Harbor Presbyterian Church: Carlsbad

Ephesians 3:14-21 (ESV) – “O, the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”

Rev. Darin M. Stone

Harbor Presbyterian Church – Carlsbad

July 20, 2008

 

I want to invite you to turn with me to Ephesians 3:14-21.  You’ll recall that to this point in Ephesians, Paul has been bringing to the surface the blessings that we have in Christ, not only as individuals, but as the church.  He’s zeroing in on the fact that through the cross, Jesus has broken down the wall of hostility and has established peace between himself and his people.  But not only that, he has taken people who were previously estranged from one another and perhaps had nothing in the world in common, and he has brought them both together under Christ.  So the gospel is a gospel of reconciliation.  It’s a gospel of restoration of broken relationships between Christ and his people, and between members of his church.

So now, Paul is about to pray that these things would make a difference in our lives.  He’s about to pray that Christ would exert a wider and deeper and more intense influence in our souls.  In other words, Paul is saying that God intends for us to feel and experience and be moved at the heart level by his passionate affection for his people.  So with that in mind, let’s turn our attention now to Ephesians 3:14-21, keeping in mind that this is God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant word to us, and we do well to attend even to the reading of it.

14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

20 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, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

I don’t know any of you remember the Bob Newhart Show.  Do any of you remember that one?  Well, Bob Newhart’s character was a psychologist.  And a few years ago, he did this skit on MAD TV where he played “the five minute psychologist.”  And there’s this scene where this lady comes in to see him for an appoitmetnn

Now I say that as we come to the end of Ephesians 3 because you’ll notice that Ephesians is nicely split into two parts.  Chapters one through three zero in on the foundations of Christianity.  Paul is bringing out some of the most salient aspects of what it means to be a follower of Christ and what it means to be part of his people.  And then in the final three chapters – chapters four through six – Paul is going to focus in on how those foundations of Christianity are to be lived out in the Christian life.  And so what Paul is saying here is that if you are going have any real life that goes deeper than the superficial level – if you’re going to move beyond making the Christian life just an act, and if it’s going to really transform the way you understand God, and yourself, and your relationships with other people – those changes are going to have to happen at the level of your beliefs.  So he saying that doctrine matters to the Christian life.  When we get to Ephesians five and Paul talks about Christian marriage, he is going to root everything he says about marriage in the doctrine of the atonement.  So if you get the doctrine right – not just intellectually, but experientially – you get the marriage right.

So I would suggest to you that a change in our beliefs takes more than three minutes, because real life change only happens when our fundamental assumptions are changed.  Does that make sense?  How you perceive the world, what you think about, what you want in life, the way you emotionally respond to certain situations, and what you do with your life, are all born out of what you believe, many of which you cannot prove.  They’re born out of what you believe about God, about ultimate things, about yourself, and about the world.  And that is not unique to Christianity.  That is true of every person, right?

And so Paul knows that these Ephesians – who live in the midst of a culture that had no interest in Christianity, and often persecuted Ephesian Christians for their beliefs – Paul knows that the only way they are going to be able to navigate the Christian life in the midst of this culture is to have their fundamental assumptions brought in line with the gospel at the heart level.  They are going to have to have a change of mind, but that change of mind is going to have to be so profound, that it not only brings them into intellectual assent to the gospel, but cause their lives at the deepest, existential level to be changed.

So Paul here gives us four ways our inner life must be framed, so to speak, if you and I are to do what we’ve been created to do, which is to become so deeply satisfied in Christ, in who he is, and in what he has done for us in the gospel, and to see that satisfaction in Christ drive us to live a life that honors and pleases him.  And since they’re not all in the worship guide, I’ll tell you at the outset where Paul is going with this.

He’s concerned first, that we have an inner life framed by strength.  Secondly, by being rooted and grounded in love.  Third, by knowing God’s love.  Fourth, by God’s fullness.

The first thing that Paul is primarily concerned with is that we enjoy an inner life of strength.  He wants us to enjoy an inner life of power.  He does not want us flying through life in weakness, but you have to understand that our cultural definitions of strength and weakness are all upside down.  We are taught, from cradle to grave, that strong people accomplish things that make themselves look great in the eyes of other people.  Strong people are wealthy.  Strong people went to the top schools.  Strong people don’t have serious marital problems.  Strong people don’t have serious child-rearing problems.  Strong people have hot bodies.  Strong people have well-ordered lives.  And so with all our hearts, you and I pursue those things, hoping that by attaining them, we will be people who are not left emotionally, relationally, mentally, and financially powerless. 

Now those are all good things, but have you noticed that of all the things in the world Paul could have prayed for here, he doesn’t pray for any of that?  Wouldn’t the Ephesians – wouldn’t Harbor Presbyterian Church – be in such better shape if we had more of that kind of stuff?  Think of what we could do if the housing market did what it was doing four years ago and the stock market quit going in the tank!  Think of what a great witness we would be if we didn’t have any major family problems in this church!  Think of how much happier we would be if we didn’t have to juggle so many things in our lives!  But Paul doesn’t pray for any of that. 

No.  He says that the way we’re going to enjoy strength and power is if the Holy Spirit causes Christ invigorate and strengthen our souls.  When your soul becomes saturated with the goodness of Christ and his grace is constantly reminding you that you don’t stand or fall in his sight based upon how well you order your private world, that’s when the strength of Christ will permeate the membranes of our soul. 

Do you remember how the Psalmist says that “even though my flesh and my heart may fail, the Lord is the strength of my heart and my portion forever?”  The only way you could ever in your right mind say such a thing is if you are come to a place in your life where you can honestly say that you are more and more deriving your strength from Christ and not from how prosperous all the facets of your life are.  Look, I have never met a person who has said, “I am so deeply satisfied in Christ and so profoundly strengthened by him because I have the big house.  Because I drive a BMW.  Because I went to Stanford.  Because my kids are so well-behaved.  Because my marriage is so wonderful.”  If the strength of your soul – if your significance – is derived primarily from those things or from other things, that is idolatry.  That is the sneakiness of deception.  But when you can look at your life when it’s falling apart in every manifestation and say “God is enough.”  When you can sing from your heart as we have sung this morning, “Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on thee.”  When you can look pain and suffering in the face and say, “His grace is sufficient for me, for his power is made perfect in my weakness.”  When you can hang your fear, your sadness, your heartache, your loss, your loneliness, your pride, your perfectionism on Christ alone, on what he has accomplished for you, on what he has applied to you, on the fact that he treasures you at the price of his own life, that is when you will know the strength that Paul is praying for here.  Not when your life becomes one big Club Med experience.  You’re strengthened by knowing the love of Christ.  Not by having your life all squeaky clean.

In fact, that’s the second thing Paul prays for here.  He prays that they would know an inner life of love.  That they would be rooted and grounded in love.  He’s saying that love is the soil in which the strengthened Christian grows.  Love is the foundation on which the strengthened Christian is built.  Tall, mature, growing trees need deep roots.  Skyscrapers need deep foundations.  In fact, the new Taipei 101 tower, which is now the tallest building in the world, has a foundation of 262 feet deep.  And so the question is, how does love root us?  How does love give us firm foundations? 

Well, let me see if I can give you an example.  Rebecca and I lived in Mississippi when Hurricane Katrina hit.  We didn’t go anywhere the day the hurricane hit, but the next day was a beautiful, clear, calm, gorgeous day.  So I took a drive over to my office to grab a few things, but really, I was more curious to see what the city looked like after the hurricane hit.  And what was just so eerie about it all was the number of trees that had been uprooted and had brought down power lines and were lying in the middle of the street.  And you have to understand that these were big, tall, old trees.  They had been around a long time, had weathered many storms, but this one was just too much for some of these trees.  But then there were many other trees that lost some leaves and a branch or two, and they were leaning a bit to one side, but for the most part, they were just fine.  So at the end of the day, the only way in which trees are uprooted or buildings are removed from their foundation is if they come into conflict with something which is more than their roots and foundations can bear. 

So what Paul is saying here is that having the love of Christ deep within your soul as manifested by the fruit of the Spirit – things like peace, patience, kindness, etc. – sort of diffuses the ability of the storms of life to uproot you.  The love of Christ, dwelling deeply within your heart, prevents you from being tossed to and fro by life’s contingencies. 

Listen to this.  If your security is not grounded in the vast, unmeasured, boundless, free love of Jesus, it is going to be grounded in some other object of your affection.  And you know that security can never be entirely secure because you know how other people and things are.  Let me give you a very common example as to how this happens in marriage.  Some of you might think I’m taking an example right out of your own life, but I’m thinking of no one in particular here.

Say, for instance, that the husband’s emotional well-being is very much tied up in his wife’s affections for him.  If that is the case, he will never be secure.  He can run to the store, take care of the kids, fix the washer and dryer, clean the garage, and still be wondering, “Is that good enough?  Did I do enough?”  And no matter what the wife does to assure him, he still feels insecure, because in the back of his mind, he still knows that he can’t perfectly satisfy his wife in every way.  And that frustrates the wife to no end because she knows that she’ll never be able to express enough appreciation and encouragement to her husband.  So there’s this perpetual cycle going on. 

But let’s say that we can understand why the husband acts like this because his wife is just critical and naggy.  So say that she calls him on the way home from work and asks him to stop off at the store to pick up toothpaste, paper towels, and a loaf of sourdough bread.  And he does it.  He comes home with toothpaste, paper towels, and a loaf of bread.  And he walks in the door with all of these items and she doesn’t express any appreciation at all.  And when she finally goes through the bag of groceries, she says, “Why did you buy Colgate toothpaste?  You know I like my organic, fru-fru toothpaste.”  “Why did you buy just two rolls of paper towels.  Don’t you know that they come in a package of eight rolls and it’s cheaper that way?”  “Oh, you bought the bread that has preservatives in it.  Don’t you know how bad preservatives are for you?” 

And when you compound that kind of thing over the course of 20, 30, 40 years, you get more and more criticism, more contempt, more defensiveness, and more emotional disengagement.  You get all stuck up on how appreciative, and how competent, and how sensitive, and how affectionate the other person is because love has never truly penetrated your souls.

But what Paul is saying here is that when you plumb the depths of the love of Christ for you and for his people, the insecurities that you have (which at the end of the day, cause us to become critical and emotionally distant) no longer govern you.  You’re not going to be uprooted when storms come into your life because the love of Christ will not only cause you to place your identity in him and in the gospel, but it will also propel you to stop being so self-absorbed.  You’ll begin to love one another with something that at least resembles the love of Christ for his church.

But in order to be rooted and grounded in that love, you have to know that love.  That’s the third point I want to focus upon.  It’s an inner life of knowing Christ’s love.  It’s not enough to have an intellectual knowledge of that love.  God is always seeking to existentially, subjectively transform our hearts, but how does he do that?  By calling us to be no longer conformed to the pattern of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.  Look.  The mind is a means to an end.  You can’t bypass the mind and go straight to the heart.  You get shallowness and vacuity and false belief around every corner if you do that.  But if all you have is an intellectual knowledge of Christ and his love, your heart will remain hard and unaffected by your Redeemer.

So what Paul is saying is that the foundation of the Christian life is grounded in knowledge.  Not just an intellectual knowledge (although that is a very significant part of it), but also an experiential, internal, existential knowledge. 

Look.  Part of the identity of Harbor Presbyterian Church is that we consider ourselves to be “gospel-centered.”  We talk about being gospel-centered all the time.  The word “gospel” modifies nouns at this church.  Gospel-pacesetters, gospel-leadership, gospel-parenting, the gospel and the poor, the gospel and the heart, the gospel and your emotions.  Gospel, gospel, gospel.  You hear the word “gospel” so much that it loses its punch for you.  You’re like, “Okay.  I get it.”  I don’t know about you, but I’ve felt like that.

But the question is, do you really get it?  You know, this week, I was in a very melancholy mood for most of the week, and that’s pretty unusual for me.  There were a few things I was really upset about, and there was a lot of dissatisfaction in my heart.  And I think I was legitimately upset about these things, but they had become really all-encompassing, mostly because my pride was hurt.

So I was talking to a friend of mine this week who is a pastor at one of our sister congregations in another state.  He and I talk almost everyday.  And he helped illustrate to me what was going on in my heart in a way that kind of stood out to me in a fresh way.  He said that if you prick your skin, you are going to bleed, because that is what is right underneath the surface of your skin.  I bleed because blood is coursing through my veins right under the surface.

And you know this applies to other areas.  If you strike me, what ever is right under the surface is what’s going to come out.  If not so deeply below the veneer that I set before you, lies pride, bitterness, resentment, distrust, that’s all going to come out as soon as my façade becomes disturbed.

But what I need to do is to take all the dimensions of Christ’s love – the breadth, and length, and height, and depth of Christ’s love – and tuck it right under my skin.  The only way in which those toxins are going to go through the expulsion process in my life and in your life is if Christ, and his gospel, and his love are dominating our thoughts.  And as that happens, when something or someone rubs us the wrong way, love comes out of our lives.  The love of Christ – which spans space, and time, and culture, and the barrier of sin and hostility – comes out of our lives.  The love of Christ, which is ours and is the foundation for humility and security, comes out of our lives.

And I want to suggest to you that that knowledge becomes intellectually understood and experientially lived out over the course of time.  It takes intentionality.  It takes attention.  It takes focus. 

Folks, there’s so much in our lives that encroaches on just meditating and thinking and reading and praying.  And I understand that we all go through seasons in life where time and energy are on a tighter leash than at other times.  But may I suggest to you that you not only seek to make the Lord’s Day the Lord’s Day, and not a day to spend like other days of the week working and studying, but also carve out regular time in your life to engage with God, to listen to him, to pray to him, to consider his works and his words and his ways.  Spend time considering and asking him to purge the toxins from underneath your skin and to replace those things with his deep, wide, long, and high love.

But here’s another thing I want you to consider.  I want to encourage you to consider ways in which you can develop relationships with other people in the church who you can help discover the love of Christ and who can help you discover it.  Do you notice in the passage that Paul wants us to comprehend the dimensions of Christ’s love “with all the saints”?  He’s saying that growth happens best together.  I have never met a person who is growing and maturing in their faith who is disconnected with other people in the church.  I mean, did you notice how I was helped to capture a brighter glimpse of God’s love and the implications of that love in the midst of my bad attitude?  It had nothing to do with me.  I can’t take any credit for it.  It was because God used another Christian brother to shed light on the compelling beauty of Christ. 

Folks, the church – other Christians – are your sanity.  You’ll never know yourself and the love of God until someone else shows you love that comes from God.  You’ll never know your sin unless someone who cherishes you says, “I love you, but you I see an issue in your life that needs to be dealt with.”  Do you have anyone like that?  Part of the reason why people get so weirded out, and start thinking and saying and believing things that are just out to lunch is almost always partially due to the fact that they’re out of contact with real live people.  Have you ever noticed that the weirdest Christians and the cult-like movements are almost always isolated from people?  Most of those things would never fly if you had contact with other people.  Being in fellowship with God’s church, his people, sands down the eccentricities.  And we need one another in our lives for that purpose.

But what is the goal of all of this?  Why does Paul pray that we would be strengthened and rooted and grounded in love and that we would experientially know that love?  Well because God is concerned with our maturity in the faith.  Paul is praying that we would be filled with all the fullness of God.  Now let me tell you something.  I have no idea what that means.  But I think that one thing we can all relate to is the opposite of fullness.  We’ve all felt empty.  When you’re empty, you’re not much affected by things.  The love of God, the love of other people, things of beauty, your sin, God’s holiness and justice and goodness and blessings; none of that affects you much.  There’s no sense of it.  There’s no taste for those things.  And we’ve all been there.  Some of you are there now.

You know there are two kinds of people who have empty stomachs.  One set of people are dead people.  They are empty, but they don’t know it.  They have no feeling of the pangs of hunger, they don’t have any appetite, they don’t have any desire for food, because they are dead.

But the other set of people who have empty stomachs are hungry people; perhaps even starving people.  You know what this is like.  You know what it’s like to be ravenously hungry and what it’s like to smell the aroma of the food billowing out of the kitchen and the anticipation of getting to delight in that great meal.  And when you’re finally able to partake in that meal, you know the delight of seeing that food appear before your eyes and the wonderful taste in your mouth.  And you know that when you have finished that meal and when your stomach is full, just how satisfied you are.

Folks, the power, the strength, to become rooted and grounded in love, to enjoy an experiential knowledge of that love, comes by delighting in the bread of life, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Wouldn’t be great to become even more satisfied by becoming more and more filled with Christ?  John Piper has said that, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”  Let me ask you this.  Is that your life’s goal?  To become so satisfied in Christ – in who he is and in what he’s done – that every facet of your life is turned over to his honor?  Folks, I’m telling you that you have been created for that.  Don’t let your unbelief cause you to think that he is not able to satisfy you and that you must seek your ultimate joy in someone or something other than Christ.  Jesus is able to strengthen you more abundantly than you could ever ask or think.    

 

 

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