The Power of Prayer

Blair Smith, Speaker

Ephesians 1:15-23 | January 12, 2025 - Sunday Evening,

Sunday Evening,
January 12, 2025
The Power of Prayer | Ephesians 1:15-23
Blair Smith, Speaker

As you sit down, please turn with me to the book of Ephesians.  We’re going to be looking at chapter 1.  We’ll be looking at the closing prayer there by Paul, which is found in verses 15 through 23, the end of the chapter.  So that’s Ephesians 1:15-23.  As we turn to this passage, this is our second week in a New Year series, looking at the prayers of Paul, seeking to learn about prayer from the Apostle Paul.  Last week was Romans 15.  Jonathan Master preached here last evening and then this week and next week we’ll be in Ephesians with Paul. 

Hear the Word of the Lord as it comes to us again from Ephesians 1.

“For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, what are the riches of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.  And He put all things under His feet and gave Him as head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”

The Word of the Lord.

Please pray with me. 

Father, we thank You for the Apostle Paul, inspired by Your Spirit, who culminates this great chapter Ephesians 1 with a prayer and with instruction and prayer, especially its source, its power, which is found in the risen Son, the resurrected Christ, who is now reigning with You along with the Spirit.  We pray that same Spirit would be with me, with us, this evening, communicating a better-preached sermon than what my human words preach, and also opening all of our hearts here to learn from Your Word about prayer.  We pray in Christ’s name.  Amen.   

So I gather like me, a number of you in these last several weeks watched some of your favorite holiday movies.  A classic of the genre is the quirky, even some might say disturbing movie, A Christmas Story, which features Ralphie Parker and his burning quest to receive a Red Rider BB gun for Christmas.  Despite his mother’s warnings, remember those warnings that he will certainly shoot his eye out, through his obsessive desire, his subtle campaigning, he finally convinces his father to buy him that Red Rider BB gun as a Christmas present. 

Have any of you really wanted something, really wanted something and succeeded in getting it?  If so, how did you obtain it?  How did you obtain that thing that you really desired?  Well, in short, we might say, or we might answer that question, is that you managed to exercise the power to receive it, or to get it, to gain it. 

Now we must recognize power comes in all shapes and all sizes.  For Ralphie, his power was that of a child before his parents.  It’s like the prayer of the persistent widow.  He never gave up knocking at the door of potential parental generosity.  Now the power you might exercise to get something is probably different.  For some of you, though, it’s maybe similar.

Perhaps that power is influence.  Power might be money, determination, education, good looks, connections.  Whatever it is, you get what you desire, you move from point A to point B through your use of power.

This raises a question for us as Christians.  How do we get from point A to point B in our spiritual lives?  How do we change?  How do we grow?  If you’re a Christian here this evening, you have within you an inherit desire to grow, a desire to become a more faithful disciple of Jesus Christ.  Because if you’re a Christian, you have within you the Holy Spirit and He has given all of us a new nature, a new affection, new desires to be like God in Christ.

I realize this desire might burn more hotly or coolly at times, but it’s there.  It’s there in those who know Christ.  How does that object, though, the object of our desire, how does that happen?  How do we change?  How do we grow?

Well, the Apostle Paul says that the power for spiritual change, for spiritual growth, has a profound source, a profound source.  He prays in Philippians 3 that he would know, and that all Christians would know, Christ and the power of His resurrection.

What is the resurrection?  Well, the resurrection, of course, is the act by which Christ defeated sin, death, and the devil through rising again from the dead.  It’s a historical reality.  But it’s also a spiritual reality.  It’s a spiritual reality we confess week by week in the creed, I believe in Jesus Christ the only begotten Son of our Lord, and a little later we confess, the third day He rose again from the dead.

In the world, you know sadly we see it week by week, even in our country recently, in the world death gets all the headlines.  But in the Church, in the life of the Christian, life, resurrection life, always is the headline.  Resurrection is life over death.

So the question for us this evening is how does that same spiritual power which bursts forth on Resurrection morning get translated into our living as Christians?  How does that same resurrection power, which rose Christ from the dead, which will be ours when we rise again from the dead unless we meet the Lord when He returns, how does that get translated into our daily lives as Christians?

Or put another way, how does resurrection go from something that merely describes a historical reality in Jesus’ life to that which describes our very lives?  Something that describes our lives so much that we can call our lives as Christians resurrection lives?

Well, Paul’s great prayer in Ephesians 1:15-23 understood in its context, which we will look at here in just a minute, points us to the answer to this question.  How does the resurrection go from being a mere noun describing a historical reality to being an adjective within our lives?

Let’s call the Christian life, for the sake of this sermon this evening, resurrection life.  As we look at resurrection life we’re going to see three components of that life.  Those three components are going to make up the three points of this sermon.

Number one.  Resurrection identity.

Number two.  Resurrection people.

Number three.  Resurrection language.

You came to the sermon thinking it was going to be on prayer and, indeed, that’s where we’re going.  As we look at point three, that’s going to be our longest point, it’s going to really home in on resurrection language being that which makes up our prayers.

But first, resurrection identity.

The book of Ephesians is very much concerned with identity.  One author has stated that that the main purpose of Paul’s letter to the Christians at Ephesus is identify formation, identity formation.  Now of course identity is a huge buzzword.  It’s a huge question for us today.  Who are we?  What defines us?  Who provides the substance?  Who provides the boundaries for how we conceive of ourselves?

We live in a contemporary, some call post-modern world where we’ve been unmoored from communities and families that traditionally provided people a sense of belonging, anchored a sense of self, and while some have celebrated this as liberating, more and more people find it simply depressing and painful.  We find it hard to describe ourselves than some brief pithy bio that you might put on your social media account, your school, your favorite teams, your favorite music, favorite movies, where you’ve traveled.

We know as humans, human beings made in the image of God, that these brief descriptions that we want to put out there simply won’t do.  Cheap, shallow bios, cheap taglines.  They don’t describe and connect to our innate need for deep identity.

Those Paul wrote to in Ephesians were first century believers in an important Roman city along the coast of western Asia Minor.  If you can locate in your mind’s eye modern day Turkey right on the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, what was in the old Roman Empire Asia Minor.  Right there near the coast on the Mediterranean was this great city of Ephesus.  Like many cities that we know today and that we live in, it is a fast-changing, fast-paced city.

So these Christians in Ephesus would have known what it was to live in a fast-moving, oft-confusing time and place.  This as a port city.  It was a commercial center.  It was a place of coming and going, home to one of the seven wonders of the ancient world with the temple of the goddess Artemis, or often known as Diana.  Ephesus was a mecca of religious activity, where the local economy was enmeshed with religious tourism because of this great temple.

There was also in this city an obsession with spiritual power, spiritual power over demons.  The use of magic was commonplace.  What’s more, Ephesus was the center for the imperial cult of the day, where this was this extravagant worship of the genius of Rome personified in the emperor and his family.

This had a profound pagan religious environment in Ephesus that sought to shape the identity of the Ephesians.  It was right there in the public square, intersecting with civil monuments, economic transactions, the political order.  You layer this religious environment onto the very fluid social dynamics as a port city, and you have a situation very much like the global cities of today, where solid traditional anchors that shape identity give way to chaotic, even idolatrous forces which seek to press us into their mold.

In trying to help this rootless people find their identity, Paul points them forward, points them upward, to a comprehensive Christian identity that is eternal in a world we cannot see yet is even more real than the world we can see.  A power-hungry approach to power, if I could put it that way, would say power is a lot like real estate.  It’s all about location, location, location.  The closer you are to the sources of power, the higher your property value.  This is why so many people today flock to the great cities of our world, New York, Washington, D.C., London, Shanghai.  Even Charlotte is a magnet for financial and economic power. 

Power is often concentrated in particular persons, institutions, corporations, and people flock to these, not all with bad intentions, but they flock to them to try to access that power.  So when we talk about spiritual power, again location, location, location means everything.

Look at verse 15.  Look at that opening phrase in verse 15 – for this reason.  This links the whole of our passage to what comes before.  Right?  For this reason, he opens this section of verse 15, linking it to this wonderful section that precedes it.  If you read from verse 3 to verse 14 of Ephesians 1, maybe that’s something you can do later this evening or this week, you will find one long sentence in the original Greek. 

Now it doesn’t look that way in English, I recognize, but in the background of the English is one long Greek sentence, and it’s this magnificent, soaring, programatic statement and it gives all glory to God and His glorious grace while revealing it has been God’s eternal purposes to form a people, a people for Himself.   Paul unfolds how God forms and blesses His people in this one source, this one place where they should draw their identity, in Christ, or its equivalent, in Him.   If you read verses 3 to 14 of Ephesians 1, you will see this repetition 11 times, in Christ or in Him.

So to know the Father, to know the riches of an inheritance in Christ that is sealed by the Spirit, then we must be somewhere, somewhere.  One way of viewing what Paul is doing in Ephesians 1 is acting as a spiritual cartographer, which is a mapmaker.  He’s making a spiritual map and he’s outlining the spiritual cosmos where God starts and sustains everything and he pinpoints in this map where God’s people are found, and over and over again he repeats “my people are found in Christ, in the Son.”  The blessing of a relationship with God, membership in His family where we experience His grace, it’s found in this one location.  It’s found in Christ.  All that we have, all that we will be in the Christian life, is found in our union with Christ.  This ever-living, ever-powerful, resurrected Christ.

The Christian’s first conception of him or herself should not be found in the ever-shifting fashions of this world.  It should not be found in fallen desires.  It should not be found in the prejudices of our chosen tribe.  Rather, we should see ourselves as being in Christ.  That’s our fundamental identity, our fundamental location, of having roots stretched out into eternity, sourced in the resurrected Christ.  This is so important for us to grasp, so important, that our place in God’s world, our place on God’s map, is in His Son, in His Son Jesus Christ.

This is why, born this way, he can describe us as saints.  He calls us saints because of something God has done for us in placing us in Christ.  Isn’t that profound?  How do you, how do you view yourself?  How are we tempted to view one another in the body at times?

One author reflecting on Paul’s word choice here in Ephesians 1 has said this.  Paul is re-training our imaginations to understand ourselves not in terms of how we feel about ourselves, not in terms of how others treat us, but as God feels about us and treats us.  Not as our parents or our teachers or our classmates or our physicians or employers or are children define us, but God.  Not in terms derived from our employment or our education or our gifts or our physical appearance or our achievements or our failures, but God.

To know the power of the resurrection coursing through our lives, we must first understand where we are in Christ and who we are in Him, saints.  Where we are in Christ, who we are in Him as saints.  This is having this resurrection identity.

At the same time, knowing we are God’s holy ones, united to the resurrected Christ, means there’s this spiritual potency inherit in who we are.  How does this potency get channeled into the stuff of our lives?  That’s what we turn now to next, the second component of resurrection life, resurrection people.  That’s what Paul touches on here.

This is a very important point, that a vibrant resurrection life is not a life lived alone.  It’s not a life lived alone.  God is not about spiritual loners.  Paul doesn’t even have a category for solo Christianity.  It’s really inconceivable to him.

While there are a number of ways of being an active part of the people of God, to being a part of this fundamental resurrection life, we see three specifically reflected in this passage this evening.

Paul first gives us one here of love.  Paul had heard of the Ephesians’ love for all the saints.  Of course, we know Jesus commanded His disciples in John 13 to love one another.  Just as Christ has loved His disciples, we as His followers are called to love one another.  Paul commends the Ephesians for living out, following Christ, through the power of the Spirit in loving one another.

But love in the Christian body has basic ingredients.  How was this command of our Lord going to be obeyed unless we are regularly with one another, with one another, knowing one another, caring for one another?  Because love is more than general feelings of good will, it’s more than best wishes, “I hope you’re happy.”  It’s seen in our words and our actions that require us as Christians to be with one another.

As we come together on Sundays, on other days of the week, the resurrection love of Christ has opportunity to flow in the midst of our relations as we open up in Christian love each with the other.  Then we know and experience this resurrection life. 

So that resurrection love we share with one another, it’s seen in this very specific and practical act of encouragement, encouragement.  This is the second way we practice resurrection living among the people of God.  Paul here in many ways is modeling this encouragement.  This is a regular practice if you read through Paul’s letters, the ways he encourages the saints, that he encourages Christians.

Encouragement, it’s a genuine, needed ministry, a genuine needed ministry in a culture where Christians often face opposition, a lot of discouragement, feel overly criticized, even ostracized.  This was the case for first century Christians.  They would have faced various levels of persecution.  They would have faced subtle social sidelining but many of them faced overt physical persecution. 

We don’t know that in America, physical persecution necessarily yet that involves force, but we’re increasingly seeing what it’s like in the western world to know social relegation of faithful Christianity to the margins.  We hear how faithful Christians are spoken of, our tenets are condescended, there’s great condescension towards them.  There’s often surprising vitriol towards Christian or Christian teaching.      

One author has said that the Church is called to be a colony of heaven in a culture of death.  We’re called as Christians to be a colony of heaven in a culture of death.  And being a colony of heaven means we provide this blessed oil of encouragement as we seek to live out the Christian calling in the midst of that culture of death.

Paul wrote other letters as we know.  He wrote two to the church at Thessalonica.  He closed each of those letters with the admonition to encourage one another.

We encourage one another in specific ways.  We encourage one another by reminding each other of who Christ is and what He’s done for us.  That’s one way we can encourage one another.  Who is Christ?  What has He done for you?

We also encourage one another by pinpointing in our lives where we see God’s grace at work, shining a lot on others united to Christ where we see that resurrection life cracking through in them.  What this does, if you’ve had this spoken to you before, we know it lifts us up.  This is a profound “yes” to them in a world that is often saying “no.”  This will say that even though I don’t feel God is changing me and I have all of this discouragement around me, He is changing me through His resurrection power and my brothers and my sisters see it.  This gives us strength in faith.  It helps us keep pressing forward in the Christian life.

Finally, this doesn’t bring glory to the person, this gives glory to God.  He’s the source of all that is good, of all blessing that is in us.  So we need to frequently encourage one another within the body of Christ, saying we and God appreciate one another.  We need to keep fighting that good fight.  We need to keep pressing on because God is at work within us.

Now the third way we live out being resurrection people, the first two were love and encouragement, the third way, which comes after love and encourage is praying for each other.  It comes out of love and encourage.  Praying for each other.

Paul says he does not cease in giving thanks for the Ephesian Christians, remembering them in his prayers, remembering them in his prayers.  So if we’re going to see resurrection life flowing in and out of us, it will be meditated through our prayers, through our prayers.  Paul goes on in the rest of our passage to give us a model prayer for asking God to bring resurrection life to His people.

So this is our third point, resurrection language.  It’s the third component of resurrection living drawn from our passage.  It’s what we’re calling resurrection language.

Resurrection living involves the living out of knowing our resurrection identity in Christ.  It involves an active life among the resurrection people, the body of Christ.  It calls for us learning together resurrection language, which is prayer, prayer.  The primary language that we use to grow as Christians as we grow up into Christ is prayer.

Now I’m sure many of you here this evening studied another language.  Maybe some of you are studying another language right now in school or as a hobby or as preparation for ministry or travel or business.  A few of you here may be fluent in another language other than your primary language.  To require fluency in a language, what does it require?  It requires time, it requires practice, immersion even. 

It’s no different in learning to pray in the midst of our lives.  Time, practice, immersion. 

What Paul says in 1 Thessalonians, he says to pray without ceasing.  What does he mean by that?  Does he mean that we shut ourselves in a closet and literally pray all day?  No, I don’t think that’s what he means literally because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to fulfill many other things that we’re called to by Paul in the Christian life.  What he means is that we translate prayer into the everyday.  We translate prayer by seeing all of life as lived before the face of God, every part of our lives.

Thus in order to invoke God into all of our particular places, responsibilities, our relationships, in order to do that we need to learn prayer as our primary language as Christians.  Like learning any language, that takes time, that takes practice, where we learn to lift up every nook, every cranny of our lives, every relationship, every happening, every potential happening, every plan, every disappointment, all of it we lift up to God in a spirit of prayer. 

So as we go into this prayer by Paul, which we can view as a sort of model resurrection language, we recognize it comes within this broader context going back again to Ephesians 1 that’s infused with blessing.  The blessing of God is popping out everywhere in Ephesians 1.

Look at verse 3 and following with me and notice the primacy of God’s blessing: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us.  Going on: In love He predestined us for adoption.  A little later:  In Him we have redemption according to the riches of His grace.  Going a little further:  In Him we have obtained an inheritance.

On and on it goes.  There’s this primacy of blessing that Paul wants to communicate to the Christians at Ephesus, in purpose that we learn that everything we have, the purpose of this communication by Paul, is that everything we have as Christians is a gift.  We have been blessed.  We have received blessing upon blessing because of what God has done for us in Christ.

So these gifts, these spiritual blessings, how do we appropriate them?  How do they get woven into our lives?  That is through prayer.  We appropriate these wonderful gifts from God into our resurrection lives through prayer.

If we look closely at the prayer that Paul gives us here, we see four specific gifts, four specific gifts.  There’s spiritual understanding, spiritual understanding, that’s the first one, and it’s seen in wisdom, revelation, and an enlightened heart.  The second on is hope.  The third one is the riches of His glorious inheritance.  The fourth is immeasurable greatness of His power.

Paul prays that these four gifts would be given to the Ephesian Christians so that they might grow up, they might grow up into the resurrected Christ.  We can pray just as Paul’s instructing these Ephesian Christians, we, too, can pray that these four gifts would be at work within our lives as we are called to grow in Christ in the 21st century as we live it out in the place and God’s providence He has placed us.

So the resurrection life shines when these four gifts are received by us.

Let’s examine these very briefly together.

Paul prays in verse 17 that we would have the spirit of wisdom and revelation.  Then in viers 18 the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened.  So these three, wisdom, revelation, and an enlightened heart, wisdom, revelation, and an enlightened heart, they go together as spiritual understanding, spiritual understanding.  This is profound because they all link to the Holy Spirit.  Who can bring spiritual understanding?  It’s the Spirit making God’s revelation in His Word available and understood and cherished by us.

This mention of the Spirit is crucial as these gifts are those quiet, unseen ones that are worked within us through the internal work of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit takes the riches of the resurrected Christ.  He takes them and He works them in us so that we have spiritual understanding.

This spiritual understanding has a three-fold sense here in Paul.  First, it’s wisdom.  Wisdom is a deep knowing of how to live in the world in the midst of our circumstances, in a way that pleases God, in a way that reflects His character.  Wisdom asks how do we order our lives so that we can be close with Christ.  How can we walk the straight path according to His Word in the midst of the life God has given me?  Paul prays for wisdom. 

We are called to pray that we would have by the Spirit wisdom in our lives, but also revelation, revelation.  Now in the New Testament revelation can refer to one of two things.  It can be that thing like revelation from God that Paul received as he wrote this letter.  New revelation, which we believe was finished with the apostles, with the closing of the New Testament. 

But there’s this other sense which I think Paul is referring to here, and it’s something like what we call illumination, illumination.  This is asking that God would make something clear to us from God’s revelation in His Word.  He has given us His Word yet we seek as we study His Word, as it is preached.  We seek God’s light on that Word.  We seek His understanding that His truth and its power might be confirmed within us.  So we pray God would give us wisdom and revelation in our resurrection lives.

We also pray for an enlightened heart, an enlightened heart.  This specific language by Paul is that we would have the eyes of our hearts, the eyes of our hearts enlightened.  He’s saying here we need God to give us spiritual faculties to understand His Word, the ability to discern His Word.  These spiritual faculties come from the very core of our being, from our hearts.  The eyes here mentioned are, of course, are spiritual ones.  Paul is praying that we would have the ability from the center of our being to see specific things. 

What are those things that we would have the eyes to see?  These are outlined in the remaining gifts.  So those remaining gifts, the next one is the future.  He would have us take our eyes off the immediate circumstances of our lives, cast them down the tunnels of time to that which God is calling us to.  It’s the hope of our call. 

That hope is the second gift he prays for.  Second gift we can pray for.  Hope in the new heavens and the new earth.  It’s the hope of the glory of God in the words of Romans.  It’s being presented to Christ as a bride without spot or wrinkle or blemish.  Dare I say, it’s a hope, a longing for heaven.  I don’t think we see that longing much in the Church today in the West.  Maybe those that are nearing death, but would it be that we could pray to be a people, even in the strength of our lives, that have a vibrant hope, even if things are going really well for us to realize that being with Christ, being with Him among the saints in the new heavens and the new earth, is our highest calling, is our greatest hope.  That is this wonderful second gift.

Elaborating on this, Paul prays for a third gift – the riches of glory in his inheritance.  Again, he’s asking that we would have a deeper appreciation for something we already have, something we already experience.  We are those who have been given to God in the Son and God sees us in the Son.  We’re joint heirs with Christ.  We should see ourselves always in Him.  As we’ve examined already, this should shape our identity, knowing that we are encouraged to live and align with this high calling. 

We should not pass over, this is a shared inheritance.  It’s among the saints.  It’s not a solo party.  It’s a robust party we share together, the riches of the glory of our inheritance.

Then the last gift he prays for is the most crucial.  It brings us full circle in considering resurrection life.  That’s power.  Power.  Paul doesn’t say exactly what this power does until a later prayer that Nathan will preach on next week in his prayer in Ephesians 3, but he does want us to know how explosive it is here in Ephesians 1, how it is active and among us by faith.

In the original Greek you see more clearly the intensity of this power by the words Paul uses.  It’s a great, it’s a mighty power.  The point here is it transforms.  It’s a power that transforms the lives of believers.  We must realize Christianity is not just about what God has done for us in the past.  Christianity is not just about what God’s going to do for us in the future in the new heavens and the new earth.  It is those things but it is also what is God doing right now among His people in power where He is opening up the riches of Christ to us by the Spirit.  He wants us to know that by the Spirit that we might reflect His glory.

So we have within us working the most powerful force in the universe.  Yet how often we ignore it?  How often we denigrate it?  God is about changing us according to Christ through faith.  Yet we can say yes, we fail, but a true Christian is never satisfied with who he or she is.  A true Christian never revels in being depraved or being broken.  A Christian seeks to press forward to the high mark of the high calling of God.  We have the power for that as the Spirit works Christ within us, as He ministers the resurrected Christ to us.

As we pray out of that desire to genuinely change as Christians, what we’re praying for is that that power of the resurrected Christ, that same power that rose Him again from the dead, would be at work within us transforming us into the image of Christ.

He’s not only resurrected as we learn here at the crescendo of this chapter, He is ascended to the right hand of the Father.  He’s far above every rule and authority and petty tyrant of the seen and unseen world.  Paul uses language here that unmistakably communicates the absolute lordship of Christ, that this same power that rose Christ from the dead that is at work in the ascended Christ is pulsating in us and he wants us to know its immeasurable greatness, and that that power would more and more characterize our lives, that the character of Christ Himself, the blessed Son, would shine forth in us.  What a prayer that we can pray, that the resurrection Christ in His power would be at work within us, changing us.

The clear picture we’re left with at the end of this prayer, one consistent with the cosmic picture that Paul introduces to us in all of Ephesians 1, is that there’s a whole lot to reality that we cannot see with our natural eyes.  There’s a whole lot to what exists in this world within the cosmos that we cannot see with our eyes.

Have you ever scanned a horizon with your eyes, with your natural eyes, and after scanning a horizon switched over to say some binoculars, some really powerful binoculars, and what you couldn’t see with your natural eye started popping out of everywhere?  Your naked eye you only can see some things, but with some powerful magnification, stuff is popping everywhere.  It’s not as if that stuff wasn’t there when looking just with your natural eye, it’s just you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t see it clearly.

Now take this analogy and multiply it.  Some of you have heard of the Hubble telescope.  You’ve seen amazing images from the Hubble telescope.  It’s a remarkable telescope because it’s up in space.  It’s an amazing powerful magnification device up in space that helps us gaze into the profundity of the heavens and we see its wonder and we see its majesty.  It’s a space telescope, meaning it’s located there and sends pictures to us down here. 

But we must recognize that the Hubble telescope or things like it, it’s not sending us secret knowledge.  It’s simply plumbing the depths of something that’s already there, it’s just closer to the source and it’s able to communicate that to us with its incredible magnifying power.

Well, through this prayer Paul is not inviting us into some secret knowledge of the resurrected Christ, some sort of fake knowledge that doesn’t really exist.  No, not at all.  He’s inviting us into something real, but we need the Holy Spirit.  We need the Holy Spirit’s help to grow and see for it’s the Spirit who shares eternal communion with the Son and with the Father, who’s able to take what is God’s and communicate it to us.  Yes, using His Word, the inspired Word of God.  The spirit takes what is God and translates it to our souls so that we can grow in Christ, so that we can bask in the joy and glory of the riches we have in Christ.  He does this through sourcing us in the power of the resurrection.

Paul would not have us miss the true spiritual power.  It’s not found in the social currencies of our world.  It’s not found in the social status that we have.  No, true power is found in Christ, in Christ.

If we feel powerless often in this world, that’s a good thing.  Because we just might be in a place to learn not to rely on ourselves but to grasp our resurrection identity, enjoy life with a resurrection people, and learn resurrection prayer, resurrection language of prayer so that we can grow truly in our lives from point A to point B.   

Let’s pray together as we close.  Father, we thank You for this wonderful passage from the Apostle Paul.  We thank You that we have a resurrection identity with Your Son, that though we all might have different pasts, things we’re ashamed of, maybe even things we’re naturally proud of, that our fundamental identity is to be found in Christ and we’re saints in Him.  We thank You we get to share life with Him among the people of God.  I pray that we would learn to love one another and encourage one another.  We thank You that You have given us a way of speaking fundamentally to You and hearing from You in Your Word through prayer.  I pray that we would more and more know the power of the resurrection in our lives, that we would learn to pray that that power be at work within us, giving us great hope, giving us a transformation in our lives, where we are more and more reflecting the glory of Your Son, in whose name we pray.  Amen.