Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 21, 2006
W. Gregory Pope
AN OLD TREE GROWING
Ephesians 1:15-23; 3:16-21
We’re making our way through the letter of Ephesians, seeking to learn more about Christian Spiritual Formation, and what it is God is trying to do in our lives.
We began last week talking about God as the primary actor in Christian Spiritual Formation , and how the goal of Christian Spiritual Formation is to center our lives not in ourselves but in God.
I. Toward a Definition of Christian Spiritual Formation
Eugene Peterson defines Christian Spiritual Formation with this emphasis on God’s work. He says it is “God the Holy Spirit forming the life of Christ in us.” (Eugene Peterson, Soulcraft, Audio CD, lecture given at Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia)
The Christians to whom Paul is writing are those in the process of Christian Spiritual Formation . We can tell they are well on their way. Paul has heard a couple of things about them that mark their formation. He says, “I have heard of your faith in Christ and your love toward all the saints.” Both are needed: faith in Christ and love for others. Loving God and loving neighbor.
Paul has heard of this and he is grateful and does not cease to give thanks to God for this.
There is a faith in Christ some possess that does not issue forth in love for others. Their loyalty to Christ makes them mean. But that is not true Christian Spiritual Formation. As our faith in Christ grows, as our Christian Formation deepens, our lives will exhibit love for others more and more clearly.
Robert Mulholland says that Christian Spiritual Formation is “the process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others.” (M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. Invitation to the Journey, InterVarsity Press, 1993, 15)
Another similar definition describes Spiritual Formation as “the process of being shaped in the image of Christ by the gracious working of God’s Spirit for the transformation of the world.” (Spiritual Formation Network, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship)
Christian Spiritual Formation leads us into responsibility for others, caring for them, loving them as Jesus loves them.
II. Prayer
Christian Spiritual Formation is about God doing within us the work of conforming us into the likeness of Jesus. As I said last week, God is not coercive about doing this work within us. God does not impose. God invites. God invites us to join God in the work of Christian Spiritual Formation. And just as we can assist or impair our biological health and growth, so there are ways we can assist or impair our spiritual health and growth.
Saints and teachers down through the history of the church have taught us that we can assist our spiritual formation by engaging in certain practices called spiritual disciplines. We may not like the word “discipline,” but if you’ve ever tried to engage in practices to enhance your spiritual growth you know it takes discipline in order for those practices to do you any good.
Spiritual disciplines do not do the work of Christian Spiritual Formation, but they do prepare us, they do put us in a place where God can do God’s work within us.
There are many spiritual disciplines from worship to meditation to spiritual reading to service and others. The one our text calls to our attention today is perhaps the most crucial. It is the practice of prayer.
Most of us, if we are honest, would say that we struggle with prayer - with how to pray, unsure if it is helpful - all of us must surely wrestle with prayer’s mystery.
Sometimes we grow discouraged with prayer because we do not get what we ask for, the loved one we prayed for did not get well, the job we wanted we did not get. And so we wonder whether or not prayer is just a waste of time.
Our text this morning consists of two prayers Paul prayed for these first century Christians. And these prayers teach us some important things about prayer and what to pray for. Paul brings a different perspective to prayer. It is prayer centered in God and not in our own personal desires.
It is also worth noting the corporate nature of Paul’s prayer. This is a prayer for the church. Prayer is first an act we do together as the church. Praying together then informs our personal prayers.
Also, many of the benefits of prayer we receive through our life together as part of the faith community, not as individuals.
And yet, there are personal benefits to prayer.
We are formed in prayer. William Carey said that “prayer lies at the root of all personal godliness.”
Prayer is the most appropriate language for Christian Spiritual Formation because it is addressed to God, the One doing the work in our lives.
III. Paul’s Prayers
Prayer is language addressed to God. And these prayers in Ephesians are centered in God. These are wonderful prayers we can pray for ourselves, whether you are a senior graduating from high school or a senior citizen.
These prayers are not about getting what we want, but about being shaped into a certain kind of person. And that is what true prayer is all about. Spending time with God being shaped into the person God created us to be. Let’s look at the prayers.
A. The first and primary request of these two prayers is that we might come to know God.
Paul says, I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know God.
We spend our lives growing in our knowledge of God. Theology chats, like the one following worship today on the will of God, help in the process, as we think through what we believe about God. And as we do that, theology leads us into prayer, as we seek to know God as best we can.
As we seek to know God, this prayer teaches us to ask for “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation.” Wisdom is the ability to live with what we know about God. Revelation is God revealing, telling us what we could never figure out ourselves. God reveals to us through scripture, through our experience, through the words of another person, and through the community of faith. However, the biblical witness, the example of Jesus, and the testimony of the saints down through the centuries, teach us that God reveals God’s self best through prayer.
Perhaps it is time to rethink the primary nature of prayer as a time not to bring our list of things we want God to do, but as a time where we get to know God better. It is a process that will take all of eternity.
Paul says as we seek to know God we will need “the eyes of our hearts enlightened.” I love that phrase: “the eyes of our hearts.” It has to do with seeing more than that which is right before our eyes. And it takes those kind of eyes to know God. Because much of God is hidden, a mystery beyond what our eyes can see. We pray so that the eyes of our hearts can be enlightened.
Within this request to know God, Paul specifies three things he wants us to know about God.
1. The first thing he wants us to know about God is the hope to which God has called us.
And here the hope is not primarily heaven. It is the hope that carries us toward our calling of wholeness in Christ. It is about fulfilling God’s hope for us to be shaped into the likeness of Christ. It is a hope that gives us hope that we can be the person God created us to be, the person who, in our heart of hearts, we truly want to be. We pray to know the hope to which God has called us.
2. A second thing Paul wants us to know about God is the riches of God’s glorious inheritance in the saints.
This language sounds a bit strange to us. Last week we read where Paul talked about our inheritance. In this prayer Paul wants us to know about God’s inheritance. He wants us to know that God considers us the saints, the church God’s inheritance.
One of the most important things we can know about God is what God thinks of us. God sees us as saints, as holy persons, as an inheritance. The God with which we are dealing does not hate or despise us. We are God’s delight. We are God’s inheritance.
3. A third thing Paul wants us to know about God is the immeasurable greatness of God’s power.
Paul wants us to know that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him above all earthly powers is the same power at work in us.
This Thursday in the Christian Calendar is observed as Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter Sunday and the resurrection of Jesus when Jesus departs the earth and is seated at God’s right hand.
The Ascension of Jesus is way of describing his vindication by God. All the powers that sought to destroy him, all the powers that event still try to destroy him and his kingdom of justice and peace, compassion and love, all of those powers are under Jesus’ feet. Christ is above all things. And as head of the church, which is his body, we are not powerless in the face of earthly powers. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him above all earthly powers is the same power at work in us.
In us, the church, Christ’s body, lives all the fullness of Christ. He fills all in all. The presence and power of Christ fills us all.
It is at this point of praying for God’s power at work within us that the two prayers are joined together.
Paul writes in his second prayer in chapter three: I pray, according to the riches of God’s glory, that God may inwardly strengthen you with power through God’s Spirit.
Is this not the prayer we need most often - the prayer for inner strength?
I can tell you as the father of an eight month old, an eight month old who does not care much for sleep, I, along with his mother, have been in dire need of inner strength. If I were not afraid he could hear me in the nursery I would tell you he has shown significant improvement this week. But I think he can hear me, and so I will keep his good sleeping habits this week a secret.
Whether it’s having a baby at home, dealing with the stress of work, caring for teenagers or aging parents, and seeking to live as a faithful Christian, we all need inner strength that comes to us through the power of God’s Spirit.
So Paul’s first request could be summed up as the desire that we come to know God - to know the hope of God’s calling, to know we are God’s glorious inheritance, and to know God’s power.
B. A second request is that Christ will make his home in our hearts.
This happens in two ways:
1. One, through faith.
Through faith in Christ, through our invitation, our receptivity, Christ comes to live within our hearts and abides, dwells within us.
2. Christ makes his home in our hearts as we are rooted and grounded in love
Rooted is an agricultural term. Grounded is an architectural term. Both refer to the foundations on which we build our lives.
It is here that I am reminded of Wendell Berry’s sycamore. He begins the poem:
In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore . . .
Sycamores prefer deep, rich soils in full sun. In a line about sycamores I found profoundly relative to our spiritual formation is that they “tend to drop twigs so clean-up can be a hassle.” (http://treehelp.com/trees/sycamore/platanus-occidentalis.asp)
Doesn’t that not sound like a church to you? We are like old sycamores, often with a lot to clean up. But if we grow strong we can provide beauty and shade and shelter for each other.
Just as a tree must get its roots deep into the soil if it is to have nourishment and stability, so must have our spiritual lives be rooted and grounded deep in faith and love.
We become rooted and grounded in love as we come to know Christ’s love.
C. This we might make the third request of the prayer - to know the broad expanse of Christ’s love.
Paul wants us to know the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love - a love he says is beyond knowledge.
A priest from Detroit visited his uncle in Ireland. It was his uncle’s eightieth birthday. One morning the two woke before dawn and went for a walk along Lake Killarney. They stood side by side and watched a gorgeous sunrise. Suddenly his eighty-year-old uncle turned and went skipping down the road. Radiant, smiling from ear to ear.
The nephew said, “Uncle Seamus, you really look happy.”
“I am, lad,” his uncle replied.
“Want to tell me why?”
His uncle replied: “You see, me Abba is very fond of me.”
(Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child, 2nd Rev. Ed., Nav Press, 2002, 65)
To know the love of God in Christ is to now that your Abba, your Maker, Jesus the Christ is very fond of you. And it will make your heart smile.
This can happen in prayer as we move from communicating with God through speech to communing with God through the gaze of love. Words falls away, and the most palpable reality is being present to the lover of our souls. When we let go of all effort to speak or even to listen, simply becoming quiet before God, the Spirit is free to work its healing mysteries in us: releasing us from bondage, energizing new patterns of life, restoring our soul’s beauty. Here we allow ourselves to be loved by God into wholeness. (Marjorie Thompson, Soul Feast: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life, Westminster John Knox, 1995, 45)
Prayer that seeks to know God, to know the hope of God’s calling, to know we are God’s glorious inheritance, to know God’s power, and to know the unbounded love of Christ as he makes his home in our hearts - this is prayer through which God does the work of Christian Spiritual Formation.
D. The final request of these prayers is that we be filled with all the fullness of God.
The true work of Christian Spiritual Formation is to be more full of God than we are of ourselves. It happens through prayer as we rest in God, allowing the Spirit to fill and move us as God wills.
When we pray continually in this way, God is able to do within us abundantly far more than all we can ever ask or imagine. Changes can take place in my life that I cannot imagine. God can do things in my life I would never dream of asking.
I think we’ve all had our disappointments and frustrations with prayer. But I hope you’ve also had those moments when God did more than you could ever imagine - through the birth of a child, the love of a mate, meaningful work, a change in your life.
The poet Richard Wilbur offers these lines I read as a hopeful prayer:
“My eyes shall never know the dry disease
of thinking of no more than what he sees.”
I pray God’s plan for me and for us is larger than what my eyes can see.
And everything, everything is for the glory of God. That the love and grace and power of God might be seen in our lives so that others might be able to look out upon creation and smile, saying to themselves, “Me Abba is very fond of me.”
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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