"The Real Inner-Man" Ephesians 3:14-16 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Ephesians 3, verses 14 through 16.

Ephesians 3:14–16

And I'll even cheat and read the first few words of verse 17.

Paul says this for this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

This is the only verse in the Bible, this far started verse 17, that mentions Christ dwelling in our hearts.

We'll look at it briefly this morning and we'll spend all of next Lord's Day on that phrase.

And I draw your attention to that because it is such a common phrase that we use.

It marks so much of Christianity, even.

Have you asked Jesus into your heart?

Do you have the Lord in your heart?

What is your heart like?

We use that kind of language all the time, and it is very unusual in the Bible, and so I just draw your attention to this being the place where that phrase comes from.

Paul is praying that Christ would be evident in our hearts.

So I want to begin this morning by talking about the person who may likely be the most famous person from Anandale.

Annandale, where I live, where many of you live, right across the street.

This church isn't technically in Anandale, but the giant across the street is.

So it counts.

Chris McCanless.

There's been many books written about him, many movies made about him.

He graduated from Woodson High School in 1986.

His dad moved to the DC area when he was 10 years old, when Chris was 10 years old, so you know, 1978 or so.

His dad moved here working for NASA.

His mom had a job in the aerospace industry.

They eventually relocated here.

They quit their job, started their own consulting business out of their house, working for the federal government and specifically NASA.

And I just mentioned that because, as you many of you, I'm sure, are familiar with Chris's story.

For those who aren't, I'll explain it this morning.

But I want you to appreciate how much this story represents our world.

Not our world like the modern American world, our world like Annandale, our world like Springfield.

I mean, this is many of your stories.

You moved here when your kids were 10 or 8 or whatever, and working for the federal government, and you soon figured out that you can have the same job but make twice as much money as a consultant.

Can I get an amen?

And that's the trajectory.

I'm sure many of you have kids that go to Woodson High School.

He uh, Chris, began running cross-country and really fell in love with cross-country.

I've read uh much uh about him, and it's interesting how influential cross country was in his life.

The reason it's important, I think, to draw your attention to the cross-country element of this is because he felt oppressed, would be his word, by what was going on in his home.

He saw his parents grow more and more in love with money, more and more in love with their own success, more and more in love with their own business and their own pursuit of material things, a new deck on their back porch, a new upgrade to their yard.

That he felt trapped in that life.

And his parents, of course, were pushing that life onto him.

His parents, more than anything, wanted him to follow in their footsteps, I'm sure, as many parents do, and started pushing him to excel in academics.

They had a college fund for him, and they told him if he gets good grades and he can go to, you know, get into a good college, they'll pay for it.

He won't have to worry about that.

I mean, they so badly wanted their son to have success in this world.

And he didn't know how to escape that pressure from his parents, and so he turned to running.

He wrote in his own diary that he said, quote, I feel like when I'm running, that I'm running against the forces of darkness in society.

I'm running against the corruption of the world.

Running is the only thing that helps me push it away from my soul.

So I mentioned I dwell on this for a second because I want you to appreciate that worldview.

I want you to appreciate the allurement of, not just the worldview of cross country, but I want you to appreciate what draws people to the road that Chris is going to go down in his life.

This idea that this world is oppressive, that so much of our society is materialistic.

It does elevate material and financial success over any sense of holistic well-being or any sense of peace or family dynamics.

Would you rather have a child that gets good grades and goes to a good school and drives a, you know, a nice car and marries a nice wife and has a nice family without financial worry in life, or would you rather have a happy home life here and now?

And I know if you make it an either-or, everybody would say the latter, but if you look in your hearts, you would probably quibble with that dichotomy right there.

I think many people would say, you know, the secret to a family home life, a happy home life in the family is probably those things.

It is success.

And Chris saw through that in his own family.

He saw how insatiable his parents' desire was for success, the bigger business, the more money in life.

And so Chris did go to college.

He went to Emory down in Georgia, graduated, got accepted into Harvard.

But for those of you who know the story, he didn't go to Harvard.

He took the college fund that his parents had given him and gave it away to charity and became a vagabond, a nomad in life.

Sort of wandering across the country, going one national park to another, Arizona to New Mexico, California, South Dakota, where he worked on a farm up there for a while, back to Utah, where he went down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon illegally and phenomenally, as he would describe it, all the way down to Mexico.

It was one of the rare times where the river actually flowed into Mexico, and he happened to catch it right at that time and then lived in northern Mexico for a month and crossed back at the U.S.

border.

And in his own diary, he describes his exchange with the immigration officer at the U.S.

border on foot with a kayak kind of thing.

Like, when did you go into Mexico?

A month ago?

Where did you cross in?

On the river?

What have you done?

Lived in the desert.

Okay.

Welcome to America.

Chris was compelled, as he described it, by this desire to escape all of the pressing and crushing forces of this world.

And he believed the writings of Thoreau, and before Thoreau even Rousseau, that you can do that by being authentic to yourself.

That if you want to find peace in this world, the only way to find peace in this world is to push off the things of this world and to be true to yourself.

And you are most true to yourself when you are at one with nature.

And as you understand, society corrupts, society pushes down, society is filled with vice, not with virtue.

Society is filled with materialism, not with peace and harmony.

It is filled with politics, not progress.

And you think nature isn't like that.

And it's not so much that you're in love with the trees and the animals kind of thing, not like a nature lover.

That's not a right understanding of this philosophy.

But rather this idea that because the world is so corrupt, your own heart is the only thing that can be true.

And so it's best to find a place in this world where things aren't corrupting you.

And certainly nature is not corrupting your own heart.

This is the cross-country ethic taken to the world, really.

He embraced a worldview that you're only happy when you are at peace with yourself seen in nature.

And there's a longing, some people call this transcendentalism, because there's a longing inside this worldview to find something that transcends your own life in your own culture.

To find something more important than you.

To find something that is bigger than your own life that you can resonate with and that you can find peace with.

That's why it's often called transcendentalism.

Something bigger in this world than just you.

And that's not society, that's not in the next election, that's not the next political victory, or that's not the next promotion, or the next source of wealth for your family.

It's not based upon your grades or your even time in sports.

That's just based upon a principle of a force that's outside of you that resonates with you and gives you meaning in life.

That comes, of course, from Rousseau or Thoreau, or you see it in modern, you know, even nature poems kind of thing, Wendell Berry kind of novels.

Freud might have called this the psychological self, but for Freud it was all about, you know, physical intimacy, not for this worldview.

This worldview thinks there can be peace by connecting with something outside of you that resonates in the deepest part of your heart.

And so the goal behind that worldview is personal happiness.

I want you to understand that.

It is personal happiness.

This idea that you can be happy when you are freed from the pressures of this world.

What would your life be like if you bought into that worldview?

What would happen to you and your family?

If you saw capitalism as the enemy, nature as your ally, your inward soul as the judge and primary arbiter of what is true and what makes you really happy.

This is a worldview that certainly appeals to a lot of people.

If an astute person can see through all the trappings and sin and civilization and be drawn towards something else, what would that person's life look like?

And by the way, it's Solomon.

There's some elements of this transcendental worldview or this naturalistic worldview that echo in the Bible, aren't there?

I mean, it was Solomon who says that God has set eternity in the hearts of man.

Yet we can't fathom what he has done from beginning to end.

That's in Ecclesiastes.

And there's some truth to that.

That God has placed a desire in our hearts to resonate with something bigger than our hearts.

And people have a sense that this world is filled with deception.

So want a way to escape that.

And simultaneously, they understand that there is a limit to our own humanity.

We're at one place.

We're localized.

We're right here, right now.

Time existed before us, time will exist after us.

Certainly, there has to be something bigger than us to give our lives meaning.

Certainly, we should be able to connect with that.

This is a self that is not simply my body, but it's this concept of self that is my body and my soul, and my soul needs something more than what those around me can provide.

Many people turn to nature, but obviously it cannot be found there.

This is why I want to talk about his life as I did now, and I'll return to him later on this morning.

But in the context of Ephesians 3, verse 14, look at these verses again.

Ephesians 3:14

Paul says, For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named, that according to riches of his glory I can be strengthened in my inner being, he says.

This is where we pick up this morning.

This is Paul's prayer in verse 14.

I'm bowing my knees before the Father.

This is picking up where he had left off in chapter 3, verse 1.

Remember, he had the same introductory phrase there, for this reason I, Paul, he's going to get to his prayer, but he interrupts himself.

The last several weeks we've been looking at Paul's interruption, his parentheses, verse 1b all the way down through verse 13.

But now we're back to his prayer here.

We're finally back with what he's saying.

He says, This is what I'm praying for.

Before he gets exactly to the content of his prayer, he identifies whom he's praying to.

I bow my knees before my father.

This is a serious prayer.

We take I bow my knees almost as an idiom for praying, but understand the Jews usually prayed standing up.

The Jews would pray pacing around.

It would be unusual for them to pray down on the ground unless there was a form of desperation.

And that's what Paul is saying here, that he is down on the ground in desperation before the Father.

Speaking here of the first person of the Trinity.

He's pleading with the Father.

And remember, the persons of the Trinity are not interchangeable in Ephesians.

Paul continually through Ephesians works in progression from chapter, he does this in chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, beginning with the Father, who predestines all things according to the counsel of his will.

The Son, who is the Redeemer, who is redeeming those whom the Father has given him, the Spirit who is residing in those who have their faith in the Son.

The Spirit brings work backwards, the Spirit brings faith, the Son brings redemption, the Father predestines and chooses.

Paul has gone through this repeatedly through the book of Ephesians, and you could even argue that he's going through that to build to his prayer, where we see it again.

He's saying, right now, I'm bowing before the Father.

He's going to the head of the river, so to speak.

I'm bowing before the Father.

And he gives you this little phrase here, from whom every family in heaven on earth is named.

I don't want you to skip over that before we get to what he actually prays for, which we will get to this morning.

I just want you to pause and look at his little interlude here, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.

This is a really a pun in Greek.

In Greek, the word for family here.

It is the word for father, patria, patria.

It means, you know, family, you could say it, and then the ESV even renders it family, but Paul is saying, uh, some translations even render it fatherhood.

I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.

He's saying, God the Father is over every form of existence.

This is a basic component of human existence that your life comes from somewhere.

Your life was given to you.

God alone has the fatherless life.

He alone has life in him, but all of us are dependent upon God for life.

For all of us, God has given us life.

And so this is why Paul is saying, I'm praying to the Father who is over all life, from whom every family, every human family, not just the Jews here.

The Jews would all say they come from the their father Abraham.

Abraham is even the first patriarch, and we use that phrase in English.

It usually has a negative connotation in English, doesn't it?

The patriarchy kind of thing, like the men who lead the world with, you know, oppression and all of that.

Patriarchy has a negative connotation now.

It's not a negative connotation here for Paul.

It's that God is the father over all things, and every single person has this in common.

You all have a father.

Your father may not be living, some of you may not even have ever known your father, but you all have a father.

That's the way God designs the world.

He is a father over all.

Every family has a father, every family tree has a patriarch.

And not just the Jews, every family on earth, he says.

And that phrase is a common Jewish phrase to every, you know, the God is the father of the Jews, and Paul is expanding it, aggressively expanding it.

Of course, he's arguing that the church includes both the Jews and Gentiles, so this makes sense in the context, but he's saying God is the father over every human being.

Not just every human being, though.

Every family on earth and in heaven, he says.

God is the father of angels.

Every angelic rank reports to the Father.

He is over all things in heaven and on earth.

Now, angels weren't made through procreation.

Angels don't have actual parents.

Their father in that sense is God.

He didn't procreate to make the angels, he made them by speaking them into existence, like he did all of creation.

This is why, for angels, Paul says, God, in a very real sense, is the father of them.

But on earth, there's this trickle-down image of this.

That God the Father made Adam, made him out of dirt.

That God the Father made Eve, made her out of Adam.

That God named them.

It says in verse 15, on whom every family in heaven and earth is named.

And then every human being God made through their earthly fathers.

This is the reason Genesis 3 says, man will leave his, or Genesis 2, man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

And all of human existence comes from that.

And I just I pause here because I want you to understand, this is why Paul is praying to the Father.

I want you to understand that all things that have life have life from their father.

This is just the basic concept of human existence.

And so fatherhood has implications that will come up later in Ephesians 4 and Ephesians 5 and Ephesians 6 to the rest of the book.

Fatherhood has implications because if you're giving life, you in a sense have power or authority over those lives whom you create.

It's wrapped up here in the phrase, on whom every family in heaven and earth is named.

Naming in the Bible, and especially in Genesis, is a sign of authority.

You name something when you have authority over it.

You name something when you have headship over it.

Adam named the animals, the animals didn't name Adam.

God named Adam.

Adam didn't name God.

Moses didn't even name God.

Moses had to receive God's name from God.

Naming in the Bible is a very clear way of demonstrating something's authority.

This is foundational to how we even view marriage.

When a husband and wife marry, the wife takes the husband's last name.

It's not opposite that.

The wife takes the husband's last name.

It's a way of demonstrating male leadership and headship in the family.

This is God's design for the family, how it should operate.

And you think in even having a family, it's the wife who does all the hard work.

I mean, she's the one who literally has labor.

It's physically painful for her to bring life into the world.

Why is the father, why is God called the heavenly father, not the heavenly mother?

And I don't even mean that humorously, I mean it actually.

Think theologically about it.

And it's because life comes from the Father.

It might be delivered by the mother, but it comes from the Father.

The authority in the family resides with the Father.

And because of that, the Father has a very interesting power or authority in the family, more than just the ability to give life, but the father has authority to bless that life.

He has the authority to make the family in many respects like himself, for better or for worse.

The father has a very unique ability to bring joy into a family.

And he has a very unique ability to bring heartache and pain and grief into a family.

The father, the family will reflect the father's weaknesses, won't it?

An apathetic father spiritually will have apathetic children spiritually.

An argumentative father will have an argumentative family.

A father who seeks to bless his family will have a family that is blessed.

It's really not complicated theology here, but it is very practical, isn't it?

I was thinking just this week at Jim Neighbor's funeral.

I know a lot of you watched his funeral.

A lot of you were here at his funeral.

I mean, what really jarred me at his funeral, what stuck out to me at his funeral more than anything else was the testimony of his daughters.

How much they were blessed by him, how their memories of him.

They spoke so highly of him and the joy and the sense of humor and just the his love for life that he brought into their family and how he complimented them.

And it was just incredible for for me to see this kind of immediately I'm thinking, listening to this funeral, like what are my kids gonna say about me at my funeral?

Are they gonna be able to say, oh, he was a blessing, he brought joy into our family?

Or are they gonna have somebody else give the eulogy?

And to go from there to marriage counseling situations where you have a father walking out on his family, or a father who's not committed to his family, a father who's Contemplating divorce or an affair, and you know, not even understanding all of the heartache and trials that that will put into the lives of his children because of his own sin.

It will inject difficulty into the family that's not there, but he's willing to inject it into the family to pursue his own sexual desires or his own lusts or his own materialistic desires or his own sense of inner happiness.

He'll elevate his own sentence of inner happiness over that of his children and his family and bring heartache in his wake.

I mentioned that because you have to ask yourself, what kind of father is our heavenly father?

If even on an earthly level families take on the strengths or weaknesses of their father, what kind of father do we have spiritually?

What do we take on that is his?

In what way do we reflect him?

And we know where this is going.

In verse 19, Paul says we're going to be filled with all the fullness of God.

We'll look at that phrase next week.

So we're going to have all the fullness of God inside of us in some respect.

That's for next week's sermon.

But foreshadowing that right now, Paul is saying, this is why I'm praying to the Father, because I am asking God for things that only come from God.

If the very act of fatherhood is God's, and Paul is saying, I'm praying for you for something that only he can bring.

What is it?

Verse 16, that according to the riches of his glory, he might grant you, and here's the request that we've been building to for a month now, to be strengthened with power through his spirit inner in your inner being.

That's the request.

All of Ephesians 3 is building, that's Paul's prayer request.

It's all building to this.

What he is praying for, big parentheses about why he's in jail and he's still going to pray for this.

Now the lead-in to he's praying to our Heavenly Father, who's the Father over all families.

He names all of you, you're all under his authority.

This is the request that he would strengthen you with power according to his glorious riches in your inner being.

That's the request.

He wants you to be spiritually strong.

This is why he's praying to the Father.

The Holy Spirit himself proceeds from the Father and the Son.

So he's not praying to the Spirit, although you're more than welcome to pray to the Spirit.

But Paul, his whole image here is he's going to the first person of the Trinity.

He's going to the Father of all.

So where are you going to go to get that?

You've got to go to your heavenly Father.

That's the only source of it.

That's the only source of spiritual strength, the only source of spiritual power.

Paul says, I can minister to you, Ephesians, all day long.

I could spend months.

I could pour out my life in Ephesus preaching at the church.

Unless God, the Father, gives you spiritual strength and spiritual growth, it will mean nothing.

I can spin my wheels on the ice forever and ever and ever.

Unless our Heavenly Father gives us spiritual power, it won't do a lick of good.

Nothing can be gained by all of our Bible study, all of our toil, all of our discipleship, all of our ABFs, all of our children's ministry.

Nothing will be gained by any of that unless the Lord gives spiritual strength himself.

So does the Lord give spiritual strength to this kind of prayer?

Of course he does.

That's why Paul's praying it.

That's why he's on his knees before God.

He's begging God for it.

And listen, there's when it comes to theology, people often tell a lie about God's sovereignty.

They say if you believe in God's sovereignty, then you don't believe in man's responsibility.

I'm sure you've heard that.

If you believe God is sovereign over all, then why would you bother doing any work?

If you believe God is sovereign over salvation, why would you bother evangelizing?

If you believe God's going to save whomever he wants to, why would you be an evangelist?

If you think God is sovereign over your sanctification, why would you labor in the word or labor in the world?

And I mean, there's no more clear definition or description in the Bible of God's sovereignty over salvation and sanctification than Ephesians 1, except maybe Ephesians 2.

And after all of that, the image Paul closes this half of Ephesians out with is of Paul himself on his knees pleading with God, please, God, please do spiritual work in these people's lives.

You have to.

You predestine, you redeem, you send your spirit, your spirit seals, you appointed good works for them to walk in.

In light of all that, I'm begging you, God, do your work in their hearts.

He's pleading with God.

And God will do this, this phrase here, he'll do it according to the riches of his glory.

God is not a beggar.

If he was hungry, he wouldn't ask us for food.

He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.

He doesn't need anything from us.

If you're going to talk about it in terms of human wealth, there's God owns it all.

He's not just the leader in the stock market.

He owns the stock market.

And he owns Wall Street and He owns New York City and He owns New York and He owns the earth and he made it all.

I mean, so that's He doesn't need to check his portfolio.

He owns everything.

And so Paul says, God will bless you with spiritual strength in that way, according to those riches.

He says this to the Philippians 2, Philippians 4, verse 19, my God will supply every need of yours according to the riches in glory in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:19

There's nothing that will be spared.

In God's spiritual storehouse, he'll give it all.

This word strengthened here, it means a spiritual fortitude that he's praying that you'll have inner reserves from which to draw motivation for sanctification.

That's the bottom line of this prayer.

He wants you, when you're tempted to sin, to have the spiritual strength to say no and to fight sin.

He wants you, when you're feeling spiritually dry, to have the strength inside of yourself to actually open the Bible and read it and pray and renew yourself spiritually.

That's what he's praying for.

I mean, that's that's it doesn't get more practical than this.

When temptation comes knocking on your door, Paul is begging God that God would give you in your heart the ability to say no.

And when you're wondering what's going on in life and where you can find spiritual strength, God is begging in his prayer, or Paul is begging in his prayers that God would give you the spiritual strength and stamina to read the word and to grow up spiritually.

That your sanctification would be fueled by a spiritual strength.

Not a spiritual weakness, not a spiritual immaturity.

He's begging God that you would grow up spiritually, that you would become big and strong spiritually.

And how does this happen?

How do you get strong spiritually?

Well, one adjective Paul uses here is powerfully.

It'll happen to you powerfully.

You'll be strengthened with power through his spirit.

In other words, Paul isn't even praying for reluctant obedience in your life.

He's praying that you would powerfully obey, that you would forcefully obey, that your life would be marked by a strong spiritual fortitude.

And this is what the Holy Spirit brings.

This is what he does in the New Testament.

Acts chapter 1, verse 8.

Acts 1:8

It says, Jesus, and then the angel speaking, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

First is Jesus saying this, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the ends of the earth.

And then he ascends to heaven, and the angel says, Stop standing there looking.

Go do what he said.

Go bring the gospel to the world.

He's going to come back.

And so Acts 1 is describing the time period between when Jesus ascends, and in Acts 2, the Holy Spirit comes, and until Jesus returns.

In that window there, between Pentecost and the rapture, there's this idea that you will have spiritual strength brought to you by the Holy Spirit.

You will receive power, he says.

Blessed are the meek, but when the Holy Spirit comes, he makes you powerful.

Or say it this way, your meekness will be powerful.

This is very different than the Old Testament believers.

I mean, apart from Daniel, Daniel stands out as a kind of an exception to this.

When you think of Old Testament saints, you don't think of spiritual power, do you?

I mean, I don't.

You think of spiritual often weakness and failures and failings, and they're in a dark world.

They're a dark world surrounded by covenant people that are covenant people by the outward marks, not by the inward reality.

Think of David and his immediately adultery and the kingdom ripped from him, his own people exiled him.

You think of Abraham and his doubting and Jacob and his swindling and I mean name someone.

Moses and his murdering.

I mean, it goes on and on and on.

And then you get to Acts chapter 1, verse 8.

Acts 1:8

You will have power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.

Acts or Romans 15, verse 13.

Romans 15:13

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

John was the greatest of the Old Testament believers in that regard.

He's in the New Testament, you know what I mean?

Before the cross.

And yet Jesus says the smallest in the kingdom of heaven will be more powerful than John.

We'll be greater than he.

The point here is that Paul is praying that the surpassing power of the transcendent God would meet you in your innermost being, inside of you.

That's where this union happens.

That there is a transcendent truth in this world.

There is a truth that is bigger than your world, that is bigger than your culture, that is bigger than your life, that is bigger than politics, that is bigger than capitalism and commerce, that's more important than what kind of car you drive, or what kind of house you live in, that's more important than what school you go to or what your athletic times are.

There is a transcendent truth that exists before you and after you that is eternal, in fact.

And that you can have an encounter with it.

More than having an encounter with it.

You can have an encounter with it in the innermost part of who you are, inside your heart, inside your soul, in the real you.

The materialist or the evolutionist comes along and says there is no real you.

You're just matter in motion, man.

You got a flesh, and it's over when you die.

And you know that can't possibly be true.

And the transcendentalist or the naturalist or the romanticist will come along and say there is a truth out there, and there is a real you that's inside of you, and you got to go find it, and you can find it looking hard inside yourself or looking hard inside the world.

That's where you can find it, and you can find meaning and peace and happiness there.

And the psychologist might come along and say, there is a real inner you, there is a real inner being inside of you, and it does need to be happy, and you can pursue the happiness by being at peace with yourself and forgiving yourself and finding, you know, bringing out your own felt needs and finding a tranquility there, and you can pursue that.

But I'm telling you, all those paths, while they may rightly identify the importance of a transcendental, timeless truth, and they might rightly identify the reality of an inner soul, they all fail horribly when it comes to fixing your problem.

Your problem is that you need an encounter.

You need an encounter with the living God.

And Paul says, it can happen to you in the innermost part of your being.

He says specifically in verse 17, it happens to you through faith.

You place your faith in Christ and the timeless God of the universe, the one who spoke all things into existence, the heavenly Father, who is above all and over all and in all and through all, will dwell in your hearts through faith.

Christopher McCannless.

His life makes a compelling story made in books and movies and all this.

Because he revealed a problem that most people perceive, but few have the intellectual integrity to act on.

That our world and society is corrupt and there has to be something more to it than this.

He erred by finding it in nature, as I mentioned, he backpacked through national parks and rivers and all over the place, living as a vagabond for years, eventually settling in Alaska, trying to hike across Alaska.

He ended up starving to death is how his story ends.

Because he was eating.

This is so ironic in God's providence.

The Eskimo potato, it's got the word potato in it.

You'd think it would work.

Eskimos ate the roots of it, they knew that, but he ate the seeds of it.

And God made these plants with a toxin in the seed to keep predators from eating them, keep animals from eating them.

And the toxin has an effect on your body that keeps your body from metabolizing, keeps your body from assimilating food.

So you eat just notice the irony of this.

You eat this seed and it keeps your body from making nutrients.

It keeps your body from changing food into something that can give you strength and you starve to death.

If that is not a providential and ironic picture of that worldview, I don't know what is.

Looking for meaning in nature, in the innermost part of you, as you connect with nature, and killing yourself because you put nature inside of you and you cannot make energy in your body anymore.

That's where that worldview goes.

It may not be as literal as what happened to McCandless.

You may not actually poison yourself to death, but that's what happens when you look for meaning in the innermost part of you.

The more you look internal to yourself, or the more you look into nature, you cripple your ability to make any spiritual strength whatsoever.

You starve from the inside out.

But when you look to Christ, he dwells in your heart through faith, and he brings you spiritual nourishment, spiritual strength.

Only Christ can make the transcendent and eminent.

Only Christ can take the eternal truth of God and apply it to your soul.

Lord, we're thankful that you are eternal and timeless and true.

And our hearts do hunger for something more than this world.

Our hearts hunger for something more than who wins the next game or wins the next election or what stocks go up or down or just rubbish in this world.

Our hearts long for more than entertainment and more for money.

More than money.

Our hearts long for meaning and significance that can only be found in you.

So Lord, direct our hearts to you.

Christ Jesus, crucified and resurrected, God in human flesh, exalted over all things even now.

Lord, you are the transcendent God.

And you have made yourself eminent by residing in our hearts.

We give you thanks for this truth in Jesus' name.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to meet you personally at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and other church information is on our website at ibc.church.

If you want information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been an encouragement to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.