HOW TO PRAY FOR OTHER S SPIRITUAL GROWTH EPHESIANS 1:15-23 SERMON

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1 1 HOW TO PRAY FOR OTHER S SPIRITUAL GROWTH EPHESIANS 1:15-23 SERMON Meet Margaret: 92 years young with lots of memories and faith! Margaret lives in an adult foster home. Despite her increasing feebleness, near deafness and inability to walk anymore, Margaret has a powerful and effective ministry which reaches far beyond the walls of her home. Every day, often for hours at a time, she sits in a chair with a stack of prayer cards and prays diligently for missionaries. Sometimes, when she feels up to it, she will kneel beside her bed on creaky knees to talk with God. Margaret has a ministry of intercessory prayer, meaning that she intercedes for others. You need not be confined to a foster home to engage in intercessory prayer! We have an Intercessory Prayer team in our church, composed of people of all ages. I believe with all my heart that prayer has built and sustained this church for the 159 years of its existence! If it weren t for the faithful prayers of our members and friends, we would have ceased to exist a long time ago. John Wesley once said, God does nothing but in answer to prayer! So, continue to pray for your church! Lift it and the leaders in your daily prayers! Pray for vision, growth, unity, love, energy, our children and future! Keep praying, don t give up! The Apostle Paul makes this point in our scripture text this morning. The most important component of intercessory prayer is perseverance. When God prompts you to pray for someone or something, keep praying! Don t give up! This is the point of my message this morning. Please note the sermon outline in the middle of your bulletin. You will see the point at the top of the bulletin: Keep Praying! Look in the text in vs For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. Paul s received a report about the Ephesian church s powerful faith and love for each other and this has prompted him to keep praying for them. Note the positive tone of his requests! Powerful faith and love for each other both reveal a healthy church! These are good things! Paul s prayers were not simply given on behalf of churches who were struggling; he prayed for healthy churches too! Paul proceeds to tell them in vs.17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. We will return to this verse in a few minutes but I want you to note the theme of perseverance continues into vs. 17. Paul writes, I keep asking.. Do you ever get discouraged with your prayers? Perhaps you ve prayed for your spouse for many years, that he or she will come to faith in Christ. Or, you ve prayed that he or she will start attending church with you or stop the heavy drinking, or drug use or gambling or porn or whatever. Though you ve prayed faithfully for many years, you don t observe any change at all.

2 2 Or, maybe you ve prayed for an adult child who seems to have abandoned their faith. You ve asked the Lord to draw them back to the faith in which they were raised. Or you ve prayed for your parents or your best friend. But though you pray faithfully, you don t see any progress whatsoever! Here s a question we ve all thought of: why should I keep praying when God remains silent? First, Jesus taught us to persevere! Do you remember the Parable of the Persistent Widow in Luke 18:1-8? In this parable a woman kept pestering a judge for justice against her adversary. For some time, the judge refused to grant the woman s request. But, the woman kept pestering the judge! Finally, the judge granted her request for justice because he got tired of her constant requests! We should also keep praying because God s timing and our timing might be different. Thirty one years ago when I was hired by this church to be your Pastor the church had very few young adults and hardly any children. Sally and I knew that we couldn t change this situation by ourselves so we prayed. We prayed daily for young adults and children to come to this church. I have a copy of a letter I sent to our five youngest couples in You can see the letter on the screen: It s no secret that the overwhelming majority of our church consists of retired couples and older singles. Your presence and service in the church gives me hope that someday we will achieve a more equitable balance of ages. Recently, I lit upon an idea. If each of our younger couples and singles (and by younger, I mean under age 50!) were to invite one single or couple of their own age group to church we would double our current number. Would you undertake the following challenge by Christmas? Pray daily for your friends. Pray that God s Spirit would be working in your friends hearts, convincing them of their need for Him. Pray for an opportunity to share the good news of salvation. Finally, pray that God would move your friend(s) to want to learn more about God and the church. Invite them and bring them to church with you. Sit with them and introduce them to others at the Fellowship Hour. Make sure that I meet them. Church growth studies show that 70% of people who go to church do so because a friend or family member invited them and took them to church. Will you accept this challenge? I hope so! Be thinking about who you will invite Warmly, Pastor Larry Well, God heard and answered our prayers for more younger adults and children! By 1994, eight years after I sent this letter, the largest age group in our church was our under 18 age group but it took eight years for that change to happen! It didn t happen overnight! Several weeks ago I showed a video clip of an early morning prayer service at Myung Sung Presbyterian Church in Seoul, South Korea. The church was founded in 1980 and has become the largest Presbyterian Church in the world with 120,000 members. The church has been built on prayer! What impressed me about the people were the prayers being offered for their family and friends in North Korea. Church members have been praying for reunification for 65 years! They haven t given up though present circumstances seem so bleak!

3 3 So, keep praying for your spouse, your wayward child, your friend s health, whatever concerns you! God answers our prayers in His time. Paul prayed with perseverance for the Christians in Ephesus who received this letter. But he also had some specific requests in mind as he prayed. We can learn from Paul. When we pray for other s spiritual growth, pray they would gain: 1.A full and complete knowledge of Christ! Look again in vs.17 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. Paul keeps praying that God would give these Christians in Ephesus a spirit of wisdom and revelation. Why? Note the result clause in the text, so that you may know him better. Some scholars believe that Paul refers to the Holy Spirit when he uses the term, Spirit. One New Testament scholar put it this way: A spirit of wisdom and revelation can be imparted only by him who is the personal Spirit of wisdom and revelation. In other words, only the Holy Spirit can give a Christian true wisdom and revelation! What does Paul mean by the two terms, wisdom and revelation? Wisdom and revelation include insight, spiritual discernment, understanding and knowledge to help the believer grow in Christ. Note the end of the verse, the result clause, so that you may know him better. Let s consider this phrase for a few moments. The usual Greek word for knowledge is the word, gnosis. Used in the New Testament it refers primarily to spiritual knowledge. But in this verse Paul uses a strengthened form of the word for gnosis. The word Paul uses is the word, epignosis. It means exact or full knowledge, discernment. In other words, it s knowledge on steroids! Paul s praying that God would grant the Ephesian Christians a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that they would have a full and complete knowledge of Christ! In our church s New Member s class I do a simple exercise with the class to help them see the difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus. I say something like we all know about the President of our country. We read about him, see him on the internet or television and hear about him constantly. Many of us feel like we really know him. But, how many of you actually know the President as a person? How many of you have a relationship with Barack Obama? Then I say, it s one thing to know about Jesus. Many, many people in our country feel they know Jesus because they simply know about him. But it s a much different experience to actually know Jesus as our Savior and Lord, to have a relationship with Him! In this prayer that Paul prays he keeps praying that the Ephesian Christians would grow into a fuller knowledge of Christ! When you pray for your friends, loved ones, people that God has put on our hearts, keep praying that they would come to a fuller knowledge of Christ! Pray that they would come to know him better! Pray also for others to gain the 2. Knowledge of hope and riches in Christ!

4 4 Look in vs.18: I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. In his faithful, persistent praying for the Ephesians, Paul keeps praying that they would know the hope to which God has called them and the riches of Christ s glorious inheritance. What is the hope to which God has called us? One theologian defined hope this way: confidence in the future based on what God can do. (Karl Barth). Hope-filled Christians live with a certainty, a confidence not in what they can do, not in what they can accomplish but in what God has already done and will continue to do for his glory. Paul wrote the Corinthians in his second letter Therefore since we have such a hope we are very bold. Many Americans view our troubled and desperate times with a deep sense of hopelessness and melancholy. Morality has declined substantially the past thirty or forty years; terrorists seem unstoppable; global warming continues unabated and our country is divided over many issues. How can we, the people of God minister in this context? The Lord calls us to be different! God does not want His people shackled by hopelessness, fear and despair! As a matter of fact, God wants us to be a people of hope and faith! In our praying for others let us pray that we can model hope for them! Further, we must also pray for others to know the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. What s Paul writing about? God has given us a glorious inheritance as the people of God! In Christ we have an inheritance which Peter describes as one which will never perish, spoil or fade, preserved in heaven for us! So, unlike a worldly inheritance which can be mismanaged, or lost, our glorious inheritance in Christ will never perish! God has preserved our glorious inheritance for us for all time! Praise God! Finally, when we pray for other s spiritual growth we should pray they would 3. Experience the incomparably great power from Christ! Look in vs.19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. Paul proceeds to describe this power. He likens it to the power of Jesus resurrection from the dead. Look in the next part of vs.19 That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms What an amazing comparison! Paul s saying that we have the same power available to us that raised Jesus from the dead! That s mind-boggling! Stephen Mansfield tells a true story about a church that had an incredible ministry to men. For years the driving force behind the men's ministry was a man named Taylor. His ministry rocked on for years, changing lives and impacting the community. But in the midst of a major transition

5 5 within the church, Taylor got hurt deeply by his own community and he left the church. He wouldn't talk to anybody. People figured he'd come back eventually, but he didn't. Finally, some of the men in the church took it upon themselves to reach out to Taylor. After some discussion with the other guys at church, they came up with a bold plan: they would set up camp in Taylor's yard 150 men! So they set up rotating shifts and said they wouldn't leave until Taylor came out. They had electric lines running from neighboring houses to power televisions. About twenty smokers and grills worked up some great barbeque food. They were in for the long haul! They even had big signs all over the place: "Taylor, come out." "We love you." "Taylor, we know you're in there." Taylor didn't appreciate it. He even called the police on his former friends. As a matter of fact, the police showed up twice a day for almost a week. And every time they came, Taylor would come to the door to explain the situation. And every time the men camping in his yard would explode with cheers until Taylor finished his chat with the police and went back inside. But on the sixth day, when Taylor opened the door for the police and the men exploded with cheers, Taylor finally broke down and started crying his eyes out. He sputtered how sorry he was, and then he came out from his porch and greeted the guys who had camped in his yard and refused to go away. Such is the power of committed, persistent friendship. That s the kind of power God puts in our hearts! He puts the power to minister to a wayward friend in our hearts so that the friend will come back and join the church fellowship. When you pray for other s spiritual growth, remember to keep praying and don t ever give up! Pray that your family or friends would gain a full and complete knowledge of Christ, that they would come to know hope and riches in Christ and the power available to them in Christ! As I close this morning, we re going to take a few moments and pray for those in our lives whom God has put on our hearts to pray for spiritual growth. Mike, please keep the outline up so we can use it as a model. Let s pray