More Love, More Power

On Thursday of this week, about 1:30 in the afternoon, I was in my office and I heard screaming and yelling worse than when Misty gets mad a me coming from the parking lot. A man had driven up on a motorcycle and a woman pulled up in a car and they proceeded to have an epic fight for the ages. There was more profanity in that 10 min fight than this campus has heard since the Petermen brothers founded designated this land for a church in the late 1800s. About every 3rd word was a bomb. Apparently it was some type of domestic dispute.

I thought to myself, I’m going out there and putting an end to this. About that time I thought to myself, “What kind of person stops in a church parking lot to have this kind of knock down, drag out fight?” Answer, the kind of person that will shoot a pastor.

So, instead I decided to man up and call the sheriff’s office. While I was making the report, they left. I couldn’t help but think to myself how much we live in a broken world. The world is full of anger, resentment, pain, and heart ache. The Bible gives an answer for it. It’s sin.

I believe if I was God and I had made the world, and it turned into such a garbage pit of rebellion, with all the garbage that goes on here and in people’s hearts, I would have just tossed it out and started over.

But one of the core messages of Ephesians is that God decided to do something different. Instead of just giving up on humanity, he decided to restore us. The message of Ephesians is a message of unity through restoration.

This restoration plan is to create a new society where sin doesn’t get to reign. But, love for one another is a defining mark as it is centered around a love for God.

That society is the church. So we recognize that the relationships of God’s people, the church, should look radically different than so much of the strife, greed, and brokenness that we see in the world.

This is a big part of what Paul was praying for in the text we looked at last time we were in Ephesians.

Ephesians 3:17–19 ESV

17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

This restoration comes in two parts:

I. The two parts of God’s restoration plan.

A. God restores sinners to himself through Christ.

This is the heart of the gospel. Sin produced in us spiritual deadness. Spiritual deadness produced in us all manner of ungodliness.

Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV

1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

V. 4 contains the two most precious words in the Bible, “but God...” But God worked in Christ to give us new spiritual life. Jesus live a perfect life in our place. He died the death that should have been ours. And, he rose again to give life to all those who repent of sin and place faith in him to save them.

Now in the same way that the old life produced all manner of ungodliness. Christ’s new life produces all manner of godliness in us.

That new life in us is creating a new society of the people of God in a lost world.

B. God restores sinners to each other through Christ.

This is just as much a miracle. When sin gets into the human heart it produces division, greed, selfishness, which produces isolation and loneliness.

What we see in the gospel is that people who are naturally divided because of all manner of reasons are brought together in a society where the defining mark is love for each other and for our God who binds us together.

+Have you ever noticed that we tend to naturally gravitate to people who are like us. Even our culture has a way of reflecting that in our society. People of the same races tend to live around each other and even worship together. It’s not uncommon for people to describe churches, “That’s a white church; that’s a black church; that’s an Asian church; or that’s a latino church.”

That’s not necessarily wrong. The Asian church may be in a near eastern language. Same thing with the Latino. They serve food from people of that culture are use to.

We do the same thing. When was the last time we had a pot luck and the main dish served was egg rolls and noodles. No, for us it’s chicken or brisket.

+Let me tell you a problem that we do have in our church. This has happened a number of times on Wednesday nights. Someone comes to church often times with their family. Of course, the staff goes up to greet them. And most of you look at that and go, well good that’s your job. You should do that.

But people notice that you, the church members, don’t naturally do that. That’s has caused us some difficulty . But I understand why. You sit with your family or your group of friends that you are comfortable with.

These other people aren’t really like you, if for no other reason, that you don’t know them. So they end up sitting at a table isolated from the body. Isolated from the oneness. So they end up coming to church, seeing the oneness but feeling that they don’t have any part in it. Our job is to invite others into this oneness. Get up and invite others in.

-My point is that the natural divisions that separate us, even a believers on this earth, are rooted in the separation that sinners have with God.

These cultural divides were even worse in Paul’s day. Not only was it based on race and culture, but on religion as well. There was a natural divide between the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jews felt like they were the people of God. So they were privileged.

But, here comes Paul preaching that God’s intends to create this new divine society, but he intends to use more than just Jews. He intends to use people from every tribe, tongue, people group and nation.

Ephesians 2:13–16 ESV

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

No more Jews, no more Gentiles, just one new people Christians. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could get to the point that we were able to say, in the church there are no more whites, no more blacks, no more latino’s, no more Asians. Where it no longer matters what our skin color or where we are from. We are just Christians. The divisions have been replaced by unity in Christ.

In chapters 4-6, Paul is going to give us some instructions on how to live in that unity. But before he gets to that point, he says a prayer for the Ephesians who are made up of mostly Gentiles, but certainly some Jews as well.

It’s a prayer that asks God to grow them so that can live out this new society which knows the love of Christ even though that love surpasses knowledge. And that they become filled with the fullness of God through that oneness.

Now here’s the 64,000 question for Paul. “Is that possible?” Quite frankly, every society on earth from the history of time has failed to produce that type of society. God has the power to do it in Christ.

That’s why he follows his prayer with …

Ephesians 3:20 ESV

20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us,

Ephesians 5:20 ESV

20 giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,

This passage has got to rank very high on the passage used out of contact list. I’ve probably been just as guilty as anyone else. This passage is not about God’s ability to get you what you want. It’s about God’s ability to get you what he wants.

Or you might say it like this. This passage is not about what God is going to do for you. It’s about what is going to do in you and through you.

That’s important because we tend to want to make this about God’s ability to get us the job that we want, or the spouse that we want, or the conclusion to any host of problems that we want.

It is about God doing the impossible. The affects of the gospel, unity, forgiveness, love, oneness, fulfillment can not be accomplished by anything else in this world. They can only be accomplished by the gospel. And God is able to do it all through the gospel.

I found a break down of this verse in a Bible study that I was reading on Ephesians by John Stott. I want to share it with you.

Stott writes, “God’s ability to answer prayer is forcefully stated by the apostle in a composite expression of seven stages.

II. The 7 stages of God’s ability.

Ephesians 3:20 ESV

20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us,

Eph.

This is a statement about the nature of God to accomplish all that he wills.

A. His is able to do, or work for he is neither idle, nor inactive, nor dead.

B. He is able to do what we ask, for he is not deaf, but hears and answers prayer.

C. He is able to do what we ask or think, for he reads our thoughts, and sometimes we imagine things for which we dare not and therefore do not ask.

D. He is able to do all that we ask or think, for he knows it all and can perform it all.

E. He is able to do more...than (beyond) all that we ask or think, for his expectations are higher than ours.

F. He is able to do more abundantly than all we ask or think, for he does not give his grace by calculated measure.

G. He is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, for he is a God of super-abundance.

There are truly no limits to what God can do, because God is God. He can overcome sin in Christ. He restore you even as a sinner to himself. And because of that he can restore all relationships no matter what may be dividing us. And he can ground us in selfless, grounding, eternal love, a love that produces true unity in him.

Tozer Topical Reader in Two Volumes 63. Body of Christ; Unity

I feel that we evangelicals are making two serious mistakes. One is insisting upon union where it should not be, and the other is creating divisions artificially where there is no justification for them.

One blessed fact to be kept ever in mind is the organic unity of all true believers in Christ. However ill taught God’s children may be on this subject and however widely separated by artificial barriers, they are nonetheless all members of Christ and as surely one as a man’s hands and feet and eyes and ears are one by being members of his body. Unity in Christ is not something to be achieved; it is something to be recognized.

Acts 2:42–44; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4:1–6

God Tells the Man Who Cares, 49, 50.

He is able. Our job is to invite others to join us in what God is doing.

*VBS signs. Invite them to VBS. Use them to let neighbors know your devotion to Christ and to open opportunities for gospel conversations. You can invite them to church.