Eyes Wide Open | Becoming a Praying Church, Week 1 | Dan Westman | New North Church

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With that, let's go right to this week's message.

Well, good morning, everybody.

It's uh great to be with you here at New North.

Uh I I feel like we're family already, even though this is my first time with you up here on stage.

I've known Rob for a number of years and Scott as well.

And Lindsay tells me so many wonderful things about you, so it really is a gift to be here worshiping with you and kicking off this series on the prayers of Paul.

A few years ago, I did a study through all of the prayers of Paul that we have in the New Testament.

And I came away from that study with some uh convictions about how malnourished my prayer life was.

You know, we as we see the things that Paul prays for in these letters, I found a stark contrast between that and the things that I often pray for.

I find myself asking God that I would have a good day, and then I read Paul asking that people would have faith to persevere through whatever difficult circumstances life would throw our way.

I find myself thanking God for the sunshine and a good meal, wonderful things to thank God for, and yet I see Paul thanking God for his grace in the person of Jesus.

And I walked away from that study with the firm conviction that you cannot have a mature faith while having an immature prayer life.

And that sent me on a journey of longing for a deeper life of prayer over the last several years that has helped bring me to a deeper place with the Lord.

So I'm really excited for the next eight weeks that you have as a church to look at these amazing prayers of Paul.

And for this morning, the opportunity to kick that off by looking at the first prayer that Paul prays in the book of Ephesians.

Well, back in the first century, there was a city in Greece called Eleusis, just across the Aegean Sea from the city of Ephesus.

And Eleusis was known as the home of a group of religions called the Eleusinian Mystery Religions.

Everybody in that world knew about these religions, what they were.

At the heart of these group of religions was the belief that there were a group of elite people who had access to some information, some knowledge, that they had discovered the key to life, and that only they knew it.

And so they would have people traveling from all around the Mediterranean world to come to Eleusis to meet with these gurus.

As they met with them, they would go through these rites, they would perform these rituals, they would say these incantations, and at the end of this, they would be given access to this exclusive information about how to live life well.

Then they would be sworn to secrecy.

And you know, there's a number of people over the years since then who have claimed to have figured out the key to life, or the key to some component of life that will unlock the keys to success for you.

They say, Oh, well, I've I've figured out the secret to getting in shape and to losing weight, or or I've figured out the secret to making your first million through AI, or I figured out the secret to truly finding love.

And this secret can be yours too if you're willing to pay for it.

This morning, as we look at this prayer from the Apostle Paul in the book of Ephesians, we're gonna see that the prayer that Paul prays here is a prayer of illumination.

He's asking that we would come to see something that we don't normally see, that we would come to know something that we don't normally know.

It's a kind of secret that Paul's talking about.

But this secret that Paul talks about is not just accessible to the elite.

It's not just accessible to those who say the certain incantations or perform the certain rites or pay a certain amount of money.

This secret that Paul prays that would be revealed to us is available to anyone who looks to Jesus and asks for it.

It's an open invitation.

And as Paul prays this prayer, he hopes and prays that we will be given spiritual sight so that we can really know God.

That's what we're gonna see as we look at this.

And as we look at this prayer, we're gonna find in this prayer three different marks of a mature faith.

Three different marks of a mature faith that all show up in our life of prayer.

So let's go ahead and jump into our text, looking at the first few verses of the prayer.

And Paul begins with a word of thanksgiving, Ephesians chapter 1, verses 15 and 16.

Ephesians 1:15

Paul says this.

Right off the bat here in this prayer, we get a picture into some of Paul's priorities in prayer, some of the things that he cared about most and asked the Lord for or thanked the Lord for.

What we see here is that he does not begin this prayer with thanking God for the most, the newest successful business venture of the Ephesian Christians.

He doesn't begin by thanking God for the raise that this particular person got or for the financial well-being that this person has come into.

He doesn't thank God for the things that we often might turn to thank God for.

Instead, he thanks God for the things that are most important to him.

And he does this all throughout his letters, thanking God for things like faith, hope, and love.

And that's exactly what he does here, thanking God for the faith that they have and for the love that this group of people shows for one another.

In so doing, we we learn something about what our priorities in prayer ought to be.

And I hope that that's one of the big takeaways from this series is getting our priorities straight, keeping first things first in prayer.

As Paul moves on in his prayer, we get to his first request in verse 17.

Here's what he asks for.

I keep asking 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.

In these two words, we see that Paul is moving here in the direction of a prayer for spiritual sight.

Both of these two descriptions of the Holy Spirit are descriptions that get at his ability to help us see things clearly.

He's called a spirit of wisdom.

You see, in the New Testament, wisdom is not just about living well.

Wisdom is not just about having knowing how to make the right decision in this situation or that decision or that situation.

What wisdom is about in the New Testament is about primarily recognizing the grace of God in the person of Jesus.

About seeing something about Jesus that we don't always see.

So Paul prays for this spirit of wisdom.

And he asks for the spirit of revelation.

Revelation is the act of making something known that has otherwise been hidden, of helping us to know something or see something that we would not otherwise see.

Just yesterday, my family and I were at a baby shower for some dear friends of ours who were having their first child this summer.

I don't get invited to many baby showers.

In fact, I'm not sure I've ever been invited to another baby shower, but we got invited to this shower.

A few months ago, this family, uh this couple went into the doctor for their 20-week anatomy scan for their baby.

This is where they take the ultrasound and they they count all the fingers and toes and they make sure everything is looking right.

And if you want, they can also reveal to you the gender of your baby.

What's happening there?

The ultrasound tech is making some information known to you.

They're letting you know something that you could not otherwise know by helping you see something that you could not otherwise see.

And this is what the Spirit of God does.

Paul prays for a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we might know something that we could not otherwise know by seeing something that we could not otherwise see.

And what is it that Paul prays that we would know?

What is it that Paul prays that we would see?

What he prays for is that we would know God more and more deeply.

We would have a deep and abiding knowledge of God that flows out of relationship with him.

So here we see the first mark of a mature faith.

Mature faith seeks to know God deeply.

A mature faith, fueled by mature prayer, seeks to know God deeply.

In his book, Relational Spirituality, the author Todd Hall, who's a psychologist, distinguishes between two different types of knowledge, two different ways of knowing.

On the one hand, he has what he calls explicit knowledge, and on the other hand, what's called implicit relational knowledge.

You know, explicit knowledge is knowledge of facts, but implicit knowledge is knowledge of persons.

Explicit knowledge is the kind of thing that you can talk about and explain with words.

Implicit knowledge is the kind of knowing that you feel in your gut.

When it comes to our knowledge of God, explicit knowledge of God is the stuff of theology textbooks, and implicit knowledge of God is the stuff of prayer, the stuff that's formed in relationship.

You know, the Apostle Paul cared a lot about both kinds of knowledge.

In fact, the letters that we get from the Apostle Paul are what make up the source material for our theology books today.

He's all about explicit knowledge of God.

And yet, here in this prayer, he's not asking that we would just know things about God, that we would know true things, that we would be able to describe God.

Well, what Paul is praying for here is a deep and abiding knowledge of God that flows out of relationship with God.

A few years ago, I was uh taking a class for this degree I'm working on, and it was a class on prayer.

Uh and I loved this class.

I was so enjoying all that we were learning, and I would wake up early in the morning and we're learning about prayer, and I'd open this book that we're reading, and I'm just soaking in this.

I'm like, oh, I love prayer, I love prayer, I love prayer, this is so good.

And then God kind of asked me, like, do you love prayer or do you love learning about prayer?

Because you're getting up in the morning and you're getting all excited about reading about prayer, but you're not actually praying.

That's the difference between explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.

It's the difference between knowing things about God or knowing what God expects of us and actually knowing God deeply.

And knowing God deeply requires the spirit of wisdom and revelation to open our eyes, to help us see who God is, who we are, so that we can go deep in relationship with God.

That's the first thing that Paul prays for here, and the first mark of a mature faith.

But as he goes on, we see another request that he makes.

This time, not just a request to know God more deeply, but for something else.

Let's see what Paul says, starting in verse 18.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, in order that you may know the hope of which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance and his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.

You see, Paul here is he's continuing this prayer for spiritual sight.

He prays that the eyes of our heart may be enlightened, that is, that we would see something that we don't normally see, so that we might know something that we don't normally know.

But what is it here that the Spirit helps us to see?

It's not just seeing God more clearly, it's not just seeing ourselves more clearly, it's not just knowing God more deeply.

Instead, he lists off three things that are already ours in Christ.

He says, What I pray that the Spirit helps you to see is what Jesus has already done for you.

You see, mature faith does not just ask for things from God, mature faith recognizes what is already ours in Christ.

That's the second mark of a mature faith that Paul gets at here.

A mature faith recognizes, it sees, it realizes what is already ours in Christ.

A few years ago, we were celebrating the birthday of one of my kids.

I've got three boys, and uh it was one of their birthdays, and we we gathered the family together and we got out the presents, and we were gonna celebrate his birthday by opening gifts.

And as we did, one of my other kids, who was three years at the time, I looked over at him and I noticed that he was starting to tear up.

And I said, Buddy, what's what's going on?

What's wrong?

And as he choked back tears, he said, I wish it was my birthday so I could open up presents.

You see, he he had his attention in that moment was focused on what he didn't have that someone else was getting instead of what he already had.

And he had plenty.

And this is what Paul prays that we would not just ask God for things, but we would already that we would also recognize what God has already given us.

It's perfectly normal and appropriate for a child to be more concerned about what they want that they don't have than what they've already been given.

And it's very appropriate for an immature faith, a baby Christian, to be more concerned about what they want from God than what God has already given them.

But the mark of a mature faith here is a faith that recognizes what God has already given to us in Christ.

And there's three things that Paul points to in this passage.

There's three things that he prays that we would recognize are already ours.

The first thing he identifies is the hope to which we have been called.

Hope, biblically speaking, is not just wishing or longing or wondering what might come.

It's not wishful thinking.

Hope, in the biblical sense, is a certainty about what will happen in the future and its implications for us in the present.

It's the certainty that one day Jesus will come back to judge the living and the dead.

That one day Jesus will come back to redeem and to restore creation to its original intent.

That one day Jesus will come back and give us life and life to the full in a way that goes far beyond what we could ever taste or experience in this life alone.

The certainty of what is coming that allows us to live differently in the present.

Paul says, that's available to you now in Christ.

You don't have to wait, you don't have to long, you don't have to ask, that is already ours.

The second thing that he identifies here is around this language of inheritance, that we would recognize the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people.

Paul is not here praying that we would understand that we have an inheritance in God.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul makes that point.

Here his point's a little different.

Here he actually talks about the fact that we are God's inheritance.

This taps into this theme that runs all throughout Scripture of the people of God as God's treasured possession.

Did you know that you are deeply treasured by God?

That in Christ you are God's special possession, his child, that he looks at you with love, that he gets excited to spend time with you, that he longs to go deeper in relationship with you because you are precious to him.

Paul says this reality that we are God's inheritance is already ours in Christ.

We just need the Spirit of God to come and open up our eyes so that we can see it.

The riches of his inheritance in his holy people.

And we know that he feels this way about us because he didn't hold back his love, he sent his love down in the person of Jesus to live among us, to suffer, to be crucified on a cross, and to raise, to be raised up from the dead.

Paul grabs onto that idea, and as he goes from here, he's going to begin talking about this power.

This power that raised Jesus from the dead.

He says that the third thing that is already ours in Christ is the incomparably great power of God.

The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is available to us right here and right now.

We just need the spiritual eyes to see it.

We need the scales to come off.

We need our blinders to be removed so that we can recognize the power that is ours, that is available to us through the presence of the Spirit in our life.

There's an ancient Christian prayer in the history of the church called a prayer of recollection.

The prayer of recollection is the practice of reminding ourselves of who we are in Christ.

I try to begin my day each day by praying a prayer like this.

It's not a word-for-word verbatim prayer that you repeat, but rather a posture of prayer, reminding yourself of what is already true of us in Christ, what God has already given us in Jesus.

And so I begin my mornings in this place, opening up my hands in the presence of God and just reminding myself of what is already true of me in Christ.

God, I am yours.

I belong to you.

I am your child.

I am forgiven.

I have received your grace.

I am your treasured possession.

And I begin my day this way because it's so easy as I move throughout the day to live as if those things aren't true.

To look to other things as my source of identity.

And I want to bring myself back to know this.

This is what I know.

This is who I am in Christ, and live the rest of my day out of that place.

As Paul goes on in his prayer, he shifts in the second half of verse 19 here from these things that he's asking God for, these requests he's making of God, into a posture of praise.

And for Paul, the turning point here comes from his reflections on the power of God.

Let's see where Paul takes us from here.

Picking up in the middle of verse 19.

That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.

Far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come.

And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be the head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him which fills everything in every way.

For Paul, he moves from reflecting on this power of God that raised Jesus from the dead, and it's like he just gets so carried away from the idea of this that he just kind of moves to this praise, this exaltation of Jesus as the one who defeated sin and death, rose from the dead, and is seated at the right hand of God, ruling and reigning in power and dominion over all of creation.

The city of Ephesus in the ancient world was known as a city that was consumed with its quest for power.

Magical power in particular.

In 1973, Arthur Clark, who was an inventor and a futurist, said this any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Think about that.

He's writing 50 years ago.

If he could see the world that we live in with our smartphones and computers and AI and all of this, it to people living 50 years.

Years ago, this just looked like magic, much less a hundred, two hundred, two thousand years ago.

I wonder if at times, though we may not be consumed with power through magic, I wonder if we look to technology or other things for some of the same things that the people of Ephesus look to for magic.

The ability to control the world around us, to think that we can do things in our own power, that we don't have to rely on someone outside of us.

I wonder if AI makes it more difficult for us to actually trust in God because we can just open up Gemini.

I wonder if we've become less dependent on one another because we have things like DoorDash and Uber Eats and Amazon Prime.

Technology is great.

There's many benefits to it, but one of the potential dangers that we need to be aware of is the fact that it can make us feel like we are able to control our own lives well enough to make them work.

And as Paul reflects on the power of God, he says, I want, I pray that the Spirit would open your eyes so that you can recognize that Jesus is the one sitting on the throne, ruling and reigning over all creation, so you don't have to.

You can give up control of your life to the one who rules the heavens and the earth.

In this, we see the third mark of a mature faith.

The third mark of a mature faith is that mature faith submits to Jesus.

Mature faith submits to Jesus.

It doesn't try to control everything.

It doesn't go on this quest for power to make sure that life works the way that you want it to.

A mature faith recognizes that Jesus is the one sitting on the throne, that he is the one ruling over the cosmos, and it bows a knee to him.

That's what mature faith looks like.

You know, this kind of mature faith has the potential to radically change our prayer lives.

If we bow a knee to Jesus as the one who rules the world, as the one who offers his power, makes it available to us in his spirit, this has the potential to radically transform our prayer lives.

What are the things that you're asking God for?

Are they things that you can just get without God's help?

Are they things that you can do in your own power and strength, or are you praying big prayers that are destined to fall way short unless God steps in and shows up?

Paul's trying to expand our imagination for what is possible through the power of God, the power of God that he makes available to us in the person of Jesus and through the presence of his spirit.

And so he sent me a new grill.

And this thing was awesome.

It was a pellet grill, so I could smoke, I'm making ribs and pulled pork, it can sear steaks, it can do all of it.

This thing was great.

I started cooking like all of our meals out on this grill.

A couple years into using this new grill, though, it started to malfunction.

Some piece broke.

And so I'm in contact with customer service, trying to figure out what piece I need and get it ordered, and they're just not being that helpful.

One day my uncle calls me and I happened to mention to him that I'm going through this issue with the grill.

And my uncle Ken says, Oh, don't worry about it, I'll take care of it.

Two days later, the new part showed up on my front step.

I installed it and got it working.

See, what I didn't know at the time was that my uncle was good friends with the founder and inventor of this grill.

So he just sends off a quick message and says, Hey, here's what's going on.

He perfectly diagnoses it and drops the part in the mail to show up the next day.

What Paul's trying to get at in this passage is the fact that, yes, there is this kind of knowledge that we need in order to live well.

Right?

There is a secret to life.

Such a thing does exist.

But the one who has this secret is the one who designed the universe, who wrote the rules to the game, who built everything that we see with our eyes, that built this, created this beautiful universe for us to live in.

And he's the one who knows how it works.

He's the one with all the power and authority.

And he prays that God would open our eyes to the reality of who God is so that we could know him deeply.

As friends, as lovers of God.

The hope that we have, the certainty of things that are to come, the reality of the fact that we are God's treasured possession, and the power that is available to us through the Spirit, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and seated him on the throne, ruling over all that is.

Paul prays that the Spirit would open up our eyes to these things so that we could access the secret to life, which is what?

To bow our knee to the one who is already on the throne and trust him with the outcome so that we don't have to take care of them ourselves.

To worship him, to honor him, to bring glory to his name, to enjoy our status as his children.

Paul says this is this is the key to life.

We just need the spirit to open our eyes so that we can see it.

And the way that that happens is through prayer.

So I want to give us a few moments here as we get ready to transition back into singing, to just invite the spirit to come and to open our eyes.

So would you join me in prayer?

Spirit, I'm I'm just kind of overwhelmed by the sense of your presence in the room with us here.

I have the sense that there are some of us here who have been searching, searching, looking all over the place to the key to life, to the thing that will finally make us happy, the thing that will finally give us joy, the thing that will finally replace our anxiety with peace.

But Lord, this morning we just step into your presence.

We ask that, Holy Spirit, you would open the eyes of our hearts so that we could see you more clearly, so that we could know you more clearly, so we could understand that when you say that you came so that we might have life and life to the full, that you meant it.

That life in you is the only life that's really worth living.

And we are in you, Jesus, and you in us.

So I pray, Lord, that you would open our eyes to the reality of your presence with us, to the gifts that are ours in Christ, to the reality of your love for us and your power that is available for us, the transforming power of your spirit.

Give us eyes to see, give us hearts that are soft to the things of you.

Give us confidence in who you are and who you have called us to be.

We ask all of this in the holy, matchless name of Jesus.

Amen.

Hey, thanks for being with us, and we really pray that God spoke to you through his word today.

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Thanks again for joining us.

God bless you, and we'll see you right here next time.