Life has its trying times times. Some would say we have more than our share right now. Life is not easy. We only go round once. And for most it’s no merry-go-round ride, but a difficult, bumpy journey.
People pressures get us down; problems pile up; worries and anxieties persist. The fires of our faith on the hearths of our hearts slowly burn down. Life has a way of dampening those fires. Our passion for life burns down as our energies are sapped, our reserves are depleted, and our hopes smolder. Disappointments in our personal lives, discouragement over the financial recession and despair over world crises stifle the flame of expectation about the future.
All of this, multiplied by our personal needs, equal a depleting burn out. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing
left on the hearth of our hearts but burned out white ash.
But look again! There is a red ember in that white ash and the Living Christ is here to put a bellows on that ember until it ignites into a flame and then a blazing fire again.
Spurgeon was right, “ We have great needs, but we have a great Christ for our needs!”
What do you want from the Savior this morning? Vision, courage, strength, power not only to cope, but to triumph in these tough times? Here is the really good news: tough times don’t last; tough people do. And Christ is here to toughen us up with the truth about how He can turn our struggles into stepping stones.
My message this morning is not one more admonitionary, motivational talk about what you need to DO in these tough times, but rather about what is offered to you to survive in them. Then, instead of crying, “Lord, get me out of this!” we can pray, “Lord, what do You want me to get out of this?” Our motto will be, “Things don’t work out—God works out things!”
What I want to say this morning is based on a powerful passage of Scripture from Ephesians by the Apostle Paul that speaks directly to this problem we all face at times: growing weary, being discouraged, and facing the temptation of losing heart.
There is no passage in the New Testament that soars with a more magnificent assurance of strength for our struggles than Ephesians 3:13-21. Nowhere does Paul sound such depth of spiritual emotion or rise to such heights of passion as in this mind-stretching passage.
It is the Apostle’s prayer for the churches at Ephesus and Roman Asia Minor in about 63A.D, but it had implications for all of the first century church, has had an impact all through the centuries, and is the prescription for you and me for the times when we are tempted to lose vibrant hope.
As a Hebrew, Paul usually prayed from a standing position. But he told the Christians at Ephesis that when he prayed this prayer for them, he bowed his knees. “Bowing the knees” was a phrase used to express prostrating yourself. Paul wanted the Christians to know the deep earnestness of this prayer for them. Calvin believed that Paul had his face in the dirt of the floor of the prison from which this prayer was dictated. If that was so, he would have had to take down the Roman guard who was chained to him. Parenthetically, it is bracing to remember that they had to rotate off the guards who guarded the Apostle, because they all were being converted to Christ!
The Apostle Paul’s prayer was prayed for Christians who were being tempted to lose heart. They were deeply concerned about the tribulations he was going through in Rome and for the challenges all of the followers of Christ were facing. It was not easy to be a Christian in Ephesus or Asia Minor. Note the verse that immediately precedes the opening of the prayer: “Therefore I ask that you do not lose heart” and then the prayer begins….”For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The Greek word for loss of heart used by Paul is ekkakein, from the verb ekkakeo, pronounced, enkakein, to be dispirited, downcast, to grow weary, lack courage, faint, or lose verve and vitality.
There’s a deeper meaning to ekkakein. It can mean to give in to the forces of evil. This would be the meaning of ekkakomen in Galatians 6:9 “Let us not keep on giving in to evil while doing the good.” And II Thes. 3:13 “Do not grow weary in doing good.” Here “enkakesete” implies to behave badly in, to be cowardly, to lose courage, to flag, to faint. It can happen when the evidence of evil in the world around us actually draws us into giving in to evil in our own choices and behavior. It is a growing hopelessness that brings us to helplessness in temptation. Paul’s friends at Ephesus were tempted to discouragement about their own challenges because of what was happening to him in prison.
“If this could happen to the great apostle, what chance do we have!” seems to have been their mood. Paul seeks to communicate that his suffering will bring the Gentile Christians glory. He is in prison suffering on their behalf as their champion, standing firm for their inclusion as Gentiles in God’s new society, His family, the church.
And for us today, what is the solution to ekkakein? The same as Paul prescribed for the Ephesians.
Glory. The glory of Christ billows the passion we need. Paul prayed that God would grant the Christians, “according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith”(Eph 3:16-17).
The riches of the Father’s glory is what I like to call the “glory circle” of the Trinity shared by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Father glorifies the Son, the Son glorifies the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit glorifies the Son. And then the church is drawn into the circle. The Father constantly seeks to glorify His Son in the church. The “glory of God” is a term used to express that which we apprehend of His presence. Christ is the glory of God manifested in the church. Glory is the metaphor for the majesty and might of the presence of God:” kabod” in the OldTestament and”doxa” in the New Testament. Savor the richness of the Greek word, “doxa,” glory. This is a doxological congregation, if you will, called to honor, extol, and obey the Presence, Christ Himself. We speak of the Presence in the present , “We behold His glory, doxa, as of the only-begotten from the Father full of grace and truth” (John 1:14 tense change and addition mine).
Now press on! The whole theme of Paul’s prayer is for us to receive the glory, the Presence, of Christ. We sense the full impact of this prayer this weekend as this congregation is recalled to be a Christ-centered fellowship of His disciples. Christ is actually here! Your purpose is to
preach Christ, teach Christ, share Christ together, and lead people to Christ. He alone is the antidote for loss of heart.
Over fifty years of ordained ministry I have learned to take no one for granted. Underneath the polished surface, people need Christ: To meet Him, open their lives to Him, and commit their lives to be His disciples. That’s the reason that, almost every day of these fifty years, I have prayed for the churches I have served, for the Senators and their families and staffs during the years as Senate Chaplain, using Paul’s prayer for the Christians in Asia Minor. This morning, as your friend in Christ, I pray it for you.
PAUL PRAYED FOR THREE ANTIDOTES TO LOSING HEART. THE FIRST IS: to be “strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (Eph. 3:17).
The strength of Christ’s indwelling Spirit is the secret of not losing heart. We all need strength for our own set of circumstances in a time when others are buckling under and losing heart. According to Paul’s prayer for the first century Christians, strength is Christ in our inner being-mind, emotions, and will.
Paul calls our inner being the “inner man.” Peter called it “the hidden man of the heart.” What is meant in both expressions is the unseen self, distinguished from the visible, material body. It is the inner self in which the Spirit dwells and gives strength: intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, conscience, imagination, memory, will. “ The inward man refers here to the personal, rational self, the moral I, the essence of the man which is conscious of itself as a moral personality.” (Expositors).
Paul quickly identifies who takes up residence in us. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith..” The word “dwell” is katoikesai, made up of oikeo, “to live in as a home,” and “kata, “down,” thus “to settle down and be at home.” The tense is aorist, showing finality. So the translation should be, “that Christ might finally settle down and feel at home in your hearts.” It is the risen, reigning Christ who makes His post-resurrection home in you and me. Awesome? Yes! But don’t miss the secret: it is by faith that this residency is prepared for the Savior. Just as we received Christ as Lord and Savior when we became Christians, it is by the gift of faith that we invite Christ to live in us and make us like Himself. And who gives the gift of faith to believe in this magnificent mystery? The Holy Spirit! When we make room for the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit makes room for the Lord Jesus.**
Here again we witness and experience the glory circle at work. The Holy Spirit glorifies Christ, gives us the gift of advanced faith to yield to the infilling of Christ, and with Christ alive in us we are strengthened with might. His Spirit, pneuma, fills our spirit, pneumati. It is the wondrous antidote to losing heart. It is the power for life’s problems, for times of suffering, for conflict, temptation, and opportunities. As Alexander MacLaren, that great Scottish preacher of another generation put it, “You shall be strengthened with a power that will fill and flood all your nature if you will allow Him, and will make you strong to suffer, strong to combat, strong to serve, and strong to witness for your Lord.”
Life has a way of de-powering us. It saps our energies, depletes our courage and drains our patience. We need strength—strength to think clearly, love creatively, endure consistently; strength to fill up our diminished reserves; strength that flows from the limitless source of Christ’s Spirit, filling us with power. Christ has been designated by the Father to care for us, abide in us, and to provide exactly what we need each hour of each day and night to accomplish what He has guided us to say and do: Inflow of supernatural thinking power beyond our IQ, emotional equipoise when under pressure, resoluteness in our wills, vision for our imaginations, and energy for our bodies equal to the outflow in the rough and tumble of life. Because He knows what’s ahead, He prepares us with precisely what each day will demand. Most of all, He promises never to leave nor forsake us.
The Lord’s own words on the night before He was crucified become our motto and mantra: The actual rendering of the Greek of John 16:33 is, “Take courage, I have overcome the world.” He whispers in our souls, “ I will go before you to show the way, behind you to be your rearguard, beside you to befriend you, above you to watch over you and within you to give you courage.” The church is to be a courage-engendering center where members and friends receive supernatural strength to press on. Week after week people come to this church to receive strength for the struggles of life.
It is very moving to consider the working of the physical heart. Everyday it beats 100,000 times, sending 2,000 gallons of blood surging through our bodies. The physical heart is no bigger than our fist. It has the mighty job of keeping blood flowing through the 60,000 miles of blood vessels that feed our organs and tissues. A man’s heart weighs about 10 ounces; a woman’s about 8 ounces.
If the physical heart is amazing, the spiritual heart is even more so. It has been created to receive Christ’s Spirit, to be His post-resurrection home! We were born with a physical heart; we are reborn spiritually with a new heart. And in that spiritual heart, Christ strengthens us with might to overcome our negative spirit, exorcising it of ekkakein.
THE SECOND ANTIDOTE Paul prayed for was superlative love. He goes on in his prayer to claim the four dynamic dimensions of this love: “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17-19). The word for “able “ is exischuo. the word for “comprehend” is katalambano, meaning, “to lay hold of so as to make something one’s own, to seize, to take possession of, mentally grasping some idea or truth,” the words, “to know” ginosko, knowledge gained by experience, the word for “passes” is “huperballo, “to throw over or beyond, to transcend, exceed, excel.”
The first dimension of this superlative love is width. This means it is inclusive. Regardless of what we have been, we are called and cherished, set apart to belong first and foremost to the Lord. Nothing can change this. We are saints not in stained glass windows but in the rough and tumble of contemporary life. Nothing can change our status. When His arms are outstretched He reaches around us and holds us with tenderness and the strength of His nail pierced hands. This inclusive love overcomes our self-condemning, self-justifying attitudes. Christ is here reaching out to you who admit how much you need Him, embracing you with the wideness of His mercy. Don’t ever forget that grace is receiving love we don’t deserve and mercy is not receiving what we do deserve.
Note that Christ’s love is not only wide, but also long. This means that His love is inescapable. There is no place where the Lord is not there waiting for us. There is no distance we can go where He is unable to reach us. His embracing arms are long enough to reach us wherever we may have wandered.
Christ’s love is also deep. The cross plummets down to the bottom of our shame and loss. No abyss was ever found deeper than His love can sound. When we think about the cross and close our eyes to see the cruel nails and crown of thorns, and Christ crucified for us, we still can only see a little part of His great love which like a fire is always burning in His heart. When we nurse a memory of failure, or of a relationship we find it difficult to mend, when we ache inside over what people have done to themselves or others, or to us, we rediscover that we cannot ever sink beyond where He can reach us.
But Paul is not finished. He says that Christ’s love reaches not only to the depths but also to the heights to the person we are meant to be, to the unlimited possibilities He has planned for us.
A saint of old wrote the following lines on the walls of his cell regarding the love of God: “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade; to write the love of God above, would drain the ocean dry; nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.”
Our glory-induced passion is also the motivation for the church’s missional calling to what Andy Crouch has called “culture making.” I might add—culture shaking; certainly “ culture reshaping.” This church is a worshipping congregation, a healing community, an equipping center, and a deployment center for the ministry of the laity. To be in Christ is to be in the ministry. A flagrant fallacy of most local churches is the omission of this essential biblical truth. Not this church. We need not send people into the world; they are already there--in homes, the corridors of political power, the offices of business and professionals, the operating rooms and clinics, the assembly lines of manufacturing, the educational institutions, and labor forces of this community, the halls of government. In addition to helping the saints know who they are and whose they are, they also need to know for what they were intended. The ministry of every Christian is to be a minister-to share his or her faith, to reach out to those who suffer, and to apply the righteousness and justice to the realm of work and the crises of society.
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak to a group of eleven recently retired CEOs of major U.S. companies. After I had talked about the ministry of every Christian, one of the men turned to the others in the group and asked, “In all the years of attending church while you were leading your company, did your Pastor ever share the biblical truth that you are a minister and that you had been placed in your strategic position by the Lord to discern and do His will above and beyond all else?” Not one of the men responded affirmatively, even though all were members of prominent churches and had sat under highly recognized scholar-preachers. It made me wonder about some other CEOs who have made headlines in the past year because of the greedy way they loaded their parachutes with wealth before leaving their companies in distress and themselves in disgrace.
As leaders, we never can evade the responsibility to discern the plumb line of the righteousness and justice of the Lord for their realms of responsibility.
But not only that! We are called to be hopeful thinkers who can envision the best that the Lord has planned for ourselves, our families, our congregations, our jobs in the healing ministry of hospital care, the community, the nation and the world. And that brings us to the third aspect of Paul’s prayer.
The Apostle concluded his prayer for the Christians in Ephesus and Asia Minor by praying that they would experience the Lord’s serendipitous interventions of Christ. “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us. To Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”
THIS IS THE THIRD ANTIDOTE FOR NOT LOSING HEART. A SERENDIPITY IS AN UNEXPECTED HAPPENING IN USUAL CIRCOMSTANCES. Horace Walpole coined the word after reading the story of The Three Princes of Serendip (the Ceylon Islands) who went in search of treasures and were astounded by the treasures they found along the way because of the interventions of Providence. To be in Christ is to live a life full of surprises. The Lord delights to surprise us with on time, in time for our needy time interventions. And this is exactly what the Apostle promises in one of the greatest “He is Able” statements. Allow me to repeat this awesome assurance: “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church BY Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen” (Eph. 3:20-21).
Consider the words: able, dunameno, exceedingly abundant, huperekperissou (the word is made up of perissos, “exceeding some number or measure, over and above, more than is necessary,” ek, which is perfective in force here, intensifying the already existing idea in the verb, here adding the idea of exhaustlessness, and huper, above), the power, dunamis, energeo, energizing from within. God is able to do for us and answer our prayers according to the efficiency, sufficiency, richness, and power working in us. Here is a translation that is helpful: Now to the One who is able to do beyond all things, superabundantly beyond and over and above those things we are asking for ourselves and considering, in the measure of the power which is operative in us.
Don’t miss the thrust of this ascription: Christ is the glory of God, the Presence of God, but also the glorifier of God. And how does He do that? He works in us to give us the power to envision what He wants us to attempt by His supernatural power. We are given the gift of discernment, x-ray vision, of what is the Lord’s best and then to fully trust Him to accomplish it.
Consider the circumstances in which we live and the problems we face. Do we have the Lord’s vision for each of these circumstances for ourselves, our families, our homes, our work, our neighborhoods, this church, or in the projects He has given us to do? Have we taken time to allow Him to impart His vision, the power to believe it, and the freedom to trust Him completely to achieve it?
It is Christ’s way to go beyond the best that He has done in our lives before. He knows that only what happens to us can happen through us. Therefore get ready!
As my own mentor and friend, the late James S. Stewart used say, “ There is always a certain element of surprise and tension and discovery in an authentic encounter with Christ. All that we have learned up to this time is not the end of growth; whatever we have experienced in our personal relationship with Christ is only a fraction of what is in store for us; whatever we have accomplished is only a foretaste of what Christ has planned; that the power of the Holy Spirit who vitalized the birth of the church at Pentecost and shaped the course of church history has not been exhausted or His gifts fallen into abeyance, but will at any moment, burst our anew.”
Our Lord is promising wonders He has never done before in our lives. There is no limit to his transforming power, no end to His redeeming grace, no exhaustion of His enabling courage when we throw caution to the wind and as a result of a new-found intimacy with Him, dare to trust Him to do mighty things in our future.
When Christ wants to drill a person
And skill a person, and thrill a person;
When He longs with all His heart
To create so strong and courageous a person
That all will be amazed,
Watch His methods, Watch His ways:
How He persistently perfects
Whom He royally elects.
How He calls a person
To be filled with His Spirit,
To behold His glory,
To be made in His image,
To love like Him
To forgive like Him
To serve like Him
How he bends but never breaks
When His goodness He undertakes.
How the person’s gold he refines
With love that never declines
And a ministry He defines.
How He uses whom He chooses
And with vision He infuses
And with courage He induces
To try His splendor out
Our Lord knows what He’s about
His promises are true,
His strategy involves you!
I’m very thankful that Paul prostrated himself and allowed the Lord to pray through him the prayer we’ve considered this morning. Like the soldier who had to get down with Paul because of the handcuffs that bound him to the apostle, we can never again pray feckless, furtive prayers in tough times. And through them we can claim more than we ever imagined!
We need not fear the fading of the glory of Christ in our lives. You and I have been destined for a character transplant when Christ takes up His post-resurrection residence in us. We read the awesome assurance of this in II Cor. 3: 17-18. We need not be like Moses who had to put a veil over his face so that the people of Israel would not see the fading glory of his encounter with Yahweh on Mount Sinai. “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” We are given the privilege of seeing in the mirror the evidence of the transformation Christ is performing as His character is imputed into our character.
As long as you remain Christ centered, you need not fear a fading glory. The name Ichabod, the name given the Temple when the Spirit of the Lord departed, need never be given to you.
This is commitment time. I want to join with you in what Elton Trueblood called “ the company of the committed.”
When I think of commitment I remember a quote from Wolfgang Goethe. I keep it on my desk and often place it on a podium when I speak. I’ve gone back to it when I needed to open the floodgate for the flow of supernatural strength, superlative love and surpassing power of Christ to experience His glory and express His passion. Goethe said,
“The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all
manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius power and magic in it. Begin it now!”
There is a poem for trough times I repeat whenever I need fresh courage, usually every day! It was written ay Annie Johnson Flint. I think the reason I find it so moving is that it was written in tough times in her life when she trusted the Lord with her physical pain and received strength to press on.
HE GIVETH MORE GRACE WHEN THE BURDENS GROW GREATER.
HE SENDETH MORE STRENGTH WHEN THE LABORS INCREASE.
TO ADDED AFFLICTION HE ADDETH HIS MERCY,
TO MULTIPLIED TRIALS HIS MULTIPLIED PEACE.
WHEN WE HAVE EXHAUSED OUR STORE OF ENDURANCE,
WHEN OUR STRENGTH HAS FAILED ERE THE DAY IS HALF DONE,
WHEN WE REACH THE END OF OUR HOARDED RESOURCES,
OUR FATHER’S FULL GIVING HAS ONLY BEGUN.
HIS LOVE HAS NO LIMIT, HIS GRACE HAS NO MEASURE,
HIS POWER NO BOUNDRY KNOWN UNTO MEN;
FOR OUT OF HIS INFINITE RICHES IN JESUS
HE GIVETH AND GIVETH AND GIVETH AGAIN!
