A New Hope

[0:00] Today we're talking in Ephesians about a new hope, a hope that we could have never known until the coming of Jesus Christ.

[0:10] And so we read now from the Old Testament a little bit about this hope foreshadowed in Isaiah 11 verses 1 to 6. Here God's word for us. There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his root shall bear fruit.

[0:26] And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

[0:39] He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. And he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

[0:55] This shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins. The wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion, and the fattened calf together, and a little child will lead them.

[1:09] Let's pray together. God we long for a world where the wolf and the lamb shall dwell together, and where little children shall lead them.

[1:22] We can't imagine what this might be like. A kingdom established by the stump of Jesse, by the son of David, by the king above all kings, the true authority over all authorities.

[1:34] This is the true kingdom above all kingdoms. It's your kingdom, God. A place where lion and lambs dwell together, a place of peace, of righteousness, of justice.

[1:45] We come today longing for it. We feel ourselves both citizens of the world, and citizens of your kingdom. I simply asked this morning that you would reshape our desires, that you would enlighten our eyes, that you would make us long for the pearl of great price that is the gospel.

[2:06] You are our hope. That's our confession today, Lord. We ask, Father, in light of that, that you would give us a great vision of hope for our church plants, for Cornerstone, and for Tom and his work, for Charlene, for these dates that are upcoming.

[2:21] God, we ask that you would bless them, that you would bless this plant, that you would bless that part of the city, and that you would bring forth people that you've called out of darkness into light.

[2:33] I pray this for all of us, that we would have a vision for our workplaces, for our city center, for our schools, Lord, and that you would begin this vision, this new hope in our hearts this morning.

[2:47] We ask for the spirit of hope. We ask for the spirit of wisdom. We ask for the spirit of enlightenment to see the world the way you see the world. So we pray for the ministries of our churches.

[2:57] We pray for Derrick at Smith and we pray, Lord, now that you would come and meet with us by this Holy Spirit that has become the spirit of Christ in the power of His death and resurrection, that we would believe and that we would grasp hold of, that we would not merely assent to truth claims, but that we would love you and all of our being from our head to our toes.

[3:23] We ask that you would do this work in us today, Lord Jesus, and we ask it in His name. Amen. And now we come to the fulfillment of this promise in Isaiah chapter 11 that Paul talks about in Ephesians chapter 1.

[3:35] So if you have a Bible turned with me to Ephesians chapter 1, we've been working through Ephesians in our morning service and we'll read verses 15 to 23 together.

[3:46] It's also found in your sheet if you want to read it there. This is God's word to us. For this reason, because I've heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you.

[3:59] Remembering you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation and the knowledge of Him.

[4:09] Having the eyes of your heart enlightened that you may know what is the hope to which He has called you. What are the riches of His glorious inheritance and the saints over all things to the church.

[4:19] And what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe. And according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in this age, but also in the one to come.

[4:40] And He put all things under His feet and gave Him His head, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. This is God's word for us.

[4:51] Before we look at this text, we're going to sing together a passage from Psalm 8 that Paul actually quotes in verses 20 to 23 in Ephesians that we just read there about Jesus authority as the second Adam.

[5:05] So we'll stand together now and sing from Psalm 8. In all the earth, O Lord our Lord, how glorious is your name. Let's stand and sing.

[5:15] The tune is Kilmarnock. In all the earth, O Lord our Lord, how glorious is your name.

[5:31] For you have set up above the heavens your glory and your fame.

[5:45] I ask myself what then is man that you should give him thought.

[5:59] The Son of man that you to him such gracious care have brought.

[6:14] You made him little less than those who dwell in heaven above.

[6:28] And you have crowned and honored him with glory and with love.

[6:43] You gave him charge of all the works created by your hand.

[6:58] And everything that you had made, you gave him to command.

[7:13] Please be seated. Well, this passage is a prayer.

[7:28] It's Paul's prayer for a church that he had planted for the course of three years, some years ago in his past, and now he is in prison.

[7:41] He's bound up in chains, he tells us at the end of the book. And these are discouraged churches. Paul's been arrested.

[7:51] He's sitting on death row in Rome. He's in the darkness of a cage, of a jail cell. And one of the reasons that discouragement is cropping up is because, and if you don't know the history, you've at least heard of Nero.

[8:06] Nero has been emperor for seven years now in the Roman Empire. And in two years from the time that Paul writes this letter, the great neuronic persecution will start.

[8:18] The neuronic persecution was Nero dipping Christians into oil and hanging them and burning them alive. And that will go on for two years and he will kill four years and he will kill hundreds and if not thousands of Christians.

[8:36] These are getting hot, literally. And scholars are baffled by Ephesians chapter one because, look, it's bad Greek grammar.

[8:50] The whole of chapter one that we've been working through is literally four sentences in Greek. The first sentence is 202 words long. And this is just not like Paul.

[9:01] He doesn't write like this anywhere else in his letters. It's literally him pouring word over word, claws over claws, like a cascading waterfall of repetition.

[9:14] And a lot of scholars look at this and they're just like, this just doesn't look like Paul's normal writing. But look, think about this. He's in prison.

[9:25] He's bound up in a dark cage, wrapped in chains. And do you remember the words that he keeps using in this passage? He says things like this. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who's blessed us with every spiritual blessing.

[9:42] We have a glorious inheritance that he's lavished upon us. We have been called into the riches of his glorious inheritance. Look, it sounds more like a man walking through a rose garden, sipping on his favorite wine and writing poetry about God than it does a man caged in a jail cell.

[10:01] It just doesn't sound like that. Look, he's like Gandalf letting himself fall into the minds of Moria with a complete calmness and serenity over his face because he knows that if he lets himself fall, Frodo will escape free.

[10:21] He's like that. There's this sense about him. There's this transcendence of circumstance in this prayer. Look, that's what makes this prayer truly great. It's one of the greatest prayers in all of history.

[10:37] And so we're going to ask three questions about this prayer. It's a prayer for the Ephesians, but look, it's a prayer for us. He's praying for us.

[10:47] What does this prayer say and why? What's the object of our hope in this prayer and what's the power behind our hope? So first, why does Paul pray this prayer?

[10:57] What does he pray and why does he pray it? So we just established that Paul's in dire circumstances. Dier circumstances are building an emphasis. And look, this is not a small group type prayer.

[11:10] It's not the type of prayer that we normally pray when we're in small groups. If you notice, there's nothing here about praying for sick people.

[11:21] There's nothing here about praying for daily bread. There's nothing here about praying for politics. He's not asking for a new emperor. He's not asking for Nero to get displaced. Nothing like that.

[11:32] And the point is, it's not because these things aren't important to pray for. We know that they are, don't we? We just prayed for them in the Lord's Prayer. Jesus literally taught us to pray for our daily bread.

[11:42] We know that these things are important to pray for. But look, he prays like this precisely because he understands circumstances so well.

[11:53] Life is hard, right? The sick may be healed today. We pray for that. But they're going to die tomorrow.

[12:05] After Nero, something worse is coming in Rome. Circumstances are always in flux, always. He doesn't know who's going to be here today and not be back next week.

[12:19] He doesn't know who's going to bury a child this year. Look, he doesn't know whose marriage is falling apart. At the same time, he doesn't know who's going to stand before the altar and refurbish St.

[12:30] Columbus and vow the covenant of marriage and be married for a wonderful 60 years this year. And he doesn't know who's going to bring in a child, a first born into the world this year for the first time, and it'd be a glorious blessing.

[12:43] But what he does know is that all of these things are going to happen. I don't know if any of you guys watched the recent BBC war and peace drama.

[12:55] I'm sure some of you did. But at the very end of it, and I haven't read Tolstoy's book. I'm just too scared to commit to 1200 pages, I guess. But at the very end of it, Pierre has this line, and I honestly have no idea if Tolstoy actually says this in the book.

[13:10] But he ends by saying this, life is beautiful. And as long as we have life, we have happiness. And that's true. Life is beautiful.

[13:21] But Jesus says to us on our call to worship this morning, come to me, all of you who are heavy and who are weary laden. He knows you're heavy and weary laden.

[13:31] Both of these things are true. This is our light. This is circumstances. They're always changing. They're always in flux. And Paul comes to this, and he doesn't pray about our circumstances precisely because he's praying for something bigger than our circumstances that will help us have peace no matter the stage of our circumstances.

[13:52] You see, he's praying something that transcends all of these things because, look, he just knows that we're going to have them all, good days and bad.

[14:03] All right. So the question is, what's the content of this prayer then? He's transcending circumstances, but what is he praying? The first thing to notice is this, to whom does he pray?

[14:17] And it says to us that he prays to the Father of glory, not the Father of death, not the Father of disease, not the Father of disaster, the Father of goodness and beauty and truth.

[14:32] And then what does he pray for? And this is what he says. If you come with me to verse 16 and 17, he prays for the spirit of wisdom, for the spirit of revelation and the knowledge of him, and that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened.

[14:53] Look, what he's doing here is this. This is something more than merely intellectual ascent. Okay? He's praying that the Holy Spirit would make you see something, something that you have never seen before, that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened, something that you can't see, that still veiled over your eyes, would be opened up before you.

[15:19] And he calls this the spirit of wisdom on the one hand and of the spirit of revelation on the other. Now, what does he mean by this?

[15:31] It's not simply that he's praying that you would believe in Jesus. Okay? How do we know this? Well, because the very opening of this letter, he says that he's writing the letter to all the saints, right?

[15:43] And saints aren't like super duper Christians. Okay? They're just Christians. They're just people that believe in Jesus. You're a saint today if you believe on Christ.

[15:54] All right? He's praying to the saints number one. He's praying for people who believe in Jesus. And he says this in verse 15. He says, the two things I'm thankful for is for your faith in Jesus Christ and for the fact that you love the saints, right?

[16:08] So he's assuming this. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ today and you love the saints, he's praying for you. But look, he's praying for something more than that.

[16:21] He's not just praying that you would believe Jesus. He's praying for something you don't yet see. He's praying that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened.

[16:31] Not your eye. You can't see what he's talking about with your physical eyes. It's something in the eyes of the heart that needs to be seen that we don't yet see. Our eyes are dulled is the point behind this.

[16:47] And look, we know this. When we first come to believe, when we first say yes to Jesus, right?

[16:58] We don't wake up the very next morning and imbibe all the truths of the gospel, right? We don't just wake up the next morning and know what it is to feel the immeasurable greatness of his power.

[17:13] And look, to be quite frank, many of us who have been Christian for years still don't feel that way, right? You wake up on Monday morning and you just don't feel the immeasurable greatness of his power, right?

[17:29] You wake up tired and hungry and you go to work and you eat and you come home and you eat some more and you watch the BBC and you go to bed, right?

[17:40] We don't feel the immeasurable greatness of the power. There's something here that Paul's praying for us that we just don't see even after we say yes to the truth claims of Jesus Christ.

[17:51] It's something more than that. There's something we're missing. We wake up and we don't see the most real thing of all.

[18:03] And that's the principle of all of life, the underlying fact of all of reality is the kingdom of God. It's the principle of life.

[18:14] But we're just dull to it, even as Christians. In 1992, a guy named Edwin Abbott wrote a book called The Flatlands.

[18:25] I don't know if any of you maybe have heard of that book, but it's a really interesting book, what he did in it is he took the perspective of a two-dimensional world, right?

[18:35] So a world that's got no depth, only length, height, width. One of those two are the same as the other, but height and width, I think. No depth, right?

[18:47] And so he takes the main character to be literally just this two-dimensional square named Square and very creative. And this two-dimensional square goes out into the world searching for something that's bigger than him, right?

[19:04] Searching for something, some other realm, some other place that he can find that will help him make sense of his own two-dimensional world. And he goes out and you can guess what kind of a world he discovers, a three-dimensional world, right?

[19:20] The world we live in. Well, we might live in more dimensions than that. Who knows, scientists are telling us all sorts of things about it. But a world with depth, not just height and width, but depth.

[19:31] And he goes and he finds a square in this three-dimensional world that has depth and the square talks to him, this 2D square talking to this 3D square.

[19:41] And the 2D square says, look, I hear you speaking, but I can't see you. And the 3D square tries to explain to him, look, you can't see me because you live in a world that doesn't have the concept of a third dimension.

[19:56] You just can't understand it. So just listen to me and know that what I'm telling you is that the reason for your existence is that you're living inside of my three-dimensional world.

[20:09] But the 2D square is so frustrated that he can't see it, that he can't understand it, that he can't grasp it, that he ends up just wanting to do nothing else than kill the 3D square.

[20:20] If he could just find it, he would just kill it. He's so frustrated. Look, it's not that we're missing the 4 or 5D world that God lives in out there.

[20:30] That's not the point. The point is that we're missing eternity, omnipresence, the God who is the principle of all existence, the omnipresent God, the principle of life, the Creator, the purpose behind marriage, the purpose behind architecture, art, science, love, beauty, goodness, and truth.

[20:53] He is the principle. The kingdom of God is the real reality behind all of it. The point of Paul's prayer is this, that you wouldn't miss right now, even as a believer in Jesus Christ, today the certainty that the kingdom of God is the most real thing on earth.

[21:13] It's more real than anything else that we see. It's more real. Now, how do you get these eyes to see it like this?

[21:24] How do you get these eyes? Paul's answer is the very centerpiece of the prayer. The very center of this whole text, the very centerpiece of the prayer is found in this one particular clause that you might have hope in his calling, that you might have hope in his calling.

[21:47] Now, what is hope? What is hope? Hope for Paul is not what we mean by hope normally. It's something different.

[21:59] What we normally mean by hope is something more like, I really hope she says yes tonight. You know what I'm talking about. That kind of hope. It's hope, it's wishing for something in the future that you're not quite sure is going to happen.

[22:15] But for Paul, hope means something else. Hope is an assurance. Hope is a certainty. Hope is sure.

[22:26] Hope is when you have an object out in the future that's guaranteed to you, that you know. It's absolutely certain, right?

[22:36] But at the same time, it's only something that you can see with the eyes of your heart. Now, how do we understand the content of this hope, the centerpiece of the prayer? What's the object of the hope?

[22:46] What is this great something, this wisdom, this revelation, this enlightenment? What is it? We still don't know yet. He still hasn't told us. He gives us three clauses in verse 18 and 19 that you might have hope in his calling, that you would know the riches of his glorious inheritance, and that you would know the surpassing greatness of his power.

[23:09] Now, just let's do a little bit of hard work here for a second. Just notice this. When he says that you might have hope in his calling, the next two clauses at the end of verse 18 and then into verse 19 are explaining to you what the hope is.

[23:29] Okay? So when he says you could read it something more like this, your hope, which is yours if you are called by God, if you're a believer in Christ this morning, your hope, which is yours, is his glorious inheritance, which you are guaranteed because of his great power.

[23:51] Okay? In other words, your hope is his inheritance. And you have it because he's very powerful because God in Jesus Christ is very powerful.

[24:03] That's what he's saying. So he's explaining what your hope is by the next two clauses. He's trying to get us to see, I think, that what we have by faith, he's trying to get us to see what we don't see even if we have faith in Christ.

[24:20] Let me make a sense of it like this. Last year, I've told this, you guys, this story before, but you don't remember, so I'll say it again.

[24:30] Last year my cousins adopted a little girl from across the Pacific and they went over to get her and when they got there, they had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to do this and they got to the orphanage and it wasn't great circumstances.

[24:53] And the little girl was one year old, they went to her and they said, we're your new mother and father. She's never had one of those, either of those.

[25:05] And guess what she did? She screamed in a rebellion. She didn't want to go with them. They had spent thousands upon thousands of dollars, a couple years of life trying to make this thing happen.

[25:21] And when they got there, she did not want to go with them. And she especially hated, seemed like my cousin, her new mother, more than all.

[25:35] And they took her anyway, of course, and they brought her across the Pacific 14-hour flight, screamed the whole time. If you've ever been on a flight with kids, you can imagine how difficult this is.

[25:50] And finally, look, they get back, she does start to warm up with them, warm up to them, but she still doesn't know what she's gotten. Okay? You see, the thing is this, even after she started to love them for the first time back in America, she doesn't understand the inheritance that she's been worked into in this adoption.

[26:12] Okay? Look, she needed surgery, actually a series of surgeries to have a normal life. And what she doesn't know as a one-year-old is that my cousin is a doctor, and he's got money and skill to do this thing for her.

[26:33] And the thousands upon thousands of dollars, and the headaches upon headaches, and the 14 hours of tears, and the next 10 to 15 years of raising a little girl in a completely different context, and all the tears and crying and hitting her brothers and sisters and all these things that will happen.

[26:50] Look, she'll grow to love them, to love them more and more, but she still won't get it until much later in life, the inheritance that she's truly been given in them.

[27:01] But even more than the surgeries, even more than the money, she's been adopted. She's got a father that she would have never had. Look, we believe in Jesus.

[27:13] We say yes to his truth claims. But do you know what you have? Do you know his glorious inheritance?

[27:25] And does it change the way you do life? That's what Paul is praying for you. It's something more than just saying yes.

[27:36] It's learning the inheritance that you have in Jesus Christ and letting that soak through your mind, heart, down out through your toes.

[27:46] Now final point, and what we still actually haven't done yet is said still, but what is this something?

[27:59] What is this glorious inheritance? You're telling me that Paul's praying for me this glorious inheritance, that this is my hope, that this is the thing that should run through the whole of my person.

[28:11] But what is it? We still haven't seen that yet. What is the inheritance? What is his glorious inheritance? And so we come to the final point where Paul explains it in the excursus in verses 20 to 23 about Jesus.

[28:27] If you look at 20 to 23 with me, by his great power, he's guaranteed this hope for you, his glorious inheritance in verse 20, that God worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and when he seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.

[28:46] Far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named not only in this age, but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him his head, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all and all.

[29:01] Now this excursus on Christ authority is Paul uses it all over the place in his epistles in Corinthians, Philippians, here in Ephesians.

[29:13] If you noticed in verse 22, he put all things under his feet. This is a direct quote from Psalm 8, the Psalm that we sang just a moment ago.

[29:25] In Psalm 8, the Psalmist is talking about creation. That's the context of Psalm 8. He's talking about God's activity as creator in Genesis 1.

[29:36] The Psalmist is literally just opening up his Bible to Genesis 1 and writing a poetic reflection on God the Creator. And he gets down to that verse, verse 4 to 6 and he says, what is man that you are mindful of him?

[29:50] Who is man that you would give him dominion? Now that word dominion, which Paul uses here in Ephesians 1, should connect with you. You should remember it from Genesis chapter 1.

[30:04] So what Paul's doing here is he's reflecting on Psalm 8 and the Psalmist was reflecting on Genesis chapter 1 about creation. Now in Genesis chapter 1, you remember Adam and Eve are created last, human beings are created last, and God creates them as the pinnacle of all creation.

[30:23] And what he says to them is, I give you dominion. There's that word. It's in Psalm 8. It's in Ephesians 1 in our text. I give you dominion. I give you authority.

[30:36] The first human beings were given a mission. They came to them as a command. The dominion mandate was twofold. You remember it. Be fruitful and multiply.

[30:47] In other words, have babies, populate the earth, spread the garden, make it bigger. That was the first thing. And the second thing was work.

[30:59] The command to work, to labor, to till the land, to raise crops. This is for you. This is your food, right? Now it's interesting, they were called to be stewards of creation in both of these ways.

[31:13] And you remember the way that God curses them in Genesis chapter 3. He comes down in Genesis chapter 3 after they've fallen, after they've sinned, and the curse pertains exactly to the command of dominion that was given in Genesis chapter 1.

[31:30] He says to the woman, be fruitful and multiply. Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 3, the curse to the woman. Childbearing, right? You see the direct correspondence.

[31:42] He says to the man in Genesis chapter 1, work the land, till the garden, make food for yourself, name the animals. He comes to the man in Genesis chapter 3 and what's the curse?

[31:55] The land is cursed. Thorns and thistles. The land will be at enmity against you as you try to work it. In other words, look, Adam and Eve had been charged with a mandate.

[32:08] Make this creation place the kingdom of God. Have dominion over it as my steward. I've sent you as ambassador into this sphere of creation to work it.

[32:21] Now the Psalmist and psalmate is reflecting on that. God, how kind are you to give dominion to humans?

[32:32] Only humans. Paul comes to us in this passage and especially in 1 Corinthians 15 and he says this. In Adam, all things died so that in this new man, Jesus Christ, all things might live.

[32:51] Verse 25, Jesus will reign until he puts all things under his feet that God may be all in all. Look, you see what's happening here. What does Paul mean when he talks about Jesus, the authority above all authorities, God putting everything in subjection under his feet, giving him final dominion and rule?

[33:11] What he's saying is that Jesus is the second and better Adam. Jesus is the true human that came to do all the things that Adam never could do.

[33:22] Adam failed at the dominion mandate and Jesus has come to restore exactly the thing that Adam failed to do, to establish the kingdom of God on earth, a kingdom that has authority over all kingdoms, over all beings, over all livelihood, creation.

[33:42] Jesus has come as the second Adam and by the power of his death and resurrection, by the power of his being the God man, he has done what Adam could never do, what Israel could never do, what we could never do.

[33:54] He has truly become the second Adam and as the second Adam, the first true human. Look in the midst of this grand narrative of all of history, this is what's happening in history right now.

[34:09] He's taking authority over all things. His kingdom is being established. This is the real world. Jesus world is ruler within all this lies the ticket to what Paul means by what your glorious inheritance is.

[34:32] Yeah, it's his authority. It's his dominion. It's a resurrection body. It's a world renewed, a new cosmos.

[34:42] It's all these things. But look, don't miss this if you've missed everything else. This is the ticket right here in verse 18. Don't miss the fact that it says his glorious inheritance in the saints in the saints.

[35:00] Look above all of those things that Christ has been given in the power of his resurrection, the promise of the new heavens and the new earth has been given to him to be the authority over his glorious inheritance.

[35:15] Look, it's you. It's you, his glorious inheritance, which is in the saints.

[35:26] Look, if you believe in Jesus Christ today and you love the saints, you are the glorious inheritance. This is the point.

[35:36] This is this is to connect all the dots together. This is what Paul's saying. You want to wake up enlightened, enlightened eye of the heart, you want to wake up to this reality.

[35:47] Your hope is in his glorious inheritance and his glorious inheritance, the glorious inheritance of Jesus himself is you.

[36:00] You can be so sure of who you are because look, he's come to get you above all else.

[36:10] More than taking back creation, more than taking back the kingdom of this earth, the plants, the animals and establishing himself as the authority, more than all of that.

[36:20] It's you that he's come to get. It's you that he desires most. It's the church, right? You see that at the very end of the passage and he put all things under his feet and he gave him his head.

[36:33] God gave Jesus as head over his body, his body, the church, who is the fullness of him who fills all in all.

[36:44] Jesus work is not the fullness of Jesus work is his coming to get you. What would happen to our fears and our anxieties and our insecurities and the flux of life circumstances?

[37:01] If we came to imbibe and believe in this hope from our head to our toes, they would start a slow retreat behind what Paul calls the peace that surpasses all understanding.

[37:21] If God's coming to reconstitute the whole earth in his image, the renewal of all of creation, he's going to get everything under his authority.

[37:31] Nero has no authority next to him. Barack Obama has no authority next to him. All these things, he's coming to do all that. But look, what would it do to us if we realized that in all these gifts that God the Father is giving God the Son, the most precious thing that he came for is us?

[37:51] Why does he love you? Why does he love you? Because he loves you. Not because of what you've done, but in spite of it.

[38:04] He loves you because he loves you. Here's the final thing. This is the beauty of it all. You need but grass pulled of this promise by believing it.

[38:20] That's all. And after you believe it, pray for it. Pray the prayer in Ephesians 1, 15 to 23.

[38:32] Tomorrow when you wake up, pray it in the next day and the next day. And the Holy Spirit, he promises, will grant you the revelation of wisdom to let your anxieties, your fears, and your insecurities retreat behind the peace that surpasses all understanding.

[38:52] This invitation we gave in the call to worship, come to me, all of you, who are weary and heavy laden by anxieties, by insecurities, by fears, by waking up in the morning and wondering why am I still single?

[39:07] By waking up in the morning and said, what's happening to my marriage? By waking up in the morning and saying, I don't know what to do with my pornography addiction. By waking up in the morning and saying, I cannot defeat this sin that keeps cropping up in my life every day, come to him, all of you who are weary and heavy laden, he will give you rest.

[39:27] Pray the prayer of the Holy Spirit's wisdom and revelation. Let's pray. Father, we ask now, we pray the prayer that your spirit would come and give to us this wisdom, this revelation of the hope that is Jesus' glorious inheritance, which is us.

[39:52] And that we would know that Jesus will have what he came for. And by this, be sure. We want to be sure, Lord. And so we ask for this in Jesus' name.

[40:02] Amen.