“It’s a Battleground Out There” (Ephesians 6:10-17)

 We preachers are always looking for good illustrations for our sermons. I went online recently and it took me hardly a second before I was confronted by a whole boatload of collections of sermon illustrations. They came with titles like The Preacher’s Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations, Hot Sermon Illustrations, Encyclopedia of Sermon Illustrations, The Ultimate Book of Illustrations and Quotes, 500 Sermon Illustrations for Busy Pastors, 1000 Illustrations for Preaching and Teaching… And if those weren’t enough, there was the blockbuster: 6000 Sermon Illustrations. At a sermon a week, you’d have enough illustrations to see you through more than a century!

 Of course Jesus was the master of the illustration. Who doesn’t remember his parables of the farmer scattering his seed over the various types of soil, of the shepherd who searches high and low for his lost sheep until he finds it, or of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus at his gate?

In our passage from the sixth chapter of Ephesians this morning I can picture the apostle Paul pacing back and forth in his prison cell as he draws towards the conclusion of his letter to the young community of believers living in Ephesus. And I imagine him scratching his brain for an illustration to conclude all that he has been writing—something that would stick in the minds of his readers, something that they would carry away with them, perhaps for the rest of their lives.

In the previous five chapters he has covered a vast expanse of ground. The great nineteenth-century biblical teacher Handley Moule summed it up like this:

He has been telling them, from the beginning onward, of the secrets of eternal grace and love, of the wonder of their salvation from spiritual death, of their peace and life through faith, of their sealing by the Blessed Spirit, of their union with Christ their Head, of his blissful indwelling in their hearts, and then of the resultant life of humility, purity, love, truth, and every gracious duty of social holiness…[1]

When you look back on it, he has given them a whole wagonload of vital truths to consider and challenges to act upon. Now Paul needs to draw all that he has been writing to a conclusion. What can he offer them that will help his readers to retain all this in their minds—and, more importantly, to put into practical action in their daily lives?

I can imagine Paul pacing back and forth in his cell. Then, deep in his thoughts, he pauses for a moment and glances around. And suddenly it comes to him. It was one of those head-slapper moments. Of course! How could he have missed it? The perfect illustration! There it was, staring right at him! It had been within feet of him all along: the Roman soldier standing guard at the door of his cell! As Paul’s eyes rest on the guard, it all becomes clear…

Paul lists six pieces of armour in all: the belt, the breastplate, the boots, the shield, the helmet and the sword. We don’t have time in the space of one sermon to examine them all, so this morning I want us to focus on just three of them: the breastplate, the helmet, and the sword.

The breastplate: protecting the heart

So first, the breastplate. This piece of armour covered the chest and shoulders, and was constructed out of a horizontal series of circular strips of iron fastened together with leather straps. The breastplate was designed to protect all the vital organs. But the most important one, and the one I want to focus on this morning, was the heart.

Were you aware that the word “heart” occurs more than eight hundred times in the Bible? And in almost every occurrence it is referring to something much deeper, and much more vital in many ways, than the physical organ that pumps blood through our bodies. For in the Bible the heart is the seat of the will. In biblical terms, it is the core of your inner being, the source of your emotions, your morals, your sentiments, your courage, your convictions and your resolve. The heart is what makes you “you”.

For this reason the Bible places enormous emphasis on what goes on inside our hearts. Here are just a few of the hundreds of examples you can find if you take the time to look for them:

·    “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:5)

·    “The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

·    “With my whole heart I seek you…! I have stored up your word in my heart,  that I might not sin against you.” (Psalm 119:10,11)

·    “I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind …” (Jeremiah 17:10)

·    “You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

·    “Yet even now,” declares the Lord,  “return to me with all your heart … and rend your hearts and not your garments.” (Joel 2:12-13)

·    “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ” (Psalm 14:1)

The book of Proverbs sums it up well for us when it warns, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” (Proverbs 4:23) And so it is that over our hearts we put on the breastplate of righteousness.

Of course the righteousness to which Paul is referring is not our own. That is self-righteousness. That is the righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable, who stood in the temple apart from everybody else and prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.” (Luke 18:11).

No, like the breastplate that is put on from without, the righteousness that Paul was writing about is a righteousness that does not come from within, but is conferred upon us. It is not my righteousness; it is Jesus’ righteousness, by which he and he alone protects us from all the evil that can so easily strike to the core of our being. So it is that in the words of John Wesley we are able proclaim,

Jesus, thy blood and righteousness,
My beauty are, my glorious dress;
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head.

The helmet: protecting the mind

We move on, then, from the breastplate, which protects our heart, to the helmet, which protects our head. Like the breastplate, the helmet is a vitally important piece of our spiritual armour. And as with our hearts, the Bible has a good deal to say about what goes on inside our heads.

Earlier in this letter to the Ephesians Paul has called upon his readers to “to be renewed in the spirit of your minds” (4:23). Elsewhere he warns, “Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” (Romans 8:5-6) And then he cautions us “not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word” (2 Thessalonians 2:2). He challenges us to “set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Colossians 3:2). “Who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” he queries. And then he boldly answers, “But we have the mind of Christ.” (1 Corinthians 2:16).

So what does it mean to have the mind of Christ? Many years ago I was helped in this through a book by a lamentably little known author by the name of Harry Blamires. Blamires was both a student and a friend of C.S. Lewis and he wrote a number of books, one of which was entitled The Christian Mind. Here is one of the things he had to say on that topic:

The Christian mind sees human life and human history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and his love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity. It sees this life as an inconclusive experience, preparing us for another, this world as a temporary place of refuge, not our true and final home.[2]

Blamires was writing more than sixty years ago. Yet I dare to say that the principles he was articulating may be more crucial now in the twenty-first century than they have been at any time in the past. We live in a day when false notions and false ideas proliferate more than ever before—and as Christians we are not immune to them.

Our Lord Jesus himself warned that “false messiahs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24)

Today we are being bombarded from every direction with falsehoods dressed up in the guise of truth, immorality purporting to be virtue, reason being drowned out by emotion. Issues of human sexuality, abortion, and euthanasia are just three areas of many where our society is deeply divided, to the point where it is often difficult (if not impossible) to engage in rational dialogue—and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

What I am saying may seem very dreary and pessimistic, so let me cheer you up with another book I’ve been reading. It’s titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Its author documents how in recent years a number of leading intellectuals have begun seriously questioning the false assumptions that have taken hold of so much of our western thought, and are finding themselves attracted to the Christian faith. He asks whether we might be seeing the first ripples of a new wave of faith. Pray to God that that might be so!

Whatever the case, we need to have the helmet of salvation fitted firmly over our heads and to be actively seeking the mind of Christ. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul wrote to the believers living in Rome, “but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

The sword: our only offensive weapon

We have looked at the breastplate and the helmet. Both are defensive gear, to protect the soldier from attack. Now we turn to the only offensive weapon in Paul’s list—the sword. The sword that Paul’s guard would have carried was not a long, heavy sword like you might imagine in Robin Hood or Braveheart. Rather, it was a little less than two feet long and weighed less than two pounds. It was ground razor sharp on both edges, with a sharp point; and the soldier carried it not at his hip, but over his shoulder, so that he could whip it out at a moment’s notice.

And that is exactly what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ betrayal. Matthew’s gospel doesn’t tell us who the guilty party was, just that “one of those who were with Jesus” reached for his sword, drew it out and struck the servant of the high priest, cutting off his ear (Matthew 26:50).

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Hebrews 4:12)

And here we have the example of our Lord Jesus, who, though he carried no physical weapon, was adept at wielding the sword of the Spirit. When the devil sought to tempt him away from his God-given mission, Jesus’ defence was not with any sophisticated philosophical argument, but with the words of Scripture. Each time his reply began, “It is written…” “It is written…” “It is written…”

Clearly Jesus knew his Bible. And if that was the case for him, how much more for us, as we are confronted with the unnumerable falsehoods and temptations with which life in the modern world confronts us. For this reason I can’t recommend highly enough a practice, not only of reading the Bible daily, but of committing it to memory. In my own Anglican tradition we have a prayer in which we ask that we may “hear, read, mark (that is, pay attention to), learn, and inwardly digest” the Scriptures. That means taking the time and the discipline to allow the message of the Bible to soak into us, to become a part of our very being.

Early in my own Christian life I was encouraged to begin memorizing portions of Scripture. I can’t tell you how many times those verses that I committed to memory have been helpful to me, particularly in times of difficulty—and more than fifty years later many of them are still embedded in my memory.

So much of life today is a spiritual battleground, and the weapons aimed against us grow daily in sophistication and menace. So let me challenge you to put on the spiritual armour with which God supplies us—the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of truth, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God—so that in the end you may shout with all the saints, “Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” .

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[1] Handley Moule, Ephesian Studies, 321

[2]     The Christian Mind, 67

“A Field, a Faith, and a Future” (Jeremiah 32:1-15)

 I wonder if any of you have ever spent money on something and later regretted doing it. I know I have on more than one occasion. And I suspect I’m not the only one here this morning who’s guilty of it.

We call them impulse purchases. And just for fun, I thought I’d share a few examples that I came across recently on the internet:

•  I bought $50 worth of Beanie Babies because I thought they’d be worth something.

•  My partner went out to buy vegetables for dinner and came home with a kayak. He forgot the vegetables and the kayak has never been used.

•  I bought a onesie for my Great Dane. I don’t know why I bought it but I think he liked it.

•  I’ve bought a lot of “how to” kits and books, like how to knit, how to do calligraphy, how to paint, how to write poetry, etc. Have I learned how to do a single one of those things? No, I have not.

And here’s the one that I think should win the prize:

•  I bought a rare exotic cucumber from a guy who said it would give me good luck.

When we look at this morning’s passage, it might seem that Jeremiah was guilty of the same thing when he bought that field from his cousin Hanamel. Just take a moment to try to fix the scene in your mind. The city of Jerusalem was within days of total destruction. The seemingly invincible armies of the King of Babylon had rolled through the towns and villages of Israel and were now in the process of raising their siegeworks against the walls of Jerusalem. Their battering rams were pounding against the gates. The methodical, slow thump…, thump…, thump… could be heard resounding through the city, as soldiers from within vainly twanged their bows and hurled their spears in defence, and while women and children cowered in their homes in terror.

In the midst of all this, Jeremiah was himself being held under arrest for refusing to stop prophesying the ruin of Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s real problem, as Jeremiah saw it, however, was not the armies that were attacking it from without, but the moral rot that had long been causing it to decay from within. The armies of Babylon that were now pounding at Jerusalem’s gates were God’s punishment for its leaders’ and its people’s long abandonment of him and of his righteous laws.

If that weren’t enough, along comes Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel. Hanamel had not come to comfort Jeremiah or give him company. Quite the opposite, he had come to pressure Jeremiah to purchase a piece of land—a field in Jeremiah’s home town of Anathoth, just a few miles away. I can only imagine that, with the occupation of the Babylonian troops, property values in the area had taken something of a nosedive! But Hanamel hadn’t come to offer Jeremiah a deal. He was insisting that Jeremiah had an obligation to his ancestors to purchase the property. So apparently without any negotiation or haggling, Jeremiah bought the field for seventeen shekels of silver—a weight of around two hundred grams or a little less than half a pound by today’s measure.

Now I can’t tell you whether seventeen shekels of silver was a bargain for a field or not. And besides, Jeremiah never reveals its. But whatever the case, that was not what it was all about.

It wasn’t that Jeremiah’s cousin Hanamel was some fast-talking huckster. Nor was it that Jeremiah was a fool for a good deal or even that he felt an obligation to his ancestors. No, Jeremiah was acting in obedience to a direct command from the Lord himself. God had told him in advance, “Hanamel son of Shallum your uncle is going to come to you and say, ‘Buy my field at Anathoth, because as nearest relative and it is not only your right, it is your duty to buy it.’”

“I knew that this was the word of the Lord,” Jeremiah reflected, “so I bought the field at Anathoth from my cousin Hanamel and weighed out for him seventeen shekels  of silver.”

Jeremiah’s Parables

So what was this property deal all about? What was Jeremiah doing when he knew that it was probably only a matter of a few days before Jerusalem’s walls would be breached, the city would lie in ruins, and its people? Well, I suppose you could think of it as a kind of object lesson.

Back when I was pastoring congregations, one of the features of the Sunday morning service every week was the children’s talk. It usually took the form of an object lesson, something from everyday life that the children could relate to and hopefully would stick in their minds. One of the great disappointments of my ministry, however, was the number of adults on the way out of the service who would remark on the children’s talk but would never mention the sermon that I had spent hours preparing!

Object lessons can be memorable. (Think of Jesus’ parables.) And Jeremiah was a master of them. There was the almond tree—which in Hebrew sounds very much like watching. And so Jeremiah used it as a reminder that the Lord was always watching over his people Israel (1:11-12). In alarming contrast to that, there was the boiling pot, tilting over and about to spill—a warning that God would be pouring out his judgement over his people (1:12-16).

Move along a few chapters and there is the linen belt that the Lord instructed Jeremiah to purchase and bind around his waist, only to tell him to hide it among the rocks, where it quickly began to mildew and disintegrate—a visible reminder that God had once bound his people to himself but they had turned from him and strayed (13:1-11). The parable of the belt was followed by the wine jars, which spoke of a people drunk on excess and decadent behaviour and warning that God would soon smash them in his anger (13:12-14). Proceeding to chapter 18, there was what is perhaps Jeremiah’s most memorable parable of the potter’s wheel. If the potter wasn’t satisfied with his work, it was a simple matter for him to reshape it. So it was that the Lord spoke through Jeremiah, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does? Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.” (18:1-6)

And the list goes on, with the two baskets of figs, one with good figs, the other with figs that had gone rotten (24:1-10). The bad figs were a warning to King Zedekiah and his officials, who had all become corrupt, that God would banish and destroy them. The good figs stood as a word of comfort to the exiled citizens of Israel: “My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart.”

Move along to the next chapter and there is the dark parable of the cup of the wine of God’s wrath, which he would force all the nations to drink—including Judah (25:15-29). And two chapters later the Lord instructs Jeremiah to make a yoke and put it over his neck (27:1-11). It was to serve as a warning that Israel and the surrounding nations would soon be made to bow their necks under the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon.

Now move along to our chapter this morning, and you can see how Jeremiah was able to use this incident in his life as another parable, another object lesson on the Lord’s dealings with his people. This time Jeremiah was literally putting his money where his mouth was, giving substance to his conviction that God was calling him to stay in Jerusalem.

Yes, the city was doomed to destruction. And Jeremiah could easily have said, “I’m outta here.” But God still had a purpose for him there. Jeremiah was acting out of a deep trust in God’s unfailing promise—a promise made more than a millennium in the past to Abraham:

I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God. (Genesis 17:7-8)

Jeremiah’s purchase of the field, in the midst of a world that was falling apart, was a demonstration of his faith in the unchanging purposes of God. With the Babylonian armies pounding at the gates, Jeremiah was well aware that in all likelihood he would never set foot on that field. Yet rather than disengaging from the realities around him, he chose to do something that from a purely worldly perspective didn’t make any sense at all. His purchase of the field was a witness to his commitment his people and to his unshakeable belief that God, who had shown his faithfulness to them again and again in the past, would continue faithful in the years ahead.

Engagement

Flash forward now to the twentieth century. When I gave my life to Christ as a teenager, I was encouraged to start memorizing verses from the Bible. And one of the verses I remember committing to memory early in that process was 2 Corinthians 6:17, which in the old King James Version runs thus: “Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord…”

Around the same time I became active in a church youth group where we often sang a song that ran like this. (Perhaps some of you are familiar with it.)

This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.

The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door
And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

Now put these influences together, and I found that there was a constant tug on me not to get too involved in “the world” or to allow myself to be influenced by worldly thinking and attitudes. And I can’t argue that there isn’t a certain wisdom in that. We live in perilous times, when the truth is being bent and twisted and outright denied all around us, to the point where it’s hard to know whom to believe.

Looking back, however, I am grateful to God that he put other believers around me who encouraged me not to insulate myself from the world, but to be engaged in it, to wrestle with secular thinking, to have deep friendships and to work alongside people who didn’t necessarily share my Christian presuppositions. And I found that my trust in God was only deepened and strengthened as a result.

Like Jeremiah, it was vital that I seek, not to insulate myself from the world, but instead, to influence it, even if only in a small way, and to make a positive impact.

Surely that was what Jesus meant when he told his followers, “You are the salt of the earth…” “You are the light of the world…” Salt doesn’t do a lot of good when you store it in its box or in leave it in a shaker. It needs to be sprinkled out and mixed in with the food.

We use salt as a flavour enhancer and we also use it as a preservative. Right now is pickling season. It’s hard to imagine pickling without salt. It’s salt that helps to preserve the pickles, to keep them fresh. And it’s salt that gives them flavour. And that is what Jesus was challenging his disciples to do—and by extension, you and me today.

Years ago there was a popular book called Out of the Saltshaker by a woman named Rebecca Manley Pippert. One little quote from that book that stands out for me runs like this:

What do you do with a man who is supposed to be the holiest man who has ever lived and yet goes around talking with prostitutes and hugging lepers? What do you do with a man who not only mingles with the most unsavory people but actually seems to enjoy them? The religious accused him of being a drunkard, a glutton and having tacky taste in friends. It is a profound irony that the Son of God visited this planet and one of the chief complaints against him was that he was not religious enough.

Jeremiah recognized that, in spite of all the mayhem that was happening around him, in spite of the doom that was surrounding the city, God was calling him to stay. Even more, God was calling him to invest himself in it. And, as I said, I don’t know what seventeen shekels of silver was worth, but it served to signify Jeremiah’s commitment to staying put.

So as we listen to Jeremiah, let me ask you, How is God calling you to invest in your world today—in your neighbourhood? —in your workplace? —in your school? Like Jeremiah, you may never be privileged to see the fruits, but I guarantee you won’t regret it when you hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

 

“Paul’s Vision for the Church” (Ephesians 3:8-21)

Many years ago (I’m embarrassed to admit how many!) a wise friend passed on to me a little book entitled The Gospel Blimp. Maybe some of you are old enough to have heard of it. Perhaps some have even read it! The story opens with a group of friends from church gathered for a barbecue in the back yard of George and Ethel Griscom. At some point someone notices the Griscoms’ next-door neighbours, who are sitting on their porch drinking beer and playing cards. This leads into a conversation on the Griscoms’ side of the fence about how to reach people with the gospel.

In the midst of the conversation an airplane flies very low overhead—so low, in fact, that everyone on both sides of the fence stops what they are doing to look up and gaze at it—and out of that there sprouts the germ of an idea. That low-flying airplane caught everybody’s attention. How about using a blimp with a message trailing behind it to glide slowly over people’s homes to proclaim the gospel to all the unchurched citizens of the whole town?

Well, the story goes on from there. And lo and behold, the idea becomes a reality. After that it doesn’t take much longer for someone to suggest a further step. How about using the blimp to sprinkle evangelistic pamphlets over entire neighbourhoods? Soon someone else comes up with the further brainwave of installing speaker horns to broadcast sermons and Christian music. Well, as you can imagine (or perhaps you’d prefer not to!) the story goes on from there. And it doesn’t take very much longer for the whole project to collapse in disaster.

But meanwhile, quietly in the midst of all this energy being devoted to the blimp, the Griscoms’ neighbours do become Christians. Not because of the blimp, which only ever served to upset and annoy people. But because somewhere along the way George and Ethel actually began to get to know their neighbours and ended up helping them through a serious health crisis.

All of this reminds me of some advice another friend passed on to me early in my Christian walk: “Be careful not to get so caught up in the work of the Lord that you lose sight of the Lord of the work.”

So it is that Paul is writing to the believers in Ephesus to remind them of their true calling, and to help them focus on God’s intentions for his church. And I hope I’m going to make it easy for you to remember if I summarize what he says under three headings: They needed to be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power, and continuous in praise. 

Clear our Purpose (8-13)

First, then, the believers living in Ephesus were called to be clear in their purpose. Paul sets out that purpose in the opening verse of this morning’s passage. And it is this: to proclaim the boundless, unfathomable, infinite riches of Christ—a riches that beggars all human calculation.

“Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” he writes elsewhere. It’s as though, in spite of all his scholarly training and oratorical eloquence, Paul is scarcely able to find the words to express himself. “How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33)

John, at the very end of his gospel, after setting down more than twenty chapters of his memories of Jesus, finds himself coming to a similar conclusion: “Jesus did many other things as well,” he writes. “If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” (John 21:25) He just couldn’t ever say enough about Jesus.

So it is that Paul writes that his whole calling—and by extension yours and mine—is to make plain God’s eternal plan, which has now been realized in Jesus Christ. The verb that Paul uses here is photizo. Perhaps you can hear in it our English words photograph, photoelectric, photon, photosensitive, photosynthesis… They all have to do with light.

Of course, behind Paul’s words is the command that Jesus gave to his followers in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:16). So it is that you and I are called and empowered and commissioned to live lives shining with the light of Jesus—his all-embracing love, his unchanging truth, his pure goodness—in what today seems to be an ever-increasingly dark and threatening world.

And that light will shine only as our words are backed up by our actions, by the quality of our lives. It is our lives that give authenticity to our words. A century and a half after the apostle Paul, believers were going through a period of terrible persecution. Yet the church continued to grow. Why? It was the Christian author Tertullian who recognized the reason when he wrote, “It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many to put a brand upon us. See, they say, how they love one another, … how they are ready even to die for one another!”[1] Theirs was a love that also overflowed outside the Christian community to the poor, the destitute and the hungry, to widows and orphans. And it was through that love tangibly demonstrated that people also discovered the love of a Saviour. Through their integrity people encountered him who is the truth. And through their willingness to be tortured and even to die for their faith that people found him who came to bring life in all its fullness.

Conscious of our Power (14-19)

It is a calling of truly heroic proportions. But we will never live up to it unless we are conscious of the power that alone can make it a reality. We need always to be aware the light with which Jesus calls us to shine does not originate in us. It is a reflected light. And its source is the ineffable glory, the unquenchable love, the unchanging truth of Jesus himself. Paul writes about being strengthened in our inner being through the Holy Spirit’s power. And in verses 16 through 19 he gives us three images of how that happens. So let’s take a look at each of them briefly.

Paul first writes in verse 17 about Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. Many years ago (about as many years ago as when I was given The Gospel Blimp!) someone else introduced me to a little booklet entitled My Heart – Christ’s Home. It’s based on that verse which I am sure is familiar to most of us in Revelation 3, where Jesus says, “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with them, and they with me.” In it the author takes us through the various rooms of a house—the living room, where we relax; the dining room, where we eat; the study, where we read; the bedroom, and so on…

The whole point was that when you open your life to Jesus, it isn’t a matter of merely allowing him to stand in the entryway like some door-to-door salesperson. Rather, you are giving him free rein to move and to exercise his lordship throughout every room, every nook and cranny in the house: your thoughts and appetites, what you take into your mind through the books and media you read, the music you listen to, what you watch on TV and the internet and social media, your friendships, your sex life, your finances, your leisure time, and the list goes on…

Secondly, Paul calls us to be grounded in love. The image moves from a home to a forest. We are blessed with an almost endless forest behind our house. It stretches pretty well all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. But it is all on semi-swampy, rocky ground, which means that many of the trees can’t put down deep roots. So every time there’s a major windstorm (and we’ve had our share of them in recent years) there are trees that are blown over and end up falling to the ground and dying.

So how do we become properly rooted, so that the winds of temptation and misfortune and adversity don’t cause us to fall? I want to suggest three ways. We need to be grounded in holy Scripture—to spend time daily reading the Bible, seeking to grasp its meaning and then applying it to our lives. We need to be rooted in prayer—to bask in God’s great and unfathomable love in Christ and to lay our lives, our concerns and our deepest needs before him. And we need to be rooted in community, which means more than just spending an hour or so in church on a Sunday, but really engaging with God’s people, being nourished in an environment of mutual love and care.

So it is that, with Christ dwelling in our hearts and with our lives rooted and grounded in his love, we will find ourselves being filled to the brim with the fullness of God—and by his grace that fullness will overflow into and enrich the lives of others as well. That doesn’t mean that life will be easy or that we will always go around with a smile pasted on our face. Far from it! Christians are not immune to sorrow and tragedy. But it does mean that we are never alone in them. For we are graced with the constant presence of the one who has promised to be with us always, to the very end of time (Matthew 28:20).

Continuous in our Praise (20-21)

And so we are to be clear in our purpose and conscious of our power. Which brings us to our third point: and that is that we are to be continuous in our praise.

At this point my mind is drawn back years ago once again, when I was serving in a church in Montreal and we were graced with a visit from the Archbishop of Uganda. His name was Erica Sabiti. He had grown up in the church but it was only when he was in his thirties that he came into contact with the spiritual revival that was sweeping across East Africa at the time, and his life was forever transformed. In a word, he fell in love with Jesus.

I well remember the woman who was hosting him at one time remarking to me under her breath, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! All he ever talks about is Jesus. If I hear him even mention that name once more, I think I’m going to scream!” This was nearly forty years after his conversion, yet this man still found himself totally captivated by, utterly in love with Jesus.

It was clear that this man’s praise was no shallow, surface phenomenon. It sprang from a deep and unshakeable faith in God. Sabiti’s ministry as archbishop occurred during the tyrannous dictatorship of Idi Amin. And when Amin ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Uganda, Erica Sabiti opposed him publicly and stood up for them. He soon received a summons to appear before Amin, with every likelihood that, as with others who had taken a stand against him, the dictator would personally shoot him.

There was a tense two-hour wait before Amin appeared and sat down across from him. After what seemed an interminable period of silence, Amin burst out, “You Sabiti, do you know I can kill you? Why do you talk about the children of Israel?” Twice more Amin repeated the threat, after which the archbishop reached down into his bag and pulled out his Bible. Then, with a calmness in his voice he said, “Your Excellency, this Bible is full of the history of the Jews, so is your Koran. People have died because of the truth, which is in this Bible. The children of Israel are special because they are a chosen race and we shall talk about it.” Amin did not say a thing, but shook his head and walked out of the room.[2]

This was the man who could never stop praising Jesus. God grant that our worship in this place might powerfully engage our minds, stir our hearts and strengthen our wills. By his grace may it be a mighty upswelling of praise that arises out of a profound and unshakeable experience of God’s saving grace in Jesus—an experience week by week that accompanies and upholds us through all of life’s circumstances and irresistibly leads us ever deeper into him.

Paul’s God-given vision for the Christians in Ephesus was that they might be clear in their purpose, conscious of their power and continuous in praise. I’d like to conclude with Paul’s challenge to them, as Eugene Peterson powerfully worded it in The Message:

And I ask [God] to strengthen you by his Spirit … that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus 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!

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[1] Tertullian, Apology, ch 39

[2] https://ugandansatheart.blogspot.com/2015/04/uah-emarchbishop-sabitis-near-fatal.html