New Heart

Good morning. As we look into our text, I have just one simple question for you. Would you like to know God? Would you like to know God? Now, I hope the answer is yes, because that's pretty much all we have to offer here. We're here as a church, we're here submitting to the word of God, seeking to worship God and to make him known. There's a lot of things we do, but this is the main thing we're about. making God known, knowing him together, growing up in that knowledge together. So if you're not a Christian this morning, we're thankful you're here. We pray that you will meet God and that you will know him and you will know his love. If you're a Christian, we pray you'll continue to grow in the knowledge of God, knowing his love for you, being a more faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. So as we think about knowing God as one of the key words of our text this morning, I want us to realize that what or whom you're seeking to know really determines how you're going to approach the knowledge. So let me give an example. This thing I'm standing behind, this thing in front of me, we can analyze it a certain way. We can get a tape measure out. We can kind of analyze its design. And we can see that, well, it's a podium. There's a big flat surface. There's a microphone. It's something you stand behind and talk to other people from, right? And we know it's our podium because there's a crack and there's either three crosses or one cross. I don't know if we should vote on that, but we know it's our podium and also it's got seven years of stuff that I've thrown in here. So there's a way in which I can stand back and I can study that, right? And I'm seeking to know what it is. But we already kind of intuitively know what it is. But let me ask you this, how would you go about knowing your roommate? Would you measure them while they're sleeping? Would you do the same kind of stand back and analyze and measure and figure out as you would a podium or a piece of furniture? Well, I hope not or else they're gonna really not wanna get to know you. No, a person you talk to, you listen, You ask questions, you pursue them. Now, as we think about knowing God, which one of those two ways is the best to approach God? I ask that because I think we too often kind of stand back from God and try to analyze Him, and try to figure Him out, and try to make Him fit our categories. Whereas really, we're supposed to approach Him like we would any other person. We talk to Him. We listen. We're supposed to approach God who wants us to be in a relationship with Him. Christianity is a religion, but it's a relational religion. There is a devotion we have, but it's with a God who loves us and wants to know us. And just like every relationship, it takes effort. It takes emotional energy. It takes words, it takes listening, it takes personal reflection. And so here we're seeking to know God, and the first thing we're going to do is listen. We're not going to try to be creative. We're going to try to listen. We're going to say, God, who are you? And so as we walk through Ephesians, last week I kind of gave us a little intro on the doctrine of Scripture. I kind of want to do this as we go through Ephesians. Last week we looked at Scripture. We thought about the four characteristics of Scripture. It's sufficient. It's clear. It's authoritative. It's necessary. Scan, sufficient, clear, authoritative, necessary. That's what God's word is for us. He speaks to us. This morning I wanna go a little further and we're gonna think about God. God has eternally existed as Father, Son, and Spirit, and He is only one God. All right, so that's a little, That's high up there, right? That almost doesn't even make sense to us in the way we think about it in our own categories. There's one God, and that one God is Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We don't believe it because we created it. We believe it because He said it. We've received that from Him. Now, the church has traditionally said, He's one nature, three persons, and that's not what God said. One nature, three persons is a helpful way of safeguarding and framing how to talk about this one God and three persons. But that's not the way God wants us to know him. That's not how he revealed himself. He wants us to know him as the father of glory who sent his son to die for us, to rise again to give us new life, who then ascended so that he could send his spirit to dwell in us so that we can know him. It's personal. He's active. He's a God who's constantly pouring Himself out to us so that we can know Him. So this morning, we're looking to know God. And we're looking up. We're looking to the Son who has risen, as we just heard read, this last section of our passage today. He's died, He's risen, He's now exalted. And we have the Holy Spirit who's going to help us know who He is. Our passage this morning is Ephesians 1 through 15 through 23. Hope you'll follow along with us. And there's three basic parts to this text. It's a prayer. Okay, let's just first identify this is a prayer that Paul is praying. And the three parts are thanksgiving, supplication, and exaltation. Thanksgiving, supplication, and exaltation. Let's first look at the thanksgiving. This is verses 15 to 16. Notice Paul has a transition as he begins verse 15. For this reason. Okay, what is he pointing back to? Well, it's the previous sentence. For this reason, he's going to be praying based upon the previous sentence. Now, you have an English Bible in front of you, most likely, and the previous sentence is pretty short. The actual previous sentence in Greek is verses three through 14. Now all our English teachers and grammarians were thinking, that's impossible, how could they? In Greek it works, just trust that, all right? But what we have in verses three to 14 is this, Paul is just, he can't help himself. It's a grand doxology of how great God is. It's this one long sentence. And so everything he's going to be praying is based upon all those blessings. If you weren't here this last week, we looked at this passage in detail, and we looked at the key aspects of this. Blessed are those who believe in Jesus Christ. And the key phrase is blessed in Christ. I want you to just walk through these passages with me. It's worth reviewing here because what we're going to pray next is based upon all these blessings. So listen for the phrases, in Christ, through Christ, with Christ, in Him, which is referring to Christ. And think about all the blessings we have. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ, with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed us in the Beloved. In Him We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in him, things in heaven, things on earth. In him we have obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will so that we who are the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also when you heard the word of truth the gospel of your salvation and believed in him were sealed with a promised Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory. We see here this glorious doctrine of union with Christ. When we're united with Christ, every spiritual blessing, the predestination, the chosen, the adoption, the redemption, the forgiveness of sin, the sealing, the inheritance, they're all ours when we believe and God unites us with his son. It's a little bit like marriage. If one person in the marriage has a lot of debt, the other person has a lot of wealth, When they unite, they share both of those things together. The one who has wealth is taking on the debt. The one who has debt is receiving the wealth. Whenever you unite yourself, someone, in this kind of a covenant, you take the blessings and the curses with them. You're united with that. But here's what's so important about the gospel. When we're united with Christ, he takes all our curse and we receive all the blessing. When we're united in Christ, we don't bless that relationship. We're blessed by that relationship. And Christ, he takes the curse. What are those blessings again? Chosen, predestined, adopted, redeemed, sealed. We're gonna look back at those a little while. So we're still here in the Thanksgiving for this reason, because you have been united with Christ, because you received that word of salvation, the gospel which you believed. All those blessings are yours. And he adds another reason. Because I've heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love toward all the saints. Now here, I believe he's pointing out two of the most basic ways we bear fruit. Trust Jesus, love the saints. He's saying for this reason, I'm going to give thanks because of your faith and your love. And I want you to notice they're demonstratable. Paul has heard of their faith and he's heard of their love. We too often want to put faith as something that's kind of private and isolated and secret. This is my faith and this is how I live publicly. No, our faith is always demonstrated by the way we live publicly. Our faith and our love should be demonstrated with our works. So how would faith in Jesus be demonstrated? It'd be demonstrated in our worship. Are we coming with an eagerness and anticipation to sing God's praise? Are we eager to be faithful and obedient? Are we remaining steadfast in trusting God to work all things according for those who love Him, for their good? And the love of the saints. Now, thankfully, God only commands us to love saints. Isn't that good news? So we really have to love people who have halos. Those who are really righteous and good and never sin. That's the good news today. Thank you for laughing. Just making sure you were paying attention last week. All right, so a saint isn't someone who's super religious or righteous. A saint is someone who God just said, I'm going to set you apart from death and give you life. I'm going to take you out of that darkness and filth and sin, and I'm going to saint you. I'm going to pick you up out of that, and I'm going to place you in the kingdom of my beloved son. Now here's the trick. We don't choose whom God does that to. He makes saints out of all kinds of rascals, out of us. It's important to realize this because we're supposed to love all the saints that God has declared saints. They become our brothers and sisters by definition of God's own adoption. Just as he loved us who are unlovely, we're called to love the unlovely in Christ. Verse 16, the actual key word, the key action verb in the passage, I do not cease to give thanks for you. Because of the blessings of God, because I've heard of the fruit of your life because of the blessings of God, I do not stop giving thanks. I give thanks. Now who is he thanking? I believe he's thanking God. He's not thanking them directly. He's saying, I thank God that I hear of your love and your faith. Thanksgiving is an important spiritual discipline. Pointing out problems is not a spiritual discipline. Or for at least me, it comes pretty naturally. But the spiritual practice, the spiritual discipline is to look and see what is God doing beyond what all the problems I see? What is God active in? Where can I see the evidences of grace that help me be thankful for the kind of faith and love that Paul is thanking God for in these people? Because they are sinners and they're part of a broken church somewhere in Ephesus. Now I want us to see something important here. Paul is praying from three through 14. He's praying from verses three to 14. He's already declared all these blessings, and that allows him to give thanks. That gives him the lenses to realize he is a sinner, has received great grace, and so he's looking and saying, how can I see evidence of grace in others? See, it's too easy to think that when I see other people sin, that means I'm really spiritual. No, a spiritual person sees their own sin and confesses it and sees how grace is working in other people. We tend to find fault in others, that usually points to a self-righteousness. We tend to see evidence of grace, that tends to point to somebody who's depending upon grace. I want us to see here that the kind of gratitude that Paul is modeling for us and that in Colossians he commands over and over again, it begins with our relationship with God. So last week I wanted to challenge us. Ephesians 1, 3 to 14, that's gotta be our anthem. That has to be the way we think about ourselves and one another. And when Ephesians 1, 3 to 14 is our anthem, it's the way we live, it's the way we think, it's the way we worship. Blessed be the God who blessed us with every spiritual blessing, we're gonna regularly thank God. Because we're gonna see how much he blesses us. where we're gonna see how much he blesses other people. When we're regularly mindful and thinking about the blessings of God, there is no option but to thank God. When we embrace Ephesians 1 through to 14 as our anthem, the great blessing of God, we're constantly gonna see how others are being blessed, and we're gonna thank God for them. We as a church, we may see a revival take place down the street, and we're gonna thank God for that. Where we're gonna see what God is doing and we're always going to give thanks. Now here's a real practical point for us to think about. This week I wanna challenge you each day to think about how can I thank God for how he is blessing someone else? How can I thank God for the evidence of grace in someone else? This is a spiritual discipline that takes practice. So let me give you some examples. Actually, Chris in his prayer has already given a number of examples. We can thank God for the musical leadership we had this morning. We can thank God for those brothers and sisters that have practiced for many years so that they have a skill, and then they gave up their time this week to practice so that we could be led in song together with confidence. Thank you for your faith in Christ to sacrifice your time and your love for the saints to serve us this morning. We can thank those who put together the shower for after the service. They sacrificed time and energy and resources of finances so that we can celebrate an upcoming marriage. Thank you for your faith in Christ and your love for the saints that you sacrificed today to celebrate something among the church. We can thank the nursery workers. Thank you for your love and for the saints and your faith in Christ that you're giving up your time and your ability to sit in a pew and be blessed today by blessing others, by keeping the noise down and caring for parents so that way they can listen. Thank you for those who give. Make an offering. Many give sacrificially. Your time, your energy. Thank you for your love towards the saints and faith in Jesus Christ. Every day I'm gonna challenge you, I want you to think, who can I thank God for? And I want you to communicate that to them. It starts internally. Where do our thoughts veer towards? How do we count our blessings? Are we regularly thanking God? And I want you to see that this thankfulness leads Paul to prayer. I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayer. So let's look at these next verses. The supplication. Here we have supplication. He's asking here, right? So he's thanked them. He's thanked God for them. Now he's going to ask God for something. This is what supplication is. There's many different kinds of prayer. Jason led us in a prayer of thanksgiving. You can have a prayer of praise. You can have a prayer of confession of sin. Here we have what we normally think of prayer, and that's supplication. We're going to ask God for something. Paul says, I'm going to ask that God will give you what? That he may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation and the knowledge of him. Notice what Paul prays for. that God would give you more of God. That God would let you know him and see him better. That this is the spiritual prayer after counting the spiritual blessings. Paul is making a supplication based upon the word of God. We can actually go back to John 16, part of the passage that we didn't read earlier. Jesus says, truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Ask, until now you've asked nothing in my name, ask and you will receive, that your joy may be full. To ask in the name of Christ is to ask according to his ways. If you ask for the blessings, to enjoy the blessings we just read about in Ephesians 3 and 14, and the prayers we're gonna see later, he's gonna give it to you. This is what God desires to give to you. If you ask for a Ferrari, no promise there. Sorry. If you ask for the temporal blessings of this world, there's no promise there. But if you ask according to Christ and what He died to give you, you will receive it. We'll look at those in a moment. And your joy will be full. That's the reason God blesses us. Our joy will be full. So Paul prays constantly. This is one of the most important disciplines for us as Christians. Again, our text, we're actually studying a prayer today like we were in the Psalms. Prayer is something that has to be proactively practiced. Very few are just naturally good at prayer. We get distracted. Have you ever realized how much your to-do list comes to the forefront of your mind when you're trying to pray? All right, it's just so easy to think, all right, I'm gonna pray for these things, but then all of a sudden, like, oh, I need to do this, I forgot about that. It takes discipline. And let's just be honest, prayer is hard. It is a difficult discipline to learn. And that's why it takes practice, it takes focus, it takes taking God's word and listening and meditating so that we know how to speak to Him. Martin Luther said, to be a Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing. Jesus Christ has just said, you can go to the God and you can call him Father in my name. And he's listening like dad. What an invitation. What a blessing. Here we're gonna see how to pray. Paul is gonna model for us a specific way in which we can pray. There's many prayers in scripture. Here we have one that Paul is going to give us. There's a primary request and there's a supplemental request. I want you to see the primary request is this, that God the Father would give you the knowledge of him. Actually, a way to translate this a little bit better, I think, is that God would help you, that God would give you more knowledge. You would grow in your knowledge of him, that you would know him better. The three supplemental prayers are that you would know the hope. You see that in verse 18, the second half. That you would know the riches. End of verse 18. And that you would know what is the immeasurable greatness of His power. So that you would know God better, you would know His hope, you would know His riches, you would know His power. You would know God better, you would know the hope, you would know the riches, you would know the power. So we're talking about knowing God. Specifically, we're actually talking about the Father. That God, the Father of glory, the Father of Jesus Christ, that He would make Himself known, that you would know Him better. So again, let's back up and think, what does it mean to know? Because this is the key word here in this passage. Let's say you're watching a basketball game and you're almost 40, you're my generation. And you're seeing the young guys, and there's all the talk of who's the goat, who's the greatest of all time. And of course, if you're my age, you're going to say Michael Jordan's the greatest of all time. I shouldn't say that. I'm going to say that if we're watching basketball together. So I'm going to say, Michael Jordan, he's the greatest of all time. And then my friend, he's going to say, yeah, I know him. Really? You know Michael Jordan? Yeah, I know him, Mike. He won a championship in North Carolina. He then won three rings in the Bulls, played a little baseball, won three more rings. And then because, you know, he wanted to apologize for drafting Colonel Brown, he played for the Wizards for a little while. Yeah, I know him. All right, dude, you don't know him. You know about him. That isn't the kind of knowledge I want to hear. You have an encyclopedia kind of knowledge of Michael Jordan. You've not sat face to face and got to know him. You know something about Him. Here, what God wants is not merely knowing about Him. He wants us to know Him. It's personal. He's relational. He has a great love for us. He wants us to know that great love. So that we can know Him, God makes Himself known. And this is important. We talked about the Word of God earlier. Sufficient, clear, authoritative, necessary. Now in light of that, I want to say something very clearly. God speaking is not sufficient. God speaking alone is not sufficient. And this is why. We're really bad listeners. There is nothing wrong with God the communicator. What he has communicated is sufficient, it is clear, it is authoritative. He is a perfect communicator. We're bad listeners. Think about his disciples, as Jason mentioned earlier. They rarely got what he was actually saying. We rarely really understand. That's why God not only speaks, he sends the Holy Spirit inside of us so that we can receive it. He helps us know from outside in every way. He speaks from outside and then he gives us the Holy Spirit internally so that we can hear him. That's why verse 18 is so important here. That you may know God better, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened. Earlier we sang a song, In My Heart. There's two key truths that we sang there. I hope we recognize are true. The second verse, in my heart there's a treason. It poisons all my love. In my heart, there's something internally wrong. My heart is naturally not bent up towards God. It's naturally bent towards me. It's naturally perverting and twisting and corrupting everything good that comes down to me. There's something wrong. And that's why that other truth is so important that we started singing that song. There was a stirring. There was a stirring that began not with me, in my heart, so that my heart could be cured, healed, cleansed, so that when God speaks, I can hear him. I believe that's exactly what we're seeing here in having the eyes of your heart enlightened. Now, obviously, this is figurative language. Your heart doesn't literally have eyes. So what are we saying here? What is Paul getting at? One of the key themes of the Old Testament is that we might see God. This is the goal. This is God's invitation. This is what God has desired for us from the time he created us, that we would see him, that we would know him. And we go back to Moses to really see kind of the key point of this in the Old Testament. Moses says, I wanna see your glory. And God says, you can't. I'll bring my hindquarters around, but you can't see me face to face. You cannot, with your sinful corrupt eyes, see me as I am. That's what's actually so amazing about Christ coming. Look at the end of John 1, 16 to 18. No one has ever seen God, but Christ, the Son begotten of the Father, he has made him known. We get to see God in a way that Moses did not. When Moses saw the backside of God from a distance while hidden in a crack, it was fearful, it was trembling. But in Christ, we get to see God and it's welcoming and it's love. This is what it means for the eyes of the heart, I believe. Well, what is the heart? The heart is not the, the focus isn't on our feelings. There's a knowledge related to the heart, there's an affection. Really, we're talking about love. Where our love is based in our heart, our affections, our volition. The desire to know God and His love begins with a heart. So let's talk about what it means to have enlightenment. Paul is praying that we would be able to love God with a great clarity, seeing Him, knowing Him, loving Him and knowing His love. And this requires enlightenment. Well, when do you need light? You didn't walk in this room this morning or when you came in and say, hey, I don't see anything. I wish there was some light. No, it's already lit. You need light when there's darkness. There's something here that I think is very, very important. Paul already assumes that the heart is dark. When you walk into a dark room and it's pitch black, there's nothing, there's no light whatsoever, you don't know what's in that room. You don't know where the furniture is, you don't know if there's somebody else in that room, your mind starts going crazy, what's going on? Am I in a horror movie? When you walk into a dark room, you can't see anything, so what do you need? You need to turn the lights on. Our hearts, we have to kind of get this here. Our hearts are naturally dark. We rarely actually see what's going on. But the Holy Spirit, when he comes in, he lets us see what's going on. There's two things that we see that by the Holy Spirit. One, we see the sin that's actually residing there. We see the kind of knots that are tied up in the heart. We see the kind of ways that we twist and corrupt and we see sin that we never saw before because Holy Spirit, He enlightens us to see that sin. So we can repent of it, we confess it. But I believe what Paul is actually focused here is that we would see what God has put in our hearts. We would see the blessing, the sealing, the inheritance, the riches, the redemption, the adoption, the love. The Holy Spirit enlightens us so that we can see what God has actually given us. So we see there's three specific supplications connected to this. I believe they flow naturally out of three through 14, all the blessings. There's three things that Paul's praise for in light of giving the knowledge of God, that we would first know the hope, then the riches and the power. I pray that the Father would give you the knowledge of him that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you. Knowing the hope of the great calling, this helps us change our direction, our priorities. Right, your hope is what you've set before you that you're going for. Your hope is a direction setter. Your hope is your goal, and it changes the way you're going to live. It changes what you prioritize. It changes how you purpose. Now, hope also does something else. It should make you an optimist. Now, I'm preaching to myself here. I am a really good cynic. Naturally, pessimism just rolls right out of the mind and heart and off the tongue. Like a nice downward spiral, I can get into that, it's easy. But to have hope, to know hope demands that I cannot go down that spiral, I must be optimistic. It's something I have to tell myself regularly. It means we're knowing God has worked all things. He's going to work all things. There's a calling. It's a calling from God that reorients the way we think, the way we prioritize. The second prayer, that you may know God more, that you may know Him better. You may know the riches of His glorious inheritance. This is important, as we talked about last week. We just have a bad way of valuing things in life. We spend time on things that are less valuable. Where we're constantly spending more time and energy on things that are less valuable than things of heaven. Where there's an eternal, glorious riches. The inheritance of the saints is that we get to know God as Father and as love. And knowing the riches means we're not kind of distracted by the glitter of this world. And then third, that we would know the power. What is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us? So important. In the midst of this fallen world, in the midst of our hearts that are twisted, God gives us power. When we feel hopeless and helpless, he gives us power. Power to resist. We're gonna think more about that power because the whole last section is him just going on and on about what kind of power, but notice it's power toward us. Paul is praying according to the blessings of God. God has blessed his children with an inheritance, we need to know that riches. God has blessed us with a redemption, we need to know that power. God has blessed us with a hope, we need to know that calling. We need to know them, we need to pursue them. God blessed us with these things so that they're in our possession and so that we'll enjoy them. It's very important. Make sure you understand that. God has blessed you with all those blessings so that you will know them and hear this prayer so that you will enjoy them by knowing them better. I know it's kind of scary to think about, but Christmas is right on the corner. It's coming fast, folks. This is the kind of season it just speeds up. I feel like I wish I had a break, right? Gonna have to have Thanksgiving and then Christmas. And Christmas, we usually think of a tree with presents, right? Well, imagine a family, parents have sacrificially gone out, they've bought all these toys, they're wrapped up, they're under the tree, and on Christmas Day, those parents are excited. Usually, off and down, the parents are more excited than the kids. They want to see their kids enjoying all the gifts they've purchased for them, right? Now, imagine you have a little kid. We'll call him Jimmy. Jimmy decides, you know, Mom and Dad, I woke up this morning and I was, thinking I'm just gonna be content, I'm gonna just play with my thumbs. God, he's gonna make it spiritual too. You know, God's blessed me with two thumbs, I'm gonna twiddle them, I'm going to enjoy them, and that's all I'm gonna do today. Okay, so he's got siblings, they're like, Jimmy, you're crazy. You know, they're opening, they're turning the paper up, and mom and dad's like, all right, you know, Jimmy's just gonna get tunnel vision. I'm gonna enjoy my thumbs. I'm gonna enjoy my thumbs. Jimmy, and he's missing out on a blessing. And the hard part for the parent is they are so eager for him to dive in there, open that present so that they can watch him enjoy it. And he's just gonna be satisfied sitting there on the couch, twiddling his thumbs. That's us. God has given us so many spiritual blessings. He desires for us to know them, to enjoy them, to have our identity wrapped up in what He declares glorious. It is His own face that we can see. What are we doing? Just twiddling our thumbs, aren't we? We're wasting away thinking we're gonna enjoy all these other things that are so less valuable. They're not bad things. You've got thumbs, great, enjoy them. God desires so many greater blessings for you. Blessings that you can pursue in the knowledge of His Son. Blessings that you can pursue by asking Spirit, let me see all the things that I have. Let me see by enlightening the sin that's keeping me from knowing God. Help me see the blessings. There's three basic ingredients for being a faithful Christian that will help you see these things. Read your Bible, pray, fellowship. It's not complicated. You need to know what the blessings are by actually hearing from God. You need to pray, saying, God, help me see them, help me know them. Pray according to scripture, and then you need fellowship, because other believers are very important in the life of believers, so that we can help each other see these things. We're supposed to stir one another up. Pray this prayer, pray it for one another. Our last point, exaltation. Paul just seems like he can't help himself. Again, this whole passage, 15 through 23, it's one sentence. And here in 19, as he mentions the immeasurable greatness, he has to let us know how great it is. And what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead. What kind of power do you have to resist sin, to resist temptation, to stand firm in the devil's attacks? The same power that rose Christ from the dead. That's encouraging. Is there anything more powerful? We often don't believe that lie that, oh, sin, it's overwhelming. How long, oh, Lord? I can't endure. It's pressuring. It's overwhelming, the temptation, the trial. The power He has towards us, the power that He has placed within us is the same power that raised Christ from the dead. There's no question that we have the power to resist. The question is if we're going to actually seek it and use it to resist. We can feel so weak and helpless. Here Christ says, I am strong, I will help. It's not just the same power as ours, Christ is ours. In him we're blessed. Look at this passage that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him in his right hand in the heavenly places. All those blessings of the heavenly places in chapter 1 verse 3 are now ours because Christ is in the heavenly places. Look at his position. He's far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in this age but also in the one to come. Paul's kind of just elaborating more and more here. I think he wants to get us to get the point. There's no greater authority, there's no greater power. It reminds me of Matthew 28, the Great Commission. Go and make disciples. The book ends for that? Or Christ saying, all authority is mine. Go make disciples. I am with you always. The work we're called to do may seem impossible. The work we seem to be made to do is hard. We do it because the one who has all authority, all rule, all power, all dominion, the name above all names, he's with us. Well, let me get to this pretty tricky phrase. These next two verses are a little complicated. Some of it's clear, so let's deal with what's clear first. Verse 22, he put all things under his feet, and he gave him his head over all things to the church. Okay, so all things under his feet, this is victorious language, this is Christ the victor language. He crushes enemies under his feet. The Father has given him all power to crush all of his enemies. He is the ultimate victor. And then he's the head. This is authority language. He has authority. And authority specifically over all things, and He has been given to the church. Now, this verse 23 is where it gets a little tricky. The church, which is His body, that's not tricky yet, because the head needs a body, that makes sense. The fullness of Him who fills all in all. Now this is very vague language at some level. And I believe it's vague because Paul is introducing quite a paradox here. What does it mean that we are the fullness of Christ as his body? And what does it mean that he fills all in all? This is called quite a conundrum as I've studied, but here's my best understanding of what it means. For the church, his body, to be his fullness, it means that we complement him. The head is related to the body. But I think we have to go one step further. For the head to be full because of the body means that we also complete Him. Christ, the head, is completed by taking on us, His people, as His body. Now here's the paradox. Christ is Almighty God. He was perfect when He chose us before the foundation of the earth. He didn't need anything. He was perfect in His being. He was perfect in His relationship with the Father and the Spirit. So how is it that we would be His fullness? How is it that we would complement Him and complete Him? This is a mystery. This is a paradox. All I can assure you is that somehow it's remarkable that Christ said, I, want to have sheep. I want to be a shepherd, therefore I'm going to have sheep. I'm going to be a bridegroom, therefore I must have a bride. I'm going to be the vine, therefore I must have branches. Somehow we just look back and we don't understand, but he's rendered himself imperfect until he claims us as his own. As a good shepherd, so that we're a sheep. As the perfect bridegroom, as his beloved. as the divine and we're His branches. He fills all in all. He's able to bring about this fullness. So we're His fullness and He fills all in all. I believe again we're going back to the power. Christ's power is with us in all things at all times is my paraphrase of this. He fills. with His power, with His majesty, with His glory, with His love, with His very being, that which is His body, so that we are His. As we conclude in this particular section, as we conclude the sermon, let me try to summarize. Christ has won a sure and absolute victory. That makes us, His church, victorious. We have all failed. We're miserable at trying to live in righteousness. We have all failed. But because Christ is a conqueror, we now get to enjoy the conquering. Because He's the victor, He's our leader and He's our authority. He's our head. That's why we build ourselves up into Him. He has won the victory. He has conquered sin and death. We now get to share and enjoy that victory in Him and with Him and with one another. So to conclude, I have one question. Are you living in this victory and are you enjoying it? Are you living in the victory because when we talk about crushing under his feet, as we talk about him crushing death, as we think about him at the right hand of the Father, we see a victor. Someone who has won, who has fought and won a battle. Are we enjoying the victory in the battle with him or are we just pretending this world is a playground? Are we enjoying the victory that Christ has won for us so that we can know God? Are we pursuing the things of this world, thinking they're gonna truly delight us? Let us turn to Christ. Seek to know the Father. Pray the Spirit will enlighten our hearts. Let us pursue knowing God and his glory so that we can enjoy that victory. Let us pray. Father, we praise and we thank you for your kindness. that you looked upon us and had mercy, even before the creation of the world, you chose us, you chose to connect yourselves to us, so that in Christ we are blessed, as he has taken upon our curse. Help us, Lord, to be a praying people, proactively practicing, proactively pursuing that greater glory, the riches, the hope, and the power that are ours in Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.