Blessed Assurance – A Body United – Sermon – Pastors Dave and Marlee Page

Has your mind ever wandered as you pray?? Don’t feel bad if so, it sometimes happens to the very best, even the Apostle Paul. Admittedly his lapse is of a spiritual vein, but nevertheless it was a lapse. He began to utter a prayer in verse 1 of chapter 3, only to be sidetracked by his busy mind regarding the mystery of the Church in verses 2–13, and then returned to his prayer in verse 14. This is very apparent if you read verses 1 and 14 together:

“For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles — For this reason I kneel before the Father …” (v.14).

Be that as it may, Paul is now fully engaged in a prayer for God’s chosen, the Church, the new humanity as we have been calling it. This is one of the most beautiful and oft-quoted prayers in Scripture, especially in reference to the width and length and height and depth of Christ’s love. The prayer itself has been the basis of countless expositions. The prayer is uniquely beautiful, but what has made it the subject of so many expositions is that it is a prayer for us, the Church.

The opening statement — “For this reason I kneel before the Father” — may not get our attention, especially if kneeling is part of our normal prayer discipline. But in fact it is remarkable because it was not customary for Jews to kneel in prayer. The ordinary posture was standing. Kneeling indicated an extraordinary event or an unusual passion. For example, when King Solomon prayed at the dedication of the Temple, he knelt on a wooden platform before all the people and lifted his hands to Heaven in prayer (2 Chronicles 6:13). In Gethsemane on the eve of his death Jesus fell to the ground in agonized emotion as he prayed to his father (Mark 14:35, 36).

Here Paul proclaims this ageless prayer with unusual emotion, for two reasons:

First, because of the self impact upon of the overwhelming message of the Gospel he has been delivering. How beautiful it is to see a person go to their knees because of God’s Word.

Second, the apostle is on his knees in profound emotion “before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” We are God’s family – His joy and Paul knows it! He is praising God in the realization of his relationship with his Father, the Father of the new humanity in Christ. Paul knew he was loved, and that put him on his knees!

Each of these realizations now appear centrally in three major petitions for the new humanity: for strength, for love, and for fullness – all of the attributes of A Body United.

A PRAYER FOR STRENGTH (vv. 16, 17a)

First, Paul prays for the strength of these people in Ephesus: “I I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” (vs. 16, 17a). The main idea is this: just as a person who is ill needs to be strengthened, so also God’s children need to be inwardly strengthened to receive all the blessings God desires for them.

This makes sense as we have understood Paul’s telling of the wonderful things God wants to do for his own. Their grandeur makes us see ourselves through the lease of humility. There are two elements here. One is derived from God’s wealth. Notice that Paul says, “I pray that out of [literally, according to] his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power” (v. 16a). The other element in our strengthening is the activity of the Holy Spirit in our inner lives: “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith” (vv. 16, 17a). The Holy Spirit gives us the strength which is freely given according to the scale of his riches. We are renewed and empowered for life, and we grow stronger and stronger even while our bodies grow old. In this way we become full of Christ. He “dwells in [our] hearts through faith.” This prayer for inner strengthening was not a mere wish, but the request of the Apostle Paul, to God, for the Church. It our prayer for the church too.

A PRAYER FOR LOVE (vv. 17b-19a)

Paul now prays for love: “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, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge …” (vv. 17b-19a).

The opening expression, “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love …” (v. 17b), is a prayer for a lifestyle with its basis in love. Again Paul mixes his metaphors. “Rooted” is agricultural, and “established” (literally, founded) is architectural, but their significance is perfectly parallel. Like plants, our lives are to send down roots deep and wide into the soil of love. Like buildings, the foundations of our lives here on earth are to have deep, solid footings of love. If we are properly rooted and properly constructed on a foundation of love, nothing will be able to shake us.

Paul prays this because relational love is absolutely crucial to the sustainability and ministry of the new humanity. His call is to go beyond the superficial. There is nothing static here. Love must grow on until our earthly lives and and we are taken home.

In praying for a lifestyle of love, Paul also aligns his focus upward to the vertical love of Jesus, praying for the Church to be awestruck by its dimensions. “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” (vv. 17b, 18). Think about the immensity of Gods love in these ways:

• A love which is wide enough to embrace the world. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
• A love which is long enough to last forever (1 Corinthians 13:8). As Spurgeon said, “It is so long that your old age cannot wear it out, so long your continual tribulation cannot exhaust it, your successive temptations shall not drain it dry; like eternity itself it knows no bounds.”
• A love which is high enough to take sinners to Heaven (1 John 3:1, 2).
• A love which is deep enough to take Christ to the very depths to reach the lowest sinner (Philippians 2:8).

Jesus’s love is indeed incomprehensible, but Paul prays for our comprehension, that we “may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp” its proportions — literally, to take hold of them. He knows this is impossible, but he calls us to this grand spiritual exercise for the health of our souls. It is to be our life’s occupation.

Here’s a question for you to consider this week:

When is the last time you seriously devoted time to thinking about and trying to understand his love?

Have we contemplated his love in, the Incarnation? — the cross? — If not, we are missing out on the value of understanding fully how much we are loved.

But — and this is key — this is not to be our solitary task as individuals, no, we are to do it “together with all the saints.” We can only come to a better, fuller understanding of his love in community! This happens when we join together in the community of the Church.

It happens when we worship together and study the word together.

It happens when we share our knowledge of God’s love with each other.

It happens when we discover it in other believers.

We need each other in order to fully comprehend his love for us.

A PRAYER FOR FULLNESS (v. 19)

Paul’s final request is that the new humanity “be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (vs. 19b). This is a mind boggling thought, Paul is praying to understand a fullness which is the same fullness with which God fills himself. How can we understand this? How does this work? Let me try to explain through an illustration. This next week, Marlee and I will be floating on a Ship in the Gulf of Mexico and making our way into the Caribbean Seas. We have done this before. And each time I stand on the deck of A ship and look out over the vastness of the ocean, I am struck by the fact that I am but a dot alongside a seemingly infinite expanse of water. And as I stand there I almost always think that if I were to take a bottle and allow the ocean to rush into it, in an instant my bottle would be filled with the fullness of the Ocean. But of course I could never put the fullness of the Ocean into a bottle! Because Christ is infinite, he can hold all the fullness of God. But whenever one of us finite creatures dips the bottle of our life into him, we instantly become full of his fullness. We can always open to hold more and more of his fullness. And the more we receive of his fullness, the more we can still receive! This will be our experience in eternity — the ultimate exaltation of our spirit. We will be filled with the fullness of God, being brought closer, more and more into his fullness.

What a prayer! As the Church, in Jesus, Paul has prayed for our strength, our love, and our fullness.

As the Church, Paul has shown us that there are three things we must put on our prayer list:

• prayer for an inner strengthening so as to enhance our capacity to hold what he has for us,
• prayer for love so our earthly lives will be rooted in love and so we will further understand and experience his unfathomable love,
• prayer for the never ending fullness in this life and in eternity.

If we pray this list, there is nothing but optimism for us as believers, even in this difficult season…. Consider the promise we are given in 1 John 5:14, 15 — “This is the assurance we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us — whatever we ask — we know that we have what we asked of him.”

Church, our optimism comes because this prayer of Paul is God’s revealed will. Therefore, if we pray it as well, we will receive them!