To see you take your Bibles, turn to Ephesians chapter 3.
Ephesians chapter 3, that's page 1037.
If you're using one of the Bibles in the seat underneath of
you, if you don't have a Bible, grab one of those Bibles in the
seat underneath you. We would love to give that to
you as a gift from us as a church family.
And just as you're opening there, I want to say a huge
thank you to everyone who served at our block party yesterday.
We had an amazing day yesterday and we had hundreds of people
from the community who came out and engaged, and we were able to
just connect with people and begin to have some
conversations. There were several people who
came and just asked this question.
So what in the world goes on in that building anyways and feels
great just to be able to begin to have a conversation with them
about that. Well, today is the final Sunday
in our summer series on ancient prayers from the Scriptures.
And I really trust that this has been a helpful series for you
and has helped to strengthen your prayer life over the last
couple of months. You know, there are all kinds of
different things people will pray for, different ways that
people will pray. For example, kids pray some of
the most profound prayers. Don't they like prayers that
make you stop and think? Like, huh?
For example, I heard a kid one time pray this, Dear God, if my
mom makes leftovers, do I need to ask you to bless the food
again? Good question, isn't it?
If you're like most people, there's kind of three main
things that we tend to pray for. We tend to pray for, first of
all, family or friends who are going through a difficult time
in their life. 2nd, we tend to pray for ourselves when we're
going through a difficult time in our life.
And then third, we tend to also make sure we thank God for good
things that happen in our life and we pay attention to those
things and we say thank you to the Lord.
And I, I recognize that for some of you, as we've journeyed over
these last number of months, talking about prayer, prayer
might be a real struggle for you as well.
Maybe you're wrestling with what is the whole point of praying in
the first place? If you're here today and you are
just exploring and checking out the Christian faith, prayer
might seem something very foreign to you.
And so I just want to say a couple of things if you're in
that spot today. First, welcome.
We're glad you're here. Glad that you're here with us to
learn more about Jesus and how much he loves you.
And, and if you're sitting here and you're struggling with what
is the big deal about prayer, I want to try to explain to you
really quickly why prayer is a big deal for us as Christians.
First of all, the Bible teaches that every human is made to be
in relationship with God. That might sound foreign to you
or different to you, but we are all made to be in a relationship
with God. But because of our sin, because
we have done things against God's will in our lives, we have
separated that relationship with God.
We are not in relationship with him, but God loved you so much
that He sent his only son, Jesus to die on a cross to pay the
price so that you could be reconciled to God, and not only
reconciled to God, but also so that you could become a child of
God. John chapter 1 tells us that
whoever believes in Jesus is given the right to be called a
child of God, that God is not only the God of the universe,
but he becomes your heavenly Father.
And so prayer for us is this beautiful gift that's not just
merely a spiritual checklist item.
It's this opportunity for you to be able to go and talk to your
heavenly Father. It's the privilege, it's the
gift, it's the, it's the, the blessing of being able to go to
a God who deeply loves you, who is your Father in heaven, and to
be able to, as he says, come and cast all of your cares on him.
And it's such an amazing, amazing gift in our lives.
Now, for those of you who are already believers in Jesus,
you're already adopted as a child of God.
I want to ask you this question. When was the last time you
prayed for something that made you fall to your knees?
For some of us, it's been a long time.
Some of us used to do that a lot when we were little kids.
For some of us, it's been a long time since we've gone to our
knees. The scriptures have different
postures of prayer, and those postures are given to us as a
way of a physical representation of the reality of our hearts.
So when you see the idea of kneeling in prayer in Scripture,
it, it often represents this concept of coming to God in deep
submission to him and also in a place of somewhat desperation of
begging, wanting God deeply to show up and do something that
you know you are powerless to do on your own.
For most of us, those moments of kneeling in prayer happen when
there's some type of crisis, when when you feel the heaviness
in the weight of the problems of life.
Maybe it's those moments where if you're a parent, you see
something going on in your children's lives and you're just
crying out to God to do something for your children.
If you are deeply worried about a friend or someone that you go
to school with, you are crying out to God.
And sometimes you're just forced to your knees in those moments.
Or it's the spouse who's devastated by the reality of
their marriage right now who just need to go to their knees
and beg God to do something. Well, the passage that we're
going to look at today is written by a guy by the name of
the Apostle Paul. Paul is a guy who had a pretty
difficult life. He he was known for being deeply
committed to telling people about Jesus and pointing people
to Jesus and calling people to follow Jesus.
But that got Paul in all kinds of trouble.
He was thrown in prison. He was beaten up.
Some people tried to kill him for his faith.
And of all the problems that Paul had, there are only two
times that the Bible records the apostle Paul going to his knees
in prayer. One of them is found in Acts
chapter 20. The second is found here in
Ephesians chapter 3 where we are beginning at verse 14.
So just follow along as I read beginning at verse 14, Ephesians
314. For this reason, I kneel before
the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is
named. Now both Acts 20 and Ephesians 3
have one thing in common. If you were to look at Acts 20
and Ephesians 3, the one thing they both have in common is Paul
is praying for the church in Ephesus.
The the Bible doesn't record Paul falling to his knees to
pray for his health. It doesn't record Paul falling
to his knees to pray for his own well-being.
It doesn't record him going to his knees to pray for his
safety. What the Bible records is Paul
going to his knees to pray for the church.
I don't know how many of you have ever considered praying for
your church. And even if you do pray for your
church, I think if we're honest, we tend to pray for one of two
different things. We first of all, we pray for
logistics. God, would you just bless this
event that's coming up? God, would you just move in a
great way at this activity? God, would you give us enough
people to serve here? God, would you just bring us
more people to help out in kids ministry?
God, would you just give us the finances we need to be able to
do the things we need to do? Nothing wrong with praying those
prayers, but we tend to pray about logistics or the second
thing we pray for when we pray for our church is we pray for
the things that we want in church.
We, we pray for our desires, our preferences to be the thing that
happens at church. I know that none of us have our
own preferences and desires of what church is supposed to be
like. I, I, I, I want to tell you a
true story. It's not a story from forward.
I want to be clear about that right up front.
This is a real prayer that somebody gave about their
church. Dear Lord, I need some clarity.
I'm really struggling if I should stay at my church.
If you want me to stay going to this church, God, would you just
would you just show the leadership in the church how
much I need to receive? My faith is caught not taught.
Bumper sticker God, if I've lost faith in my church, how can I
share my faith with you and you with other people?
Crazy, isn't it? But some people will pray those
kinds of prayers. Today I want to give us a better
way to pray by asking this question.
How should you pray for Forward church?
The city of Ephesus is a very large city.
At the time, it was the center of worship for Greek and Roman
gods, and it was a significant center of trade.
It had all kinds of roads connecting Ephesus to all the
other significant cities of the time.
And Paul spent two years in Ephesus sharing the good news of
Jesus with its citizens. As people came to follow Jesus,
they're dealing with all the realities of living in a culture
that at best wasn't interested in God, at worst is making life
very difficult for those who do want to follow Jesus.
It was also a city that had all kinds of activity to keep people
busy and occupied in life. And in many ways, Ephesus is not
a whole lot different than the reality that we live in today.
So what could be so urgent, what would be so significant that it
would drive Paul to his knees to pray for the church?
There are a lot of things you can and should pray for the
church. But Paul's going to give us two
things that I think are two of the most essential prayers we
can pray for our church. The first one is this.
Pray for the kind of power that changes our lives.
Look at verse 16. This is the beginning of Paul's
prayer. I pray that he may grant you
according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with
power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that
Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
The very first thing Paul's Paul prays for is power.
Now, depending on who you are, you have wildly different
responses to this idea of praying for power.
First of all, if you are a little bit more aggressive and
competitive as a person, praying for power is something you get
you, you, you look at the state of the culture around us and you
go, finally, someone's going to pray for the church to have
power and not be so weak all the time.
And what you want is the church to have power.
Some of you, you've been hurt by church or you've been hurt by
power. And, and anytime someone talks
about power, it might feel a little scary to you because you
are naturally wired to be caring and gentle.
And this prayer for power kind of makes you sit back a little
bit and go, I don't know about this because power has the
potential of becoming abusive. And so you don't want that to
happen. A lot of people don't even know
what it means to pray for power. Are we praying for physical
strength for all of us? Is that what we're praying for
when we pray for power? Do do we all need to have Pastor
Derek's biceps? That's the question.
I was reading this week about a guy who can deadlift over 1000
lbs and squat over 900 lbs. And I read that and I could feel
my entire body snapping into a million pieces just by reading
it. But that's, that's one type of
power that does it mean that we should be praying for power that
puts us in positions of authority that that we should be
seeking power to be put in place as a political or business
strength and power? Is that is that the kind of
power Paul's talking about here? Well, when Paul prays for power,
he clarifies what he means. He says pray for power in your
inner being. By the way, this power that he's
talking about is not man. There's not enough words in the
English language to be able to describe what this how powerful
this power is. It is the same power that raised
Jesus Christ from the dead that dwells in you.
That's the kind of power that Paul's talking about here, power
in our inner being. It's not an external power.
It's a power that's needed in the very core of who you are.
And why? Well, he, he tells us why, so
that your life can be a place where Christ can make himself at
home. I don't know if you've ever
thought about this before, but when you became a Christian, the
Bible says that you become united to Christ.
You become one with Jesus. It's like a marriage.
And when you get married, for those of you who are married,
you know this. When you get married, the
wedding ceremony is great. You have a good day at the
wedding ceremony, but that's just the wedding.
That's not the marriage, right? You move in together and life
changes. You realize how much life
changes when when Shannon and I were first married, the wedding
was amazing, but then we had to learn how to be in a home
together. I, I, I remember like the first
times I wasn't picking up the clothes off the floor in our
bedroom or wasn't cleaning out the sink after shaving.
And then I looked, My wife looked at me with that look only
a wife can give. And I knew I'm not living on my
own anymore. We are sharing this space
together, and Paul's prayer is that you and I will be
strengthened with power in our inner being so that Jesus is
completely at home in your life Might go well.
Doesn't Jesus already dwell in me as a Christian?
Yes, he does, but it's about making him feel completely at
home in you. Now, I know you can look around
a room like this in our church and you can go, man, this is a
group of people. They all look like they have it
all together. They have no problems.
And I just want to like burst your bubble and tell you this is
a room filled with messed up people.
And if you don't feel like you're a messed up person, I
want to tell you, you're more messed up than you know.
Some of us, we have parts of our home, of our heart we don't
really want Jesus to see. There's shame because of things
we've done that we're not proud of.
You need the power of God to show up in your life to rid you
of that shame. Some of us have parts of our
life that have been deeply wounded.
It's like the part of the house that you try to fix the problem,
man, but you realize every time you go into that room, you can't
fix the problem because the problem's so big.
We need the power of God to show up to bring healing in the
places we've been wounded. Some of us have parts of our
home that we don't really want Jesus to call his home because
we like that part for ourselves. We like how we spend our time.
We like how we spend our money. We like how we carry certain
attitudes in life. We like porn.
We like our anger. And we don't want Jesus to live
in that part of our house. We we like him in these parts of
the house, this part of the house, but not in every part of
the house. And we need the power of God to
show up in our lives. Like imagine, imagine being
married and telling your spouse you can live in these rooms but
you can't have access to this room.
Good luck with that. But so many of us do the same
thing with Jesus. You can have access to this part
of my life, but I don't want you having access to this part.
For some of you, there are things that you know God wants
you to do, but for whatever reason, part of you is tired and
you're ready to just give up. And for some of you, you're
afraid to even start trying to do the things you already know
God wants you to do because you're afraid you're going to
fail. You need strength.
You need the power of God and your inner being to keep going
and doing the things that God wants you to do.
All of us have things outside of us that are trying to get our
attention and our affection the the countless hours trying to
find our value and worth by comparing it to other people in
our network of relationships or on social media.
We need the power of God in our inner being to help us stop
being defined by everybody else and to start being defined by
the One who made us. And here's the thing, it's not a
DIY project. Some of you are really good at
DIY projects. Others of you should never pick
up a hammer or a screwdriver. But when it comes to the state
of your heart and your soul, your inner being, none of us are
capable of this being a DIY project.
We all need the power of God to show up, you and I.
We can never become the people we were created to be on our
own. We desperately need the power of
God at work in our inner being to do this.
Jesus doesn't come and just put a fresh coat of paint over
things. Jesus comes to renovate from the
inside out and you need this. Your family needs this.
Our church needs this. We need the power of God to show
up and work in our inner being so that we are increasingly
becoming a community that is saturated with the presence of
Jesus. And here's what happens when
that when that is in control of our lives.
You can be free of the past pains that haunt you.
You can be set free from the power of sin in your life.
You can become a more loving, patient, gentle, joy filled
person. You get to be part of a mission
that's bigger than yourself, a mission that matters for
eternity. You will honor God with your
life when that power is at work in you.
You know, as Christians, we are famous for praying for everybody
else who has a problem. But one of the things we really
need to be asking for. We ask, we need to ask for the
power of God to show up in our own lives, in our own church,
and change us. If you want to pray for our
church, pray this. Pray that we would be
strengthened with power in our beings so that this home
increasingly becomes a place where Christ is at home.
And the second thing Paul prays for is this, pray that we may
come to deeply know the love of God.
Look at the second part of verse 17.
He says, I pray that you being rooted and firmly established in
love may be able to comprehend with all the Saints what is the
length and the width, the height and the depth of God's love and
to know Christ's love that surpasses knowledge so that you
may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Jesus is not just a cleaner who is coming in to clean up the
mess of your life. He's not just a new homeowner
looking to renovate your life and then flip it.
The intention, the intention of Jesus towards you is just simply
this. He loves you.
He really loves you. Everything he wants to do in
taking up residence in your life is because of his love.
His love has no bounds. We talked about his love showing
up on the cross, but his love continues on beyond the cross.
It's a love that can show up when you're exhausted as a
parent and there's just one more diaper that needs to be changed
in the middle of the night. It's a love that can show up
just as much in that moment as in the moments when you're
desperate and you need some hope.
It's a love that shows up when you're at work and you're
looking at a big project and you need wisdom because you are in
way over your head. It's a love that shows you,
shows up, and gives you a supernatural wisdom.
It's a love that gives you strength for today when you
aren't even sure if you can make it another day.
It's a love that cares enough to comfort the broken hearted and
also cares enough to warn and correct you when you've gone off
track. It's a love that doesn't require
an appointment for a conversation and a love that
will never leave you or forsake you.
It's a love that says your Heavenly Father, He's going to
supply every single need you have.
It's a love that's not defined by what you do or don't do.
It's defined purely by who He is.
It's a love that said you have so much value and worth, He
would send His only begotten Son to die on a cross to pay the
price for your sins. It's a love that says one day He
will make everything right, every wrong committed against
you and every wrong you've ever committed against someone else.
He will make it all right. And not only that, it's a love
that says one day I'm going to carry you from death into
eternal life. And that is just scratching the
surface of his love. Paul's prayer is that the church
would comprehend what feels impossible to comprehend the
length and the width and the height and the depth of the love
of God, that as God's people we would constantly be minding the
treasures of how much God loves us.
I I know that here forward we, we talk a lot about how much God
loves you. Maybe you've heard it so many
times It now goes in one ear and out the other and you tune out.
But here's what I found. Far too many Christians don't
really know the love of God. You, you might know it in your
head because you've heard a few sermons about it or read some
Bible verses about it. But this prayer, this prayer is
asking for more than head knowledge about the love of God.
This prayer is asking that you and I would deeply personally
experience the love of God in our lives.
That's what he means when he says to know Christ's love that
surpasses knowledge. And I, I know as soon as I start
to talk about having a personal experience with something for
some of you, that now starts to feel a little weird because some
of you go, I don't have emotions, so I don't want to
feel anything because I can't feel anything.
You do have emotions. You just need to get in touch
with them. You'll be OK.
All right, some of you, when I start to talk about having a
personal experience of the love of God, you've grown up in a
Christian environment where it's all about how much knowledge do
I have that as soon as I start to say experience of the love of
God, you start to feel a little bit, oh, Kirk, what are you
doing now? Where are we going with this?
But this is what Paul's prayer is that we would deeply know
this knowledge is good, but this prayer is for experience.
Some of us are on the opposite side.
We're obsessed with Christian experiences.
Like you just, you need to be at your next thing that's going to
give you your next high to be able to go, oh man, God just
loves me so much. And then you leave.
It's like a, a jolt of caffeine first thing in the morning.
And then you leave and you're OK for a couple hours, right?
And it's great. Those are great experiences.
I don't want to diminish those experiences, but here's what I
want you to know. So many times they're a moment
in time. And what Paul's talking about
here is an experience that can be experienced not only when you
have that high in a religious church service somewhere, but
when you are in the middle of your week and everything's
crashing down around you, that you can deeply know and
experience the love of God for you.
It's an experience that carries on into all of your life.
And I know this, that so many of us, no matter how long we've
been Christians, we have seasons in our life where we wrestle
with whether or not God still loves us.
Where is the love of God? It just feels dry.
You wrestle to really know it. I've had I've had those seasons
my own life, like I know God loves me in my head, but it's
not really alive in my heart. And what I learned was too often
it's because I wasn't paying attention to where God's love
was already showing up. And so dare to pray a prayer
that just says, God, give me the eyes to see where your love is
already showing up in my life. Help me to pay attention and see
it and not miss what you're wanting to do.
You know why this matters so much?
That we deeply know the love of God?
Because according to Paul, this is the path to becoming
everything that God wants you to be.
That's what Paul says. He says that we would know
Christ's love so that you may be filled with all the fullness of
God. Like the whole point of the
Christian life is that you and I are being so filled more and
more with the presence of God in our own lives that it overflows
into the way we live our lives. Listen really carefully to what
I'm about to say. Christian maturity has nothing
to do with your age or how long you've been a Christian.
I have met 15 year olds who are more mature Christians than 75
year olds. It's not about your age.
You can go to church your entire life and still be very immature
as a Christian. You can serve in every possible
way there is to serve in the life of a church.
You can know a ton of theology, all good things to do.
By the way, I'm not knocking these things, but you can do all
those things and still not be filled with the fullness of God.
That's the height of Christian maturity, that you are filled
with the fullness of God. All those things will not
compare to truly knowing the love of God.
There's nothing that will shape your life to be who God wants
you to be more than really knowing how much God loves you.
Here's how DA Carson describes it.
He says our speech, our thoughts, our actions, our
reactions, our relationships, our goals, our values, all of
them are transformed. If only we live in the
self-conscious enjoyment of the love of Christ.
You might be wondering, well, how does that actually play out
in our lives? Let me give you a couple of
examples. Some of you, you're really
struggling to forgive someone right now.
There's just stuff that they've done to you and you are
wrestling with how could I ever forgive them?
I'm I want to forgive them. I'm trying to forgive them, but
I can't forgive them for what they've done to me.
Here's the answer. Don't spend so much time trying
harder to forgive. Spend more time thinking about
how much God has forgiven you. And the more you realize how
deep and wide the forgiveness of God is towards you, the more
He's going to give you the power in your inner being to be able
to forgive that person. Some of us have other people in
our lives, family members or people we go to church with even
who frankly just annoy us, right?
Some of you, I'm going to be honest right now, some of you in
this room, there are people in this room that you, I just don't
like that person. They annoy you.
Tell me that that's the fullness of God in your life.
It's not. You want to change that?
Guess how you change it. Here's the reality about God's
love for you. The Bible says that God has
loved you with an everlasting love, an enduring love.
Now think about how many times every week you do things that
disappoint God. Think about how many times every
week you do things that let God down, and yet God just says, I'm
just going to keep loving you. It's an enduring love towards
you. And the more that you rest and
understand the enduring, faithful love of God for you,
the more that the frustrations you have with other people kind
of become a secondary issue, and you can't help but love them.
The love of God, knowing it changes us.
Now you might think, Kirk, I already know all this, but
knowing it is not the same thing as experiencing it and living
it. We will always need God's help
in these areas, no matter how successful we are as a church.
This church in Ephesus was growing, booming.
People are getting saved. All kinds of great things are
happening in this church. And yet Paul's praying this
prayer for them. No matter how successful we
become, we will always need this prayer.
The church in Ephesus shows us that we must never stop praying
to know God's power and love as a church.
You know, just 30 years after Paul praised this prayer, John,
one of Jesus disciples, is on the island of Patmos and he has
a vision we see. We call it the Book of
Revelation. And in the Book of Revelation
chapter 2, Jesus is speaking words, talking about the church
in Ephesus. You know what Jesus says about
the church in Ephesus just 30 years after, after Paul wrote
these, this prayer, This is what Jesus says about the church in
Ephesus. This is Kirk's paraphrase.
You guys, you're rocking it. Good things going on.
People are coming to faith. You're being faithful to good
theology. You care deeply about people
walking away from sin. You're serving.
You're doing all the things, you're checking all the boxes.
But then Jesus says this. I have one thing against you.
You've lost your first love. You've walked away from your
first love. Somewhere along the way, the
church that Paul prayed would know the power and the love of
God forgot that the Christian life is all about love.
They forgot that it's all about God's love for us, our love for
God and our love for each other. And it's so serious that Jesus
had to call them to repent. Church, I, I love you, I love
this church. I love so many of the things
that God is doing in our church. I love the way that you serve.
I love the ways that you reach our community.
I love the hunger that so many of you have for the Bible and
theology over the next few weeks.
We've got all kinds of ministries launching and kids
ministry and youth ministry and young adults and discipleship
groups and equip classes and events and so many things that
are coming over the next number of weeks.
But let me say this, all the activities on our calendar, all
the Bible studies that we attend, all the classes and
events and groups that take place in the life of our church,
and anything else that you might love about our church, none of
it matters apart from the presence and the power and the
love of God. Without Him, we're just a club.
With Him, we are the body of Christ in this world.
This prayer is the kind of prayer that if God hears us and
God answers us, we should expect things to always be changing
amongst us. Because God's changing us, He's
filling us more and more with His fullness of who He is.
When you pray this prayer, you're not praying for the
organization of Forward Church. You're praying for yourself.
You're praying for your family, you're praying for the other
people that are sitting around you in this room because you and
I, we are the church, You're asking God to change us.
And I can tell you that this is a prayer that Pastor Derek and
I, we, we pray for you on a regular basis.
I know that our staff and our elders, we pray this kind of
prayer for us as a church that we would become more and more
like Jesus. This prayer happens all the
time. But today I want to ask you to
make it your prayer as well. In just a moment, I'm going to
invite you to pray these prayers for our church.
And I know that amongst us today, some of you are
struggling to know the power and love of God in your own life.
And I just want to encourage you.
Ask Him to show you, ask Him to reveal to you how much He loves
you. I know that some of you,
frankly, you need to repent as Jesus has called us to.
You claim to be a follower of Jesus, but you've lost your
first love. You've lost your love for God.
Your love for each other has grown cold and you need to
repent. And all of us who call forward
our church home, we need to pray for our church.
So I want to ask you to close your eyes and please close your
eyes. I in this moment I really don't
want anyone looking because I don't want anyone to judge
anyone else. We need to be a church that is
hungry to know and experience the power and the love of God
amongst us. If you really want this for your
life and for your family and for us as a church, I'm going to ask
you to consider doing something that's going to take you outside
your Baptist comfort zone. Do you want it bad enough that
you would literally kneel before God?
In just a moment, when we start to pray, I want to invite you.
I want to invite you. We got all kinds of space up
here at the front. I want to invite you to come and
kneel before God and pray this prayer.
You aren't able to kneel because of health issues.
And I'm going to invite you to respond in some other posture.
Maybe it's holding out your hands, maybe it's standing where
you are. I don't know what it is, but
some posture that says God, I recognize that I need this
power. I need to know how great your
love is for me. And we need the same thing in
our church. So church for the next couple of
moments, whether you're kneeling or sitting or standing or
holding your hands out.