GOOD FRIDAY service: March 29 at 7pm

Want a weekly email with encouragement and upcoming events? Sign up.

Close Menu X
Navigate

Knowing God

April 8, 2018 Speaker: Mitchel Kirchmeyer Series: Jesus Is Alive...Now What?

Passage: Ephesians 1:15–23

How can you know God better?

I grew up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin so the outdoors was a big part of my childhood. My dad is an avid outdoorsmen so I did a lot of hunting while growing up: deer, bear, grouse, rabbit. My favorite was turkey hunting.

Turkey hunting season was in the spring and we usually went in April. Spring is when turkeys are looking for a mate. Male turkeys gobble to broadcast their location as they look for hen turkeys. But their gobbling also broadcasts their location to us so I always found it exciting to try to sneak up on them. At night, turkeys find trees with horizontal branches to sleep in. This is called roosting. So we’d try to discover where the turkeys were roosting at night. Then in the morning, before the sun came up, we would quietly work our way close to where they were sleeping. We’d have turkey calls that sound like hen turkeys and as the sun came up, we’d try to attract the male turkeys to us with those calls. Our aim was to draw them toward us as soon as they flew out of the tree.

It wasn’t fun getting up at 5:00am to beat the sun, but one benefit was getting to experience the world around us waking up. We would be in our position before there was any light. We could barely even tell what things looked like around us. As we waited for the sun to come up and the turkeys to wake up, I’d look out at my surroundings, trying to make out what I was seeing. Sometimes in the dim light of the moon, I could guess what I was looking at. But then as the sun began to come up, it would reveal things more fully and more clearly. Trees and bushes and hills and valleys would come into view. As the sun’s first light began filling the forest, one bird would wake up and start singing, then two, then three, then a choir. As the sun crept higher into the sky, the world was waking up and we were being shown the beauty all around us that we couldn’t see in the dark.

Series Introduction
Today, we are beginning a four week series for the month of April. We just celebrated Jesus’ resurrection with Easter. Jesus’ resurrection proves that he was telling the truth when he said his death would open up a new relationship with God to us. We can now be forgiven of our sins and know God in a personal relationship. But what exactly does that mean? How do we know God in a personal way? We are going to spend four weeks exploring the benefits of Jesus’ resurrection and how we can know God in a series called “Jesus Is Alive...Now What?”

Sermon Introduction
This week, we are going to be looking at Ephesians 1:15-23, which is a prayer to know God better. Prayer is talking to God and this passage will teach us what to ask God in order to know him better. In those early morning hours turkey hunting, beauty was all around me but I couldn’t see it until the sun came up. With God, the beauty of who he is has been made available to us but sometimes we can feel like we are sitting in the dark and need the sun to come up so we can see him.

The big question this passage answers is: how can you know God better? How can you know God better?

Paul’s Prayer (Ephesians 1:15-23)

The book of Ephesians is a letter that Paul, an early follower of Jesus, wrote to a church he had helped start in the city of Ephesus about 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection (62 AD). In the opening passage of the letter (1:3-14) Paul explodes with twelve verses praising God for all the blessings he has given to those who surrender their lives to Jesus. These blessings were planned and sent by God the Father, they come packaged in Jesus, and they are delivered by the Holy Spirit.

Following this, Paul prays for the believers in Ephesus. Prayer, simply put, is talking to God. Verse 15 tells us why he prays. It says:

15 For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, (Ephesians 1:15-16)

Paul is thankful and motivated to pray because it is evident God has worked in their lives. Faith and love are still the evidence that God has worked in someone’s life. If you are learning to live in daily dependence on Jesus and you are loving others, that is good evidence that God has worked and is working in your life.

How does he pray for them? Verses 17 says he prays:

17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened (Ephesians 1:17-18a)

Notice how Paul prays. The Bible tells us that there is only one God but this one God exists in a loving unity of three equally divine persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. One God who exists as three persons. If you are new to Christianity, we call this the Trinity. God is a tri-unity - three divine persons united as one God.

Paul directs his prayer to the glorious Father. And he asks the Father to give them the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of God the Father. We learned during our Easter series that because of Jesus, the curtain that separated us from God’s presence has been torn in two. Now, when we believe in Jesus, God’s personal presence - the Holy Spirit comes to dwell inside us.

Paul calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. Wisdom can only come through revelation because wisdom is all about living rightly in God’s world and you can only live rightly in God’s world if you know the God who created it. The only way you can know someone is if they reveal themselves to you. I can try my hardest to know someone and ask the best questions in the world, but if they refuse to reveal themselves by answering me then I cannot know them. The Spirit reveals the Father to us so that we can know him on a deeply personal level.

The Spirit has already revealed God through human authors in the Bible, but Paul here says the Spirit can reveal to us by “having the eyes of your heart enlightened.” The Spirit “illumines” or “shines light on” who God is. We are in the dark about who God is until the Spirit shines light on him. None of us can know God apart from the Spirit’s work of revealing God.

Paul says the Spirit enables our hearts to see God for who he truly is. In the Bible, the heart is the core of a person’s being that drives and controls everything they do. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (NIV). Picture the heart like the driver’s seat in a car. Whoever is in the driver’s seat, controls where the car goes and what it does. The heart is the driver’s seat of a person’s life. And someone or something is always in the driver’s seat. Whatever you value most in your life will be in the driver’s seat. Whatever you see as most important, as highest priority, and as your greatest treasure. That is the thing you will trust. So whatever that is will be in the driver’s seat of your life, steering your life in the direction it wants you to go. It controls where you are going in life and what you do.

Paul wants God to be in the driver’s seat of the Ephesians’ lives. For that to happen, they need see God as their greatest treasure, highest priority, and most important. They need to value him above all other things. And in order to value him above all other things, they need to see him for who he truly is. If we truly know God, we would know how awesome he is, and he’d be worth everything to us and we would trust him with our lives. So Paul asks the Father to activate the Spirit’s light-shining work in them.

When I got up super early to go turkey hunting and sat in the dark, the beauty was all around me. I just wasn’t aware of it because I couldn’t see it. And because I wasn’t aware of it, I couldn’t appreciate it. The trees, the grass, the hills and valleys, and the spring flowers were all there even when it was dark.

The beauty of God is always there. God is never more or less glorious or worthy of our praise. The problem is that we suppress that truth. We’ve darkened our minds to it. We need light to be shed on it. We need the sun to rise in our hearts so we can be awakened to the truth about who God is and see him for all his glory. The Spirit is like the sun rising in our hearts to reveal the truth about God. The Ephesians have the Spirit and Paul is asking the Father to let the light of the Spirit to rise higher in their hearts so they see God more fully and clearly.

The big question this passage answers is: how can you know God better? The start of our answer is this: Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light. Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light

The question is: on what? What should we ask the Spirit to shine light on? That’s where Paul goes next. Take a moment and write these three words on your bulletin: hope, love, and power. Now, circle the one that you need the most right now.

Hope, love, and power are where Paul is going to focus his prayer if you want to know God better, these are three truths that will tell you what God is like as a Father. Let’s start with hope in verse 18.

The Hope God Gives to Us (Ephesians 1:18b)

To review the whole prayer starting in verse 17, Paul prays this:

17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, (Ephesians 1:17-18a)

That you may know what? First:

that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you (Ephesians 1:18b)

Often we use the word “hope” to express wishes. “I hope it goes well.” “I hope you have a good day.” “I hope you have a good vacation.” But the hope that God gives to us is more than a wish; it is about a future that he has promised and that will certainly happen. It isn’t a future we wish would be true; it is a future that will be true because God always keeps his promises.

The future God promises to those who trust in Jesus is one with God and one without sin. God says that he is making all things new: he’s making us new and he’s making all of creation new. Imagine a car that came out of the factory new and in full working order but after years of abuse and neglect, its paint is chipping off, its engine is spitting and sputtering, there’s rust all over, and the interior is all ripped. Then someone takes it into their shop and puts in the work to restore it so it can roll out of there as a new car.

This is how the Bible pictures us and creation. God created us in full working order, but sin has corroded and corrupted us and the whole universe as well. It’s all broken down by the effects of our separation from God but he is restoring it all and he’s started with us. One day, it will all be fully restored and made new.

You can state it this way: Because of Jesus, the hope God has called us to is a future free from the presence of sin. The world will be without sin. At the same time, we will be with God. When God created the first humans, Adam and Eve, he walked and talked with them face to face. One day, we will be able to do that. We will know God fully and will be free from sin.

Jesus is doing that now. Jesus is God’s Son who took on flesh. He has a new body untainted by the effects of sin and he is in the presence of God as a human. Jesus’ present existence is our future existence.

The big question this passage answers is: how can you know God better? The first answer is: Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the hope he gives to you. Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the hope he gives to you.

God calls us to a future with him and without sin. That is our certain hope. If you want to know God better, you need to see him as a Father who has called you to a guaranteed hope when you had none. Let’s turn to the second truth Paul wants us to know about God.

The Love God Has for Us (Ephesians 1:18c)

He continues in verse 18. He asks the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on:

what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, (Ephesians 1:18b-c)

Parents can leave their kids an inheritance after they die. Perhaps it’s a house or some money or some land or a car. The Bible talks about inheritance in two ways. First, God gives his children an inheritance. Our inheritance is what we just talked about: it’s the hope to which he has called us. It’s the hope of inheriting a world without sin where we live with God in his presence. It’s the hope of a whole new creation. That’s our inheritance and what we have to look forward to.

Second, the Bible talks about God receiving an inheritance. When God brought the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he called them his treasured possession and his inheritance. An inheritance is something of great value that is set aside for someone to receive. Paul calls all Christians “saints” here, which means “holy people.” “Holy” means “set apart.” God purchased us out of slavery by Jesus’ death and set us apart for adoption into his family. Now, when God looks at us, he sees us as his treasured possession of great value and he looks forward to finally receiving us into his presence.

Once we did not belong to God’s family. We were alienated and estranged from him. But when God adopts us into his family, he loves us with a love deeper than we will ever know. He rejoices over you, cherishes you, treasures you, calls you his treasured possession, and considers himself rich to have you as his glorious inheritance. After we have trusted in Jesus, we look forward to a future with God and God looks forward to a future with us.

The big question this passage answers is: how can you know God better? The second answer is: Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the love he has for you. Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the love he has for you.

If the hope God gives to us is about one day being free from the presence of sin, the love God has for us is about being free from the penalty of sin. The essence of sin is a desire to replace God as the King of our lives. We want to be on the throne instead of him. We want independence and refuse to submit to him. We’d rather reign over our own kingdom rather than live in his. But if we separate ourselves from God, we separate ourselves from the Giver of life and we experience death in every way - spiritually, emotionally, physically, relationally, mentally. Jesus took on the penalty for our sin. He died in our place to bring us back to God. We can be free of sin’s penalty because Jesus paid it.

Now, instead of being separated from God, we can be embraced with his love as sons and daughters. Jesus was totally sinless. He never did anything that separated him from God. Imagine a relationship where neither of you ever did anything that hurt the other person. That’s the relationship Jesus, God the Son, has with God the Father. Now, because of Jesus, we enjoy that same relationship. All the barriers between us and God are torn down. God treats us the same way he treats Jesus. We get the same treatment. Jesus is God’s beloved Son who never sinned and now because we are forgiven we are treated as God’s beloved sons and daughters who are free of sin’s penalty.

God proved his love for you when Jesus died for you. He laid down his life for you. He took the penalty of your sin in your place. If you want to know God better, you need to see him as a Father who loves you, cherishes you, and is crazy about you. Let’s turn to our third truth.

The Power God Works in Us (Ephesians 1:19-23)

Paul continues his prayer in verse 19. This request gets the lengthiest description. Back up to verse 18. He asks the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on three truths:

what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might (Ephesians 1:18b-19)

This last truth is all about power. In this verse and the following, Paul piles on word after word to convey the power God is working in the life of someone who believes in Jesus. It’s like he went to the thesaurus and looked up synonyms for “power.”

What level of power does God work in believers? Paul says it is according to the “working of his great might.” In verse 20 and following he is going to use Jesus as the supreme illustration for what God’s great might does in the life of someone who believes in Jesus. He says in verse 20 that this is the great might:

20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 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. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:19-23)

God worked a great reversal in Jesus’ life. Jesus was betrayed, arrested, denied, mocked, condemned, crucified, then died. He had no heartbeat. No pulse. His body went limp and then stiff. He was a cold, lifeless corpse. And so he was put where all corpses need to go: he was buried in a tomb.

But God, raised him from the dead. He brought him from death to life. Jesus breathed again and not only that, but he had a new resurrection body, never to be corrupted by death again. And he was not only raised, but he was seated at the Father’s right hand in heaven. Jesus has been enthroned to the highest position of honor, privilege and authority. No one is above him - not now, not ever. And not only was he raised and seated at the Father’s right hand, but all things have been put under his feet. All other powers are not only inferior to him, but have been subjected to him. And not only was he raised from the dead, seated in glory above all others, and everything subjected to him, but he has been given as head over all things to the church. He is the church’s Lord, and Savior. He is the King taking care of God’s treasured possession.

The most stunning illustration of God’s power is bringing Jesus from death to life to Lord over all things. Talk about a turnaround. This is the great reversal of history. From condemned and dead to alive and reigning. But what Paul says here is that the very same power that God worked in Jesus to raise him from the dead is the very same power God works in us. God is doing a great reversal in our lives taking us from condemned and dead to alive and reigning with Christ in his kingdom.

Paul says that we are Christ’s body and he is our head. In the ancient world, the head was viewed both as the controlling and as the life-giving part of the body. The head tells the rest of the body what to do but also life flows from the head to the rest of the body. You can live without a hand, but you can’t live without a head. In the same way, Jesus rules over his body, the church, but he also fills his body with life - the same life and power that he has. And as he fills us, he is filling the world with his kingdom presence.

The big question this passage answers is: how can you know God better? The third answer is: Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the power he works in you. Ask the Father to shine the Spirit’s light on the power he works in you.

If the hope God gives us is about being free from the presence of sin and God’s love for us is about being free from the penalty of sin, God’s power working in us is about being free from the power of sin. We are no longer slaves to sin. The shackles that once held us in bondage have been broken. We are now able to say “no” to sin and “yes” to God. God is now in the driver’s seat. Sin isn’t.

Application

Hope, love and power. It’s important to note that Paul does does not pray for God give hope, love, and power to the Ephesians. He is praying that they would be aware of the hope, love, and power God has already given to them.

When I was turkey hunting in those early morning hours, the beauty was there even if I couldn’t see it. But once the light was shown on it, I began to see it and appreciate it. Similarly, the beauty of God is there even if we can’t see it. Even if we were sitting in a vault of treasures and wonders, if the lights were off we wouldn’t know how many riches were really in the vault. The Holy Spirit is the one who shines light on how rich we are to know God.

This truth can summarize what we are saying: Know that God is the gospel. The gospel is the good news that we get God. It isn’t primarily about getting out of hell or going to heaven when you die. No, the good news is that God is amazingly gracious, abundantly loving, overwhelmingly merciful, and wonderfully patient. The good news is that God gives us himself as the most extravagant gift we will ever receive and that we get to know him and enjoy him. The more you know God, the more you’ll become acquainted with hope. The more you know God, the more you’ll become acquainted with love. The more you know God, the more you’ll be acquainted with the power to overcome sin.

Do you have this God that we’ve been talking about today in the driver’s seat of your life? Or do you have some other version of god in the driver’s seat? A pastor and writer named A.W. Tozer once famously said: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Why? Because what you think about God will determine how you live and it is very easy to have a distorted view of him.

We have a tendency to think God is a big cosmic party pooper. He’s the lawgiver in the sky - the rule enforcer who’s always watching. He’s the ultimate fun sucker. He always has a scowl on his face and is waiting for you to get your act together. If that’s your view god and that’s who you have in the driver’s seat, you probably feel a heavy burden on your back and want to kick him out of the driver’s seat a lot because that isn’t a god worth worshiping.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, our culture wants God to be big mushy ball of love that never tells us “no”, sweeps all our misbehavior under the rug, and lets us do whatever we want. This god actually prefers to be in the passenger seat and let you drive because he wants you to define life and happiness on your own terms. This god might as well not even exist.

The good news is that neither of these is what God is like. God is better than both of these. Our God knows our deepest need is to be in a close, personal relationship with him where he guides us through life, takes care of us, shows us the way, and picks us up when we fall.

The problem is that there are so many voices in the world telling us what God is like. That’s why we need to pray and we need others to pray for us. Paul is praying that the Ephesians would know God better and you know what that tells us? It tells us that our prayers can make a difference in someone’s life. Your prayers can enable others to know and enjoy God more.

This also tells us that knowing God better happens with others. That’s why we have Gospel Fluency Groups. They are groups of 2-3 men or women and they are focused on growing in our knowledge and love of God. The best way to know God better is to do it with others. If you aren’t in one, consider making that a part of your life. If you are in one, commit to praying for others in your group that they would know God better. That is one of the best uses of your time.

Conclusion
With that said, we are going to pray for each other. Early, you wrote down hope, love, and power and you circled the one you need the most right now. Turn to the person next to and tell them the one you circled. Don’t explain. Just say hope, love, or power. They are going to take 30 seconds to pray for you then you are going to do the same for them. I’ll tell you when to switch. Then I will close us in prayer.

More in Jesus Is Alive...Now What?

April 29, 2018

Knowing God's Power

April 22, 2018

Knowing God's Love

April 15, 2018

Knowing Our Hope