And I do invite you to turn to
the third chapter of the epistle to the
Ephesians for our consideration this morning.
Let me just review for a second or
two what has come to our attention thus
far so that we might not get so
engrossed in some minutiae of the letter that
we fail to see the overall purpose and
plan of the Apostle as he wrote this
epistle.
I'm sure he had in mind the needs
of the people to whom he addressed himself
in this letter.
And I don't think he was thinking that
they were all deep students, theological experts and
all that sort of thing, but he was
thinking probably more of their practical problems on
a day-to-day basis that they faced
as they sought to live for Christ in
a pagan environment.
And so although the truths are couched in
magnificent and beautiful language, we mustn't lose sight
of the fact that there is a practical
application to the daily Christian living.
For instance, what has the peak thus far
revealed to us?
Well, in the first chapter we noted that
he called to their attention the fact that
God had a special hope in his calling
of them out of their darkness and into
his marvelous light.
He reminds them that they are his sacred
inheritance from which he expects some dividends.
And all of that, that Christ might be
formed in them unless they become discouraged and
feel that that's an impossible goal to attain.
He reminds them of all the limitless resources
at their disposal, the exceeding greatness of the
power that they have at their disposal for
the accomplishment of that fact.
And then we moved on into the next
chapter, into chapter two, and from that mountain
peak they were reminded, or we are reminded,
that despite our wretched and hopeless past, we
are now in Christ.
And in him, and from that lofty position
in Jesus Christ, we are assured of an
eternal home, an eternal fellowship with God in
which he will display throughout all the endless
ages of eternity his kindness and his love
toward us in Christ Jesus.
Now, that all brings us up to what
shall we see from the mountain peak revealed
in chapter three.
Well, maybe if any of you are at
all interested, I suggest a very simple outline
of this chapter as sort of hooks on
which we can hang a few thoughts this
morning.
For instance, I would suggest that the verses
one through twelve of the chapter, that's almost
the full half and more of the chapter,
might be entitled, Unveiling the Divine Purpose, The
Unveiling of the Divine Purpose.
We'll come back to these points in a
moment and consider them separately.
And then verses thirteen through nineteen, bringing us
almost totally to the end of the chapter,
would be a prayer in which Paul seeks
to have us understand the divine purpose or
plan, understanding the divine plan.
That's verses thirteen to nineteen.
And the last two verses of the chapter
we might entitle The Unleashing of the Divine
Power.
Once again, he brings them down or around
to the point that God supplies what is
needed.
If he makes a demand upon us, if
he lays some claim upon us, he provides
what is needed in order to meet that
claim or requirement.
Now, I wonder if it wouldn't help us
a bit if I rather rapidly read, so
as to refresh our minds a bit on
this portion of scripture, these early verses.
So, with your indulgence, please follow.
For this cause I, Paul, the prisoner of
Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, if you have
heard of the dispensation of the grace of
God which is given me to you, how
that by revelation he made known to me
the mystery, as I wrote before in a
few words, so that when you read you
may understand my knowledge in the mystery of
Christ, which in other ages was not made
known unto the sons of men, as it
is now revealed unto his holy apostles and
prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should
be fellow heirs and of the same body,
and partakers of his promise in Christ by
the gospel.
Whereof I was made a minister according to
the gift of the grace of Christ to
me, who am less than the least of
all saints, is this grace given, that I
should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches
of Christ, and to make all see what
is the fellowship of the mystery which from
the beginning of the world hath been hid
in God, who created all things by Jesus
Christ, to the intent that now unto the
principalities and powers in heavenly places might be
known by the church the manifold wisdom of
God, according to the eternal purpose which he
purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom
we have boldness and access with confidence by
the faith of him."
Maybe the bottom line of that passage is
found there in verse 11, according to the
eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus
our Lord.
The Germans have a philosophical term with which
we here in America, it seems to me,
are not very familiar.
I became acquainted with this term in a
rather odd way.
As a student in seminary, we were informed
that our professor of church history, who had
had to retire, was being replaced by a
very brilliant German scholar who was coming on
from Germany to take up that post in
our seminary.
His name was Professor Muller, and when he
arrived he was so German in every way
that it became sort of a joke in
the seminary as well as a little bit
of a burr in our saddles.
He, first of all, had almost a very
obvious disdain for American students.
I learned, in my own personal embarrassment one
day, what the German word dummkopf means.
If any of you understand German, you'll know
too.
I didn't know whether he was complimenting me
or insulting me.
He called me a dummkopf, simply because I
did not know how to go to the
blackboard and draw the Rhine River.
I said to him, Sir, I was born
on the banks of the Delaware River and
I can't draw that one.
How do you expect me to draw the
Rhine River?
He says, You are a dummkopf, which I
suppose, I think, means a cabbage head, in
amounts of being a dummy.
Anyway, this professor was constantly deriding us because
of our abysmal ignorance of, particularly, philosophical concepts.
We learned to ride with that after a
while.
He one day asked a question in class
of one of our students.
He said, I want to ask you, what
is your Weltanschauung?
The fellow looked and said, I didn't know
what was showing, Sir.
He said, ah, and that set him off,
but always when he got one of those
kind of replies from smart American college and
university students, it usually triggered tirade against us.
And so he began to tell us how
that the young boys and the girls in
Germany, when they are in the gymnasium in
the early schools in Germany, they are called,
they have a well formed Weltanschauung.
And up to that point, all of us
wondered if that was some physical exercise they
went through that formed them so nicely physically.
Well, really it's not.
And my wife, who understands and has taught
German, will often times say, oh, how you
murder the German language.
And I say, I know that, but I
think that people may understand that I'm just
a dummkopf.
But at any rate, this phrase or this
word is a philosophical term, a German philosophical
term.
It occurs, by the way, many, many times
in Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Hitler had a Weltanschauung.
What does that mean?
A world view, a viewpoint of the world,
a philosophy of what the world is all
about, and how things are working in the
world, and what ends and aims toward which
events are moving.
Do you have a view?
Do you have some kind of a philosophical
approach to the world so that you can
somehow cope with the problems that come as
you contemplate the world condition?
Well, if there's any people in all of
the world who ought to have a well
-formed Weltanschauung, it is Christian believers, because we
have a divine revelation in which there is
unfolded to us a viewpoint of the whole
world.
And Paul talks about that in this particular
passage.
We might say that here, as there is
unveiled to us the divine purpose, this is
really the disclosure of God's Weltanschauung.
And that purpose, incidentally, is maybe a little
better enunciated in another passage, which says,
having made known unto us the mystery of
his will, according to his good pleasure, which
he hath purposed in himself, that, this is
his purpose, this is what he has planned
and purposed in himself, that, in the dispensation
of the fullness of times, he might gather
together in one all things in Christ.
Both which are in heaven and which are
on earth, even in him.
Here is disclosed then God's ultimate purpose.
God has an eternal purpose and it is
his fixed intention to gather the universe, all
of it, and every creature in it, under
one head, namely the Lord Jesus Christ.
And this shall include things in heaven and
things on the earth.
And God will never rest until all rule
and all authority and all might has been
cast down and the Lord Jesus Christ himself
has been enthroned far above all.
That's God's grand and glorious purpose.
And he is working all things toward that
end.
Now, you who may have served in the
military, and I might say just in passing,
it's an interesting thing for me to be
here.
My very first contact with the military was
here at Camp Blanding.
And Stark, Florida, was a very interesting place
in those days.
It just swarmed with G.I.s. And
I shall never forget, I thought I had
reached the last edge of the universe when
I came to this seemingly God-forsaken wilderness
called Camp Blanding.
And in this neck of the woods, it's
all changed a great deal.
But if you were in the military and
you were given some kind of a task
to perform, seemingly a meaningless task, like, soldier,
your job is to guard this little crossroads
here.
You're to stand guard eight hours a day,
march back and forth and back and forth.
And here we are, maybe a thousand miles
from the battlefront.
And I might say, what in the world
am I doing here?
This little crossroads, the only thing that crosses
are a few cows and some sheep and
a couple of people.
I don't hear a gun going off.
I don't see an enemy.
I've got a menial job here to do.
And it has no connection whatsoever with the
war.
So I might become very discouraged.
Until one day, an officer comes.
He's got a chicken on his shoulder.
That means he's a full colonel.
He's up there somewhere.
And he's got, under his arm he has
a roll of papers and he unrolls it
and he says, hey, G.I., I want
to show you something.
Look, here is the latest disclosure of the
battle plan.
This is how the war is going.
This is what is planned by the high
command.
Here it is.
See the whole plan right here?
Here's where we're going.
Here's where we're moving.
Here's where our forces are moving.
And over here, in this little place with
an X, is where you are.
You may not feel that you have a
very vital connection with the whole battle, but
this is an important little crossroads here.
If the enemy, if they should possibly come
through here, your job is to alert the
forces.
Well, all of a sudden, that little spot
that's up to that point seemed like nothing.
Most discouraging.
I understand now.
I'm part of the whole plan.
And it becomes significant and meaningful.
And it may alter my whole approach.
Well, when you look at life itself, and
we get lost in all the entanglements of
life, and the problems that we can't solve
beset us, and all of a sudden I
say, who am I?
And what am I?
Where do I fit into the scheme?
Of course the general doesn't send every day
his plans down to the common G.I.
soldier down here in this obscure spot so
that he knows every single day what the
strategy is.
Of course he doesn't do that.
But our general has done it.
He's revealed in his word what his overall
plan is, and what his purpose is in
this whole universe, in fact.
Not alone the world, but beyond the world.
This is God's cosmological philosophical plan if you're
pleased.
For the universe, and it's all revealed right
here.
Wonderful.
And you and I fit into this whole
thing.
We know that we fit into it because
he tells us so.
He says that we are involved, personally involved.
The fact of the matter is, up to
this point we've been reminded that we have
been predestinated unto God's plan and purpose.
And by the way, don't get frightened.
I think I mentioned that the other day.
Don't get frightened by those terms.
You know the Biblical meaning of predestination, the
Biblical meaning, I didn't say the theological meaning.
I said the Biblical meaning.
It has to do not with the destination
of the redeemed, but the purpose of God
in calling and selecting the redeemed.
We have been predestinated, not unto heaven.
We have been predestinated to be conformed to
the image of his son.
There's a difference.
It has to do with status, not destination.
We who have been called and selected and
elected, we have been predestinated by God to
be conformed to the image of his son.
One day we shall be exact.
That's what God's purpose is.
And we fit into that.
See, and Paul is here unveiling that grand
and glorious purpose.
Then he comes to verse 13.
Wherefore, in the light of all of this,
in the view of God's overall grand and
glorious purpose to bring everything in this universe
under the headship of our Lord Jesus Christ
until he is Lord Supreme and Sovereign over
everything and every creature in the universe.
Wherefore, in the light of all of that,
I don't want you to faint at my
tribulations for you, which is your glory.
I have a soul agony as I think
about you.
I think of maybe you don't grasp this.
Maybe you haven't comprehended all of this.
And so I agonize in my heart and
in my prayers for you that you might
come into a fuller understanding of all of
this.
It will alter, it will change your whole
approach to life if you realize what God's
purpose and plan is in the universe and
how you fit into that plan too.
So I'm agonizing in my heart and I
have great tribulations for you.
And for this cause, I bow my knees
unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And if you start there, and once again,
you'll find one of those long sentences in
this epistle.
Our first study, I reminded you, in that
prayer was 199 English words.
In this prayer that Paul now prays, there
are 80 words in a single sentence.
We have the habit once in a while
in some of our gatherings to have what
we call sentence prayers.
That's one way of limiting some of the
saints who pray all over the earth when
they pray and travel all around and eat
up the whole time.
So we sometimes say, now we just want
a sentence or two to pray.
Just thank the Lord for something or petition
Him for something, just a sentence.
Well, I wouldn't dare risk that if the
Apostle Paul were in the audience.
His sentences were rather long.
And this prayer has 80 words in it.
Let's notice it.
I bow my knees to the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole
family in heaven and earth is named.
That, in each case now, you have hinge
words, hinges.
These are hinges on which there revolves or
hangs a very important statement.
There are several.
That, He would grant you, according to the
riches of His glory, to be strengthened with
might by His Spirit in the inner man.
That, Christ may dwell in your hearts by
faith.
That, ye being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend with all saints
what is the breadth and length and depth
and height, and to know the love of
Christ which passeth knowledge.
That, you might be filled with all the
fullness of God.
We might say that all those that's could
be enunciated in order that, in order that,
in order that, in each instance.
Now, let's see if we can analyze this
prayer, because we are now on the slopes
of the high peak in this chapter.
I think we reach the peak at a
specific point, and we're approaching the peak in
this prayer.
When you analyze it, you will notice that
the very first thing that he's praying for
in verse 16 is for spiritual empowering.
That, He would grant you, according to the
riches of His glory, to be strengthened with
might by His Spirit in the inner man.
Beloved, I would say that my associations in
the Lord's work have been, of course, most
of my life has been occupied in church
ministry, as well as an educational institution.
And I would say, for instance, I was
pastor of one single church for 33 years.
I said that proved to me one thing.
It proved the validity of the biblical doctrine
known as the perseverance of the saints, to
endure one man for 33 years.
My fellowship among the brethren grows out of
the fact that my good wife was born
and reared and raised among the brethren in
the north of England.
And in this moment, when we are free
from pastoring churches, we fellowship with the Boca
Raton Bible Chapel, the brethren in that place.
So I sometimes feel a little bit like,
not quite like a Philistine among the Israelis,
but I do feel a little bit like
a stranger or a foreigner who is invading
the camp.
But it has been a very delightful and
very helpful experience for me, personally, to have
the fellowship with God's people among the brethren.
My wife feels she is back to her
roots and enjoying herself immensely.
I charge her, however, I say the only
reason why you delight in going to the
assembly is it gives you a chance to
buy new hats.
But at any rate, one of the things
I have noticed is a marked difference in
the public praying of the brethren as over
against the kinds of prayers that one hears
in most of our churches.
I deplore the shallowness of the praying that
I hear as I travel about the country
among Christian people.
The dimensions of the praying are so limited
and the requests are so sometimes puerile and
childish.
I go into a prayer meeting in a
church and I sometimes think I am in
a medical clinic.
They are praying for everything from ingrown toenails
to acute dandruff.
The whole prayer time is taken up with
praying about somebody's illnesses and troubles.
I don't deny that we ought to be
praying for one another and people who are
ill deserve our prayerful attention.
But when that occupies almost the totality of
our praying, then I think it leads to
immaturity in the art of prayer.
This is so apparent that I thought one
Sunday morning I would experiment.
So I said to friends here in the
church, and I expounded a little bit on
this idea I have just spoken to you
about.
I said, what would you do if some
Sunday morning one of the brethren walked up
to you and instead of the usual, you
know what we do, hello Joe, how are
you?
Oh, I'm fine.
How are you Bill?
I'm fine too.
Been a good week?
Yeah, good week.
Feeling good?
Yes, feeling fine.
How's the wife?
She's fine too.
And the kids?
Yeah, the kids are all well.
And business going good?
Yeah, business going pretty good.
We had a good week this week.
I'm so glad you look fine Bill.
Yes, you look the same John.
What have you done?
You've battered your gums for about three minutes
in a waste of breath and time.
Isn't that the truth?
But we all do it, you know.
We can't get away from it.
We can't escape it.
So I said, suppose some Sunday morning one
of the brethren walks up to you and
says, Jack, I've been praying for you all
week.
The first thing that happened, you may be
bristled.
Am I that backslidden that you're praying for
me?
No, I've been praying all week.
You know what I've been praying for?
I've been asking God to so deepen your
understanding of the things of God that you
would become a mighty giant in our midst.
That you would come to know the Lord
in such a rich and marvelous and powerful
and wonderful way that it would just shine
through you Jack.
That's what I've been praying for.
That you would be strengthened with spiritual might
in your inner man by the Holy Spirit.
I said, you know what would happen to
you Jack?
You'd faint.
You'd fall over.
You couldn't believe it.
See?
That somebody would express their desires toward you
in terms of grand and great spiritual concepts.
We could learn some lessons maybe from the
apostolic prayers and what he prayed for.
As he thinks of these Ephesians, he says,
the one thing I want above everything else
is that God would strengthen you with spiritual
might by the indwelling power of His Holy
Spirit.
I tell you then you'll be able to
cope with and conquer any situation that you
face.
If it's strong within, what matters what's without?
See, in Christ I'm an overcomer.
In Him I can face every and any
situation in victory.
That's what he's looking for.
I want you to be strengthened with might
by the Holy Spirit in your inner man.
And God is so concerned with our inner
man.
This generation of ours is obsessed with concern
about the outer man.
Do you know that?
I watch people sometimes when they sit down
at a meal and I have a friend,
before he eats a thing he reaches in
his pocket and he lines up about 17
pills.
Blue, green, yellow, black.
You know he's not sick.
Nothing wrong with him.
But he just believes that these pills all
contribute to his physical energy.
So he takes the two pink ones.
The only trouble is those pink ones cause
a little buzzing in his ear.
So he takes three green ones to cure
the buzzing in the ear.
But they make those three green ones, when
he takes them regularly, they give him a
little bit of a crick in the back
of his neck.
So he takes two pink ones.
And the process goes on.
But why are you taking all those pills?
Oh, they make me feel strong.
Or, get up early in the morning and
what do you see?
Agonizing people.
And I say the reason I don't jog
is because they all seem to be enjoying
it so much.
Look how happy they are on their faces.
They're nearly dying, those people.
Gasping for breath.
What do they want?
Oh, they're taking care of the outer man,
all right.
If you're thinking of where to put your
surplus money in a business that really pays,
I advise you strongly to buy into a
health club.
They're the most important and the most lucrative
businesses in America today.
Everybody goes to the health club.
Mothers take their babies along dressed in those
tights, you know, and they're all going up
there to do aerobic exercise.
What for?
The outer man.
Develop it.
Improve it.
Strengthen it.
Oh, if only we would spend a fraction
of time spent on the development of the
outer man, on the cultivation of the inner
man, there would be a vast difference in
our whole approach to life.
So Paul says, I'm concerned about that inner
man.
So there's a plea for spiritual empowering.
Then he goes on, in order that Christ
may dwell in your hearts by faith, semicolon.
Now, Paul, just a moment.
You've got me perplexed right away.
I thought, and you better be careful, Paul,
about your doctrinal expressions.
Be sure you're straight now.
Paul, you taught in other places that when
a person comes to Christ and receives him
into his heart and life by faith, that
Jesus Christ comes into that person's life really,
and literally.
He dwells within their bodies, changing the nature
of the body so that it is really
now the temple of the Holy Spirit.
But Christ dwells within.
Is that right, Paul?
He says, correct.
You've got it straight.
But now you're praying that Christ may dwell
in their hearts by faith.
This is a bit confusing, sir.
If he's already there, why are you praying
that he may dwell there?
Well, he said, you see, you have English
listening antennae.
You don't have a Greek antenna.
You see, he uses a very special word
here.
The word dwell, in this case, means to
make your home and settle down in a
place.
Or put it the other way, settle down
in a place and make it your home.
Feel at home.
There are some homes we all visit where
we feel we must sit on the edge
of the chair with our feet in just
the right position and hardly move, because one
mustn't.
You're not quite at home there.
You're allowed to be there.
You're a guest indeed.
But you don't feel quite at home.
There are other places where you know what
you can do.
You can even take off your shoes as
soon as you come in.
And they tell you, come on out in
the kitchen.
Sit down beside the refrigerator even.
Oh, you say, that's just like home.
I feel at home here.
All right, he says, I want you to
be so strengthened within your inner man that
the Lord Jesus Christ will settle down and
feel at home in your heart and in
your life.
Does he?
Some have said that in the lives of
some people, Christ has place.
In others, he has prominence.
And in still others, he's allowed to have
preeminence.
That's the position he desires, preeminence, so that
he may feel right at home, settle down
there, that Christ may settle down in your
hearts by faith and feel at home, so
that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend what you can't
comprehend.
That's a paradox.
To comprehend, be able to comprehend with all
the saints, the breadth, length, depth, and height,
and know the love of Christ, that passive
knowledge.
I don't understand that passage of Scripture.
I'm frank to tell you.
I ponder it.
I search through it.
I wonder why he put it that way.
But I guess I have to just accept
it and believe it and rejoice in it.
What I do pick up is that he
wants us to be rooted and grounded in
love.
Now, our mother tongue, English, is very poverty
-stricken sometimes in its words, its vocabulary.
What is love anyhow?
What do you mean by love?
Oh, how we have misused that word.
It's like a worn coin now.
It hardly has a basic definition anymore.
We've worn it.
I see it on the bumpers.
Now it says, I red heart my dog.
You know what that means?
I love my dog.
We stick that on our bumpers.
So love has become symbolized by a red
heart.
Come Valentine's Day, we're smothered with red hearts
that talk about love.
Love, what is it?
Well, is it that I see we in
the back there with two teenagers that look
at one another with moony eyes and they
sit so close you couldn't get a piece
of paper between them and we say, ah,
that's puppy love.
Yeah, love.
So is that what love is?
Then I pick up the newspaper and I
read that Ms. So-and-so is marrying
Mr. So-and-so and each of them,
she's been married four times before and divorced,
he three times before.
And when the newspaper reporters interviewed her, she
said, for the first time in my life,
I'm in love.
And she used the same word, love, L
-O-V-E, love.
Is that what love is?
That emotional whatever, physical emotion shown by a
four times exchanged woman who is really an
adulteress?
Is that what it is?
Or I go into a sick room and
I see a mother bent over the cradle
of a baby who's torn with fever, restless.
She's almost frantic trying to comfort it.
And I say, you haven't slept, you must
take rest.
No, no, no, she can't take rest.
Why not?
Oh, look at her face.
And there is described what we call mother
love.
Is that the same word that we use
for those kids in the background for that
Hollywood act?
No.
Well, then what is it?
Well, there's something that a minister sees that
seldom other people see at a Christian wedding.
When a young couple walked down the aisle
and you asked them to repeat the vows
of marriage, look at their faces.
If you could take a picture, you would
see a light that's so special.
I had a wedding once and it was
nearly busted up by what a guy did.
He didn't do what we had rehearsed.
We went through the whole business.
And on the day of his marriage, I
said to him, Albert, do you take Marie
to be your wife?
He said, I do.
And so on.
And then he turned and looked at her
and he said, gee, but I love you.
Wow, that just broke it up.
You weren't supposed to say that, but he
couldn't help it.
And the look on his face and her
face betoken something very sacred and special that
we call marital love.
And then I walk outside and I see
a couple of people whamming away with some
catgut and hitting a ball and one of
them yells, 40 love!
Is that what it is?
This love?
Then I turn to the word of God
and it says, for God so loved his
world.
Demonstrated it in that he gave his son
love.
I want you to be rooted and grounded
in love.
This something, this difficult to define something that
really you cannot define, that's why I think
he says, when you reach out beyond a
human into the realm of God, length, breadth,
height, depth, the love of Christ.
Christ is incomprehensible.
You cannot measure it.
You can't somehow put it together.
What is it?
Well, friend, in the world of Christians, I
can honestly say, though I don't know personally,
many of you, only a couple or so
here, you are strangers to me, but I
can honestly say, I love you.
Now, is it because you're nicer looking than
other people?
Don't press your luck too far.
Is it because you're brighter and smarter than
most people?
I refuse to answer on the grounds that
it would incriminate me.
Is it because you're so nice to me?
That might be a factor, but none of
these are the reason I love you.
I'll tell you why.
Because, you see, Christian love is an indefinable
something that has in it, as somebody said,
a minimum of emotion and a maximum of
evaluation.
You know what that means?
You don't have to feel nice.
There are a lot of people I love,
but I don't like them.
I love some Christians, but, oh, the thought
of spending all day with them in the
same automobile is simply obnoxious to me.
I must admit it.
I don't like them.
They don't like me, so it's mutual.
See?
But I love them still.
You know why?
It doesn't...
Christian love has a minimum of emotion in
it, but a maximum of evaluation.
If God thought you were so valuable to
Him that He was willing to give His
Son to die for you on the cross
of Calvary to buy you, then I can't
think anything less of you than God thinks
of you.
An object of love.
And the basis of my love for you
is the evaluation God put upon you.
And if He thinks that much of you,
what can I do but respond and say,
I think also highly of you.
That's what He's praying for, I think.
Now He comes, and I'm sorry I'm over
time here, but they tell me I'm running
off the tape all the time.
But you'll have to forgive me.
And to know the love of Christ, verse
19, which passeth knowledge in order that you
might be filled with all the fullness of
God.
That's the peak in this chapter.
There you are, you're at the mountain peak.
That you might be filled with all the
fullness of God.
Dear friends, let me tell you something.
The only other person of whom the scriptures
speak that He was filled with all the
fullness of the Godhead bodily was our Lord
Jesus Christ.
Can it possibly be that God wants you
and me also to experience the fullness of
God bodily in us?
Is that what He's saying?
If He is, it's the most breathtaking concept
maybe in all this epistle.
You'll not reach a higher peak of blessed
truth anywhere else than at this point.
That you might be filled with all the
fullness of God.
Not in heaven, later on, now.
Right now.
On this tawdry, miserable planet, to experience something
like this, to know it, to really know
it, that's it.
That's what He's praying for.
Little wonder then, that almost in the next
breath He says now unto Him who is
able to do exceeding abundantly above all you
ask or think, of course it has to
be God who does it.
I'm incapable of any of this, but He
can empower and strengthen and give us all
that is needed.
There was a young Canadian, only 19, no
he was an American, excuse me, he was
an American, only 19 years old.
He couldn't get into the Air Force during
the war here in America, so he slipped
across the border and I don't know how
he maneuvered this, but he got into the
Royal Canadian Air Force.
And he became a member of the crew
of a fighter bomber.
And after a few missions over Germany, one
night as they flew over Schweinfurt in Germany,
the AK-AK caught that plane and the
fuselage of that bomber became a coffin.
And all the crew died in the crash
of that plane shot down.
And it was the sad task of the
Canadian chaplain of his unit to do what
they always had to do when boys died,
gather together their belongings and ship them back
to parents or wife or loved ones with
a covering note or letter.
But as he searched through the few belongings
of this lad, he found a brown piece
of paper on which was scratched some magnificent
words.
And John Gillespie McGee, Jr. had written what
has now become known as High Flight.
And here's what he wrote.
Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of
Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered
wings.
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds and done a hundred
things you have not dreamed of.
Wheeled and soared and swung high in the
sunlit silence.
Hovering there, I've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls
of air.
Up the long delirious burning blue, I've topped
the windswept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark or even eagle flew.
And while with silent lifting mind, I've trod
the high untrustless sanctity of space.
Put out my hand and touch the face
of God.
What John Gillespie McGee felt as he pushed
his plane high in the skies, that he
could just reach over and touch God's face.
We must feel as we stand on a
peak like this and hear God say, I
want you to be filled with all my
fullness as my beloved son was.
Then we reach out and touch the face
of God.
We'll not get any higher than this in
all the epistle.
Now let's pray.
Father in heaven, it's beyond our ken.
We can't take it in.
We believe all these words, but we must
be honest with thee.
We must confess with deep shame.
We haven't known much in reality in our
experience of what this is all about.
So we pray that today as we walk
our little path of life, wherever we go,
in the ordinariness of life, the humdrum of
it, or the excitement and the adventure of
it, whatever, in the midst of it all,
Lord, wilt thou feel so at home in
our hearts.
Wilt thou strengthen us with such spiritual might
in our inner man that we'll be able
to comprehend that love beyond our comprehension that
somehow reached out and got hold of us
and now takes the frailty and fragility of
our lives and fills them with thy fullness.
And let some of it show.
Let some of it shine forth in our
words and actions this day so that at
the end of the day we'll be able
to look back and say we walked today
with a king.
Amen.