Sermon on Ephesians 3:14-21

My wife loves me.  I have grasped this and know this experientially.  I have been married to Mary Ann for almost 33 years and I am still in love with her.  There is no one more suited to me or who has been more of a blessing to me.  We have four children, all of whom are now married and one of whom has given us a grandchild, Alyssa.

I remember vividly the night while we were dating that I had determined to tell her I loved her.  I was so nervous she thought I was going to break up with her.  But telling her I loved her was tantamount to telling her I was willing to commit my whole life to her and marry her.  It was a big deal.  I had a pretty good idea that she loved me, but I was making this commitment to her and it brought all kinds of expectations.  Happily, she said she loved me, too, and the next step was to ask her dad for permission to marry her.

We married and starting having kids a couple of years later.  We have always nourished a loving relationship through our conflicts, difficult times, joyous times, and every other kind of time that can come to a marriage.  But there came a time in our marriage when a particular stressor seemed to become more than we could handle.  It seemed as if the stress all came from me, and though we visited counselors to deal with it, it did not improve.  I wondered at times if her love for me would be enough to keep our marriage together.

One day, sitting in our carport she said some things to me that I will never forget.  She said, “I’ve come to the place in all this we’ve been struggling with that I can tell you that if nothing ever changes, I love you, and I would not change the fact that we got married and are together.”  Man, what incredible words.  It was not long after that that we discovered the solution to the problem we had been having and the joy in our relationship took an even bigger upward turn.

Now why am I telling you this?  Because if you want to be filled to all the fullness of what marriage has to offer, you must be convinced of and experience that the other person loves you unconditionally, and because, if you want to be filled to all the fullness of God, you must be convinced of and experience that He loves you unconditionally.  That is the message of our passage tonight.

Context

You may recall that Paul began a prayer report in chapter 3, verse 1 that he purposely interrupted to explain how big a deal it was that God had commissioned him to preach the mystery of the gospel to both Jews and Gentiles, and to establish the cosmic proportions of our faith.  But the reason he was starting to pray was because he knew that as powerful as the truth of God’s grace extended to Jews and Gentiles was, until his readers, and until we, could grasp the depth of His love for us, we could never experience all He has for us.  So now he resumes his prayer.  And here it is.

3:14-19

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that 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 you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now before we go very much farther with this I have an important question for you.  Why do you think Paul makes so much of God being our Father here?  He could have said, “I pray that God will strengthen you to discover and prove His love for you.”  But instead he focuses our attention on the fact that God is the Father of every family in heaven and earth.

What is our impression of a Father supposed to be?  What is your impression?  God has given us families for the purpose of training our souls to look for a loving Father in our Creator, and because of sin’s insidious presence, it can instead become a negative advertisement for the Creator.  What happens when our fathers don’t love us?  We automatically think something is wrong with us.  And we respond with fierce inner terror at how unsafe the world is, and then rage at whatever made life this scary.  When God comes to us and says, “I want to be your Father,” we say, “Yeah, right, fathers don’t have too good a track record in my experience.”

Have you been turned on to the writings of Donald Miller yet?  He has a book called Blue Like Jazz  that is just exceptional, talking about the necessity of community for the Christian, among other things.  But his next book, To Own a Dragon: Reflections on Growing Up Without a Father, is amazingly incisive and helpful.  He talks in this book about a time when he, because he had never grown up with a father, chose to live with a guy and his family and learned something about being a father.

He writes about John and Terri and the birth of their first child, Chris, and how John saw his love for his son as a reflection of God’s love for us, (pages 62-63).

And if you look at verse 16, that is exactly what Paul is trying to convey when he speaks of God answering his prayer for us according to “his glorious riches.”  God does not love us enough to answer us with a smidgeon of an answer, but by the standard of His absolute wealth.  Whenever I buy stuff for myself I can’t stand to spend much money.  It rips me to buy a pair of shoes for more than $20.  I can’t understand a pair of pants being $45 or more.  But when I’m buying something as a present for my wife, I don’t even think about the cost.  Will it impress her, will she love it, will she look at me with a big huge smile and plant a giant kiss on me?  I don’t want to hold back.  I love her.  And God loves us, too.

So what is Paul’s prayer?  He prays for strength, for us to have strength.  Strength to do what?  To grasp God’s love for us.  He puts in a couple of different ways.  We need strength from God’s Spirit to let Christ dwell in our hearts by faith.  The Trinity wants to take over our inner real estate.  He wants us to hand over our Gaza Strip to His sovereignty.  He wants to move in with His love.

And Paul prays that we’ll be rooted and grounded in love and so have power to grasp every dimension of Jesus’ love for us.  The Message puts it this way, “I ask him that you’ll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights!”

And then he says he wants us to be able to know this love even though it surpasses knowledge.  We need resourcefulness to do the difficult.  We need God’s power to do the impossible.  It is impossible to fully comprehend the love of Christ, but Paul knows that God is so eager for us to know it that He will answer Paul’s prayer.

And then Paul makes an unbelievable promise.  If you and I will grasp and then experientially come to know the love of Christ for us, we will be filled up to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Do you want to experience the fullness that God experiences?  Comprehend and believe in His love for you.  It will so radically change your life, so free you to walk with your head high, so enable you to move in faith and power into seemingly impossible situations, that you will enjoy the freedom and joy of God Himself.

Is that really true?  Well Paul said it was.  Let me talk about that in a little bit.  But first…

Notice now how Paul ends this prayer report.  He praises God as one who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine.  What is he conveying?  That God is so eager in his love to shower on us this good thing – strength to figure out how much he loves us – that he is willing to go beyond our wildest expectations to answer this prayer.

 

Application

I am willing to bet that most of you have “grasped” the love of Christ.  If I were to poll you to find out if you believe that Jesus loves you, 99% of you would say, “definitely.”  If I polled you to see what you saw as proof that Jesus loves you, you would almost unanimously say the proof was that he died for you.

But if I asked you how many of you have experienced Jesus’ love for you, I might get some really different answers.  What would be evidence that you have experienced Jesus’ love for you?  I’ve talked with someone recently who has felt tremendous shame over his thoughts and behaviors of late and has wondered if he’s really saved.  Do you know what has been at the heart of that concern?  He feels an inward need to be perfect in order for Jesus, or anyone for that matter, to accept him.  Doesn’t he need an experience of Jesus’ love for him, much like my experience of my wife’s love for me as we sat one day in the carport?

Have you been challenged to give your life to the Lord to serve him any way he chooses?  What has made you hesitant?  Don’t you believe that God might lead you to serve in some fashion that you will hate?  Is that what you believe his love would provide for you if you surrender to him?  Don’t you need an experience of Jesus’ love for you that goes beyond the grasp you supposedly have of his love?

Have any of you ever thought that when so and so prays she gets God’s best, but when I pray, it seems like I even get the opposite of what I want.  Have you ever been afraid to ask God for something because you know you’ll be disappointed?  Have you ever considered giving up on prayer because your prayers are never answered?  Would grasping and knowing that Christ’s love for us knows no bounds alter the way we view prayer?

What would be a major lie the Devil would love to foist over on us that could more hamstring our effectiveness than the lie that God doesn’t really love me?  Why am I so afraid to find out if it is really true or not?  Because, if God doesn’t love me, life is lost.  It seems safer to not really try the limits of God’s love than to try them and find they don’t extend past my own feeble relationships.  But Paul is promising us here in this passage that this is exactly what God wants us experience, that He does love us to the extreme and will go out of His way to strengthen us to perceive it.

Would you risk putting your heart on the line and asking God to answer your prayer for strength to know His love?  Are you willing to try reaching out and experiencing the breadth of God’s love,  testing its length, plumbing its depths, rising to its heights?  Then I’m going to ask you to undergo an experiment.  I want you to begin praying this for someone else.  I have given you a form of Paul’s prayer that encourages you to put the name of someone you desperately want to see this prayer answered for.  I want you to practice it tonight by turning to the person next to you, and if you don’t know their name, getting it and using it in this prayer by praying out loud or silently for them as they bow in prayer.  Make sure no one is left out.  I want everyone prayed for at least once tonight.

Then I want you to begin praying each day for someone you really hope will experience Jesus’ love to the fullest.  Pray with the expectation Paul prayed with that God is eager to answer this prayer.

 

“Father, out of your glorious riches will you strengthen ___________ with power in his/her inner being, so that Christ may dwell in his/her heart through faith?

Will you root and establish ____________ in love so that he/she may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ?

Will you enable ____________ to know this love that surpasses knowledge, so that he/she may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God?

Thank you that you are able to do immeasurably more than I am asking or imagining, according to your power that is at work within us.  To you belongs all glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!  Amen.”