St Paul was someone who prayed continually (I have not stopped giving thanks for you, he says in Ephesians 1. 17). In other letters he says to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.17), that in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving we should let our requests be made known to God (Philippians 4.6) and encourages us to “pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6.18). Paul was, it seems, in an ongoing conversation with God in which he prayed through his emotions and his everyday encounters. So there is much that we can learn from his prayers.
In this prayer (Ephesians 1. 11-end) he prays first that God the Father will give the Holy Spirit to the Church at Ephesus. He has already said (in verse 14) that all Christians receive the Holy Spirit in their lives as a mark of God’s ownership on their lives. So he is not praying here for the Holy Spirit to be given for the first but, instead, for more of the Spirit to be released in our lives. Later in this letter he urges the Ephesians, instead of getting drunk on wine, to go on being filled with the Spirit.
He is praying for an ever deepening experience of the Spirit because it is the Spirit who takes us deeper into God. The Holy Spirit brings wisdom and revelation about God; as Jesus said, the Spirit teaches us everything revealing the truth about God and reminding us of all that he told his disciples (John 14. 17 & 26). As Paul prayed, we too need to constantly ask for more of the Spirit in order that we know more of God.
We need to recognise however that this is experiential as well as intellectual. The Spirit reveals the character of God to us, not just facts and information about God, in order that that same character begins to be expressed in the way we live our lives. This is real knowing, not head knowledge but heart knowledge. When we have such knowledge then we can cope during the hard times, such as bereavement, when we don’t know how or what to pray or when our prayer can only be questions or accusations towards God.
Paul acknowledges that these times come; that there are times when we find it hard to pray. We do not know how to pray, he writes to the Church in Rome (Romans 8. 26) but in those times the Holy Spirit himself comes to help us by pleading with God for us in groans that words cannot express. We are often quite restrained in our relationship with God and in our praying. Therefore, we will often praise God and say that we will obey or follow him but we rarely argue, protest, complain or question him, at least not publicly. Yet here Paul is saying that the Holy Spirit wishes to help us express our deepest feelings – the groans that words cannot express - to God. Doing so is part of our coming to know God more deeply.
As we do so, we come to see, and be captivated by, the hope for the future that God is working out in the world through Jesus and the Church. Jesus’ resurrection is a foretaste of what will happen to all of us and this world that we inhabit. Like Jesus, we will be resurrected into a future where there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain (Revelation 21. 4) and this future will be lived out on a newly transformed earth which has been united with heaven. This is a future in which the rule of God is over all and the character of God expressed in and through all. A future for the world and humanity as we were originally intended to be before our sin marred God’s creation.
This is the hope to which we and all who have gone before can look forward. This is the hope to which Paul prays that our hearts and minds will be opened so that we see how rich are the wonderful blessings God promises his people and how very great is his power at work in those who believe.
As this hope takes us captive, we can play our part in moving humanity and the world towards this resurrected future. God’s power to bring about this resurrection future can be at work in us too. We have been chosen to be in union with Christ, people living under his rule and revealing his character in the world. This is what it means for us to be saints and to live as saints. By living as little Christs, which is what the word ‘Christian’ actually means, we reveal him to others and draw others into this hope for resurrected future. God chose us to be his own people (his saints) in union with Christ because of this purpose, based on what he had decided from the very beginning. We are, therefore, Christ’s body in our world, the completion of him who himself completes all things everywhere.
Let us then, Paul writes, praise God’s glory. We have a guarantee in the gift to us of the Holy Spirit that we shall receive what God has promised his people. Our groans will be heard, our lives transformed, and our future assured.
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Billy Preston - That's The Way God Planned It.
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