To Know His Power Series

INTRODUCTION

• How many of you woke up with excitement and anticipation concerning the prospect of coming together with your brothers and sisters in Christ to worship? (I AM TAKING NAMES )

• Does the thought of waking up each day knowing you get to serve the Lord excite you? Or do we just take for granted that God is with us?

• What gets you excited each day that gets you going? We are in the midst of a series entitled REASONS FOR MY HEART TO BEAT.

• In this series we are looking at some things that can get us excited to start the day.

• More importantly the areas of excitement we are exploring together can help transform a lethargic walk with Jesus into one that is exciting and full of hope.

• As we get to know the Lord better, as we start to understand the various blessings we have from God, it should light a fire of excitement under us.

• Today we are going to examine reason number 2 in our series REASONS FOR MY HEART TO BEAT, TO KNOW HIS POWER!

• We serve THE ONE AND ONLY GOD THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE!

• As we progress through the text we need to take note that all that we have from God comes to us as a result of His power, or His ability to do what He promises to do.

• Whatever God has promised in His word He has the power to deliver! I hope that thought gets us excited about our GREAT GOD!

• We will be in Ephesians 1:15-23 today. Paul is writing to the church at Ephesus, this young church was enthusiastic about their faith but they were very young in the faith.

• In verses 15-16 Paul commends them for their faith and their love for all the Christians. By the way, when one has a strong faith, they will have a strong love for God’s people.

• What we will cover today is some of the content of Paul’s prayer for this church. His goal is for them to grow in their faith and as a result have a great walk with the Lord!

• Let us begin by looking at verses 17-18!

• SLIDE #2

• Ephesians 1:17–18 (HCSB) 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, would give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. 18 I pray that the perception of your mind may be enlightened so you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the glorious riches of His inheritance among the saints,

• SLIDE #3

SERMON

I. Be open to knowing God.

• Faith can be difficult at times to build; there are so many obstacles that get in the way of our development. Life happens, people can lead us away, and distractions can take away from our focus from Jesus.

• Paul prays for help for the Ephesians in two areas.

• First he prays for a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God.

• The basic premise to this part of the prayer is that God would give them a spirit of wisdom so the people could understand the revelation and therefore realize they need to give God the glory for the blessing.

• This is similar to what Paul prays for the church at Colossae in Colossians 1:9.

• SLIDE #4

• Colossians 1:9 (HCSB) For this reason also, since the day we heard this, we haven’t stopped praying for you. We are asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding,

• If we do not possess a spirit of wisdom we will never really grow to maturity because we will never really understand what God has done, and is doing.

• We will never understand the purpose behind much of what God does so then we will never be able to fully give God the glory for what He does.

• We will attribute God’s blessing to things such as our own ability or to the god of luck.

• Wisdom is the ability to take knowledge and understand it to the point of being able to apply it.

• It is being able to perceive the drift and meaning of what God makes known so that what is made known is a real revelation to us.

• As we seek to know Jesus more, we then understand more.

• God has given us all we need; we just need to see it.

• SLIDE #5

• 2 Peter 1:3 (HCSB) His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.