Transcript

During this time together in God’s Word we’ll be looking at Ephesians 1:16-23, and the power available to the believer in Christ.

During WWII a Christian young man was drafted off a farm in Georgia and sent into the army, and he took his Christian faith with him…which meant he continued to practice things like reading his Bible and kneeling by his bed to pray at night.

This infuriated the young man’s sergeant, who began to harass him at every turn…trying to make him over into his image of hostility. Yet at no point did the young believer resort to returning evil for evil.

He endured all the abuse without a word of complaint and again and again went out of his way to do nice things for the sergeant.

Late one Saturday night the sergeant came through the barracks drunk and exploded when he saw this young man kneeling in prayer by his bunk.

He started to make fun of him loudly before the others who were there and tried everything he could to distract the boy.

When at last nothing else had succeeded, the sergeant took off one of his muddy, heavy boots and threw it at the boy from clear across the room.

It hit him in the back of the head and so stunned him that he fell to the floor, but in a moment he regained his composure and without a word—began to pray again.

Even more upset, the sergeant took off the other boot and threw it and it too hit the lad in the head, but he didn’t retaliate.

In complete disgust the sergeant reeled off a string of expletives and stumbled into his own quarters and went to bed.

The next morning when the sergeant awoke, he sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his eyes and trying to shake off his hangover, and when he opened his eyes looking down he saw his boots, cleaned and polished, sitting neatly under his bunk.

This was more than he could take. He jumped up, quickly walked into the barracks, found the young man, and went over to him with tears in his eyes and said,

“What is it with you? I have done everything in my power to break you down and make you over in my image, but instead you have broken me. What do you know that I don’t know? What is the secret of your incredible power? I want to know!”

The power to change, the power to make a difference, the power to stand, the power to endure, the power to do what’s right, the power to live like Christ is available in every believer. These verses explain the secret of our incredible power.

Ephesians 1:15-16 says, “Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and love unto all the saints, Cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayer.”

Paul says that he does not cease to pray and give thanks for the Ephesians. Like other men of God in the Bible like Moses, David, Daniel, Nehemiah, Paul was a prayer warrior. We should not overlook also that our Savior was a Man of prayer.

Prayer is the channel thru which the finite has access and communication with the infinite. Paul knew that prayer is the source of our spiritual power in Christ.

Men who shook the church in time past knew this as well: men like J. Hudson Taylor, Charles Spurgeon, Martin Luther, D.L. Moody, Harry Saulnier, etc.

Prayer for others was a vital and habitual part of Paul’s life and ministry and should be for ours as well. We see faith and love in Paul’s life in his example of prayer, as he brought his petitions to God in faith, and prayed for others out of love.

Because of their faith and love, because they were saved and living for Christ, Paul was genuinely thankful and did not cease to give thanks to God for them.

As we follow Paul’s example in prayer, we too should be thankful for other’s faith and faithfulness and service for the Lord, and to do it without ceasing.

Three men were arguing over the proper posture for prayer. The first man said that you should be on your knees with head bowed in reverence to God.

The second argued that you should stand with head raised looking into the heavens and speak into the face of God as a little child.

The third spoke up saying, “I don’t know about these positions, but I do know this: the finest praying I’ve ever done was hanging upside down off the side of my roof!”

Regardless of worrying about position, God wants us to just pray, to like Paul and “cease not” in our prayers, to pray all the time, to pray constantly, to pray faithfully.

There are two prayers by Paul in Ephesians: the first here is regarding light, the second is regarding love found at the end of chapter 3.

Ephesians 1:17 reads, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

Paul first thanks God for what He has done and is doing in the lives of the Ephesians and then his prayer is for their further, deeper spiritual maturity.

First, notice the use of the pronoun “our,” “our Lord Jesus Christ. He is our Lord. In our personal relationship with Him, we are His, and He is ours.

Paul calls God the Father, “the Father of glory,” as He is the One who is all glorious, the source of all glory, and the Father to whom all glory belongs.

The first part of Paul’s prayer was that God would grant the Ephesians wisdom and revelation in knowing Him. Paul reveals all these rich blessings from God’s hand, and then prays that we might grow in our knowledge of Him who gives them.

Paul prayed that the Body of Christ may be given more and deeper wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God.

Being given wisdom and revelation about God takes place through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. John 14:26 says, “the Holy Ghost…shall teach you all things.”

I Corinthians 2:9,10,13 reads, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit….

“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.”

Paul prayed that believers would know God increasingly.

And because God has made known unto the Church “the Mystery of His will,” we can grow and know Him in a deeper way, knowing His master plan and overall purposes for mankind, knowing what He’s doing today under grace.

Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is for a keen, deep, rich, strong understanding of God through His Word. As we do this, this will change and transform our lives.

USA Today writer Larry Copeland wrote a story about the danger of “peephole” driving in the winter. He writes that anyone who lives in the frozen north has likely been a peephole driver at some point, and probably often.

You’re in a hurry to get to work on time, and when you walk out into the cold you find that your car is encased in a layer of snow and ice from an overnight storm or freeze. You start the car and turn up the heater.

You get out your scraper and battle to chip out a clear space on your windshield. After a few minutes you have cleared away an opening the size of a large pepperoni pizza.

You are now shivering and miserable, and you realize this will take 10 more minutes. So you move to the rear window and scrape off a narrower opening the size of a small sausage pizza with extra olives and do the same with the side windows. You throw caution to the frigid winds and get in the car and drive away.

Then it hits you: you can hardly see. You drive really slow and lean up close to the windshield and peer out your peephole and hope against hope that you don’t run into anyone before the heater and defrosters melt more of the ice away from your windows.

Worse yet, as you peer out your peephole, you notice that other drivers are peering out of their peepholes! Copeland’s article ends with this warning from the Department of Motor Vehicles: “Peephole driving is an invitation to disaster.”

Peephole driving is an apt picture of what it’s like to go through life with the limited vision that comes from limited understanding and wisdom—the kind of limitations that come from not knowing the Scriptures. This can lead to disaster in life too.

Christ doesn’t want us to have a limited, blurry, out of focus understanding and knowledge of Him. He wants us to know Him clearly. Rightly dividing God’s Word, and knowing we are under grace and that Christ is the Head of the Church the Body of Christ, carrying out a heavenly ministry today gives us a clearer understanding of Him.

But we must also faithfully give ourselves to growing in His Word and in prayer for us to know Him and see Him, and have a clearer view of our Savior by the Spirit.

Greater understanding, greater clarity comes to us in life as we embrace more of God’s Word, which takes us ever deeper and wider into a knowledge of Christ and into a more meaningful relationship with Him.

Ephesians 1:18 says, “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.”

Paul’s prayer is that the eyes of our understanding be enlightened that we might know God’s calling, inheritance, and power.

The phrase “eyes of your understanding” literally speaks of “the eyes of your heart.” It is not just the intellect that Paul has in view, but the heart.

True spiritual understanding takes place as the truths of God’s Word travel from the head to the heart and changes both our thinking and our heart.

The truths of God’s Word are made known to us by the Holy Spirit’s illumination. Were it not for Him and His work, we would remain in darkness to it. The Holy Spirit, the Bible’s Author, reveals, teaches, and enlightens us to understand His Word.

Illumination in its full definition has to do with the Spirit enlightening us to spiritual meanings and what God’s truth means to us personally, what it means to our life.

Paul prayed for illumination, for enlightenment, that the Ephesians would be flooded with divine light by the Holy Spirit so they might see and know, so their minds and hearts would be touched and changed, by three things.

First, “what is the hope of His calling.” In Ephesians 4:4, Paul writes, “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling.”

The calling points to the future, as Paul calls it the “hope of His calling,” and “one hope of your calling.” Hope in Scripture speaks of “assurance for the future.” It is not a hope-so hope, it is a know-so hope.

Paul wanted the Body to be illuminated to the hope to which God calls us. Israel has an earthly hope and calling, where they are promised a land, a kingdom, and a King. The Body of Christ has a heavenly hope and calling.

Paul wanted the Ephesians to be illuminated to God’s heavenly calling for the Body, the surety of it, all the spiritual blessings we enjoy there as heirs and citizens of it, how we’ll be glorified together with Christ, and be with Him there eternally.

Secondly, Paul wants us illuminated to “the riches of the glory of [God’s] inheritance in the saints.” Verse 11 speaks of our inheritance in Christ, v. 18 speaks of God’s inheritance in us! Paul wants us to know what a treasure we are to God.

We are prized by Majesty. We are a treasure of incomparable worth to Him.

In Christ we are dearer to the heart of God than all the splendors of creation, than anything. Paul wants the eyes of our heart opened to know how precious we are in the eyes of God.

One day, Ephesians 5:27 says, we will be presented to Him as “a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing.”

We are the trophies of His grace. And it is unspeakable grace that unworthy sinners, saved by grace through faith in Christ, could ever occupy such a place in the heart of God that we would be God’s inheritance.

God has purchased us at a great price, and in Christ we are His possession and His inheritance. This knowledge is to reach for our hearts, so we might lift up our lives for Him as a living sacrifice, and be pleasing and honoring to Him in all we say and do.

Paul goes on in Ephesians 1:19-20 in his prayer about what he wants the Body of Christ to be enlightened to: “And what is the exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of His mighty power,

“Which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and set Him as His own right hand in the heavenly places.”

Thirdly Paul wants us to be enlightened to and know the power that God has given to us. And he heaps up terms to speak of God’s power, which defies description.

Paul prays that we might be illuminated to God’s surpassing, transcendent, incomparably great power which is given to us who believe.

We are taught here that we have the power of God within, the same power that raised Christ from death to life, the same power that seated and exalted Christ far above all.

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes, “The Apostle is not praying the Ephesians may be given power, but that they may know the power of God that is already in them.”

Paul wanted them to be illuminated, be given a divine awareness of the power they possessed in Christ, and for that awareness to affect how we live and serve the Lord.

Believers have resurrection power to resist temptation, do God’s will, endure hardship, overcome sinful habits, to live and stand for Christ, and to serve Him.

So the power to change, to make a difference, to stand, to endure, to do what’s right, to live for God and live like Christ is available in every believer.

The story has been told of a do-it-yourselfer who went into a hardware store early one morning to shop for a new saw.

The salesman took a chain saw from the shelf and commented that it was their “newest model, with the latest in technology, guaranteed to cut ten cords of firewood a day.”

The customer thought that sounded pretty good, so he bought it on the spot. The next day the customer returned though, looking somewhat exhausted.

“Something must be wrong with this saw,” he moaned. “I worked as hard as I could and only managed to cut three cords of wood. I used to do four with my old-fashioned saw.”

The salesman was confused and he invited the customer to come around to the back of the store to try it out on some wood they had there.

They went to the woodpile, and the salesman pulled the cord on the chainsaw. The motor revved and fired and when it did, the customer leaped back and yelled, “What’s that noise?”

We chuckle at a story like this, but the customer trying to saw wood without the power of the saw to help him is very much like the believer who attempts to live the Christian life without yielding to the power we have available to us through God.

We have unlimited power at our disposal for living the Christian life.

It’s been rightly said that “Grace supplies the wealth, faith lays hold of it.” Paul wanted us to know about the power at our disposal provided by grace, so that we will not fail to use it, so that we will lay hold of it and live in it by faith.

John Henry Jowett tells the story about a small town where an elderly woman died. She died penniless, uneducated, unsophisticated. But during her lifetime her selfless service had made a tremendous impact on many for Christ.

On her tombstone are chiseled the words, “She did what she couldn’t.” Jowett writes, “That can be the epitaph for every Christian who will allow Christ and His power to live through us: He can do through us what we can never do ourselves.”

The Christian life isn’t about doing all you could for Christ, it’s about doing what you couldn’t through Christ, what you couldn’t without Christ. His power enables us in our service, and as we yield to Him and His power by faith, we bear fruit to God.

And also Paul writes this to show us that this same unlimited, inexhaustible power that raised Christ from the dead, will also raise our bodies from the dead when He redeems the purchased possession of these bodies at the Rapture.

And this same power that raised and seated Christ at God’s right hand in the heavenly places will also raise and seat us there in heavenly places.

As Paul says, in Ephesians 2:6: “And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

In the meanwhile, we can live for God’s glory in the same power that will bring us to glory to forever be with Him, which raises and exalts us in Christ.

Ephesians 1:21-23 says that at God’s right hand in heavenly places, Christ is “Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also that which is to come:

“And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the Church, Which is His Body, the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.”

Having risen from the dead, and ascended up on high, we see by these verses that He has been highly exalted. C. H. Mackintosh puts it, “Empty Cross, Empty Tomb, the throne of heaven occupied.”

In Christ’s exaltation, at God’s right hand, Paul writes that our Lord is “far above all.” No authority or power, whether human or angelic, is greater than Christ.

Christ is far above all, He is authoritatively over all, He is superior to all. He is supreme Lord with supreme power. He has absolute, universal authority.

He is far above Satan, far above Satan’s world system, far above all the fallen angels, far above all the holy angels, far above all mankind.

He is far above all names, titles, ranks, levels, powers, and jurisdictions.

He is far above all. He has no equal, no competition. He is greater than all.

“All things” are under His feet and He is Sovereign over everything and everyone else.

And the power of our exalted Christ which cannot be overthrown or ever defeated is the power that is available to all believers, is the power that will seat us in heavenly places.

Our Lord Jesus’ absolute authority extends to the fact that He is “Head over all things to the church.” He has sovereign authority over the Church of today. He rules and reigns supreme. He is our Head and our Lord.

In 1376 “The Morning Star of the Reformation,” John Wycliffe, a lecturer at Oxford University, wrote a controversial work entitled ’Of Civil Dominion’.

In it he audaciously asserted that Jesus Christ is the Head of the Church and not the Pope. Wycliffe’s views were condemned and he was sent into exile.

But Wycliffe continued propagating his ideas through a group called the Lollards, who proclaimed this view even to the point of death.

It is a point worth dying for: that Christ is the head of the Church and no one else. The reason it is important is because headship of the Church determines who we obey. Are we to obey Christ or are we to obey men? We are to obey Christ.

Verse 23 tells us that the Church “is His Body.” The Church of today is a living organism, a body of believers and members who are in a living relation and union with its Head, subject to Him, deriving its life from Him, operating through His power.

As He is its Head also in that Christ is the mind of the Body and the members are to be striving to live and be controlled by the mind of Christ.

And that mind is a mind which is full of love, grace, truth, humility, serving others, sacrifice, and compassion.

Paul says also in verse 23 that the Body of Christ is “the fulness of Him that filleth all in all” or “fills everything in every way” is the idea.

The church is “the fullness of Him,” or a living expression of Christ, and the world should see Christ in us, the Church. We are enabled to do so by His life and power.

In Christ, the Church has everything it needs. He meets all our needs. He fills all the Body in all ways; He gives us everything we need in every way.