Prayer to the God of Glory (Ephesians Sermon 5)

I have to be honest with you, I have always struggled with prayer my entire Christian life. From the very beginning of my Christian life, I wasn’t really sure how prayer worked. I’m still not entirely sure how it works. I remember early, maybe a few months after I came to Christ, I was being discipled by a guy with Campus Crusade for Christ. We were working on a car. I’ll never forget this. I was trying to get a spark plug changed and it just wouldn’t work. We worked on it together for about an hour, to the point where I couldn’t even look at the car anymore. I was so frustrated by this. He said, “Why don’t we pray?”  I said, “Why should we pray?”  He said, “What?” I said, “Well, why should we pray?  God’s just going to do what He’s going to do, anyway.”  He rebuked me without giving me an answer to that deep theological question. We never did get that spark plug in. I’ll never forget driving my car with one of the spark plugs out. It sounds worse than if it has no muffler. I’ll never forget the guy running out and telling me to turn the engine off. I’ll never forget that. He said, “One of the spark plugs is missing!”  Well, we knew that. We said that we couldn’t get the spark plug in and he looked at me like I was lower than a worm. “You couldn’t get a spark plug in?” he said, “Give it to me.”  He took the spark plug and reached back and his hand came back empty. I said, “Where are you going?”  He said, “I’m going to get a wrench to tighten it. It’s in.”  It was just like that. I felt like a total loser. Now, Tim, my discipler later said, “God answered our prayer. The spark plug got put in.”  I said, “Yeah, but I didn’t want all that trouble and I didn’t want to be ashamed.”  And still those words that I spoke years ago have plagued me and haunted me in reference to prayer. Why should I pray?  God’s going to do what he’s going to do anyway.

Have you ever struggled with prayer?  Do you struggle now?  Would any of you say that your prayer lives are exactly what they should be?  Well, I don’t know anyone that would say that. Even those that are flourishing the most in prayer, still yearn for more. There was a time in Luke 11 when Jesus’s disciples came upon Him praying. They watched him praying and they watched him finish his time of prayer. They said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray.”  I feel that don’t you. Say, “Lord, teach me to pray. I want to pray, better than I do.”  It seems to me that in Ephesians 1 and again later we’ll see in Ephesians 3, the Lord has to some degree said to all of us, “Have you considered My servant Paul?  He’ll teach you to pray.”  We can learn from the Apostle Paul, what to pray for and how to pray. So, as we come to Ephesians 1 and we’re going to focus this morning on 15-17, we’re going to learn better how to pray. My desire is that as a result of this sermon and this study, all of us will pray better. That we will flourish actually in our prayer lives, that we will pray better individually, that we will pray better corporately because we need that.

I. Thanksgiving for the Ephesians’ Genuine Conversion

Now, Paul begins in verses 15 and 16 with thanksgiving for the Ephesians’ genuine conversion. The apostle Paul has already unfolded in verses 3-14, I would say the single most magnificent sentence in all of scripture. It’s one long sentence, 12 verses. He has unfolded in a very quick way, the theology of the Ephesians’ salvation. How it began “before the foundation of the world.”  How God chose them in Christ before the foundation of the world and how “God the Father predestined them in love to be adopted as His sons” and how God planned this entire salvation out before anything came to be. And how then, Jesus, God the Son, shed his blood. We have “redemption” in verse 7 “through His blood,” and how God the Spirit applies that to us individually when we “heard to word of truth, the Gospel of our salvation having believed we were sealed with the Holy Spirit.”  So we have the work of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, in the salvation of these Ephesian Christians.

Paul tells them how he’s been praying for them. He says in verses 15 and 16, “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.”  We have Paul beginning with thanksgiving and also we see his intercession for them. There are parts of prayer that are adoration and thanksgiving in which we thank God for who He is and what He’s done. We worship Him, we praise Him. We then acknowledge our own neediness and our inadequacy for the challenges and we confess those things to God and say, “We need You. We have to have Your help.”  So we are confessing that God is all sufficient and we are needy. So, Paul begins with thanksgiving and then he moves on to intercession, making requests for the Ephesians. Now, what was it, he says that moved Paul to pray for the Ephesians?  He says, “Ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints,” Paul had heard greatly encouraging reports about how the Gospel had transformed their lives. In other words, he had compelling evidence of their genuine conversion to Christ.

So, what are marks of genuine conversion?  How can you know that you’re born again?  How can you know that you’re elect?  How can you know that you’re saved?  He talks first about faith in the Lord Jesus. It’s not enough for someone to believe in God. A lot of people say that they believe in God. Jews believe in God. Muslims will say that they believe in God. Hindus believe in God. Paul is moved specifically by their reports of their faith in the Lord Jesus. They believe in the Lord Jesus, he says. Now, the Gospel came to Ephesus and at the center of the Gospel is the truth about the Lord Jesus. This cuts to the center of what a sinner has to believe to be saved. Jesus is the center of the Gospel, specifically His saving work on the cross. Look again at verse 7, “in Him,” that is in Jesus, “we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins.” So faith in the Lord Jesus means, “I have renounced any effort at self salvation. I am not self sufficient. I cannot atone for my own sins. I am a sinner. I have cast myself on the saving work of Jesus on the cross. I have trusted in Him to save me.

But, who was this person who died on the cross?  Who was this individual?  The simple two words, Lord Jesus, sums up a lot of doctrine about the Christian religion. “Lord” emphasizes the deity of Christ. “Jesus”  emphasizes the humanity. This man, this human being, born of the virgin Mary, in the ordinary way as a baby was raised and grew physically, he grew in wisdom, stature and in favor with God and man. He just grew up before the eyes of witnesses, of neighbors who saw Him grow up from a little boy. He had flesh and bones and blood. Who needed food, air and water in order to survive. He, in many ways, was just the same as you and me. He had no “physical appearance, beauty or majesty, there was nothing in His appearance that was unique.” He wasn’t glowing with the glory of God all the time. He did, on the Mount of Transfiguration, but that wasn’t His consistent appearance. He looked ordinary, very ordinary. He was a normal human being. He got tired and needed to sleep. Most of all, He could die. He was a human being in that He could die. That’s the humanity of Jesus. We also see the deity of Christ, the Lord. The deity of Christ. We believe that Jesus is God in the flesh, that He is truly the Lord Jesus Christ. The Ephesians came to believe that their Savior was not only human, able to shed His blood and die, but also God as proven by the resurrection from the dead. He was declared with power to be the Son of God by His resurrection from the dead. This is essential to our salvation. It says in Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”  You have to confess to the deity of this man, Jesus. This confession, this conviction, that Jesus who lived 2000 years ago is actually God in the flesh, can only come about by the direct working of the Holy Spirit of God on your heart. Only if the Holy Spirit of God works on you and in you, will you ever be able, truthfully, to make the confession “Jesus is Lord.” It says in 1 Corinthians 12:3, “No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”  We can never make that confession except by the direct action of the Spirit of God. Paul believed and had heard that these Ephesians could make that confession. They believed in the Lord Jesus. They had left their pagan ways, their belief in many gods and goddesses. They turned their backs on all of that and they believed that Lord Jesus was their personal savior and their God. This is the first evidence of their genuine conversion. Secondly, he talks about their “love for all the saints.” This is the other great transformation in the Holy Spirit, not only vertically, believing in the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, believing that Jesus is God vertically, but horizontally. It transforms how you treat others, and especially how you treat other Christians, how you feel about other Christians he mentions.

Now, the natural man not born again, has no special desire for fellowship with other Christians. I know I didn’t. Before I was converted, I didn’t like Christians. I didn’t want to be around them. I think that the Apostle Paul would say, ” I was in the exact same condition, brother. I didn’t like Christians at all. As a matter of fact, I used to drag them off to prison, both men and women.”  Paul hated other Christians. He had no desire for fellowship with them. So, non-Christians tend to see us Christians in a number of bad ways. They see us as narrow-minded bigots, perhaps. You’re going to hear that kind expression more and more as the 21st century unfolds here in the US, narrow-minded bigots. Killjoys, hypocrites, perhaps uneducated in some ways, worthy of mockery and disdain, this is the way that non Christians see Christians. But, once someone has been genuinely born again, that all changes. It is impossible to love the Father and not love His children. One of the great evidences of the transforming work of the Spirit of God is your love for all the saints, for other Christians. How can we explain this? How can we explain that I would say that any genuine Christian who is sitting and listening to me today, would much rather be in the extended presence of another spirit-filled Christian than even the most famous, or influential, or fascinating or athletically skillful non-Christian for a day. I would much rather spend the day or travel with a Spirit-filled Christian than even the most famous or influential non-Christian. I think you all know exactly why. “What fellowship does light have with darkness?” What are we going to talk about?  We’re going to disagree about the most important things. It doesn’t mean that we can’t have a communication or a relationship, we do try. I’m just telling you that I have deep love and attraction for other Christians, even if I’ve never met them. You know what I’m talking about. You can be with another Christian from another country. You could not even share the same language, but through a translator you have immediate fellowship with that person, man or woman, boy or girl. It is beautiful, the “love for all the saints.”

The Holy Spirit had worked in these Ephesians, a genuine work of conversion, a belief in the deity of Christ, the Lord Jesus, and a genuine love for all the saints. Now, let me just stop and apply this right now to you. Do you see these two things in your life?  Can you rightly assess yourself and say, “I believe that Jesus is Lord. I believe in the deity of Jesus. I believe that He died on the cross for my sins. I believe that I am a sinner, saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus and I have called on the name of the Lord Jesus for my salvation. I believe that God raised Him from the dead, proving that He is Lord.”  Can you make that assertion and is it played out in you life by the way you treat other Christians?  The genuine love that you have for the brothers and sisters. 1 John says a lot about this. You can’t say “I love God and hate your brother.” If you are a genuine Christian, you’re going to love other Christians. Do you see these evidences in yourself and if not I just plead with you now to trust in Christ for the salvation of your soul. It could be as Daniel said earlier,  “This is the very reason why you came here today.”  That perhaps for the first time you understand the Gospel and now you call on the name of the Lord for your own salvation.

Well, Paul goes from this evidence that they’re genuinely born again to thanksgiving to the God who brought it all about. I think this is just so vital. It could be that some of us are depressed, and sad, and struggling in life because we don’t give thanks enough. We’re not thankful to God in any and every circumstance. We haven’t learned the discipline of thanking God at all times. So these two evidences of genuine conversion move Paul to thanksgiving. He thanked God because God the Father had sovereignly worked these things out through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Paul gave credit where credit is due. It’s so important that we see the theology of thanksgiving. There are so many things that I could say about that but what I want to go to is, you thank the one responsible. To the one who gave the gift, you say thank you to that one. We see the sovereignty of God in salvation by what Paul thanks God for. He thinks God is responsible for their salvation so He thanks God for it. I see the same thing in Romans 6:17. It’s one of my favorite theology of thanksgiving verses. Romans 6:17 says this, “Thanks be to God that though you used to be slaves to sin you wholeheartedly obeyed that form of teaching to which you were entrusted.” I preached a sermon once with this simplified title from Romans 6:17, “Thank God You Obeyed.”  Now, meditate on that for the rest of the afternoon.

How in the world can I give God credit for something I did?  Paul did. Thank God you obeyed. Thank God you believed. Thank God you repented. It is God who worked these things in you. Thank God you’re a Christian! Paul does that. He gives thanks. Paul continually thanked God for his own conversion, but here he goes beyond that. He thanks God for other people’s conversion. Thank God you obeyed, not just thank God I obeyed. I’m grateful for that, oh eternally grateful. But, I’m grateful for your salvation too and as a matter of fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that it’s reasonable to be equally thankful for your salvation as for mine. The same God worked them both. So, I am growing in that discipline of thanking God. I know that when I get to Heaven I will be equally thankful for the salvation of all of my brothers and sisters in Christ as I am for my own because it will be a clear display of the sovereign grace of God. We need to give God thanks. We need to give thanks for our own salvation. You need to be like that one leper, the Samaritan, remember, that came back, the other nine walking on their way. Ten lepers cleansed. One of them remembered to go back and give thanks in Luke 17. He fell at Jesus’s feet and couldn’t stop crying and thanking God for his cleansing. We have received a greater cleansing than that. We have received cleansing from sin. We have been delivered from Hell. We have been adopted as sons and daughters of the living God. Thank Jesus every day. Thank God for your salvation, but then go beyond that. Thank God for other people’s salvation. Do it in prayer. That’s what Paul does.

II. Perseverance in Prayer

We also see the perseverance in prayer here. Paul says that from the first he heard, he has never stopped thanking God for them. He didn’t just say one thanksgiving prayer, “Thank God for the Ephesian Christians.”  But he continued to thank God. Look at verses 15 and 16, “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and you love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you. I have not ceased giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.”

We need perseverance in prayer and this may be the rub here, this may be the problem. The fact that God is not a vending machine and that He doesn’t immediately dispense the things that we ask Him for, even though they may very well be in His plan and may very well be in accordance with scripture. In Luke 18:1, Jesus taught them the parable of the persistent widow for the reason that they should always pray and never give up. Why are we tempted to give up?  Because God’s timetable is not our own. Because God will not be ruled by us. He is the King, we are the suppliants. We are the servants asking for grace and mercy. He’s not the servant, the slave that comes immediately and does whatever we ask, but He takes into consideration our requests and does what His wise plan has ordained to do. Also, because prayer is meant to transform us as well as to transform circumstances. We are to be genuinely, gradually, consistently transformed by a habit of prayer. I think often of the idea of a piece of cold, black iron being put into a bed of coals and then the bellows by the blacksmith blowing air on it. It just has to be in there a while to get it heated up and soft, yielded to the blacksmith so it can be shaped and molded. My heart starts in prayer, cold and distant so I need to be there for a while. Not on just any one given prayer time but over a long period of time in my life. I need to ask again and again and again for these things.

Prayer is a form of training of our souls. What physical trainer ever says, “I want you to do one push up and one sit up for me today, there you’re done.”  I know you’d love a trainer like that but you would have a kind of secret instinct that he or she wasn’t doing you much good. You don’t seem to be getting into better shape. I think you know why. But, a physical trainer that wisely pushes you close to the breaking point, you know that trainer is doing you some good. The Lord doesn’t instantly answer our prayers. He wants to grow and to develop in maturity, to learn how dependent we are on Him. He wants us to care more about the things we’re praying for and so we need perseverance in prayer. Paul prays day after day. He refused to rest. He refused to cease. He continued to give thanks for them. God was as worthy of thanksgiving on Wednesday as He had been on Tuesday of the previous week. It never changes. God is immutable. He always is worthy of thanksgiving. Paul literally made remembrance, he continued to think about them, remembering their names. He spoke their names to God in prayer and so should we be in our prayer lives. We notice that he also gives prayer to the “God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory.” Look at verse 17, “The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

III. Prayer to the God of Our Lord Jesus, the “Father of Glory”

Paul’s prayer is directly to God the Father. Here I want to give you a Trinitarian theology of prayer, based on scriptural evidence. The usual pattern of prayer is that prayer is made to God the Father by the mediating work of God the Son, Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. As far as I know, there is no biblical evidence whatsoever for prayer directly to the Holy Spirit. As far as I can find there is only one prayer in the New Testament that is directly to Jesus. That is when Stephen was being martyred and he looked up and he saw heaven open and he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. He said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”  Now, I don’t think it’s wrong to prayer to Jesus or wrong to pray to the Holy Spirit. Considering the Holy Spirit, if you can blaspheme to the Spirit, why couldn’t you speak or address the Spirit. I think you can. But, I think that the Bible gives us the pattern of prayer to the Father. One thing I’m concerned about is that people have a reluctance to come to the Father that they don’t feel toward Jesus. They seem to have much more of an affinity toward Jesus than to the Father. That would be completely wrong and heartbreaking. Jesus came to bring us to the Father. He came to be the mediator, to point us to the Father. He always wanted us to be able to see the Father in Him. He came to reveal the Father to us and so we should prayer in the regular pattern. Prayer to God the Father through the mediating work of Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think we see that in Ephesians 2:18. Maybe you could look ahead just a few verses. It says, “For through Him,” that is through Jesus, the mediatorial work like He is a new and living way open for us, “through Him we both, Jews and Gentiles, have access to the Father by one Spirit.”  That’s a Trinitarian verse on prayer. We have access to the Father. Prayer goes to the Father. We get there by the mediatorial work of Jesus on the cross.

I think that true prayer should begin with remembering who you’re speaking to. I think we should stop. We should pause. We should be extremely reverential as we go in to pray. I love what it says in Ecclesiastes 5. He said, “Do not be quick with your mouth and do not be hasty in your heart to utter anything before God. God is in Heaven and you are on earth so let your words be few.”  Now, that’s all about reverence, isn’t it?  Don’t just run glibly into God’s presence. Pause, stop, be mindful. “Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by your name.” That kind of thing, a sense of greatness and majesty of God. Let’s think about it. He is the “God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory.” Think about that before you go in.

Now, what does Paul mean by, “The God of our Lord Jesus Christ?”  Well, this is an identifier of God. Which God are we praying to?  Remember how Paul was in Athens and he saw some shrine marked with these words, “To the unknown god.”  They were polytheists so they were trying to cover all the bases. I wonder if that unknown god would have been pleased with that or offended. But, we’re not polytheists. We don’t believe in an unknown god. We believe in One God and that He has revealed Himself to us by means of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ and by means of the Holy Spirit’s work in the scripture and in creation. God identifies Himself. In the Old Testament you see this again and again. “I am the God of Abraham” or “I am the God who appeared to you at Bethel.” Or He says to Moses at the burning bush, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”  He identifies himself that way. “I am the God who appeared to your fathers.”  But, Jesus is the mediator of a new and better covenant. This is a better way to identify the God that we’re praying to. He is the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus, our Lord Jesus, approached God the Father as a man. He believed in the Father. He trusted the Father. He obeyed the Father. He loved His Father. He prayed to His Heavenly Father. He sought to please His Father at every moment. After His resurrection, He spoke to the redeemed. He spoke to the church in this way in John 20:17, He said, “Go to my brothers and tell them I’m returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” The exact same relationship I have with the Father, I have now made for you.”  So, he is our Father as he is also Jesus’s Father. Now, he is the only begotten Son of God. We are adopted children, but he is our Father. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and Jesus came into the world to reveal the Father to us. Hebrews 1:3, “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being.” “When we see him, we’ve seen the Father,” it says in John 14. Now, here Paul calls him the Father of Glory. Think about that. What does that mean, the Father of Glory?  The NIV has “the Glorious Father,” but I like the Father of Glory as though he is not only glorious himself, but he is the Father of all Glory, all emanations of illumination and radiation that there is in the universe, come from God as the source. He is the source of all the rivers of glory that there are in the universe. Everything comes from God.

Now, what is the glory of God the Father?  We think of the radiant display of God’s perfections, the shining radiance who He is. He is the Father of Glory. It says in 1 Timothy 6:16, “God alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light.”  I was meditating on that, “unapproachable light.”  I was thinkin  about, what is that like?  You know, it says in Isaiah 6, “The seraphim were covering their faces.”  Unapproachable light, the glory of God. I pictured the sun, 93 million miles away, but I thought, “Wouldn’t it be something is God could make a special deal for us for just a day, and we could be 1000 miles away from the sun.”  He’d have to do a Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego thing, surrounding us with a bubble of protection from the heat and radiation of the sun. But, we’re just thinking about light. The sun is 103 times larger across the diameter than the earth so you could fit 103 earths, stacked up across the diameter. Let’s say that we’re at 51, right in the middle and were about 500,000 miles away from the sun. You’d look up in the sky and all you would see would be fire, raging, overwhelming light and fire. No heat because we have that special Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego bubble. We would be there and there’s radiant light. That’s what I think of being unapproachable light. That is the God that we’re praying to, the Father of Glory. There will come a day in the New Heaven and the New Earth when the sun will be going. The sun, the moon and the stars will be gone. The whole world will shine, it will be radiating with the Glory of God through Jesus. That’s the Father of Glory. He is the source of all glory.

As we begin to pray, we come with a sense of overwhelming awe and reverence. There is a sense of the majesty, the infinite majesty of God and how great He is. Now, what is the goal of this prayer?  Well, it’s knowing God. Look again at verse 17, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him.”

IV. The Goal of Prayer: Knowing God

Now, this is the first of a series of intercessions. We’re not going to deal with the rest of them today, there’s just too many of them, and they are wonderful. We’re just going to zero in on the first intercession. We come to God because He is capable of giving us infinitely more than all we could ask or imagine. We glorify God by asking for great things because He’s a great God and God wants to make our requests made known to Him. And the first request should be, “Oh, God, I want to know you better. And I want this brother and this sister to know you better. That’s what I want. I want the knowledge of God.”

Now, Paul is going to pray many more things than this, but he starts with this, that the Ephesian Christians would have the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God,” that they would know him. They are already Christians, already born again and he’s praying, “Oh, that they would know you better. That they would know you more fully, more deeply and more richly.

A.W. Tozer in his classic, “Knowledge of the Holy,” said this, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”  What comes into your mind when you think about God?  It’s the most important thing about you. So said A.W. Tozer and J.I. Packer, in his classic, “Knowing God,”  said this, “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination, something which lays hold of our allegiance. This the Christian has, in a way that no other person has, for what higher, more exalted and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?”  That is the organizing directive of your life from here to eternity, beyond the time when you’re raised from the dead in a resurrection body. On into the New Heaven and New Earth, you’re going to still be learning God, forever, the knowledge of God. It’s an infinite study and we’re going to be studying it forever.

Now, this is Jesus’s deep cry in John 17. This is his definition of eternal in John 17:3, “Now this is eternal, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.”  That’s what eternal is, to know God. This is the great tragedy of the lostness of the world. John 17:25 says, “Righteous Father, the world has not known You.”  This is the work that Jesus does in every Christian at conversion. John 17:6, “I have revealed You to those whom You have given to Me out of the world.” I revealed You to them.  This is the ongoing work that He wants to continue doing. John 17:26, “I have made You known to them and I will continue to make You known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and I myself may be in them.” 

So, what is this knowledge of God?  What does it mean that they may know God?  Well, it is factual. It is knowledge about God, facts about God, truths about God that come from scripture. Who he is, what he’s done, his great acts in the past, these come from the pages of scripture. Facts about God. We should be zealous to gain as many facts as we can from the Bible about who God is, about His attributes, His actions, about His plans and purposes in the world, what it teaches about Him. Facts about God, but God wants far more than just that.

Now, we know that no true relationship can be without factual knowledge. You can imagine a couple just beginning their relationship. They’re sitting down, they’re having a cup of coffee and they have one thing on their mind. Tell me about yourself, I want to know who you are. Maybe it started with eHarmony.com, I don’t know. I mean, it begins with something. It’s amazing how people get together these days. I was talking to a Christian about that and he said, “Are you OK with that?”

I said, “Well look what happened with Isaac and Rebekah and that whole camel thing. He went and got a servant, came back with her and that was that. They got married.”  So, I’m not sure what they conversed about on their wedding night. It’s like, “Tell me your name, at least. Let’s get to know each other.”  There’s some information that we need to have here. So, I’m thinking eHarmony has more filtering going on than happened with Rebekah and Isaac. But, the servant went out and he was serving Abraham and brought the wife back for Isaac and it worked out great. Be careful with what you do with what I just said.  I’m not going to that “Nth” degree, “Pastor said it was fine!”  All I’m saying is that relationships begin with a passing, a giving and receiving of factual knowledge. That’s what I’m saying. There’s no relationship without it.

I actually knew a couple once that had no common language between them when they got married. They got married in the 1920’s, a Swedish woman and an Italian man. They both spoke broken English, so that was interesting. Anyway, moving on. The passing of factual information is not enough. There needs to be a covenant love, a deep love relationship. Think about James 2:19, “You believe that there is One God, good. Even the demons believe that and they shudder.”  Demons have more factual knowledge about God than you do. Factual knowledge is essential, but it’s not enough. There has to be a heart of love, a covenant love relationship of affection. In Matthew 7 Jesus said this, “Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven but only those who do the will of my Father who is in Heaven. Many will say to Me on that day, Lord, Lord did we not prophesy in your name and in your name, drive out demons and perform many miracles?  Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evil doers.”  What is Jesus saying there?  Not, I don’t have any facts about you. Oh, He has all the facts about them, 100% of the facts. But, they had no love relationship.

So, are you conscious of the presence of God in your life by the Holy Spirit?  Do you have a sense of His presence with you?  A sense of intimacy with God?  A sense that He loves you?  That He calls you His son or daughter, that He calls you by name. If you have a sense of intimacy and love affection with God, that’s what knowledge of God means. A sense of close covenant relationship. Like David said in Psalm 63, “Oh, God you are my God. Earnestly I seek you. My soul thirsts for You. My body longs for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water. I have seen You in the sanctuary and beheld Your power and Your glory because Your love is better than life. My lips will glorify You.”  A sense of that kind of intimacy with Moses and God on Mount Sinai where he says, ” Now show me Your glory.”  And he says, “No one can see My face and live. I’ll put in the cleft of the rock and I’ll cover you with my hand. You’ll see my back as I do by.”  There’s that intimacy between God and Moses.

Do you have a sense of a love relationship with God?  A sense of the presence of God?  I think it’s a matter of savoring God, of tasting, of seeing and savoring God. Like it says in Psalm 34:8, “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”  Imagine, picture a table with a heavy white linen tablecloth and like a cut crystal dish and a scoop of raspberry sorbet and a heavy spoon next to it, plated with silver. Imagine picking up that heavy spoon and scooping out raspberry sorbet, and putting it in your mouth and it’s melting on your tongue. You can taste the raspberry and then swallow. Well, that description is not the same as eating the raspberry sorbet. There’s nothing that I can say verbally that will be equal to experience of actually having it on your tongue. Have you experienced the love of God?

Jonathan Edwards, in his classic sermon, “Divine and Supernatural Light,” put it this way, “There’s a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There’s a difference in having a rational judgement that honey is sweet and having a sense of that sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes but a man cannot have the later unless he has had the idea of the taste of honey in his mind.” “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

V. The Means to That Goal: The Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation

Alright, so that’s the end of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians. What’s the means to the end? He says that it’s the “Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.” Well, here I believe, different than almost every English translation, that the “S” in Spirit should be capitalized. I don’t know if it is in the ESV. I know it’s not in the NIV. So, what’s the difference in lowercase “spirit” and uppercase “Spirit”?  Well, uppercase Spirit would refer to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Lowercase spirit would be a disposition in the human heart, a spirit inside yourself. Thank kind of thing. A spirit of wisdom.

I think it makes perfect sense that we were just a moment ago talking about the sealing of the Spirit. That this is the ministry of the Holy Spirit of God, to give you “wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of Him.” It is the Holy Spirit’s work to unveil God and to make God appear glorious to you. It is the Holy Spirit’s work to do this in our hearts. That is the Spirit of revelation. 1 Corinthians 2:10, 11 says, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s Spirit within him. In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.” So the Spirit searches these things and brings them to us.

Now, he doesn’t do this by extrabiblical revelations. That’s where cults start. Muhammad had a revelation from an angel and wrote the Koran. Joseph Smith had a revelation from an angel and wrote the Book of Mormon. Mary Baker Eddy had a revelation and started Christian Science. Those are cults or false religions. I’m not talking about a spirit of revelation that comes outside the bible. I think it comes from what the Lord has given us through the ministry of the apostles and prophets, the church built on the foundation of the Scripture, the apostles and prophets, and the Holy Spirit takes the scripture and makes the truths about God clear to you. He illuminates your mind and your heart. We’ll talk more about that, God willing, in the future. The Holy Spirit illuminates and makes these things clear, without that illumination, you’ll never know God.

Martin Lloyd-Jones told the story about a relationship between William Wilberforce who was an evangelical Christian, politician, tremendous leader in England in the early part of the 1800’s, who was instrumental in the fight against the slave trade and eventually against slavery itself. He had a good friend named William Pitt, who was Prime Minister, not a believer. Wilberforce was deeply concerned with his friend. Deeply concerned with his soul. He would try to give him books. He would try to share different things with him. William Pitt was a brilliant man. The two of them had interesting, spicy conversations but still, nothing. Well, one day, William Wilberforce heard that a famous preacher, a power preacher named Richard Cecil was preaching nearby where they lived. So, he persuaded William Pitt to go with him to hear. Wilberforce said, “I had never heard a clearer exposition of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  Never clearer explanation of the deity of Christ, the death of Christ on the cross, His resurrection from the dead and the need for repentance and faith. So much so that Wilberforce was swimming in tears. But, Pitt sitting next to him was not moved at all and afterward Wilberforce asked, “Well, what did you think?”  He said, “I must tell you, Wilberforce, I concentrated carefully on everything that man said. I tried to follow his train of thought and his argumentation and honestly, I have no idea what he’s talking about.”  Now, William Pitt was more intelligent than Wilberforce, but if the Spirit of God does not give you wisdom and “revelation and the knowing of him,” you will never know him. But, if the Spirit of God does give you wisdom and revelation, you will know him more and more. That is the work of the Spirit.

VI. Application

Now, what can we take from this. What I would say is, I’ve already made an appeal to non-Christians to believe. I’m now going to make an appeal to you Christians to pray like this. This is a simple application. Look at your prayer life and say, “Do I pray like Paul prayed?  Do I pray without ceasing with thanksgiving to God the Father in the name of Jesus, by the power of the Spirit? And do I pray for other Christians like this and for myself? And, if not, I’m going to urge you and plead with you. Go to God and say, “Make me a prayer warrior. Change my prayer life. Give me this kind of intimacy that you gave to the apostle Paul.”

Father, we thank you now for what we’ve learned in Ephesians concerning Paul’s prayer life and concerning what he prayed for, for the Ephesian Christians and we give you thanks for it. We ask that you would transform our prayer lives, oh Lord. Make us powerful prayer warriors. Enable us, oh Lord, to pray as Paul prayed for the Ephesian Christians, that we would see an unleashing of power here in First Baptist Church as we have never seen before even in our lifetime. We pray in Jesus’s name. Amen.

The challenge and promise of genuine prayer:

Perhaps nothing in the Christian life holds so much promise coupled with deep problems as does PRAYER. I have had some of the richest times in my life in prayer… but I also struggle as most Christians do with a wandering mind and a weak will

Ephesians 1:15-17 is the doorway into a deeper prayer life… Context:

Ephesians 1:3-14… perhaps single greatest, most elaborate and complex sentence ever penned in literary history… the unfolding of clause after clause explaining the eternal depths of our salvation, from God’s gracious election of us in Christ before the foundation of the world, through His loving predestination of us to be adopted as his sons, through the gift of Jesus Christ, whose blood has worked full redemption for us, the forgiveness of our sins… through the giving of wisdom and insight to understand the purpose of His will to unite everything in the universe under one head, Jesus Christ… through the direct activity of the Holy Spirit in working in us to believe the gospel, through the sealing of the Spirit… giving us “authenticating proof” that we are children of God. All of this flowed through the pen of the Apostle Paul in one, long, glorious sentence of truth… like a flowing of radiant light and heat, sweetness and glory all wrapped up in words… words, words, one after the other, communicating infinitely deep truths

Having established in this one, long, glorious sentence these ineffable truths, Paul turns to PRAYER for the Ephesians

This is a powerful combination: the ministry of the Word and Prayer… the dual foundations of all genuine ministry

But as we listen in on Paul’s prayers for the Ephesian Christians, we are mindful of our own deficiencies in prayer… we read of the lavish promises God makes in Scripture concerning prayer:

John 15:7-8 If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you. 8 This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.

1 John 5:14-15 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 15 And if we know that he hears us-– whatever we ask– we know that we have what we asked of him.

We read testimonies of many of the godliest people in church history concerning prayer:

·        “God does nothing except in response to believing prayer.” John Wesley

·        “The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history.” Andrew Murray

·        The prayer power has never been tried to its full capacity…if we want to see might wonders of divine power and grace wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let us answer God’s standing challenge, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and might things which thou knowest not. ~ J. Hudson Taylor

Then we look at our own prayer lives, and we are brought up short… we are brought to grief; we wonder if we have ever really prayed at all; many Christians testify that they hardly pray at all, though they yearn to pray; many set aside time for prayer every day, and they have a “prayer list” and they follow some pattern for prayer, and they crank it out… but they know there must be SO MUCH MORE to prayer than that!!

So we can understand Jesus’ disciples when they saw Jesus derive so much pleasure from His prayer life; they saw Him get up a great while before dawn and go spend hours in intimate fellowship with God, pouring out His heart to His heavenly Father, listening to the Father’s answers, readying Himself to do everything the Father wanted Him to do that day; a perfect man leading a life of perfect prayer… who it seems could do or say NOTHING apart from the direction of God His Father…

Once, when Jesus’ disciples saw Him praying like this, the emptiness in their own hearts, the vanity of their own prayer lives was exposed; but awakened within them was this one yearning:

LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY!!!

Well, in God’s good providence, He has assigned to His choice servant, the Apostle Paul, a measure of the answer to that request… LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY!!! The Lord would say to us, “Have you considered my servant, Paul? Have you read how he prays for the churches in the various epistles he wrote? Learn from him!”

So, we come to Ephesians 1:15-23, we come to one of the richest of Paul’s prayers for the Christians he was ministering to… and as we study his model prayer, we can grow in amazing ways to be more powerful and effective in prayer, and more intimate in our relationship with our heavenly Father

I.   Thanksgiving for the Ephesians’ Genuine Conversion

Ephesians 1:15-16 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

A.  General division of prayer: thanksgiving/worship and petition

Daniel 6:10-11 Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before. 11 Then these men went as a group and found Daniel praying and asking God for help.

Thanksgiving can be for anything God IS or HAS DONE… so it can be combined with WORSHIP and ADORATION

But then, prayer is a humble acknowledgement of our own NEEDINESS and GOD’S ALL- SUFFICIENCY… we are weak, He is strong; we need filling, He is able to fill us abundantly

So in Ephesians 1, we see Paul beginning with thanksgiving, and moving on to intercession, making requests for the Ephesians

B.  What moved Paul to pray?

1.  “Ever since I heard about your FAITH in the Lord Jesus and your LOVE for all the saints…”

2.  Paul heard greatly encouraging reports about how the gospel had transformed their lives

3.  In other words, he heard compelling evidence of the GENUINE CONVERSION of the Ephesians

C.  Marks of genuine conversion

1.  Faith in the Lord Jesus

a.  It is not enough for someone to “believe in God”… Jews believe in God;

Muslims believe in God; Hindus believe in God

b.  Paul is moved by reports of their faith in the Lord Jesus

c.  The gospel came to Ephesus, and at the center of that Gospel was the truth about “the Lord Jesus”

i)  This cuts to the center of what a sinner has to believe to be saved, and it reduces it to the simplest level possible

ii)  Jesus IS the center of the gospel… specifically His saving work on the cross

Ephesians 1:7 In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins

iii)  Faith in the Lord Jesus means I have abandoned all hope of self- salvation; I know I am a sinner; I have cast myself completely on the Lord Jesus, trusting in Him alone to save me from hell

iv)  But who was this person who died on the cross? He is the LORD JESUS, Paul says

v)  “Lord” = the deity … “Jesus” = the humanity; this man, human being, born of the Virgin Mary, fully man, fully God

vi)  This included all the miracles Jesus did, proving His deity; His ability to heal every disease and sickness; his power to feed the 5000 with a few loaves and fish; his ability to still a storm with a word; to drive out demons; even to raise the dead!! The LORD JESUS

vii) The Ephesians came to believe that their Savior was human, able to shed his blood and die… but also that He was GOD, as proven clearly by His resurrection from the dead

Romans 10:9 … if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

viii)  This conviction can only come by the direct work of the Holy Spirit on their hearts:

1 Corinthians 12:3 no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.

d.  Paul heard that these Ephesians had left their pagan ways and had come to believe that the LORD JESUS was their personal Savior

2.  Love for all the saints

a.  This is the other great transformation the Holy Spirit… a deep love for other Christians

b.  The natural man, not born again, has no desire for fellowship with Christians

c.  They tend to despise them, think of them as narrow-minded bigots, killjoys, hypocrites, uneducated, worthy of mockery or disdain

d.  But once someone is born-again, they have a deep desire to be with other Christians; a delight in fellowship with people who also love Jesus as they do

e.  How do we explain this? How can anyone explain away that I would MUCH RATHER be with a genuine Spirit-filled Christian than the most famous and wealthiest and beautiful non-Christian?

f.  The Holy Spirit had worked this genuine love for other Christians in the hearts of these Ephesians…

Application: are these two evidences clearly seen in your life? Do you have faith in the LORD JESUS and do you have a deep love for all the saints?

D.  Thanksgiving: Because God is Responsible for Every Genuine Conversion

1.  These two evidences of genuine conversion MOVED PAUL to thanksgiving, because God the Father had sovereignly worked them by His Holy Spirit

2.  So Paul gave credit where credit was due…

3.  Thanklessness is a great sin in the unregenerate heart

Romans 1:21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

4.  Thanksgiving is based on God’s sovereignty in salvation

Romans 6:17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.

THANK GOD YOU OBEYED!!!

5.  We should all GIVE THANKS to God for our own conversions!

The TEN LEPERS:

Luke 17:15-18 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him– and he was a Samaritan. 17 Jesus asked, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”

6.  But Paul has moved way beyond that… he NEVER CEASES in giving thanks for OTHER PEOPLE’S CONVERSION

a.  God deserves just as much praise for someone else’s salvation as He does for yours

b.  The more mature you become in your prayer life, the more thanks you will give for the grace you see in other people’s lives

II.   Perseverance in Prayer

A.  Paul Says from the First He Heard, He Has NEVER STOPPED Thanking God

Ephesians 1:15-17 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16 I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17 …. that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

B.  The Need for Perseverance in Prayer

1.  Prayer was meant to be continual… constantly flowing up to God

2.  Part of our problem in prayer… how prone we are to grow weary and give up

3.  Jesus’ parable of the PERSISTENT WIDOW:

Luke 18:1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up.

4.  God does not move immediately in response to our prayers… we need PERSEVERANCE in everything we do in life; prayer is a great training ground for this

5.  Especially in worship and thanksgiving, learning to thank God without ceasing for your own salvation and that of other saints is so HEALTHY and strengthening

C.  Paul’s Example

1.  Paul prayed day after day for the saints…

2.  He refused to rest, refused to cease; God was every bit as worthy of thanks on Tuesday as He was on Monday; as worthy when things were going well as when they were going badly

3.  Paul said he literally “made remembrance” to God of the Ephesian saints; he spoke their names, remembering them to God in prayer

4.  So also should we!

III.   Prayer to the God of Our Lord Jesus, the “Father of Glory”

ESV Ephesians 1:17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him

A.  Paul’s Prayer: Directed to God the Father

1.  Say this reverently: Sometimes a problem when Christians focus so much on Jesus and neglect the Father

2.  Everything Jesus did was to reveal the Father to us, show us the Father, bring us to the Father

3.  We should not have an unreasoning and unscriptural fear of the Father as we overemphasize fellowship with Jesus, walking with Jesus, praying to Jesus

4.  So many hymns are directed to Jesus… and yet the Scripture directs us always ultimately to God the Father

5.  Paul consistently in his prayers in the epistles offers them to God the Father

6.  Some have said (rightly so) there is no jealousy in the Trinity

a.  It’s not wrong to pray to Jesus, though there’s only one example of it I can find and that’s when Stephen was dying and he said, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!”

b.  There is no example anywhere of prayer to the Holy Spirit

c.  Every other prayer in the Bible is offered directly to God the Father

7.  Jesus is the MEDIATOR… He came to open a door of access to God the Father

Hebrews 10:19-20 Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body,

8.  The Spirit empowers us to pray through Jesus’ mediation to God the Father

Ephesians 2:18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

9.  So we should focus our hearts on this biblical pattern… approaching God by the mediating work of Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit

B.  True Prayer Begins with Remembering Who You’re Speaking To!

1.  Too often we rush into the presence of God and forget who He is, how powerful and awesome and radiant

2.  We are so prone to extremes: to be either so terrified by the majesty of God, feeling that we need a perfectly worded prayer, very formal sounding, with high grammar and vocabulary… OR to be thoughtless and careless and cavalier about prayer, flippant, irreverent

3.  So we must STOP! PAUSE! THINK! REFELCT!! Who is this Being you’re about to address

C.  Paul Prays to “The God of Our Lord Jesus Christ”

1.  This is a vital reflection for us… how Paul identifies the Person to whom he is praying

2.  We do not pray to an unknown God… as Paul said to the Athenians:

Acts 17:23 as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

3.  God has revealed Himself in history, and in scripture

4.  We call on Him based on that prior revelation

5.  Old Testament: God identified by past encounters

To Isaac:

Genesis 26:24 “I am the God of your father Abraham. Do not be afraid, for I am with you; I will bless you and will increase the number of your descendants for the sake of my servant Abraham.”

To Jacob:

Genesis 31:13 I am the God of Bethel, where you anointed a pillar and where you made a vow to me.

To Moses, God identified Himself this way:

Exodus 3:6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

6.  God is the God who created heaven and earth, the seas and everything in them; God is the God who made a way through the Red Sea; God is the God who chose David and made him King over all of Israel; God has been identified in all these ways and others in the Old Testament

7.  BUT Jesus is the Mediator of a New and better Covenant! So Paul identifies God as the God of our Lord Jesus Christ

a.  When Jesus became human, he identified with us

b.  He approached God the Father as a man and believed in the Father, trusted Him, obeyed Him

c.  He loved His Father, prayed to Him, sought to please Him at every moment

d.  And after His resurrection, He speaks to us like this:

John 20:17 Go … to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'”

8.  We pray to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus has revealed God to us and enabled us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him

Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

D.  The Father of Glory

1.  Paul also identifies God as “the Father of glory”… (NIV has “the glorious Father”, but “Father of glory is better!!)

2.  God is not merely glorious… He is the source of ALL GLORY there is the universe… he is the unending fountain of glory; it flows from His person like a vast river flows from a limitless spring

3.  Glory = radiant display of God’s perfections; God is the one

1 Timothy 6:16 who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light

Meditate on that phrase: UNAPPROACHABLE LIGHT!

I picture the seraphim in Isaiah 6 covering their faces because the glory of the Lord is so overwhelming

I picture the sun, 93 million miles away, burning, burning, burning…. With unapproachable power; the sun is so huge, (1.4 million km in diameter), you could line 103 earths side by side next to each other to reach from pole to pole of the sun…

If we approached the sun, and somehow God willed that we not be incinerated by its inconceivable heat, we would be overwhelmed by its sheer magnitude… stretching fifty earth diameters up and fifty earth diameters down… a wall of fire, a raging inferno; a single flare erupts from the surface, emitting more energy than the earth would use in a billion years… it is a TERROR, a raging inferno of power; and God is infinitely greater; He created it and sustains it at every moment

4.  God is the Father of Glory…

a.  Hebrew for “glory” = “weightiness”, “massiveness”

b.  God is the weighty center of the universe, visible and invisible

c.  God has put His glory on display in the creation and sustaining of the universe…

d.  BUT far more, in the unfolding of the gospel

i)  We see God’s power; God’s wisdom, God’s immutability; God’s love; God’s patience; God’s kindness;

ii)  All of these on radiant display in the gospel

iii)  He is the “Father of Glory!”

5.  This is the God to whom Paul prayed… the God to whom we pray as well

6.  Thus as we begin to pray, we come with a sense of overwhelming AWE and reverence…

Matthew 6:9 This, then, is how you should pray: “‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name

IV.   The Goal of Prayer: Knowing God

ESV Ephesians 1:17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him

A.  We Come to Paul’s First Intercession

1.  We come to God because He is capable of giving us infinitely more than all we could ask or imagine!

2.  We glorify God by asking Him for GREAT THINGS because He is a GREAT GOD!!!

3.  God wants us to make our requests known to Him

4.  But note what is the first request…

B.  “In the Knowledge of Him”

1.  Paul is going to pray many more things than this

2.  He want the Ephesian Christians to know and be assured of many things

3.  But Paul starts his requests for them in this way… that they might KNOW GOD… know Him more deeply, more intimately, more powerfully than they ever have before

C.  A.W. Tozer and J.I. Packer

Tozer: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Knowledge of the Holy

Packer: “What makes life worthwhile is having a big enough objective, something which catches our imagination and lays hold of our allegiance, and this the Christian has in a way that no other person has. For what higher, more exalted, and more compelling goal can there be than to know God?” Knowing God

D.  An Infinite Study

1.  Amazing! These Ephesian Christians had already come to know God…

2.  Conversion is not the end of this study… it is merely the beginning!

3.  Paul wants them to know God MORE AND MORE

4.  There is absolutely no end to this study… to know the infinite person of God will take an infinite amount of time; and that’s what we’ll have in heaven—an infinite amount of time; and that’s what we’ll do in heaven—study God forever.

E.  Jesus’ Deep Heart Cry for Us

1.  Definition of Eternal Life

John 17:3 Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

2.  This is the great tragedy of the lost world:

John 17:25 Righteous Father! The world has not known You.

3.  This is the work Christ did for us at conversion

John 17:6 “I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world.

2 Corinthians 4:6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

4.  This is the ONGOING work He will do in us forever

John 17:26 I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

F.  What is this “Knowledge”

1.  It IS factual… knowledge ABOUT God

a.  There can be no basis of a love relationship without factual knowledge

b.  God wants us to know everything we can about Him… all the facts; who He is, what He has done

c.  Those facts are revealed plainly in the Bible and also in creation

d.  We should be zealous to gain as much factual knowledge about God as we can be knowing the Bible intimately and clearly

2.  But it is INFINITELY MORE than that

a.  Demons have far more accurate factual knowledge about God

James 2:19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that– and shudder.

b.  God wants us to go beyond mere factual knowledge

c.  He wants us to have an intimate knowledge of Him, a LOVE RELATIONSHIP

Matthew 7:21-23 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

d.  He wants us to have an ENCOUNTER with the living God!!

Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “It is almost impossible to put this truth into words, but it means that God should be real to us, and that we should be conscious of Him and conscious of His presence. I make no apology for asking whether you have ever known this? Is God real to you? When you get on your knees to pray, do you know that God is there, do you realize His presence?”

3.  So many accounts of this

a.  Jacob at Bethel:

Genesis 28:16-17 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” 17 He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”

Exodus 33:12-23 … Then Moses said to him, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” 17 ¶ And the LORD said to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.” 18 Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” 19 And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.” 21 Then the LORD said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

c.  Psalm 63

Psalm 63:1-3 O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 2 I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. 3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you.

d.  Job

Job 23:3 If only I knew where to find him; if only I could go to his dwelling!

Lloyd-Jones: “He had not lost his theoretical knowledge of God; he had not ceased to know the attributes of God and about the works of God. That was not what Job was seeking. He had experienced fellowship and communion with God, but for the time being he had lost it. What he was seeking was the Person Himself, direct contact from the living God.”

At the end of the book of Job, God “shows up”… Job has an unforgettable encounter with the living God as God speaks powerfully to him out of a terrifying storm:

Job 42:5 My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.

4.  Seeing and Savoring God

Psalm 34:8 Taste and see that the LORD is good

Have you TASTED the goodness of God? Savored it? Imagine a cut crystal dish of raspberry sorbet on a table covered with a white linen table cloth. Imagine a heavy silver spoon next to it. You can picture the sorbet in your mind, you have a sense of the sweet delicate flavor, of how it would be if it melted on your tongue and the sweet liquid flowed down your throat… but thinking about it and actually tasting it are two different things.

Jonathan Edwards, “A Divine and Supernatural Light”

Thus there is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance.

Have you tasted the goodness of God for yourselves? Do you KNOW His goodness?

V.   The Means to that Goal: The Spirit of Wisdom and Revelation

ESV Ephesians 1:17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him

A.  “Spirit” not “spirit”

1.  Almost every English translation has the word “spirit” with a lower-case “s”

2.  But this is clearly the ministry of the Holy Spirit… it is His secret and powerful work to minister the knowledge of God directly to our hearts

3.  The Holy Spirit is the deposit guaranteeing our inheritance

4.  In order to do this, He takes some of the future intimate knowledge we will have of God in heaven and brings it to us RIGHT NOW

B.  The Spirit of Wisdom

1.  The Spirit works wisdom in us… the ability to perceive and accept and delight in the truth about God

2.  Not merely the wisdom of Solomon that seemed very much tied to the physical creation and daily life

1 Kings 4:32 – 5:1 [Solomon] spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs numbered a thousand and five. 33 He described plant life, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of walls. He also taught about animals and birds, reptiles and fish. 34 Men of all nations came to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, sent by all the kings of the world, who had heard of his wisdom.

3.  But the wisdom of God embodied in scripture and in Christ… the wisdom of spiritual things in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus

4.  This is wisdom only the Holy Spirit can give

1 Corinthians 2:7 we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.

a.  The philosophers and scientists of this world could not reason their way to God

1 Corinthians 1:20-21 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

b.  But this wisdom is Christ and it is God’s secret nature

1 Corinthians 1:23-24 we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

1 Corinthians 2:10-11 The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. 11 For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

C.  The Spirit of Revelation

1.  God cannot be known by us unless He reveals Himself to us

1 Timothy 6:16 God dwells in unapproachable light.

J.I. Packer: “All my knowledge of him depends on his sustained initiative in knowing me.”

2.  God unveils Himself to us by the ministry of the Spirit as He reveals Christ

a.  This special and deep knowledge of God does not come by extrabiblical revelations

b.  The cult leaders all claimed to have special revelations from God

i)  Mohammad did, and wrote the Koran

ii)  Joseph Smith did, and wrote the Book of Mormon

iii)  Mary Baker Eddy did, and founded Christian Science

3.  The Spirit’s external work: the inspiration of Scripture

a.  We come to know God better by the work the Spirit has ALREADY DONE in inspiring the perfect Scripture

Ephesians 2:20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.

4.  The Spirit’s internal work: the illumination of Scripture

John 16:13 But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth.

Psalm 119:18 Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.

5.  The Spirit’s additional internal work: sealing to a greater and greater degree

D.  Without The Work of the Spirit, We Cannot Know God At All

Lloyd-Jones tells story of William Wilberforce trying to lead his intelligent powerful best friend William Pitt to faith in Christ. Wilberforce had been converted by reading Philip Doddridge’s book The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul. Wilberforce was an active Christian, instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.

William Pitt was brilliant, the Prime Minister of England, but he had no understanding at all of spiritual things. Wilberforce was extremely anxious about his friend’s eternal soul; he sought to get him to come to church regularly. Finally, Wilberforce heard that a powerful preacher named Richard Cecil was going to be preaching in a certain church. Wilberforce persuaded Pitt to go. Richard Cecil preached a very powerful message, so powerful that Wilberforce had never heard such a clear exposition of the gospel and of spiritual things in his life; he was deeply moved, even to tears. After the service had ended, Pitt turned to Wilberforce and said, “You know, Wilberforce, I did my very best to concentrate with the whole of my power on what that man was saying, but I have not the slightest idea as to what he was talking about.”

Pitt was far more intelligent than Wilberforce, but the same message that so powerfully moved the soul of Wilberforce was incomprehensible to Pitt.

That is why Paul prays for the Ephesian Christians to have the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to know God. They were babes in Christ, and needed to know God more and more… that is the ongoing work of the Spirit through the scripture today.

VI.   Application

A.  Do You Know God Like This?

1.  Have you had the powerful clear revelation of God the Father through Jesus Christ His Son?

2.  Have you seen yourself to be a sinner, desperately in need of salvation?

3.  Has the Spirit made Christ crucified glorious and beautiful to you?

4.  Has the Spirit shown you God’s loving face, His tender mercies in Christ?

B.  If You Are a Christian

1.  Do you see how zealous Paul is that the Ephesian Christians know God netter and better?

2.  Does this awaken inside you a sense of yearning for intimacy with God?

3.  Can you begin praying these things for your own heart? Could you pray this:

Psalm 42:1-2 As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?

4.  Can you ask God to work in your prayer life in the same way?

5.  Can you begin praying these things for other brothers and sisters in Christ?

6.  Can you set the ideal of knowing God as the central quest of your life?

7.  Can you search the Scriptures every day to see what they may show you of the glory of God?

8.  Can you “Taste and See” that the Lord is good?

9.  Can you learn more and more to cherish God the Father, the Father of the Lord Jesus, the Father of Glory… to go directly to Him in prayer?

10.  Ask God to make you a prayer warrior like this… filled with persevering prayer, of this type…spiritually minded, praying these kinds of things for your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends, your coworkers, your neighbors, your pastors and elders…