Northside Church - Sydney
God is Able Week 3: …Able to Succeed
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Morning, folks. If you've been fortunate enough to fly, what is the one thing that you can guarantee on your trip apart from excess baggage charges and a lack of legroom? It's the pre-take-off safety demonstration, right? I love getting on planes and seeing the pre-flight safety demonstration because of the total lack of interest of everyone else who's on the plane. If you notice, you get on. Even the stewards seem to just not even really bother, you know, pull down the mask, exit to here and here, and everyone pulls out their book that they're reading at the moment, turns on the lights so you can get a bit more light into the situation. People just write it off, and yet it's there all the time and it seems quite routine. In the passage this morning, the central verse that we read, an incredible doxology, an outburst of praise from the Apostle Paul says, "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we could ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within us. To him be the glory." Look, I don't know about you, but sometimes I can approach these sorts of verses the same way that people on a plane approach a pre-take-off safety briefing, right? Yeah, I can imagine it more than we can imagine, exit to here and yep, yep, I get it, I get it. And Paul says, "No, you don't." You've got to read through it. Again, it's wine verse 14 when Paul says that for this reason I bow the knee at the beginning of his prayer, for this reason I kneel before the Father, you know, what he's saying is an intense and incredible prayer. Jewish people often stood up to pray, sort of bend the knee, they didn't have the cushy little sort of puke cushions that you'd have in those old churches back then. It was an intense prayer and see the Ephesian church was facing all sorts of challenges. The sort of challenges we could be facing right now. They had sickness and disease, they're in constant warfare, spiritual warfare as well. There was danger of robbers, dangers of armies, dangers of invasion, and yet it's none of these issues that he prays for, right? None of them, there's one thing he prays for, and if they're going to succeed, he's saying there's one thing that you need. Paul's saying to us this morning, if you think that your big problems this morning are financial and relationships and influence and your circumstances, just like the Ephesian church, they're, look, don't get me wrong, they're significant issues, I'm not downplaying that. But Paul goes even deeper, he says, "If you just had this one thing you could face all situations and this is what you need more than anything, this is the big need in your life. In fact, if you have this, you can succeed through your financial situation and your relationship issues and the need for influence and prestige. What is it? That's a love of God. And if you're a Christian and you hear in this and you go, "Yeah, yeah, I heard this. Come on. You're treating this like a pre-take-off safety briefing," right? Look, I want to challenge this this morning as God has impacted me when I read through this very common, wonderful passage of Ephesians that let's not glaze over here, guys. If Paul is praying for this for the Ephesian church and Christians, it means only one thing that they may not, they have not got it yet. The love of God. Let's look at his prayer. You know the love of Christ, he prays for the power to grasp the love of Christ, and then he prays for the power to hope in the love of Christ. Let's look at this first. First of all, he says, he prays for the power to know the love of Christ. Now keep in mind that this is a prayer for Christians. Paul's written a letter to the Ephesians. He's writing to a lot of churches in the area of Asia Minor, which we call Turkey today. And so he's writing to a number of Christians and when you realize that, there's a number of things that really stick out and puzzle us here, because, for example, in verse 17, he prays that Christ might dwell in their hearts, and yet in chapter 2, verse 22, he's already said that Christ is indwelling in him. He says, "And in him, you two are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Holy Spirit." He's already said that. Then in verse 19, he says that they will know the love of Christ. And yet there's plenty of places in the Bible, you see, one John chapter 3, where like you can't be a Christian unless you know the love of Christ. And yet, and then Colossians chapter, yeah, so in that section there, he's praying that they will know the love of Christ. And then in verse 19, he prays that they will be filled with the full measure of God. And then he also writes elsewhere in Colossians chapter 2, verses 9 to 10, that for in Christ all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form, and you've been given the fullness of Christ. They've already got it. Here's the quiz guys, multiple choice. Why is Paul praying that his Christian's friends get what he emphatically says elsewhere? They already have. There's only one answer, and that is, it's one thing to know of the love of Christ. It's another thing to experience it in your inner being, your heart of hearts, the center of your conscious, and your personality, and who you really are. You know of it, but it's another thing to experience. Look, let me put it this way. Imagine that you won a brand new car in a competition, think of your favorite car, could be a Holden cruise or something simple for those of us that are humble, but you win a brand new car in a competition, and one night you go out, and it's dark, and it's rainy, and it's stormy, and you are out in the middle of nowhere, and you go to get to the door of that car and you tap your pockets and you realize I've lost the keys. Now it's possible for in that moment that you're as cold and as abandoned and misplaced as if you have never owned that car in the first place. You don't have the keys to access it, and so what Paul is saying here is that the reason that he's praying for Christians, what he's really saying to Christians is you know but you don't know. You have this wonderful inheritance in the love of Christ, but when you come up to it, guys you've forgotten the keys. It's as absent, it's as far away from you as if you've never received it in the first place. So what Paul's saying guys is don't lose your keys to the love of God unless you understand that you'll never move on. That's a reality. It's one thing to know of the love of Christ, it's another thing to experience, it's reality. How do you do that? I hear you ask. It's good because Paul prepared this a bit earlier for us, and we see secondly that he prays for the power to grasp the love of Christ. Now, I recently became an uncle for the first time, and I'm starting to get a bit clucky, and it's tough when it's all in your own family. You love sort of seeing this little guy Jake in there, and one of the most amazing things for me to watch as he grows from one week through to six months, he's still relatively new, was how uncle his hands were as a baby. He just couldn't control them, and so you'd give a kid of six weeks old, a rattle, and they can't grab on to the thing, right? And it's amazing to watch their development as a young child when they can finally learn how to grab, and he's starting to grab now, which is really cool because he can throw stuff everywhere, and he's learned the power to grasp. Now, the question is, why often do we see the differences between two Christians? One that says, "Hey, I'm the by some a believer, but one person is full of joy and of power and of resilience and peace, and the other one is still fading and floating away. One's learning how to grasp." And so the issue here, what Paul's saying is what is true reality, what is actually true to us spiritually as far as the universe is concerned, the things that are true of God is not real to people. What do you mean? Look, I don't know about you, but when I think about the disciples, I think, well, if I was just there like them, then I would believe. If I was just them hanging out with Jesus, then I would believe, and neither that I would live life of incredible faith and courage, and I would just be changing the world because they had Jesus. And yet at the same time when I go and look back through, we've got something today that they never had in their early days of their journey. We have the Holy Spirit, and Jesus' final pep talk to his disciples gives us an insight into the role of this Spirit, the Spirit that Paul prays for with the power of that Spirit that he prays for in Ephesians, Jesus says in speaking to his disciples, "But the advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you all things and remind you of everything I've said to you." I see what Jesus is saying is that the job of the Holy Spirit is not so much to inform you and give new information, but it's to make the same old information new. To reveal these truths into a reality that you finally get, you see the disciples had the truth. He was there in front of them, but they didn't get it. Well they still live lives that were thrown around every now and then by their circumstances, and so Jesus saying, "The work of the Spirit is to take what is known to you and make it true to you," and that is a great problem that we all face in the Christian life. It's just not real enough for us, and so the degree to which our faith impacts our success is it's not so much a matter of revelation. We've got plenty of revelation about what God has done, but it's not real to us. We need to bet that into our inner being. Paul says, "We need to bet it in how." Look, forgive the babyface looks. You wouldn't believe this, but I'm actually old enough to remember a time in which cameras use this funny thing called a film. You would put this film into the back of the camera, and as a child I was always taught that you couldn't expose the film to sunlight because you would wreck the film. Later in science class I discovered that the key ingredient in film is a chemical or compound called silver nitrate. The job of the silver nitrate, that key ingredient on the negative there, was pretty much silver nitrate quickly darkened on its exposure to light, and so you'd have to have this film laced with silver nitrate in order to bed in the image that you had received through the front lens of the camera. Forgive me if I'm getting too technical with you here, but look, this is what I'm saying. That unless the film was laced with silver nitrate, that the wonderful image that you were taking would not be embedded on it forever. What I'm trying to say is, and what Paul's saying is that the work of the Holy Spirit is to prep your heart to receive the light of God's love the same way that silver chloride preps a negative. You have to have the presence of the Spirit to take in this incredible image from God, and so when Paul prays I'm praying the Spirit will give you power, not only to understand the concept but to experience the actuality of it, that's why he prays that you might grasp. And it's a funny word because it's a great word meaning literally to ambush, to overtake a city, to rob and wrestle someone to the ground that was used corporately in the sense to sack or plunder a city. So what's he saying here? When he prays that you grasp the love of Christ, Paul's not saying wrestle God to the ground and rob him. What he's saying is take the truths and the principles and the doctrines about God and wrestle that to the ground, wrestle that to the depths of your heart. And so if we haven't the Bible and we hear a text here that says, "Jesus love you," and you go, "Yeah, that's cool," Paul's saying, "It's not good enough." There are riches in there, and the real question is do you have the spiritual power to think and to reason and apply and bid that down into your heart until you get the riches out or until it breaks and bursts out of you? Not only that, the truth of God might radiate when you need it most. Like for some of you, where you come from families where a parent said, "You and you're never going to amount to anything," or a sibling has put you down your entire life and your self-esteem has been chronically affected, those words begin to shape the inner being. And Paul is praying that every believer will have an inward experience where Jesus will become so real to you, that all those verdicts will become relativized, the verdicts of your father, the verdicts of your mother, the verdicts of a spouse, the verdicts of a boss, the verdicts of a friend, those verdicts are relativized so that Jesus' love and Jesus' approval becomes more real to you than the verdict of the father and the mother and the spouse and the friend. So guys, see what I'm saying here? The inner experience can't happen unless the Holy Spirit silver nitrates your heart. Until the wonderful image of God's love can bid itself and not fade away on the very depths of your heart. He prays you have the power to grasp and finally he prays this morning that you have the power to hope, he prays that you'll have hope. Now when we get hope from this verse 13 in this passage here just before verse 14, he says, "I ask you therefore not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you which are your glory." Now, here's the question because it seems a bit off the radar here, but how can a guy who has been constantly bent or piped throughout his life and his ministry end up saying such positive statements? I mean, is he just being chipper? Was Paul the sort of Christian that was like, you know, how's your week being Paul? Well, I got bashed and I got flogged for praise Jesus. You know, is he just sort of saying to the Ephesians in church, "Well, chin up, big fella." Now, not only that, how can a guy who is suffering, has been suffering, I would have say to a God who is able to say to him, who is able to do a measurably more than we can ask or imagine. Come on, Paul. You know, that's what we think. If your God could do more than you can imagine, then why are you suffering, big fella? Why won't he pull you out of your circumstances, mate? The question is for us this morning, and I want to ask you this morning, what if you could have success regardless of your circumstances? You see, there's no way to get through life unless you know how to get through suffering. Anyone who's been around long enough knows that, but there's no way to get through suffering unless you have a hope because hope means, you know, human beings are absolutely shaped by their understanding of the future. You've got to have something bigger than yourself to believe in. I mean, look at Chappelle Corby when you see all the magazine shots of her, when she's in jail over there, and when the verdict came down upon her that she would not see the light of day or the Australian shores for another 20 years, it crushed her physically, psychologically, she lost hope. And that's because your view of the future determines who you are now. And so what is the hope that Paul had? It was the assured conviction of the triumph of God. He knew that God was going to win in the end. I remember watching rugby with my mates once, and it was an incredible tight game between Australia and the All Blacks, and they were screaming at the television and they're throwing popcorn, and they're jumping up and down, and the scores were neck and neck, and yet I was totally and absolutely calm. I was just sitting back and enjoying the game, enjoying the spectacle in front of me. I'm sure people looking from the outside are going, "How could he do that?" Because I am a die-hard rugby fan, and look, it wasn't for a lack of love in my rugby. But you see it was a rerun. We taped it. We were watching the rerun, and it sort of blocked ears, so you don't notice a bit. See, I knew the score. I had an assured conviction of the triumph of the wallabies, and so in that sense it meant I was just, I was cruising through, I was absolutely certain, and affected my whole persona. You see, in Ephesians 3-10, just before this passage this morning, Paul says this, "His intent was that now, through the church, that's us this morning. The manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and the authorities and the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose, that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord." What's Paul saying there? He's reminding us of the score. He's reminding the Ephesian church of the score. He's reminding us that he's accomplished his purpose in the work of Jesus Christ. He's working on it through Jesus Christ. Not it's in the pipeline, and hopefully it'll be all right. He has accomplished his work in Jesus Christ. Guys, I don't want to ruin the story. I've said this before, but I go to the back of the book here, we win. And a short conviction of the triumph of God, our problem, and it's my problem, right? We're all the same here this morning. Our problem is we place our hopes on things that are finite, and we forget that we know the score. And so if you make, as your ultimate hope, any finite object, what is suffering other than the stripping of those things? If you find out things you're ultimate hope, you won't avoid suffering. You will, in fact, become more anxious, more worried, more protective, more defensive, more nervous, more upset, more anxious, that you will lose or you have lost them. And so guys, I want to ask you this morning, what is your hope? Unless you have a spiritual reference point that is beyond your circumstances, something beyond this world, you will not be able to endure suffering. That's why we need to not only know, not only to grasp, but to hope in the love of Christ, the writer of the song Nature Boy said, the greatest thing that you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return, to know the love of Christ. That is the hope that we have as Christians this morning. Do you see the need for bringing the love of Christ into your inner being? And although you may know to be a Christian and know all the right words, and yeah, I know it, I know it, I've heard it before. You look Paul saying you don't, whilst it seems abstract, and whilst we'll never fully know the love of Christ, the love that surpasses all knowledge and understanding, all of the truths of the Bible, as abstract as they are, are made absolutely real and understandable in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. And notice this morning, Paul's begun to do that for you. He talks about the breadth and the length and the depth and the height of Christ. What's he doing? He's meditating narratively. Look, the breadth of Christ, John chapter 12 verse 32 says, "But when I, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men, all people to myself." Hear that? All people. A breadth means regardless of your past or your pedigree this morning, you've been included in the plan for his love, whether you've accepted it or not. Have you considered the breadth of the love of Christ? Then there's a length, Revelation 13 verse 8 says, "The lamb that was slain from the creation of the world," what it's saying is he knew before the beginning of time what he was coming to do. And yet he came and he decided to die for us. And before there was time, there was a love that was pointed in your direction. And then the other question is what will Christians be doing from billions of years from now? What are we going to be doing in 10,000 years? We're going to be knowing and grasping the love of God. Have you seen its length? There's a long love in your direction this morning. And there's the depths. You know, if you had had 60 books, this thick, and every page on it and big bold letters, in nice clear writing, so our eyesight could get it, if there was just that writing and 60 volumes of books where God just says, "I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you." And you know what? We're probably still not going to get it, but you want to see the depths of his love. Philippians 2 said he didn't consider equality with God, something to be grasped, but he humbled himself into the very nature of a man, became a servant. And on the cross, he cries out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" On the cross, Jesus went to the depths of hell and back for you. That's the depths of his love for you this morning. And there's a height, John 17, he says, "I'm, he prays father, I'm giving myself away for them so they might have the glory that we had before the creation of the world." Everything he did was so that we could share in the glory and the love and the relationship that he had with the father. Now, don't email me during the week, ask me what that means. I really don't know. Just get a nosebleed with me, and are you getting the heights of the love of God? It's in the gospel that you see that what you have been seeking to find has first found you. The only love that could ever fully satisfy that yearning deep down and you will span the lengths and the breaths and the depths and the heights of time and space for you this morning. If you feel anything right now, you want to cry out to him? Can we just be a little bit moved by the truth of the gospel? If you are, you know, that is the spirit, silver nitrating your heart this morning. Make it ever more real to you. Paul prays for one thing, not your circumstances, but the power to know, the power to grasp, the power to hope in the love of Christ. So Christian this morning, you're saying, "I know, yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I get it." Come on, don't pull out the book or the little card in the front seat. Let's just take the pre-fight, flight safety briefing a little bit more seriously because when we need it the most, it's the very one thing that could save your life. To him who can do more than we can ask or imagine how God is able to succeed, succeed through the power, not in a God that goes and fixes everything through us, but the power at work in you. If you're succeeding this life in the next, to know, to experience, to grasp, to hope in the love of Jesus, that's the one thing you need this morning. Do you have it? You can have it through faith in him this morning. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, it's these moments when we have spoken out your word and we come back to the revelation of your truth. It's these moments of prayer right now in this service, Father, that we need the most. It's these moments now that as your spirit moves amongst the hearts of your people, every one of us in this place this morning, Father, I pray like Paul that each and every one of us might know, might grasp how wide, long and high and deep your love is for us for your Son, Jesus Christ. So Father, our part is played. We read the words, but now we leave it to your incredible, immeasurable power to work. But not new information into our lives, Father, but making the information we've always known new to us this week, whether we've been a Christian for a day or for 80 years. Lord, may we as a church and as a people be changed this morning through the reality of that prayer, and may we as a church glorify you. May this world, Crow's Nest and Sydney and New South Wales and Australia, may the world see, Father, that you are a God who is able to succeed, not by taking things in your own hands, but through working, through broken and imperfect people like ourselves. That's where there's ever more power, ever more glory. And if that happens, may it go always straight back to you. Pray this now in the mighty name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]