God’s Love, Our Fullness

Sermon Outline for Ephesians 3:14-21

Sermon Title: God’s Love, Our Fullness

Theological Proposition: To be filled with God’s fullness we need a deeper understanding of God’s love Sermon Purpose: To encourage believers to remember God’s immeasurable love for us Homiletical Proposition: Experience God’s fullness by knowing God’s love.

Introduction:

Image: Losing a close friendship can feel similar to our relationship with God growing cold. 

Need: We often don’t feel God’s fullness and presence in our life

Homiletical Subject: How can we feel more of God’s presence in our lives?

Passage Context: Ephesians 3:14-21 is Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians to be filled with God’s fullness.

Message Preview: First, we’ll explore the issues with intimacy, then we’ll examine Paul’s pathway to presence, and then conclude with some practical application on how to better experience God’s presence in our lives.

Announce & Read Text: Turn with me to Ephesians 3:14-21.

(Transition statement: First, let's explore the issues Paul says we face when trying to experience God’s presence in our lives.)

I. We don’t always feel God’s presence. (Illus. you don’t ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar if you already have sugar in your house.)

A. We aren’t full of the fullness of God. (Illus. Its disappointing to find a swimming pool without any water. Its not doing what its meant to do)

B. We don’t have the strength/ability we need. (Illus. Seeing the 100lb dumbbell at the gym, we want to lift it – but its just too heavy.)

C. We don’t fully understand the love of Christ. (Illus. “Jesus loves me this I know” yet we are afraid, disrespect our brothers, walk in disobedience, aren’t bold for the gospel etc.)

We don’t understand its magnitude – and thus reduce God’s love. (Illus. the vastness of outer space is hard to wrap our minds around, so we often limit our thinking on space – or don’t think about it at all.)

a) We reduce God’s love by limiting it to certain people.

b) We reduce God’s love by believing it is conditional.

We don’t understand its complexity – and thus intellectualize God’s love. (Illus. we often make God’s love only an idea)

a) We intellectualize God’s love through licentiousness. (Illus. Using “God will love me anyway” as an excuse to sin.)

b) We intellectualize God’s love by discounting God’s love during trials.

(Transition statement: Paul’s prayer highlights our problems with feeling God’s presence, but crescendos into a request that we be filled with God’s fullness. Let’s now examine Paul’s prayer to see how we might filled with God’s fullness.)

II. To experience God’s fullness we need His power and His love.

A. We need a power/ability from God to experience God’s fullness.

We need power that accords with God’s glory, not our circumstances or our performance. (Illus. in our society, our abilities earn us favor with other people – but not in God’s kingdom.)

We need power that comes from his Spirit – not our efforts or discipline. (Illus. looking for a grocery item in the wrong isle – you won’t find it and its frustrating.)

B. Understanding the love of God is the key to intimacy with God. (Illus. You won’t feel true intimacy with your spouse if you don’t understand and believe that they love you.)

1. We must understand the magnitude of God’s love for us. (Illus. Seeing the Grand Canyon in pictures is one thing, but to truly appreciate the wonder of the GC, you have to stand before it and experience its magnitude.)

2.  We must know that Christ’s love goes beyond knowledge. (Illus. The cross doesn’t make sense. It goes beyond all knowledge.)

(Transition statement: Finally, let’s consider how to walk in God’s presence in accordance with his great love for us.)

III. Find God’s presence by knowing God’s love.

A. Pray for the ability only God can give – deeper comprehension of His love.

1. This ability only comes from God.

2. Deeper intimacy comes through prayer. (Illus. one of the main ways you learn the way your spouse loves you is by communicating with them.)

B. Stop limiting God’s love.

1. Stop downsizing the love of God. (Illus. Like having a picture of the Grand Canyon as your screen saver – so often we settle for reduced/fake versions of God’s love)

a. Don’t reduce His love to conditional love. (Illus. Believing God only loves us when we are "good enough" or perform well spiritually)

b. Stop limiting his love to people, including yourself. (Illus. hitting a hard time and thinking or acting like God doesn’t love you)

2. Stop reducing God’s love to an intellectual concept.

a. Stop using God’s love as a license to sin. (Illus. Truly knowing our spouse loves us doesn’t encourage us to cheat, it encourages faithfulness.)

b. Stop discounting God’s love when you are facing trials. (Illus. hitting a hard time and thinking or acting like God doesn’t love you)

B. Meditate on Christ’s love for you.

1. Meditation grows our comprehension.  (Illus. The more you think about a subject, the more you understand it.)

2. Meditate on his faithfulness and love.  

a. Meditate on his past faithfulness to his saints. Illus. Read about saints in the Old Testament and read biographies of saints in history.)

b. Meditate on his past faithfulness to you.

c. Meditate on his sacrifice on the cross.

Conclusion:

Repeat the HP verbatim: Feel God’s presence by embracing God’s love

Reinforce the message: The relationship with my high school friend never got better. I didn’t have the ability to fix it. It needed active participation from him to help repair our fracture. Luckily, God has done all the work needed to repair our fracture. Though the relationship with my former friend will most likely always be broken, God himself was broken to repair our relationship with Him. His love on the cross echoes throughout all time that we are loved, and we are invited into the deepest of fellowship with him ALWAYs. Let us today, remind ourselves that God’s presence is always one prayer away, because His love has never been a step away.

Manuscript:

Well, everything changed overnight. When I was in middle school, I was probably, I think I was in seventh grade, I met my friend Gregory. Gregory and I met in math class. We hit it off instantly. We played the same video games and we thought the same girls were cute. So that obviously meant we became best friends. And…

We did, and so throughout middle school and ninth grade year of high school, we were best friends. We were at each other's houses every weekend. We would spend hours in the yard throwing frisbee, having deep conversations, talking about life, and yeah, just doing life together. We were best friends. The 10th grade rolled around, and...

I remember in 10th grade we started rolling with this other crew, we had a few close friends that we would hang out with. And there was a guy in the group who was doing some things that I didn't really like. He wasn't treating a friend of mine right and I confronted him about it and kind of, yeah, had a disagreement with him. And after three years of friendship, Gregory sided with him and within the course of a week...

He grew cold, he stopped hanging out with me, and our best friendship basically vanished overnight. And why do I say all this? Well, some of you are probably thinking, Ben, that is just on par with high school relationships, right? They come and they go, they fade, they do not last, and it's really kind of fickle to want to put hope in them. And I would agree with you. I think high school relationships, that just happens. But the reason I bring that up...

is because I think so often that kind of really hot friendship and then you find yourself eventually in a position where it feels cold and distant, that happens a lot in our relationships, but it also happens a lot with our relationship with God. Where it feels like at one point we were just on fire, we felt God was in our lives, we felt so close to him, so near to him, we were hearing his voice at all times. And then

Eventually we look up and we see that he's nowhere to be found. And we feel far away, he feels cold, and we're wondering, did I do something wrong? Or has he left me?

Well, what I want us to talk about today is how do we feel the presence of God? How do we know that God is with us? How do we feel full of his presence? How do we feel full of the fullness of God? And I want to do that through Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3. So if you have your Bibles, let's turn to Ephesians 3, 14 through 21.

. One, we already kind of pointed it out that that we're not full of the fullness of God. That we often don't feel guns presence in our life, right? He feels cold. He feels distant.

The second problem we have, you see it in verse 15, or sorry, verse 16, is that we don't have the power we need. We don't have the strength or the ability. It says that according to the riches of His glory, He may grant you to be strengthened with power. Right? He's asking that they may be strengthened with an ability. And so that points, I think, to us that we don't have power. And we often feel pretty powerless in our relationship with God.

And then the last thing that I think Paul points out is that we don't understand the love of God. That we don't understand God's love. Because in 17 it says that we may have the, he's asking that we may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints, what is the breadth and depth and length and height and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Right, verse 18. So.

We don't know the love of God. And it's kind of two-parter, I think. One, I think the issue is we don't understand the complexity of God's love. We don't understand its complexity. He says that it surpasses knowledge. And so oftentimes we want to make love just an idea. We want to make God's love this intellectual concept, but it's more complex than that. And then I think the second thing is we don't understand the magnitude of God's love.

He says that we would have the ability to comprehend just how big, how wide, how high, how deep it is. It is too magnificent and the magnitude of it is too big for our minds to wrap our heads around. So we don't have the fullness of God. We don't have the ability and we can't understand the magnitude of Christ's love and we can't understand the complexity of Christ's love. What do we do? Well, I think this prayer again gives us answers.

So I think Paul's prayer shows his fullness. And the way that we do that is we ask God, do we find fullness through God's power and God's love? We find fullness and presence in God's power and his love. So first let's look at verse 16. Paul prays that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being.

So one, we see that this power accords with his glory. So we need a power. So the first thing we need is we need a power. We need an ability that we don't have. That is that if you wanna figure out, like we don't have this and we need strength, right? We want to lift the, we wanna bench 500, but you're gonna need a spot. If you want to lift this heavy barbell, it's like we need help doing it, it's crushing us. We need help lifting in the gym.

And then this and but notice this that this is a certain type of power one. It's a power that accords with his glory Not our performance or our circumstances So often I think we think the power of God comes when we are behaving well or when we're in a good circumstance but this says that the power that we need accords with the riches of his glory and It says that it comes through his spirit not our efforts not artworks

We don't manifest God's presence. God's presence isn't with us when we're doing good things. This ability to understand God's love and to feel the fullness of God comes through his spirit. So we need an ability, and then we need to understand the love of God. We need to understand the love of God, right? Verse 18, that you may have strength to comprehend with all the saints.

What is the breadth, height, depth of love? And to know the love that surpasses knowledge. So first we need to understand Christ's love is magnificent. We need to know the magnitude of God's love. And I think this is like standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. So often we want to, you know, we'll look at pictures of the Grand Canyon, we'll have screen savers of the Grand Canyon, but until you stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon, you can't truly feel its wonder.

So we can't, we need to stop intellectualizing God's love. We need to stop reducing its scope and minimizing it. We have to feel it and let it be what it is. Secondly, we need to know the complexity of God's love. We need to know that God's love is complex. It surpasses knowledge. It surpasses the circumstances you're in. It surpasses the sin that you're in.

that Christ's love is incredibly complex. It overthrows knowledge. If we want to see this, we look at the cross. Right, if we want to see this, we look at the cross because the cross does not make sense. How do we know this? How do we know that Christ's love surpasses knowledge? It's because there's no amount of knowledge that says Christ needed to go to the cross. No amount of knowledge would tell you that. That God himself died for us, he loves you, and that goes way beyond an idea.

So we need an ability that we don't have, and we need to understand Christ's great, great love for us, its magnitude and its complexity. How do we do that? With our closing time, I want to try to answer those questions. I think, one, we have to pray. We have to pray for an ability that we don't have. Right, it's God's ability. It's God's power. We know that it's through prayer. that we enter into the presence of God.

Yeah, right, it accords with his glory, his ability, it's his power. So we have to pray, we have to talk with God and say, Lord, we need your help. Prayer increases our intimacy. You have to talk to somebody to get to know them better. You know this, if somebody tells you that they love you, but you don't trust that, you won't believe it. So we need to pray. Secondly, we need to stop minimizing and reducing the love of God.

Stop limiting and reducing the love of God. Right, one, stop reducing it. Stop trying to reduce Christ's love. Let it be the big thing that it is. Stop reducing it to meet your circumstances. Stop reducing it to, yeah, just when you're good enough, when you feel like you deserve God's love, that is reducing his love far beyond what it's worth.

And don't intellectualize it either. Don't intellectualize God's love. Don't make it just an idea. How do you know you're doing that? Licentiousness. If you say, I can sin because God still loves me, that means God's love is an idea to you. Stop saying that it should be applied to certain people. Stop saying that God's love applies to this person, but doesn't apply to this person. Or stop saying that God's love applies to that person, but not me, but not yourself.

Don't reduce God's love. It is bigger than you can imagine and it is more complex than you can imagine.

And if you need any, so stop reducing it. A couple ways we can do that, I think we can think about his faithfulness. We meditate, we remember. One, we remember God's love for his past saints. We can read through the scriptures, we can see how God was faithful to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David. We see how God has preserved Israel, he's been faithful to his people all throughout history. He's not gonna be unfaithful to us.

So we meditate on his past, faithfulness to his saints, and also saints of history. I think we can read biographies. That's a helpful way to do this, is think about how God has been faithful. I love reading Augustine's Confessions. I like reading about Charles Spurgeon's life. I like reading about Abraham Lincoln, people who God just moved in their life, who trusted him and he was faithful to them. Second thing, I think we can meditate on God's past faithfulness in our lives. That if we slow down,

think about it, God has been faithful to us in so many ways. And so often we can get really myopic and think that this circumstance that we're in is unique and that God's love will not find us here. And he's not with us. But I don't know what you're in, but zoom out. Remember how you felt the same way two, three years ago. And God showed up in a big way. And he was nearer to you than you imagined and he was opening doors that you couldn't see. So remember his past

And then lastly, remember his sacrifice, remember his works, and remember the cross. If we want to know that God loves us, we have to remember the cross.

It goes beyond knowledge. Meditate on his gift, his death for you. My friend, ship with Gregory, never got better. We never repaired that relationship. He did not want to. He was angry with me, he was cold with me. He was glad that it never got better. And I couldn't repair it on my own. I didn't have the strength to repair it, right?

It needed reconciling work on both ends to heal that relationship. And unfortunately, Gregory did not want to do the reconciling work, despite maybe me wanting to. Really bad. The good news, friends, though, is that the reconciling work has been done on God's part.

that God is not waiting for you to do a reconciling effort. It is not outside of his control. He has all the power and he has crossed the bridge of death to reconcile our friendship with him. So friends, remember that he is always one prayer away. He is not far away from you. His love is bigger than you can imagine. Trust in that love, rest in that love, know God's love and embrace his presence. Thanks.