It and this year we are still holding on to the same team and
our hope is to go deeper in how we live out one another
together. That's why this past days we've
been walking through Ephesians, especially chapter 1 to chapter
3 just to prepare our hearts. This weekend we will reminded
that God chose us, forgave us and made us his own.
How we were spiritually dead under God's judgement.
And then you come to those two words in chapter 2 verse four.
They change everything which is but God.
If those words were not there, there will be no salvation, no
church, no hope for any of us in this room.
God in His mercy stepped in and made us alive in Christ.
And how the church, ordinary people saved by grace, is where
God displays His wisdom to the whole spiritual world.
So as we sit here with all of that, something should be
stirring our hearts. A deeper sense of how great God
is and how much, how much we need Him.
Because what God has done for us in Christ is so amazing, so
undeserved, so much bigger than anything we could do on our own,
that that the only right respawn is to come before him on our
knees. And that is exactly where Powell
is. He's on his knees because he
knows that without God moving, nothing is going to change.
So let's pause here with a question.
When was the last time you were in that place, truly desperate
in prayer? Not the prayer you rushed
through before a meal, but the canwell.
You knew with complete clarity that everything depended on God
and nothing on you. Has prayer ever felt that urgent
for you, for your family, for this church?
And that is the prayer Paul is about to pray here, a prayer
that shows us what we should be asking God to do, not just in
our own lives, but for us as a church.
So the title of our first session is A prayer for the
church, a prayer for the church. So please turn your Bible to
Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 to 21, ever since chapter 3,
verses 14 to 21, and let me read the whole passage for us, verse
14. For this reason I bow my niece
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 the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all
generations, forever and ever, Amen.
This is God's word. So church president sisters,
here's now look at verses 14. It says for this reason, I bow
my niece before the Father. So the normal posture in Jewish
prayer was standing, Kneeling was reserved for moments of deep
humility, even crisis. So when Powell kneels here, he's
coming in desperation. He's looking at the church and
realizing this is beyond human ability.
And notice where he turns, He comes to the Father.
It says in verse 14, We learn in the previous chapter, this is
the Father who has adopted us, who has brought us into his
family. And as Paul says in the next
verse, this is the Father from whom every family in heaven and
on earth is named. So Paul is praying to the one
who is the source of church itself, the one who brought
these people together and the one who has the authority and
the power to shape them. Which is why Paul knows that the
life of the church doesn't ultimately depend on how well we
planned, but on whether God himself is at work among among
us by his Spirit. And that is why this is what
drives everything. In this passage, Paul builds
this his prayer around 3 specific requests.
Each one begins with the word death, and through them he is
asking God to work in specific ways in the lives of these
believers. And as we walk together through
them together through the 1st, I want us to keep one question in
front of us. What does this mean for us right
now, right here for us as a church?
So here the first thing he prays.
First, strengthen in the inner being, verses 16 to 17 a Now
look at again at verse 16 as Paul begins this prayer, he
prays 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 we can see church.
The way he prays already teaches us something.
He asked God to grant this. In other words, this is not
something we can produce. It has to be given by God.
And this already achieved for us here as a church, because when
we think about church life, especially with a team like one
another, it's very natural for our instinct to think about
action. Like we start thinking about
what needs to change, what needs to improve, what we should be
doing more intentionally. Those things matters.
But Paul starts somewhere else here.
He starts with prayer because he knows that what happens in our
lives together will only go as far as what God is doing inside
us. Then he adds this phrase
according to the riches of his glory.
This is easy to pass over, but it tells us how God works.
Paul doesn't say God gives out of his riches, as if he were
giving small portions from a large supply.
He says God gives according to his riches, meaning his giving
reflects the fullness of who he is.
And what are those riches? They are the riches of his
glory, His power, His grace, His goodness, everything that makes
God who he is. And then Paul becomes more
specific here. He says this strengthening comes
with power through his Spirit and in your inner being.
So that word power is important here.
Paul is not talking about a general kind of strength, like
trying harder or becoming more disciplined.
This is the same power he has already spoken about earlier in
this letter, the power that raised Christ from the dead.
And now he's saying that this power is at work in believers.
So our lives then are not sustained by self effort, but by
God himself actively working within us.
And notice how it happens. It is true.
His Spirit, which means the strengthening is not something
external. It is not just changing what we
do on the outside. The Spirit of God is actively
working within us, renewing our hearts, reshaping our desires,
reordering what we love, and giving us the ability to respond
in ways we could not do on our own.
And as you see, that leads to where this world happens in your
inner being. This is the centre of you are
not just your actions, but what produce those actions.
Your thoughts, your desires, your instincts, your reactions.
In other words, Paul is praying for something deeper than
behaviour change. He's praying for transformation
at the level of the heart. Because if you are honest, this
is often where we struggle the most, right?
Outwardly, things can look fine. We show up, we serve, we stay
connected. We often think the problem is
that we don't try hard enough. We tell ourselves, I just need
to be more patient, I just need to respond better next time.
I need to try harder. But the deeper problem is that,
left to ourselves, we don't naturally love what God calls us
to love. Our hearts are easily shaped by
comfort, by pride, by self protection.
So those moments are revealing. They expose what is really going
on inside us and remind us that this goes deeper than behaviour
and how much we need God to work with him.
And this is exactly where Paul is praying.
He's focusing on what's going on in our hearts, where our real
response are formed. And this is important because
the challenge of living out one another is rarely about not
knowing what to do. We already know what we are
called to do, to love, to forgive, to be patient, to bear
with one another. But the difficulty is that our
hearts don't always move in that direction.
So Powell prays for strength there.
And this is where it leads, Paul says, so that Christ might dwell
in your heart through faith. Now, Christ is already present
in the lives of believers. Paul knows that.
But here he is praying for something more, for how deeply
Christ is at work. Hopefully he takes hold of our
hearts. And when we see the word dwell
carries the, carries the sense of settling in, like making a
home. So think about the difference.
There's a difference between staying somewhere and truly
settling in. Like right now while we're
staying here at through Constanto Resort, we're just
passing through, right? We use the room, we adjust a few
things maybe, but we don't really change anything.
I don't know if you changed anything in your room already,
but over time, we know we are leaving soon on on this Sunday.
So we don't shape the place around us, but imagine if
someone actually owned one of those filler up the hill.
When the owner comes in, they don't leave things as they are.
They begin to change things and over time the whole place starts
to reflect them. Their presence reshape the
space. But in this picture, we are not
the owner. Christ Holy Spirit is the owner.
That's the difference Paul is pointing to, which means this is
not about us fixing our hearts so Christ can come in.
Paul is praying that Christ himself, by his Spirit, will
take hold of our hearts and begin to change what is already
there. So this is not about trying
harder. This is Christ making his home
in US, and when he is at work, he begins to reshape our hearts.
And this happens, Paul says, through faith.
That means an ongoing trust in Christ, a continual turning
toward him, especially in those moments where loving one another
feels difficulty or costly. Faith is what keeps bringing us
back to him instead of pulling away or closing off.
And this is where it connects so directly to our lives together,
because one another is usually leave out in fairly ordinary
moment, a comment that lands the wrong way, a conversation that
feel tense, a moment where you feel overlooked.
In all of those moments, what comes out of us is shaped by
what is happening within us. So if Christ is at home in our
hearts, shaping us from within, it begins to show, not all at
once, but over time, in the way we respond, in the way we
remained, in the way we move toward one another instead of
away. So it's worth asking honestly,
what is happening in our hearts toward one another?
Are we becoming more open, more patient, more shaped by Christ?
Or are there places where we have started to close off?
And Paul's prayer brings us here first, before we think about
what needs to change around us. We are invited to ask God work
within us, to strengthen us in our inner being so that Christ
will truly dwell in us. So perhaps the most honest
prayer we can bring to God is not.
Lord, help me to do more, but the prayer of something like
Lord work in me, strengthen me where I'm weak, shave my heart
in ways I cannot do myself, make my life a place where Christ is
truly at home. So first Paul prays that we will
be strengthening in our being. Then he continues with a second
prayer, rooted and grounded in love.
Verses 17 B to 19 A Paul continued his prayer and now he
shows us where that inner being, inner strengthening is leading.
He says that you being rooted and grounded in love.
So he uses 2 pictures here, one from nature, one from
construction. Like a tree with a deep roots
and a building with a solid foundations.
But both point to the same idea, something that holds steady when
pressure comes. So the question is, what
actually holds us steady? Paul says it is love.
And here he's not first talking about our love for God or for
one another. He's talking about Christ's love
for us. And this matters because it
shows us where the Christian life begins.
It doesn't begin with what we produce.
It begins with what we receive. We don't start by trying to
become more loving people, we start by being rooted in the
love that has already been given to us in Christ.
And we all know how much we need that.
Because relationship, even in the church are not always easy,
right? There are misunderstandings,
different expectations, moment when someone disappoint you or
when you feel over the look. And in those moments you begin
maybe to pull back, maybe not outwardly, but inwardly.
You become more guarded, your heart more careful, less open.
So what keeps that from becoming your pattern?
PowerPoints us here. When your life is rooted in
Chrysler, there's a stability that begins to form, not because
everything around you is steady, but because your center is no
longer controlled. By what is happening around you
then, Powell continues, that you may have strength to comprehend
with all the Saints what is the breadth, length, height and
depth. And again he says we need
strength. I hope that should catch our
attention. We usually think we need
strength to endure suffering difficulty.
But here, Powell says we need strength to understand
something, and that tells us something important about us.
It means that left to ourselves, we are not even able to take in
what God has already given. We are not naturally able to
grasp the love of Christ the way we should.
So even here we are dependent on God.
We need His help not only to live the Christian life, but
even to understand it. And that brings us to a humbling
place because it means we don't just come to God for strength
when life is hard. We come to Him because without
Him we remain shallow in our in understanding.
We hear the truth, but it doesn't go deep.
We say the words, but they don't shape us.
Why? Because what he's talking about
is beyond what we naturally take in.
And what are we meant to grasp? It says here the love of Christ.
So Paul assumes something here, that we can be around this truth
for years and still not really taking it in.
We can say Christ loves me and it stays at the level of words.
So Paul stretches language here, breadth, length, height, depth,
not to define it, but to help us see what we have not reached,
the age of it. Wherever you are in your
understanding of Christ's love, there's more.
This is a love, God's love, that reaches in every direction, wide
enough to embrace all kinds of people, long enough to endure
through years of weakness, high enough to lift us into a new
life, and deep enough to meet us in our lowest places.
And Paul says this is something we are meant to grasp together
with all the Saints. That part is easy to miss, but
it matters more than we think. That means this doesn't grow in
isolation. You don't come to understand
Christ love fully on your own. There are parts of it you only
see in shared life. We begin to see it in patience
Endurance. In quiet forgiveness, in the
choice to stay when it would be easier to step back.
And sometimes we see it more clearly, when we are the ones in
need. And yet we are still deceived.
We are still loved. And in those moment we are
experiencing more than kindness or good character.
We are being drawn into the reality of Christ's love, and
it's there in that shared life that our understanding begins to
deepen. It moves from something you
agree with to something you actually live in.
And then Paul says, and to know the love of Christ, that
surpasses knowledge. At first that sounds confusing.
How do you know something that goes beyond knowledge?
But this is something we recognize.
There's a difference between knowing something is true and
living as if it is true. You can know that Christ loves
you and still live as if you need to prove yourself.
You can know that Christ loves you and still be easily shaken
by how others treat you. That's the gap Paul is
addressing here, and he's praying that this love would
become settled in us, not because we are fully understood
is because we will never will, but because it has begun to
shape how we live. So maybe the question for us is
not simply are we loving one another well, but something
underneath that? Are we living as people who are
rooted in Christ love? Are we letting that love sink
in? Or are we moving on too quickly?
Are we allowing that love to shape how we see others, how we
respond, how we remained? Because as we keep coming back
to Christ's love, trusting it and living in it, something
begins to change. And after time, the life of the
church begins to reflect not just our effort, but the work
Christ is doing in us as his people shapes the way we
actually treat one another. So church, first, Paul prays
that we will be strengthened in our inner being.
Second, that we will be rooted and grounded in God's love.
And then he comes to his final prayer, filled with all the
fullness of God. Verse 19, B.
So after praying for strength, after praying that we will grasp
the love of Christ, he leads us here.
Verse 19 it says that you may be filled with all the fullness of
God. If you are honest, it can feel
unclear. What does that actually mean?
How can people like us be filled with the fullness of God?
But Paul is not being careless with his words here.
There is where his whole prayer has been moving.
The strengthening of our inner being leads to Christ dwellings
in US, the Christ dwelling. Christ dwelling in US leads to
being rooted in God's love, and being rooted in his love leads
to this, that our lives are are increasingly, increasingly
filled with God himself. So when Paul speaks about
fullness, he's talking about God's life shaping our lives,
his characters, his presence, his ways becoming more and more
evident in US. And this only makes sense when
we remember where that fullness is found.
In Colossians 2, Paul says that all the fullness of God dwells
in Christ, and in him we are being filled.
So what Paul is describing here, it's not that we become God, but
being united to Christ and sharing in what is already true
in him. And here's one way to see it.
We often live as if we are running on empty and we need to
find something to fill ourselves up again.
So we try to manage, we try to push through, we give to give
what we can't. But Paul is showing us different
reality here. If you are in Christ, you are
not drawing from your own limited supply, but you are
being filled from His fullness. And it means your life is no
longer sourced from yourself. And over time you start to
notice something changing in your heart.
The way we response starts to change, not at once, but
gradually. There's patience that was not
there before, a willingness to stay when it would have been
easier to withdraw, A capacity to love that you know did not
come from you. And you realize this is not just
me trying harder. This is not just us trying
harder. The Lord is at work in me.
And this is where it becomes very, very personal because many
of us know what it feels like to run out.
You've been there. Your energy is gone, your
patient is thinned. Someone needs something from you
and inside you already know you don't have much left to give.
And in those moments, we tend to go in one of two directions.
We either force ourselves to keep going.
You don't have or we quietly start to withdraw.
But Powell is leading us somewhere better than both of
those. He's leading us back to Christ.
He's praying that our lives would not run on what we can
produce, but on what God supplies, that his life becoming
the source from which we live. So when you reach that point,
instead of just pushing through or pulling away, you learn to
turn to Him. You bring your emptiness
honestly before Him. You stop pretending you have
enough. You ask Him to do in you what
you know you cannot do on your own.
And as that become more real in your life, in our life together,
even in small way, you began to realise you are not carrying
this by yourself anymore. Now look at verses 20 to 21 as
Paul finishes this prayer, he doesn't move straight into
instructions. He doesn't say now go and do
this, but he leaves our eyes first.
It says in verse 20. Now to him who is able to do far
more abundantly than all we ask or think, according to the power
at work within us. It's like Paul is saying, before
you walk away from this, remember who you are talking to
because everything he has just prayed.
Strength in the inner being, grasping the love of Christ,
being filled with the fullness of God.
It can feel too much. You might hear it and think this
sounds good, but that can really happen in a life like us, life
like mine, in the church like ours.
But Paul speaks directly to this hesitation.
He points us to God as the one who is able to do more than we
ask, even more than we can imagine, beyond what we would
even think to pray for. Which means these prayers are
not unrealistic. They rest on who God is and on
what he's already doing. And then Paul turns this into
praise. To him be the glory in the
church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations,
forever and ever. Amen.
So notice where that glory is sin in the church and in Christ
Jesus. Not in perfect people, but in
people who are being changed, A community, local church where
grace is practice, where love grows, when lives are slowly
shaped by Christ, that is where God's glory becomes feasible.
And Paul says this will continue throughout all generation,
forever and ever. So this goes beyond one moment,
one season 1 retreat. This is the ongoing life of the
church across time as God continues to work in his people,
to work in us. So as we come to the end of this
passage, we are left with both an invitation and a confidence.
The invitation is to pray the whale the way Paul prays, to ask
God to strengthen us, not to strengthen us, to root us deeply
in Christ's love, to fill our lives with his fullness.
And the confidence comes from who God is.
He is able, He is already at work, and he will continue to do
more than we expect in ways we may not always see immediately,
but are real and lasting. So as we go from here, may we
carry a simple prayer from this Lord, do this work in us, in our
hearts, in our relationships, in our lives together in our church
so that in the ordinary ways we live with one another.
Your glory will be sin. And together as a church we can
say Amen, Amen. Praise be to God.
So church, let's take some time now to personally respond to
God's word. You can stay where you are or
find a place here that helps you focus and pray more freely.
What we have just heard is a prayer for the church, and it
reminds us of something we often forget.
We are weaker than we think. We struggle to obey God, and we
also struggle to understand His love.
So let's pray personally now. We have a bunch of time
different like we have in the Sunday celebration.
We have some time to begin with the humble confession.
Acknowledge your need and you can bring before Him the areas
where you feel weak, distracted, or spiritually dry.
Then you also can pray along the movement of this passage, not
only for yourself but for the church.
You may ask God to strengthen us in our inner being.
Pray that as a church, God will work deeply in US, shaping our
hearts so that our faith is not easily shaken, as that we as a
church will be rooted and grounded His love.
Pray that together we will grow and understand the love of
Christ more clearly. And this is something we don't
grow into alone, but together with all the Saints, with this
church. You may want to write this down
as your own prayer to God in your booklet so you can make it
personal, honest, and specific as you bring your heart before
him. So let's take a moment, few
moment in personal prayer and reflections.