Ephesians: Pettions in Prayer

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As we go forward it is important that we should be aware that the Apostle’s concern for these people is that they “may know” the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. They are not, primarily, to seek the blessings that He can give, nor are they necessarily to seek holiness, they are to seek the Lord Himself.

All holiness, sanctification, every kind of blessing and every condition in the Christian life, is to be the result of our knowledge of Him as a Person and our communion with Himself.

So we have seen Paul’s approach to prayer. We should take this approach and model our own prayers after it.

Now Paul dives into his appeal to the Father for the believers at Ephesus.

We should first note what Paul is not praying for.

Just for a moment, imagine you are Paul, with the same style of prayers that you have now, what would your prayer consist of?

What do you pray for yourself and one another?

Pauls prayer is not that he may be brought out of prison in order that he may return to preach to them in Ephesus.

That would have been very desirable; and no doubt he did pray in that way; but that is not the big thing, it is not what he puts in the centre, it is not the thing he wants to impress upon them.

Neither does he merely offer some kind of general prayer for them that God may bless them and that God may be good to them.

I emphasize this particularly because it seems that far too often our prayers are of this character.

We pray God’s blessing upon people.

We pray that God may be gracious unto them, and may look upon them; and we leave it as some kind of general prayer.

I understand we all have burdens and scripture tells us to pray for one anothers burdens, but how do you pray for those burdens?

Do you pray that God would give said person the finances to meet a need?

Do you pray that God would give them a new car or a new job or whatever material to relieve the burden or do you pray like Paul does here?

The first thing we see that Paul prays for is,

I. Paul Prayed for their Inner Man

He prayed that their inner man would be strengthened with the power of the Spirit.

We notice some characteristics about this petition.

i. This Petition is Exclusively Spiritual

Paul is not asking God to bless them with material blessings, he is asking that they be blessed according to the riches of His glory.

He is concerned, not about their material needs but their spiritual.

He focuses his attention and his concern on their spiritual state.

Pauls entire attitude towards life is spiritual, and when he prays, he always starts with the spiritual.

This is a principle which we ignore at our demise.

Paul praying this for the Ephesian believers is in accordance with our Lord, (Matt 6:33

Matthew 6:33 KJV 1900

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Christ was dealing with people that always worried about there food and drink, always worried about the material things. Christ in essence says, “The trouble with is that you are starting with the wrong end, you are starting with the material, those things that are seen, you need to start with the spiritual, things unseen.” i.e the riches of His glory.

The second characteristic is,

ii. This Petition is Extremely Specific

Like I said, this is not a mere general prayer; he singles out certain matters, he isolates certain particulars and brings them forward one by one in his prayer to God on behalf of the Ephesians.

True Christian praying—praying in the Spirit, praying in Christ—is not only spiritual in character, but it is always specific.

Ultimately there is no better index of one’s spiritual state and condition than one’s prayers.

If a man’s prayers are formal it means that his whole position is formal.

If he is more concerned about the language that he uses and of diction you can be sure that his main concern again is with the externals.

Is there freedom in his words, is there spirituality in the prayer?

Is there an understanding of the essential character and nature of the Christian life?

Does he talk to his Heavenly Father like a little child talks to his earthly father?

Let us face this individually for ourselves.

When you pray to God what is your greatest concern about yourself?

Are you concerned chiefly about circumstances and ambitions—your body, your affairs—or are you primarily concerned about your spiritual state and condition?

Which is it that receives chief attention and most time in your personal prayers and devotions?

Are you primarily concerned about the whole question of your spiritual growth and development, your knowledge of God, your relationship to Him, and your enjoyment of Him?

Is that the big thing?

Or do you give priority to the things that belong to the externals of life?

The Apostle’s prayers are not only essentially spiritual, but also specific. There are certain aspects of the spiritual prosperity of the Ephesians that he is concerned about in particular, and so he mentions them one by one.

iii. This Petition is Encouragement for the Saint

Now Paul is not making light of their problems by not speaking of them. The NT approach to the problems in life never makes light of them.

I think the problem we have today is we think that if someone is not praying for our material needs, we dont think they care about us.

Why is this?

Well society and phychology have made us believe that we are to always be happy and when we know that people care about our situations, it makes us feel like we matter which makes us happy. Or they may say to us, “It could be worse, it is not as bad as it seems.” We think this is encouragement.

The problem with this is that this model of prayer or method of encouragment is found nowhere in scripture. Scripture never minimizes a problem or a difficulty: it does the exact opposite.

The world pats us on the back and says, “it is all right”.

This is wrong to do if it is not so.

Paul is not pating them on the back and saying, “everything is going to be ok.”

Understanding that Pauls petiton here is not a worldly encouragement it is a spiritual encouragement to strengthen their inner man.

Jesus says in John 16:33

John 16:33 KJV 1900

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.

Jesus never promised a rose garden, but He did promise that he will be with us.

That there is encouragement and that is what Paul is telling them.

iv. This Petition is Expanding their Safeguards

Let me give a little illustration to show what I mean.

The biblical teaching concerning our response to attacks is very similar to that which happens in nature in the case of the physical body and disease.

It is a convenient way of looking at this whole problem.

Sin and evil and Satan and all the forces that would get us down, and depress us, and destroy us, are like diseases resulting from the attacks of germs and microbes and viruses which are very powerful and potent, and even capable of destroying life.

We are all constantly being attacked in this way, whether we are aware of it or not.

They are inside us; our bodies are full of many billions of germs any of which at any moment can become lethal and destroy us.

How does the body deal with these things?

There is a mechanism in the body which is designed to resist such attacks.

It is a question of infection and resistance.

Resistance is sometimes referred to as man’s natural constitution; some term it as natural immunity. Some men are born with better, stronger immune systems than others, so when two men are exposed to the same infection, while one may be struck down the other is unaffected.

This is because the latter has a better resistance.

This mechanism that is used for resistance in the body is not always very strong, indeed may be very poor.

So what is needed to meet infection is to build up the resistance.

There are many ways of doing this. One is to take exercise, to get out into the open and fill your lungs with fresh air and oxygen. Another is to take the right kind of food.

However, there is another line of approach, namely, to take drugs of various kinds and to try to attack the enemy directly.

This approach is not concerned with building up the resistance, it deals in a direct manner with the invading germs.

Another possible method is to operate and remove some infected organ.

Now the method that is being employed by the Apostle is that of building up the resistance of the Ephesian Christians.

There are the circumstances, there is the attack, so the Apostle prays that God ‘according to the riches of his glory, may strengthen them with might in the inner man’.

Whatever the attack may be, the resistance can be so strengthened that they will be made more than conqueror.

This is the essential biblical teaching as to how to live in a world such as this, and how to keep going in it, and how to be ‘more than conqueror’ in spite of everything that happens in it.

This is the only way of being what the Apostle calls ‘more than conquerors’ in spite of everything that attacks us. Or, as he states it in chapter 4 of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, if you desire to be able to say ‘Our light affliction which is but for a moment worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’, you must also be able to say, ‘While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen’ (vv. 17–18).

The same principle operates everywhere in the spiritual realm. Build up the inner man. Strengthen the resistance.

II. Paul Prayed for Settled Faith

We must remember that Paul is writing this to believers, so for anyone to think that Paul is giving proof that a person must recieve Christ into their heart is wrong.

the Apostle is not praying that these people may become Christians, He is praying that Christ may dwell in their hearts by faith, although He is already present.

So how do we dispel the misleading thought of making this about salvation?

The answer is to be found primarily in the word ‘dwell’.

It is a compound word which basically means ‘to live in as a house’.

But when a prefix, meaning ‘down’ is added, the word comes to mean ‘to settle down and be at home’.

The Apostle deliberately chooses to use this word to emphasize the idea of taking up your abode, of settling down, of making your permanent home, as distinct from merely paying a visit or as being in a place in some general sense.

What then is the Apostle really praying for here?

We must look at one other word before answering the question.

The word ‘dwell’ really conveys all, but the Apostle underlines it, as it were, by saying,

‘That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith’.

In Scripture the word ‘heart’ generally means the very centre of the personality.

It does not mean the seat of the affections only; it also includes the mind, the understanding and the will.

It is therefore the very center of the soul.

So what the Apostle desires for the Ephesians is that Christ may dwell in their minds; not only in their intellects but also in the very centre of their personalities.

He was already in their minds, for they had already believed; but there is a great difference between being a believer in Christ and having Christ dwelling in your heart.

Such is the distinction which Paul is clearly drawing here in the case of Ephesian Christians.

It is vitally important that we should apply this to ourselves.

To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is not the end of Christianity, it is but the beginning.

To believe the truth about His person and about His work is absolutely essential, and if we do not subscribe to these truths we are just not Christians at all.

No man can be a Christian unless he believes on the Lord Jesus Christ in that sense.

But that is not what the Apostle has in his mind here.

You can have Christ in your mind and in your intellect and still not be able to say ‘I live, yet not I …’

Paul’s desire is that Christ may also dwell in their affections, that Christ may dwell in their will, that Christ may be the dominating factor in the whole of their life, controlling it and directing it.

Christ is to be the very heart of their hearts, He is to be at the very centre of their lives.

When Christ becomes the center of our lives, our faith will be so settled, that it will be like the pyrimds in Egypt.

Our faith will weather the sand storms of satan

the whirl winds of the world

and the pressure of public opinion.

Get Christ into the very center of your soul so when the winds and rains come, your house will stand!

Finally,

III.Paul Prayed for a Strengthening of Love

so As we move forward it is important that we remember that the Apostle’s concern for these people is that they may know the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

They are not, primarily, to seek the blessings that He can give, nor even to seek holiness, but to seek the Lord Himself.

All holiness, sanctification, every kind of blessing and every condition in the Christian life, is to be the result of our knowledge of Him as a Person and our communion with Himself.

My primary ambition should not to be a good man, not even to be a holy man.

There are ‘holy men’ in other religions, in Buddhism, and Judaism, for example.

The specific truth about the Christian is that our holiness is the result of our knowledge of Him, and of our relationship to Him.

In a sense, therefore, we must not even speak about ‘the deepening of the spiritual life’; we should speak of the deepening of our knowledge of Him and our love of Him.

So what is Paul saying?

In essence, Paul is saying, because Christ is the center of your life, you will be ‘rooted and grounded in love’.

Paul does not say that we must be rooted and grounded in God’s love. That will come later.

Here the emphasis is that we ourselves should be rooted and grounded in love.

In other words, love should be the predominating and prevailing element in our lives and conduct and experience.

Obviously we have no love in us apart from His love. ‘We love Him because He first loved us’; and there is of necessity an element of love in the Christian life from the very beginning.

One simply cannot believe that the Son of God came on earth and gave Himself to the death of the Cross for us, and for our sins, without there being an element of grateful love toward Him immediately.

The Apostle has already dealt with this aspect of truth in the first and second chapters.

Here, in the third chapter, he is concerned about a deeper love, a more permanent love, and he is very specifically speaking about our love to Him, rather than about His love to us.

So the subject here is our love to God, our love to the Lord Jesus Christ, our love towards our brethren in the faith, our love of Christian work and activity, indeed our love for everything that pertains to the ‘truth as it is in Jesus

So in order to make this concept stick, Paul used two terms:

Rooted and Grounded

The word Rooted immediately makes one think of a tree and grounded makes one think about a house or a tower. (think about how those bldgs in big cities have these big grounding rods)

Let look first at how

i. Our love should be like a tree

The word ‘Rooted’ means ‘deeply rooted’.

We must not think of a sapling that would be blown down if a slight gale should happen to rise,

but rather of a majestic oak tree whose roots go down into the depths of the earth, spreading in many directions and taking a firm hold of earth and rocks.

We must think of a great tree of considerable age and girth, that looks as if it is going to stand for ever.

Just picture a giant oak tree and the massive root system they have.

Their roots are strong and they spread and divide and subdivide in every direction.

If that tree is ever blown over it has to raise that tremendous mass of earth with it. But it cannot be shaken because it has gone down so deeply.

And so, according to the Apostle, this is to be the condition of the Christian.

It is his description of love in the life of the mature Christian.

Let us remind ourselves once more that the Apostle is praying for people who were already Christians, who had already believed, who had already been sealed by the Spirit. But they must advance beyond their beginnings, and experience the Christian life in its maturity. And that life should call forth admiration.

Our love for Christ should be striking and arresting like a tree, a great tree which as you are walking through a forest suddenly makes you stop and stand and say, How marvellous! How majestic! How wonderful! The Apostle prays that these Ephesian Christians may become such.

And when our love for Christ towers over all other love like a giant red wood, then our love for one another will be so evident that people wont have to ask if we are christians, they will know it.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, by the love ye have one for another.

Next, we look at how

ii. Our love should be like a Tower

So, we are not only to have love like a tree that is rooted, we need to be like a tower that is grounded.

The bigger a building the deeper and stronger the foundation should be.

You are not going to build a 50 floor high rise on a double wide foundation. It wont work.

The principle that is taught here, is that the christian’s life and activity (works) must be built upon love.

Who’s house stood?

The one upon sand or the one upon the rock?

Thats right the rock.

You know why in Manhatten, NY they can build those massive skyscrapers but in say wilmington they cant.

Because of the foundation. the Island is made mostly of rock.

Paul is in essence telling us, that you not only need to have a love that is active and alive, you need a love that is firm upon the foundation.

One that can stand the test of time. One that will not be lost at the first sign of trouble.

Trees and tall buildings both move some times when the winds blow, but they dont fall. Why? because of being rooted and grounded.

Are you rooted and grounded?

How is your faith this evening?

How is your inner man?

Paul was calling the Ephesian believers to a higher plain. God is calling all of us here tonight to a higher plain.