Unfortunately due to technical error, this sermon’s audio was lost
The Essence is Presence
Many people begin a new year wanting to work on certain aspects of their lives. Some want to work on exercise habits, relationships, finances, or faith. The best way to do these things is to set a goal that you can move toward. The end goal is what determines the practices.
So if you want to grow in your faith this year, what does that look like? Where do you start? The first thing you need to do is define what health looks like. Knowing the essence of what Christianity is will help you know what working on your faith looks like.
What is the essence of Christianity? Some would say the gospel or going to church. Some would focus on beliefs and some would focus on behaviors. Many people boil Christianity down to propositions or practices, things to believe or things to do. But is that the essence?
Of course, Christianity is propositions and practices. You have to believe certain things about God to be a Christian, and real Christians want to obey God by doing things like going to church and loving their neighbor. But what’s at the bottom of the Christian faith?
At the very bottom of the Christian faith is the promise and reality that we can know God. The essence of Christianity is living in the presence of God. As Paul said, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord…I have suffered the loss of all things…that I may know him” (Phil. 3:8-10).
Do you see how knowing God is the goal of Christianity? The doctrine of justification means that God declares us righteous in Christ through faith, meaning we can enter freely into God’s presence without condemnation. The doctrine of adoption means God chose us and made us his own not based on anything we’ve done, meaning that we now know God as Father. The practice of Bible reading is to listen to God so that we can know him. The practice of worship is to come into God’s presence and enjoy him.
God Wants to Be Known, Not Used
What about prayer? What’s the point of prayer? If we’re honest, we pray mainly because we want God to give us things we want. It’s transactional. If we pray at all, we pray when we really need something. We want the advantages of God without intimacy with God.
If this is how we approach human relationships, we’ll end up hurting those we claim to love. Why? Because when we say we love someone but our actions make it clear that we only want what they can give us, then the other person feels used and distance and hurt and anger build. No one wants to be used. We want to be delighted in, enjoyed, and cherished. We were made to know and be known, especially in marriage, but in all relationships to a degree. So when we use people instead of cherishing them, our relationships will flounder and intimacy will die.
It’s no different with God. He’s a Person who desires to be known, not used. As J. Gresham Machen says, “Man comes to God as one person to another.”[1] We were made for relationship with God, to know him and be known by him.
Prayer then is about knowing God. But we usually miss the thing we need the most in prayer, namely, God. We’re believing and doing the right things, but we don’t know him.
This sermon is for me as much as you. I’m not preaching as someone who’s got prayer nailed down, but as a fellow struggler. Most of my prayers are consumed with a laundry list of things I want God to do for me, rather than a deep desire to know him and be with him.
The Goal of Prayer
The essence of Christianity is knowing God. This is the essence of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians in 1:15-19. In this text, we see the goal of prayer, the power of prayer, and some specifics of prayer.
If the essence of Christianity is knowing God, then the goal of prayer is knowing God. In Paul’s prayer, he asks God to help these Christians “know him better” (v. 17, NIV). Paul wants these believers to know God.
Interestingly, in his letters Paul never prays for a change in circumstances for his friends. The people he wrote to faced trials, afflictions, disease, death, and dictators. They had far less security than we do today. But Paul doesn’t pray for the things that would probably be at the top of our prayer lists.
Of course, Paul didn’t think it was wrong to pray for such things. He knew Jesus taught us to pray for our daily bread and elsewhere he tells us to pray for those in authority over us. But his prayers for his friends reveal what he thought was most important for them, what he believed was the most important thing God could give them.
What was it? A knowledge of God. Knowing God was more important for them than anything else in their lives. Paul knows that intimacy with God is the only thing that can get them through life, so instead of praying for their circumstances, he prays for their hearts.
The Power of Prayer
And this leads us to consider the power of prayer. Paul prays for their hearts because he knows that this is an interior work, a work only God can do in them. He asks God to give them “a spirit of wisdom and revelation” and that “the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened” (vv. 17-18).
He’s not asking for God to give them new revelation on par with Scripture. “Revelation” can mean what’s in the Bible, but here it means what we call “illumination,” or what the Holy Spirit does to make God more clear and real and beautiful to us. It’s the Spirit’s job to take the things that belong to God and give them to us (1 Cor. 2:9-16). Jesus said that he would send the Spirit to “glorify him” (Jn. 16:14), or to help us know Jesus as real and not just an abstraction.
The Spirit must do this work because it’s heart-level work, which is why “the eyes of our hearts must be enlightened.” The “heart” in the Bible is the control center of the entire person, the engine of our desires, emotions, commitments, hopes, thoughts, and behaviors, the operating system running our life. For us to truly desire to know God, God must send his Spirit into our hearts, not just to update our operating system, but to replace our old OS with a new OS.
When God opens the eyes of our hearts to a particular truth about himself, it means that it grips us deeply and changes us. For example, we can believe that God is good, but when the eyes of our hearts are opened to that truth, we not only understand it cognitively, but emotionally we find his goodness wondrous and beautiful and deeply moving and we want to live in a way that honors and reflects that. The OS of our hearts has new code that makes us taste and see that the Lord is good (Ps. 34:8).
When God does this in our hearts, we’re set free from the tyranny of our circumstances. Instead of being blown around by other people’s opinions of us, we can rest in God’s settled love for us. Instead of constantly wondering if we’re good enough, we can rest in God’s declaration that we’re righteous in Christ. When things are going well, we’re able to avoid overconfidence and spiritual indifference. When things aren’t going well, we aren’t strangled by despair and discouragement. Why? Because God is no longer an abstraction but a reality. His love is the consoling presence we need in any circumstance.
Do you see why praying to know God better is better than praying for circumstances?
The Consequences of Prayer
The consequences of praying like this are immense. Positively, when our prayers are primarily about knowing God, we also start to get to know ourselves. When we sit and look at God, we find that we see more of ourselves. Listen to how Tim Keller describes this in his book Prayer:
“Prayer is the only entryway into genuine self-knowledge. It is also the main way we experience deep change – the reordering of our loves. Prayer is how God gives us so many of the unimaginable things he has for us. Indeed, prayer makes it safe for God to give us many of the things we most desire. It is the way we know God, the way we finally treat God as God. Prayer is simply the key to everything we need to do and be in life.”[2]
The poet George Herbert said that prayer is “the soul in paraphrase.”[3] To paraphrase something is to give the gist of it, to sum it up and make it understandable. In prayer, God sums us up and helps us understand ourselves. Only before God do we find who we truly are.
The consequences of ignoring this kind of prayer are profound. Even if we look great on the outside, our hearts will grow cold and fears will dominate us. Listen again to how Keller describes what happens when we ignore our inner life with God:
“If we give priority to the outer life, our inner life will be dark and scary. We will not know what to do with solitude. We will be deeply uncomfortable with self-examination, and we will have an increasingly short attention span for any kind of reflection. Even more seriously, our lives will lack integrity. Outwardly, we will need to project confidence, spiritual and emotional health and wholeness, while inwardly we may be filled with self-doubts, anxieties, self-pity, and old grudges. Yet we won’t know how to go into the inner rooms of the heart, see clearly what is there, and deal with it. In short, unless we put a priority on the inner life, we turn ourselves into hypocrites.”[4]
This describes much of my adult life. Even as a pastor, it’s incredibly easy to focus on the outer life and ignore the inner life. I have worked hard to look spiritual while not cultivating a life of prayer and self-examination and heart-level honesty with God.
John Owen said, “A minister may fill his pews, his communion roll, the mouths of the public, but what that minister is on his knees in secret before God Almighty, that he is and no more.”[5] And J. I. Packer boldly stated, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face.”[6]
So what if we’re theologically articulate, know the Bible backwards and forwards, never miss church, work hard, give generously, live morally, and sing loudly if our prayer life is empty! All these things are good, but they’re means to an end, and the end of all things is knowing God and enjoying him forever. Where do we better do that than in prayer?
Some Specifics of Prayer
Now notice the specific things Paul asks God to show these believers in verses 18-19. He wants them to know the hope, riches, and power of God. Isn’t this what we need too? We feel hopeless, poor, and weak. But Paul says that God wants us to know hope, riches, and power.
First, Paul prays that God would help us see the hope he’s called us to. We’ve been “called” to this hope. We don’t conjure it up. God’s calling is rooted in his choosing us (1:4). Those who don’t know God live without hope (2:12). But God’s people have God and therefore have hope.
The objective content of our hope is in 1:10, where Paul says that God’s ultimate plan is to reorganize the entire universe around Jesus. If we’re in Christ, this is good news. Our hope is nothing less than a resurrected life with the resurrected Christ in a resurrected universe.
Second, he prays that God would help us see “the riches of (God’s) glorious inheritance in the saints” (v. 18). This isn’t referring to our inheritance (as in 1:11), but God’s. What is “God’s glorious inheritance”? It’s “in the saints.” It’s his people! In Christ, God makes us his treasured possession. This is what Jesus means when he talks about “those whom the Father has given me” (Jn. 6:37, 10:29, 17:6, 9, 24). The Father loves the Son so much that he gave him an extravagantly rich and generous inheritance, and we’re the inheritance!
Do you understand the value God places on you? As the song says, “Two wonders here that I confess, my worth and my unworthiness. My value fixed, my ransom paid, at the cross.” God cherishes you so much that he gave you as a gift to himself, and he gave up himself to have you. Of all the things God could’ve given himself, he chose us. Weak, sinful, rebellious, broken people. But in Christ, we become the glorious wealth of God. Does this shape your self-image? This truth raises us out of self-pity and kills self-exaltation (4:1-3). God’s grace makes us high and low at the same time.
Third, Paul says that he wants God to help us see “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (v. 19). The resources available to believers are enormous. The same power that brought Jesus back to life and seated him at the right hand of God is available to “us who believe.”
Paul expands on this in his next prayer in 3:14-21, where he says God’s power is what enables us to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. But here he makes it clear that knowing God means experiencing the power of God. As D. A. Carson says, “Paul cannot be satisfied with a brand of Christianity that is orthodox but dead, rich in the theory of justification but powerless when it comes to transforming people’s lives.”[7] Is God’s power changing your life?
A Sufferer Writing to Sufferers
One reason, I think, he asks for these specific things is because he’s writing as a sufferer to sufferers. The word for “knowledge” in verse 17 only appears in the intercessory prayers of Paul’s letters from prison (Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon). Why? Perhaps because Paul understands that when everything else is stripped away and all you’re left with is God, you see just how fundamental knowing God is to life.
With Paul, these Christians were facing all kinds of trials and afflictions living in a more pagan empire than America with evil and demonic things happening all around them. But Paul knows that what they need most is God, so he prays for them to know God better.
God Came to Us to Know Us
What’s the essence of your Christianity? Doctrine and ritual? Beliefs and behaviors? Propositions and practices?
Christianity is about knowing God, and prayer is where we get to know him. The God who made you wants to be known by you. God knows everything about us, every last detail, everything we’ve hidden from others, and he still loves us and wants to know us. God comes to us in Christ, shows us himself, dies for us, all so we can know him. Do you know him?
[1]Quoted in D. A. Carson, Praying with Paul: A Call to Spiritual Reformation, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 207, n. 3 under ch. 9.
[2]Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 18.
[3]Quoted in ibid., 30.
[4]Ibid., 22.
[5]Quoted in ibid.
[6]Quoted in Carson, xiv.
[7]Carson, 154.