Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Ephesians 3 | Date: August 17, 2014 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Despite the fact that so many of our congregation are away today, it was just wonderful singing this morning—good songs, good singing. It’s been a blessing already to be here. If you will take your Bibles and turn with me, please, to Ephesians chapter 3. Ephesians chapter 3. I’d like to read through the entire chapter. Ephesians chapter 3, beginning with verse 1:

For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles—assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace, which was given to me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory.

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 we ask or think, according to the power at work in us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Let’s look to the Lord in prayer. Our Father, we pray that you will help us to see something of the glory that is revealed to us in this passage from your Word. Every time we come together, we are very mindful that it is not enough that we read and that we understand your Word. It’s not enough that we interpret it carefully and rightly. We ask that your Spirit would accompany your Word and pursue it and come along behind and lighten our minds and our hearts. We pray that you’ll lift up the hearts of your people by it. We pray that by it you’ll give us a greater appreciation of your love to us in Christ. We ask that that will in turn become the great shaping factor of all we are and how we live and think. Fashion us by your Word, we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.

The title of the message this morning is “The Gospel-Centered Life.” The Gospel-Centered Life. We have glanced at verses 1 through 13, and you can see there, as we have seen before, that Paul there picks up on the same theme that he was expounding in the last half of chapter 2, which we looked at: that in Christ, God has brought Jew and Gentile together in one body, in one new man, transforming them such that the former barriers and divisions have all been broken down. Now we have one new man brought together in Christ, brought together to God in worship of him, accepted before him. In fact, he gives it this analogy of the temple—that the church is this great temple that God is building. Each member, each person, is a “new brick” in the building, if you will, that God is using to constitute this great temple in which he dwells. This temple is made up of transformed men and women who were lost and helpless and hopeless, but he has rescued and transformed them.

And you’ll see in verse one that Paul starts out, “For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles…” and then he digresses: “Assuming that you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me, how the mystery was made known, and I made known that mystery to you, and you understand what it is,” and so on, and so on, and so on. Another one of Paul’s long sentences. And then he picks it up again in verse 14: “For this reason…”—okay, we’re back to that now—”For this reason, I bow the knee before the Father. I pray.” For this reason—that is, what we have been seeing in chapter two and now what he rehearses again quickly in the first part of chapter three—for this reason, I pray.

Now, one of the functions of this passage—this is not the main point, but one of the functions of this passage that I’ll try to point out as we go through in a couple of places at least—is that here we have an inspired prayer. Surely there’s something we can learn about prayer itself from Paul’s model. There’s something here that can guide us into what and how to pray. So we’ll keep that in mind as we go through. Let’s just start with that question: What do you pray for? And when you’re asked to pray for the church, when you’re asked to pray for one another here at RBC, what do you pray for?

Well, notice the kinds of things Paul prays for. Verse 16: “that he’ll 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, and that you may be,” if you can believe it, “filled with all the fullness of God.” There’s how Paul prays when he prays for the church. You know that it’s been one of my concerns that we don’t allow our prayer meetings to devolve into simply praying for physical and external temporal needs. And here we have a great example from the Apostle Paul as to what stirs him to pray and then what kinds of things he prays about.

What strikes you as you read through this prayer, verses 16 through 19, is what we might call the spiritual focus of it all. His concerns in this prayer are things like spiritual power, the inner man, faith, understanding of the gospel, love, strength, growth, development. He’s speaking of character. He’s speaking of godliness, Christ-likeness. And he’s praying that God will enable and cause his people to be all that they are called to be in Christ. And that’s the burden of his prayer. So, as I always like to say, if you fall asleep, now you’ve gotten the long and short of it. He’s praying for spiritual concerns.

Or we might put it this way: Paul is praying that God would accomplish in us what, in fact, he has purposed to do in us and for us. And that’s what he means when he introduces it by, “For this reason.” “For this reason, I pray.” “For this reason” points back to all of this that God has done with the church. He has taken hateful and hating Jews and Gentiles in the deepest of settled opposition to one another and has brought them together on a level plane at the cross into the presence of God, where together they form a worshiping community with all other horizontal level barriers broken down. Together they have come to God, redeemed in Jesus Christ as a new worshiping community, loving one another. And all of that presupposes deep transformation of life and of heart.

And that, in a nutshell, is what God has purposed to do for us. He’s purposed to make a people for his own glory. We saw that crystallized in verse 10, so that the church might be the means by which God honors himself before all of the angelic and demonic hosts. He can show off, in the very existence of these people who have been rescued and restored and transformed, the greatness of his grace and his power and his love. And we stand then as testimony and honor to God.

So in other words, Paul here—we can put it briefly—Paul is praying in keeping with God’s stated purpose. Isn’t that interesting? Paul is praying in keeping with God’s stated purpose. It’s a question that comes up often in the church: Why pray if God has ordered it? Why pray if God has already ordained this to happen or that? And while we can talk about all of the details of that, and we can do that another time, one of the answers has to be that for the Apostle Paul, for the inspired Apostle, that is not a deterrent to pray; that is incentive to pray. He’s praying in keeping with the purpose of God, that it would be experienced individually in every member of the church, that God would make us all that he has purposed to do in us and through us and for us. And so in that respect, it becomes a marvelous guide for our praying, that we can look at one another and then bow to God in prayer and pray according to what he has promised to do for us.

Paul Prays for Power

All right, now for a quick overview of the passage, verses 14 and following. You’ll notice in verse 14, Paul does not quite say he prays. He uses a euphemism for that: “For this reason, I bow my knees before the Father.” And then we have another bit of a digression, verse 15, a parenthetical comment about the fatherhood of God: “From whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” That is to say, when we speak of God as Father, it’s an analogy, but it’s not an analogy that runs from the bottom up. It’s not as though he’s comparing God to fathers here and saying we should think of him that way. It’s the other way—that he’s the model Father after whom all families in the earth are named. Whatever fatherhood is in its ideal—now we’ve all known of bad fathers and mistakes that fathers make and all of that, that’s not the point—but fatherhood in its ideal is a model, it is a type of the real model who is God himself, the Father. So he says, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,” who is the ultimate and the ideal Father in all that fatherhood should be and is. And he prays.

Verse 16: “that God would grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in his inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” So he prays that God would grant to the Ephesian believers that they would be strengthened (verse 16) and then (verse 17) that Christ would dwell in their hearts by faith.

Now this is really a tightly compacted prayer, so I’m going to take a minute and just give you a quick overview of the flow of thought here. Verse 16 again, he prays—here’s the main word—that God would “grant to be strengthened” and that “Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith.” In turn, he prays this (verse 18) “in order that you may have strength” or be enabled “to comprehend and to know the love of Christ.” You follow? Pray, first of all, that God would grant strength to be strengthened and that Christ would indwell, so that (verse 18) you would have strength to comprehend and to know the love of Christ, and that in turn (verse 19, at the end of the verse) “that you may be filled with the fullness of God.” He prays that God would grant you to be strengthened and that Christ would dwell in your hearts in order that you may have strength to comprehend and to know, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Let’s try to work our way through it. Verse 16, Paul prays for power. He prays “that God would grant you to be strengthened with power.” But it’s power of a special kind. Notice it: he prays that God would grant you to be “strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner man.” In the inner man. That’s an expression you might remember from elsewhere in Paul’s writings. You remember it probably most famously in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, where Paul speaks of the outer man and the inner man: “Though the outer man perish” (and he’s speaking of all the difficulties he’s been through) “though the outer man perish, the inner man is being renewed day by day.”

The outer man, the external man, that is everything temporal, everything that is associated with this body—whether it’s health or wealth or the circumstances in which we live of whatever kind—that’s the outer man. The inner man is what we are on the inside: how we think, our ambitions, our appetites, our goals, the things that we want, the things that we don’t want, what motivates us. The outward man is that which is on the outside. In the contrast here, what he’s talking about is the inner man, and he prays that this inner man would be strengthened with power. That is, that he would be given power toward what we’ve already seen: godliness, character, Christ-likeness. This new man would be strengthened. And for this, the inward development of this inner man, Paul prays that the Spirit of God would give enablement, would give power. In fact, he piles up the language here: “strengthened with power,” “strengthened with power.” He could have used either one of those words, but he uses both. To be strengthened with power in the inner man.

In fact, he sounds pretty optimistic about it: that you would be “strengthened with power through his Spirit.” How is that? Verse 16 again at the beginning: “according to the riches of his glory he may give you to be strengthened with power.” You see how he constructs the whole thing? He looks at God as this infinite resource of great power. After all, he’s the Creator and the Sovereign over all that is. There’s no power that is that is not his. This God who is rich in glory, this rich-in-power God—that he would grant you power in the inner man, and to be strengthened by his Spirit. And in fact, he’s optimistic about it, not just because God is so powerful, but because (verses 14 and 15) he is, after all, our Father. And all that fatherhood is in its ideal, that is what God is to us. And so he looks at God not just as this reservoir of raw power, but he looks at God as this—yes, this powerful God—but the powerful God who has established himself as our Father. He is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in Christ he is our Father. And this great resource of infinite grace that has been displayed in Christ, and this great resource of power, Paul says, “In keeping with all that God is to us in his greatness and in his goodness, I pray that he will strengthen you with power.”

Well, that’s a pretty optimistic prayer. And he says that he prays that God would give according to his inexhaustible riches, according to all the perfections that make God the glorious and the good and gracious God that he is. And in fact, this is something we can count on because, after all, this is God’s purpose for us. He has set out to do this in us and for us. It’s for this purpose that He indwells us.

All right, then He moves on in verse 17: “He will grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” “So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” Now, Paul here is writing to believers. He’s not praying for their conversion, their initial conversion. He’s not praying that you would “let Jesus into your heart,” to use our terminology. He’s praying to believers that “Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith.”

And the word “dwell,” of course, has domestic kind of connotations: that Christ would take up residence in your hearts. Settle in, make himself at home in your heart. He’s speaking of Christ indwelling then, and it’s not, I don’t think, as something in addition to being strengthened, but this is what the strengthening that he prays for is: Christ dwelling in your hearts. I heard Sinclair Ferguson say one time—it’s something I thought was very perceptive; it’s simple and obvious when you hear it, you’ll say, “Yeah, of course,” but it’s just an insightful remark that’s important to keep in mind—and that is: there is no such thing as grace. There’s no such thing as “grace.” And when we ask for God’s grace, what he gives is not some “thing” called grace. What he gives is Christ. Christ indwelling in us by his Spirit. And when we need, in these terms, power, God does not give a “thing” called power. What he gives is Christ indwelling us by his Spirit to make us and to enable us to be all that we are.

And the metaphor that he uses here is that Christ would make himself at home in your hearts. Many of you know what it is to own a home for a period of time, and you know what it is to settle in and make it your home. We haven’t done much in the house that we live in now. In the previous house that we had, over the years, we did a lot of work. We started with some rearranging of some walls and closets and things like that, and we repainted minor things like that, and then it grew. The front porch was sagging. And so, because the porch had sagged, the roof above it had sagged. That was kind of unsightly. So we asked a guy to come look at it. By the time we were all done with everything, we had new closets, we had new painting in the whole house. We had a couple new walls. We had a new porch, a new roof—a bigger porch than it used to be. In place of the garage, there’s now a nice den. And we had a new garage moved forward down the driveway. And the driveway’s been paved. And we’ve got a swimming pool in the backyard. And we’ve got a beautiful deck around the pool. And we’ve got siding all around the house and a new roof on top. Because, after all, we’re going to be here the rest of our lives. And the “rest of our lives” ended up being a few months and we lost our shirt because we sold it so soon.

But you know how it is: you move in and you rearrange this and you rearrange that and you add this and you put on this addition and that addition. And after a while you begin to think, “Yeah, this is us. This is our home.” And that’s the metaphor Paul is using here. And he’s saying very simply that when Christ moved into your house, your house was in pretty bad disrepair. It needed a lot of rearranging. You had a lot of activity that you were doing you shouldn’t have done. A lot of things you should have done that you were leaving undone. And even the things that you did that weren’t bad in themselves, they were not done with the greatest of motives. They were not done to honor and please God. Not done out of a heart of love for God. You rather resented being called a sinner.

And simply put, it took a considerable measure of divine power for your house to be rearranged before Christ could be at home in your heart. And this is the metaphor Paul is using here. When Christ moved in, it was in terrible disrepair, and it needs this ongoing attention. And he prays that Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith and make those continual changes that are needed to adjust and make us all that we are supposed to be. That’s what he means when he prays that Christ will dwell in your hearts by faith. In the book of Galatians, he uses another metaphor: that of Christ being “formed” in your hearts. I love that expression: Christ being formed in our hearts. This works its way out into all kinds of expressions, and in fact verses 14 to 21 becomes the transition, the pivot, which turns Paul’s attention now when we get to chapter 4, when he starts exhorting us: “do this, behave like this, act like that, don’t do this but do the other.” And we famously get to chapter 4, Paul’s turn to what we call the practical exhortation section of his letter. This is the transition: that Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith, that he would make these necessary adjustments and form you into all that he’s called you to be.

God is not concerned, in other words, God is not concerned for power in our lives to perform outstanding displays of the miraculous. And in fact, God is not concerned for a mere creedal Christianity so that you just know the right doctrine and can argue down any Arminian. God is not after that. What God is after is a deep transformation of heart and life to make us all that he’s called us to be in Christ. Godliness. Deep transformation of character and life that shows itself in obedience, discernment, faithfulness, humility, patience—the fruit of the Spirit that he speaks of in Galatians chapter five—that would be stable and joyful in trials. What he’s concerned about is to transform us, not apart from the truth, but by the truth, but he’s still—what he’s after is to transform us and to make us like Christ. That’s his purpose for us, and he has set himself to accomplish it, and so Paul prays for it. Make this increasingly the experience of your people.

Now we come to the end of verse 17, and we have a couple of expressions: “rooted and grounded in love.” Rooted and grounded in love. That’s a mixed metaphor. “Rooted in love”—that’s an agricultural metaphor, that we’ve grown deep into the soil of God’s love. “Grounded in love”—that’s an architectural, construction metaphor. You lay the solid foundation on which you build a building, “grounded in love.” He mixes his metaphors: that this would be the enriching and the stabilizing factor in your life—a growing recognition and understanding and appreciation of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Rooted and grounded in love. It’s a great expression. We’re going to see more of this for the rest of the message. Rooted and grounded in love. What he is after is that we come to an increasing understanding and appreciation of the love of God in Christ. That we see, in other words, a gospel-shaped love that becomes the stabilizing and driving factor in Christian living.

Now there is some question as to whether or not these expressions, “rooted and grounded in love,” should go with verse 17 (“so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, being rooted and grounded in love”) or, as my translation has it, that “you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength” (verse 18). And it goes then with verse 18. I rather think it goes with verse 17. In either case, he is pointing to this central factor of Christian living, and that is that we would be established in the love of God in Jesus Christ. And that’s what he says when we get to verse 18.

Paul Prays for Strength to Comprehend

Here’s our second request: “that you may have strength.” First, he prayed (verse 16 and 17) that God would grant you to be strengthened and that Christ would dwell in your hearts. Now, verse 18, he prays “that we 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.” We may have strength to comprehend and to know the love of Christ. Power from God indwelling us by his Spirit to grasp what is itself ungraspable: the infinite love of Jesus Christ.

Now, just as we saw in verse 17 that when Paul prays that Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith, he’s not praying for the initial conversion of these Ephesians—they are already believers. By definition, they know something of the indwelling of Christ. So here, when he prays that you would “know the love of Christ,” he’s not assuming you don’t know anything about it. Of course they know something about it. They’re believers. By definition, they know something about the love of Christ. And that’s what they’ve embraced in their faith. In fact, Paul has spent a good amount of time in chapters one and two talking about the love of God in Christ and his saving love and so on. What Paul is suggesting here when he prays that we will have strength to know the love of Christ, what he’s suggesting is not that we don’t know anything about the love of Christ. What he’s suggesting is we don’t know enough of the love of Christ yet.

Now, I don’t know if that’s a thought that’s ever occurred to you. You might have thought, “Okay, I got that.” But Paul portrays the love of Christ here as something that is infinite and immeasurable. And he prays that we will come to know in increasing measure that which cannot finally be comprehended: the great love of Christ for us. And so he gives some kind of metaphorical descriptions of what the love of Christ must be like—that we would know it in its breadth and length and depth and height. Working out the measurements, as it were, of Christ’s love.

What is the breadth of Christ’s love? Well, that’s the measure from side to side, the width. I would take it, if we’re going to have some specific meaning attached to this, it would be something like the scope of Christ’s love, which is an amazing thing. It encompasses the whole globe. We read about it in the book of Revelation: men and women from every tribe and kindred and tongue in heaven, under heaven, singing praise to the Lamb who redeemed us by his blood. Amazing, the breadth of Christ’s love.

Or, look at it in another way: the length, the measure from front to back. If we can assign some specific meaning to that, it would be something like the time length of Christ’s love that runs from eternity to eternity, which we’ve already learned here in the book of Ephesians. It started back before the foundation of the world when he set his love upon us and chose us and predestined us and set us for this great glorious destiny. From eternity to eternity, his love runs for all of us. It’s an amazing thing. The breadth, the length.

The height: the measure from the bottom to the top. Again, if we can find some specific meaning attached to this, it would have to be referring to something like the glories that God has accomplished for us and secured for us in Christ. Rebel sinners, not only forgiven—that’s just the beginning—but actually made sons and brought into fellowship with God himself. Paul has described that at length in chapter two. You remember we saw that he took us, lost and helpless as we were, and brought us to be seated with Christ in the heavenlies. The height of Christ’s love—an amazing thing.

And then the last one, he says, the depth of Christ’s love. Well, if the height of Christ’s love is the measure from the bottom to the top, the depth of Christ’s love is the measure from the top to the bottom. And again, if we can assign a specific meaning to that, it would have to be referring to something like the great condescension of Christ in his love for us to save us. What is the distance that he came in order to secure us for himself? How do you measure the distance from the glory of the universal empire that is his to the dereliction of the cross? How do you measure that?

He says, “I pray that God would give you to know the breadth and the length and the depth and the height of the love of Christ.” Now Paul is not—he’s surely not saying that there are actual units of measure so that we can figure all this out: “We measure from side to side the breadth of Christ’s love, and we’ve got 400 barrels of love here. We measure the length of Christ’s love, and here we have a thousand barrels of love. In the height, we’ve got 1,500 barrels of love. In the depth, we’ve got 2,000 barrels.” He’s not speaking obviously in those kinds of terms, because he tells us next that it’s really incomprehensible. It can never be fully grasped. But the point is to stress the immensity and the immeasurable greatness of the love of Christ—attempting to come to grips with the demonstrated love of God in Jesus Christ, the ultimate measure of it being the cross. How do you measure the love of Christ, who is God the Son from all eternity, coming to the rescue of poor rebel sinners who have sinned against Him and rebelled against Him in every conceivable way, and coming as one of them in order to take their place and to bear the curse and the wrath of God against their sin that they had committed against Him? How do we ever finally come to grips and say, “Okay, I got it”? This is a love like no other.

So Paul prays, “May your power be at work in them so as to make them grasp this love ever more fully, ever more adequately, that they will see ever more clearly the great purpose of grace that has been put at work for them.” And so he prays that we will be strengthened to grasp the love of God in Christ. You ever pray like that? “Give me the strength to know the gospel of grace better.”

Now, what’s very important here is to follow the… I’m sorry, I bumped the mic. So Paul is not praying simply that we will come to understand the love of Christ. He’s praying that we will be strengthened to understand the love of Christ so that (verse 19, the end of the verse) “so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Now this is a very important connection, and we’ll flesh it out in just a minute. But notice he prays that we will be strengthened to know the love of Christ so that we will be filled with the fullness of God. Now this is just staggering language. To be filled with the fullness of God? That almost sounds like heresy, doesn’t it? And if it weren’t written by an inspired writer, you’d say, “No, we don’t want to say that, it goes too far.” Filled with the fullness of God? In what conceivable sense could you ever say that? Surely, Paul, you’ve gotten caught up in devotional heat of some kind. You’ve said too much.

No, he says, “I want what I pray for. It’s for God to enable you to grasp increasingly this great love of Christ in the gospel so that by that, you will be filled with the fullness of God.” Well, what does he mean by that? Well, he’s speaking of this fullness of God in some sense as the measure to which we are growing. This is what God has purposed to accomplish in us. Really? A fullness of God? Well, isn’t the goal of the Christian life—isn’t God’s goal in saving us—to make us like Christ? And I think he’s using similar language to that here. That the whole of our Christian life would be this progress aimed in degrees and in step-by-step, growing all the while to become measured up to what we’ve been called to in Christ. To be filled with the fullness of God. Doesn’t mean that we’ll become divine, of course not. But that we’ll become, in increasing measure, made like the one who has saved us.

Now again, if that’s the progression of thought, I want you to see how it works in Paul’s praying. This is, I think, extremely important: “strengthened to comprehend and to know the love of Christ so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” That is, this is the means or this is the process by which God makes us what we are called to be. How is it we come to the end “filled with all the fullness of God”? How is it we reach that point? Answer: by being strengthened to comprehend and to know the love of Christ. And by the strengthening of the Spirit within to grasp more fully the love of Christ, we are filled to the fullness of God.

The means or the process by which God makes us finally what we are called to be is not a crisis moment of surrender when I “let go and let God.” No. The way that God makes us to be what he’s called us to be is not “we walk an aisle, make a decision, and we’ve got it.” Finally, you just had to let go. No. The means by which God brings us to become what he has called us to be is this growing apprehension of the gospel of love—the gospel of the love of God in Christ—so that by that, we are made stable and by that we are made faithful. Simply put, it is by an increasing understanding of the gospel that this love, this gospel love, becomes the soil in which we are rooted and on which we are grounded for stability and faithfulness in the Christian life.

Now this is vital. We cannot be as spiritually mature as we should be unless we are empowered by God to grasp the love of Christ. Now, I’m not one for easy little “keys”—”Here is the key to the Christian life.” You know, I’m not one for that. But if there is a key to the Christian life, this is it. It is not mere mysticism, waiting for God the Spirit to work in me, where you’re waiting passively for him to do what only he can do. It’s not mere mysticism—although a fuller realization of God’s purpose will never come to pass apart from the Spirit of God powerfully working in us. But it’s not mere mysticism. Nor is it mere intellectualism: “I’ve learned the gospel. I’ve learned all the doctrines of soteriology. I’ve got them down. I get it. And now I’m where I ought to be.” No, it’s not mere intellectualism either—although it won’t happen apart from an increasing understanding and grasp and appreciation of the love of God in Christ. It’s not a mere intellectual exercise; it’s not a mere passive happening.

But it is the work of the Spirit of God working by means of the gospel. By means of the gospel, increasing our understanding and grasp and appreciation of the love of God in Christ so that it reaches more than just our understanding, but our affections and everything about us, shaping who we are so that we become increasingly awed by this great love of God in Christ in what we call the gospel. And for that, what is absolutely necessary is not only the gospel, but the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ working in us powerfully to that end. This is a huge emphasis of the Reformation. It is not just the gospel at work; it will never accomplish anything. But neither is it just the Spirit of God at work; that will never accomplish anything. It is the Spirit of God working through the gospel. It is the Spirit and the Word. The Spirit and the Word. The Spirit and the Word.

And what he’s exhorting us to simply here is that we become increasingly exposed to the gospel of grace so that that becomes the stuff that the Spirit of God uses to grow us and to mature us and to make us what he’s called us to be in Jesus Christ. I’m certainly not advocating what I would call a second work of grace where—bingo!—now I’ve got it and it’s happened. But rather that this is the process by which the Spirit of God works to make us what he’s called us to be. This very simply is why the Apostle Paul can say things like, “It is the love of Christ that constrains us.” Never mind all of the problems and all of the difficulties and the persecutions and trials that I’ve had in serving Christ; what pushes me, what compels me, is my understanding of the love of Christ.

This is what Paul has in mind in verse 17 when he speaks of being “rooted and grounded in love.” Teaching, understanding, informing the intellect, yes, but the Spirit of God at work in our otherwise hard hearts melting us with a felt realization of the great love of Christ for us. This explains our concern as preachers. I know people at church wonder, “Why do the preachers love to preach so much doctrine?” Yeah, we love it, but this is the stuff God uses to make God’s people what he’s called them to be. And now you know why Paul writes as he writes so often—that the first bulk of his letter is going to be doctrine and talking about the gospel from this angle, or from that angle, or from the other angle. And then he turns the corner, as he does here in chapter four, and moves on to exhortation to Christian living. Why spend all that time talking about election? Again. Why spend all that time talking about predestination? Again. And why spend all that time speaking of redemption again? Adoption again, forgiveness again and again. Why do that? Paul is simply telling us here: this is the stuff that God uses to make us what he’s called us to be. Only by our clearer understanding and felt experience of the love of Christ will our lives be increasingly transformed.

I know of churches where the emphasis is so heavy on the depravity of man—in which, by the way, I think we would agree entirely—but the emphasis is such on the depravity of man, and that is held to be so much the whole picture, that the people in those churches, dear saints (I’ve met some), could just never have joy in their Christian life because they hear all the time how bad, how bad, how bad, and that’s all they hear: how bad, how bad, how helpless. There are some brands of fundamentalist churches who, in their doctrine, we would agree with widely—they preach and believe in grace, they believe in justification by faith—but what you hear week in, week out, week in and week out, what you hear is: “Do this, perform that way, act that way, do this, do the other, don’t do that.” What you don’t hear is the love of Christ.

And since we’re picking on people, let’s just go ahead and talk about us Reformed Baptists. There are breeds of Reformed Baptists that are so consumed with the law of God that every week, after week, they are thundering the law, thundering the law, thundering the law, thundering the law. And yes, yes, it is important. It is an essential part of the Christian life to know the law of God and how it governs every dimension of our lives. But for incentive, for enablement to keep that law, don’t point me to the law. Point me to Christ.

And we’re called on to suffer. What’s going to help us? An understanding of the sovereignty of God? Yes. An understanding of the commands of God? “Be faithful in trials, count it all joy when you’re falling into trouble”? Yes. But at the end of the day, what’s really going to make me faithful in suffering is a deeper appreciation and a felt realization of the great love of God in Christ. Many times, many times for years in my preaching, I would counsel people in my preaching that the best preparation you can make for suffering, which is surely coming—the best preparation you can make and you must make for suffering is to fortify your mind ahead of time, deeply, with the truths of Scripture, in the gospel of Christ. Recognize that when that evil day of suffering comes, it’s not good at that point to have to scramble and go ask the preacher, “What is it I need to know?” What we must have beforehand are minds that are deeply saturated with these truths so that, being rooted and grounded in love, we’re rendered stable and mature and faithful in Christ.

Many times I’ve told people that in preaching, and then it came our turn to suffer. For years we watched as our daughter suffered with excruciating pain and just the deepest kind of mental torment. It was an awful thing. Throughout those years, people would ask, “How are you guys doing?” Of course, it seemed to be made better for a year or two. We were very encouraged. And then, of course, it turned worse, and she died. And even since then now, people ask regularly—it happened the other day on the telephone with another somebody—”How are you guys doing? How are you guys doing?” Let me just tell you something about that question from someone on this side of it. That, on the one hand, there’s a lot that we really appreciate about the question. It shows sympathy, it shows concern, it shows love, and we deeply appreciate it. On the other hand, it’s just not a very good question. “How you doing?” What do you say? How you think I’m doing? Every day there’s this great big hole. But we’re Christians. My wife says it best: “We’re doing fine; we just cry a lot.”

And what I want to say—and what I have said on a few occasions when I felt like I had the time to preach—what I want to say is that we’ve never struggled at that deep level of questioning God’s love. Whether or not we’re still serving, we’ve never had to struggle at that level. Because what I want to say is that the measure of God’s love for us has nothing to do with the health of my family. The measure of Christ’s love has nothing to do with the life of my family. The ultimate measure of God’s love is a cross where God the Son amazingly came and took the place of rebel sinners to bear our curse, to make us his. And with that, our inner man is strengthened. With that, our inner man is rendered stable. And we are brought to be what God has called us to be.

So Paul says, “Here is how you pray: Empower these people by your Spirit to know the incomprehensible love of Christ. So grip them with the realization of the love of Christ that they will never again waver in their faithfulness, but that always, though the outward man is perishing even, the inner man is being renewed every day.” Do you think God might like to answer a prayer request like that? Well, in fact, you might think that verse 19 is a little over the top. Fill them with the fullness of God? Know the unknowable? Comprehend the incomprehensible? What kind of nonsense is that? Verse 20: “Now to him who’s able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think according to the power at work in us.” That is to say, neither the immensity of our requests nor even the bounds of our imagination can place any limits on God’s mighty ability to work in us and to make us what he’s called us to be.

And once you work through a passage like that, and you’re reminded of the greatness of the love of Christ, and you’re reminded of the power of God at work in you through that gospel, what do you want to do? Does it make you want to sing? That’s verse 21: “To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever.” Here in the church we find God’s trophy of grace, a testimony of his power and grace at work. And the praise that we render to him today is just a sampling of the praise that will be his forever and ever. Amen.

Let’s pray. Our Father, we are thankful for what you have accomplished for us in Christ. Our hearts and our minds will never quite get around, never fathom fully what you have done for us in him, but how we love to revel in it, and how we praise you for the strength that you give us through it. God, make this, make this the determining factor in the heart and life of every one of us here at RBC, working in us powerfully by your Spirit through the gospel to make us what you’ve called us to be. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.