The Fullness of God
0 ratings
· 27 viewsHow do we attain the fullness of God?
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
One of the most overlooked days on the church calendar is the day of Pentecost, which happens to be today. There are two events that Christians have historically celebrated on this day, the pouring out of the Holy Spirit and the beginnings of the Church as a result of the Spirit’s power. We may not readily see how those two events go hand in hand but it is hard to explain how a small ragtag group of Jewish believers could begin a movement that would span across two millennia and reach almost every corner of the earth. And in spite of being the most persecuted religion in the world, it has managed to overcome almost every conceivable cultural and language barrier and now numbers over 2 billion followers. When Christianity was in it’s infancy, one promiment religous leader by the name of Gamiliel gave some very sage advice about this new movement:
So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” So they took his advice,
The history of the church is by no means perfect and has a checkered past but one thing, you can be certain of is the fact this is from God and as Jesus proclaimed, “Even the gates of hell cannot prevail over the Church that is built in His name.” And we may downplay the significance of the church in this modern era but when you think of movements that have stood the test of time and flourished over the last 2000 years, the Christian Church has no peer. Nations and kingdoms have come and gone, multiple pandemics have threatened humanity, countless wars have been waged but the Church has continued to marched forward. In it’s purest form, the church is an unstoppable force not becasue of the faithfulness and zeal of it’s followers but becasue of the power of the Holy Spirit.
Think about this, it’s hard to imagine how a religion that is as lax as Christianity has come this far. When I think of zealous and faithful adherents, in my mind I think of Muslims and Jehovah’s Witnesses who are on the corner of 4th and King, every single day trying to promote their cult. I think of Mormons who send out their young adults by the tens of thousands every single year for 2 years of missions around the world. Mira and I used to joke that its a good thing that Christians are saved by grace becasue if it came down to effort, we would be in big trouble. But imagine what God could do through the Church if we walked in unity and lived in the power of the Holy Spirit. We would have revival!
To that end, we are going to continue our series from Ephesians where we left off last week and look at what it means to be filled with the fullness of God.
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Body
Body
I know that we have been going through the book of Ephesians very slowly but I just can’t get myself to skim over these verses lightly. As we come to the doctrinal high point of this letter, it’s important for us to pause and examine the keys to being filled to the uttermost with the fullness of God. Three key requirements for being filled by God are:
1. To be rooted and grounded in love.
2. To comprehend with all the saints, the extent of Christ’s love.
3. To know His love that surpasses knowledge.
One of the simple measures of the strength of our union with Christ and how much of our heart He is currently occupying is to look at what our lives our rooted in and what provides the grounding for our lives. We have to realize that as we are reading passages like this from the Scriptures, there is not one single word that God wastes. To be rooted and grounded in love conveys two of the most important analogies regarding the Church and the believer’s life. First, we are like a tree whose growth and flourishing is completely dependent on the health of it’s roots. This is why the Psalms begins with this all important truth:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
You might be wondering where these verses talk about love, it seems like it is just pointing us to root our lives in the law of the Lord, the word of God but if you stop there, you’ve actually missed the entire point of the Psalm. In the New Testament, both Jesus and Paul summarize the true intent of the Scriptures in their own way:
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
The capacity to be fruitful in any and every season of life and to prosper in all we do depends on how deep love is rooted in our hearts. You don’t have to be an expert in biology to know that trees can only grow to the height that their roots allow. Once a tree reaches a height that is no longer supported by the health and depth of their roots, it either stops growing or given the right storm, it topples over. Needless to say, this is something that we have seen the last year. Sadly what we are reading and seeing on social media from beleivers on all sides of the spectrum reveal roots that are shallow and unable to hold up under the trying conditions of the world. We are seeing Christians and churches literally withering away because their love is not rooted deep enough. And if we are not aware, this same thing will happen to us.
The second analogy for love is more architectural and conveys the idea of building on solid ground. Again Jesus used this analogy to describe the ground on which one should build their lives.
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.
The ground on which you decide to build is an accurate predictor of the long term stability of your life and whether the things you build will continue to rise or ultimately sink. Here in San Francisco, we have the classic case of miscalculating the land on which we decide to build. When it was first built, the Millenium Tower in San Francisco was the icon of luxury living in the city but they quickly discovered that the ground they built on could not support the height and the weight of the project. In a matter of under a decade, the building had sunk over a foot and even more frightening, it had started to tilt 6 inches. I don’t know about you but that is not a building that I would want to call home. At any moment, given where we live, a good-sized earthquake can bring that house down.
To build your life on anything else but love for God and others is to invite unwanted instability for you and all that you hold dear. It’s not hard to see this fact. If you lack love for your family, affairs, divorce, and estrangement are ready to knock down what you’ve built. If you lack love for other brothers and sisters in Christ, there is no Church stable enough to withstand the destructive forces of our malcontent. If we refuse to love our neighbors, our influence in the community becomes nothing and it’s not long before they turn on us in anger. And the consequences for not grounding our lives in love go on and on but perhaps the greatest consequence is we cannot comprehend the extent of Christ’s love for us.
There is an important order to what Paul is saying about love in this passage. Being rooted and grounded in love is addressing our love for God and our love for others and that is what sets the condition for understanding with all the saints the breadth, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love. I know that this seems somewhat contrary to what we may have learned about the order of love. According to the prevailing thought, our love for one another comes out of the overflow of our individual, personal experience of God’s love for us. But after this message, I would invite you to really study and pray through 1 John 4 and allow the Holy Spirit to open up this teaching on the order of love. According to the 12th verse, this is what we read there:
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
This is the exact same sense that we get from Paul in our passage from Ephesians, as you root and ground your life in love, we begin to comprehend together with all the saints, this perfect love of God. When I first became a Christian, the love of God was more theoritical, more intellectual knowledge based on the Gospel, but as I saw people in the church loving one another, as I experienced their love for me, how they opened up their home and their lives to a relative stranger, how they cared for me, and wept with me in prayer, the love of God became more tangible to me, that is what truly opened my eyes to the reality of God’s love. As a new believer, everything about Christianity was foreign but I could not deny the love that people had for one another in the church where I was saved and I was compelled to follow that example.
Having love become the core of your being is important for many reasons, but perhaps the greatest reason is that it lays down the condition for you to truly appreciate Christ’s love as a masterpiece of the human heart. I love the way Martyn Lloyd Jones frames this idea that we see here. He states very logically, unless you are inclined towards art, you cannot truly appreciate the value of a priceless piece of art. Unless you are muscially inclined, you don’t really understand what makes for a timeless composition. In the same way, unless your heart is inclined towards love, unless it is rooted and grounded in love, you cannot hope to comprehend the fullness of Christ’s love for you. When Mira and I went to Paris some years back, we had a chance to see the Mona Lisa and not being artisically inclined, I could not understand why people waited hours to see this. I could not grasp why this was considered to be the greatest work of art in history. I was unmoved and underwhelmed. (I’m sure I’m probably offending some art loversin this message but you get the point right?)
Those who are not inclined towards love can view the gospel in much the same way. We can turn the most beautiful work that anyone has ever accomplished in the name of love and make it nothing more than a transaction: Christ died for me, I believe in Him, then I receive eternal life.
This might be a necessary place to start your walk with God but if this is where it stops, you have not even begun to scratch the first layer of understanding Christ’s love for you. And here, the apostle outlines the place where we can begin to think more thoughtfully about this love.
First let’s consider the breadth of Jesus’s love for us. I want you to imagine how many people have been touched by His compassion, His kindness, His loving sacrifice. Revelations at least tries to describe this breadth in these words:
After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
As I mentioned, there are two billion people on earth currently who have called on His name. There are billions more that have gone before us and who knows how many more billions of people will be touched by the love of Christ. This great multitude of people from every tribe, tongue, and nation testify to the breadth of His love.
Then there is the length of God’s love. From everlasting to everlasting, from eternity past to eternity future, God has, and is, and will always love you! This is the promise that God gave to the prophet Jeremiah and the same promise He gives to us.
the Lord appeared to him from far away.
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
You cannot measure the full length of His love becasue it is timeless.
But His love doesn’t even stop there because it follows you into the very depths of darkness itself. In Psalm 139, David writes that even if he could go down to hell, God’s presence would still be there. For those who believe, we realize that this is exacly what Jesus did for us. He bore the shame of the cross, took upon himself the judgment of God, endured the pain of being forsaken by the Father, left and abandoned to the grave so that He could rescue us from darkness into His marvelous light. The gospel is the guarantee that there is no depth of sin and darkness, where the light of Jesus’ love does not shine brighter.
Finally, we think about the height of God’s love for us. It wasn’t enough just to rescue us and save us from our sin. Now through His love, He has raised us up to highest place in heaven. This is a recurring promise that Paul reminds us of in this letter to the Ephesians.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
But God doesn’t end there and as if that wasn’t enough, in the coming ages, He will show us the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. And this brings us to our last point because comprehending the breadth, length, height, and depth of God’s love isn’t even the end point. The apostle Paul separates that thought out with perhaps the most important use of the word “and” in all of human writing. There is even more to God’s love than comprehending the extent of it with our minds, we can go even deeper and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
As amazing as it is to grasp the immensity of God’s love with our minds, the love of Christ goes even beyond that. As we think about this phrase that perhaps many of us have read before, to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, it immediately poses a contradiction in terms, a paradox. How can I know something that surpasses knowledge? If you are performance oriented, this could be your worst nightmare! People who are accustomed to grasping everything that you put your mind to, hate the idea that there is something that you cannot bend your mind around. And even for the greatest human genius, the love of Christ cannot be grasped by the mind. (Sometimes the human mind can actually get in the way.)
In 1 Corinthians 8:1, Paul reminds us that “That we all have knowledge. But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.”
Whenver I think abou this verse, for some reason I’m reminded of a Spongebob Squarepants episode. When my kids were younger, I would occassionally watch the show with them and Mira would hear me laughing louder than the kids and ask me, “Who is the kid here, this show is so stupid.” Anyways, the episode that comes to mind is called “musclebeach” and it’s where Spongebob buys inflatable arm muscles in order to impress his friends but he ends up entering into a muscle building contest where as hard as he tried to puff up his arms, they didn’t provide any real strength. That’s a good picture of what the knowledge of the world provides for us, no real answers, no real strength. If the secret to our lives was in more knowledge, why then are we struggling more and more with our anxiety, fears, and depression. We know more than any generation of humans has ever known because of the internet and we are less fulfilled than ever. If life is simply about knowing more, why is there such a downtrend in happiness? Because knowledge puffs up giving the appearance of strength, but it’s love that ultimately builds up.
And there is something that happens when you try your hardest to know something that surpasses your knowledge: it begins to humble you. During my college years, for some reason, I decided to take linear algebra. I was good at regular algebra in high school, how much harder could linear algebra. It’s linear after all. But then I got into the class, and there were more letters than numbers. The tests were more like essays trying to prove the deep questions of math rather than solving a mathematical equation. And I knew I was in way over my head. I survived the class with a D and had new found respect for John Nash. But more than that it humbled, because I thought I knew math but I realized I knew nothing.
Conclusion
Conclusion
If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, he is known by God.
If you want to be tuly filled by God, sometimes it begins by first removing all your preconceived ideas about God’s love, that you know something about it, when in fact we don’t even understand the basice elements of His love for us. To humble ourselves and to plead our ignorance of His great love for us lays down the conditions to be filled by fullness of God because He opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.
The New Testament scholar NT Wright, diagnoses one of the main idols of our culture and that is the pursuit of knowledge. Pursuing knowledge is a good thing but when it is placed above God, it becomes idolatrous and takes you further and further away from the God that you are trying to know. Like the Christians in the first century, we struggle with the same error of gnosticism. (Derived from the Greek word, gnosis, the root for the English, knowledge.) For the intellectuals of that time and in our time, there doesn’t seem to be point in trying to know something that cannot be known but as it relates to God, this is what NT states:
“The real gnosis, it seems, is not your knowledge of God but God’s knowledge of you; other claims to posess special gnosis will puff you up, allowing you to pose as one of the elites.”
True knowledge is found in the simple confession that God knows you and He loves you with an unending, everlasting, eternal love.