else will distinguish us from the Mormons and the Muslims and the Moose lodge? Nothing. Nothing other than the presence of God.
Are you thirsty yet?
I liked what Dave Johnson said at a recent Pastor’s Renewal Retreat on this same subject: (paraphrase) "Hollywood can make better movies than us. Broadway can put on better productions than we can. Corporations have more money and build bigger and more attractive buildings than us. What do we have that nobody else has? The Presence."
We are a people of the Presence! Without the presence of God, we are nothing! It’s the presence of God that distinguishes us. It’s the presence of God that draws the attention of the nations. It’s the presence of God that brings people to the blessing of God. It’s the presence of God that makes us holy.
At Pentecost, there came a sound "like the blowing of a mighty wind that came from heaven." That wind was the Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit came upon the people and the crowd came when they heard the sound. They were bewildered because the upper room recipients of the Presence were speaking in tongues and each person heard them in their own language, but the reason they came was that they heard the sound of the wind.
Friends, we need the wind of God. When the wind of God blows and we receive the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, we will know Jesus better. We will have experienced him. His presence will be made manifest to us. People will be drawn, not by our wisdom, nor by what has been revealed to us—they’ll be amazed by those things--but it will be the presence of God that draws them. We are a people of the Presence! What else will distinguish us from the rest of the earth?
Paul had two things he was praying for on behalf of the church in Ephesus (and if it was God’s will for the church then, it is God’s will for the church now). First he prayed that they would receive the Spirit of wisdom and understanding so that they would know him better. Second, he prayed that the eyes of their hearts may be enlightened so they would know the riches that accompany him. He prayed they would know the Presence before he prayed they would know the milk and honey.
There’s nothing wrong with milk and honey. Your Father in heaven loves to give you milk and honey. It’s a delight to him to give you hope, riches, and power. But knowing Jesus comes first.
Receiving the Spirit of wisdom we can say to God, "I hear you." Receiving the Spirit of revelation we can say, "I see you." This is the first prize for those who live by faith—Jesus is your reward. Living on another level, we encounter Christ in wisdom and revelation. Living on another level, we encounter the manifest presence of God. Living on another level, the Spirit of God becomes for us a pillar of cloud in the light of our good days and a column of fire in our darkest nights.
The hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power are incredible promises for us who believe. But they mean nothing to us apart from him. Without knowing him personally, without having experienced his manifest presence, these things are meaningless. How could we trust him if we don’t know him? It is senseless.
We’ve already learned that those who have heard and believed are blessed. Now understand this, you who are blessed: Jesus is your reward. Jesus is the prize. God is the goal. Don’t pursue the milk and honey. Don’t live or believe or follow for the sake of the hope, for the riches, or for the power. You’ll find those things in Jesus. Live to know him. He is your reward.
When you know that you are blessed and that Jesus is your reward, you are living on another level.
