“FILLED”
“Empty” or “Full”? Which would describe you this morning? Perhaps that’s not fair. You may feel half-full and are quite fine with that. I thought my tank was better than half full this week until I realized it was nearly empty.
My Dad instilled in me a quirky habit which actually fits my cautious personality. He taught me to always fill up my car’s fuel tank when it got down to a quarter tank. Never let the tank go down to empty, you never know when you will need a full tank, he always said. And to this day I faithfully watch the level of my fuel gauge. But doesn’t everybody?
No, I found out that not everyone does, especially my wife. Whenever we switch vehicles I have trained myself to ask, “Is there gas in your car?” “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’ll have enough,” she replies. And every time I climb into her car I have to yell – she’s taken off already in my van – because, sure enough, the needle is on “E” and I never know if it will make it to the 216 highway, never mind the church.
But we’re not talking about gas here. We are talking about our spiritual tanks. We are concerned about the level of spiritual fervor, passion, and motivation for living the Christian life. You people who are like me, gas-gauge watchers, we care about not letting our cars go empty. Why don’t we have the same concern for our spiritual vitality? For one thing, it’s not as easy to measure. You feel like everything is fine between you and the Lord, your prayer life has never been better, you know he’s close by, everything’s great spiritually. Then, Pow!!, the next day or week you feel like “What happened to that wave of power I was riding?” When did the tank go dry?
You know what happened? You lost heart. You got discouraged and in all likelihood, you don’t know why. Or you do. Someone came along and ripped the spirit out of you with some harsh words. Some unsettling event sucked the wind out of your sails. Suddenly you are discouraged. You have lost heart. Your spiritual tank is on ‘empty.’
Prologue: “For This Reason…”
If you feel like this, or even if your tank is still half-full, Paul has a prayer for you. Paul sensed that the Christians in Ephesus were losing heart and that they needed a reason to keep living for the Lord. We see some of this discouragement in v. 13 where Paul’s suffering has seemingly dampened their resolve to follow Christ. They needed some motivation to spur them past the temporal troubles of daily life.
“For this reason…” Paul writes. He wrote this before and didn’t finish his point in 3:1, but now he returns to his purpose. Think of what Paul has told them already: he has revealed to them their identity as children of God; he has explained to them the purpose of the Holy Spirit in their lives; he has revealed the power of God at work in them; God’s grace has never been clearer to them; and he has shown how the walls of hostility no longer divide them. Has it sunk in?
“For this reason…” Paul now writes – all the truth in the world will not sink in unless God wills it – “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from who his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name…” Praying on one’s knees was not usual. Jews stood to pray with arms outstretched. To pray on one’s knees is to be driven there by some deep, intense concern. Abe Lincoln once said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of those about me seemed insufficient for the day.” I have found that on my knees is the only appropriate place to cry out to God.
And when you have lost heart, when you are despairing about your spiritual life, or someone else’s, when all is cold and lifeless in your spirit and you feel like giving up on everything, get on your knees and cry to our Father.
1. Renewed Power In Your Inner Being
And pray what? Pray as Paul did: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being…”
In our desperation to be renewed in our Christian walk it is easier to pray “Fill me Lord. Fill me with whatever is missing.” Paul knows what’s missing. Being filled is only part of the answer and there are steps that need to be taken first. If you feel weak then you need strength; you need God’s power because it is likely you have been operating on your own power again. You need power in your inner being.
The outer person is easy to take care of. We shower it, we feed it, we shave the whiskers off our faces – or legs – we are very concerned about the outer person. Most of us are. But are we concerned about our inner being? Do we even know what it is?
Your inner being is your spirit, not your soul, but your human spirit. This is where God does his work of recovery in your life; this is where salvation has effect. As Paul said to the Corinthians, outwardly we are wasting away but inwardly we are being renewed day by day. This is not the realm of feelings, but of your subconscious, the deep-seated part of your life. When you get discouraged or brokenhearted, some would say your spirit has been crushed. That is true of the inner being; when your spirit is crushed despair overtakes you.
At times like that, down on our knees, we pray for a fresh infusion of the Holy Spirit’s strength in our inner being. Jesus gave us his Spirit to work in our spirits. He is the river of life flowing inside of us. Our human spirits naturally thirst for a drink of God’s Spirit. We are continually parched because our spirits were made to find in God the refreshment we yearn for. Doctors don’t agree on how much water we really need. Mine says 8-10 glasses per day; Sanjay Gupta says drink only when you need to. Too much water can actually be bad for you. But to drink of the Spirit constantly is a requirement for vibrant living and touches the deepest level of your life.
The question I know is on your mind is this: How? How do I drink of the Spirit? What do I have to do? Nothing. God is the one who does it. All you have to do is ask. Ask that your spirit can be restored so that you can function the way God intended.
2. Reminding You Who’s Inside
There is a purpose in praying this that yields an immediate result: We pray for an infusion of God’s strength “…so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” What the infusion of the Spirit does is to awaken faith, so that you can begin to believe again. And the one thing that we need to believe, the one thing we rarely take seriously, is that Jesus has come to make his home in our hearts. Go ahead; put your hand on your heart. You can’t feel him. And no he is not literally bouncing around in your primary muscle. But he is in you. That alone is amazing.
Did you know this is the only place in the NT that speaks of Jesus being in your heart? We always talk about Jesus in our hearts. We ask people if they have accepted Jesus into their hearts. We sing at Christmas, “Come into my heart Lord Jesus.” But this is the only reference to such an incredible reality. What do we mean by this?
The force of such imagery, the deep impression we should receive from “Christ in our hearts” is that the character of Christ, his whole life, death and resurrection, should increasingly dominate and shape the whole orientation of our lives. Having Christ live in me changes everything.
Robert Munger wrote a booklet called “My Heart; Christ’s Home,” in which he pictures the Christian life as a house. Jesus comes into the house and goes from room to room. He goes into the library of the mind and begins to clean up the trash found there. He replaces it with his Word. He enters the dining room of the appetite and finds many sinful desires listed on the menu. He replaces things like materialism, pride, envy, and lust with humility, love and purity. And so the story goes. Jesus makes himself at home in this person’s life. As the process continues Jesus continually finds things that don’t belong.
It is a fanciful and quaint way to picture a deeper reality. Jesus lives in us and his presence will affect change in us as we cooperate with him and allow him to shape our lives.
3. Rooted In A Foundation Of Love
He will never leave you nor forget you. Jesus has taken up residence in your heart. As your spirit is refreshed and you come to realize again this great truth, the feeling begins to return. Love! Jesus is in you and that should reassure you of his promise to be with you always. That will never change. And in this comfort you find that your self-identity returns.
Paul’s second major prayer request in three parts pleads that we would “get” this love; and by “get it” I mean understand and acknowledge it. “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love…” Get this…your confidence and self-assurance grows as you come to be grounded in the fact that you are loved. Botanically, Paul speaks of love as that which is rooted. I remember at Red Rock Bible Camp how the Jack Pines were so easily uprooted when a storm came along. Fifty mile per hour winds knocked them over revealing that their roots spread out but not down. Underneath was rock, nothing to hang onto, and so they fell. A person who is properly grounded in the right soil can send roots deep into a source that can feed it, nourish it and sustain it. The love of Christ can do that. Winds of trouble cannot so easily uproot a person grounded in Christ’s love.
Love is so essential to our well-being. When we know we are loved and cared for and accepted, then we know who we are. The people that love you, know you, and give you freedom to be you. That’s what God’s love is like. On the other hand, a lonely life lived apart from decent friends is difficult on your well being. What causes people to kill themselves? They don’t feel loved. No one appreciates them. No one reaches out to them. They have no grounding in an enduring love. Christians have this grounding of love and security in Jesus Christ. We have deep roots in a God who loves us and sustains us in the storms.
4. Revealed Scope Of God’s Love
How deep can our roots go? They can never go as deep as the soil allows because the soil is limitless. As Paul prayed, “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
Scholars have tried to decipher this imagery in a number of ways. One specific way is that the love of Christ is seen as reaching down to the lowest sinner and reaching up to the saint already on his way while drawing widely from all races and going long to search for the extremely lost. I think that their noses are touching the glass and they need to step back.
Take this imagery in the cosmic sense. God’s love is so huge that it cannot be measured or fathomed. F. M. Lehman caught the vastness of Christ’s love when he wrote the hymn The Love of God. “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade; To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.” This love is for you, and unlike our feeble human relationships that shatter over trivial matters, God will not stop loving you.
There are two matters that stem from this reality we should not forget. One is that this prayer indicates that we grasp this love “together with all the saints.” This love is not meant to be hoarded. In fact, it cannot possibly be kept to oneself. The love of God poured into you, if it is truly received, pours through you to other believers. Paul prayed similarly for the Thessalonians: “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you” (1 Thess. 3:12).
The second matter is an encouragement. You know these verses, but I forget them in my darker times, as do you. But let’s remind ourselves again: Romans 8:35-39 (Private in Iraq) Nothing can take this love away from you.
5. Restored To Fullness
In this last step of prayer in recovering your heart and restoring the fullness of the joy of God in your life we come to a paradox. Paul prays that we would know “…this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” How can we know what is unknowable? It is so immense, where do you begin to know the entire scope of this love? Well you can’t understand it but maybe you can feel it. We want to feel something in our Christian experience. That is the postmodern desire of even longtime church goers. We want to feel God’s presence. Well it is like that. You can feel the love of God even though you do not understand it. And in that way you can begin to know it.
A baby feels his mother’s love. He senses how deeply his mother loves him and at times he won’t go to anyone else – not even his dad. Does a baby understand his mother’s love? He can’t grasp it. He can’t explain it. But he knows it because he feels it. As we begin to lay hold of the truth of Christ’s love we begin to see how much he loves us in our surroundings, our relationships, our world. Don’t you see it? You don’t feel it? Then we need to begin again on our knees – because it’s there.
You and I were meant to be filled – filled to the brim and overflowing God himself – filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. This is what Paul talks about later as being “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Really, these are just different aspects of the same quality. How can you not know love with the Spirit working in you? How can you not know love with Christ living in you? How can you not know love growing in you like a tree planted by streams of living water? It’s all the same. To have God in all his fullness in you is to have love in you, because God is love. And when God loves you, is there anything you can’t do?
Epilogue: What God Is Able To Do
Let’s work on that last thought for a minute. The last verse of this prayer is a doxology – a praise ending. It says “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us…” If we unpack what the writer is saying and follow his rhetoric we come up with this:
God is able
- To do whatever we ask for in prayer
- to do what we may fail to ask for but yet what we think of
- to do all we ask or think
- to do above all we ask or think
- to do abundantly more than all we ask or think
- To do infinitely more abundantly above all we ask or think.
And on top of all that, Paul says this inexpressible power is at work within us. Blaise Pascal said “The greatest single distinguishing feature of the omnipotence of God is that our imagination gets lost when thinking about it.” God is able to do more than we ask or imagine. Are we asking? Or imagining? Are we dreaming God’s dreams?
If our spirits are crushed it is hard to dream. All we see are broken dreams and finite human love. If you have lost heart in following Jesus then let’s pray this prayer together and ask God for a fresh fire to burn out all the unnecessaries in our lives and replace them with what really matters. Christ lives in you, and if nothing is impossible for him, there is no end to what he can do in you.
AMEN
