Transcription
[Music] Well again, I'm excited about the fasting in prayer because I believe these are big days for the church. I believe they're big days for everybody who sets their heart on seeking God, because anytime you and I look to the Lord and we say that we're going to deny ourselves for the purpose of seeking Him, that's the time when God is going to meet us. God's going to give you dis sermon. God's going to give you a divine turnaround, a breakthrough in your circumstance, things that maybe have been unresolved. I believe this is going to be a season of resolution, but we're gonna see God resolve things, where we're gonna see God work in incredible ways, and I believe we're gonna see God do more than we can ask or imagine. I just really love that verse especially for this season. It's in my heart in a big way, and every time that plays on the screen or I'll look at the brochure, it just I get excited because God has put that in Debby in my heart for the church for this season. But God's gonna do more than we can ask her imagine. That comes out of Ephesians 3 as Paul's praying, and as it comes from the end of his prayer, a very eloquent prayer. You'd be hard-pressed in Scripture to find a prayer that's more eloquent. Heber's forth in this doxology of praise. Let's bring it up on the screen. Verse 20: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine." It's not only more than you can ask, it's not only more than we can imagine, it's immeasurably more. It's beyond what you could measure. It's beyond what you could quantify. It's bigger, it's better, it's more according to his power that is at work within us. The Message puts it this way: "God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!" I'm just asking you to let that get into your heart so that as you're praying, there's this anticipation that God's gonna do in your life, in your family, in your work, in this church, more than we could ask or imagine, more than we could guess, more than we could request. He doesn't do it by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
But along the way to God doing more than we can ask or imagine through us or for us, it's important for us to understand that God wants to do more than we could ask or imagine in us. Honestly, the answers that we seek, oftentimes while necessary and certainly important, and God understands the importance, if they're outside of us and they don't ever—God's work doesn't touch the inside of us—then we've missed the great opportunity of seeing our faith built, of seeing our intimacy increased, of seeing our walk with God strengthened. So what I want us to do is I'm just praying, and honestly, as I'm praying for you and tell you, as I get up and I start the day, and as I'm praying through the day, and as I'm thinking in the times where I'm feeling the effect of the fast, I'm thinking of you feeling the effect of the fast. So I'm praying for you that God would strengthen you, that he would strengthen us as a church, that he would work in you just like I'd like him to work in me through the fast. On Sundays, we're gonna talk about fasting directly, but tonight we're talking really about God's work in us, which I think is so critical to seeing us experience more than we can ask or imagine. So let's pick it out. Paul's prayer—we're just taking it verse by verse. Let's pick it up in verse 16 of chapter 3: "I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." That's an interesting thing that Paul is asking. Karen and I want you to think about it for just a moment in this way: at salvation, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in you. I mean, we read this in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 and verse 19: "Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit?" So in the Old Testament, God had a temple for his people; in the New Testament, he has a people for his temple. He lives in people. At salvation, the Spirit of God takes up residence in you. And so Paul saying, "Don't you know you're the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God?" So if that's true, now back to Ephesians chapter 3: what does it mean that Christ might dwell in your hearts through faith? Here's what I want you to understand. Technically, we would say that the Father is in heaven and Jesus Christ is at the right hand of the Father, right? That's his physical location. The Holy Spirit lives in us. And yet what Paul is talking about is a mystery that not every Christian experiences, but it's a mystery that will take you deeper in Christ and will open up your life to an experience of his power and his love, because he always wants to work his power in love in your life and in the lives of other people, right? So it will take you deeper in your experience of that. The more we grow in Christ—here's what it means for Christ to dwell in us—the more you and I grow in Christ, the real he becomes to us. In other words, one of the ways you could measure maturity in your Christianity is how real is Christ to you? How real is he to you? Because the more we grow in him, the more he manifests himself to our heart. The Holy Spirit lives in us, but God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and Jesus reveals himself to our heart. Now think of this. He said this to the disciples in John chapter 14: "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them." He's not talking about showing himself for the sake of salvation; he's talking about showing himself to them for the sake of revelation, of manifestation. Let me ask you this question. Not asking if you're saved, because you can be saved and answer no to this question and still be saved. Do you really know the Lord Jesus Christ personally? Do you know him as a person? Just like you know the people that are important to you in your life, do you know Jesus as a person in that way? As a person, is Jesus real to you? I'm not talking about is the reality of his love real, and do you believe that? That's not what I'm talking about. Personally, Jesus as a person, is he real to you? Put it to you this way: has there been a time when he manifested himself to you? Here's what Paul writes to the Galatians: he says, "It pleased God to reveal his Son in me"—not to me, but in me. It's an inward revelation. And the saints in times past have always understood that this is a very important part. And I would suggest to you, though, as Pentecostals, we focus—and I don't believe inappropriately—on the empowerment of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of God working in us and being sensitive to the Spirit. That certainly has its place in our relationship with God. But there is also a revelation of Christ to us that is very, very important. Hudson Taylor, who started fifteen hundred churches in China in the 1800s, here was something he prayed every single day: "Lord Jesus, make thyself to me a living bright reality, no more dear, more intimately nigh than even the sweetest earthly type. Lord, make yourself a bright reality to me. Jesus, reveal yourself to me, and make it so intimate, so close that my experience of you, Jesus, is more real, more intimate, more close than any human relationship I have." But you know him as a person like that. And when the Lord reveals himself to us in that way, it will lead us to a conscious fellowship with the Lord and an enjoyment of him. You know, I mean, hey, listen, when I'm hanging out, you know, to be with Debbie, you can just be together as a couple and you just enjoy one another's company, or you can be with friends that you really enjoy, and you're just like hanging out with them. It's not like you're talking all the time. It's just like—and you can enjoy their company. I want to ask you this: do you enjoy conscious fellowship with Jesus? Were you just—since Jesus is right there, and you're just enjoying his presence? Again, you can be a Christian and not yet have experienced that. But what he was talking about in Ephesians chapter 3, in verse 17, is that experience of Christ, the presence of Christ in the heart, is real. And I'm not talking about through the presence of the Holy Spirit; I'm talking about in addition to the presence of the Holy Spirit in your heart, so that you witness—you have the Spirit witnessing that you are a child of God, as you call out to the Father, we're going to see in Romans 8—but you also have a recognition of, an awareness of, a revelation of Jesus to your heart where he is a person you know, you love, and that you enjoy.
Look at it again, Ephesians 3 verse 17: "so that Christ might dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and grounded in love." So here's what Paul is saying. Paul is saying that Christ dwells in our hearts, and the result is that as Christ becomes real to you, you're going to become like him. And what's one of the hallmarks of Jesus? His love. He operated in love. He loved. He was sent from the Father, he loved people. And there's two pictures here when you look at this: rooted and grounded. So the idea is that the two pictures—rooted, like a tree; grounded, like a building coming up out of the ground. So it's the idea of stability, it's the idea of permanence, it's the idea with the tree of vitality, beauty. So let's take rooted first of all. So if we're going to be deeply rooted, so now we've had this revelation of Christ, and once we have this revelation of Christ, all of a sudden what happens is the one thing we're really aware of—Christ, when we are relating with him, is his deep love for us. And all of a sudden what happens is we now are rooted in his love. So what's true of a tree when it's rooted? It's drawing nutrients out of the ground. So the soil we're rooted in is his love, and those nutrients make us grow. From the soil produce then God's love in our life. I could try to make myself like Jesus, and so can you, and we will fail every time. See, the problem with a lot of Christians is they're trying to act like Jesus without being rooted in the love of Jesus. And so it comes off—it's off. It's like a piano that's out of tune. It's there's a dissonance there that doesn't sound right. But if I'm planted in the soil of his love, all of a sudden I find myself drawing all of that love up through me, and then it's displayed to people. The second illustration is grounded. "So that Christ might dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you might be grounded in love." So it's like a building. And everybody understands building in this sense: before you can go up, you got to go down, right? So you got a—you know, before they built this building, when they were building it, there was months of excavation and concrete going in the ground, piers and footings, everything that would sustain the weight of the building. So it's similar to that. What Paul is doing—and think about this—Paul is preparing a foundation. And here's what he's saying: he's saying that he needs you two to have a revelation of Christ and be rooted in love so that you can grasp what how wide and high and deep and long is the love of God. I mean, in order to grasp the greatness of God, we need a foundation in God's love, and that begins with the revelation of Christ. Let me just say this: once a person really begins to walk in love—and here's a very interesting thing—Paul invariably in the epistles links, he very rarely mentions faith without mentioning love. Because if you have somebody operating in faith, what did he say in First Corinthians? "If I speak in the tongues of men and angels," that takes faith, "but have not love, what I am nothing." "If I give prophetic words but I don't have love"—it takes faith to give a prophetic word—"but I don't have love, I'm just making a sound." "If I offer my body to be burned," that takes faith to say you know I'm gonna lay down my life, "but I don't have love." Listen, if we operate in faith but we don't have love, and so what does it take to receive from God the "more than you can ask or imagine"? Part of that is faith, but if it's not rooted in love, God's grace expressed in our life in power without love can damage people—not because there's anything wrong with God or what God does, but because the instrument he uses is not operating in a love that gives glory to God, that honors God, that brings unity. And so here's some things to just think about foundationally for love.
Number one: being rooted in love means first of all we know God loves us individually. We know that God loves—do you know God loves you? I think Brendan Manager says that one question God will ask us when we appear before the judgment seat is, "Did you really understand how much I loved you?" Because I think when a person settles that—I think most people are not sure God really—just like Lisa Harper said Sunday—they're not, they know that God is a God of love, they're just not sure he has that feeling for them. And until you settle that in your heart, not only by faith but by training your conscience according to the Word of God, you're going to struggle to ask God for great things because you're gonna wonder if he loves you enough to do it. Number two: not only do we need to know God loves us, but we need to love God. If I'm gonna receive more than I can ask or imagine, listen, one of the things that I need is I need to love God with all of my heart—not to earn that, but so that when God works through me, what I do express his love. May be more important than our prayers is our attitude towards God. God, do you really love the Lord? Number three: we love our brothers and sisters in Christ. You know, if we can't love people we've seen, how come we love—how can we love God who we haven't seen? So the people around you, your brother and sister in Christ, we've got to love them. Number four: this is gonna be harder, gets tougher: got to love your enemies. Anybody can love the people around them who are friends and great and awesome and do things for him. But can you love the people who hate you? Can you love the people who insulted you? Can you love the people who lied to you? Can you love the people who are unfair about you, who set unfair things about you? Can you love the people that you were good to them but they weren't? I mean, that's when you find out what you're made of. Can you love those people? Number five: do we love God's commandments? Do we love his commandments? Listen to this in Psalm 119: "Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. I love your commands more than gold, more than pure gold." I mean, do you love God's Word like that? Do you? Do you love? Being rooted in love means you bet you just love. You love, you know God loves you, you know you love him, you are living in love because you had the revelation of Jesus. You're rooted in his love, and because it's his love, the produce of your heart is to love people and to love his word. And then finally: we serve out of love. I'm asked musicians to come. We serve out of love so that you know—listen, anybody can serve, but I'm gonna tell you, there's a big difference between somebody who serves out of love and somebody who doesn't. And you put a host at the door, and they can host and they can shake hands, but if they don't love—I mean, they're like one man wrote a book on "A View from the Zoo." He was a zookeeper at the San Diego Zoo, and he wrote about the parakeets on rollerskates that they have there. He said, "You know, they could do it. He said their heart just wasn't in it." So you know, sometimes we can find ourselves doing things and our heart's not in it, and it's never as effective as it would have been otherwise. Listen, serving in love—whether you're serving in the nursery and the children's area, whether you're serving on the platform or the parking lot, whether you're serving you know any place—serving in love. But all that begins with being rooted in love. And prior to that, Paul prays that Christ might dwell in your hearts richly, that there might be a rich revelation of the Lord Jesus to you and to me.
Have you had that? I don't know about you, but as I thought about that all afternoon, I mean I just thought, "Wow, that is so true. That we need that." And that Jesus—Jesus is wanting to reveal himself. There's some of you, you've never had that word. He's really revealed himself to you, and you view him personally and personally, and you just enjoy when—you know when he's there, and you know when you're talking to him, and you know he's a very real person to you. And if you've never experienced that, God wants to do that in your heart. Or if it's been a long time since you've experienced that, God wants to do that in your heart. And I'm just simply suggesting, as we're moving in, is there at the start of this fast that one of the most important things that could happen in any of our lives is either a fresh revelation of the Lord or a first-time revelation of the Lord. So right now, what we're going to do is I'm gonna have Randall come, and he's gonna sing a song, just "I Love You Lord." And my prayer is that God would give us a fresh revelation or a first-time revelation, because some of you are saved, you've just never had that revelation of Jesus where you view him not as the wonderful God who loved you enough to die for you—which is wonderful—but you've never moved beyond that to walking with Jesus as your very best friend. So what I'd like to say, I was like just likes to get into the altar and just begin to worship him and just ask God to give you a revelation, because when he does that and he reveals himself to you, at that point it's going to be life in a whole different way for you at every other level.