To download the text and/or audio file for this week's sermon, please go to the "Sermon Archive" page and follow the instructions you'll find there.

For a study guide to prepare for next week's sermon, please click HERE

EMPOWERMENT: PRAYING FAITHFULLY

Building Great Relationships, Part 4

May 27, 2007 – Pentecost Sunday

Pastor Bob Sanders

Last weekend Debbie and I were in New Jersey for our daughter Becca’s graduation from Princeton Seminary.  It was a wonderful time – not only for the graduation celebration but also for the chance to meet the parents of our son-in-law (to-be), Dave Bruner, who also was graduating from the seminary.  As most of you know, Becca and Dave will be married here this coming August 18 (and you’re all invited to the wedding).  My job is to be the father of the bride, and I’m working hard on learning my part.  As I understand it, there are two basic functions.  One is to stand and say something like, “Her mother and I do” when asked “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”  The other function is to reach for my checkbook – frequently and without flinching.  As I say, I’m working on it . . .

In the meantime, we continue with our series on Building Great Relationships.  Our Scripture reading is from Ephesians 3, and it’s a prayer which the apostle Paul offers for his friends in the church at Ephesus.  Paul loved to pray for people.  He understood that great relationships are built on prayer.  Great marriages, great friendships, great partnerships are established and nourished through times of prayer.  So let’s listen now to Paul’s prayer, and think about how it compares with the prayers you and I offer for the people we know and love.

Ephesians 3:14-21

14For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. 16I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, 17and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. 18I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. 20Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, 21to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Big Prayers

When I was in seminary I remember having an ongoing debate with a friend about the theological validity of “small prayers.”   For example, is it right to ask God for a good grade on a final exam?  (If not, most of us were in big trouble, since final exams were when we did our most fervent praying.)  What about praying for your team to win the big game?  (That depends.  For my friend who was from Boston, if it’s praying for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees, the answer is YES, since for him this was clearly a matter of good-versus-evil).  Then there was the all-time favorite: Is it OK for a Christian to pray for a parking place at the airport or the parking garage (or the church parking lot)? 

I don’t know if it’s right, but I know I’ve done it. 

I’m not opposed to small prayers.  I think it was Anne Lamott who pointed out there are really only two prayers out there.  One is “Help! Help! Help!” and the other is “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”  But the danger of small prayers is that they can trivialize God, reducing him from Lord of the universe to your personal errand boy.  In light of today’s Scripture reading, I’m not worried about whether we’re praying too many little prayers.  But I am concerned about whether we’re praying enough big prayers.

What’s a big prayer?  It’s a prayer based not on my personal wants but on God’s eternal purposes.  It’s a prayer to do something only God can do: to change a life, to open up a hardened heart, to heal a strained or broken relationship.  It’s a prayer to make a lasting difference in the lives of the poorest of the poor.  It’s a prayer for an unreached people like the Wolof of Senegal to come to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.  It’s a prayer for peace in places like Israel and Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.  It’s a prayer to transform a church from “the bland leading the bland” to a dynamic, Christ-centered community.  Big prayers – prayers that call on a big God and dare to ask him for big things – the kind of things only God can do.

More Christ

If you want to learn how it works, our passage from Ephesians 3 is a great model.  It is a big prayer, one of the biggest in the entire Bible.  Here’s how Paul begins.  Listen to verses 16 and 17 again:

I pray that, according to the riches of [God’s] glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.

When Paul prays that “Christ may dwell in your hearts” he chooses his words carefully.  There are two Greek words that can be translated as “dwell.”  One means to inhabit a place as a stranger, like a guest in a hotel.  The other word has to do with settling down, to make a permanent home.  It’s this second word Paul uses here.  He’s praying for Christ to dwell more deeply, more permanently, more securely in their everyday lives. 

It’s perhaps the biggest, most important prayer anyone can ever pray.  It’s the key to what it means to be a Christian.  The word “Christian” means “Christ-in-one.”  It means the living Christ actually living, dwelling inside a person.  Some of you have not yet invited the Lord Jesus to dwell in your hearts.  Some of you are trying to live the Christian life on the outside, but without the presence of Christ on the inside.  And it can’t be done.  It’s why you feel defeated so much of the time.  You feel like you’re faking it.  And no wonder.  You need a source of inner power, and that power comes only from Jesus Christ dwelling in us and living his kind of life from the inside out.

I pray with Paul that you will quit faking it.  Quit trying to do it all on your own.  Instead, ask the Lord to live his life in and through you.  But please notice something more.  Notice that Paul is praying for Christians – for people who have said “Yes” to Jesus Christ, people who have received the Holy Spirit, people like many of us who, to be honest, sometimes find ourselves feeling a little flat, a little stale, a little bored and wondering “does God have anything else for me?”  Some of us feel like we’ve plateaued in our faith journey – instead of growing, we’ve leveled off. 

Arthur Burns was a former chairman of the Federal Reserve System and ambassador to West Germany.  He was a man of considerable gravity.  He was also Jewish.  So when Arthur Burns began attending an informal White House group for prayer and Christian fellowship in the 1970s, he was accorded special respect.  No one knew quite how to involve him in the group, and week after week when different people took turns ending the meeting in prayer, Burns was passed by – out of a mixture of respect and reserve.

One week the group was led by a newcomer who didn’t know the unusual status Burns occupied.  As the meeting ended, the newcomer asked Burns to close their time with a prayer.  Some of the old-timers glanced at each other in surprise and wondered what would happen.  But without missing a beat, Burns reached out, held hands with the others in the circle, and offered this prayer:

Lord, I pray that You would bring Jews to know Jesus Christ.  I pray that You would bring Muslims to know Jesus Christ.  Finally, Lord, I pray that You would bring Christians to know Jesus Christ.  Amen. 1

It’s a great reminder that being a Christian does not mean we’ve somehow “arrived.”  Being a Christian means following Jesus on a lifelong journey.  We aren’t finished and we certainly haven’t arrived.  Some of us need to get started – to ask the Lord Jesus to come into our hearts.  Some of us need to go deeper – to ask him to dwell more permanently there, to live his life in and through us.  Arthur Burns was right: we need more Jesus.

More Power

And, as Paul says, we need more power.  “I pray that…you will be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit” – the power that comes from the Holy Spirit.  Jesus told his disciples in Acts 1:8, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be witnesses.”  And that’s what happened on the day of Pentecost.  The Holy Spirit came and the disciples were filled with a new power that enabled them to tell Jesus’ story and live out Jesus’ love in a way that the world could not ignore.

We need power.  You understand this, don’t you?  We need power beyond ourselves to live this Christian life.  And that power comes from the Holy Spirit strengthening us in our inner being.  We need different kinds of power, do we not?  Some of us need power to acknowledge our weakness.  We are so confident we can do it ourselves.  Some of us need power to confess our failures and ask forgiveness.  We need power to resist temptation.  Power to expect change.  Power to break a long-held habit, something that has strangled us for years.  Power to meet suffering.  Power to face depression.  Power to live in a less-than-ideal environment.  Power to let go of a grievance, to start again.  Power to love.

And your church needs power, too.  Power to worship the living God with intelligence and joy.  Power to proclaim Jesus Christ and to see many more come to him in faith.  Power to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  Power to be faithful partners with our brothers and sisters around the world – especially this morning as we take this next step in our partnership in Senegal, as we give so that a “kingdom outpost” can be established in Baba Garage, near our villages.  Our partnership began twelve years ago on Pentecost Sunday when we received an amazingly generous offering for the first wells.  How appropriate that on this Pentecost we’re seeing this breakthrough in what we’ve been praying for all these years – to see a church established where there has never been one.  That takes power.  So does standing beside AIDS orphans and widows in Zambia.  So does creating affordable housing for seniors right here in our own community.  It takes power to resist the apathy and affluenza around us and dare to make a difference in the name of Jesus Christ.  It takes the power of the Holy Spirit.

Pray this way for the people you love – your family and your friends, for your church and your pastors.  Don’t just pray that God would make things easier and more comfortable for them.  Pray that God would strengthen them with power through his Spirit – power to be faithful, power to make a difference. 

More Love

More Christ.  More power.  And there’s one thing more Paul prays for – more love.  Paul prays that they might have power (there’s that word again) “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.”

Now that is one big prayer.  Paul prays that we might know in a personal, experiential way the love of our Lord.  Paul isn’t praying that they will love Jesus more, but that they will understand how much Jesus loves them.  Understand this love in all its dimensions – its “breadth and length and height and depth” – this love is so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get ‘round it.  This love that will never let us go. 

One time several years ago I had a powerful encounter with God – one of the most powerful I’ve ever had.  I’ve told some of you about it.  It was toward the end of a week-long conference for pastors.  I’d spent the previous three or four days hearing from many of them all the wonderful things God had been doing in their ministries – all the lives given to Christ, all the crowds packing their churches, all the new programs springing up.  But I didn’t have any stories like that.  I was working in a small church that seemed to be going nowhere.  No great growth.  No spiritual successes.  No powerful people or programs.  And the more I heard from others, the more worthless and useless I felt. 

That night the speaker talked about the love of God, and something he said reminded me of Becca’s childhood blanket.  My daughter had this blanket for years and years and it was tattered and torn.  But Becca (who was in grade school at that time) still hung onto that blanket.  As far as I know, she still has it – or whatever’s left of it.  If you saw it, you’d say it had no value at all.  Just a bit of cloth, faded and thread-bare.  But in Becca’s eyes, it was precious.  Irreplaceable.   Wondrously loved. 

And for a moment I saw myself like that blanket.  Worn and tattered.  Not worth much in the eyes of others, perhaps.  Not worth much in my own eyes, for that matter.  But to the owner of the blanket – to my Lord – precious and deeply loved.  I wept when I saw it – how much our Lord loves little ragtag people like me.  I cannot begin to describe what that meant to me then – what it means to me now.  My value isn’t based on my performance.  My ultimate worth isn’t determined by what others think of me.  It’s all based on this Lord who loves me just the way I am. 

If you want to know how to best pray for me and for the people you care about, pray this way: that we may have the power to comprehend his great love for us.  To know – in our heads, yes, but most of all in our hearts – the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.  To know he loves us in spite of our failures, in spite of our worn and torn places, in spite of our ragtag past.  Loves us so much he sent his only Son to die for us – that’s how precious we are to him.  He’s always loved us that way, and he always will.  Some of us struggle with a sense of being unworthy, with the feeling that because of what we’ve done we’re somehow outside the scope of God’s love.  Some of us get so tired and discouraged because we keep trying to earn God’s approval, earn our family’s approval, earn our company’s approval, earn our own approval.  We keep striving to be “good enough.”  What’s the greatest gift you could give us – the best thing you could do for us?  Pray with Paul this prayer: “Lord, break through those tired and fearful hearts, and give them power to comprehend how much you love them.  Show them, convince them, reassure them of the love of Christ, the love that surpasses knowledge.”

* * * * *

Are you interested in building great relationships?  I can tell you from my own experience that faithful praying knits lives together like nothing else.  Especially when we dare to pray some big prayers.  Prayers like what Paul models for us – that Christ would dwell in our hearts, that we would be strengthened (as individuals and as a congregation) with the power of the Holy Spirit, that we would experience the love of Christ and live it out.

Do you ever pray that way for the people you care about?  For your spouse?  For your children?  For your church?

I wonder what God would do among us if we started praying big prayers for our family and friends.  For our church’s mission partners and our outreach.  For our worship services and Sunday School classes.  For our pastors and leaders.  For our whole church.

I wonder . . .

According to Paul, nothing we pray will ever be too big for God.  He welcomes big prayers, and he delights in answering them.  I close with Paul’s final words:

Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.  Amen.

1. As quoted in “Followers of the Way,” www.navigators.org/us/ministries/b2g.