Seeing God at Work in Our Mess

Life is messy! Your life is messy. My life is messy! We are all just a mess! The messiness that is in each of our lives often is a result of our own sin or just the nature of living in a sinful world. We look at our lives and we are often times asking God to remove the mes from our lives. We see the mess as a hindrance to serving him. The mess that is in our life or even the messiness of someone else’s life is flowing into our life and causing inconveniences and destruction of our plans.

A week ago God allowed me to attend a fellowship hosted by Arch Ministries. Each year the focal point is church planting and disciple-making. Each year four general sessions take place where a different speaker shares truth from God’s Word related to a topic chosen for that particular year. In between those sessions are ample fellowship time, meals, sessions dedicated to prayer, gospel testimony on God working in current ministries and of young church plants around the country, and workshop sessions.

This year the theme was Preparing Today for a Healthy Tomorrow from 2 Timothy 2:2 “2 The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

They took this theme and narrowed it down with the general session speaker to how do we prepare for a tomorrow where loss and lament are necessary. The purpose was to help each other know how to minister biblical truth in the middle of the messiness of life.

The first session was preached from Psalm 139. The pastor speaking began his preaching by sharing that his first daughter was born without thigh bone, femur and fibulia yet had a foot at the end of her leg. At four they had to amputate most of the foot to accommodate easier prosthetics with a joint in her knee. He goes on to share the story of how God worked through all of this. He uses Psalm 139 to explain how God has designed for us in life (God knows us, is with us, made us, thinks about us, and changes us.). Life can be messy and we all have areas where we limp in life.

The next speaker shared with the toughness of losing his wife to cancer when they were both 50 and a couple years after that his adult daughter died of cancer. He is now remarried to a widow who lost her husband prematurely and they met through church planting endeavors. He shares from Hebrews 11 that trouble an trials are a part of life under the curse. He shared while going through his mess one must trust in the Lord, hold to the truth from the Lord, and live with thanksgiving to the Lord. He stressed that we all need to be getting ready for trouble because trouble is coming. Messiness in life will come. Are you growing in your walk with God today so that you are ready when the trouble comes.

Building on that Tuesday evening before the speaker got up to preach, a pastor and his wife were asked to give a testimony of some recent that they had and are still going through. This pastor and his wife share the story of their 28 year old daughter who loved the Lord struggle with mental health. She had serious struggles and one day she went for a walk while visiting her parents and younger siblings like she normally did only this time she did not come back when she was planning on going shopping with her sister. They began searching for her at a park where they found her car. Her teenage brother found her lying next to a railroad track lifeless. The pastor and the family heard him yelling and they all then arrived to see their daughter and sister had take her life with a gun.

In this moment the pastor described how lifeless and dark life felt. He and his wife shared the spiritual struggles they went through and 6 months later though better are still working through.

Life is messy.

The Speaker then got up and began preaching from the text we will get to this morning. He first though told his story of how he chose to marry a young lady with cistic fibrosis. He had to work through the thought of marrying a lady who would most likely die young. She lived into her 30’s and passed away. The pastor was transparent on the difficulty of going through the loss even when it was inevitable. A couple years later he went to the process of figuring out whether to remarry. One day he was with a close friend as a guest speaker in Alaska and God gave him that spark again about a lady in the church. She was an Alaskan State Trooper, and a single mom who had never been married. He struggled with whether to go forward with dating and then once dating to get married. As a man in ministry he received a lot of different advice. One day he went to his dad and his dad gave him a list of things to think through. He went to a cabin and got alone to spend time with God. He shares how God began to peel away the layers of sin in his life. God showed him the sinful messiness in his life. He shares how God in his love and grace showed him that Christ needed to be the totality of his life. He was not any different from this lady he was dating. They both had the messiness of sin from past and they both struggled with sin in the present. They were both sinners. By God’s grace he had saved them. She loved the Lord and was immensely active in her church showing that love through serving. God then gave him a peace and they got married.

Life is messy!

The last speaker shared how he had to in the last year do church discipline on a close friend who responded by completely rejecting the friendship. He went to Matthew 1:1-8 to emphasize that we all live in a mess.

Matthew 1:1–8 NASB95

1 The record of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham: 2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. 3 Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, Perez was the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram. 4 Ram was the father of Amminadab, Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon. 5 Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse. 6 Jesse was the father of David the king. David was the father of Solomon by Bathsheba who had been the wife of Uriah. 7 Solomon was the father of Rehoboam, Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asa. 8 Asa was the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah.

Yes, this is a longer than normal “introduction”. God taught me so much in this week of being at the Arch Fellowship that God has laid it on my heart to encourage all of us with some of the truths.

Life is messy!

When you and I go through messes and trials. We need to humble ourselves and let God show us the depth of our flesh. We need to allow God through his Word to change us!

Ephesians 3:14-21 our text for this morning helps us do just that.

Ephesians 3:14–21 NASB95

14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. 20 Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, 21 to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

Our big idea this morning is:

We need the totality of Christ in our inner life in order to glorify God in our mess.

So often we want the mess to go away and we wonder if God is their. We ask as each of these speakers struggled with, where is God?

I am here to share with all of us from God’s Word. God is here! When we go through a mess we make it through by being filled with the fullness and power of God. In this prayer of Paul’s we see intense passion for himself and the church to have an ever deepening relationship with God and his Word. The passion in Paul’s prayer is seen with how he describes his posture. Kneeling to pray is not a requirement. However, here with Paul and multiple places in both the OT and NT when someone went to their knees or even all the way to the floor a more ardent passion is seen through the person praying. Paul’s passion in talking to God in prayer flowed from the humble realities of God’s truth and His heavenly father with whom had healed his soul and saved him from eternal punishment in hell separated from God forever. Paul came to God in humility, reverence, and submission. Paul understood the messiness in his life could not be dealt with by him but could only be fixed by God. He understood that God cares for His children, each and every one of them. He uses the word father to describe God. He proceeds to state God’s complete knowledge of each and every family and their name. In the ancient near east the term father carried with it dignity and authroity. Paul was recognizing this in God. It is this one and true God, an almighty father that Paul expresses his passion for how we become more like Christ. It is this, living with the totality of God as our focus that strengthens our inner man. It is with this passion that Paul through prayer lays out for us what we need to get through the messiness we face in life!

The first can be found in Ephesians 3:16-17, Paul prays for God’s strength be granted to us through the Holy Spirit.

I. We need to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit’s power, 16-17a.

In order for the Christian (US) to be able to glorify God in their mess, we need God’s strength. We need our inner lives to be strengthened. Sin and our flesh seek to wreak havoc on our lives. The multitude of avenues by which our flesh and the influence of Satan attacks our hearts, attacks the core of our spiritual life is more than can be numbered. If we are to live in a way that glorifies God in our messiness, we must be able to identify and conquer the flesh bents in our life.

What is a flesh bent you may ask? A flesh bent is the direction of sin your flesh and life leans into when not right with God. It is where your life begins to turn when your eyes are of Christ, the Author and Finisher of our faith. So I do ask all of us this morning, have you taken the time to ask God to help you identify those flesh bents and for his strengthening in your inner man to conquer those bents. Yes, this side of eternity you will always have a bent toward some type of sin when God is not the totality of your life, but you can conquer them and progressively eliminate their power in your life. Life is messy but we keep on being passionate about God’s truth that Christ is now our mediator going to make supplication and petition on our behalf. What a power duo! Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit mediating and interceding on our, on your behalf to our great God. It is this power that strengthens our inner man!

One commentator likened this truth Paul is praying for to an ill or physically unable individual needing to be strengthened before they can enjoy all that life offers. When someone has major surgery they have to take physical therapy to help strengthen their weakness. When we as Christians are weakened by the mess of sin and its affects we need our inner man to be strengthened in order to receive the blessings God desires to give us.

When you and I take the time to examine the blessings of God it ought to strike a motivation in us to want God’s strengthening in our lives. When we see these blessings Paul enumerates in Ephesians 1-2 we can’t help but see our inadequacy to be strengthened on our own. Two elements exist on how we as Christians have our inner man strengthened.

The first of the two Paul discusses is God’s riches. What optimism we can have knowing that everything is God’s. The power that strengthens our inner man is the power that created sustains the entirety of Creation.

...[the riches of his glory’. That glory is God’s radiance or splendour, which conveys the ideas of the perfection of his character and activity]. His glory is often conjoined with power (Rom. 6:4; Col. 1:11) and parallelled with his goodness (cf. Exod. 33:22 with v. 19). (Peter Thomas O’Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 256–257.)

God is glorified through our inner man being strengthened.

The second is God’s power. God uses the Holy Spirit as the agency with which he dispenses his power to us. Throughout the NT power and the Holy Spirit are consistently linked. In Acts 1:8 Luke proclaims that it is the Holy Spirit that comes and gives the disciples the power to go into all the world and preach the gospel.

Acts 1:8 (NASB95)

8 but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

In Romans 15:19 Paul proclaims that it is in the power of the Holy Spirit that he was able to fully preach the gospel of Christ.

Romans 15:19 (NASB95)

19 in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Spirit; so that from Jerusalem and round about as far as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

The power of the Holy Spirit is the agent by which our inner man is strengthened. So what is this inner man that Paul is speaking of?

The inner man would have been understood by the original readers as center of a person’s life. It referred to their focal point. It is this center that needs regular strengthening to oppose the sin in the battle and struggle we face daily (Romans 7:21 “21 I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.”). Paul in other letters speaks of the inner man needing to be renewed daily (2 Corinthians 4:16 “16 Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day.”).

The Holy Spirit permanently indwells the believer. Paul at the beginning of Eph 3:17 shares a synonymous explanation of the Spirit strengthening the inner man. He uses the term heart here referring to the seat of a persons affections, the control center for their life. It is here that Christ dwells. It is through this that the Holy Spirit strengthens us to give control of all that we are and do to Christ. The more the Spirit empowers our inner man the more our life is transformed in to Christ’s likeness.

Exalting Jesus in Ephesians (We Need to Be Strengthened by the Spirit’s Power (3:16–17a))

Carson says,

When Christ by his Spirit takes up residence within us, he finds a moral equivalent to trash, black and silver wall paper, and a leaking roof. He sets about turning this residence into a place appropriate for him, a home for which he is comfortable.… When a person takes up long-term residence somewhere, their presence eventually characterizes that dwelling.… When Christ first moves into our lives, he finds us in bad repair. It takes a great deal of power to change us; and that is why Paul prays for power.… [He is] transforming us into a house that pervasively reflects his own character. (Spiritual Reformation, 186–87)

We can praise the Lord for how we have the Holy Spirit and God’s riches to streghten our inner man. Paul then starts the second half od Eph 3:17 to explain that we need the power of God to grasp the glorious love of God.

II. We need the Holy Spirit’s power to grasp God’s love, 17b-19

God’s love is immense. Scripture tells us that it is beyond our complete comprehension. As our inner man is strengthened and Christ dwells in our hearts Paul expresses the importance of being rooted and established in God’s love so that we will better comprehend the love of Christ. Being rooted and grounded in God’s love provides the ability to love others. Our lives need to be rooted and structured on the love of God. It is this love that we ought to look at our next door neighbor, it is this love that we are to look at our coworker, husband, wife, child, grandchild, church member, and the list could continue. Paul gives more specific detail on why we need to be rooted and grounded in love. Paul’s detail is laid out with three clauses denoting purpose.

1. may be able to better comprehend the greatness of God’s love;

The four dimensional description Paul provides is to emphasize the greatness and as one put it, “the infinitude of God’s love.” God’s love is incalculable. One commentator described these dimensions as:

Ephesians—The Mystery of the Body of Christ (A Prayer for Love (vv. 17b-19a))

1) A love which is wide enough to embrace the world. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

2) A love which is long enough to last forever (1 Corinthians 13:8 Love never fails... ). As Spurgeon said, “It is so long that your old age cannot wear it out, so long your continual tribulation cannot exhaust it, your successive temptations shall not drain it dry; like eternity itself it knows no bounds.”7

3) A love which is high enough to take sinners to Heaven (1 John 3:1–2 “1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” “1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.”).

4) A love which is deep enough to take Christ to the very depths to reach the lowest sinner (Philippians 2:8 “8 Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” ).

The Four Magnitudes describe an infinite, incomprehensible love. In A. W. Tozer’s words,

… because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning, because he is eternal, his love can have no end, because he is infinite it has no limit, because he is holy it is the quintessence of all spotless purity, because he is immense, his love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea.… 8

2. to know Christ’s love

Paul is not praying for the Ephesians to have a stronger love for Christ but rather to have stronger understanding and knowledge of God’s love for them. He first mentions just seeking to comprehend the greatness of God’s love and now turns to knowing God’s love more personally. The level of knowledge here is not just an academic level but rather grasp God’s love in an experience type of way. What does it mean to experience God’s love? First, experienceing God’s love is not mysticism. If you emphasisze experience too heavily than you can fall into all sorts of false teaching and heresy. God’s love will never contradict what God’s Word reveals. Thus, our experience of God’s love must be seen through the lens of Scripture. Second, experienceing God’s love is not something to be avoided. Their are some afraid to over emphasize experience that they end up describing God as cold hearted.

So what does experienceing God’s love look like?

The Christian is secure in Christ, 17b; Paul also states in Ephesians 1:13 “13 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise,” .

The love of God surpasses knowledge; we will never experience it to the fullest but we need to keep marvelling at God’s love and rest in the forgiveness of God. Marvelling at God’s love and standing in awe of God’s love is vertical in its experience. We can also experience God’s love horizontally with those around us. We need to live with same love God shows us—patient, forgiving, and forbearing(Ephesians 4:2–3 “2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing tolerance for one another in love, 3 being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”).

3. be filled with the fullness of God

As we come to know God’s love more fully and live it out we will grow in spiritual maturity and better grasp the totality of God!

Exalting Jesus in Ephesians We Need Power to Grasp Christ’s Love (3:17b–19)

Paul wants them to know the love of God in Christ to the end that they might “be all that God wants them to be” or “be spiritually mature” (Carson, Spiritual Reformation, 195).

We cannot be mature spiritually unless we grow in knowledge and experience the power and love of God! Paul later in this letter encourages the Ephesian church to continue being filled (controlled) by the Spirit of God. As we are filled with the fullness of God we are to continue growing up into Christ until we fullness(Ephesians 4:13–16 “13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. 14 As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; 15 but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”). God is growing us to maturity through His Son, Jesus Christ! You and I along with all Christians will not grow and mature in Christ without knowing and experiencing the power and love of God in Christ! We need His fullness in order to be like him!

If we are to love our neighbors, our church, our families and friends, our coworkers and any we come across in this fallen and sin-broken world we NEED the fullness of God’s power and love!

Pastor David Brock said this during his sermon, “May our inner man be yielded to the totality of the glory of God.” What a great summary of these verses! Our inner man, our heart needs to always be yielding to the totality of God’s glory. God’s glory represents all that God is! It is His character being radiantly reflected!

It is in these final two verses Paul puts together the hope we have because of God’s love and power. We see that God’s maturing us and his power and love work greater than we could ever imagine. God works in a way that will glorify him. Let’s now examine why we can hope in the greatness of God’s love and power.

III. We need to live with hope in the greatness of God’s power and love, 20-21.

We live with hope because of God’s ability to do above what we can comprehend. Can you think of a time where you were going through something in life and asked God for help? You thought that God was going to answer in a variety of logical ways but when the finality of the situation was completed by God it was nothing like you expected. See, God does this even in the messiness of life he providentially allows in your life. So often we struggle to hope in the middle of our messiness. We struggle with seeing God. We struggle with trusting God. We retreat into our selfishness, we lean toward our flesh bents, we run to human assistance, we neglect to truly see God’s power and love. We just want it to be over. The mess is just gotten messier! How can God love me and let me go through this mess? In this moment part of the struggle is neglecting to see your messiness and your sinfulness. We fail to see that God is at work in the mess and always is at work! We are so focused on the mess and the process we see needs to happen according to us to get out or we just need God to get us out so everything will be good that we miss God’s working that is above and beyond what we are even asking of him!

This work he is doing is according the immense power that we have in us through the Spirit and Christ who dwells in us! WE CAN HOPE BECAUSE GOD’S POWER TRULY WORKS ABOVE ANYTHING WE CAN IMAGINE!

It is through this working that God is glorified! God wants to receive glory through us—the church for all eternity. It is God’s power that does the work!

Even in our messiness and the messes we go through “God is able to do extraordinary things through ordinary people by His power at work within them. (Tony Merida, Exalting Jesus in Ephesians (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2014), 91.).”

God’s love and power will forever bring him glory!

Conclusion

To begin this morning I shared illustration of the messiness in 5 different pastor’s lives. The messiness that was shared by them is not unique to a pastor but is true in it’s own messy uniqueness in others lives. Each of these men while sharing testimony used God’s Word to detail their own social, personal and spiritual struggles due to the messiness in their life. It is in these messes that we see our own personal and spiritual messiness when see the physical mess from God’s perspective.

Paul lays out in his prayer for the Ephesian church the need to yield to the totality of God to the glory of God. Our heart, our inner man, the seat of our affections needs to be yielded to God! We are being filled with the all fulness of God. The more we know God’s love and power, the more we experience God’s love and power the more we see how wretched we are before God. We see the true messiness of our inner man. We see that God’s love and power has saved us from that punishment of that sinful messiness. We see that though we are saved by God’s wondrous grace, the messiness of sin in the world brings into our lives messes that God desires us to live out our faith in him by resting in his love for us and trusting in his power over the mess.

Spiritual growth will not happen apart from yielding to God’s power and love. Paul says because of this doctrinal truth that we are to walk worthy of the calling we have received and to do so in a specific way. We can’t without knowing and experiencing God’s power and love. We do this all so that God is glorified!

So Christian, today, what has God revealed to you about your life? What does the messiness of sin look like in your life? Are you willing to truly agree with what the mirror of God’s Word has revealed to you this morning? In preparing and studying this text this week God showed me areas in my life where the messiness of sin was winning. I need God’s power and love! You need God’s power love!

As God reveals the messiness of your sin, how are you then responding to the situational messes that God has providentially brought into your life?

Do you wonder if God is at work or even present? Are you trying to use human reasoning and logic to clean the mess up? Are you focused on getting rid of the mess rather than being content in the mess and letting God work and mature you?

Maybe this morning God providentially does not have you going through a mess? How are you handling the messiness of your sin and preparing for the time when the mess does come? The mess, the trial, the difficulty will come and when it does will you let this text richly work in you or will you be scrambling and maybe even chaotic in your response because you were not spiritually ready.

To be ready is to be growing in the knowledge and experience of God’s love and power!

We need to submit to the totality of Christ in our inner life in order to glorify God in our mess.

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