Sunday Report
This Old Testament passage carries New Testament doctrine! Did you notice how the top is like a choral refrain in heaven while the bottom is a response from earth? There is a relationship connection!
The eye of our living Lord is upon us who have His living hope in our hearts. Our hope is because we have received His love poured into us so that our faith may be renewed in hope since we have now been joined, His Spirit to our spirit, and redeemed.
God’s grace flows to us and in us. This is most amazing! Pondering our reality, what actually is going on in us is staggering!
More staggering than a predictable eclipse of the sun, orders of magnitude greater and unseen is… grace. It is not so much what the Creator has done, gazing at the sun’s halo; it is what the Creator is now doing! Have you seen the Son’s halo?
Our three “L”s form a nucleus of Spiritual identity. They speak to the essential Life of Jesus Christ, God’s Love shared in us and the Holy Spirit’s Light to guide our glorification in Jesus producing His fruit.
God is! He is the “I AM” and has bought us into His eternal family. This is our new family name and we need training. What He has begun He will continue to perform.
Righteousness and sanctification and redemption sum up the wisdom God gives because we are in His Son, Christ Jesus. This is declared for us in 1Cor. 1:30, above … and He is in us.
Our three “L”s form a nucleus of Spiritual identity. They speak to the essential Life of Jesus Christ, God’s Love shared in us and the Holy Spirit’s Light to guide our glorification in Jesus producing His fruit.
In our last discussion of Christ’s Life in us, we described our created center in the knowledge of Jesus, receiving supernatural resources to grow God’s grace. Love, Life and Light are all part of our singular wholeness in Christ but each contributes qualitatively to our culture of Jesus’ grace in us. We want to now turn to “Light” and see how God illumines our natural soul and uses His word of truth.
LIFE is the second thread in our BodyLife trilogy of “L”s. We are speaking, of course, of Jesus’ resurrected LIFE in us. This common term in the evangelical community has lost its cutting edge. The living Life of our resurrected Jesus is literal. Not a mystic concept or theological idea, Jesus dwells in believers, Colossians 1:27, 2Cor. 1:22, Romans 8:1cf.
This truth is absolute! Do we see Jesus in believers or do we hear them pleading for Jesus’ help? No wonder Christianity is viewed as mystic and off the wall! How would you answer this? Valid or not?
We spoke to the issue of BodyLife in our last GN. BodyLife is an organic reality flowing out of every believer. A new life has been created inside our body and joined to God’s own Spirit becoming our new identity.
Problem! We are so rooted in our fleshly body we end up walking in flesh while living in our new spirit/Spirit. God’s resurrection power is thereby unavailable except in putting to death sin in the body … Jesus already nailed it to His cross! We need to nail it to His cross also, using His resurrection power. Jesus paved the way for us to get it done.
This is our third GN in a trilogy. We began with a drill down of Galatians 2:20 where a constant contrast between death and life is depicted, I have been crucified nevertheless I live. Christ Jesus, who is delivered from death by death, is also experienced by the born again believer. Created in Jesus, a believer is a new person with a new identity. Our New Life is supernaturally birthed, literally, providing living roots within our risen Savior. Our distinctiveness is a resurrected Jesus within us, inside our container of flesh. This is so amazing it is difficult to grasp! It is a miracle … only by His grace! His power is released into our old crucified self. It sounds cultish to a person without a supernatural Spiritual birth. Yes, it is supernatural, and just as mystic as is creation all around us.
This verse is like our view of the Redwoods. There is much more than meets the eye. Sin cannot overwhelm neither can circumstances be so impossible that grace is not waiting on scene to do “so much more.” Grace is a personal relationship working inside-out as well as outside circumstances - in. It is about two persons in relationship! One person is you and the other person is too amazing to describe!
The other side of our grace relationship is God Himself. Not the image of God who is in our mind, nothing that small. It is The Eternal Reality of God Himself. The I AM Who creates out of nothing! This is the person on the other side of our personal relationship because we are in Jesus Christ. It is not only GOD, it is The Holy Spirit, it is The Lord Jesus Christ, it is the Triune Godhead Person! I know! How can it be? Yes, it is the God of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses and the God of Jesus. Our grace is from out of God, our personal God, who provides power for us to accomplish His will ... and so much more! This grace, the Grace of our Triune God, is “this grace in which we stand,” Romans 5:2. How glorious is our God!
Clearly, God’s glory is seen in physical light piercing the dense, living redwood fence reaching upward into God’s kingdom. Much more than this, His organic glory within each believer connects us with each other as we grow consuming grace. His eternal glory within us often escapes our attention. His glory becomes our glory as our oneness in Him and each other is manifested even in our own flesh, Romans 8:11.
Here is one mystery of Godliness unlocked for the believer who “has ears to hear.” Our soulish tendency is to rely upon self but the testimony of the Lord is sure making wise the simple, Ps. 19. When we “will” open the faith door into our mind and heart, we enter into God’s own sanctuary of counsel, Rev. 3:20. His Truth is light into our soul so we can discern His “good” and become wise, Heb. 5:14. This is where we need to spend personal time! His glory becomes ours since we are His.
Faith is one of the most pivotal elements in the life of God’s people since it determines destiny and qualitative growth in our created existence of grace. We are Drilling Down faith.
When I was a boy, we drove our 1935 two-tone grey Plymouth through a redwood tree. They had a one way road through one of these behemoths in northern California. A few redwoods are still alive today “who” were just beginning life when Jesus was born. It is hard to imagine how massive these ancients become. I wonder how large we can grow our faith?
Faith is one of the most pivotal elements in the life of God’s people since it determines the destiny of our created existence AND our qualitative growth in grace. We are drilling down faith.
January Grace Notes listed 12 commonly known faith verses. One of many omitted is the following:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” -Romans 1:16-17, (See also Habakkuk 2:4, Hebrews 10:38, Galatians 3:11).
God grows faith through grace. Once we are born into His care, we become part of God’s grace culture. This unique system of living is sourced in God Himself. Every circumstance of our life reaches into His personal nerve center because we have been bought and brought back into God’s personal family becoming children of God. His loving response to His children, who are in Christ, is an ability gifted to each believer according to God’s purposes and our need. This is called grace.
Our faith is joined to grace and has divine purposes. We grow in Christ through our faith by His grace. Growing in Him is preparation, while in our flesh, for ruling with Him during His earthly millennium kingdom and then reigning with Him eternally.
Paul has layered steps into the fullness of God from the posture of prayer. We have been looking at each step starting at the bottom, the fullness of God, and moving up, one step at a time, back to the top, leaving a staircase for our understanding into God’s love. Last time we looked at faith. It is our door allowing Christ to “dwell in our hearts” allowing us to experience the fullness of God.
Now we want to look more closely to what the apostle Paul means by dwelling in our hearts. The word he uses in the Greek is a compound word meaning House (οικοs) and down against (κατα). It is not uncommon in Greek to combine a preposition into a word in order to convey a nuance or emphasize a meaning. In this instant, the emphases is not just living in a house or dwelling in it but with the κατα formed into the front of the word, Paul emphasizes the full weight of God’s presence is meant to impact our soul-self. He is saying Christ may come against our heart so that we can know the full content of Jesus’ presence within our soul-self.
Our faith is based upon our knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship with Him as a person. A regenerated believer, one who has been born again, knows what it means to have new life. It is easy to identify by our experience of faith when Jesus Christ came into our life. But this new birth is an embryo of life in Christ. It begins a gestation period introducing us into grace accessible by faith. Being born again is receiving Jesus factually! We literally receive the resurrected life of the person, Jesus Christ. How is this possible? … Love! What has love to do with it? ☺
In human terms it is ridiculously absurd. This reality contradicts natural laws and our sense of what is possible. The colossal nature of what God has done is a measurement of how gargantuan our God of love is! The regenerate person has within “self” a witness and testimony of the saving power of Jesus Christ as well as God’s immense love which drives grace. Paul says it best in Romans 5, it is so “much more!”
“Love is layered throughout this passage and the dominate theme. But none of our core samples of love are the same. In fact, this prayer passage itself suggests God’s diversity. The further away from the center of God’s fullness, the love textures become more dimensioned with reason and truth. They all have love in them but the closer we get to God’s fullness, the more dense is the love surrounding ‘fullness’.” -GN
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, … … …
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. - Ephesians 3:14-19
We are continuing our look at this passage illustrated in the life of Elijah. God exposed the breadth, length, height and depth of agape love through power from where Elijah was standing inside the cave. Watching God’s display, protected by the cave, didn’t persuade. Elijah had just been God’s own instrument of power before Ahab and all Israel. The wind, earthquake and fire may have been a reminder but not a revelation for Elijah. But it wasn’t God’s power he saw, it was His love. Fear had griped his heart driving him into the cave but he left the cave in faithful submission to the lover of his soul.
We have been “Drilling Down” this past year unlocking God’s word in our heart and mind. It has been percolation time for God’s word within our very soul, “dwelling richly,” filling us with the fullness of God. However, as we began looking at Paul’s Ephesian prayer, in chapter 3, we began “fracking” from inside at different angles. We recognized how variable is our own capacity according to God’s grace and purpose. Now, we want to observe God’s spiritual geological formations surrounding His fullness. Paul paints a cross-section of love, in this prayer passage, that encapsulates God’s fullness. Penetrating God’s love is a requirement. Filling our fullness is receiving love out of His fullness.
This isn’t our last probe into being “filled with the fullness of God.” But we must start “drilling up” to the love of Christ surpassing knowledge (Eph. 3:14-19). The way Paul puts it, love is a condition for being filled with the fullness of God. But first, we want to be realistic about what Paul means by “filled with all the fullness of God”. We won’t leave our discussion with all the answers but perhaps we can measure its meaning within our understanding. As we journey in faith, God is ever increasing our capacity to receive more grace (Romans 5). So, since we are not removed from God’s spiritually organic activity, “being filled with all the fullness of God,” we focus our soul’s attention in other directions as God maintains His work within us. Let us not forget, it is God working within us, to will and do according to His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13). His faithful work in us continues while our mind is otherwise engaged (Philippians 1:6). This is pictured for us in 1Kings 17ff as we probe this remarkable man Elijah.
After about two years alone with the birds, the brook and God, Elijah is now ready to be strengthened in his faith and tempered for Ahab at Zarepath. First, the widow who did not have the resources to do what Elijah required. Exhausted of resources, the widow submits to God through Elijah and proves God’s faithfulness. Second, bringing back to life what God had already promised to sustain. God seals Elijah by putting divine power into Elijah’s hand for use restoring life into the widow’s son. God affirms Elijah showing His power to others through him and allowing Elijah to experience God’s reality in God’s service of love and judgment.
We began a “reverse drill down” last week on the following prayer of Paul to saints in Ephesus:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according 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.
– Ephesians 3:14-19.
Paul is giving us the things necessary to be “filled with all the fullness of God”. This is the climax of his prayer so if we start with the premise that, indeed, we do want to be filled with the fullness of God, lets reverse engineer Paul’s prayer from the “fullness of God”, working our way backwards to where Paul kneels in prayer for the saints. In this way, we can identify the hinge points, the markers Paul uses, from praying on his knees to being “filled with all the fullness of God.”
This is one of Paul’s prayers for the saints in Ephesus:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according 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.
– Ephesians 3:14-19.
This is a marvelous prayer. It is spiritually layered from bowing on Paul’s knees to that upward place of being “filled with all the fullness of God.” On the surface it may seem artificial or symbolic. How many people do you know who are filled with all the fullness of God? Yet, Paul didn’t speak in euphemisms. He was focused on being a pastor rather than a theologian. His constant desire was people to experience life in Christ Jesus in very practical ways. The early Christians were actually called people in “the way” (Acts 9:2).
