Thank you, Roland. Well, please do keep that passage open in front of you if you’ve got a bible there. If you would like a bible and haven’t got one on your lap, raise a hand and Peter will be happy to bring one to you. There we are. Just Jenny in the middle here. There we are. Any other takers? No. Well, with this passage in front of us, then, let’s pray and ask for the Lord’s help. Words from Psalm 19. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, o Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Well, in England, of course, when you learn to drive a car, do you remember doing that? You put an l plate on the back of your car. A big l learner. And as we think about prayer this morning, I wonder if you feel that you have a big l plate on your back, learner. I certainly do. We’re always learning when it comes to prayer, aren’t we? Well, here is a prayer from the New Testament which I hope will help us as we learn to pray this morning. Ephesians, chapter three and verse 14. Paul writes, for this reason, I bow my knees before the father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being. This is a prayer that Paul is praying for those Christians in Ephesus, in the province of Asia, the roman province of Asia. And it’s a prayer that springs out of God’s plan to create an international people, Jews and Gentiles. And Paul is praying two things for these Christians, two lessons for us to pray. Here they are. I’ll just tell you straight away what they are. He’s praying for power to become more like Christ. He’s praying for power that they become more like Christ. And he’s praying, secondly, for power to grasp the love of Christ. Power to grasp the love of Christ. So, power to become more like Christ. Power to grasp the love of Christ. Let’s start with the first power to become more like Christ. Verse 16. Have a look down at your bibles. Verse 16. He prays that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Or maybe you’re thinking, surely Christ already lives in their hearts. They’re Christians. We talk about inviting Jesus into our hearts and we become a Christian. Surely that’s already the case for them. Well, the word dwell in our verse, the word dwell is a strong one. It means not just to stay somewhere, but to take up residence there. It’s the way a homeowner settles into their home. Paul is praying that Christ would settle into his home in their hearts. I want to imagine a couple buying their first home. Maybe if you’ve owned your own home, you can think of what that was like for yourself. You pay for it, it’s yours. You move in, you dwell there. But as the months and the years pass by, you begin to make alterations to your house. You build a garage, perhaps for your car. You add the extra bedroom for your growing family. You repaint it. You carefully plant a garden until that home is just as you want it to be. And one day you say to your spouse across the breakfast table, you know, I really like it here now. We’ve shaped it to our needs. It’s our home, we have made it ours. And the moment you become a Christian, Christ comes to dwell in your heart by faith. But that’s just the beginning when you’re a Christian, when he moves in, into our hearts, the improvement time begins. And it’s only when we become christians we realise all that needs to be fixed. All the changes in our lives, all the old habits we must change, all the thinking we must correct. And it’s a lifelong process. When he moves in, the Holy Spirit finds the equivalent in our lives of the damp patches and the rotten floorboards and the that need to be torn down and replaced and the new things that need to be put into place. It’s a lifetime’s work until at the end, the prayer is that Christ will say, now I really feel at home here. Now I’ve made that my dwelling place. Well, that’s what Paul is praying for, the Ephesians. This morning in this prayer I remember an old man at a former church. He’d been the pastor of the church I grew up in. Mister Stevenson was his name and he was a godly, godly saint. But I can remember him one day saying, you know, I am more sinful now than I’ve ever been. We thought, Mister Stevenson, you’re the most godly man in the church. But because he’d been following Christ all his life and the Holy Spirit had been doing his work throughout Mister Stevenson’s life, showing him the dark patches of his heart and pulling down the broken parts and building up and making new, well, he was very aware of his need of a saviour, more so than the day he became a Christian. And I wonder if that’s your experience. Don’t be discouraged if it is. That’s a sign that Christ is at work in your heart by the Holy Spirit. We will always be battling against sin until the day we die. Because Christ is making your life and mine his dwelling. That’s Paul’s prayer that Christ would make his dwelling place in us. So Paul prays for power. Power to be holy. Power to think and act and talk in ways that please Christ. Power to live in a way, the way of thankfulness to God to be humble. Power to be humble. Power to be discerning. Power to be obedient. Power to be trusting. Power to become more like Christ in our character and behaviour. The christian faith isn’t just something to be believed with our heads. It has to affect our lives day by day. Paul’s prayer that Christ would dwell in our hearts by faith and make our hearts his home. That’s the first prayer. Power to become more like Christ. Here’s the second one. Another prayer for power. And this time it’s in verse 17. If you have a look down. Verse 17. Paul prays that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength or power to comprehend with all the saints, all God’s people, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Well, weve already said Paul has prayed for something in his first prayer, something that the Ephesians already have. Christ already dwells in their hearts, but hes praying that Christ would dwell in their hearts more and more. And hes praying the same thing here, something they already have. Paul is praying that they would be able to grasp how great Christs love is for them. Oh, they know something about Christ’s love. If we had read from the beginning of the letter, we’d have seen that in chapter one that they were already rooted and established in love. But now he prays that they might grasp more and more Christ’s love for them. This is a book that we used to read to our children when they were very young. Perhaps you read it to your grandchildren or to your children. Guess how much I love you. Do you remember? Have you read that? The story of little hare, little nut brown hair and big nut brown hair. Little nut brown hair. If I could read your bedtime story is about to go to bed and he wants to make sure that big nut brown hair is listening. So he says to his dad, guess how much I love you. I don’t think I could guess that. Said big nut brown hair this much, says little nut brown hair, stretching out his arms as far as they would go. Oh, says big nut brown hair, that’s a lot, but I love you this much. And he stretches out his longer arms and the story goes on as they try to understand how much big nut brown hair loves little nut brown hair. Well, Paul is praying for these ephesian Christians. Not that they would be able to guess how much God loves them. No. They need the power of God to grasp how much he loves them. When I say to my wife, do you know how much I love you? I’m not asking her an intellectual question, have you understood how much I love you? Can you explain it logically to somebody else? Can you answer exam question about my love for you, Katie? No, I’m saying, do you really know in your heart how much I love you? Paul is asking the Lord that the Ephesians would know that, that they would have God’s power really to know in their hearts how much he loves them. You know, in some parts of the church today, they’ve appealed to experience. Feelings count for everything, experience over God’s word. And they build a whole religion or a whole morality on their feelings rather than what God has revealed to us in the scripture. But there has been a swing against that, maybe in some churches that they are so suspicious of emotions and feelings that the christian faith is only up here. It’s only an intellectual thing, an overreaction. The Bible says that genuine christian faith has to be an experience as well. If we never experience in our hearts the love of Christ, well, we have to ask a question. Have we really understood the love of Christ? Do you remember the two disciples as they were walking along the Emmaus road on that first Easter Sunday, walking with Jesus without realising it was him. Only afterwards, after he had revealed himself to them, did they say, were not our hearts burning within us as he opened the scriptures to us? Genuine christian faith is an experiential thing. Our hearts are burning. A genuine and deep grasp of the love of Christ. It rarely comes to somebody who isnt spending time in the Bible. Oh, we need God’s word, we need to be spending time in his word, because that is how he speaks to us. But when Paul prays that the Ephesians will have power to grasp Christ’s love for them, it’s not just an intellectual understanding he’s praying for. Sometimes grasping Christ’s love may be triggered by a tragedy or a sadness in our lives. I wonder if that’s been your experience, it’s been mine. Sometimes something awful has happened, and maybe not immediately, but sometimes, sometimes later, though, we experience the love of Christ in a deeper way than we’ve ever done before. We’re so grateful for that precious, precious experience, aren’t we? But it’s not just a personal thing. Paul prays in verse 18 that the Ephesians would have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. It’s a church thing. We grasp the love of Christ as a church family together. If we read Ephesians chapter two, we’ll have seen Paul talk about God’s reconciling work for Jews and Gentiles, bringing us together into Christ’s family and into the family of God. He prays now, it’s only together that we can grasp the love of Christ. You can’t do it on your own. We had a friend. He’s gone to be with the Lord now, but for many years, he was a Christian, but he wouldn’t go to church. He loved Christ, he said, but he wouldn’t go to church because he could never find the perfect church. And so for many years, he did church online. Long before COVID he would stay at home and listen to sermons on the Internet. But Paul would say to him, you can’t grasp the love of God over the Internet. There are good reasons. There are good reasons why. Why some need to do that, of course. And perhaps somebody watching today is for a health reason or some other practical reason, unable to come to church. But it’s not the ideal. We all know that you can’t grasp the love of Christ if you sit on the edge of church and never get involved in the lives of other Christians. We do it together, church, family. And it’s an amazing thing to be part of a church family where all the barriers are broken down. In Ephesus, there are no longer Jews and gentiles. British, Chinese, Nigerians, Canadians, Australians, young, old, rich, poor, black, white. All the barriers are broken down in Christ. Together, we experience the love of Christ. Paul doesn’t want the Ephesians to guess how much God loves them. He prays that God would give them power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know that love that surpasses knowledge. How wide? How wide is God’s love? Well, it crosses. It crosses every barrier, every border, time and history and space. God’s love rests on every continent and every country of this world, every culture. It reaches out to all peoples, irrespective of age or race or sex or gender or social background. It calls into existence a family that didn’t exist before God’s own family. It’s so wide, it sweeps up you and me. How long is it before God created the world? The Bible tells us the Father loved his son with a boundless love, an eternal love. He chose a church and united this church to his son to be his bride and set his love on us before we were even born. He chose us in Christ so that we might have in him redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our sins. He chose us and loved you and me before we ever loved him. How high is his love? His love is so high that it raises us from the depths, raises us right up to his throne in heaven. Sinners as we are, with all our failures, lifts us up to God’s right hand and seats us with Christ in the heavenly realms and pours his blessings on us. And pours his love on us in Christ so that we’re welcome to his table, as we are this morning. How deep is his love? As deep as Calvary. As deep as the cross where Christ suffered God’s judgement on our behalf. As deep as the deepest pit of hell. If we could say that which Christ experienced on the cross, that’s the depth of God’s love for you and me. The greatest distance in the universe is not from one end of the cosmos to the other. It’s the distance between the throne of heaven and the cross. That’s how deep God’s love is for you and for me. And just so we get the point, Paul reminds us that when we’ve stretched every sinew and when we’ve pushed our thinking to the very limits, we’ve only just begun to touch the very fringes of the edges of God’s love for us. He says in verse 19 that God’s love surpasses knowledge. It’s wider than we could ever imagine, longer than we could ever dream, higher than we ever anticipated, deeper than we could ever think. We don’t deserve it, but it’s ours nonetheless. Unconditionally, unreservedly. It’s not a soft love. When we sin, it will correct us, but that love will never let us down. Many people struggle with Christ’s love. Some people find it hard to accept it themselves. That God would love me. I can’t believe that God would love me if he really knew what I was like. I was talking to someone a few months ago who said that, oh, if you knew what I was like, you wouldn’t want to talk to me. She said, here’s my second book recommendation. Guess how much I love you. And Jim Packer, knowing God, I think I’d choose this one if I were you. Jim Packer, in his book, knowing God, writes that God sees all the twisted things about me that others do not see, he says, and I am glad he sees more sin in me than I can see in myself. And even what I can see is enough. And yet, for some amazing reason, he writes, he wants me as his child. Perhaps more amazing than that, I know God is that he knows me. And he has given his only son to be my saviour, to die for me on the cross. And he has put in his own spirit in my heart to make me his child. And he has taken up residence my life and dwells there. And he’s promised that he will never leave me whatever I do, and he’ll never forsake me. And instead he wants to change me and take up residence more and more in my heart and make me more like Christ. And day by day, as I live with my brothers and sisters in the church family, he wants me to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is his love for me and that I might know that love that surpasses knowledge. Maybe you know that old hymn, the love of God? Written by Frederick Lehman, 1917. It became famous around the world. I think they sing it in America, probably more than we sing it here. But it’s said that this poem was found scratched on the walls of an asylum for the mentally ill and it was turned into a hymn. Perhaps you’ve heard it. Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made were every stalk on earth a quill? And every man a scribe by trade to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky. Isnt that wonderful? Shall we pray? Almighty God, our loving father, we thank you for your love, Lord. We read about it here. As wide as the world, as long as eternity, as high as heaven and as deep as the cross. We pray that you might strengthen us with power so that we might truly and increasingly know your love for us in our lives and be filled with all the fullness of God. We ask in Jesus name, amen.