A Prayer for the Church

You know, it is possible to use a car every day and not have any clues to how it works. That's the way I am. I drive a car all day long, you know, day after day. Thousands of miles, I have no clue how the thing works. If I start to hear something a little funny, I take it to somebody who does know how it works and they figure it out. But I'm not real good at figuring that kind of stuff out. In the same way, you can also know everything about a car. You can know how the engine works. You can know how the transmission works. You can know about the exhaust system, the ignition system and all the rest. But don't use it. Maybe you don't drive or you don't use the car. You know, in the very same way, it is possible to know a lot about your Bible and never use it. It's possible to know the doctrines of the Bible. It's possible to know the standards of the Bible. It's possible to know the promises of the Bible. It's possible to know how to interpret the Bible. And never use it. Never drive the thing. Never live it out. It's possible to do that. And that's exactly the point at which Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 is directed. Paul prays for the second time in this letter in chapter 3, a prayer that we will use and live what we have learned. You'll find your place in Ephesians 3. We'll look this morning at verses 14 through 21, where we find the second of Paul's prayers in this letter. The first prayer at the end of chapter 1 was a prayer that we might know and understand this great salvation. This prayer is that we might use it, that we might live it out. One is to know, one is to be, one is a prayer for enlightenment, one is a prayer for enablement. God wants us not only to know what we have in Christ, but to live it, to live it out, to really drive the thing and not just know how it works. And that's what this prayer is all about. It's a prayer for the church. It's a prayer for the church at Ephesus, and it's a prayer for the church at Johnston Chapel. So let's see what Paul prays for us to understand and live out about our Christian faith. I want you to notice, first of all, in the first couple of verses, the commitment of this prayer. In verse 14 and 15, Paul demonstrates his own commitment as he prays. He says, for this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. Now the kind of commitment that comes out of Paul's heart is seen in two ways in these verses. It's seen, first of all, in his posture. Paul's commitment is seen in his posture. He says, for this reason, I kneel. I kneel before the Father. Now that may not strike us as being significant or in any way extraordinary, but you have to understand Jewish people did not normally kneel to pray. When Jewish people, Old Testament and New Testament prayed, they normally stood. That was their sign of respect and reverence, was to stand quite often looking up to heaven and lifting their hands as a little childwood to a Father. That's the posture they normally assumed when they prayed. If, by the way, you can still see that today in Israel, if you go to Jerusalem, and you see the Jews who gather before the wailing wall, which is really the only part of Herod's temple that's still left, the Western wall of the temple, you can see Jews standing there today. You won't find them kneeling. You'll see them standing quite often rocking back and forth as they pray, staying alert and praying with their whole body, if you will. Normally Jews stand when they pray. The only time in the Bible people kneel when they pray is if it is an especially intense situation, or it is a significant point, a special event in Israel's history. For instance, when Ezra found out that the Jewish people were going back on the Mosaic Law and intermarrying with Gentiles, he knelt down, he fell to his knees in prayer. When Solomon dedicated the temple that he had built for use in Israel's worship, there was a special platform built for this significant historical occasion, and the Bible says Solomon got up on that platform and knelt before all the people to pray, because that was a significant event in Israel's history. When Paul was saying goodbye to a group of pastors from Ephesus in Acts chapter 20, and he told them, I know I'm going to Jerusalem, I know I'm going to be arrested there, I don't know what lies ahead, but I don't think I'll ever see you again, and they were weeping and crying and saying goodbye to him, and the Bible says he knelt to pray with them, especially intense situation, and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The night before he would lay down his life for you and me, fell to his knees in that Garden, in great agony and prayed, and then eventually onto his face as he lay prostrate on the ground, signifying the intensity of his heart and what was on his heart. So when anybody in the Bible knelt to pray, it was a special sign of intensity that something really serious was going on here, and I think Paul's posture of kneeling really indicates his passion for what he's praying about. I want you to see a couple things about his passion in these verses. First of all, he was passionate because he believed what he had just written. You see what he says there in verse 14, for this reason I kneel before the Father. For what reason? Well, you have to go back through the first three chapters to find out why. He has just talked about the great salvation that we have in Christ. All that Christ has given us, all the riches of the grace of God, hours because of Jesus and what he did for us on the cross. And all of that is hours in Christ, and when Paul recognizes and is overwhelmed with what he himself has written under the Spirit's guidance in those chapters, he is so passionate about it that he falls to his knees in prayer, and he kneels before the Father. Now by the way, there's a great lesson there for those of us who give out the Word of God, for those of us who preach and teach the Bible. It is possible for us to become very mechanical, just kind of conduits for a message that we've never experienced ourselves. And that's true whether or not you're teaching in a wanna club or a Bible fellowship or preaching from this pulpit. It's possible for us just to get it all up here and deliver it like a piece of conduit and never really feel it ourselves. Never really let it go through our own hearts. Philip Brooks, the great pastor of several centuries, several generations ago in Philadelphia, who by the way wrote a little town of Bethlehem, Philip Brooks said it this way, he said the danger for the preacher is that he becomes like the conductor on the old time passenger railroad trains, who announces the destinations where other people are going, and imagines that he himself has been there, but he's never set foot out of the train. There's a danger for any of you, any of us, who are giving the Word of God to someone else, that we don't let it run through the grid of our own heart first, and impact our lives first, and that we just simply give out to people, announce to people what we ourselves have never set foot in, never experienced. Paul was not that way. Paul was so overwhelmed with what he himself had just written about the great glory and riches that we have in Christ. He was so overwhelmed with that, that as he began to pray, he fell to his knees, the posture indicating his passion, because he believed, he believed, and was so overwhelmed with what he had just written. But he was also passionate in this prayer because he recognized the great privilege to be in the family of God. You see what he says there? For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. Paul could not get over the fact that he had a father in heaven. God was his father. He was in the family of God. He was a child of God. And he was a part of a family that is the greatest family of all. Some of whom are in heaven, some of whom are still here on earth, he says in verse 15, that great family of God, all those who have placed their faith in Jesus Christ as their Savior, are in the family of God. And there is no greater family. Don't you love family? This is a family kind of year, isn't it? We get toward Thanksgiving and Christmas, a family kind of time of year. You love being with your family, spending time with your family. And don't we love to talk about our families? You know, I can just imagine how it's been at Bob and Jan's house this past few days with all those girls back. And the grandkids here, family, and to see the beam and the smile on my sister's face, because family is here. Family. There's nothing like family. And there's nothing like the family of God. Brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing that we have a heavenly father who knows everything about us and still loves us. Who cares about our every need more deeply than any human father could ever care. That's the family we're in. And thank God for that family. Paul couldn't get over that. When he thought about the father he was addressing and the family that he was a part of, he fell to his knees in a passionate expression of prayer. That's the commitment from Paul's heart of this prayer. But I want us to spend most of our time this morning on the content of this prayer. Because what Paul prays for, what he asks God for for the Ephesian church is what God wants for you and for me here today. These four things that he asked and prays for are four things that we will need. If we are going to live out what we have seen in the first three chapters, what Paul has described for us of our position in Christ. And all the riches we have through our salvation in Christ. If we're going to live that out day by day, we have to have these four things. We have to have first of all strength. Notice he prays, first of all for strength for the Ephesians, verse 16. I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit in your inner being. He's talking about strength in the heart in your inner being. And he mentions two ways this strength comes to us. Spiritual strength. First of all, it comes from dependence upon God. He says, I pray that out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power. So where does this power come from? Where does this strength come from? It comes from dependence upon God. And similarly, the idea is that we need spiritual strength to live the Christian life and that comes as we depend upon God. We don't have that strength ourselves. We need it from an outside source and we need to depend upon the Lord to grant us that strength. Now some of you have had surgery, most of you probably in this room have had surgery at one point or another. And you know what it's like to come back from surgery or to come back from an illness where you've spent time in the hospital and you've lost strength. Sometimes it's really quite surprising how much strength we do lose and it takes a little time to regain that energy. Coming back from surgery, you have to regain physical strength to be able to go about life as you know it. To be able to do the normal things that you would normally do. You have to build that strength back up. Same thing is true spiritually. In order to live the life day by day that Christ wants us to live for him, we have to have spiritual strength. And that's not found in ourselves. It's found in God out of His glorious riches. May He strengthen you with power in the inner man. He's the one we get our strength from. But the second way we get that strength is not just from Him but it comes through His Spirit. You see it there in verse 16? Paul says, I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being. It is the Holy Spirit that communicates to us God's strength to be able to live every day like we should faithfully and obediently for Him. Now we talk about the strength and power of the Spirit and it kind of rolls off our tongues and I'm not sure we really understand the concept. What does it mean to live by the power of the Spirit? How do we get the power of the Holy Spirit? We know the Bible teaches the Holy Spirit is with you already if you're saved. If you've placed your faith in Christ as your Savior, the Holy Spirit already indwells you. He maintains an abiding presence with you, is with you all the time. So He's there. It's a matter of learning how to draw on His power. How do you do that? Well, let me once again make a parallel with physical strength. Physical strength is very much like spiritual strength. The way we get physical strength is the way we get spiritual strength. There are at least there are a lot of similarities and parallels. The way we get the fuel for physical strength is through food. That's the fuel that gives us the strength. You stop eating to three, four, five days, you're going to start losing strength. We get the fuel that we need to have physical strength from food. How do you get the power of the Spirit of God? How do you get spiritual strength? It's by feeding, taking in the food of God's Word. There's nothing magical about this, nothing mystical about this, nothing eerie about this, nothing secretive about this. The power of the Spirit comes as we take in the Word of God. And as we begin to digest and make a part of our system the Word of God. Secondly, how do we get physical strength? We develop our physical strength, not only with food, but we put it into action through exercise, through movement, through motion, through developing and using the muscular system. If you just sit in front of the TV all the time and vegetate, you're probably going to lose strength. You need to move some, do some things, get up and do some. That's how we develop strength. And how do we use the food spiritually that we take in and develop spiritual muscle? Biobedience. It's biobedience. It's that simple. When we obey the Word of God, that's when the Holy Spirit's power kicks in to give us the strength we need to do whatever God wants us to do. The Holy Spirit's power is not some mystical thing that you say, Lord, I need a zap from heaven. I need some kind of zap of power from heaven. I'm waiting here till I feel it. It's not how it happens. As you purpose in your heart to obey the Word of God, that's when the power of the Spirit of God kicks in. And the power of His Spirit comes as we obey. But there's another thing about physical strength that translates over to spiritual strength. There is a core of our being that dictates our physical strength. That is our cardiopulmonary system, heart and lungs. The strength of your lungs and your heart will determine how much strength you have. That's the very core of your physical strength. And in the same way, that's the very core of your spiritual strength. Spiritual power, the power of the Spirit comes when we exercise our breathing capacity spiritually, and we breathe out our prayers to God through prayer as we commune with Him, as we take in His Word, exercise obedience and pray, carry on that constant conversation with our Lord through the day where we call upon Him for strength, where we let Him know about our weaknesses, confess to Him our sins, draw from Him His strength and power to live like He wants us to every day. As we live that praying without ceasing kind of lifestyle, then we gain strength. That's how the power of the Spirit comes. Again, there's nothing mystical or magical about that. It is feeding on the Word, purposeing in your heart to obey the Word, and carrying on a prayer life with the Lord that brings the power of the Spirit. Spiritual strength comes a lot like physical strength comes. So Paul prays for strength, for strength for us to live out the Christian life. Secondly, he prays for submission. Look at it in verse 17. He says, I'm praying this, verse 17, so that Christ made dwell in your hearts through faith. Christ made dwell in your hearts through faith. So He wants Christ to dwell in our hearts through faith. And what you're saying is, wait a second, I thought He already did. If I trust Jesus as my Savior, doesn't the Bible say that I am in Christ and Christ is in me? Yes, it does. In that sense, positionally, yes, Christ is already in you. He's already dwelling in your heart. So what is He talking about? What's Paul talking about? Well, it's all found in the Word dwell. It's a compound word. The Greek word is actually two Greek words put together, which means to settle down and be at home. Now, there's a difference in just dwelling and settling down and being at home. There's a difference in Christ being a guest in your heart and settling down and being at home in your heart. And the difference is submitting every room in your life to Him. Now, if you invite me into your home and you say to me, just make yourself at home. You don't mean that. You really don't. Because you know what I do in my home? I raid the refrigerator. I pillage through the cupboards, find out where the good stuff is. You know, you want me to do that in your home? You know what I do in my home? I go find something else to wear and in the chest of drawers. You don't want me going into your chest drawers and pulling out clothes and finding stuff to wear, do you? Probably not. You know what I do in my home? I sit down and look through the bills I've got to pay and look at my checkbook. You don't want me doing that at your desk, do you? You know, pillaging through your bills and seeing what you've got to pay and seeing how much balance you have left in your checkbook. You want me doing that in your home? You really want me to be at home in your home? You see, there's a difference in a guest no matter how graciously and kind of you may treat that guest and someone who really settles down and is at home. And what Paul is praying is that we will not just allow Jesus to be kind of, you know, stand off, arms linked, guest in our home. Oh, treating kindly, treating nicely, be courteous, but he's saying open up every room and let him be at home. What he's saying quite literally is this. Let Jesus go into the library of your home, which is your mind. Let him see the magazines, the books, the TV shows, the movies that you're allowing to influence your mind, the library of your mind. Let him clean out the library. And then let him go into the dining room of your appetites in your house, of your heart. The appetites that have been fed too long with the world's menu, the world's menu of prestige and materialism and lust, and let him clean all that out of the cupboards in the dining room of your heart, and let him fill it with a hunger and thirst for righteousness. And then let him go into the living room of fellowship, and let him take control of all of your relationships, your friendships, your marriage, your relationship with your children or your parents. Those rooms where you have people in, where you relate to people, let him take control of that, submit to his authority in that. And then let him have the keys to the workshop, where you've built everything in your life around the toys that you have. Let him have the keys and clean out the workshop and say, Lord, I want you to build something of eternal value here. I want you to build with gold and silver and precious stones, things that will last through the judgment seat. I want you to build kind of priorities in my life that I will be concerned about people and you, and serving you and loving people, want you to take over the workshop in my life. And then yes, throw open the door to every closet in the house of your heart, the place where you've hidden away secret sins, and let him clean out the closets, let him clean out the closets, let him take out everything in your life and the deep inter recesses of your heart, things that you keep hidden in the dark, let him clean it out. In other words, let him settle down and be at home in your heart and every recess of your heart and every room of your heart don't hold anything back. That is total absolute submission to the Lordship of Christ. That's what He's praying here. He's praying that Jesus be allowed to settle down and be at home in our hearts by faith, by faith. This is not something that is easy to do. We've got to trust God that He will do what is right and that we'll have the strength to give up what we need to give up for Him. So it's a prayer for strength, it's a prayer for submission, thirdly, it's a prayer for seizure. He actually uses a word which means to seize something. Look at it in verse 19, or excuse me, verse 17, middle of the verse. He says, I pray that you being rooted and established in love, now that's talking about agricultural term being rooted, set your roots down deep in this love, an architectural term being founded on or build a foundation on this love. So rooted and established in love, doing that, verse 18, that you may have the power together with all the saints to grasp. Literally the Greek word means to seize, to lay hold of, would be the best translation, to lay hold up, to seize. He wants us to seize something. What is it he wants us to seize? He wants us to grasp, to understand, to seize and to live out the dimensions of the love of Christ. You see what he says there in verse 18? To grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. He wants us to seize in our understanding and in the way we live, live this out. What Christ's love for us was like. Because when you once grasped that love and seized that love, you will not be able to live the same way. You'll have to live that same kind of love out to other people. So let's just explore for a couple of minutes how wide is God's love? The Bible says it's wide enough for him to embrace the whole world. John 3.16 says it this way, for God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life. You see, He loves the whole world. His arms are wide enough to reach around the whole world. It does not matter who you are or where you've been or what you've done. God loved you so much that He sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross to pay for your sins. No church can do that for you. No religion can do that for you. No moral life can do that for you. No New Year's commitment can do that for you. Nothing that you do can get you to heaven. It's all in the love of Christ, the love of God that's so wide it embraces the world and reaches out to the whole world to everybody. No matter who you are, how wide is His love? It's wide enough to include everybody. Kevin and I were going out to lunch on Thursday and we noticed a guy walking down the ridge and he was kind of unkempt and just the look, you know, the first thing you would think when you looked at this guy was, he's throwing away his life on drugs. And so we stopped and asked where he was going and he told us and we said, hop in. We'll take you over there. It's in town and so we'll take you. And he got in and one of the first things he said was, you know, most people wouldn't stop and pick me up and we said, well, why? Because the way I look. And he did look pretty rough because the way I look. And you know, we talked to him about the fact that Jesus said, if you're going down the road and there's a guy laying there who's been beaten up and he looks pretty bad, doesn't matter. You be his neighbor, you love him and we love you and don't even know you but we want you to know the love of Christ and that's what Jesus said to do. And so we began to talk and he began to talk about the fact that, you know, most churches would not accept me. And as we talked a little further with him about that, I think Kevin and I both began to wonder, would we accept it? If he walked in this church and sat down, would we embrace him? I hope we would. I hope we would. Because God's love is wide enough to include everybody. He loves everybody. I don't care where you've been or what you've done. I don't care what you've done with your life. God loves you. He loves you. His love is wide enough to embrace anyone. But notice the Bible says, I want you to understand how long his love is to, how long is God's love? God's love is so long that it will last forever. It will never end. Look at these verses in Romans chapter 8. Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else. In all creation, we'll be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ. If you know Jesus as your Savior, that love will last forever. And nothing can separate you from Him. If you have placed your faith in Christ, there is nothing that can separate you from that love. That love is long enough to last for all eternity. You say, well, I've walked away from that love. I've made a mess of things. I've turned my back on God. I still love you. You want you to come back. His arms are still open to embrace you with his love. His love is that long. But then Paul says, I want you to understand not only how wide and how long but how high his love is, how high is God's love? It's high enough to take us all the way to heaven. It's how high it is. Look at these verses in 1 John 3, which tell us how high God's love is. How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called Children of God. Now here's how great it is in verse 2. He says, dear friends, now we are the Children of God. And what we will be is not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, in other words, when he comes back, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. He will take us to heaven with him. So you see his love is high enough to take us all the way to heaven. That's how high his love is. But then he says, also, want you to understand how deep his love is. Not just how wide and how long and how high, but how deep it is. You know how deep God's love is? It's deep enough to reach to the lowest center. To the lowest center. It's deep enough to reach that far. You know how I know that? Because he's already saved the worst center that ever lived. First Timothy chapter 1 tells us that. Look at what Paul says. The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly along with, here it is, the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Here's how that grace and love report out verse 15. Here's a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am the worst. You know why Paul believed he was the worst of sinners? Because he spent most of his early life trying to ruin the church, kill believers, destroy the church, and God saved him. So he saved the worst. He can save you. He can save anyone, no matter what you've done with your life, no matter where you've been, no matter how deep the pit of your life that your life has gone into, he can reach down. That's how deep his love is. He loves you and he wants to save you. Now if you ever begin to even grasp, if you ever seize the least little bit of understanding of that love, how wide and how long and how high and how deep it is, your life will never be the same. Not only will you understand, that's the only thing that can save you and get you to heaven. Is the love that Jesus poured out on the cross for you. But you will also understand, like John said in 1 John 4, as I have loved you, you're to love other people. We're to live that same kind of love to other people. That's to be wide and long and high and deep. This unconditional reaches out to anyone. That same kind of love, we're to express. That's how you live out this seizure of the love of God. So Paul prays that we understand this and notice how he ends it in verse 19, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. That sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it? How do you know something that passes knowledge? How do you know something that can't be known? Well the first word means to know by experience. So we're to know by experience something that surpasses human knowledge, human ability to figure stuff out, or the world's ability to figure out love. You see the world's kind of love is conditional. If it gets scorned, it turns its back and walks the other way. God's love never does that. You can experience a kind of love, my friend, that will never turn its back on you. That will love you forever. The world's love is in it for what it can get. God's love, he loves you because of what it can give. He wants to give you eternal life, give you his son, give you a home in heaven. That's God's kind of love. It's a giving kind of love. And the comparisons could go on. You see we can experience, we can know by experience something that cannot be known in the world. It's God's love. And when that love grabs ahold of you and when you seize it and understand it, it revolutionizes your life and the way you live has got to be in that kind of love. So there's a prayer for strength. There is a prayer for submission. There's a prayer for seizure. Then there's a prayer for saturation. For saturation in verse 19, notice in verse 19 that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. The word filled means to be dominated by so that you are now characterized by something. Bible talks about the fact that a person is full of wisdom or full of faith or full of the Holy Spirit. It means that you are so dominated by the Holy Spirit, so dominated by wisdom, so dominated by faith that your life becomes characterized by that. You become known by that. So what does it mean to be filled with all the fullness of God? Well think of all that's in God's character. His wisdom, His love, His grace, His mercy, His faithfulness and on and on it could go. You're saying John that I can be filled with that, with that kind of character, with who God is, all His fullness? Yeah. Yeah. That's what Paul is saying. That we can be filled with all that fullness. You say, wow, how does that work? How does that happen? Well maybe a simple illustration will help us understand this. If you go to the Atlantic Ocean, remember the first time you ever saw the ocean how insignificant you felt standing there on the shore, how big the ocean was, just so big and you feel so small. But you know, you can take a pint jar and set it down on the sand and let the waves roll into it and it will be filled up with the fullness of the ocean. You'll never be able to drain the ocean dry with that pint jar, but you can fill it with the same character of water that's in all the rest of the ocean. And you see, what Paul is telling us is you'll never be as faithful as God is. You'll never be as wise as He is. You'll never be any of His characteristics to the extent He is. He's like the ocean. You're like that little pint jar, but you can be filled with those characteristics. As you do these things, He's talked about as you pray for strength, as you look to the Lord for submitting to Him every area of your life. As you lay hold of the love of God and begin to live that out, then you will grow more to be like Christ. You will be filled with all that God is in His character that will begin to dominate you and characterize the way you live. That's what He's talking about. Now, that's what Paul wants for you. That's what he wanted for the Ephesians. That's what God wants for you and what he wants for me. Now, just in closing, let me mention that Paul was confident God would answer this prayer. The confidence of this prayer is found in verse 20 because he was confident in his power. You see, verse 20 now to Him who is able to do a measurably more than all we ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. You say, can God really do this for me? Can God take old average normal Joe Cindy like me and make me this kind of Christian that's really living this kind of stuff out? Yes, He can because He has that kind of power. Paul was confident of His power. You see, Paul said He's able to do more than all we ask. He's able to do measurably more than all we ask. He's able to do measurably more than all we ask or imagine. That's God's capacity, His power. But He was also confident of this prayer being answered because of His purpose. God's purpose is that in verse 21, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. That's His purpose. That through the church, through our lives, we reflect who God is. That's what it means to glorify God that He have glory, that we show other people who God is through the church and through Jesus Christ, God may be seen. That is an amazing parallel, by the way, that the church would be placed with Jesus Christ as being the two instruments through whom God shows Himself to this world. He showed Himself through the life of Christ. Now He wants to show Himself through the church. That's His purpose for us. And then Paul says, Amen. And I'm sure when the Ephesians read that, they said, Amen. That we live that kind of life. Let's pray and ask God that we'll live that kind of life too. Father, thank you for life in Christ. Thank you that we don't have to get to heaven on our own by religious duties, by things we must live. But Lord, you've already done all the work for us through Christ and His cross, His death. And Lord, we thank You that because of that, through faith in Christ, we now want to live for You out of gratitude for Your grace. Help us to live the kind of life that Paul talked about, to really live with this kind of strength and submission and seizing and understanding Your love for us. And to really, to really grasp and be saturated with the fullness of everything you are, help us to know and understand that so that we can live differently for You in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.