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| Rev. Brian Wilkie |
Pastor of St. Andrew's Christian Community
Rockland, Ontario
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PODCAST LINK to CFRA
broadcast - Sunday, July 3rd, 2016:
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Broadcast Notes:
This
program is sponsored by Good News Christian Ministries, P.O. Box 184, Rideau
Ferry, ON K0G 1W0. I’m your host today,
Brian Wilkie of St. Andrew’s Christian Church in Rockland. As always, I want to start by thanking you,
our listeners; we are so grateful for your encouragement and support. Please remember that you can always visit our
website for materials to encourage and support you in your Christian walk, and
if you miss an episode of the show you can go to our website and download the
podcast or mp3 of our broadcast. Details
can be found on our website at www.gncm.ca.
Today I want to give a special shout-out
and a “Thanks” to Sandy Davidson who
has sponsored this program with a gift to Good News Christian Ministries. Thank you so much for your support.
A Prayer
For Today
Today’s
program is – I hope you’ll find it –
a gift to you, our listeners, because as a small group in the church that I
serve has been looking at the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, we found this
prayer within the letter of Paul to the Ephesians, and it’s a prayer he prays
for his church which I pray for my church which today is a prayer I pray for
you. This is what scripture has to say:
After Paul has
described the blessings that the Ephesians have received he says:
“For this
reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus, and your love
for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you
in my prayers. I keep asking that the
God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of
wisdom and revelation so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may
be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you,
the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably
great power for those of us who believe.
That power is like the working of His mighty strength which He exerted
in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in
the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and
every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one
to come. And God placed all things under
His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the Church, which is
His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.
This is the word of God.
We’re
going to take a look at how we can pray this prayer today for each other, for
our congregations, for the body of Christ as a whole, and we can even pray it
for the world.
So we’ll take a look at that in a few
minutes, but on the theme of prayer I’ve picked a few songs today which reflect
that theme and the first song is a version of Standing in the Need of Prayer sung by Carolyn Arends from her
album Love Was Here First. Would you listen to it with me?
- Standing in the Need of Prayer, Carolyn
Arends -
Carolyn
Arends, who we’ve just listened to, is one of my favourite artists in the
Christian music field, and she’s a Canadian living in Abbotsfort or Surrey, BC
area and has done a number of great albums.
But this Standing in the Need of
Prayer is an old spiritual that really expresses a timeless truth, because
we all need prayer, we all have needs
in our lives, and we are so encouraged and delighted when someone lifts up our
needs to the Lord in prayer.
We can
often look around and see other people in need of prayer, and, yep, they do
need prayer. The people around us are
people like us who find that daily life wears them down, that sometimes their
own sin is strong in their life, sometimes their attitude needs adjustment. But when it comes down to it, isn’t it us
that we can most fervently pray for, that we can recognize our own sin, and let
God operate on our souls first? Yes, I
stand in the need of prayer! Do you?
When
Paul sees the Ephesians and he sees the greatness of their faith, he wants to
pray for them. Very often, perhaps, we
let prayer be generated by an obvious need – when things happen worst, that may
be when we’re most inclined to pray. But
when things are going well, shouldn’t we also pray? Shouldn’t we continue to thank God, and praise
God, and shouldn’t we ask God to continue to build on what He’s already
doing?
This is exactly what Paul does in
his letter to the Ephesians and I truly believe that as this is God’s word,
this is not just Paul expressing his will, but this is the spirit of God
expressing the will of God through Paul in the words of scripture, because what
Paul prays for is such a fabulous prayer, what a great prayer for anybody,
because first of all he says, I give
thanks for you – I haven’t stopped giving thanks for you.
Do you have somebody in your life who just
doesn’t stop giving thanks for you?
People that know your weaknesses and strengths but are so glad that they
have you in their lives? It may be your
husband or wife, it may be your parents or your children. It may be a friend or it may be a pastor that
you’ve been supporting with your encouragement and praise. But you know what? There always is somebody that doesn’t stop giving thanks for you, and that’s our
Lord, Jesus Christ. You see, Paul isn’t
moved just by his own compassion and his own enthusiasm when he makes this
prayer for the Ephesians.
Paul is being
moved by his Lord, Jesus Christ; he’s being inspired by the Holy Spirit of God,
and it is God who is the most thankful person, the most thankful being, that
could ever exist. Jesus Christ is at the
right hand of God, interceding for you constantly. And the prayers that are stirred up in so
many people’s hearts, the prayers that are stirred up for you and for me, are
first of all stirred up by the Holy Spirit of God. God stirs up people to give thanks for you,
and I think I can say for all the other hosts of this program that we are
stirred up to give thanks for you, our listeners, for the people who are
praying for us and supporting us. We are
so thankful to be a part of helping you to grow in your faith, but your faith
also helps us to grow, and we remember you in our prayers as well.
I’d like to say I’m as good as Paul at this,
where he can say I haven’t stopped giving
thanks for you – but, like you, my prayer life can be intermittent from
time to time, but wouldn’t it be great to be at the place where we could say we
are continually praying, that whenever we turn our head and see something in
the world around us we have either a reason to give thanks and praise to God,
or in addition to giving thanks and praise we might also be able to lift up a
request to God for the need that we see around us. It’s Paul who turns to Jesus Christ and to His
Glorious Father and he asks something, that God would give something to the Ephesians. Now if you had a list of the top ten things
to give to somebody, to ask God for, it might not be the same thing, but I
would encourage you to look at the scriptures and let scripture teach you how
to pray for others, because Paul doesn’t ask for ordinary things.
The Ephesians are in the Roman Empire, and
Paul writes many times to churches saying he wants to strengthen them when they
are being persecuted, and so do the other apostles, Peter, John, and James,
encouraging the Christians to be courageous in persecution and to have God’s protection. But instead of asking for these things, at
this point, Paul says, I want God to give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation
so that you may know Him better. Paul
sees the great faith of the Ephesian people, and what he wants is for it to be
even greater. He wants them to know Jesus
more. He wants them not simply to
receive wisdom, but the Holy Spirit which brings wisdom with Him.
The Holy Spirit comes into us, and doesn’t
just deposit a few wise words, but lives in us and continues to pour wisdom and
revelation into our hearts, so that we can know the Glorious Father.
Do
you want to know God more? You may have
a little faith. You may in fact think
that you have no faith. Or you may think
that you have really learned a lot, that you know your Bible backwards and
forwards and you’ve served God faithfully.
It’s those people who know him best that seem to want to know him more.
But if you want to know God more, you can be assured that my prayer – just as
the prayer of Paul was for the Ephesians – my prayer for you is that you would
know Him better.
I pray that the words
that we speak over the radio show, and the words that you hear from your pastor
in your church at home and the other sermons you listen to, and the
conversations that you have with believers would build you up in the knowledge
and the love of Jesus Christ.
Paul
prays for another thing – he prays that not only would you know Jesus in the
present, he prays for the Ephesians that
the eyes of their heart would be enlightened so they would know the hope to
which God has called them, the glorious riches of His inheritance in the saints. You know, it’s important for us to know hope,
it’s important for us to understand that God is able to provide for us in this
life, but that He’s provided an even greater promise in eternity – that the
life to come is a hope, a glory that can keep us going when this life presents
its difficulties.
Let’s take a bit more
of a look at that after we listen to a song that speaks to us about the glory
and the wonder of who God is. This is the song How Majestic is Your Name from Maranatha! Music, A Collection of the Top 25 Worship Songs of
the Decade.
- How Majestic is Your Name, Maranatha!
Music -
We
were beginning to speak about the hope that we have in Christ. Paul praying that the Ephesian Christians
might have their eyes open, so they may see the hope, they would know the hope
to which they have been called. I’d like
you to know that hope as well, and I’d like to know it better myself, because
the hope that we have has been actually expressed in the song that we’ve just
heard. Our hope is in being face-to-face
with the majesty and the glory of our Lord.
Our hope is that we will see him face-to-face, be filled with His
perfect love, know him fully and enjoy him forever. God is the greatest being that could ever
exist.
Everything that does exist was
created by Him, and He is above them all, perfect in power, perfect in love,
perfect in glory and perfect in splendor, and our destiny is to spend eternity
with Him. It’s a great joy to consider
what pleasure, what goodness, what happiness will be ours in heaven, when we’re
face-to-face with Jesus. So many of the
jokes and casual conversations about heaven talk about streets of gold and
harps and clouds and all kinds of things, the Pearly Gates is an expression
that is part of our vocabulary as a culture, but these are not the joys of
heaven – the joy of heaven is God.
To
know God is to love him and to love him is to enjoy him. The hope that we have is very much like the
hope that Jesus Christ had. It says in
the scriptures that Christ endured a lot of things; He endured the Cross
itself, by keeping in His focus the glory that lay ahead of him.
I know that the glory that lay ahead of Jesus
Christ was to return to His Father, and sit at His right hand; I know that the
glory that belonged to Jesus and that He was looking forward to included the
existence that He had from all eternity with His Father, in perfect unity with
the Father, and the Holy Spirit; that just His being in heaven was so full of
glory, and yet He left that glory, came to earth and died on the Cross in order
to add to that glory, and the thing that He added to that glory was that He
would bring many sons with Him, many children of God would be saved through Him,
that many people would come to spend eternity with Him, and that Christ looks
forward to the hope that kept Him faithful through the Cross, and the hope of
glory was the hope of bringing you to be with Him forever.
One of God’s great pleasures in eternity is to
spend it with His people, with redeemed, glorified, perfected, wonderful people
that have come to Him and have started to enjoy an eternal friendship with
Him. Just as we look forward to spending
eternity with Jesus, Jesus looks forward to spending eternity with you. And so God wants you to know that the hope
that you have is through Jesus Christ.
If
your hope is in other things, that’s an insufficient hope, and if you hope, in
fact, to spend eternity with Jesus, it comes through faith in Him, through
turning to Him, through trust in Him. It
comes through the forgiveness that He’s offered through the Cross, it comes
through the cure that He’s offered through the Cross. And Paul goes on to pray for these Ephesians
that they would also know the power, the
incomparably great power that God has for those who believe. He says that the power that is working in you
who believe, although you may not feel it - some people feel the presence of
God from time to time, some people long for such an experience; but whether we
feel it or not, the great glorious power of God is in those who believe, and he
says that this power is like the working
of His mighty strength, the strength which He exerted when He raised Jesus
Christ from the dead.
The power
working in you is a resurrection power; more than that – this is the power that
not only raised Jesus from the dead but also seated him at the right hand in the heavenly realms; this is the
power that set Jesus Christ above all rule and authority and power and
dominion; this is the power that has raised Christ above every title that can
be given, so that He is called King of kings, Lord of lords, not only today but
in eternity.
So this power, by which God
placed all things under Christ’s feet and appointed Him to be head over
everything for the church’s body, this power is at work in those who believe,
this power to save us from sin, this power to keep us faithful into eternity,
this is at work in you and Paul’s prayer is that you would know it.
Well, this is my prayer for you as well. And I do pray that you would turn from time
to time to the first Chapter of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians and you would
read that prayer in verses 15 to 23 and pray it for somebody you know, or pray
it for a congregation, or pray it for a pastor, pray it for a missionary, pray
it for someone who doesn’t yet know Christ that they would know Christ, seeing what it is that God has Paul pray for
the Ephesians and take that as an example of how to pray for others. Well now, let’s ourselves turn to God in
prayer, and if you don’t mind I will repeat some of the words from our
scripture.
All Mighty God, I do give You thanks
that we have been given faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and that You’ve given
us love for all the saints. Lord, we
give thanks for one another, that You have shown Your love – the faithfulness
of Your love – by saving others, reminding us of Your love for us. Lord I pray that for all who are listening
today that You would grant the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that they may
know You better.
I also pray that the
eyes of each of our hearts might be enlightened in order that we would know the
hope to which You have called us, the riches of Your glorious inheritance in
the saints. And that we would also know
the incomparably great power that You are working in us who believe, which is
the same power that worked in Jesus Christ to raise him from the dead, to set
him at Your right hand and to put him above ever power and dominion and
authority in all creation, both in this present age and in the age to
come.
We thank You, Oh Mighty God, that
this is Your prayer for us, not just Paul’s, that this is Your word, and we
stand on it with confidence. In Jesus’
name. Amen.
Once
again, thank you, our listeners for your encouragement and support. You do keep us on the air week by week. If you can support our ministry financially we
certainly appreciate that. You can make
out a cheque to Good News Christian Ministries, P.O. Box 184, Rideau Ferry, ON,
K0G 1W0, or you can donate through our website, especially if you’re already on
our website listening to the podcast of this broadcast.
Once again thank you to Sandy Davidson for your support of this program today, and I want
to encourage each one of you to worship in a church where the gospel is soundly
proclaimed and lived out with compassion, integrity and resolve. And so, to conclude our program, I’d like you
to listen to a song called Take My Hand
Precious Lord. This is sung by a
Winchester native, George Beverly Shea from his album I’d Rather Have Jesus.
I do pray that the Lord will
hold your heart and you would know Jesus personally and profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside deep within your
heart, and may the heavenly Father surround you with His constant and abiding
and accompanying love.
- Take My Hand Precious Lord, George
Beverly Shea -
Rev. Brian Wilkie
St.
Andrew's Christian Community,
Rockland, Ontario
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listen to the above broadcast, click on the following link:
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