Filled Up, Together

Well, good morning, church family. It is so good to see everybody today. Thank you all for being here. We have come to the portion of our service where we dedicate some time to praying as a congregation. And like we’ve done the past couple weeks, and like we will do today and also next Sunday, we’re going to pray for the Delight Women’s Conference. This is the first time you’ve heard about that. That’s a conference being put on by leaders of the Charleston Baptist Association that work with women’s ministries, such as Miss Donna and Becca, and leaders from other churches. They are putting on a conference in early October, so bringing in someone to come and teach the Word. And what we’re praying for this morning specifically is that God would be preparing the women and the churches of Charleston. You know, there’s a big prayer that there would be some ladies that come that do not know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and that’s where they would give their lives to Him. But there’s also a prayer, obviously, that there would be women that come that do know Jesus as Lord and Savior, and the hope and the intention for them is that they would grow deeper in their relationship. So this morning, we’re praying specifically that God would prepare women and churches of Charleston to invest a weekend in that, and that God would use that to grow their relationship. So if you will, you take it away. You grab a neighbor, pray for the Delight Conference, specifically the women and the churches of Charleston, and I’ll put a bow on it here in a second. Y’all take it away.

Father, I love to hear the prayers of this people. God, I love to hear the voices, the voices of the men and the women and the children in here, God, calling on You, asking You to do something that we can’t do in ourselves. God, we need You to prepare the women in the churches of Charleston for the Delight Conference. I can talk about it from this pulpit, and other pastors could talk about it from theirs. We can share about it on Wednesday nights. Lord, we can do the texts and the phone calls to invite folks, but ultimately, Lord, You are the Lord of the harvest. You are the one that tills the soil. You are the one that can prepare us and the other churches for this time. God, on its surface, it is another conference. It’s another two-day event where people are going to get together, and they’re going to sing songs to You, and they’re going to hear the Bible being taught, and they’re going to consider how it all matters for their life. But God, we pray that it is so much more than just a conference. I pray, Lord, that for years to come, there would be generations of believers that would look back at October 3rd and 4th as a decisive spiritual marker for them, as either the weekend where they gave themselves to You in salvation for real, or the weekend where You helped God eradicate strongholds of the evil one in their lives, where You helped take the gospel not just to save them, but to deepen them and to get rid of just some of the crud that we accumulate in life. Father, I pray that You would prepare our church and the other churches of our association, Lord, to invest well, invest time financially even, Lord, to help this conference be a success. God, I pray that You would please do all those same things right now. God, as I share Your Word, as I share what You have been talking about with me this past week, God, I pray that You would help all of us to be prepared for what You have. Lord, for the person in the room that is not yet saved, God, the person that has not given their lives to You, I pray that You would take this time right now and You would make that happen. I can’t do that, Lord. I also can’t create the growth. It’s like what Paul said in First Corinthians: Paul planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. I need You to do that. We need You to do that. So Lord, please, God, I pray You would guard my tongue from saying anything that is not true. And Lord, You would guard our hearts from rejecting anything that is. We love You, and it’s in Your name we pray. Amen. Amen.

Well, one more thing happening this week that I want to make sure Everybody is aware of the calendar insert in your bulletin that gets prepared ahead of time for the weekend. Sometimes things happen or our plans late in the week that don’t make it to that. One of those things was the passing of Miss Mabel Hill. She was a stalwart, crucial member of our church for so long, and in a lot of ways we are still standing on her shoulders of the things that she did for us and the way she contributed to our church. This Friday morning, the visitation will be here at 9:00 a.m. and the funeral will be immediately following right here at 10. As always, Becky is coordinating a bereavement lunch for the family and for the church to happen right after that. If you’re interested in helping contribute to that lunch, Miss Becky would be the one that you would talk to after service today.

She will be remembered in a lot of ways. One of the ways she’ll be remembered is just a strong Christian. She was a person that just stood for the Lord, knew what the Lord stood for, and kind of stood with Him in that. She had a deep relationship with Him. And it makes me wonder because I got that news as I was preparing for this sermon. And it makes me wonder, what is the difference? What is the difference between a weak Christian and a strong one? Some people, they get to the end of their life and they are remembered as having such a strong, vibrant, real, intentional, alive walk with Christ. And others get to the end of their lives and they are remembered as being churchgoers, occasional Bible readers, pray-before-they-eaters. What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a strong Christian and a weak one?

I’m not convinced this is about personality or even effort. I think it’s about whether a Christian lets God fill them with His strength or not. You know, I’ve said it before that God has strength and He has grace for us kind of like this big tub, and we control the valve, and the valve goes straight to our souls. And sometimes we just open it just a little trickle, and we just kind of live off of a couple drops of His grace, and then we close it back up. And others, they open that thing wide, and they never touch it ever again. And God’s just constantly flowing into them, and their lives are constantly overflowing with God’s grace and strength into other people’s lives.

What is the difference? We’ve all met people who have peace that does not make sense, who are praying for others, and it seems like God is hearing and answering their prayers. We’ve also all met Christians who live without joy, without power over temptations, or without very much fruit for the kingdom. If you’re honest, which are you? I’m talking to a little over a hundred folks right now. Which are you? Are you a strong Christian that is walking vibrantly with the Lord with that valve turned all the way open, or are you just kind of subsisting on a trickle of God’s grace? Are you someone who is trying to live the Christian life, but you are experiencing more than a fair amount of frustration and difficulty? Or are you someone who is vibrantly and powerfully walking with the Lord of the universe?

Today, my aim is to talk about the crucial difference between the two and to give you a tool so that you can open that grace valve. That’s my prayer for you. If you will go ahead and turn to Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14-19, as we continue our series in Christ. You know, the whole point of the book of Ephesians, Paul is writing to this church in southwest Turkey. The whole point is to communicate one thing: being in Christ changes everything in us. And this morning, we’re going to see how being in Christ can functionally, can legitimately change your life.

There’s one real main point that I want you to take away from today, and it’s not just something I want you to know. It’s something I want you to believe and to practice. Here it is: We pray and God fills. We pray, God fills. This is Ephesians chapter 3. I’m only going to take it a couple verses at a time. Let’s start with verses 14 and 15. Paul says, “For this reason, I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” We’ll stop right there. In a moment, we’ll get to the prayer.

We’ll get to why Paul is praying. We’ll get to what he is talking about when he kneels before the Father. The first thing I want us to see, though, is that there should be a rhythm of prayer and doctrine in your life. What we see right here from Paul is that he has been discussing a lot of doctrine, a lot of teaching, a lot of truth, and he can’t help but to pray as a response to that. The same he if you look like Ephesians 2 starting in verse one all the way to halfway through chapter 3, Paul is teaching some incredible truths. He is teaching the reality of us coming from spiritual death to spiritual life. He’s teaching the miracle of God unifying local churches around Jesus Christ, the crucified son. He is teaching the incredible mindaltering truth that God is building a temple for His home, not just with bricks and plaster, but with souls and people. And when Paul is reflecting on all these things, he cannot help but turn to prayer. As he is consuming and teaching this doctrine and reflecting on the truths of the gospel, he cannot help but pray. Man, reading the Bible, hearing sermons, watching YouTube teaching about Christianity ought to produce prayer in our life. It ought to. And I think that it’s safe to say that prayerlessness often reveals a heart that has grown distracted or distant to God’s truth. No matter how familiar it might be up here. I’ve heard someone say that the longest journey for anything to take is the 18 or so inches from your head to your heart where you can mentally grasp something versus on a soul heart level experience it. When we mentally grasp doctrine, when we take in the Bible, when we listen to sermons, or for me to deliver one, it ought to go from here down to there and be expressed through prayer.

We pray because God is real. Paul, look at how Paul describes Him in verse 15. The father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. When you pray, you are not praying to a distant deity. You’re you’re not praying to a powerless advisor. You are praying to the ruler and the father of the universe. We pray because God is real and He matters and our prayers therefore can change the world. We had a need at our church for a kids director. So we started praying as a church and you know what happened? God heard those things and He supplied our need. God will do that. Our prayers can change the world because they get at the heart of the one who rules everything. That’s why we do congregational prayer. That’s why before I get up here to deliver a sermon, we gather as a church family to lift up needs. If it was all dependent on us, I’m not sure that I would carve out two or three minutes on Sunday mornings to listen to us kind of mumble to each other. To be honest, I think there would be a better two or three better use of that two or three minutes, whether it be leadership or communication or trying to put a guilt trip or something like that. But we we take that time because we believe that God is real and He listens. And prayer is one of the best ways for us to align ourselves with His purposes and to voice our desires and our dreams and our hopes to Him. So we take a moment every Sunday to gather and to do that.

We also take time every Sunday to gather for prayer in the boiler room Sunday mornings. This is my shameless pitch. 9:15 over in the old church once again standing on the shoulders of the spiritual giants that have gone before us. All the prayers that have been offered, all the songs that have been sung, all the sermons that have been delivered in that old church, and we’re adding to it by praying. Man, I’ I’d invite you just join us just once where we get together. There’s not a whole much whole lot of an agenda but there is a plan and we just pray because we believe prayer changes things. We pray God fills. How could we not respond to the truths of the Bible other than dedicating time for us to pray? So that’s what Paul does. Paul is it’s like Paul says, “Your prayers matter.” So, if you’ve been praying for a friend to meet the Lord and be saved from their sin, keep praying. If you are praying for a family member to get out of a dark lifestyle, keep praying. If you are praying about a dire medical situation that you don’t see the end of, keep praying. Keep praying. Your prayers matter. So, how does the Apostle Paul begin to pray for these Ephesians? Remember, he has just taught a lot of truth. Chapters two and three. And then he says, “For this reason, because of all this, I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven on earth is named.” And this is what he says, verses 16 and 17. I pray that God may grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with power in your inner being through His Spirit and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Let’s stop there. That’s the first half of Paul’s prayer. He’s going to pray for a couple things. The first thing he’s praying for, if you’re a notetaker, write this down. The first thing Paul’s praying for is for the Ephesians to experience God’s power. Man, God can fill you with strength. That grace vat can be turned wide open and God’s grace and His power can flood into your soul. He can strengthen you and He does it according to what? The riches of His glory. Anybody in the room think that God is poor in glory? Do we think that He’s just comfortable with glory? Like He’s not just making ends meet, but He’s comfortable. No. God is rich in His glory. He’s not poor. He’s not comfortable. He is rich in His glory. The beauty of a sunset down at the beach, that’s God’s glory. The miracle of new life held in your hands taking its first breaths outside the womb, that is God’s glory. The countless stars at night, that is God’s glory. And the riches of God’s glory are the measure of the strength He wants to put right inside of you. When you go to the beach later and you look at the incredible ocean and you say, “Who can make this? Who can handle all this?” God wants to take that panorama of beauty and pour it into your heart as His strength. But here’s the deal. God can’t fill you with strength if you are strong in yourself. If your heart vat is already filled up with your own stuff, God can’t pour Himself into you. Some of us, we come to the Bible and it’s like we’re trying to open the valve, but we’re already filled to the brim and there’s no crossover happening. So, we got to we got to be empty of our own strength. Paul says this in Second Corinthians, God’s grace is sufficient for you and His power is made perfect in your weakness. If you are strong in yourself, God cannot put His strength inside of you. So, I’m going to say this to a bunch of folks that I think historically are pretty independent, pretty strong in themselves. The way to God’s power is to be weak. The way to God’s power is to be weak. Man, why do you think bad things happen to good people? Because God’s trying to show us something. It’s like God’s trying to look at you and say, “Man, you’re not the king of your life. You’re not the ruler of everything. I could take you out like that, but I choose to keep putting My breath inside of you because I want you to walk with Me. I want you to know Me.” We can’t be strong in the Lord. We can’t receive His strength if we’re strong in ourselves. So God takes that strength and it’s Paul says in verse 16. He places that strength in your inner being. That’s how you know what type of strength that is. You see the strength is not financial or else God would put that strength in your wallet. The strength is not for you to be successful and God put it in your workplace. The strength is not in your body for you to be healthy. The strength is placed in your inner being. God’s strength is planted in the place where you need it the most. Your inner being, your soul. I ask you this morning, is your soul weary? Are you tired like on the inside? If we were sitting down and you were to just kind of let your hair down and let your guards down and I asked you, “How are you doing?” Are you tired on the inside? Are you tired of just trying to make it? Are you tired of trying to keep things together? Are you tired of trying to just be okay? You are a perfect candidate for God’s strength. All it takes is for you to have an honest Look at yourself. Say, “Yes, God wants to fill you with His strength. He wants to take that strength and plant it in your soul. He wants to fill you up. But He can’t do that if we’re strong in ourselves.” You see what happens though when God puts His strength inside of somebody? Verse 17 says, “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” That’s Maple Hill. Christ dwelling in her heart through faith. When when God takes us and He fills us, Paul makes an incredible claim that I hope strikes you this way. God makes His home in your soul. We are meant to be a home for the holy God of the universe. And when God fills you with His strength, you become filled with the Savior. That living hope we sang about can live inside of you because Jesus paid it all. And because of Him, we can say praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation. When God does this, when God fills you with His strength, when you become a home for God, when Christ dwells in your heart, that’s when your life looks like Galatians chapter 5, where the fruit of the Spirit is love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. The law is not against these things, but those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires.

You don’t get that way by muscling it up. You don’t get that way that way by just learning more. You get that way when God’s strength flows into your soul and Christ dwells inside of you. The secret of strong Christians, the secret of spiritually fruitful Christians is not better resolve, more discipline or more head knowledge. It is the presence of God inside of them. Man, have you ever met somebody who just oozed Jesus so hard you walked away and you said, “That was different. I might not wash this hand now.” You ever gotten to meet some of your spiritual heroes where you just convinced, man, when they prayed, God kind of like this person’s praying. The secret of that is that they have been weak with the Lord and they have let God fill them with His strength. That’s what Paul prays. He prays that these Ephesians would experience God’s strength. And if that wasn’t enough, Paul also prayed something else in verses 17-19. He prayed for the Ephesians to know God’s love. Once again, if you’re writing stuff down, I want you to write that down. Paul prays for the Ephesians to know God’s love. Look at verses 17 through 19 with me. “I pray that you being rooted and firmly established in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width and height and depth of God’s love and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge. Okay? So that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

That’s why we broke this passage in half. Paul prays for two things that result in two types of filling. That’s what’s going on here. The first one, he prays for them to experience God’s power. Right here, he’s praying for them to know God’s love. He starts off and he says that you are rooted and firmly established in love. I just want to say something. God’s love is what holds you and stabilizes you. Once again, it is not your resolve. It’s not your discipline. It’s not your ability to pull yourself up by your bootstraps or just grin and bear it. It’s not your cunning or your intellect. It is none of those things. It’s not your family network. It is not the country we live in. What roots and establishes Christians is God’s love for us. God’s love is what holds us. It’s what stabilizes us. It provides our foundation and our sanity. The fact of God’s love is what we stand on. And Paul describes that love as having four dimensions, which for us, we’re three-dimensional creatures. I don’t know how you get this one. We can understand what is high. We can understand what’s wide or long, whichever way you’re looking at me. And we can understand what’s wide. Paul says, “God’s love has height to it. It’s got depth to it. It’s got length to it, and it’s got width.” There’s a fourth dimension being introduced here, which I guess helps us understand God’s bigger than us. God’s love is even, in my mind, unknowably big. But Paul says we can know what is unknowable. Okay, Paul, easy for you to say, bud. Here’s what we need to know, though, is that God’s love is longer than long. His love is wider than wide. It is higher than high. It is deeper than deep. It is immeasurable yet knowable. I heard someone say one time that the gospel is simple enough for our kids to grasp it, yet deep enough for us to spend a lifetime meditating on it, never getting to the bottom. That is God’s love for you. But I need handles. You might need some handles, too.

Let’s think about God’s love being wider than wide. The pew you are sitting on, highly technical research here, is either eight and a half or 14 and a half feet wide. None of us in this room are able to stretch 8 and 1/2 ft because there’s nobody in this room that’s 8 and 1/2 ft tall. That’s how that works. Our sanctuary, once again, highly technical research done, is 45 feet wide. 120 of us with a healthy mixture of adults and kids would be able to stretch about 600 feet wide. We’d go two football fields wide if we stretched out like this all side by side.

Our fine state of South Carolina is 200 miles wide. I can’t even wrap my m my mind around that at this point. Earth 7.9,000 miles in diameter. Do you know how many of us it would take to stretch across the middle of earth? I don’t. But God’s love is wider than that. His love is wider than wide.

It’s also deeper than deep. Your bathtub might be two to two and a half feet deep. Charleston Harbor, where Sam and others work at its deepest, once again, highly technical research done by Google, is between 52 and 54 feet deep. Does that sound about about right? Okay. Thank you, Sam. Lake Crater in Oregon, that’s the deepest spot in America. Lake Crater in Oregon is 1,943 feet deep. Don’t worry though, sunlight stopped shining at 656 feet. That means there is about 1300 feet where the sun don’t shine in Lake Crater, Oregon. That sounded odd. Mariana Trench. Mariana Trench, the deepest place on planet Earth, is 36,000 miles feet. 36,000 feet deep. That’s incredible. A mile is a little over 5,000 feet. 36 divided by five. That’s a lot of miles.

God’s love is deeper than that. His love for you is deeper than that. God’s love for you is so deep that He would reach into the depths of earth to pull you out of death. His love for you is so long that He would cross the greatest chasm between heaven and earth in one incredible stoop of grace and He would bend down to wrap His arms around you. His love for you is so high you can never escape it. That’s how much God loves you and He wants you to know that.

And God’s immeasurably great love is leveraged for your benefit to cleanse you of your shame to fully forgive you of your sin and to restore you to peace with God. And man, when you start to get that, when the knowledge of that makes that incredibly long journey of 18 inches from here to here, you become filled with the fullness of God. That’s incredible. We’ve been talking about four dimensions of God’s love which our brains cannot fathom. Take this emphasize. You become filled with the fullness of God. That’s what God intends for you. Not little trickles of grace, but the fullness of who He is gushing in and through you.

So when you are filled with the knowledge of God’s love, you become filled with Him. To know God is to love Him. If you do not know, if you do not love God, I question whether you really know Him. You may know a lot of things about Him. You’ve probably heard a lot of great sermons about Him. You’ve probably heard some Bible studies taught about Him. You’ve probably read in His word. You’ve probably talked about Him. You probably heard about Him as a kid. But do you know Him? If you know God, your life can’t help but just kind of gush with Him.

I say it this way. Your life will only be as powerful for God as you are in love with God. You want to see some fruit? Like, do you want to see people come to faith in Jesus because of your direct verbal witness? Man, you got to grow in your love for the Lord. Do you want to see God start to answer your prayers in real time? You got to grow in love for the Lord. Are you still falling into the same sexual temptation day after day? You don’t have a resolve or a discipline problem. You’ve got a love problem. If you are still lashing Out at people and holding grudges against people and boxing them in your mind, you don’t have a relational issue. You got a love issue. Man, if you are just greedy and jealous for more and more gain and you envy other people’s assets and their toys and their homes and their portfolios, you don’t have a financial management issue. You’ve got a love problem. And the only way from little love to more love is for God to open the tap and to fill you with more of Himself. And you get to control that. You’ll only conquer temptations and live with joy as you grow in your love for the Lord. Your life will only be as powerful for God as you are in love with Him.

Man, I promise you cannot muscle your way to loving God more. You can’t do it. You can’t just just grit your teeth and just make yourself love God. You can’t look at yourself in the mirror and say, “Love God.” You can’t do that. I can’t look at you and say, “You better start loving God.” I can’t do that. It doesn’t change anything in you. The only thing that happens there is for God to start pouring more of Himself into you and for you to start considering the four-dimensional magnitude of God’s love for you. This is the Christian life. We pray, God fills. We pray, God fills. We pray and God fills. God takes us and He fills us with His strength and love.

So this morning you might feel spiritually dry, emotionally tired. It’s like you’re just going through the motions. But this week, what if you asked God to fill you with His strength and to remind you of His love? What if you walked this week not like Jeremy Simmons? What if you walked like God inhabiting your soul? What if your prayers became the place where God’s power begins to change you and others through you? What if the only appropriate way I know how to respond to a prayer written in the Bible is for us to pray the prayers of the Bible. I’ve tried to help make this in a way that we can all handle ourselves. So, here’s what I want us to do. Pete’s going to pick just a little bit to kind of help set the mood and help you not think about the person right beside you. And I want you to think in your mind, who is somebody in your life that needs to be filled with God’s power and His love. It might be you. You might be coming in this morning feeling so dry and so tired. Or you might have a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, a business acquaintance, somebody that you know is just so empty and so dry. And I want us to take a minute and pray this prayer for that person. It could be you. It could be the person beside you. It could be the person that you’re going to see on Tuesday. We’ll put it on the screen. I invite you to pray this prayer. I give you a few moments to do that and I’ll wrap it all up.

To the riches of Your glory. Please strengthen Sauldam Baptist Church with Your power so that Christ may dwell in us through faith. God, thank You for rooting and firmly establishing us in love. God, please help us to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and the width, the height and the depth of Your love. God, please help us here. Help our friends, our family members, our co-workers, our children. Help us to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge so that this community, this church, Charleston will be filled with the fullness of God. God, for the person in the room right now who is dry, who is tired, God, please meet with them over the next few moments. God, fill them. Help open the [inaudible], God, for them to experience Your power, to know Your love. Please, God, I even pray during this final song that You would bring them forward. I get to pray with them, call on Your name for them and with them. Please, Lord, we love You. Amen.