Filled with All the Fullness of God

Introduction

Slide: blank

Grace and peace to you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We’re finally at the end of this very eventful year. We’re about to begin a new season, a new phase of life, a new school year for some, and we imagine what life might look like if we could start afresh. We dream about a better life than what it is now. A life where we exercise 3 times a week or eat more veggies. A life where we actually get enough sleep and where we get time to do the things that we want. A life with less stress and more quality time with family and friends. A life without sickness or masks or a global pandemic.

We dream about a life where we feel close to God, where our prayers flow easily from our lips, where the Bible makes sense and where church feels like family.

Slide: words

We dream about a life where we are happier and more alive, more fully and completely human. I’m trying to describe something for which Scripture already has a very good word.

Slide: Shalom

It’s that idea all throughout today’s worship - that’s the Hebrew word shalom, which our English Bibles most often translate as peace. Irvin, Shawn and Johnston have helped us explore its meaning - shalom doesn’t just mean the absence of conflict and fighting.

Silde: definition

It is the active presence of harmony and goodness.

It means completeness. Beauty. Wholeness. Perfection. And whether or not we use those words, that’s we all want to have. Deep inside us, we all yearn for that shalom completeness in our lives because that is how we have been designed. We were designed for shalom, to be whole, to live the good life as God always intended, and we struggle and suffer today because the world we live in is not good. The original Shalom was lost, but we still remember it and long for it because we are children of God.

Slide: Identity in Christ

That’s why for the past two months we’ve been on this series talking about our Identity in Christ. We have not forgotten who we are, and through Christ we are working to regain that original identity.

Brother Irvin preached about how we are a royal priesthood of God, ministering in His earthly temple, which brother Kenneth later emphasised when he preached on how we are a set apart people—different people.

Elder Simon preached about how we are His followers, which brother Terry emphasised when he preached on how God is our Master and Him alone.

Brother Romaine preached about how we live bold lives through the power of Holy Spirit.

Brother Adrian preached on how we are designed for a happiness that comes from God and not this world.

And brother Joel preached on how we are to live courageously, which captured many of the ideas from the previous sermons.

My task today is to try and bring it all to a close, to try and tie all these threads together. We see who we are meant to be, and we know we are not there yet. We need to grow, and the way we close that gap is, the way we grow from brokenness to wholeness, imperfection to perfection, is:

Slide: Prayer

Prayer. Prayer is the natural instinct of a child of God, just as it is natural for a child to ask their parents when they want something.

Slide: Question

So today I want to ask a strange question: what are we praying for? What kind of good life are we praying to have? Because here’s the thing: prayer reveals our priorities. We naturally pray for what we desire most. So yes, we want to be perfected. We want to live full and happy lives. We want to live in a state of shalom. But which version of it are we praying for?

Last week, brother Joel highlighted that everyday, we are confronted with at least two versions of the good life:

Slide: Two versions

One is the shalom and completeness of God, the abundant life that Jesus invites us into through the Holy Spirit. The other is the good life as presented to us by culture.

Slide: SG Dream

For Singaporeans, that is the Singaporean Dream which is largely defined by material affluence and stability.

Slide: Slash

These two versions of the good life don’t get along. At some point, we have to choose which one ultimately holds our allegiance. Which one do we allow to define our identity and our way of life?

Now, we know the right answer. But it’s not about what we know; it’s about what we want. It’s about what we end up praying about.

Now, it is not a bad thing to have both, but which one is our ultimate priority? Which one do we give the most attention to when we pray? It is not wrong to pray for good health, for success at work or school and material stability. But when the vast majority of our prayers are that God would bless us and grant us success and stability in this life, when the vast majority of our prayers are that God would protect us from sickness and difficulties and trials, I wonder if we have prioritised the lesser things over the greater things. And I wonder if we must learn to pray rightly again.

The Text

And so we come to the text of the day, which one of the most beautiful prayers in all of Scripture.

Slide: Desires —> Prayer

Earlier I said that we pray for what we want. In other words, our desires determine our prayers.

Slide: Desire <—> Prayer

But it also works in the other direction: praying differently can also produce different desires. Meaning, when we begin to pray more for spiritual things, we begin to want those spiritual things more. And for the rest of today, we’ll look at what those spiritual things are.

Ephesians 3:14–21 ESV

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so 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. 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, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

This is not a list of bullet point answers to the question of how to pray. This is not a cool and collected logical essay about how to pray correctly, as though if we just prayed for the correct things and met all the correct criteria, then God would approve our request. This is a prayer born from the heart of one who is totally and utterly overwhelmed by the limitless of love of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the prayer of someone who has discovered at last what he has been looking for all of his life, the one thing that truly satisfies. Paul will not rest until he can have it in full, and he will also not stop praying until the church that he loves is also filled to the brim and overflowing with it.

So what is this thing that Paul is so obsessed with having? What does he desire that the church would be filled with?

Slide: Title

It is “the fullness of God.”

This is a weighty phrase. It is abstract and kind of hard to really understand. Last week, we held our annual Youth Camp, and this was one of the Scriptures that we looked at. And we realised at first we didn’t really know what this meant. It’s one of those very lofty Christian expressions like “justification” or “sanctification” that we kind of know but don’t fully grasp. But this is the capstone, the climax of Paul’s prayer. It is the highest point, the strongest language that Paul can muster to describe what God desires for the church. So this is probably something we should pay attention to.

Slide: Adjectives

In essence, Paul is praying for God to make His church complete. Perfect. Mature. Filled with the total shalom of God. It means that we grow into all that God designed us to be, we live the life we were designed to live. We have all the virtues and fruit of the Spirit that God designed us to have. This is the good life, the shalom life, the complete and full life.

Paul could have prayed for their material blessings. He could have prayed for their safety, for their physical health, that they would not be persecuted by their enemies. But all that pales in comparison to being filled with the fullness of God. Don’t you want that too? Wouldn’t you want for yourself and your family and all your loved ones to be filled with all the fullness of God?

Three Parts of Fullness

In Paul’s prayer, there are three elements that make up this fullness.

Slide: Strengthened with Power

The first part of fullness is that we are strengthened with power. Not power in the sense of being able to fly or super strength, not power to control people as we might say a leader or government has power over the people. This is power that comes from the Holy Spirit. Brother Romaine preached about this several weeks back. It is power meant for a very specific reason: so that Christ can dwell our inner being.

Now, consider this: why does Paul need to pray this? He is writing to a church right? So these people are already Christians—they have been baptised into Christ and they’ve received the gift of the Holy Spirit and Christ now lives in them—Galatians 2:20. Why does Paul still need to pray for it to happen?

Slide: Charles Hodge Quote

One Bible scholar puts it this way: “The indwelling of Christ is a thing of degrees.” Christ does not enter into our hearts all at once, because we would not be ready to contain Him if He did. Yes, at the point of our baptism, Christ forgives our sins and we begin a beautiful new life with Him—but it is only the beginning of a long journey of continual growth and transformation.

Slide: House

It’s kind of like when you buy a house—a BTO or resale flat. You put in your deposit, you sign the Sales and Purchase form. Is it your home yet? Not quite. It may still under construction and you may have to wait another 5 to 10 years before you can actually live in it. And after you move in, you’re still going to renovate and redecorate until that house becomes a home that is suitable for you and your family’s needs. And then you need several more years to pay off the loans, and only then can you call it “your home”.

Slide: Home

Creating a home, a dwelling place, takes a lifetime of effort and hard work, but it is so worth it in the end when you can finally call it your home.

How much more then when Christ wants to take our hearts, full of sin and imperfection and weakness, and transform it into His dwelling place, His temple? If your heart is anything like mine, it is a mess, and it needs a total makeover before the fullness of God can be present in me. It’s not that God isn’t willing; it’s my heart is not fully prepared to host Him. And that’s why Paul prays that we may be continue to be strengthened with power through the Holy Spirit so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Wouldn’t that be something worth praying for on our knees?

Slide: Rooted and Grounded

The second part of fullness is that we are rooted and grounded in love. Think about it: if Christ really “dwells in our hearts through faith”, it means that He is in charge. He decides what we look like, He renovates our hearts until He is satisfied, which means that we begin to look like Him. And what is the single most defining characteristic of Jesus Christ? Love. As Rachel Gooi recited in the GEMS video earlier, the greatest of all the virtues is love. It is the virtue of all virtues. It is our compass and guiding principle.

Everything we do, everything we say, every thought we think from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep—everything grows out of the foundation of love that Christ has built in our hearts.

When we pray to be filled with all the fullness of God, we are praying to be rooted and grounded in that kind of love, and it is dangerous. It means giving up comforts and security. It means doing things for others at our expense. When we act out of love, it means we don’t get what we want. Just look at Jesus and where love brought Him: hung on a cruel cross with iron nails rammed into his wrists.

But that same love changed the world forever. It was the love of Christ gave the early church the courage to be tortured to death because they refused to deny Him. It was love that sustained the church during the Plague of Cyprian in the second century AD, when everyone else fled to escape the disease, the Christians stayed to care for the sick at the cost of their own health. It was love that brought the first missionaries from the West to Singapore, to leave their families behind to preach the gospel and plant a church that we now know as PPCOC. In that sense, this church was born out the love of Christ. Love is inscribed in our DNA, and to be filled with the fullness of God means that we become a people rooted and grounded in dangerous, sacrifical love.

Slide: Know the love of Christ

The third part of fullness is that we come to know that love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. We just looked at the love that we have towards others. Now we’re talking about love in another direction: the love that Christ has for us.

It is very easy for us in Christian circles to throw that phrase around. “God loves you” or “Jesus loves the little children”. I think that we often think of love as this warm and fuzzy feeling in your gut. I wonder if we actually understand its full weight. Listen to this description of Christ’s love by Charles Spurgeon:

Slides: Spurgeon quote

“You know that Christ’s love is an eternal love, without beginning; an everlasting love, without end; a love that knows no bound; a love that never lessens and cannot be increased; a love that burns freely in his heart towards you as an unworthy, undeserving sinner; a love which led him to live for you in human nature, and to die for you in his own body on the [cross]; a love which made him stand [as] Sponsor, surety, and substitute for you, and led him to bear your load of sin, and die while doing so, and bury that sin of yours in a [tomb] out of which it never shall rise.” And that is just the beginning of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Slide: know the love of Christ

Do any of us claim to understand the love that our parents had for us? Maybe when you became parents yourselves, you begin to understand some of it, but never all of it. It is always mind-boggling, it always leaves you somewhat confused. So what do we do in response? We love them. We respect them. We adore them.

So when we pray to be filled with the fullness of God, we are praying to be overwhelmed, to be swept off our feet with the knowledge of this love. The love of Christ surpasses knowledge because we are not supposed to understand it. We’re not supposed to “figure it out” and write it down in an equation. No, the right response is worship. We pray to know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that we are caught up in endless worship and adoration and praise.

Invitation

Slide: Title

Now, what does any of this have to do with this season that we find ourselves going through?

We live in an era of unprecedented events, and the most natural thing to do is to allow fear to conquer us, to keep us locked in our comfort zones and just wait to see how everything turns out, see what other people do first—a very Singaporean thing to do. I think that we tend to pray small prayers—for our own safety and the health of our families, for us to keep our jobs and keep living comfortable lives and be impacted as little as possible. That’s the easy thing to do.

But I believe that we, the children of God, the people whose identity is in Christ, we are not called to live lives of ease, but lives of fullness. Not lives of fear, but lives of Holy Spirit power that radiate God’s shalom to others. Not lives where we look out for ourselves and our immediate circles, but lives of radically selfless love for all. Lives that are so caught up in the surpassing love of Christ that no matter what this life may throw at us, we will never stop declaring the goodness of God, even through a pandemic or church rebuilding and relocation or changing social currents. That is our identity in Christ.

Slide: Mosaic

Now, that’s a lot of stuff to grow into, and that is where prayer comes in. Prayer is how God transforms us into what we pray for. That’s why it matters what we choose to pray for. It’s not that praying fancy prayers with bigger words will make God more pleased with us. Prayer does not change God so much as it changes us. When we pray to be filled with the fullness of God, we are praying that we will want the things that God wants for us. When we pray for His shalom to fill us, we will taste and see just how good He is and our earthly comforts don’t seem to matter as much. Not our PSLE score, not our GPA, not our yearly salary, not whether we live in an expensive home or drive a nice car, not whether our kids get into the top schools or have the best tuition or enrichment classes.

All that fades away as the glory of Christ comes to live in us in full measure, and we taste the sweetness of His presence that is beyond compare. We have power through the Holy Spirit to bring about goodness and healing and hope to a world that has none of it. And we know love that excels the best language we have, a love that will never let go, a home from which we never want to wander.

Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to want that? Would you not want Christ to become all of your desire and satisfaction? Wouldn’t you want people to notice that you are different, that you live without worry because Christ is your hope? Wouldn’t you want to live without fear because Christ is king over your heart? Wouldn’t you want to be free of the rat race and this relentless pursuit of more, more, more, and rest at last in the shalom of God, where we are made full and whole and perfect?

Prayer

Let us pray.

Great are you Lord, and most worthy of praise. You are most high and most wonderful, our heavenly sweetness, love divine, all else excelling. What words can express our gratitude for your love that surpasses knowledge? What tongue can tell the fullness of your majesty?

So receive our humble prayer, for we long for your fullness, though we are still far from it. Supply us with the satisfaction that only you can provide. Teach us to pray when our prayers are too small and our hopes too weak. Stir in our hearts a desire for you, that we may want you and no other.

And so we pray that the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, may grant us to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in our inner being, that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. We pray that we may be rooted and grounded in love, and that we may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and breadth and height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge itself. Fill us, O Lord, with the fullness of God.

Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, both now and forevermore. Amen.