Vision 6: Outcome #1—Drawing Near
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Eph 3:14-21
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Bye, kids!
Good morning, and welcome to Family Worship with the church body of Eastern Hills. Whether you are here in the room, or online, thanks for being part of our celebration of Jesus this morning. I’m senior pastor Bill Connors, and I’m grateful for this church family and being able to gather together.
If you are visiting with us for the first time today, thanks for choosing to worship with Eastern Hills! We would like to be able to thank you for your visit and to pray for you, so if you wouldn’t mind, please take a moment during the sermon to fill out a visitor card, which you’ll find in the back of the pew in front of you. If you’re online, you can let us know about your visit by filling out the communication form at the bottom of our “I’m new“ page. If you’re here in the room today, you can get that card back to us in one of two ways: you can put it in the boxes by the doors at the close of service, or I would love the opportunity to meet you personally, so after service, you can bring that card to me directly, and I have a gift to give you to thank you for your visit today.
Thanks to Tok Nyo Wright for the coffee and snack bar in the Crosscourts.
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VIDEO: Andrew Mark & Petra Adil, church planters in Montreal, Quebec
Opening
Opening
We’re in our 6th week of messages around our mission, core values, and desired outcomes as a church. We’ve already considered our MISSION: People helping people live out the unexpected love of Jesus every day. And over the last four weeks, we considered our Core Values: AUTHENTIC FAMILY, REAL TRUTH, TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH, and last week, PRACTICAL IMPACT: We seek to meet the needs of our neighbors wherever we find them. We looked at the parable of the Good Samaritan, and were challenged to look for ways to show compassion to our neighbors—and the point is not to ask “who is my neighbor,” but to ask, “to whom am I called to BE a neighbor?”
This morning, and for the next 4 weeks following (other than Easter), we will look at our five desired Outcomes as a church. For today, we will look at Outcome #1 by considering Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3. So as you are able to, please stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word and turn in your Bibles or Bible apps to Ephesians 3, where I will begin reading in verse 14.
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. 16 I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, 17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, 19 and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us—21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
PRAYER (That EHBC would be granted, according to the riches of God’s glory, to be strengthened with power through the Spirit, to have Christ make His home in our hearts through faith, and to be rooted and established as we come to understand together the incredibly long, wide, high, and deep love of God that surpasses knowledge) Pray for the Bells and the difficulty they are navigating with their partner church, and the meeting this Tuesday.
Whereas our Core Values describe who we are and who we want to be as a church, along with the impact that we want to have on the community around us, our Outcomes describe what we would like to see happening in the lives of the people who engage in the life of the church family. Together they kind of ask: Are we fulfilling our mission of being people helping people live out the unexpected love of Jesus every day? Are we living out that unexpected love? Are we helping others do so? Are we sharing that unexpected love with others?
Each of our desired Outcomes are “how” questions that we should be asking ourselves first of all individually. We should be paying careful attention to how we walk, according to Paul in Ephesians 5:15.
15 Pay careful attention, then, to how you walk—not as unwise people but as wise—
However, there’s a collective consideration here as well. Being involved in the ministry of Eastern Hills should be a part of what God uses to “move the needle” in our lives, so to speak. Not that simply being a part of Eastern Hills causes us grow, but is God working in and through this ministry to promote both our spiritual growth and the fulfillment of our mission? Plus, this collective consideration also means that if we want the church to grow (I’m primarily speaking about maturity, not numerically), and we are the church, then logically, the church will only grow if we do.
So basically, as we grow through being a part of the Eastern Hills church family, are we seeing movement in these areas of our lives? If so, great! If not, why not?
Our first desired Outcome question is this:
How am I drawing near to the unexpected love of Jesus today?
If we are going to be people who help other people live out Jesus’s unexpected love, we have to ask: Am I drawing near to that love? It’s awfully hard to help someone in something that we ourselves know very little about. So this is where it starts.
This particular one is about spiritual disciplines, what we kind of collectively refer to as “drawing near.” The language for that comes from James 4:8:
8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
The first “draw near” is an imperative: a command. We can choose whether or not to draw near to God. He is not going to force us to be close to Him. This might sound harsh, but He’s not desperate for our love—we should be desperate for His. He doesn’t actually need us—we desperately need Him. He in His sovereign grace has chosen to spread His love abroad through Christ, but only His love obliged Him to do so, not how loveable we are. So we are commanded to draw near to God. This is an act of obedient faith—not an act that saves us, because we can’t earn our salvation—an act of response to the incredible love of God and the truth that He actually wants to be near to us.
Within each Outcome are five Outcome Expression statements that we can use to evaluate our answer to the question. For this Outcome, we consider the following five statements:
I set aside daily time to study and memorize Scripture to deepen my intimacy with God.
I pray many times throughout the day, seeking God’s heart and direction.
I can hardly wait to meet God in Family Worship to be refreshed and restored.
I find myself becoming more and more sensitive to how the Spirit is prompting me throughout my day.
I am quick to recognize my sin and run to God to confess and repent.
Our focal passage this morning contains the elements of all five of these statements. However, we have to remember that the context is that this is a prayer of Paul for the church at Ephesus. His prayer is ultimately a prayer for the Ephesians to experience God’s power and intimacy with Him. I suppose that you could summarize it by saying that it was a prayer that they would draw near to God, and that God would draw near to them. However, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t teach us anything. If these things were important enough for Paul to ask the Lord for them on behalf of the church at Ephesus, then aren’t they things that we should want to see in our lives as well. So in that regard, this prayer teaches us some things that we should be in prayer for in our own lives, and in the life of Eastern Hills.
And prayer is where Paul starts:
1) Drawing near involves prayer.
1) Drawing near involves prayer.
The beginning of Paul’s prayer here is actually not verse 14. He opens this prayer with verse 1, where he says: Ephesians 3:1 “For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—” and then he takes an inspired, holy rabbit trail and spends the next 12 verses talking about his calling and the mystery of God’s grace in saving the Gentiles through the Gospel, before coming back to praying:
BILL: ONLY 14-16A
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. 16a I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory,
He says, “For this reason...” What is “this” reason? It’s what he has written in chapters 1 and 2: God’s amazing plan of salvation through the blood of Christ, and the fact that that salvation is offered even to the Gentiles—that in the gospel God was redeeming for Himself not just Jews, but people from every tribe, nation, and tongue. This is what Paul means when he says, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.”
This is the mystery that was revealed in 3:6:
6 The Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body, and partners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
The gospel is the good news about how God has provided His One and Only Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins—our sins being the things that we do, say, or think that don’t honor God and the things that we should do, say, and think in order to honor God, but don’t do. We deserve eternal judgment and separation from God because of sin because He is perfect, but when the sinless Son of God Jesus Christ went to the cross in our place, He took that penalty on Himself, dying in our place, and then beating death by rising again. If we will believe the truth of the gospel, trusting Jesus as our Savior and surrendering to Him as Lord, turning from our sins, then the Scriptures tell us that we will be saved.
This is what Paul was talking about when he said, “For this reason...” Because of what God has done, he gets on his knees in prayer. He comes humbly. He comes desperately. And he comes confidently.
Paul was a big advocate for praying a lot. He did so himself:
2 We always thank God for all of you, making mention of you constantly in our prayers.
9 God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in telling the good news about his Son—that I constantly mention you, 10 always asking in my prayers that if it is somehow in God’s will, I may now at last succeed in coming to you.
And he commended praying often when he wrote his letters to others:
17 pray constantly,
18 Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.
Paul had no qualms about coming to God in prayer often for various reasons—requests, thanksgiving, worship. We must see prayer as a vital part of our spiritual lives, because it’s a wonderful gift that God has given to us to be able to come directly to Him whenever and for whatever.
16 Therefore, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in time of need.
The wonder of prayer is that there’s never a time that it’s unavailable. When we come to the Lord in prayer, even just in the privacy of our minds, He hears us. We don’t get His voicemail. There’s no AI attendant that we have to talk to first. We can confidently come right to His throne in humility with our need, or the needs of others. We can do so whenever we’d like to, whenever we need to. And we can do so as often as we want.
This is why one of our Outcome Expressions is, “I pray many times throughout the day, seeking God’s heart and direction.” If we want to draw near to the unexpected love of Jesus, then the best place to start is with prayer. There are no magic words. There’s no trick to it. Just talk with God like you would talk to a friend or family member. Share your concerns with Him. Tell Him what you need and ask for it. Thank Him for what He’s given you. Praise Him for who He is. Ask Him the questions that are in your heart. Repeat back Scripture to Him. Talk to Him about what others need. Sit in stillness and just listen for His voice. This is all good to do in prayer. It’s not just a laundry list of things we want from God. It’s coming to God because we want to be close to Him—that we want God, not just what He can give us.
Of course, Paul prays that God would provide what he asks for “according to the riches of His glory.” God’s glory is incomparable. Paul confidently prayed that God would provide for the church in the measure of what His glory is capable of providing! That’s a lot! And He actually wants to bless us through that intimate relationship. He wants us to pray, because He loves us. And there’s no safer, no more stable place to be than close to God. Which brings us to our next point and what Paul asks for the church in this prayer:
2) Drawing near provides stability.
2) Drawing near provides stability.
The world is a shaky place. We can’t even trust that words will mean the same thing over time. Words that used to mean one thing often shift in meaning from generation to generation. The word “drip” is one example. Originally, the word meant “to fall in drops,” like rain or leaky plumbing. But if you’re a Boomer, you might think a “drip” is a boring, uninteresting person. My generation, Gen-X, stopped using “drip” that way, and we generally think of “drip” just in terms of plumbing, or maybe a way of preparing coffee. Millennials started using “drip” to refer to expensive jewelry. And Gen-Z hears “drip” and thinks about a person’s whole style or vibe. Boomers: you hear “drip,” and think “problem or insult.” Gen-Zers: you hear “drip,” and think “positive or compliment.”
Fortunately, the Lord doesn’t change like shifting word meanings, and Paul prayed that the Lord would grant the church stability through His strength and the foundation of His love:
BILL: 16B-17
16b ...to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, 17 and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love,
Paul prayed that the church would be strengthened with power in our “inner being.” This is in contrast to our “outer being”—our physical selves. The truth is that our outer bodies, over time, grow weaker. Generally speaking, as we age we lose strength and vitality in our bodies, have to be more cautious about injury, have more ongoing aches and pains, maybe have to take more medications, have to have more procedures, etc. The fascinating thing is how much we focus on the outer being as a culture. In fact, for many, the outer being is their source of hope and happiness—it is most important. But just like the word “drip,” the target, the goal, the definition is constantly changing. What was “in” just a couple of months ago is “out” now (six-seven).
What would happen if we strengthened our outer beings, but were complete wrecks on the inside? Would we have stability in our lives? Hope? Joy? How often have we heard of such struggles?
Paul’s request shows that what’s more important is the inner being. In Christ, this should also be constantly changing by the working of the Spirit who lives within us. But instead of changing based on the whims of fashion, fame, or TikTok, Insta, and YouTube, the target of this change never moves: the goal is always to be like Christ. Our inner being is being renewed, even as our outer being is slowly being destroyed, as Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:
16 Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. 17 For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. 18 So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
Our momentary light affliction in our outer beings is contrasted with the incomparable eternal weight of glory being produced in our inner beings in Christ. Seen vs. unseen. Temporary vs. eternal.
So can someone be deeply frail on the outside, but filled with hope and joy because of being strengthened on the inside? Absolutely. Side note: By all means, take care of your bodies. I’m not saying not to. But don’t do so to the neglect or distraction of your heart. Our bodies can become our idols if we let them. OK, back to the inner being:
When Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,” he’s not suggesting that the Ephesians are not believers, and that somehow Jesus was not in their hearts through His Spirit. The word he chose doesn’t just mean “live in.” The picture he’s getting at is that Christ would literally “make His home” in our hearts. Or you could say “make our hearts His home:” that He would be in the process of a complete remodel of our hearts—knocking down walls, changing paint color and wallpaper, putting in new carpet, hauling off trash and broken appliances, replacing faulty fixtures in our inner beings, so that our hearts fit Him, instead of trying to get Him to fit our hearts. This transformational growth is only going to happen by the Spirit’s power, and as we become more and more sensitive to His work, we will respond more and more like Christ.
This is an issue in the world. Many only want Jesus if He fits what we want Him to be, and might even resist hearing or believing the gospel because we think that if we come to Christ, we’ll have to give up who we are. And that’s exactly the point! Apart from Christ, all of our hearts are fixer-uppers, broken-down shacks of sin that are supposed to be mansions of the Savior.
This is why Paul said in Romans 12:2:
2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.
The result of this is that we would be “rooted and firmly established in love.” Rooted is an agricultural term: that a plant would have deep, healthy roots, and thus be immovable. “Firmly established” is an architectural term, as a wall build well on a solid foundation, so also immovable.
Paul used the same imagery in Colossians 2:
6 So then, just as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to walk in him, 7 being rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and overflowing with gratitude.
And he called the church at Corinth to this same kind of stability in their faith:
58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.
11 being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, so that you may have great endurance and patience, joyfully
15 And let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts.
2 and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.
7 being rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, and overflowing with gratitude.
35 Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?
We stand upon the real truth of the Word of God (which cannot be broken—John 10:35), the gospel of Jesus Christ, which both shows us what God’s love looks like and how we are to love. Drawing near to God through the strengthening and change that He provides by His own power as we study and memorize His Word provides a stability to our lives that the world simply cannot give. Jesus explained this with a parable:
24 “Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock. 26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn’t act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded that house, and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.”
Grant Osborne provides a great summary on this, which also forms a great transition to our next point:
Ephesians: Verse by Verse Prayer for Strength and the Indwelling Presence of Christ (3:16–17)
This provides an overall image that makes this passage memorable: the church consists of a family (the people of God) living in a sacred structure (the church as a house and a temple) where Christ dwells in and with us. At our home we have a landscaped yard (rooted) and a firmly anchored house (grounded). The love that roots and grounds us is the love of the Godhead more than it is the love of church members for each other. It is divine love that anchors us in the church.
3) Drawing near happens both individually and together.
3) Drawing near happens both individually and together.
The journey of faith that we are on isn’t ONLY an individual journey. It is also not ONLY a collective journey. We are an authentic family. That’s our first identifying Core Value as a church body. We aren’t in this walk of faith alone. We do so with our brothers and sisters in Christ here at Eastern Hills. We see the picture of both in verses 17-19:
BILL: 17B-19A
17b I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, 19a and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge,
To be fair, there is certainly an individual aspect to what Paul is saying here. When he prayed that Jesus would dwell in our hearts through faith, he was writing to the whole church (second person plural). However, each of us must take ownership of our own faith—to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul wrote to the church at Philippi (2:12). The psalmist prayed his own prayer of faith, for example:
8 Let me experience your faithful love in the morning, for I trust in you. Reveal to me the way I should go because I appeal to you.
This was David praying to the Lord his own personal prayer.
But it’s unavoidable that there is a collective picture here as well that Paul praying for. God also loves His people as a whole. In Jeremiah, for example, when speaking of His people Israel, the Lord declared how massive and long-suffering His love for them is:
3 the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued to extend faithful love to you.
“Him” here is Israel. And Paul says that true Israel, though disobedient, is still loved on account of the patriarchs (Rom 11:28), and that He still has a plan for them (Rom 11:26, Rev 7:4-8).
Like David and Israel, God loves each of us and all of us. It’s both. So the point of Paul’s prayer here isn’t that we would come to love God more (although that’s a great prayer to pray), but that we—all the saints together—would understand just how much He loves us.
There’s this beautiful “dimensional” picture of this that Paul paints here. Think of all of the ways that we measure things: distance, area, volume, weight, time... “How much love does God have? Can we measure it with miles or acres or gallons or pounds or minutes?” Of course not. We naturally read this metaphorically, that instead of Paul speaking of a particular volume of love, he’s speaking about the power and scope and passion of God’s love. This metaphor is something that we can all grab a hold of.
While he’s speaking metaphorically here, he’s not saying that there is no means of measuring the love of God. In fact, Paul in this very letter has given us an indication of how massive God’s love for us is:
4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, 5 made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace! 6 He also raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might display the immeasurable riches of his grace through his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8 For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift—9 not from works, so that no one can boast.
8 Let me experience your faithful love in the morning, for I trust in you. Reveal to me the way I should go because I appeal to you.
We can see some concept of the length, width, height, and depth of the love of God in the sacrifice of Christ, which by God’s grace took us from being dead trespassers to living children, through whom He is going to put His incredible kindness on display! The psalmist expressed this beautifully in Psalm 103:
3 the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued to extend faithful love to you.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his faithful love toward those who fear him. 12 As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
When we draw near to God and confess and repent of our sins, we experience His love in an individual sense, which impacts the community. When we come together to worship Him on Sunday mornings, we declare our collective reverence, awe, adoration, and praise of Him, which impacts us each individually. The two go together!
Paul continues by praying for a paradox. A paradox is a statement or pair of statements that seems to be self-contradictory. A couple of examples:
“The more you try to impress people, the less impressed they are likely to be.”
“The more you fail, the more likely you will be to succeed.”
“The more you care about others, the less you care about yourself.”
So Paul prayed that we would “know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge...” His love is unexpected. It surpasses knowledge. Paul’s prayer is that we would know that which surpasses the ability to be known.
How do you know something that surpasses knowledge? Only through the experience of the power of God. It is incomprehensible to those who have no access to His power. This is why Paul prayed that we “may be able” (v. 18) to comprehend and know. The Greek for “may be able” reflects the idea of “being fully able,” “having the power,” and “being strong enough.” So Paul’s prayer for us is that by God’s power through His Spirit’s work in our hearts, the only power by which we could possibly do so, we might draw near to Him in order to completely comprehend the love of Christ shown in the cross. And even beyond that: to know, experience, and live out this love in a way that goes well beyond our ability to fully grasp. Which brings us to our last point:
4) Drawing near brings maturity.
4) Drawing near brings maturity.
Paul has prayed that we God would grant that we be strengthened with power through His Spirit in our inner being according to His glory, that our lives would be remodeled through faith so that we look like Christ, and that we would be “rooted and firmly established” in His love. Then he prayed that we would be able to comprehend and know together the incredible dimensions of this love that surpasses knowledge. But then he gives the reason for this prayer:
BILL: 19B only
19b so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
I can say that at first in English, I took this phrase “that you may be filled with all the fullness of God,” as a reference the filling of the Holy Spirit—that as God empowers us by His Spirit to comprehend the love of God and to know the love of Christ, thus allowing us to be MORE filled with the Spirit. I wouldn’t say that my initial impression of this is an irresponsible initial interpretation, and some commentators agree. However, you could take this interpretation to mean that we only get “some” of the Holy Spirit. But that’s not right. Either He lives within us, or He doesn’t. He doesn’t “kinda” live in us.
So looking at the Greek, this phrase says that what Paul is praying for is that we would be completely filled with the complete fullness of God, and if we put this together with a couple of other verses that Paul wrote, including something that he wrote in the very next chapter of Ephesians, it starts to make more sense.
The first part is for us to understand what the “complete fullness of God” is. Paul addressed this in Colossians 2:9-10:
9 For the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily in Christ, 10 and you have been filled by him, who is the head over every ruler and authority.
Christ, being fully God, is the exact representation of God’s fullness. For us to be completely filled with the complete fullness of God would be for us to look like Jesus. This makes sense, especially when we pair it with what we saw about Jesus dwelling in our hearts. But how does this happen? Paul wrote about this in Ephesians 4:
11 And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, to build up the body of Christ, 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.
So God puts together the church and equips certain people: Leaders, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, so that they would equip the believers, building up the body of Christ, until we reach unity in faith and knowledge as we grow into maturity that looks just like Christ’s. To apply Paul’s term to this question of what this means (since we “grow” into this fullness), this is a prayer that as we draw near to God, He would empower us so that we would be spiritually mature together, and that maturity should be manifested in our doing the “work of ministry,” individually and collectively: We live out the unexpected love of Jesus.
Notice that Paul’s assumption is that we will not be as spiritually mature as we ought to be unless we receive power from God through His Spirit to enable us to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of Christ, and that we are engaged in the life of the body of Christ, His church.
D.A. Carson wrote this:
16 I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit,
Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation Two Central Petitions
It is wonderful to revel in the love of God. Truly to experience that love, to live in the warmth of its glow, invests all of life with new meaning and purpose. The brotherhood of the saints takes on new depth; “fellowship” becomes precious, not the artificially arranged shaking of hands in a service or the shared pot of tea or coffee. Forgiving others becomes almost natural because we ourselves, thanks to God’s immeasurably rich love, have been forgiven so much. Others may despise us, but that makes little difference if God loves us. How shall trouble or sorrow or bereavement drive us into macabre despair, when we can say, with Paul, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom. 8:35). Our speech, our thoughts, our actions, our reactions, our relationships, our goals, our values—all are transformed if only we live in the self-conscious enjoyment of the love of Christ. Our testimony is then no longer dry and merely correct; it is living and vital as well. We are, in short, growing up spiritually.
Brothers and sisters: we’re in this together. We are to individually and collectively draw near to the unexpected love of Christ, so that both individually and collectively we might encourage and support one another as we grow, so that we would grow up into Him who is the head, who is Christ:
14 Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit. 15 But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into him who is the head—Christ.
19 and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of God’s Son, growing into maturity with a stature measured by Christ’s fullness.
23 which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.
9 For the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily in Christ, 10 and you have been filled by him, who is the head over every ruler and authority.
32 And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ.
1 And you were dead in your trespasses and sins 2 in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient.
2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, 3 making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
16 I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit,
Closing
Closing
To close, as Paul finishes this prayer, it’s like he can hardly contain himself. His prayer overflows into this awesome declaration of how great God is:
20 Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us—21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
He can do these things. We cannot. Who is equal to this? Not us. Only Him. Without all that He has done, we would never want to or even be able to draw near to Him. And it’s for His glory: in the church and in Christ, the body and the Head, the bride and bridegroom (Stott). Only He can do above and beyond all that we ask or think.
This is who we draw near to. This is who we pray to. This is some of what we should ask Him for, church.
But it starts with faith—believing the Gospel and trusting in what Christ has done for us—for you—so that you could be saved.
Baptism
Church membership
Giving
Prayer
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Neighboring Moments (email impact@ehbc.org, text 505-226-3445):
The couple next door are from Iran. Both their parents still live there. We have made sure they know we are concerned about them, their parents, and the conflict. Most of all, we let them know we are praying for them, their parents, and the entire situation.
Working in the community through rocketry competitions. Building relationships with families that attend, and have the opportunity to impact the Jemez Reservation through a rocketry workshop in April.
Bible reading (Ex 33, Jn 12, Pro 9, Eph 2)
Pastor’s Study tonight: Matthew 5:33-37
Prayer Meeting: The Lord is My Banner, Jehovah-Nissi
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
33 Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments and untraceable his ways! 34 For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? 35 And who has ever given to God, that he should be repaid? 36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.
