Untitled Sermon (8)
THE EXPERIENCE OF HOPE
Living in Hope—March 28, 2004
Ephesians 3:14–21; 1 John 3:1–3
14 For this reason I kneel before the Father, 15 from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. 16 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.
And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 20 Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
First John 3:
1 How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.
This is the Word of the Lord
We’re doing a series on hope. As we said last week, the reason we’re doing a whole series on this subject is we tend to underestimate the formative power in our lives of our believed-in futures. That is to say we misunderstand or we underestimate how profoundly our character and the way in which we live in our daily lives are determined by what we believe our ultimate future to be. Here are two examples quickly, since each week I want to say something about this to drive it home.
Ernest Becker wrote a book called The Denial of Death some years ago. He got a Pulitzer Prize for it. His thesis was there has never been a society in the history of the world before that was so secular. There has never been a society in which so many people believed our ultimate future doesn’t exist, that there is no ultimate future, that when we die we rot, that our personal consciousness we have right now is utterly temporary.
There has never been a whole society of people with such a widespread belief that there was no ultimate future at all. Becker’s point is we also live in a society that puts more emphasis on sex and romance and money and power than any culture ever because we are trying to deal with the sense of cosmic insignificance that keeps breaking in on us because of our belief that there is no ultimate future. That book won a Pulitzer Prize. I’ve never seen anybody deny its thesis.
Let me give you an opposite example. We’ve talked about this every so often. In the early church it’s a historical fact that when the plagues broke out in the urban cities of the old Roman Empire, the Christians tended to stay in the cities and take care of the people who were dying and died themselves in many cases while so many other people just left. Why? Were Christians more virtuous people? Were they just more loving people, more caring, more virtuous people? No, it was their hope.
Christians have absolute assurance their ultimate hope is one of infinite, personal love. That’s what we’re in for. We have absolute assurance, should we die, at the end of time the new heavens and new earth means infinite, personal love from God. They were just acting in line with their hope. They weren’t better people. They weren’t more virtuous people in some kind of way. They were completely determined. The people who left and the people who stayed all had to do with what they believed their ultimate future was.
The real question that comes up right away is … We’re going to keep looking over the weeks at how your belief in your ultimate future determines how you deal with suffering, how you deal with death, how you deal with sex and romance and money and power, and so forth. I think a lot of people would have to say, even though you believe in most of what the Bible says about the ultimate future, it hasn’t changed your life. You really don’t handle suffering or death or these other things any differently or better than other people.
Why would that be? The answer is because it’s not just simply the doctrine of Christian hope, the second coming, the new heaven and new earth, the resurrection. It’s not just the doctrine. It’s not just the cognitive belief. It’s the experience of hope. This experience is talked about in these two passages, especially chapter 3 of Ephesians where Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians. I’d like to look at this. Let’s look at the promise of this experience, the sources of this experience, and last of all, how we get it.
1. The promise of this experience
If you read Paul carefully, when you get to chapter 3, you almost immediately see there are some things that look like contradictions. Paul says, say, in Colossians 1:27, all Christians have Christ in them. To become a Christian is to receive Christ in you. Yet here in verse 17, he’s saying, “I pray … that Christ may dwell in your hearts …” Why would he pray that for Christians if it’s already true?
We know earlier in this very book, in the very letter of Ephesians, he says to be a Christian is to receive the fullness of God. You receive Christ, he indwells you, and you receive the fullness of God. Yet verse 19 says, “I pray that you’ll be filled with the fullness of God.” Why would Paul pray for Christians to get things elsewhere he says they already have? The only answer would be made clearer if I give you an illustration.
When I was in my first pastorate in Virginia, I remember I would visit and I got to know an older woman who lived by herself in a very old house. It was so ramshackle. It was so old, when you would walk by the side of it, you could actually see the light come through the boards on the side of the wall. It was dangerously hot in the summer. It was horribly cold in the winter, and she was always getting sick as a result. She was always going in the infirmary. She was always going in the hospital.
Originally, I thought it was because she was resourceless, and I discovered from her friends, and actually from her, she actually had quite a bit of money in the bank. You maybe know people like this. For various reasons she was petrified of ever touching that nest egg for fear that someday if she really needed it, it wouldn’t be there. She never spent it. She actually had the wealth, but she lived poorly. As a result, it was killing her. She had it, but she wouldn’t draw on it.
That’s exactly what Paul is talking about here. It’s actually quite an indictment. When he prays this for the Ephesian Christians, he knows this is the normal Christian condition. We have access to things we never draw on. We have intimacy with Christ in principle. We have the love and fullness of God in principle, but it has never broken through into our inner being where it actually is an experience and it actually changes us.
What do we mean by “inner being”? Notice one of the two main things he’s asking for in this prayer is, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, that Christ might dwell in your hearts by faith, that you may know the fullness of God.” What’s that? Greek scholars will tell you what that word means. Here’s one. I took this out of one dictionary.
It’s talking about the inner being is the center of personal consciousness and identity, your consciousness of who you are. For example, a lot of people have said a lot of things about you over the years. This happens a lot. Maybe you’ve had friends and other people tell you how great you are. You have certain accomplishments. It’s also possible you have parents or some other significant person in your life who has told you what a failure you are and how you’ve amounted to nothing.
Here’s the question. When you look at all those various verdicts that have been passed on you, which one is going to reside in your inner being? Which one is going to penetrate and come inside and become the controlling reality, the reality that controls how you see yourself and how you respond to the world and everything else? People say many, many different things, and you may believe some of them. Which one will come all the way inside and penetrate you into your inner being?
It’s one thing to believe in the head of what God has done for you in Christ; it’s another thing for it to come on the inside and become the controlling reality so if people abandon you or people reject you, if doesn’t matter. You never live as an abandoned person. You never respond as a rejected person because what he has done for you in Christ is the controlling reality. That’s the real reality to your self. That’s who you really are. It comes in and becomes part of the true you.
Paul is saying without the power of the Holy Spirit you may be rich as a Christian and yet live poor and literally be dying out there, all the same resentments, all the same selfishness, all the same drivenness, all the same. You have belief, and you’ve sealed it off from your inner being. By an experience, which we’re talking about here, by the Holy Spirit this has to come all the way in. It has to penetrate. This is the thing Paul is talking about. This is the thing Paul is asking for.
By the way, most people don’t believe this book of Ephesians was written just to one church, because if you read the letters, when you get to the end, there are a lot of specifics about what’s happening in a particular church and specific greetings to specific people. That’s not in the book of Ephesians. Many people believe … I do too … Paul wrote this to a whole region. It was written to a whole region, and it was read in a whole lot of churches.
So Paul is talking to maybe the broadest possible spectrum of people he speaks to in any of his letters, and he assumes they actually don’t have this. He assumes they need it. He assumes Christ is dwelling but he’s not dwelling, that they know the fullness of God yet they don’t know the fullness of God.
In fact, take a look if you want. The essence of it is in the very, very end of verse 19, where he says, “I pray that you would know this love that surpasses knowledge.” Wait a minute. “I want you to know something you can’t know.” Is he being deliberately paradoxical? I know he’s being deliberately vivid, but he’s not being paradoxical.
When the love of Christ you believe in your head actually gets into your inner being, always the language is, “I knew it, but I didn’t really know it. I thought I knew it. It was something I knew, and yet I never knew it at all.” When you’ve crossed a line and you start talking like that, these things have begun to break into your inner being. Has it happened to you or are you living poor and literally dying because of it? Quickly, here are some examples.
When Blaise Pascal, the great philosopher and mathematician, died, they discovered, sewed into the inner lining of his coat, an entry from his diary. This is what it said. “In the year 1654, Monday, the twenty-third of November, from about half past 10 in the evening till half an hour past midnight, FIRE [capital letters, one line]. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of the philosophers and the learned. Certainty, joy, certainty, emotion, sight, joy, joy, joy, tears of joy. My God, will you leave me? Let me not be separated from you.”
That’s only a piece of it. I’m sure you can always get the whole thing on the Internet somewhere. What was he saying? Compare this with what Paul was saying. First of all, he says, “Not the god of the philosophers.” Blaise Pascal was a philosopher. He was a great philosopher, and he’s not saying philosophy is no good. It’s not like he stopped doing philosophy after November 23, 1654.
What he’s saying is an abstract idea of God is nothing compared to this. The things he knew about God broke into his inner being in an amazing way. “Certainty, joy,” he said. “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of history, the God of personal relationship, not the god of the philosophers.” Notice when he says, “Please don’t leave me,” he’s experiencing the indwelling of Christ. It’s not like Christ doesn’t indwell a Christian all the time, but he’s experiencing the immediate presence, the nearness.
Dwight Moody was not nearly as famous, but he was a nineteenth-century minister, preacher. He was on his way to London. This was in the late 1850s. To do that from Chicago, you had to come to New York, so he was waiting in New York before his boat left. This is from his biography. He says, “Well, one day, in the city of New York—oh, what a day!—I cannot describe it, I seldom refer to it; it is almost too sacred an experience to name. Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for fourteen years. I can only say that God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask Him to stay His hand.”
He goes on in the biography to say he was walking up Wall Street, by the way, when God broke into his inner being in a way … These were things he knew, but he had really not known them. He had a friend who lived not too far away. He ran to the man’s house, he asked for a room for himself, he went up into the room by himself, and he stayed alone for hours, the Holy Spirit coming upon him, filling his soul with such joy that eventually he had to ask God to stop it. He says, “I don’t think I can take any more of this.”
Why do you think Paul says to get ready for this the Holy Spirit has to strengthen your inner being with power? Because you would crack under the weight of it otherwise. When you bring up stories like that, these are the mountaintop experiences. They’re not the more mundane, the more routine sweetness, and the more routine experiences you can have. So it’s a little bit dangerous to say that, but I’m trying to get a point across.
What have you settled for? Are you someone who believes but there’s very, very little impact in your inner being and you know that? Is what your parents say about you much more of a controlling reality than what God says about you in your inner being? You need the experience of hope through the Holy Spirit. You need what Paul is praying for.
2. The sources of this experience
I have given you this second section out of 1 John 3, because he talks about what the Christian hope is. Notice the word hope in verse 2. He’s talking about something that’s going to happen at the end of time or at the end of life. Here’s how he puts it. He says, “But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” This is the beatific vision.
David says at the end of Psalm 17, “When I awake, I will be satisfied by seeing your face in righteousness.” The word satisfied means absolutely filled. Psalm 16 says, “… in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.” The Bible talks about it but says no one can have it in this life.
In Exodus 33, Moses asked for it. He says, “Now show me your glory.” He says to God on Mount Sinai, “I want to see your face,” and God says, “It’ll kill you.” In 1 Timothy 6:16 is the same thing. “God, the King of kings, Lord of Lords, who lives in unapproachable light, which no human being has seen or can see; to him be glory,” says Paul. John says this is what we’re in for, to see him as he is.
To give you an idea of this, let me draw on something like what I said last week but not quite the same. Imagine you have poured your life into being a great pianist. I’m sure some of you are. When you play, you have some friends who say, “You’re the greatest,” and you love your friends.
But imagine one day one of the greatest pianists in history happens to be in the audience and you don’t know it. Then that person comes up afterwards and to your shock walks up to you and says, “You’re one of the greatest pianists I’ve ever heard.” No offense to your friends, this statement fills you up, outweighs everything anyone else ever said about you. You experience glory. You feel solid. You don’t feel ephemeral. You feel filled up, but that’s a dewdrop compared to this.
Who do you let see you just as you really are? Who? Only the people you love the most, only the people who are the most intimate with you. When it says God will let us see him as he is, that is an act of self-disclosing love. It means when we see him face to face, he will look upon us with his eyes of delight. He will open his heart all the way. He will declare his undying love for us in such a way we will know in that moment in everything you’ve ever wanted you were wanting this.
In every set of arms you’ve ever thrown yourself into, whether it was a parent or a child or a sibling or a friend or a lover or a spouse, every piece of music that sent you to the moon that you listened to over and over again. In everything you ever longed for, you were really longing for this, and you’ll know it in that moment. You’ll be full, the fullness. You’ll be satiated.
That bottomless pit of need for love and joy and glory in the human heart will be satiated. John has the audacity, even though it makes sense, to say … Look at his last verse. It’s in the future. Even though it hasn’t happened yet, to even want that changes you now. To even want that purges your soul of the impurities right now. To even want that in the future starts to grow love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and meekness in your heart.
This is what Paul is talking about actually in chapter 3. By the Holy Spirit we have an experience of the future. We have a foretaste of that. The Holy Spirit prepares your inner being for it very much the way silver chloride was put on … Photography was basically invented when we found out a way to put silver chloride on a piece of paper. If you had an untreated piece of paper and you just stuck it up there and you exposed it to light reflected off an object, nothing would happen to the paper. It just stayed the way it was.
If you treated it with silver chloride, which was light sensitive, and then you exposed it to light reflected off an object, permanent picture, permanent images. Without the Holy Spirit working on your inner being, you may be very interested in Christianity, you might get very excited about something you read in the Bible, you might believe a number of things, but only if the Holy Spirit treats your inner being …
When it treats your inner being, these ideas about God strike your heart and become the true you because the Holy Spirit is giving you a foretaste of the future. It is giving you a foretaste, a down payment, an installment of what it’s going to be like to see him as he is.
3. How we get this experience
I don’t want you just to go home and say, “Wow, that got me all excited, but I have no idea what to do about it.” Let me just suggest from the passage five things. If you’re going to get this, you’re going to get this in five ways.
A. Deliberately. When Paul says, “For this reason I kneel before the Father …” almost all praying in those days was standing. When Jesus talks about praying, he says, “When you stand praying.” People stood. You never knelt unless you were really serious. This is an intense prayer. This is deep submission to God.
I think what Paul is suggesting is if you want to move from just believing to really experiencing in your inner being the indwelling Christ and the fullness of God and love of God, you’re going to have to get deliberate about it. You’re going to have to get serious. You’re going to have to draw a line in the sand and step over it yourself and say, “I’m going to seek this.”
Be careful. You’re seeking God. You’re not seeking an experience of God. In other words, the experience is there so you can have him, not so you can have great feelings about him. You have to be very careful, especially in a very experientially oriented age. What it is saying here is you’re going to have to be serious about this. You’re going to have to be deliberate. You’re going to have to set your face for it. You’re going to have to seek it.
B. Prayerfully. It’s interesting that Paul doesn’t tell them how to find this. Paul prays for it, because Paul is actually showing us how he got it. When it comes right down to it, what I’m talking about is basically a matter of prayer. Dwight Moody was walking up Wall Street, and he had the experience of God’s breaking in his inner being. It’s only because he knew how to pray. It was only because he had been praying about it and praying to find God.
When it comes right down to it, what I’m talking about is prayer. You have to be disciplined. You have to be skilled. You have to be committed. You have to have a prayer life. You have to have a disciplined prayer life. You have to have it. The connection between the future and the present comes through prayer.
Think of it this way. A light switch doesn’t have any power of its own, but the light switch connects the power outside with the light inside. The light switch is just a vehicle. It’s just a conduit, but this is what it is. Without it all the stuff we’re going to talk about, all the stuff we have talked about, all the things that can happen in your life are not going to happen. It comes right down to this. It’s prayer.
By the way, the traditional understanding of prayer is prayer is adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, ACTS. Have you ever heard it put in an acronym like that? You have adoration and praise. You have confession and repentance. You have thanksgiving for what he has done. You have petition and supplication, asking for things you need.
The supplication and the thanksgiving are fairly easy to do. We do it all the time. We ask for all the things we want, we check off the things we have, and we thank him. It’s the first two. Do you know what it’s like to spend an hour in praise and confession and not thanksgiving and supplication? Do you know what it’s like to go after God, not just after things from God, and ticking off the things you’ve gotten from God? Do you know what it’s like to go after God?
The discipline of that is the key to all this. There’s just no other way around it. I don’t know what else to tell you. When Paul bows the knee and prays for this, he’s trying to say, “This is the only way to do it. You’re going to have to bow the knee. You’re going to have to learn how to do this too. You have to get skilled at it. You have to be good at it.”
I don’t know any place worse than New York City to be trying to do this. There is no place I know harder to set aside time and find places for quiet, for contemplation. We’re so busy. We don’t have the time. We have no privacy. We’re up against each other all the time, but there is absolutely no other way.
C. Patiently. In fact, when Paul prays for this, instead of telling us how to do it, he’s essentially telling us this is a gift of the Holy Spirit. This is not something you have control over. The Spirit has to do it. You cannot do it to yourself. Both the Catholics and the Protestants over the years have talked about this actual experience where something you know with your head breaks into your inner being.
They call it infused love. The word infusion means poured in from the outside. You can tell the difference between working yourself up the way you can by thinking and working on your heart versus a word coming in from the outside, the Spirit being poured in from the outside. Therefore, you are not in charge. You have to be patient.
Saint John of the Cross, a Catholic mystical writer, a great writer about prayer and experience, wrote a book called The Dark Night of the Soul. How do you like that as a book on prayer? You say, “I think I’ll read some other book on prayer,” but he’s right, because he talks about dark nights.
One of the dark nights he talks about he calls the “night of sense.” What he means is when you have decided to finally draw that line in the sand and you step over it and you say, “I’m going to be deliberate about prayer. I’m going to develop my prayer life,” he says it is normal that almost one of the first things that happens is you experience spiritual dryness. One of the things that happens is you just give up.
It’s the same thing with Bible reading. You say, “I’m going to read through the whole Bible.” You get to Leviticus, and that’s that. You start January 1, and somewhere around February 1, you get into Leviticus, and then you never get any further. The same thing happens here. “I’m going to learn how to pray.”
John of the Cross is right in saying almost immediately you get into dryness. Why? Because this is the Holy Spirit’s work. What are you supposed to do? You don’t give up. You pray right through it. You just keep going right through it, because you have to be patient, because you know this is not something you’re going to do to yourself. You’re not going to whomp your heart up into something.
D. Intelligently. Here’s what’s important to see. This is not just a mystical thing you wait just to happen. This is not something like the sound of one hand clapping. It’s not something that just hits you out of the blue and you just have to wait for it to happen. The second main thing he asks for is power to grasp. Do you notice that?
He asks, “… 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. And I pray that …” Here’s the second petition. “… you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp …”
The word grasp is the word katalambanō, which originally meant to besiege a city and to break through the gate and take it, to sack a city. You say, “Wow!” It’s a very strong word. When you look at the other places where it’s used, it’s very intriguing. In Acts 4:13, there’s a place where the early disciples began to preach in public, and we’re told the religious leaders … It says, “When they grasped that these were unschooled, uneducated men, they were astonished.”
That’s interesting. That’s not just understanding. “When they grasped that they were unschooled men, they were astonished.” The same word is used in Acts 10, where Peter sees God pouring out the Holy Spirit on the Gentiles, on Cornelius, and he’s shocked that God is calling the Gentiles and pouring out the Holy Spirit. He says, “Now I grasp that God is no respecter of persons.” In both cases, it’s shocking. Something breaks in.
This is what Paul is saying. He says this is all a matter of you reflecting on the truth, thinking about the truth. The truth, the Scripture, the Word, doctrine, all the stuff I just said isn’t enough, but it’s where you start. You reflect on the truth, you understand the truth, you study the truth, you meditate on the truth until it explodes, until it breaks through your wall, until it comes into your inner being, until you say, “I always knew that, but now I know that in a way that makes me feel like I never knew it before.”
If you really want to get specific, almost everybody, Protestant and Catholic, used to say, “You don’t just study the Bible. You read and meditate; you pray and contemplate.” I suggest you take a passage of the Bible, read it about five or six times, and underline the two or three things you begin to feel come at you, that surprise you, touch you, impress you, interest you. They’re starting to put forth its power.
Then meditate. By meditate I say ask three things and write these down. How does what this text says lead me to adore God? How does this lead me to confess a sin? How does this lead me to thank him for his grace? In what way does this particular text lead me to adore him, confess a sin, or thank him for his grace? In other words, think out the implications.
Then pray. Take the stuff you just wrote down, because it’s adoration and confession, and pray it. Not during the night of sense, but sometimes as you’re reading, it can happen. A little later, as you meditate, it can happen. Usually, as you pray, it can happen that you begin to get a sense of the reality on your heart. You sense the breaking through.
Then just stop and contemplate and adore him and love him. Sometimes contemplation doesn’t happen. You can’t force it. It’s from the Holy Spirit. It comes from the glorious riches outside of you, inside. You don’t whomp it up yourself. So read, meditate, pray, contemplate until it explodes.
E. Jesus-centrically. Notice Paul does not say, “I want you to know the love of God in general.” He’s meditating. Let’s do it. Let’s go. He says, “I want you to see how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.” That’s interesting. Why doesn’t he say, “I just want you to know the love of Christ”? He’s meditating. He’s showing you how to do it. Let’s do it.
You could do this with the resurrection. You could do it with any aspect, but let’s look at the cross. Do you know how long Christ’s love has been? Do you know in the deeps of time he made this decision? We’re told the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. In the deeps of time, Jesus Christ determined he was going to love us and come to earth and die on the cross and take the eternal punishment.
When he got here, people jeered at him and they denied him and they betrayed him and he continued to come at us. He continued, and he’s going to take us all away to the place where we see him as he is. Jesus’ love is the longest love ever. Jesus’ love is a long love in the same direction toward us. Nothing has stopped Jesus’ love. Nothing will ever stop Jesus’ love. Do you see how long Jesus’ love is?
Let’s think about how deep Jesus’ love is. Have you ever loved somebody in trouble? If you’ve ever really loved somebody in trouble, they always bring you down. Literally, if you’ve ever tried to save somebody who’s drowning, they always take you down. They’re on their way down. If you try to pull them up, they’re going to pull you down. If there is anybody who’s sinking emotionally and psychologically, to the degree you keep yourself with them, to that degree, they’ll pull you down. That’s just the way it works. Right? You survive by detaching yourself.
Nobody ever went as deep as Jesus. For him to love us, he had to get down to, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Do you know no one has ever been that low? No one has ever been in a pit like that. You and I might turn from God and then he forsakes us, but do you know what it’s like to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind and have him forsake you? That never happened before. That will never happen again. No one ever experienced that kind of heartbreak.
Also, don’t forget the Son knew the Father from all eternity. It’s hard to lose a spouse. Everyone knows to lose a spouse under any circumstance is just traumatic, but we only know our spouses for 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. The Father and the Son have known each other from all eternity, and they lost each other.
When he says, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” no one has ever been down as deep as Jesus. No one has ever been down in a pit that low. “O the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!” Do you see something about how deep Jesus’ love is? Do you see how long his love is on the cross?
One more … Do you see how high his love is? What is the height of Jesus’ love? Jesus, the night before he died said, “Father, I want them to be with me so they can behold my glory, so they can have my glory.” Do you know what Jesus’ glory is? It’s that which fills his soul with infallible and infinite and endless joy and love, and he wants you to have that.
He goes to prepare a place for you. That’s what the cross is all about. The cross is about taking you higher than you can even imagine. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine …” Do you see the height of Jesus’ love? Do you see the length of Jesus’ love? Do you see the depth of Jesus’ love?
Do you see the breadth? It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what race. It doesn’t matter what class. It doesn’t matter what record. We have been redeemed by his blood out of every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. Do you know what Paul is doing? He’s meditating, and we’re meditating. Has anything happened in your heart in the last 90 seconds? Of course.
As the Holy Spirit does that, the things that are cowing you, the things that are driving you, the things that are bothering you in your life, are being weakened. Go there deliberately, patiently, prayerfully, intelligently, and Jesus-centrically. “The hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets, before we reach the heavenly fields, or walk the golden streets,” says the hymn.
The future is available now, only partially but really. Go for it. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.” Let’s pray.
Thank you, Father, for giving us the assurance of hope and showing us how it works, and we do ask that you would teach us how to go about taking hold of the things Paul so powerfully prayed for us to experience. We ask that you would help every person hearing this today to know what their next steps need to be. Please open to us now. We cannot wait to see you as you are, but open your heart to us now. Break into our innermost being so we can know the hope that makes not ashamed. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.