Ephesians - Chapter 3 review
Ephesians · Randy Peterman · Jul 1, 2018
Ephesians (2018-19), No. 24
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261910495026

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Well, because I'm an overachiever, I wanted to start off with Eternity. That seemed like a good place to start. I wanted to kind of narrow our scope in as we go into Chapter 3, so we won't spend too much time talking about Eternity's past and Eternity's future. That's maybe a bit grand for a 50 or so minute long lesson. I wanted to take a look quickly at the big picture context and ask, why is Ephesians 3 in the Bible? And it turns out there's some good reasons for that.

Some of them go back to the time of creation, whenever that was. People always argue how many thousands of years ago it was or if it was longer than that. I think we can argue that it was thousands of years ago. But I'm not willing to commit on whether it's six or ten or some number that I think there's some good arguments for it. But that's outside the scope of this class. But what happened after God created mankind in his image? We screwed up. Adam biffed it.

There's this substantial need for God to resolve the problem of relationship with him that is eternal. The fact that it's eternal is substantially important because when we take a look at the book of Ephesians, it's actually taking into context everything from the fall all the way into everything into eternity future.

If we look at Ephesians 2.7, we see that Paul reminds us that grace is going to be poured out into eternity future. So I'm not just making up eternity here. This is the context of Ephesians. And then Paul was writing this from Rome to the church that he spent about three months in when we look at Acts. In fact, in the main service we just covered that, that Paul was in Ephesus. And he was there for about three months teaching in the synagogue. And he was trying to deal with the Jews. When you go to the synagogue, are you dealing with the Gentiles? No, you're dealing with the Jews. So he's also reaching out to the Gentiles. That's where his ministry was to. But this city had this heritage.

It was a Greek colony and then it was a Roman colony. It was taken over by the Romans in about 27 BC. So there was this establishing here and there was a mixture of influences. You had the Greeks, the Romans, and then because it was the way the Romans established their colonies, we have all these Jews that got transplanted.

They got Roman citizenship and they got tax incentives. So you mix these people together. You've got the Roman soldiers to make sure you maintain dominance in the area. You've got the Jews who are there with things. You have the Greeks who are left over, right? The ones who didn't move away after the war. And you have international trade.

Ephesus was considered by some historians to be the second most powerful city in the Roman Empire outside of Rome. So the way I kind of think about it is like everybody knows Washington DC is where our federal capital is, but where are our most important cities as far as trade and commerce are concerned? We have New York and LA, right? It's a really big thing and of course after that other cities get really upset if you don't list them, but we won't spend our time with American geography and business policy.

But all of this is we have this conflict and the struggle that is dealing with a colony that has different cultural backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, and different political allegiances. Because if you're a Jewish colonist that's been moved to Ephesus, how much energy do you think you're going to spend on really loving Rome? You're going to spend some energy because you get the benefits. But the Jews have a heritage that is strong, that is going to constantly be in contention with the Romans.

So Paul has visited this city. He was there for three months. And he's writing them a letter here. And it's clear that Paul understands his audience. So I wanted to jump through chapters one and two very briefly to get us into chapter three. Because if we're going to talk about a summary, we need to know what we're building on.

What's the first foundation that Paul establishes for us in chapter 1? Somebody pick a favorite verse in chapter 1 because there's a long list of them. Like Bob said with chapter 2, what's your favorite verse? Chapter 1, what's your favorite verse? There's a bunch. It's like a run-on sentence from verse 3 to verse 14. If you pick the whole sentence, you've got two-thirds of the book. So in there, Paul establishes a worldview that is rooted in God's eternal plan. And how many of you remember from the Acts series in the main service, when Paul went to Mars Hill, what did he do?

They said, we love new things. And Paul came and he established, when he engaged them, he established a worldview, a biblical worldview as a starting point. you guys have an unknown God, you have a marker to an unknown God, and I know him. And he begins saying this whole worldview builds out on this unknown God that you pagans don't know. And so in chapter 1 in Ephesians, Paul actually reaffirms this principle of this worldview that starts with God. And then he reminds them that their salvation is guaranteed. And then he reminds them that they have a family relationship through adoption. And again, who can remember why adoption is significant in the Roman culture?

Anyone? I was thinking it was Hebrew, but maybe it's Roman. It's Roman. When you adopted someone, it was as an adult, and it was irreversible. Okay. You were an adult. It was irreversible. You were preeminent to any biological children. That's going to upset some of the Jews who feel like they're grafted in, right? The other thing is that it was legal for a Roman man to kill his children all the way into adulthood, if you adopted someone, that right was removed. So this adoption was significant.

Can you lose your salvation if God can't disown you and you become preeminent? No. That's a big deal. The first prayer in Ephesians is actually in chapter one and Paul prays for them to have a deeper intimacy with God and to have knowledge from him. And it establishes Christ as the preeminent ruler that is waiting for God to release his throne to him on the earth for the millennium, for the thousand years.

Then we get to chapter 2. I'm sorry I'm moving fast, but we actually are supposed to be doing a summary of chapter 3, but I just want to establish the foundation and the next layer here. Chapter 2, while we were in our trespasses God sent his son. What foundations that chapter 3 builds upon are in chapter 2? Does anybody have any recollections? Chapter 2 builds on the nature of our relationship with God by emphasizing that He sent His Son while we were still children of wrath in verses 1-5.

We're now seated in the heavenlies with Christ in verse 2-6. That's identification truths. That's a really important set of truths, right? And saved by grace. He showed us mercy and he poured out grace. And these lead us to being saved by faith through grace.

And Paul establishes all this and he's building, say again? Paul establishes all of this building of God's plan and blessing to focus on the next critical doctrine and that straddles chapters 2 and 3 but as it turns out it also impacts chapters 4, 5 and 6 as well. And that is the talking about the idea that God has created a new body in the New Testament, a new body, the church.

Now, we've already had three plus lessons on that, so I don't want to belabor it too much, but it's one of those things where I think it's worth pointing out that sometimes these chapter markers are artificial, right? Not sometimes. They weren't inspired.

So chapter 2, starting in verse 11, is Paul going into the two entities, the Jews and the Gentiles, becoming one. And he has three primary arguments in this passage. One, in verses 11 through 16, Christ broke down the dividing wall of the law. That really bothers the Reformed folks and the Catholics, right? They like to mix in their law and get that blended in there. They massage it in. It makes them feel good because they get to check off the check boxes of the stuff that they do.

Paul's second argument in verses 17-22 is that there were prophecies in the Old Testament that this was going to happen. Not only did Christ fulfill the law and break it down, secondly there were prophecies that this was going to happen. So the Jewish believers who read this would be given a Well, they would not have an excuse. Maybe we'll put it that way. You knew this was coming. The prophecies were given in the Old Testament.

But, that being said, the full understanding of what those prophecies would create in this new body was not there. Which is why his third argument is the mysteries. And so what do we do with the mysteries? Why is Paul talking about a mystery here? They didn't know it before, Tom? I think we've been over that a lot if we've been here long term. Sure. Mousterion, something that had previously been unknown was suddenly revealed. Yeah.

So Paul has three arguments. The first two would be more relevant to maybe a Jewish believer, but the third one is specifically focused on the Roman believers. And since we're going to be going into that in chapter three, we're going to take a look at that in more detail. So we're finally now, see I blitzed through chapters one and two. We went from eternity past already in chapter three here. Verses one through thirteen here in this in this section here are unity in revelation. We have the mystery that was revealed to Paul and given to the church today.

The question I've got starting off this section is why would the Romans look down on the Jews in Ephesus and then secondarily why would the Jews look down on the Romans? So the Romans come in and the Romans have dominance, their political power, and the Roman soldiers do what? What do the Roman soldiers deal with when they're at work? What's their 9 to 5? They've got to make sure that they control the people, they have to make sure that there's civil order, and they also, this is also probably a fun job, you get to go up and help collect taxes.

So nobody likes you no matter what, whether they're Roman or Jews, right? So the soldiers are representative of the government, but the Roman soldiers and the Romans are looking down on the Jews in Ephesus in part because the Jews have a whole legal system that separates them.

Oh, well, we wanted to have the neighbors over, but we couldn't because we don't have a dairy kitchen and a meat kitchen, for example. That's a moderate analogy, if you will, because I don't think that the Jews had multiple kitchens. They just probably had multiple pots and they were able to keep things separated. But today, how many of you have been over to the Doyle's house and seen their neighbor across the street? Mike has often had stories about it, but they had a separated kitchen. They had a kosher kitchen. Two refrigerators, two sets of cooking things and you never mixed because in the law it says you can't cook a calf in its mother's milk or a kid in its mother's milk.

Brian White said he was going to be here in town and I joked with him. I said, do you have any food restrictions? He said, well we don't do dairy and we don't do gluten because of our food allergies. And then he said, but also the 613 laws of the Old Testament. I said, well, that really ruins my bacon wrapped lobster covered in goat cooked in its mother's milk. So I guess we're not doing that for 4th of July.

But the idea is that the Romans saw the Jews as irritants. Because they came in with this division. Now, why did the Jews hate the Romans? They were keeping them from being their own nation. If you grew up, like I did in Northern California, in a Reagan household. Ronald Reagan was I mean, there's God and Jesus, and then there's a pretty big gap between Jesus and Ronald Reagan, but then after Ronald Reagan there's another big gap between everybody else, right?

And that's not my dad, that's just the grander scheme of my family, so don't take that the wrong way with my parents. But if you grew up the way I did, there was this great elevation for this heritage that we had that, as it turns out, was rooted in a long line of culture. So I'm not saying anything political about that. I'm saying there's a culture, but it was tied to the politics. It was what I knew. And then we moved to the big city.

And holy smokes, there were all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds, with all kinds of religious ideas, and all kinds of political backgrounds. It was before the diversity that we see now with sexual, I'll say, confusion. But it forced me to have to deal with diversity that I never understood.

In Northern California agriculture there are two colors of people for the most part. And they're both religious. And it was okay. It was pretty easy. And then I moved to the big city. And there was diversity and I had to reconcile those things. Well, the Ephesian culture was actually quite similar. You had lots of people with lots of business and background variation. And they were a major trading port. So you got people from all over the Roman Empire and all over the world that would come into this place. So there's a lot of division. And so Paul says, hey, I preach the gospel to you. Here's the gospel. And these people repent of their carnal ways. They believe that Jesus Christ is their Savior. And then what? Well now they've got to get along.

How many of you come from divorced families or have divorced families and you've had to watch the blending? My parents are the only, on my dad's side, the only one that isn't divorced is my dad and mom. All the other siblings got divorced. My wife and her family, there's divorces on her side of the family and so she's had to be part of a blended family.

I, on the other hand, got it really easy. We just had one mom and dad and three siblings and everything. It looked like the TV shows. It was splendid. But the thing about watching blended families or being part of a blended family is you get this really fascinating thing where some families just gel. Some families everything's okay.

But then there's a lot of families where there's a lot of contention. I think it's a trope now, but there's a lot of the you're not my mom or you're not my dad kind of shenanigans that can happen. And so those kinds of arguments are actually relevant when we look at what Paul is bringing up here in Ephesians chapter 3 with this unity.

Paul's ministry to the Gentiles brought a tremendous amount of turmoil to the Jews who had been raised in a segregated religious context and they knew the prophecies of the Messiah. They knew Jesus was coming. Did he come like they expected? No. They knew from God's promise to Abraham that all the nations would be blessed, but they were really not cool with the idea that all the nations would be blessed in a new entity and it wasn't about being a Jew anymore. And so Paul's ministry there came and it upset some of them.

What modern day secular philosophy is prominent today that drives division and keeps us from coming together in the church now? Do we have anything like that that's happening? In the universities today, it is prominently taught a philosophical view called postmodernism. And postmodernism is very dangerous, in my humble opinion, because one, it does not believe in absolute truth.

But two, it says you can't understand this other person because you have a different background. So it already creates division. When you watch the news and you see somebody who's in, let's say, a minority situation, the news anchors want you to feel distanced. from those people while still pulling on your heartstrings to get you to feel compassion for them. But they want you to know that you can't understand those people fully because you're different.

What does Paul say? Well, everybody in this room, no matter what ethnic background you are, no matter what political party you may be registered with, no matter what job you work, I believe you're all my brothers and sisters in Christ. And that makes us the same, it doesn't make us different. It removes those divisions.

That's a big substantial variation, but post-modernism says you need to go find your own tribe, your own group of people, but you'll never really understand one another. and that's being taught in the universities and in some cases now more and more in high school and junior high as those teachers that graduated from the universities are going into the schools and promoting these thinking or these thinking, these ideas. Yes, possibly all the way down into elementary school to the youngest ages, right? So postmodernism is huge but it demands that we ignore things that unite us like love and it increases tension. So that's a big problem that we face today. But the Ephesians didn't have postmodernism, but they had philosophies of the day that still caused underpinning divisions. Now let's get back to mysteries here. Verses 3, 4, and 9 all include the word mystery or musterion in there.

Paul writes that there are mysteries revealed to him for the church and this is significant Because of the Roman mystery cults. The Roman mystery cults were those tribalistic thinkings where it's like, oh, well, there's a Roman soldier mystery cult. What do they believe? Anybody know what they believe? We don't. We know about the mystery cults, but each mystery cult had its own mystery.

Shocking, I know, right? But the mystery was what they would keep so that you were on the inside. How do you know that you're part of us? Well, come over here in the corner and we'll tell you the secret. So Paul comes and he says, we have a mystery too. And the Romans are like, oh, you have a mystery? And they're like, yeah, and here it is. We don't have to go in the corner. I know, isn't it cool? but the Romans were dealing with this idea of the mystery and that's partially why we know that Paul understood his audience, right?

He knew that they understood. Today the mystery of the church seems insignificant to us but we have to recognize that there was a critical starting point there. In verse 10 Paul talks about the manifold wisdom and as I was looking at manifold wisdom for this lesson. I thought, man, there's a lot of cool stuff in here and this probably could be a whole lesson on how do we know about knowledge and wisdom.

But we don't get to do that today. So hopefully we can cover it in a high level. The nature of the mystery was that it kept back some of God's wisdom. Did God want to hide his truth from his people? No. He's revealing. We see God's progressive revelation throughout time. He's revealing himself to his people.

But there are certain things that, while God revealed them in prophecy, they were not relevant to the day-to-day lives of every believer, so that they didn't need to fully understand everything that was going to come along all of time. How many of you know exactly what's going to happen during the Millennial Kingdom?

What? Does God not want you to know? Is the fact that there's a mystery saying something negative about God and His character? I don't think so. There's nothing about something not being revealed that says that God doesn't love us or God doesn't want us to know things. He just also knows what we need to know.

And so, prior to Christ's arrival, the Jews' expectation was for a ruling Messiah. Jesus came down to the earth and showed up in humble circumstances and then behaved in an Isaiah 53 sort of a way. That was an Old Testament prophecy. It was given. They had it. So when Paul comes into the synagogues, like he did in Ephesus, where do you think he went? He went He probably went to Isaiah more than once. That's a pretty deep well, if we're honest. Isaiah's got all kinds of prophecies, or the Psalms.

And throughout the whole Old Testament, he could argue, this is who Jesus is! Look! He did it! It says the Messiah's coming. He's going to do this. Look, this is Jesus. The Romans killed him, just like they said he would. But he took your sins. Oh, only God can do that. Right?

And yet, They didn't understand. Now let's talk about this wisdom part. The nature of the mystery was that it kept back some of God's wisdom, but obviously God's wisdom is infinite. So the idea of manifold here is this really cool Greek word. He's able to perceive nuance and truth explained beyond what our human minds can imagine.

The word translated manifold here is the Greek word palopoikilos, which I just butchered. was used normally to describe a painting or canvas as having a diverse amount of colors. Poly is many, and then the second half of that, the poikilos, is many colored. So it's many, many colored. So when it says the myriad wisdom, imagine the rainbow, all the spectrum of color as we can see it, And because God's infinite, maybe we want to account for colors that are outside of the human retinal spectrum, right? The many, many colored wisdom of God. Now what's happening with that? Let's look at verse 10. What's happening with that wisdom? Does it stay with us? What does Paul say happens with that manifold wisdom?

Tom? watched on by the angels who are picking up on this for a possible later use to praise the Lord all the more when the time comes. That's just a speculation. They're paying attention. They're watching. They want to see this coming true and they see it coming true here and there. The church is manifesting it.

The angels are seeing it but the rulers and the authorities on the earth as well It's God's manifest wisdom, applied in our lives, lived out. It's not just God's wisdom. If Paul just said, listen, God's showing us his wisdom, that would be cool. But it's in us.

Now, I think Paul's been secretly sneaking in some truth here, so let's see if we can't dig into this. This is not a mystery, though, so I'm not doing anything sneaky here myself. How many of you have all of God's wisdom right now that you know inherently and you just walk around spouting it out? I have to put my hand down because I most definitely don't have that.

But what do we have together? We each have what God has revealed to us today in the progressive growth of our walk with Him, conditionally, but we don't have it alone. We have it together. Where's Paul's whole theme of Ephesians starting in chapter 2.11 gone with the church? Is it loneliness? It's togetherness. We know it and we reflect it together in the plural.

I need Bob desperately. Dave texted me this week. He texted me a funny picture about bacon he found. He said, this reminded me of you, and I thought, I've had worse things that people will be reminding me of. But I need the wisdom of the other believers, because I don't have them.

Bob? You know, I think to some extent it relates to the wisdom of God. It's founded on sound theology and doctrine. Yeah. And I would suggest that none of us claim all of that. Yeah, we should be careful, yes. This is not buffing up the old man to please God, right? Certainly not.

I mean, that's wonderful wisdom that relates to that life. That life that's led by the Spirit, and the Church is responsible to live that out. In fact, in Ephesians 4, we're going to go there, right? Yeah, and even the second half of this passage, he's going to talk about love and life being rooted in who we are in Christ. You cannot separate them. They're completely intertwined.

But I think it's worth calling out here with this idea of the manifold wisdom, is that it's manifested through us. Not that we're polishing up the old man, as Bob said, but instead that because it's the life, and because it's lived out through us, the angels are watching, as Tom said, that's repeated in other places in the New Testament, as well as the world around us.

There's been a lot of contention about how the Christian should interact with politics. I'm sure each one of us in this room has one level or another of personal study or thoughts on the topic. But this here says that if we're abiding and living out the life of Christ, that the politicians are going to notice.

So that's not too bold of a political statement, but it's what Paul says. So I think that's kind of cool. Even if Paul didn't have Facebook. He couldn't be on Facebook posting political memes. Continuing on, this manifold wisdom is awesome. If wisdom is knowledge applied and God has all knowledge, only he can truly have pure and infinite wisdom. So we know the source of wisdom. We know how that works. But we get to manifest the nuances of it that he's revealed to us.

Then in verse 12, and I actually got to teach this in the other class, if you were in the Unfathomable Riches class, the same morning that it was being taught here in this class in verse 12, was it you Roger or you Bob? I was teaching the other class, I don't know, who got to teach verse 12?

Was it you? Yeah. So no matter which class you were in, if either this class or the other class, you were getting this lesson on that Sunday morning. And which one was right? Well, hopefully we were saying the same thing. Because I think Bob and I both have the same excited attitude as does Roger about confident access. And in fact, any believer in this classroom, if you understand confident access, should be equally excited about it.

If you're a Roman, and you go barging into Caesar's palace, what's going to happen? They're not going to let you gamble. Sorry, that's a Las Vegas joke. So if you're a Roman and you go barging into Caesar's palace, his guards are going to make sure you don't make it. Bob gave the international sign for you're going to die in the back row there. But the idea is if you do that as a Roman, you don't have confident access.

You have access. Paul said, I want to go be judged by Caesar. So he had to go to Rome. I'm thinking the rental property business was hot in Rome if all the prisoners had to come in and get their own place and wait to see Caesar, right? But this confident access, the Romans know that you can have access but you don't have confident access. You don't go barging into Caesar's palace and declare you want things.

What would the Jew think? We talked about this during Bob's teaching or if you were to listen to the other one. What does the Jew think about access to God? Through the temple. And who gets to go see the Holy of Holies? One priest, one day a year. And if you go back and look at Leviticus, you can see in Leviticus chapter 16, God gives Moses an entire set of laws tied in with what the priests have to do.

And there's a scapegoat. How many of you have heard the term scapegoat in your life? And you think, oh, scapegoat. And you use the term. The scapegoat is literally a biblical concept. It's from the Old Testament. And the priest would rest his hand on the head of the goat, and they'd send it out of the village. And resting his hand on the goat's head was saying, these are the sins of Israel. And he'd put it on the goat, and they'd send it out. Israel's sins are forgotten by God today.

And the funny thing in Leviticus 16 is that more than once, I think it's two or three times, it repeats, you need to do this so that you will not die. Talking to the high priest, to Aaron, in the case of Leviticus 16. So you have this substantial ceremony that's going through just so that one person can go see God or God's glory in the Holy of Holies.

And Paul says we get bold and confident access. If you're a Roman, that's crazy talk. And if you're a Jew, that's suicidal. And Paul says, hey, you, you get that. We all do. That should get your attention. That's a pretty tremendous blessing. But there's no segregation and we all have that confident access because we're in the new one singular body, the church.

So Paul has made an argument for unity and he says, listen, this third argument through mystery is a serious undertaking of God's so that we don't have to undertake anything but faith. And then Paul, in verse 14, is continuing on with this idea of unity, but he does so in the form of a prayer to the Father. So, Paul's first prayer is in Ephesians 1, 15-23, where he covers the depth of their knowledge of God and the fullness of their blessing in Him. And this prayer relies on that truth that has been revealed, but also on the believers understanding it and the Lord using it to change them. Paul prays for understanding. If we talk about the manifold wisdom, we want to understand that, don't we? So Paul prays for understanding.

And that's a really powerful thing. How many of you have ever been to a Bible study where everybody goes around and says, let's talk about what this means to me. That's not always evil, so I want to be careful that I'm not creating a scarecrow argument here. But God intended to communicate to us. There was authorial intent from God and then authorial intent from Paul here. And so Paul, when he is bringing this about here, he is saying God intended for us to have this manifold wisdom and to understand it. And so this idea of understanding in this passage here is substantial.

Knowledge is important. Let's quickly cover verse 15, the father of all creation. So when Bob taught this lesson, I raised my hand and I said that I think the father means something specific. I'm going to talk about why that is here because I've had time to study it before I said I'm winging it. This time I've had a chance to study it, so I'm looking at it.

I did happen to look at some other commentaries, and I will tell you that all the commentaries said there is some difficulty in interpreting this. So Bob is not crazy for saying, hey, I don't have a great confidence to just say it just means this one thing and dismiss everybody. First of all, I don't mean to assert that Bob is normally crazy when I say that.

But it is significant and part of Paul's argument of unity towards the Jews that he points to God's fatherhood for all creation. When the Jew thought about God's fatherhood, they went back to Abraham, but they didn't stop there. They also saw Genesis. And the idea of God being the father of all creation is substantial. On heaven and earth, that would have meant something to them substantially. Another thing that I think is important to look at culturally that we don't think of today.

How many of you have ever worked for a company that asks for you to sign away your intellectual property? In software, which I do as my job, every job I've ever taken I've had to sign off the rights for intellectual property. And we do it in passing. Bob? In a university setting it's complicated. Isn't it though? It's publicly funded, but yeah. Bob will testify to the complexity of it.

But culturally, at the time of this writing, and historically speaking, if you were the creator, you were the owner. And so the idea that God was the creator and owner also came with him being the namer. And so there's a culturally significant argument. So again, because there are ways that this could be argued in other directions, I think there's reason to say that there would be an ownership, a creatorship, and a namership.

That's not really a word. Let's not go too far there. We'll let Paul make up words. I'll try not to. The idea that's there is worth considering God as the creator, as being able to name things. What does he give Adam dominion of in the garden? All of the earth. He gives him dominion of all the earth. And then what does he ask him to do? He names it. Okay, that's significant because God was creator and God could name through ownership all of his creation. But he gives right and dominion to Adam to do that.

And so that's why I think that is one reasonable argument to substantiate this idea here. What we have here is no matter which direction you go with God being the father of all that are in heaven and earth, We can all agree that God is sovereign and created everything. And life flows from Him, no matter what our arguments are. So we have this idea here that God is the Father of all creation.

And if you were a Gentile and you prayed to a lesser God, this would have been, historically, a pretty weird prayer. You wouldn't pray these kinds of things to Zeus. You wouldn't pray these kinds of things, if you're in Ephesus, You wouldn't pray them to Artemis, right? You wouldn't pray these kinds of things.

But Paul does. So looking at verses 16 and 17, there's an interesting structure. My dad told me about this commentary by Harold W. Hohner. It's called Ephesians, an exegetical commentary. I highly recommend it. There's a few places my dad has Inimitable Way has sent me a list of a few places where he disagrees with him, but it's a really solid commentary with insights that reflect decades of studying. He put together this outline with 16-19 that I thought was worth sharing with you.

In verse 16 he has the request that God would grant to us, the church, to be strengthened by the power of His Spirit in the inner man. As Bob was saying, that we would be walking in the Spirit to have that life in the Spirit. In verse 17, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts, rooted and grounded in love.

That's the result. The prayer is for the request with that given result, but then for a purpose. So there's the three layers of this. The purpose there is that we may be able to comprehend with all the saints and result to know the love of Christ with the purpose of being filled with the fullness of God.

Now, we talked about the manifold wisdom. We talked about Paul's prayer in chapter one that we would have knowledge. There seems to be something that Paul is concerned about. He wants us to get big heads, doesn't he? No, no he doesn't. Why does Paul want us to have knowledge from God? To be equipped, for sure.

Years ago, I'm thinking we're coming on probably more than a decade ago, Mike Doyle was leading the main service He got up and he read a quote from the Hungry Hearts. I know that's a shocker. You guys just can't believe he would do that. One of the things that he read that Sunday morning, and I can't remember anything else about that Sunday morning, but I can remember this one thing because it rocked my world.

Spiritual growth happens when we understand what is true of us in Christ. So how do you grow spiritually? Do you memorize all the Bible? How do you grow spiritually? You take that manifold wisdom of God and you learn it. And His Holy Spirit makes it true in your life.

So we don't get the credit, right? This reminds me of a conversation last weekend. I was at the Narcan Diabetes Association meetings in Orlando. There are two people that I've aligned with who know the Lord. two women, one at Hopkins and one at Einstein, and we were sitting there having lunch together. And those two, I mean, I love them to death, both in the Lord and for their collegiality in science and medicine. all they could do is talk about everything going wrong in their lives.

I think the kind of perspective that maybe God's allowing that for a purpose. Not that I've got my eye on it, but the point is, just again what I said before, the mental wisdom of God's laid out in the circumstances that are there. to train us and mold us and conform us to the image of the Lord. Your heart goes out to them and they kind of share that with them. It kind of bounces off the wall. I think we've all been there. But knowing yourself and knowing who we are in Christ is really kind of putting things in the right perspective.

I share that only because it did a conversation. Well, when we talk about knowledge, and I think your illustration is useful, wisdom is not just knowledge, right? That's knowledge. Wisdom is knowledge applied. Listen, I know this is true. And this is what this looks like when I put tennis shoes on it.

And then you go to somebody who's like, I don't know. When we go to the word and we go to the scripture, and that's our authority, it's not anecdotes. Anecdotes are how you derive some pieces of opinion, but not necessarily information. I jokingly said on Facebook this week, not that anybody should care what I say on Facebook, that I'm an anecdote scientist. Because you've heard of data scientists. Anecdotes are small pieces of opinion, not necessarily facts or information.

And so what happens is at work we have test systems that don't have enough user data that reflects real user data. And so I joke that we have anecdotes, we don't have data. And so then QA finds defects for some reason. But I'm an anecdote scientist. But anecdotes are not what God is about. He is about truth and He is about love and manifesting that wisdom in our lives. But I want to emphasize one more thing because I think Paul's got a theme here. He says, may be able to comprehend with all the saints.

How many of you are ready to walk out of this room this morning knowing you can go it alone? I can't. I have to tell you in my weaknesses and in my lack of knowledge and lack of life experience, I desperately need each one of you. I don't know what you know everywhere. We have probably a Venn diagram of overlap. But I'm the weirdo that draws lines of infinity on the board and you might be thinking about the next five minutes, right? So we have, and there's no way I'm getting through this lesson.

I knew I was going to do this to myself with five minutes left. We have next here the multi-dimensional love. And I have to tell you, I love these verses and I cling to them with great excitement. Paul's writing about love here is powerful. It reaches to every dimension perfectly, as Roger said, infinitely and perfectly.

But it does so with a network effect. How many of you know what a network effect is? This is modern social vocabulary. But the thing about a network effect, how useful was the first fax machine? Anyone? Zero. First fax machine, useless. As soon as we had the second fax machine, we increased its effectiveness 100%. But the thing about the network effect with love is that, let's say God teaches me an important thing about love. He did.

When my dad had his 42nd birthday, I ran my Chevy love truck down the side of my parents' brand new to them Camry. And after making sure I was okay, my dad helped me buff the side of the car and make sure that things were sort of restored in a workable state. That's not a great birthday present, let me just say. Okay, at 42 his day that day was probably expecting a chef's salad. That is his go-to for birthday meals for decades now. And I made it about damaged vehicles.

And so I stood there, I think I was 16 or 17, somewhere in there. I'm not good at the math with birthdays. Crying in my parents' garage because there was love in a way that I had never understood it before. My dad had been living sacrificially for, well, At least at that point in time, 16 or 17 years for me, plus my siblings and my mom, and I didn't understand it.

But I learned it then, in a way. But guess what? Each one of you has love that you've learned in a special way, and I need to learn it through you. There's a togetherness again. And whose love is it? It's God's love through you, through me, through us together. And that's a powerful thing. So when we look at God's infinite love in all of the...

Paul uses four directions, which I love. I know Roger did the same thing I did. We looked it up. We're like, why did he do four? Because I'm familiar with the three axes and he decided to go all four directions. But I think it's worth calling out. I've got here quoted Colossians 3 verses 12 through 14. See if this isn't familiar with what we've been looking at here.

So as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone. just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you. Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity." Where are the gaps? Where are the gaps in between kindness and humility and gentleness and patience and bearing with one another? Where are they? I don't know.

But God has the perfect gap filler in love. It's multi-dimensional. and it gets to behave in his body in a way that is better than bondo. Have you ever seen the car accident with the little ding and they put bondo in it? It doesn't matter how deep it is, you can just put more bondo in there. Love is grander than bondo. Alright, we'll move quickly through 2021. Since it was last week, I feel less guilty about this.

But if God can do more than we ask, and Paul is asking for these things for the body, what does that mean about the plausibility for these things to happen? God can do more than we ask, Paul says. How plausible is it that God can do it? It's God. It's not just plausible, it's undeniable. It's a fact. It's a thing God will do.

He is able to do these things in us, and it's a powerful, powerful attitude, and it's a mindset change. Now, all of that is building up, and I want to just close with this last thought here. Setting up for chapter 4, one and growing to completeness. We talked about this even this morning. Paul's focus is continued from God's purpose and our growth to our unity as a body who has been made one in Christ.

Chapter 4 is going to talk about love, mercy, unity, and growth even further. How many of you Have the Chafer definition of grace memorized? The unmerited, unlimited blessings of God due to the totally adequate work of Christ on the cross? How do we know it's unlimited?

Chapter 4 is going to tell us. Chapter 4 has that answer in it. And so, we have a great amount of depth that we get to cover there, but it's going to be rooted in this idea of unity. It started in Chapter 2. Really, it even started in Chapter 1. and we're going to go into chapter four and we're going to talk about unity in an even deeper way.

Any other thoughts or questions? We've blitzed through chapters three, starring the eternity past. Nobody? All right, let's close in prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for the chance that we get to study your word. Thank you for the richness of what is in here and the richness of its impact on our lives individually and together. We do pray for the manifold wisdom that you've given us, that we would share the palette of colors of wisdom that you've given, and the richness of the multidimensionality of love. In Jesus' name, Amen.