Beyond Knowledge

This is Ephesians 3, verses 14 to 21.

Ephesians 3:14–21

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, that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us.

To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

Amen.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us again today.

My name is James Rathman, I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

And we have been preaching through Ephesians this summer.

And so now we're at Ephesians chapter three, the second half of chapter three, and it is one of the most glorious prayers in all of Scripture.

To be honest, I'm a little intimidated to preach through this text.

I was telling my wife that I've had this sense with each new chapter in Ephesians, just like, I don't know if I have the internal holiness to be able to convey what is in this text.

And so humbly I come before a text of scripture like this and just hope that we can see it together.

So I'm going to pray for that, and then we'll get started.

Lord, we pray that you would let us grasp just a taste of this prayer this morning.

Lord, let our hearts be transformed just by looking at it.

And I pray that that transformation would help us to know you more completely, that it might even spread in our hearts, into our relationships, through our church body, into our community, and that we might pray something and experience something as outrageous as to be filled with all the fullness of God.

Lord, would you help transform our imaginations to see something like that?

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So the way that relationships and the way that we often think about love or experience love in relationships, uh, I think in our culture, it looks like kind of two ingredients.

A loving relationship we'll describe as one where we can just express ourselves in an uninhibited way.

And so the basis of our love or the basis of a relationship continuing is our ability to engage in a self-expression in that relationship.

And you see, that's kind of still about you in your experience of love.

And what that leads to is relationships that are better described, rather than being described as loving, they're better described as codependent or enmeshed relationships.

And so as a society as a whole, we're kind of a codependent society where we're looking to express ourselves, and then the way that we experience love is to have whatever we express validated back to us.

And when that doesn't happen, when that validation back to us isn't received, it's extremely threatening because we're looking to the other person to uh really fulfill our own self-expression in our desire for love.

But the picture of love that we see in Scripture is something vastly different from that.

In fact, it's a type of love that really uh rather than making you this kind of like weak little thing that needs to walk around and then and then spit out whatever it has on the inside and then and then demand that it be reflected back to itself.

Instead, it is a love that in your inner being fills you with power.

Now I know that sounds a little Tony Robbins-y, but for real, that's what we're looking at this morning, is a love where there's a person of substance in your inner being.

You become a person of substance and weight.

And what that means is when you're a person who has a real substance inside of you, then you can love without demanding something in return.

You can love in such a way where your love isn't just a trick of codependency, your love is really giving of yourself.

And that's because you would have a self to give.

So when we look at this love that we're meant to grasp of Christ's love towards us, it's important that we don't slip into this um sort of cultural vision of love, which is really just codependency.

And instead, we have our minds transformed to see a more complete, more wonderful picture of love in the love of Christ towards us.

So let's go ahead and begin with uh who Paul addresses this wonderful prayer to.

He says, For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.

Okay, so he begins with for this reason.

Now, if you'll remember, last week we preached through the first half of chapter three, and it's just a parentheses.

And he begins that with for this reason, and then he interrupts himself, and he does all of chapter three, or the first half of chapter three, and he's like, look, I've got to talk about me as an apostle and how I was given this mystery, which is that the Gentiles now are included, and he he shows how his story intertwines with the glory of the gospel being shown to the Gentiles who he's writing to.

And then it gets back again, and he's like, okay, now for this reason, I pray this.

So those for this reasons they connect up, and it shows us that what he has in mind is not just the previous 14 or 13 verses of chapter three.

What he has in mind is the whole sweep of Ephesians that he's written so far.

And so the reasons that can be included as backing or motivation for this prayer are reasons of that in Christ Jesus we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, as he says in chapter one.

Or it is the reason that Paul has heard of the faith and love that the Ephesians are demonstrating towards all the saints, and so that motivates his prayer for them.

We can see it's that, as in chapter two, we were dead in our trespasses and sins, but God made us alive in Christ Jesus.

That's one of the reasons for this prayer that he prays.

It's that the alienation that we experienced between God and ourselves and between each other, that alienation that makes us desire real relationship, has been resolved in Christ.

And finally, the reason that he did say in the last chapter that the mystery of the gospel has been revealed and that Jews and Gentiles are brought together into one body.

And that one body demonstrates through the church the glory of God to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.

Paul says, for that reason, I pray this.

Now, what type of prayer could follow all those reasons?

Well, it's one addressed to the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.

So this isn't a description of God that we see anywhere else, but we can intuit what it means, where he's saying God, he relates to God fatherly, calling him Father because he grasps what the gospel means in terms of our adoption.

God is our Father, but he's the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth gets its name.

This means that God is the source of all things.

If you can imagine a category, God is the source of it.

He is the one from whom all things flow.

And they don't flow from him as sort of emanation from like some cosmic uh like alien source of energy or something, or some impersonal Big Bang type of experience.

They they flow from him in the way of a father.

It is good theology to say that God has loved the world into existence and that the world maintains its existence by the father's love.

So Paul for this reason prays to the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth gets its name.

And he prays for two things in particular.

He prays that we would be strengthened in our inner being.

And two, the second thing is he prays that we would know Christ's love.

Those are related.

We'll see how they're related.

So the first thing that you would be strengthened in your inner being.

Ephesians 3.16.

The lesser famous 3.16.

That according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being.

You know, this is the part of ourselves that is most rapidly vanishing.

The private space, the internal quiet space, where no noise is coming in from the outside.

You have an inner being.

The constant amusement, the constant intake of our external lives, it always leads to the atrophy of our internal lives.

Now he wrote that in 1898, and right before it he says, look, with the speed of technology, with the speed of communication, with this flood of information that is constantly available to us and chiming for our attention, we know that there is a drain because this exacerbation of our external life leads to an atrophy of our internal life.

That's why so many of us we feel so thin.

We feel like there just isn't much there to give, which is why when we enter relationships, we're giving just the smither of something, and we say, you have to reflect just that back to me.

Because otherwise, there will be nothing here that could withstand not receiving back what I've given into the world.

See how this lack of substance in our internal lives, it for uh not it causes us to act in almost like a tyrannical way with our relationships, where we have demands on what we are able to receive in love from the people that we're getting close to.

And it's because, at least partially because, we're so thin in our internal lives.

It's like we could perfectly say the opposite of what Paul writes, using the same phrase for uh inner being, in 2 Corinthians 4, where he writes, we do not lose heart, though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.

I think in our culture and much of our experience with like smartphones constantly chiming, we could say precisely the opposite of that.

We could say our outer self is being cultivated and manicured and entertained and filled with information, but our inner self is wasting away.

Our outer self is being renewed day by day.

There's a new stream of data, there's a new uh opinion that you can then relate.

I call it a cover opinion, like a cover song.

When you hear an opinion on a podcast, and then it's like, well, you should hear me say it.

There's always a new opinion that you can grab for that day and then cover as though it's your own.

Our external lives are manicured, they're tended to, so that we can think I can be a full person and have no internal life.

But we're thin, we're fragile in that way.

We're tyrannical in our relationships when we operate in that way.

And when it is time for us to lay down ourselves in love for one another, we don't even have a self to give.

We're just an aggregate of whatever streams we've happened to cobble together.

But Paul prays that we might be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, that the Spirit of God might have use the very power of God to transform us into people of actual substance, people who have a solidness in our identity, who have a real internal life, so that our outer selves could waste away day by day, be that physically due to something like poverty or sickness or disease or aging, our outer selves can be wasting away, and we can become less and less beautiful on Instagram as the days go by, and yet our internal selves are being renewed, strengthened by the power of Christ.

People of substance that happens by the Spirit, and to what measure?

It is according to the riches of his glory.

Another word for glory is weight.

According to this unsearchable weight of God.

You know, the image that came to my mind is like a ballast stone in a ship.

Because I used to do maritime preaching before this.

And during I didn't.

And just in case that wasn't clear, there's a lot of visitors and uh a ship with no ballast stones is just tossed about by the waves, and wherever they go, it can't even set a course.

But with the weight of glory in our hearts, put there by the Spirit, to what measure, according to the riches of God's glory, we might become people of substance.

Now, to what end?

Because it's typical to talk about the gospel as just like a fix for the psychological ails of our moment.

But the end of being people of substance is not so that we can finally fulfill all of the uh uh self-help knowledge of being able to speak our truth and stand in our power, and you know, whatever the subtitle of the next book you'll buy is.

No, there's a particular purpose that we are made people of substance.

Ephesians 3, 17, it says the reason, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

We'll touch the second part of that verse soon.

Why?

Why be strengthened with power in your inner being?

Why would the Spirit come and place these ballast stones in your soul according to the riches of God's glory?

It is so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

I read a wonderful description of this in a book by D.A.

Carson called Praying with Paul.

And uh it's about all the prayers of Peter.

And there's a you win some, you lose some.

And he gave this great picture of this prayer.

And it's relatable, especially if you've tried to buy a house in Denver or if you've you've had you've had to go through that ordeal.

My wife and I uh bought the home where we live uh in 2017.

And I described it as we we didn't buy a home, we bought a fort that children built in the woods.

And then we lived in it as though it was a home.

And so we moved in and we were thrilled to move in, uh, so excited to move into this home.

Uh, but the windows were you could literally just grab them and pull them out, which is not good for a window.

Uh the it had a drop ceiling throughout the house, you know, like at Target.

The difference between Walmart and Target, by the way, drop ceiling.

Just notice when you go in there.

It's a nice little touch from Target.

And uh the electricity, none of the what none of the outlets were grounded.

If we had if it was cold and we had the heat on and the TV and we're running the dryer, no, you you're gonna have to pick two of those.

But as we've moved in, and over the course of the past four years, there's been basically constant little projects.

And so last summer, the house was able to get painted because of all the money the government's just giving us.

And we were able to replace the windows, and so they actually open and close, and you can't pull them out anymore.

They're not just plexiglass.

And uh the outlets have been grounded, and so we're able to dry clothes and watch TV at the same time, like the Jetsons.

And so we it's really been just this past summer where Megan and I will like sit down in our home, and it's like, you know what?

I really like it here.

This feels like us.

These are the colors we chose.

You know, this it's pictures of our family on the wall.

This feels like home.

It suits us.

We enjoy it here.

Now, our souls are in the same condition morally when Jesus moves in.

Jesus moves in, he's like, There's not any windows here.

He's he's lying all the time.

There's uh this trend of sexual immorality that's just marking this soul that I live in.

There's patterns of deceitfulness and greed, and there's a self-centeredness with the way that they're moving about their lives.

But over time, the spirit goes to work.

And the spirit is creating in us a dwelling place for Christ.

As all of a sudden, by confession and repentance, the sexual immorality turns into a desire for purity of heart.

That over time, a place where we would have lied to save our skin, now we bring truth into the light, even at great cost towards us.

And our souls become a dwelling place for Christ, that He is in us.

This is the transformation of our souls that the Spirit accomplishes.

Paul then inserts this little clause at the end of verse 17, which serves as the pivot point for the whole prayer, which is that you being rooted and grounded in love.

That is what this true internal life looks like.

It is a person who is rooted and grounded in love.

That's a person who has something to give, has a substance that can be laid down for someone else.

Rooted and grounded in love.

Now, that also serves as a condition for our ability for the second thing that Paul prays, for us to know the love of Christ.

Verses 18 through 19.

That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now, if you were to pray for someone's maturity in Christ, if you had a friend and they just became a Christian and you were praying for them to mature, what would you pray?

You know, you might pray like, oh, they're they should move out with their significant other that they're living with until they get married.

So I'm gonna really pray that that happens.

Or they they uh you know they sh they shouldn't continue in this job because it's putting them in all these these morally compromising situations.

So I'm gonna really pray that they get away from that.

Or, you know, we'd we'd have these particulars in mind that we would pray for their maturity, but Paul zeros in and his prayer is that they would know the love of Christ, that they would know it, that we, you know, Paul's always praying, you, you, that you would know the love of Christ, to love that surpasses knowledge.

He says, this is the source of Christian maturity, that your maturity in Christ will find its sealing insofar as you know the love of Christ for you.

When you think of maturing in your faith, do you consider that your lack of maturity in Christianity might actually be a lack of confidence in Christ's love towards you?

Let's start to meditate on it with Paul.

May have strength to comprehend.

So remember, he's prayed for a strengthened inner being.

And now what do we use that strength for?

It's it's this dwelling place of Christ that has been created in us that is suitable for Christ to inhabit.

And it gives us this strength to comprehend towards who?

With all the saints.

So together, this isn't a solo operation.

With all the saints, we begin to comprehend Christ's love.

And what are the characteristics?

It's the breadth and length and height and depth.

Christ's love is voluminous.

It is like what we sing that song, it's like an ocean without bottom or shore.

You can just keep swimming.

Quote theologian Dory.

You can just keep swimming.

That's all I can hear.

Because there is no oce, there is no bottom or shore.

It is an unsearchable love for you.

The breadth.

How is the breadth of Christ's love shown?

We've seen it throughout this book with the inclusion of the Gentiles, that this is a love which stretches towards all peoples.

This is why it's something that we have to do with all the saints in a gathering like the church.

I was talking with a pastor friend and he was sharing, don't you see that the church is everything that people are looking for in the world right now?

Where else do people of such different backgrounds gather together in unity underneath something that can actually bring them together?

It's only in the church.

The breadth of Christ's love spreads to all peoples.

All the distinctions that we draw amongst ourselves, the racial distinctions, the economic distinctions.

The in Colorado, the way that we distinguish amongst each other by our hobbies, you know, all of those things are subsumed in the love of Christ.

The breadth is unsearchable.

So who can you look over now?

The length.

Look at how Christ's love stretches on to eternity.

Look at the patience that He has in His love towards you, even just in your own life.

This happens like once a Sunday, so we'll just let it.

Good.

The length.

Just consider his patience towards you.

Have you thought that by your continual pattern of sin, you have exhausted the patience of Christ towards you?

And you've misunderstood the length of his love.

Remember, this ocean of his love that you're swimming in, it has no shore.

Swim as long as you'd like.

You will not find the shore.

His patience is inexhaustible.

The height, we are loved into the most glorious position where we can call God our Father.

We are brought into His family, into the heights of His glory, Christ Himself dwelling in our hearts.

What glory we are loved in.

Depth.

Consider the depth of sin that you have in your heart.

Consider the sins that still tend to guide you.

Consider the renovations that need to take place in your heart still as the Holy Spirit goes through and pulls down the drywall and then sees, like, you know, plastic wood covering the rest of the walls and says, ah, all that good work that I thought was taking place was just out of pride.

There's so much more work to do here.

The depth of God's love is inexhaustible.

He goes to the depths of our sin.

And we find his love there.

This love of Christ surpasses knowledge.

That's what Paul prays.

To know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Now, this requires a practice.

In fact, the very phrase demands a particular posture.

Because he's saying, know something that surpasses knowledge.

And so, how do you engage with something like that?

You know, to know something means the data is in, the fact is settled.

And so you can write it down in a book and you can take that book and put it on the bookshelf and say, I have this knowledge now.

But this is knowing something that surpasses knowledge, which means we must find ourselves in a place of contemplation.

We don't have much of a contemplative history in our Christian tradition, in the Reformed tradition.

But this demands a contemplative Christianity because we are seeing a truth, seeing a love that we must meditate on.

How do you develop this internal life?

Can I tell you, I'll just be very practical, because this does not come naturally to me.

I much more think of my relationship with God in terms of problems and answers.

You know, it's like a philosophy problem or a math problem.

And that there are certain questions of theology, and then our maturity as Christians comes in reading and discovering and finding ways to articulate the answers to those questions.

Anybody else think of their maturity like that or grow like that?

All right.

Well, four the four of us.

There is a demand on us to come face to face with a knowledge that is unknowable, a knowledge that swallows us up in just our trying to know it.

And so that means that God is demanding that we spend time contemplating the depth of his love towards us.

I'll try and be very practical.

So here's what you do: you take a timer on your phone and you say, hey Siri, set a timer for 10 minutes.

And you sit and you think that I may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

That I may be filled with all the fullness of God.

And for ten minutes you think about that.

Next time.

Fifteen minutes.

You know what you're doing there?

You're coming before the teachings of Scripture.

And you are participating in Scripture forming your inner being.

This is a truth that demands contemplation.

This is a simple practice.

But we are so thin and so saturated with just information that we never come before.

Love that surpasses knowledge and just stop.

Love that surpasses knowledge.

Wander around through your story.

Where is it that you find that Christ's love hasn't touched?

And then consider it surpasses knowledge.

I could touch there.

I could be filled with all the fullness of God.

And all of a sudden, you're becoming a person of substance.

You're participating in the Holy Spirit's creation of a dwelling place for Christ in your soul.

You cannot be a Christian without an inner being.

It is where this takes place.

And the love of God is often so impotent in our lives because we've never come face to face with it to contemplate it.

It's like the most practical I've ever been in a sermon.

How is it that knowing Christ's love changes you?

How does that work?

You know, our our flesh would rear up and say, look, you can't let yourself know Christ's love too much.

Because if you let yourself know Christ's love too much, it's going to stop you from trying to pursue holiness.

And instead, you'll just settle in to whatever sin patterns and whatever areas of your life you have to be living in now.

And you'll just settle into those and you'll think, oh, Christ loves me anyway, so it doesn't matter.

That's what our flesh wants to tell us.

But look, knowing Christ's love is the way that we are transformed in our inner being.

It is the way that we mature as Christians.

Because think of how you learn as a child.

The way you learn as a child is sometimes it's it's through, you know, just direct discipline or like, hey, say this, not that.

But most of the time, you know what it is?

It's you do something and then you look at your parents' face.

And then you learn.

I did this and I saw this type of face flash towards me.

And so I learned.

And you know what that type of learning is?

That's a transformation of your inner being.

You cannot be transformed without gazing upon the face of your father and seeing his love towards you.

When he is calling you out of sin, you have no hope of getting there by strengthening your flesh.

You must look upon his face and see that he is calling me out in a never-ending love.

Or have you forgotten that it is the kindness and patience of the Lord that is meant to draw you towards repentance?

Well, how can you be drawn towards repentance if you aren't gazing upon his face?

How can you be transformed if you don't see his love towards you?

This is the way we change.

That's how humans change.

Paul concludes with this doxology.

Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever.

Amen.

Now you have to hear this doxology at the end of a prayer like that, because you will come in and you'll begin meditating on the wonder of Christ's love towards you.

And you'll begin to think, I I've gotten to the end and I found the place where he can no longer love me.

I found the place where his love can't extend.

The breath stops this type of person.

And when you get there, you need to think, wait a minute, he is able to do far more abundantly than all that I ask or think.

And knowing that truth moves your contemplation of the love of Christ from this place of, okay, I can I can change insofar as I have internalized the love of Christ, which is still you as the limit, you as the one who receives glory because you were the most contemplative.

And this switches it to wait a minute, the love of Christ goes beyond what I can ask or think, which means it's not just a thing that's in here.

It is not that we needed a father to love us psychologically, as Freud would have it, and so we painted ourselves a father in the sky.

And so long as we imagine his love towards us, it will heal our child wounds.

No, it is not a psychological projection, it is beyond what you can ask or think.

God's love is there, it is real, which means you can even trust it in your inability to properly contemplate it because it isn't limited by you, it's beyond what you can ask or think.

Now we're starting to have faith.

Faith in something that's outside of us, faith in Christ.

Now, these two things, the riches of his glory, and that in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, that he might receive the glory.

Those are the bookends of the prayer, and this pivot in the middle that we would be rooted and grounded in love.

The Christian life is like this spiral, okay?

It's a spiral upward, where we, in order for us to even receive the love of Christ, we have to be strengthened by the power of God's glory to receive it.

And then our lives aim at the glory of Christ.

And how do they point towards the glory of Christ?

By our enjoying and receiving the love of God.

See how there, here's the amazing news of Christianity.

God has married together the pursuit of his glory and his love towards his people.

And God will get his glory.

It is with that type of absolute confidence that you can trust in the unsearchable depths of Christ's love towards you.

With that, let's see if there are any questions.

No questions?

Okay, cool.

No further questions, Your Honor.

Okay, let's pray and then we'll take communion.

Father, we pray that as we move into this time of communion, that we would begin to participate with the love that is shown most tangibly at the cross.

As your body is broken for us, your blood is poured out.

What substance do you have that you were able to lay down your life in the most meaningful way?

Taking upon our sins that we see the depths, raising again so that we see the heights, bringing it, breaking down the dividing walls between us so that we see the breadth, a never-ending patience towards us, so that we see the length.

Lord, let us enjoy and walk in that love, see your face looking down on us and loving us, that our hearts might be transformed and we might grow in holiness because of the work that you have done by your Spirit.

Strengthen us with power to comprehend, Lord.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.