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Extravagant Love
Ephesians 3:14-21
July 8, 2007
Rev. Libby Boatwright
A major event happened this week — the introduction of a new ice-cream flavor called the Oden Berry, named after Greg Oden, the much-heralded superstar descending on Portland as the great hope of the Blazers. And it’s tasty too, made up of “strawberry, chocolate chip, and just a hint of victory.” And the frenzy is not limited to an ice-cream flavor. I remember the day after the basketball draft, the front page news read, “It’s Oden” and then “Oden takes in a practice.” And “Oden begins in Vegas,” and there were rallies in Pioneer Square, billboards, and hourly broadcasts going on the minute this young 19-year-old stepped off the plane. Why, right now there are now 434 Oden-related items on E-bay. And let me say that I think we have a terrific center for a team that could really use a boost. But friends, it’s all about competition for your mind, your priorities. One day, I’d love to see a new headline that reads something like “It’s God! — more powerful than anything imaginable who gives the right combination of boundless love, and inner strength and power and amazing grace and spirit.” But that wouldn’t even begin to describe our Creator. Somewhere along the way we took God off the throne of heaven and placed human creatures and inventions in his place. We’ve made such an emphasis on the earthly things that order or inspire our lives that we’ve given God a back seat, put him in a box, relegated him to two columns in a back section of the paper on a religion and ethics page, or banished him into the outer reaches of our imaginations, only to be called off the bench for a crisis. My prayer today is that somehow we begin to disengage from the things, these icons that tear us away from our Creator, and give him a rightful place in our hearts; to taste and see that the Lord is good. Let’s read what Paul has to say in his second prayer in the book of Ephesians.
Ephesians 3:14-21 (The Message)
My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by His Spirit — not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength — that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask Him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all Christians the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. God can do anything you know — far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams. He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us. Glory to God in the church! Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus, Glory down all the generations! Glory through all millennia! Oh yes! The word of the Lord!
The Ephesians were being lured by the marketing magicians of Paul’s day, the Gnostics, and were caught in a frenzy of powerful spells, new approaches to life, and elitist thinking. And who were the Gnostics? Well they believed that there were two Gods — the one responsible for creation and the superior God revealed in Christ as the Redeemer, and that their knowledge of this and other mysterious secrets made them an elite society of believers who saw themselves set apart from others who worshiped God. Paul is on his knees, anxious to get people back to the heart of worship, believing in just one God and his extravagant love for us, because there was spiritual disunity everywhere, including competition between good and evil spirits, God and demons, God and man, and Jews and Gentiles. Paul longed to see Jesus bring unity and love and joy into the hearts of those who were lost in a sea of mistrust and anger. And so he’s praying here for three areas of the Christian walk to encourage their decision to follow Christ: A life lived in the strength, the knowledge, and the fullness of God. Paul didn’t see this prayer as a pep rally, but as the inspiration of generations who would come to know Christ and make him known.
Strength in the Inner Person
So the first thing that Paul prays is that out of God’s glorious riches he will strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, the place where reason and conscience and will reside —rooms often taken up with worldly desires and invisible to the naked eye. And so this Spirit comes, as Ben Campbell says, to “settle down in you” with the power to clean house, beginning with the mind, to “fill us with life anew”, inspiring us, teaching us to love and do the things that are holy, set apart from the world, getting our heart pure, clarifying questions that come up. And then the Spirit moves to the conscience, allowing us to make good choices, giving us discernment as we’re faced with moral dilemmas and ethical compromises, convicting us when temptation overwhelms us, and we need to make a U-turn. And then the Spirit moves to the will, changing it from our selfish desires to what God wants for us, showing us the way to forgiveness, allowing us to make a choice to accept Christ in our hearts, literally giving over our whole life to him. We realize we are no longer alone — we have a wonderful counselor to walk alongside us. In short, the Spirit inspires, equips and strengthens our soul. And what happens when we are strengthened like this? As the song says, the “dear Christ enters in.” He has a place to live that’s holy, set apart, prepared for him — a heart that he desires to inhabit and have a relationship with.
Knowledge of Christ’s Love
And when we are strengthened by our inner person, we begin to see a glimpse of what this relationship is all about. We discover the boundless dimensions of Christ’s love. The passage tells us that as Christ dwells in our hearts through faith and we are firmly planted in love. In fact, the word here implies a foundation, the solid basement of the spiritual temple. And we find that this love is strong enough to withstand anything, a love that defies description; it surpasses knowledge. Believers were convinced that knowledge of God was grounded in love — And this love has breadth, which includes every person of every kind, in every age, in every world; Christ’s love has length, the length to which he would go, obedient unto death and accepting the cross; his love has depth, descending into hell, experiencing death, and his love has height, for he still loves us in heaven, living to make intercession for us, for no person is outside the love of Christ. Think of the most precious gift you have, the one that you cannot imagine ever being without — your spouse, your children or family, a special memento from a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a special friend. And something comes in the way of you and that precious gift and you have to give it up, because the greater good is that the people of the earth will be allowed to live. That’s what God did in giving up his son, Jesus Christ. The most precious, sinless person in the world was sacrificed so that we could live, be forgiven of our sin, have eternal life. This love is the foundation of our life in Christ and God longs for us to live in the awareness and the knowledge of that great love — and then to share that love in community; for it takes community both to learn and express love.
The Fullness of God
But we shortchange God if we stop at the passion and death of Jesus. When we assume that his sacrifice was all God could do, we haven’t finished the story. Instead, we have to remember we were promised fullness; a fire, not a flicker; light blazing, like a city set on a hill, not a dim little pen light; joy, not a momentary happiness, but an abiding joy that flows from the satisfaction of our hungering and thirsting for God. It’s the radiant excitement of a man finding treasure hidden in a field; it’s Mary Magdalene finding out on Easter morning that the risen Lord is walking with her in a garden. That’s fullness of God.
We cannot possibly contain God’s fullness, but we can receive it to the degree that we desire after God. When we are so yielded and open to him that he comes to us and dwells with us in intimacy and power, then we begin to experience in life all the things that Jesus promised to the fullest, the fruit of the spirit, mercy, grace, forgiveness of sin. But we can’t do that in a vacuum. We need to be in intimate conversation with God every day; to maintain a relationship that won’t let this light go out. For when we do, when we stay in touch, we no longer see through tinted, distorted lenses, but with the eyes of Christ. Our insights about people and about things we cannot control come to the surface. The mystery of God’s saving plan for his children starts to become clear.
I got to see this fullness in action this last week; My friend Marty Brutcher, from whom I have permission to share this story, is a wonderful deacon and faithful prayer intercessor who leads Sunday prayer time each week in Bob’s office, and who recently found out she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Now, when Marty got the news in the hospital there was plenty of sorrow and crying and boxes of Kleenex, but once she got over the initial moment, an amazing thing happened. She began to talk about the fullness of God, that she was so excited about seeing her Savior, that she would be so full of his Glory that she would feel like she could burst. And she wouldn’t need this body any more, that God would replace it with a new one, so she could contain even more of His glory and soar through the heavens and walk alongside her Lord. And then she began to sing, “And that will be, glory for me…oh that will be glory for me, when I stand in his presence and like Him shall be, Oh that will be glory for me.” She was full in the fullness of God, singing his praises — followed by a testimony of how God had carried her all these years, how she made a decision for Christ out of her years of desperation and despair — how God lifted her up out of depression. Her countenance, her face was radiant. Her family, many of whom were struggling with their faith, listened, hung on her every word. She was free in the fullness of God. She longed for the moment when she would meet God face to face and would see the people she missed — her dad, her brother, the grandchild who died. She embodied the verse from Isaiah 43: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you, I have summoned you by name; you are mine.” If we could bottle up that moment, many would see what the fullness of God was all about. This moment was Marty’s doxology, a praise of glory, a celebration of the power of God to deliver even more than humans might ask or think.
And the final verses of this passage are a doxology as well. For it’s not only Christ but also the church, a unified body of Christ, as the focus of praise. It’s a ringing affirmation of God’s extraordinary saving power, asking that God bring to perfection the work of salvation that has already begun among those who love him. And Isaiah reminds us this is “everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.” God longs for us to live a life full of his power, full of his glory.
I know for some this whole idea of God’s magnificence and power is hard. Maybe there isn’t much spark in your life, or you’ve been disappointed along the way, by some unanswered prayer, someone in your life who you thought was a believer that let you down and you assume God was behind it. So you’ve put God away for another time. Given up and found some safe vanilla formula of success and comfort.
But our job is to be faithful, keep our eyes on Christ, as it says in Hebrews 12, and pray. The late Mother Theresa says it so well, “Love to pray, feel often during the day the need for prayer and take the trouble to pray. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep Him as your own.”
So the challenge this week is to let God out of the box. Pray with all your heart to discover who He is in your life — his immense love for you; to be amazed by the earth, His creation, and the beauty and the glory of his presence in your life. To watch a sunset, not from the confines of your home, but on top of a hill for the full ½ hour it takes to set, to revel in the sky at dawn when he lifts that same sun from the horizon, to believe that God can do anything and pray for the impossible, the incalculable to happen, to get God out of the confines of a small, intimate place and let him roam around in your imagination, a wide open space of dreams and new things you want to try; to experience the wealth of his glory and test his ability to give — to know that his power cannot be contained in a little black box that performs every electronic function known to man and cost $600, or a finite list of what he’s accomplished — but to believe what he can do, which is infinite. Because unlike all the gadgets and gizmos that people wait in line for that eventually wear out, beyond all the young superstars that are traded and retire, God is eternal, always current, always available. We cannot possibly imagine in our wildest dreams what God can accomplish, what his extravagant love for us is all about. But we can try. We can pray that God will reignite that long-lost excitement we once had, and set our heart in a new direction in confidence that he is able and will do amazing things in your life.
He is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think.
Glory to God in the church
Glory to God in the Messiah in Jesus
Glory down all the generations
Glory though all millennia, Oh yes!
AMEN.
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