Today I am going to share the message I prepared for the 220th American Baptist Church Conference this past weekend.
Contextualize –
Imagine a movie in your head.
Picture what I am describing.
While you are doing this,
try to place yourself in the movie.
Where would you have fit in?
Paul – in prison
Two types of Christian churches – Jewish & Gentile
Paul’s calling was to the Gentile church
Here’s what God reminded these churches, just like us.
“You might be small, seem insignificant,
but stop looking at you!
Take your eyes off yourself and look around for the Holy Spirit!
Put your eyes on what God is doing.
“God can do anything, you know—
far more than you could ever
imagine or
guess or
request
in your wildest dreams!
He does it
not by pushing us around
but
by working within us,
his Spirit
deeply and gently
within us.”
Paul gave that message to a group of churches who were small and just starting out.
In fact, they were Gentile churches, trying to fit in with a movement that had been created by a Jewish Messiah and managed by a group of Jewish Christians.
Neither side knew what to do.
That’s when the Spirit stepped in.
Working within, deeply and gently.
I think that is also our situation.
I think that we are a church that lives far below that is available to us.
This prayer that Paul sends to the Ephesians, is the same prayer we should pray for each other. That we would understand just how magnificent God’s love is.
Paul asks God to strengthen the Ephesians
with might through the Holy Spirit
in their inner being.
Not a brute strength kind of might,
but a glorious inner strength.
Paul wants God to strengthen –
“in accordance to the riches of His glory.”
That’s an incredible amount if you think of it.
Paul prays for the Trinity to strengthen the inner being of these believers, and encourage their resolve.
Paul prays the believers will allow Christ to reside in their hearts, permanently.
Paul then seeks to have them rooted and grounded in love.
Remember, God is love.
The kind of love that looks out for one another, lends a hand, seeks the best for those around you.
By doing this, the believers would be able to comprehend, like the Saints, the dimensions of the love of Jesus.
Paul’s is down on his knees praying that the readers of this letter would understand together
every dimension of the love of Jesus.
According to Paul, the love of God has dimensions:
width, length, depth and height.
The love of Jesus has width.
Take the wideness of a river. You can see how wide it is by what it covers over.
God’s river of love is so wide it covers over my sin, it covers over every circumstance of my life so that all things work together for good. In fact, His love is as wide as the world, John 3:16. I think we will be surprised just how wide God’s love is when we get to heaven and see people we had very little comfortable fellowship with on earth, who did have fellowship with Christ, and will dwell with Him forever.
The love of Jesus has length.
When we think about the length of God’s love we should start with the question,
“When did the love of God start towards me?
How long will it continue? Jeremiah 31:3,
“I have loved you with an everlasting love;
I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.”
The love of Jesus has depth.
Philippians 2:5-8 tells us how deep the love of Jesus goes.
“Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges.
Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.”
You can’t go much deeper than death on a cross.
The love of Jesus has height.
To understand the height of God’s love, ask yourself,
“How high does He lift me?
Let’s go back to Ephesians 2:6 for an answer,
“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,”
The best way to measure the width, length, depth and height of God’s love is to come to the cross. The cross pointed in four ways, essentially in every direction, because….
- God’s love is wide enough to include every human
- God’s love is long enough to last through eternity
- God’s love is deep enough to reach the worse sinner
- God’s love is high enough to take us to heaven
Paul also prayed that these churches would know,
not speculate,
not guess,
not emote or base their information on feelings,
but would know the love of Christ.
Paul knew
and his prayer is
that everyone knows the love of Christ.
So Paul asked that God would fill the churches unto all the fullness of God. Paul doesn’t write for us to be filled “with” the fullness of God, but, “unto.”
Which means “in reference to.” Paul wanted the church to be filled to capacity in reference to the character and attributes of Jesus
Think about it, to be filled with God would be great.
To be filled with the fullness of God is even greater.
But to be filled with ALL the fullness of God should knock your socks off!
Can you even fathom what that is like?
Can you measure it?
Each of you should have a paper tape measure.
I’d like to take credit for this “demonstration” but I saw it while leading a women’s Bible study by Angela Thomas-Pharr, who gave credit to Miles Adcox from “Onsite” an emotional awareness organization.
Hold up your paper tape measure.
Inches on one side – centimeters on the other
We are going to use the centimeter side.
Okay, don’t shoot me, I want you to find your age.
Wherever your age is, I want you to tear on that line.
Now that you have made your tear,
I want you to hold up
This represents all your years past.
Okay, got it, all your years past.
Throw it behind you, that’s behind you.
Gone!
Like Elvis and his mom.
Okay, again, don’t shoot me.
I didn’t make this up,
thank Miles Adcox, of Onsite counseling.
Take a second or two and think,
“What age do you think you might be when you die?”
You can go big! My grandfather died at 98 and his daughter, my aunt is 94 and doing well, and my father is 90 so I’m going to 95.
Rip that baby, go on, you don’t know anything,
this is NOT prophecy.
I want you to take everything after you ripped and show it to me, I want to see it.
That’s eternity, right there.
That’s the front door to eternity,
Okay throw it, we are going to get there eventually.
Now I want you to look at what you have left.
Got it, see how big that is?
This is what we have left.
What if you were to take what you have left, and
fill it with ALL the fullness of God?
He has more for you in these years than you could ask, or imagine.
If you will bend your knee and let Him be the power at work in you,
If you will cooperate with all that God wants to do
not to push you down,
but to lift you up.
These are the years we have left.
To be surprised by God or
These are the years we have left.
To stay the way we’ve always been.
But, let’s be honest, we don’t stay the same.
You know, that’s not what really happens,
We may say we want to stay the way we have always been,
But what really happens is we decline, and decline and fall into a sense of apathy, and resistance, of arrogance and sadness.
Are you kidding me?
What in the world?
With God on our side, who could look at this span of life that is left and say to themselves,
“I’m okay the way I am.”
“I can’t get any better.”
Yeah, I don’t want that.
May we be the Followers of Jesus who look at this and think,
“Wow, I can get a lot crammed in here, Yeah!”’
“I think I can, I can meet a lot of people who need to know Christ.”
“I think I can do a lot.
I can really get some memories made with my kids.”
“I think I can be a whole brand new person by about “right there.”
God has redeemed us for life, joy, grace, for the praise of His glory.
Go at it … ask for every good thing you have experienced.
God can do above that.
Go at it … think of or imagine things beyond your experience.
God can do above that.
Go at it … imagine good things that are beyond your ability to name.
God can do above that.
And what is even more, God wants to do this for us now. He doesn’t want to wait until we get to heaven.
This power is at our disposal today, this very moment.
How will you live what you have left?
Take hold of the years you have left for me
Hold them up to the Lord,
(Pray)
Father, we hold our years up to you.
Don’t stop redeeming us now, we still have a lot of life we want to live, with you, growing, changing to be more like You.
We have a lot left to do.
We have a lot of love we need to spread around.
I know we are going to have to cram it into what we have left.
Let us learn how to change.
Lord, some of us have a bit of undoing to do,
but it looks like we’ve got time.
Will you teach us how to undo some of those things?
Lord, we offer these days, we lay them on Your altar and ask that they be anointed, by the Holy Spirit, that they will be filled with your Words, and that each day they will be redeemed,
Until we get to the day when we are fully redeemed.
We place our years in your hand.
To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
