Above Every Name
Notes
Transcript
For the past few weeks, using the letter of 1 John as our guide, you hopefully heard the overarching message - that to be a faith-filled Christian, and collectively be a faith-filled Church, means to believe in Jesus as the Son of God and to activate that belief by loving one another and obediently following God’s commands.
This is the message we heard two weeks ago in one of the key verses found in 1 John 3:23
And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
We believe and we love.
Today, I am going to be focusing on the passage we just heard from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians - and if you have a Bible, I encourage you to open it and follow along - because you will notice that Paul commends the church for doing exactly that.
For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers,
For this reason…Because you believe and you love - I can’t stop giving thanks and praying for you.
Notice how Paul says “for this reason” - what is the reason?
If we back up a few verses, we see that Paul begins this letter by reminding them (and by extension - each of us) that our spiritual blessings, including our faith and our love for one another, come from God. It is because He loves us, and was unwilling to abandon us to our sinful and broken state, but set out from the beginning to rescue and redeem us - this is why we believe and how we can love. He chose to adopt us through Jesus and call us His own children.
Listen as Paul explains how this works…
You too heard the word of truth in Christ, which is the good news of your salvation. You were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit because you believed in Christ. The Holy Spirit is the down payment on our inheritance, which is applied toward our redemption as God’s own people, resulting in the honor of God’s glory.
When you hear the gospel, the truth of what God has done for us through Jesus, and you believe it - you are sealed with the Holy Spirit. In the ancient world, a seal was an engraved device, for example a signet ring, that would be pressed into clay or wax to leave an impression. When the clay or wax hardened, the seal’s impression would indicate to all who saw it that whatever item was sealed belonged to the owner of that seal.
If you were handed a letter with the king’s seal on it, then you knew that the contents of that letter contained the thoughts and decisions of the king.
When you believe in Christ, God places his seal, the Holy Spirit, on you. His promises now are in effect on your life. Your sins have been forgiven - and on the day of Judgment - when every man and woman will be held in account for how they lived their lives - that seal that has been placed on you will ensure that you receive God’s promised salvation. All this by God’s grace which you received by faith.
It being Mother’s Day, most of you are probably remembering the love and sacrifice your mother gave you, in countless ways, so that you would become a well-rounded person, secure in knowing whose child you were, and able to pass on that love you received to your own children one day. I know it does not always work out that way and not every mother was able to fill her parental role well. That is the nature of a broken world and why we need Jesus. But for the mothers who did it well - albeit imperfectly - we can see that their love and care begin before we are even born. And they would move heaven and earth in order for us to grow, develop our gifts, and find success in this world.
How much more has God, our Heavenly Father, done in order for you to come to know His Son and to be made into the person He desired you to be?
Now in regards to this letter, Paul wrote it from prison, likely when he was in Rome around the year 60 AD. His body was in chains, his circumstances were bleak, but his heart and his spirit were free as he gave God thanks through prayer for these faithful followers of Christ. The thought of them brought him joy.
And it is his prayer for the church that I really want to hone in on today.
Let me ask you. Do you regularly pray for your church? Does the thought of your brothers and sisters here at Grace give you joy and lead you to give thanks and lift them up to the Lord?
I know that many of you do. I know because I can witness of the fruit of your prayers. I see with my eyes and sense in my soul the peace and joy of a people who pray for one another and look forward to spending time together.
If praying for your church is not a regular pattern in your life, I encourage you to make it so. It makes a difference. Paul does not come across as one who waste his time, on the contrary, I would say his amazing success in planting and developing churches throughout the Roman Empire was rooted in his time spent in prayer. He writes of the importance of prayer quite often.
I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf,
In the letter to the Colossians, he lifts up as an example a disciple named Epaphras, in Col 4:12
Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ Jesus, greets you, always struggling on your behalf in his prayers, that you may stand mature and fully assured in all the will of God.
Strive together with me in prayer….struggling on your behalf in prayer…somehow, I don’t get the impression that Paul’s idea of prayer was that it was a pious act with little consequence. Or an action of last resort when all else has failed.
No, Paul showed that prayer is as essential as breathing.
Rejoice always, pray without ceasing,
Considering Paul’s practice and understanding of prayer and the high level of importance he attributes to it, let’s look at what he actually prays for when he prays for the Ephesian church - because it may help us to know what to pray for when we lift up Grace Church - and this new movement of Wesleyan faith we call the Global Methodist Church.
What does Paul pray?
that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,
Paul prays for God to reveal more wisdom and knowledge of Himself so that we would know the hope and the riches that we have received.
Said another way, Paul prays…that we would know God. Because the more we know God for who He is, then the more we can come to know who we are in Him and with that knowledge, live into the person God has called us to be.
Due to the effect of sin on our lives, our image of God can be distorted and our image of ourselves is flawed and incomplete. Without revelation from God, without the truth coming to us from outside ourselves, we are completely lost.
If from a young age you are taught that God is distant, that he is too busy to concern himself with someone as insignificant as you, that it is up to you to make something of yourself in this world - then your image of God is going to be distorted and your image of yourself is going to be flawed and incomplete.
The good news is that God has revealed himself to us. Every truth we know about God is known because He has revealed it. The Bible is God’s self-revelation. From the beginning, we find that He is our Creator and that He made each of us in His image. As we move through the scriptures, we learn that He is our Deliverer, our Redeemer, our Protector, our Sustainer. He is all powerful, all knowing, Ever present. He knows every hair on our head and every thought in our minds.
In time, He revealed Himself completely by becoming one of us.
All the fullness of deity lives in Christ’s body. And you have been filled by him, who is the head of every ruler and authority.
Learning who God is will take more than a lifetime. For our children back in Sunday school, the lessons they learn will hopefully give them the basic building blocks - but even the most wise, learned, and eldest among us will admit that there is so much they have still to learn.
Paul prays that God would give us the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him.
I’m sure quite a few of you know the song Open the Eyes of My Heart. If you know this song, sing the chorus along with me:
Open the Eyes of My Heart Lord
Open the Eyes of My Heart
I want to see you.
I want to see you.
That chorus comes straight out of verse 18
so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints,
“The eyes of your heart enlightened” is an imaginative way of saying “may you have spiritual insight.” That you would know - not just in your head, but in your heart — in the core of your being - this hope that we have in Christ.
What is this hope that we have? What riches do we possess because of our belief in Jesus and our love for one another?
This is what Paul lays out in the first three chapters of this letter. I encourage you to spend time slowly reading through it this week.
And as you pray for the church, pray that we would all continue to grow in our understanding and our spiritual insight of all that God has done and is doing and what that means for you and me.
To close this message, let’s consider the last part of today’s passage…
Ephesians 1:19–23 (ESV)
…(that we would know) what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Our God, because of His great love for you, did something so remarkable and unexpected it is hard for us to fully comprehend. He imposed limitations on himself so that He could become one of us, a human named Jesus, and live among us. He experienced everything that we experienced. He allowed His own people whom He created, to put him to death - so that our sins would be paid for by his blood. By His great power, God resurrected Jesus, restored to Him all power and authority and has positioned Him Above all things: and all things means all things - every creature, every object, every being in every place, in every time, is under His dominion and authority.
And if that was not enough, that same power that God worked in Jesus is also in you right now - if you believe Jesus and you love one another.
We are one with Christ. He is the head and we, the church, are the body. Touch your head - now touch you body - it should still be connected.
He is above all things - guess where that takes you?
He has all power and authority? Guess what you have?
The more we come to understand who God is, what He has done for us through Jesus, it will shape who we are and how we live out our calling here in Cambridge and beyond.
This is why Paul prayed for the church in Ephesus, and it is why we would be wise to pray for the same here.
Let us pray.