Church, please pray with me. Oh Lord, we are so thankful.
I'm so thankful to stand in the midst of your inheritance.
You've said that, that your inheritance, your glorious
inheritance is found in the Saints.
It's found in this local church where your authority has been
given. Your truth is preserved.
Your truth is preached. And what a privilege it is to
see coming out in time all of the plans that you foreordained
from all eternity that this is your church.
And as a one of the pastors here, Lord, I'm so thankful to
see their faith increasing in you, their, their knowledge
increasing, their love for one another increasing to see all of
the fruit of all the good works that you've prepared for them an
eternity past. That they would go into these
crisis women's shelters and they would be in the prisons and they
would be with your orphans and your widows and that they would
be out with the homeless. Lord, and to hear the reports of
all that's happening. God, there's nothing to do but
to to give thanks. We're so incredibly grateful
that you've not left us alone in this world, but you've given us
a body and you've given us a family.
You've allowed us through adoption to be participants in
the divine life, God. And what a privilege it is to
stand here. Lord, we say, look, look where
we're standing. God, we're so grateful.
We ask all this in Jesus name, whose son we pray and in him we
thank and praise. Amen. 1st Corinthians 1415, also
written by the apostle Paul. Paul reasons out loud and he
sees reasoning. He says if I pray in a tongue,
he says my, my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful.
So he's working out what, what am I to do?
And he's this. He says, if I pray with my
spirit, I will also pray with my mind.
I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also.
There's a famous Puritan, you've heard of him, John Bunyan.
He wrote Pilgrim's Progress, one of the greatest Christian works
to ever come to us. That's where we get Little
Pilgrim's Progress, which was a lot of our, as parents, a lot of
our favorite books. He wrote another work whose
title is First Corinthians 1415. He calls it I Will Pray with the
Spirit and with the understanding, also a discourse
touching prayer. And it's extremely short.
You could read it in an hour. And what he's, what he's trying
to get in this is in the short pamphlet, he says, I want you to
know what it means to pray, what is true prayer.
And then he says, and I want you to know in this systematic
ordered list, what does it mean to pray with your spirit and
with your mind? What does it mean to pray with
your spirit and with your understanding?
And he asked the question that everyone of you ought to be able
to answer quickly and thoroughly.
It's what is prayer or to ask it the way he asks it, what is true
prayer? And we often know prayer more by
what it's not than what it is. You know, prayers not a, a
magical formula where we get God to do the things that we want
him to do. That's what it was in Ephesus.
That's not what it is for us. It's not bargaining with God to
get him to do something and we'll do something else.
It's not informing him of something that he doesn't know.
It's not a performance. It's not vain repetition like it
was to the 1st century Jews or even the Catholics today.
It's not self-centered. If it's not these things, then
to ask his question again, what is true prayer?
And Bunyan answers it this way. Prayer is a sincere, sensible
and affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through
Christ and the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit
for such things as God has promised or according to the
Word, for the good of the church, with submission and
faith to the will of God. You all get it by the end of
this. I hope you will.
I want you to see this prayer of Bunyan.
We're going to say it over and over again.
He's going to lead us through Ephesians 115 to 18.
The progress of Ephesians 115 to 18 follows this prayer.
It teaches us what true prayer is.
And I hope this prayer will guide you so that you understand
our passage. And I hope by the end of it, as
we take these, these line by line, you will have a working
definition of prayer. You can internalize this.
You can take this, you can commit it to your memory.
We'll go through a line at a time.
First, we say prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate
pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ, and we're
going to see. Second, it's in the strength and
the assistance of the Holy Spirit. 3rd, it's for the things
that God has promised us or according to his Word. 4th, it's
for the good of the church. And 5th, it's with submission
and faith to the will of God. And we'll take it in those
chunks. But let's read our passage today
in Ephesians one beginning in verse 15.
Read with me, He says, for this reason, because I have heard of
your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and your love toward all
the Saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you.
And Paul is connecting theology to prayer in verse 15 when he
says for this reason, for this reason is is not pointing
forward. It's pointing back to all the
Trinitarian theology that you've just heard.
They didn't just come to faith. This began in the mind of God
the Father when he predestined the Saints for adoptions that
they might be his people and he would be their God.
And they were purchased in time by the eternal Son of God
through his death on the cross. He says I bought you, I redeemed
you and his Holy Spirit sealed them.
And it's in all of this fulfilled prophecy as the
prophet Joel said, as Ezekiel said, as Isaiah and Jeremiah
said, it's coming to pass. I'm, I'm hearing about it in
jail, the eternal workings of, of God in time, his promises
coming true, All these fireworks are going off.
And it, they, it was a gift of God.
It was in love that he first loved them and now they're
loving one another. And it's, it's an incredible
thing. And he says their faith and
their love are the living proof that God's decrees are true.
And he's hearing about their public reputation of their faith
and their fellowship. And he's hearing about it in
these little humble churches that he's planted.
And there's another firework that's going off in his mind.
He says, I see the, the horizontal or the vertical
dimensions and the horizontal dimensions.
He says, I see that you're, you have a love for God the Father
and that your faith in God the Father is increasing.
And he says because of that, you love your, the Lord, your God
with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
mind, with all your strength. He says, and I hear that you
love your neighbor as well. Evidence of their regeneration.
This is what they were known for.
He says I heard, remember in Thessalonians.
He says I heard of it like the roar of a stadium, like you can
hear it from miles away. I heard it on Friday as I was
running around airport track. Everyone seemed to be having a
really good time at Shawnee High School in the football games.
Like man, I should be there. He says I heard about your faith
like that. He says it the same with these
Ephesians. I hear about it all the way here
under house arrest. I hear about your faith.
And he says it's faith. Verse 15, in All the Saints, not
just Jews, not just Gentiles, not just the rich, not just the
people that were like them, he says your love for all, for one
another. He says it's a city that's known
for diversity and the Spirit has bought unity through the
submission to Jesus Christ. And so remembering all of that
context, I go back to highlight Bunyan's definition of prayer.
He says that prayer is first sensible, which to him would
have meant guided by understanding and perceptive and
spiritually aware. And so when you see all of this
context, you read verses 3 to 14, you realize just how
perceptive and theological and spiritually aware the apostle
Paul was. His prayer, if anything, is
sensible, and he's praying here with his spirit and with his
mind. And you move on.
It says Paul's prayer is first affectionate, and you can see
that if you go again back to the book of Acts.
If you remember the goodbye that Paul had with the Ephesian
elders back in Acts 20, verse 36, he's leaving the church and
Luke records there was much weeping on the part of all.
They embraced Paul and kissed him, being sorrowful most of all
because they would never see his face again.
And so that's the kind of love that happened between the pastor
and his congregation. You can feel it dripping out of
the pages of Ephesians and you can feel it coming out of the
prayer. It's affectionate and it's
pastoral warmth. And he says also that his prayer
is sincere. And we say that he doesn't have
to write this letter again. There wasn't anything he was
correcting. There's no bad theology.
There's no he's writing to them because he's their pastor and he
loves them. He's he's writing them to to
encourage them. And he hears that they're still
believing and they're standing strong in the faith.
And so he writes in verse 16. I do not cease to give thanks
for you. Very helpful in a sermon on the
1st week of the month is to understand the word is
Eucharisto. I give thanks.
And that's an alternative name for our Lord's Supper.
We call it the Eucharist, which is this Greek word.
It means I give thanks. And there's a scholar named
Ledogre. He did a careful word of the
word, a careful study of the word Eucharisto to say what does
it mean in the 1st century? What did it mean to them?
And he said it means simply to thank, to give thanks or to
return thanks. And he says, quote, it always
signifies the outward expression in Word or deed of the interior
sentiment of gratitude for a favour received.
And so you see the internal affection and sincerity of the
Apostle Paul with his the the use of his mind, you feel the
heart with the affection and sincerity.
You see the mind and the sensibility.
And he puts all of these together with all of this rich
theology that's going around in his head.
And it out pours into this one glorious prayer for all the
Saints and we see that with Paul, all his prayers are done.
Verse 3, verse 17 to God the Father through Jesus Christ.
Jesus says we've been given access to the the Father through
the son. We pray John 15 through the son
so that our prayers may be complete.
All of this happening in our prayer before our eyes.
The the second point I want to bring you is is as Bunyan's
sentence increases and continues.
He says we do all of our praying in the strength and assistance
of the Holy Spirit. We do it by the power of the
Holy Spirit. Read verse 17 with me.
We're coming out of the introduction now into this, the
prayer itself. He says that the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit
of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him.
And so verses 15 to 16 are kind of introducing the prayer.
He's teeing it up. When you come to verse 17, he
says this is the heart of the matter.
He really only has one thing he's praying for and you see it
in, in this verse, all of verses 15 to 22 for a prayer for one
thing. This is Paul's prayer for his
church, for these churches. It's the prayer for our church.
He says, I'm praying for spiritual deepening.
I want you to know God better. I want you to experientially
know God more intellectually, experientially spiritual
deepening. And he's going to elaborate in
verses 18 and on. I want you to know God better.
He's going to say, really? So you can know three things #1
the hope of your calling, it says #2 the glorious inheritance
of God in the Saints. And then third, the immeasurable
greatness of his power. So three things He wants you to
know, the hope of your calling, God's inheritance in his church,
and the immeasurable greatness of his power, which will be
that. That point alone will be the
subject of next week's sermon as we continue through this.
But but how do we come to know these things?
How do you know God more? Paul 17 verse 17 Paul prays that
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory may
give you the spirit of wisdom and the spirit of revelation.
You know, through the strength and the assistance of God's Holy
Spirit. That's how you come to know God
more. And this is significant because
they already have the Holy Spirit.
And so this means Paul's not praying for them to receive the
Spirit for the first time, but he's praying for special
manifestations of the Holy Spirit.
So we pray that we would be filled with the Spirit.
We've been filled with the Spirit once when we were
baptized with the Spirit. But now we pray, Lord, fill us
with your spirit. It's something that only he can
do. It's a passive commandment.
And Ephesians be being filled with the Spirit.
So we're praying for special manifestations of the Spirit
that he might search the deep things of God and make them
known to us. And nearly every scholar that I
read this week has said the spirit of revelation here in
this passage is capital S spirit.
You're in ASB will have it as a lowercase S, but they argue it's
it's capital S, it's the Holy Spirit.
And those that's that argue that this is a capital S spirit are
arguing that he's teaching essentially the same thing that
we already read in First Corinthians 2IN verses 10 to 16.
It says the Spirit searches the deep things of God and makes
them known to you. Hear this again.
Now he says, Quote these things God has revealed to us through
the Spirit. For the Spirit searches
everything, even the depths of God.
For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of
that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the
thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.
Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the
Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things
freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not
taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit,
interpreting spiritual truth to those who are spiritual.
So Paul's praying a very deep and bold prayer to these local
congregations. He's praying that they would
give, that God would give the Holy Spirit's insight and
disclosure in the sphere or area of the knowledge of God himself.
He's praying to God saying, deepen our understanding of you,
teach us to know you. And he prays in the power of the
Holy Spirit for the power of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the
Ephesians Saints so that they can know God more and more
deeply. Third Point, as we continue
down, what are we to pray for? How are we to pray?
What is true prayer? We pray for such things as God
has promised or according to his word.
If you look at verse 18, Paul says we've been given very great
and precious promises and he calls him in verse 18, riches.
You have been given riches. And the word is plutos.
It translates abundance or riches or wealth.
You've been given wealth. I want to give you a much
shorter definition of prayer that you can remember alongside
John Bunyan's, and you're going to remember this a lot easier.
There's another famous theologian in church history.
His name is John Calvin. He says this is his description
of prayer. Prayer is digging up treasure.
Prayer is digging up treasure, he says in his book, Book 3,
Chapter 20 of the Institute's. It is thereby the benefit of
prayer that we reach those riches which are laid up for us
with the Heavenly Father, for we dig up the treasures that were
pointed out by the Lord's gospel in which our faith has gazed
upon. That's so beautiful.
I'm going to read it again. It's therefore by the benefit of
prayer that we reach those riches which are laid up for us
with the heavenly Father, for we dig up the treasures that were
pointed out by the Lord's gospel of which our faith has gazed
upon. So what Paul's doing is Paul's
praying to a congregation or to congregations of of churches
that he says have received every spiritual blessing in the
heavenly places. You have received everything in
Christ. You are rich, you are wealthy,
you have an overabundance. And now he prays that they may
have more. And we say, is this selfish that
to those who have everything, he would pray that we would abound
still more and more. And we say, is it selfish or is
this the very will of God for his church?
You go to Jeremiah 923 to 24 a verse I hope you all will
memorize. It's been incredible.
One of the most foundational verses for me and my life and my
ministry. He goes through and he says all
the things we're not allowed to boast in, and then one thing we
get to boast. And he says we can't.
We can't boast in riches. Let not the rich man glory in
his riches. Let not the wise man glory in
his wisdom. Let not the strongman glory in
his strength, or boast in his strength.
But let him who boast, boast in this that he understands and
knows me. For I am the Lord, exercising
loving kindness, righteousness, and justice in the earth.
For in these things I delight, says the Lord, we boast.
The one thing we're given to boast in is that we know God
deeply. Hosea 6/6 He says I desire
knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.
So he's telling the church rather than all your external
rituals, rather than than giving all of your money or rather than
doing all the external things and washing the feet of orphans.
He said I want you to know me because doctrine is morally
transformative. That will come.
You need to know me, Paul. To the Philippians, I count
everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord, that I may know the power of His
resurrection. Colossians 19 to 10.
Another prayer. We have not ceased to pray for
you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of His
will and all spiritual wisdom and understanding increasing in
the knowledge of God. So, so to Calvin, prayer was was
digging up treasure. The promises of God are are
objectively true, but he says this is you've been given these
things, but you bring them down. You pray them down in your
conversations with God, you pray down his benefits.
You pray according to the blessings that he's promised you
in Christ. And John Bunyan said the same.
He says you have to pray for such things as God has promised
or according to his word. You don't get to pray for just
anything and everything you want.
You pray according to his promises.
You pray consistent with his word, and we pray those things
that God has promised us. Paul says we are to know God,
and we were promised that we might know him.
And so Paul's praying to uncover the treasure for this church,
which brings another amazing reality.
Paul's not praying for his own treasure.
This is intercessory prayer. So he's not digging up his own
treasures. He's praying on behalf of local
churches, digging up their treasure for them.
And so you can search your own heart and say, what?
What am I praying for when I pray?
Is it for the good of the church, or is it for the good of
me, myself and I? And are you digging up treasures
for others? Are you praying consistent with
the promises of God, or are you praying for whatever your heart
desires? Paul's digging up treasure on
behalf of his network of local churches.
And there's one treasure that Paul is interested in above all,
one promise that he's trying to bring down.
He says, I want you to know God more.
I want you to be deepened spiritually to know God better.
Spurgeon says in all of this, in this knowledge of of God and his
immensity, He says there's a bomb for every wound, there's
quiet us for every grief, there's treatment for every sore
that he says as application. Therefore go and plunge yourself
in the Godheads deepest sea, get lost in his immensity and you
will come forth as from a bed of rest, refreshed and
reinvigorated. I know nothing which can so
comfort the soul, so calm the swelling billows of sorrow and
grief. So speak peace to the wind of
trial as a devout musing upon the subject of God.
So prayer is for such things as God has promised or according to
his word. And fourthly, he says your
prayers must be for the good of the church.
You pray for the good of the church.
And we've already seen him praying in verse 17.
We've already seen this. He's praying for their for their
knowledge and their deepening of the wisdom of God.
And you look to verse 18. You can read it with me.
He says, I pray that you all that you is plural, that you all
may know. What is the hope to which he has
called you? What are the riches of his
glorious inheritance in the Saints?
And again, we're going to we're going to look at this more
deeply next week. What are the three things he
wants them to know? The hope of your calling, the
riches of his glorious inheritance and the immeasurable
greatness of his powers. There's a commentator named
Folks who writes in his commentary on Ephesians.
He says it's an amazing thought. The fellowship of Christians is
the sphere in which the inheritance of God is found.
You all are sitting among God's inheritance right now, he says,
just as it is also true that it is in and through his church
that the truth of God's purpose becomes known and declared.
It's at that point we stop and we say what an amazing assembly
this is. This is where God has put his
authority in this world. He's put it in this local body,
in all of his local bodies. This is where we guard truth.
This is where we preserve and proclaim truth.
This is where God's inheritance is found.
And so when he prays that we would know the hope of Our
Calling, he's saying, I if, if you would know the hope of your
calling, you would know that your inheritance is secure and
it would be fueled for you to weather any storm in this life
because you know your inheritance is coming.
It's been promised by his Holy Spirit.
And by knowing the riches of God's glorious inheritance, he's
saying that you have value regardless how much you value
yourself, which I think if you ask most of us, we don't value
ourselves a whole lot. But you say in God's eyes, you
are his inheritance, you are his riches, and you go back.
This has been the teaching from the very beginning.
You go all the way back to Moses.
He's saying I will be their people, they will be my people
and I will be their God over and over.
This is the point of creation. We were supposed to be his
people. He's supposed to be our God.
And through Christ, these promises and this plan is coming
back. It comes in and Deuteronomy 10/9
where it says that the Levites, so you remember, they didn't get
land, they didn't get a special inheritance.
And why? Because God was their
inheritance, he says I'm a better inheritance to them than
anything they can get in this world.
And you come to Deuteronomy 32, nine, it says the Lord's
portion, the Lord's inheritance is his people.
Jacob is his allotted inheritance.
And so Jesus has bought, purchased, redeemed the church
that we might be. We, we have immeasurable value
in the eyes of God. We are his inheritance and he is
ours. We are his people.
He is our God. And Paul, what he's doing in
verse 18 with these words, as he's focusing them on their new
identity in Jesus Christ, it's his glorious inheritance in the
Saints, and he's orienting them. He's focusing them on their new
identity and he's orienting them toward their future hope and
their inheritance. And you'll see that all of his
prayers, like Jesus before him, all of his prayers are for the
good of the church. Everything is oriented toward
the Saints, and Jesus said the same.
You go back to his high priestly prayer in John 17.
Jesus prayed for the church. He prayed for its unity, it's
perseverance, it's holiness, it's glory.
Paul's modeling his prayers on Jesus.
We're modeling our prayers on Jesus and the apostle Paul.
And finally, to complete our definition of prayer, we pray
fifthly with submission and faith to the will of God.
And so we above all people in redemptive history of all
people, we are to be those who submit to the will of God,
because this is this is the things angels long to look at
verse 9 Paul said that the insight that God has for all
eternity been planning to make fully known to his Saints.
He has made known in time according to his purposes, which
he set forth in Christ. At the end of our passage in
verse 18, he says, the eyes of your heart have already been
enlightened. It's it's, it's already
happened. Your eyes have been opened.
You've been enlightened to spiritual truth.
The mystery of God from all time has been revealed to you.
And now the responsibility for you is to submit in faith to
that will. And this is what it means when
we call him Lord. I begin every prayer with the
word Lord, and that's it's submitting at the beginning
saying not my will Lord, but your I submit your will.
I submit to you in faith. You are my Lord.
I bow the knee to you and you look back to verse 17 again, you
see a dependence on and a submission to God the Father.
Paul's praying demonstrates that when he prays that he may impart
wisdom. So Paul is praying to God for
things that only God can do. When we pray for spiritual
deepening, we're praying to God for something that we could
never do on our own. When we pray for spiritual
Deeping, when we pray for conversion, saying Lord change
their heart, that's something that only He can do.
Jeremiah said it this way. Can the Ethiopian change his
skin? Can the leopard change his
spots? Neither can you do good who are
accustomed to doing evil. Only God can make You Beautiful
and moral and righteous and good.
Only God can impart wisdom. Verse 18 and he's done it.
You have had the eyes of your heart enlightened.
Your heart of stone has been taken away and you've been given
a heart of flesh. Your soul has been flooded with
light. When you pray to God, do you
pray to him to do things that only he can do?
Is there a submission to him? Is there a deference to him?
We say that the eyes of your heart are enlightened.
There's, there's literally been a, an enlightenment in your
soul. The the light has been shown in.
And what's the opposite of being enlightened?
It's what you were before. It's where the world stands now.
They don't have morally transforming doctrine.
They're they're deaf, they're in ignorance, they're in sin,
they're in darkness, they're in despair.
Ephesians 5/8 For at one time you were darkness, but now you
are light, and the Lord walk therefore as children of light.
Matthew 1315 For this people's hearts have grown dull, with
their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed.
Romans 121 They have become futile, and their thinking and
their foolish hearts were darkened.
But Church, not so with you. You have been enlightened.
Acts 2618 Your eyes have been opened, that you have turned
from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, that you
may receive forgiveness of sins, and a place among those who are
sanctified by faith in Christ. Matthew 1316 God calls you
blessed. He says blessed are your eyes.
We could say it this way, blessed are your eyes for they
see. Blessed are your ears for they
hear. For truly I say to you, many
prophets and righteous people long to see what you see, and
could not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear
it. So you have made been made known
the will of God, and now He says His will for you is to know Him
more deeply. But to do this, you submit to
Christ by submitting to His Word, submitting to His will,
knowing spiritual deepening is possible for you.
We pray this, this is my prayer for you, that you would know God
more. And you pray with anticipation
because it's actually possible. It's, it's coming and you're
promised inheritance. The Spirit's guaranteeing that
your inheritance, it's coming, it's promised.
You pray for it, you pray it down.
And these come to us. All of these things come to us
in prayer. And so I ask again, is this how
you pray when you pray? Do you pray for the good of the
church, or do you pray for the good of yourself?
And when you pray, are you praying for His promises, or are
you praying for your desires? And what is true prayer?
We'll wrap it up by remembering these words one more time,
bringing it all together. What is true prayer?
Prayer is a sincere, sensible and affectionate pouring out the
heart or soul to God through Christ and the strength and
assistance of the Holy Spirit for such things as God has
promised or according to His Word, for the good of the
church, with submission and faith to the will of God.
I invite the deacons to come down as we take this Lord's
Supper in unity and as you come, I want to pray, and I pray that
as I pray, you will pray with me in your spirit and in your mind.
Lord, we pray the same thing that Paul prayed for for his
local churches, for this local body.
Lord, I pray that this congregation would know you more
deeply. And we pray through Jesus Christ
who bought us, but in the power of the Holy Spirit, who alone
knows the deep things of God. And we pray, Lord Spirit,
impress these truths on us so that we can know new things of
God, Give us new framework, help us to understand things that we
never even thought of before. Lord, expand our understanding,
teach us and make us confident in the hope that is Our Calling
and in the immeasurable greatness of your power.
And to see our own value, especially, Lord, when we don't,
when we see no value in ourselves and we see no value in
the the humility in this humble little local church.
Lord, impress on us what our true value is.
Teach us to know you better. And Lord, make our faith
increase me our love increase. We ask all this in your Son's
name. Amen.
Thanks for listening. To learn more about Heritage
Church or if you'd like to respond to this sermon, visit
our website at www.heritage Shawnee dot.
Org.