Assurance

Transcript

I want to start by going off my manuscript right away, and I just want to clarify that I don't see what I'm about to do as a sermon, for a few reasons.

One, I'm not expounding a text of scripture like we normally do in a sermon. I'm going to be talking about a topic and presenting a topic and raising some questions about a topic. So it's not a sermon for that reason.

Second, It's also not a sermon because it's not going to seem like, or it’s not going to feel like a sermon. It's going to feel, I think, more like a lecture because I'm going to have to read a lot of what I've got written here, and so I need you to bear with me as I do that. I won't be preaching so much as just repeating some things I've tried to work out and get precise in my language in.

The third reason it's not a sermon is because I really want us to have some discussion at the end. I'll close the time out and come back up and we'll have a time of Q&A. And, I'm looking forward to that. In fact, I'm thinking that I may cut some stuff at the end just so that we have enough time for that.

So it's not a sermon but, I'm super thankful to be here. Thank you, brother, for having me here. Thank you guys for being here. And, before I tell you more about tonight's topic and where we're headed, I do want to start by telling you what I have prayed and what I do pray now that God will do in your hearts.

I've been praying about tonight and praying about what God would do in your hearts and that activity, what God does is always the most important dynamic when it comes to Christian teaching and Christians on Sunday mornings. It's been a habit of mine to see in the beginnings of my preparation through the whole week to when I preach, I want to have a very clear prayer.

This is what I'm asking God to do. And so I had that for tonight. It's important because by God's grace we are supernaturalists, which means that we believe there are certain things in reality that only God himself can do. And when it comes to changing our hearts, working on our hearts, that is always the case when it comes to our hearts, the control center of our person.

Only God can make a difference. And that's actually a point of hope that we have when it comes to ministry, when it comes to times like this, alongside what I'm saying, hopefully through what I'm saying sometimes, despite what I'm saying, I trust that God is at work. I trust that God is doing something. And because he's doing something, then I have confidence to pray about what he's doing.

Since we know that God is that we're always at work, we can say to him, Father, here is what I want you to do. I know you're doing something. I know you're at work here. Here's what I want you to do. Here's what I'm asking you to do. And as I thought about tonight and as I just thought about you overall, this group, my prayer is that God would make himself to be your all-consuming passion and you're all satisfied.

I want him to give more of himself to you in the deepest meditations, in your thoughts and your words and your actions. I want God to be the biggest thing in your life, in your conscious reality, in your moment by moment existence, in all of your relationships. I want you to wake up thinking about God. I want you to go to bed thinking about God. I want you to make your every move in light of God throughout the day, in every single room that you enter. I want you to know that God is in that room and that He is actually the biggest thing in that room. I want God to be in your face.

I want God to be what you are all about. And I want you to be happy. But I want you to want that. I want you to want that. And then I want God to do it. I want him to answer this prayer. I want him to make this true of you, of us. And if all of what I just said seems impossible, to unrealistic, I want you to know that it's not. As Christians, one day this will be our experience and more when God perfectly conforms us to the image of Jesus. In all of our conformity to Jesus this image will finally be instantaneous. We do experience transformation now by small degrees as we pursue this conformity to Jesus, and knowing that we can experience transformation in this life leads us to the big question: How much conformity to Jesus do we expect to experience in this life? Does that make sense? The question is how much like Jesus do you think you can become in this world?

Like, in this world, in this life, in this present reality, how much like Jesus do you think you can become? Just think about that question. How much like Jesus do you think you can become in this world? Chances are you're probably thinking a few different things and try to just name a couple.

Maybe you're intrigued by the question and you realize you've actually never thought about that, never really asked yourself. But in that way, I say you're intrigued. Maybe you realize as you ask yourself the question, you realize right away that you don't expect much. You have undersold the experience of the Christian life, and you have, perhaps unintentionally settle for a kind of, until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow. It's likely that even subconsciously, you think that progress in Christ likeness doesn't really happen in this life in any measurable way. I think many of us think that. How much like Jesus do you think you can become in this world? That's an important question. And I want to convince you that pursuing Christlikeness, becoming more like Jesus in this world, is a possible endeavor.

You can experience real transformation into the image of Jesus in this life. And now, just to be clear, you have to be clear about this: We are never going to experience sinless perfection in this life. To think that would be a theological error, it would be a mistake to think that we can experience perfection. But in our attempt to avoid perfectionism, in our attempt to avoid that mistake, we don't want to give up on any kind of progress.

This miserable sinner Christianity is the idea sometimes when you think, we're never going to be perfect. So we just kind of are whatever. I'm never going to really get there. So we just kind of give up because we know we can't be perfect. We shouldn't do that.

We won't experience sinless perfection, but we can experience actual change. We can become more like Jesus. We can have more of God now. We can surround ourselves and do habits in our lives of Edenic movements. You guys remember that in Leviticus, we can orient our lives closer to God. We can get more of God in this life.

We can live closer to Him. And this is where I'm convinced that the topic of assurance is extremely relevant. And that's what I mainly want to talk about tonight. But we're talking about assurance. Okay, but before we get there, I want to back up as an introduction and talk about some foundational realities that I think are important.

I got a little carried away, I think, in just trying to I want to just make sure that we can ground this topic really well and I want to make sure that we're getting getting off on the right foot. And so I want to start before we get to the topic of assurance, we're going to start with the two most fundamental realities that there are.

And it is the glory of God and the realness of God. And so what I hope you see us doing here is we're starting way up top here and we’re funneling this thing down. Okay? So we're going to start here and kind of feel it out. And the way we start is with these foundational truths, these fundamental facts.

And so what I'm going to say now, I think, is the most fundamental fact, what I'm about to say, the sentence I'm about to say, is the most fundamental fact to everything in existence. The only reason anything exists outside of God is for the purpose of magnifying the glory of God.

In essence, God is fully satisfied in himself. That is, He's satisfied in the fellowship of His perfection as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is dependent upon nothing but instead all things are dependent upon him. All things that exist have been created by God to serve as the arena in which His perfections are manifest and his perfection is being manifest is the showcase of his glory.

And so the great end for which God created the world, to borrow from Jonathan Edwards, is the glory of God, is that His glory be seen and delighted in by us together with His own intra Trinitarian eternal sight. And that's a deep way to say that for all eternity, God has always seen His glory shine and He's always been glad about it.

Within the Fellowship of the Trinity and Creation is that eternal gladness spilling over, as it were, to be shared with us. God created us to share with us the sight of His glory. That's what we mean when we say everything is about the glory of God. Everything is about the display of who God is in our delight, in who God is.

That's the most fundamental thing about everything, right? Everything that exists, exists so that God can display His glory for us to receive His glory and delight in the display of this glory. Enjoy him like he has enjoyed himself for all eternity. That's the glory of God. And then right next to this, right beside this fundamental fact is that God is real, which means that every truth we learn about God, which God has revealed to us, is truth about a real God that, and it might sound super obvious to you, or it might sound a little silly that I have to say this, but I think this is very important that we should revisit this.

God's revelation of himself is not an ideology. It's not a mere worldview, as though is only a body of knowledge among several others that we're supposed to prioritize and by which we operate. There are a lot of views in the world. There's lots of worldviews out there, and that's been the case for a very long time. Different systems have all different ways of conceiving of reality and navigating the world.

We see this in the Bible, We see this was a situation that the Apostle Paul encountered in the Book of Acts, Chapter 17, when he was in Athens at this place called Mars Hill. And Luke in chapter 17, he gives us a little bit of a commentary on the Athenians. He tells us what the people of Athens were like in Act 17, verse 21.

He said that they would spend their time in nothing except telling and hearing something new. It's kind of a dig he's made, making that on the Athenians. An example in our day would be, you know, we have what you would call technology junkies in our day, people who are always getting the latest gadget and the hottest, newest technology.

Well, the ancient Greeks had what you could call like philosophy junkies, right? There were people in Athens who they just wanted to know, what's the latest thought system, what's the hottest philosophy, what's the new way to see everything and try to make sense of the world? That's what Paul was facing. And Act 17 is what he faced when he wrote to the church in Corinth.

It was an old Greek city not far from Athens and Corinth. They were caught up in this quest for wisdom of what you would call it, worldly wisdom. In Carson's commentary on 1 Corinthians he says,

The Corinthians, the way they understood the word wisdom, was that wisdom was a public philosophy or a will to articulate a worldview that made sense of life in order the choices, values and priorities of those who adopted it.

It was a thought system, for the Corinthians, it was a thought system with a body of knowledge. And there were several such bodies of knowledge, of thought systems in the day. And each of these thought systems competed in the marketplace of ideas, right? That's kind of what Mars Hill was. And in Acts 17, it's kind of this marketplace of who's got the best idea and let's let all these ideas get together and compete.

And we, of course, still see that today, which means we should ask, is the revelation of God meant to be just another idea competing against the rest?

The answer is no.

It certainly gives us a vision for the world. It gives us a worldview, and its worldview, we understand, is the meta-narrative that makes sense of all the other smaller stories, the story of the Bible is what encapsulates all the other stories out there in the world.

I want to tell y’all, I was recently on Netflix and they have this special about basically, this is like a documentary of all these different, amazing archeological finds throughout the world. And I watched like the first episode. It was too boring for Melissa, so I just got through an episode.

But what's amazing in this first episode is they're finding pyramids like all over the world, not just in Egypt. They're finding pyramids like all across, like all the different corners of the world. And they're finding all of these similarities in these pyramids from images. It was like, wow, how are there all these similarities in the pyramids?

And I'm just listening to it and I'm like, yeah, we saw the first pyramids, Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel, and they all seem to have like similar worship things. And then this is the amazing thing. All of these pyramids seem to have suffered some kind of like cataclysmic flood. There was some type of, like water damage, you know, that destroyed stuff.

And how and that's also why they think perhaps some of the pyramids were built because they were building these pyramids, because they know the world would have flood and are trying to do so. There's all these, there's all these theories. And it's very interesting, all these theories about how where these things came from. And I'm watching it and I'm like, man, I know all about that.

Like, we can we read all about that. And it is true. The good in there is, of course, flood stories and all these different cultures. And it just is a reminder that we believe the Bible is the meta-narrative. I mean, it's really an amazing thing to see.

And so the Bible does make sense of the world in that way. But the revelation of God is not first about how we make sense of things. The revelation of God is first about God Himself, to whom we submit. And that, what I just said, that only makes sense if God is real. If it's just an idea, if it's just a thought system like all the others, in fact do it in the marketplace and let it compete and it's going to do great.

Okay. But but the revelation goes more than that, because God's a person, he's he's a real being. And what he tells us about himself, he tells us about himself so that we would worship him, that we would receive the revelation of him and submit to him. He is a true living being. He's greater than what we can imagine.

God is the ultimate reality behind all things, and I think it is what is called metaphysical realism. And I love this phrase because I'm influenced by Dallas Willard here. This was the late Dallas Willard. This was a central concern for him. He thought it was a very important category and I agree with him. Metaphysical realism says that the physical sense, perceptible world is not all there is, which is he's right, but it's a good kind of snap back to reality.

I think for us, we live in such a materialistic age. It's good for us to remember there is more out there than what we can see and what we can touch and hear and smell. We have perceptions, right? We have these senses. We inhabit the world with these senses. And in a world that has kind of lopped off the notion of a higher being of God, we can fall for the lie that what you see is what you get, that all there really is is what we can ourselves experience and apprehend with our senses.

And that's just, that's just not true. That's not true. There is a vast, a vast unseen world around us. And whatever exists, wherever it is in all of reality, it is what it is. Apart from our thoughts and perceptions, there is an objective universe and we can't see it all. God, for example, this is important, God, for example, is who He is apart from our knowing him.

And when we learn truth about God, we're not making things up. But we are coming into contact with a real being. How do we receive it, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — God, the Father, who has made himself known through the Incarnate God, the Son whose testimony is superintended and confirmed by God? The Spirit.

There are people in the world who either don't know God or they reject God entirely. And that does not change anything about God’s being. We just need to swallow that God is God regardless of us. That's what it means that God is real.

And in order for us to have more of God, these two facts are the foundation:

1) everything that exists is for the glory of God, including us.

2) And God is real

And I want to start here, and I want to say, I don't think we actually ever really get over this. We don't. Because if we believe these two things, if we sincerely, humbly embrace these two facts from the heart, God's glory and God's will, if we embrace these facts from the heart, it will absolutely change everything about your life.

Absolutely. And so questions are going to say, how do we embrace? So how do we take these foundational realities and how do we apply these truths about God down into our everyday experience?

How do we take — I just went way up here right? The glory of God, the ruinous of God and, you know, metaphysical realism is all up here — How do we bring that here, like where we are right now?

I want you to hear that question to be the same question of how can we have more of God, how can we live closer to God in this life? How can we live closer to God here and now? I think it's good for us to remember that we're not the first Christians to ask that question.

That question was a central concern for the Apostle Paul, and you see that in his letters. And it was a concern that at least reemerges during the Protestant Reformation when there was a recovery of the gospel in the Bible's authority. One of the major implications of the Protestant Reformation as the glory of the Gospel was recovered was that the gospel impacts the everyday lives of everyday people.

That was a big discovery, a rediscovery of the Protestant Reformation. The gospel is for the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. It is not that, you know, there was this balloon separation between the sacred and the secular, and that just got popped in the Protestant Reformation. It's not that there's only a small portion of the church, the clergy who really care about God and everybody else just kind of carries on with their mundane functions. It's not, that's not the way it is.

But every single member of the church is reading the New Testament for understanding the Scriptures. Every single member of the church can know God, all of us can. We have access to God and we all each of us, can experience more of God together in our details. And therefore, because that was rediscovered in the Protestant Reformation, there was an emphasis on every member of the church knowing Christian doctrine is not just for the professional, it's not just for the clergy. Every member of the church can know theology, can know what the Bible says. The whole church: men, women, boys and girls can and should know the Bible and how to apply the Bible. And that conviction is the backbone of our Reformation heritage, our church.

Our heritage goes back to that. I mean, it goes back to the New Testament, right? Yes, but a big piece of our heritage as a church, it goes back to this rediscovery in the Protestant Reformation that all of us, we have access to God, as personal believers. We have access to God ourselves not to go through a priest.

We have access to God together and we help one another come to God and know God more. We can each grow in knowing God more. We each help one another as we are maturing in grace and that's why it's important for us. We have read, we can read the Bible, and we can study the Word of God and we can encourage each other.

All these things come from the Protestant Reformation and recovery of the Gospel. And we are thankful for that heritage, that our church, and anybody who wants to know, we all can know scripture. We all should know scripture. Anybody have any idea, I mean, any guesses here, as to how the reformers expected everyday people to learn Christian doctrine?

The answer is through catechism.

Okay, I'll talk about this later, but catechism comes from the word catechesis, which is a Greek word that means teaching or instruction. And a catechism was a document of Christian doctrine that was laid out in the format of questions and answers. And the idea was that it was meant to be sticky, it was meant to be memorable.

There were questions and answers that you can memorize and then recall as you go about your day, right? That's the idea. A butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker can remember these things. And as you're doing your stuff, you can bring it to mind. That was the point of catechism. And there were several catechisms that I mean, it's amazing how many cataclysms came out of the Reformation. And my favorite catechism is the Heidelberg Catechism.

The Catechism was written in 1563. It's the most popular catechism, the most widely used catechism, and for good reason. The Heidelberg Catechism is a masterpiece when it comes to bringing the truth of God down into our everyday experience. For example, the very first question goes like this. Question 1,

“What is your only comfort in life and death?”

That's a good question, right?

I guess that's how the catechism starts. It's that we're just minding their own business. You know, we open this thing up and it's like, well, we're not playing around here. What is your only comfort in life and death? We're living and whenever we're going to die and when it comes to those two things, life and death, what's your wish, your comfort?

By comfort, in 1563, it wasn't superficial and shallow. Comfort was like peace. It was a way to talk about joy and happiness. Where do we find comfort in life and death? Here's the answer.

Question: “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”

Answer: “That I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and death to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.”

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and he has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. And he also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from head without the will of my father in heaven. In fact, all things must work together for my good because I belong to Him.

Christ, by His Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me whole heartedly really willing and ready from now on to live for him. How awesome is that? Right? It's true. It is true. The answer is true. It's a sticky reminder of reality and is kind of a roadmap for how we navigate life. The second question goes like this, And then what do you have to know in order to actually practice that? In order to actually live that way? Here's the answer.

You have to know three things. You've got to know, I'll say it the way it says it. Three things. First, you have to know how great my sin and misery are. Second, how I am set free from all my sins and misery. Third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.

You’re a sinner. You've been set free.

And the rest of this catechism is basically just extrapolating those first two questions and it's amazing. And get this book right here and read this thing and memorize this thing and put this thing to work, because what that does is that brings it all down.

It brings it down to our experience. I love the way it works. I love the whole design of it. Of trying to bring this thing down to where the rubber meets the road. Several years ago, I tried to summarize the first two questions of the Heidelberg with a short sentence. So I tried to condense is down.

Basically, I wanted to summarize the heart of questions, wanting to in a coherent way that helps me frame my day. So this is a sentence that I've drafted. This is the same sort of deal, right? Yeah. The idea is we're taking these little nuggets, these little tools, and we're put them to work.

Okay, So here's, here's this, this anchor sentence. The more we are assured of God's love in how much we don't deserve it, then the more we are humbled and filled with joy, Then the more we are poured out in love for others, which all amounts to magnifying the glory of God. And so what I get when I get stuck sometimes, or when things are hazy for me, I come back to this.

I come out of these four parts and each related to the other first. The more we're sure of God's love and how much we don't deserve it. I need to know how I'm loved by God and God's love blows me away because I realize I don't deserve his love.

If you think you deserve God's love, don't be impressed by His love. If you deserve it, it's not impressive. What makes it amazing is the fact that we don't deserve it. So the more we're assured of God's love and how much I don't deserve it, that He loves me anyway because he's God. The more we get there, then the more we're humbled when we're filled with joy, more blown away.

And then in that humility and that joy, what happens when we're poured out in love for others. I want others to know this joy. I want others to know this love. And when we do that and live that way, it means that it magnifies the glory of God. I try to think carefully about these and apply and then work this out.

And I've put, I put these things to the test over the last five years. Part of this is that I'm hoping to write on this in the future, but here's something this is, here's something that has occurred to me, occurred to me last year that was new to me, both for that anchor summary. So I didn't notice this until last year, but I'm going to read a line from the Heidelberg and there's an important one I want you to hear after the first question, the answer goes at the end, because I belong to Christ by His Holy Spirit assures me of eternal life.

And then when I was trying to summarize it, I started the summary. The more I'm assured of God's love and how much I don't deserve it. And then I realize a year ago, I mean that has got some promise both in the first question of the Heidelberg and even how I just was thinking about the Heidelberg in our brain, the truth of God down into our everyday experience.

It is assumed over that we have this thing called assurance. What is that? What is the assurance of salvation? Now we're going to talk about assurance. So that's what now the actual word assurance is only used a few times in the Bible is seen, is used a few times. But the concept, the idea of assurance, the evidence of assurance, I think shows up all over the place.

I hope that when you read the Bible, you see a disparity between the way that you relate to God and the way that the people in the Bible relating to God. When you read church history, there's the disparity between the type of relationships that people in the past have of God and what we have of God.

You know, I just want you to know I'm not comfortable with that perspective. I don't think it makes sense. Okay. And is there one example that we see? I mean, part of it is we have to remember that the people in the Bible are just people like Paul was just a dude, like he was a person like us.

And yet look look at his experience with God, like he had an experience of things, of being called up to the third heaven, he talks about this. What if one day we we're going to stand before Jesus and we're going to realize, we could have done that or that we could have done this.

And it's like, I don't, I just, I don't want us to settle for, I don't want us to undersell the Christian life. And so I want us to feel a disparity. We look in the Bible when we look at those in the past. I mean, how is it that there's this story of Jonathan Edwards where he's run this horse?

They heard this these saints from from the past. He's running horse one day he's praying. He's he's riding a horse. Okay. It's just like this is not a spiritual thing, okay? He's riding a horse, but he's praying as he's running his horse. And he because he has this experience, but he becomes so moved by the reality of God's love that he has to get off this horse.

And he basically it has to say, God, you have to stop. Like, I can't I don't have capacity to absorb the glory that I'm experiencing right now of how much you love me. And it's like you read about that and you just think, could that could we have some of that? You know, here's the example in the Psalms that I just think is incredible.

We looked at this this past summer. There are two basic parts, David facing hardship verses 1 to 7. And then we see God's care for David in verses 8 to 13. But the main thing that's repeated in song 56 is this is the assurance that David says we see this refrain in verses 3 to 4. This is what David says in Psalm 56 verse three, he says,

When I'm afraid I put my trust in you, in God, whose word I praise in God I trust I shall not be afraid. What can flesh do to me?

And we're like, okay, that's faith. We see David's faith here.

He's saying, God, I get afraid. We get it for him. And he may not get afraid, but I'm looking to you. I'm trusting you. And I know that with you, it's going to be okay. That's a good model.

In this second time. When he says it, he amplifies it just like you goes.

Listen to this. This is Ps. 56:9, He says, this I know that God is for me. That's a bold thing to say, man. That's one of the most arrogant things. Anything you can say. If it weren't true. This I know, I know this. I know that God is for me and God His word I praise in whose word I praise in God I trust.

I shall not be afraid. What can man do to me? Yes, There's nothing David's like. I'm. I'm untouchable, is what he's saying is now 56. And we see, okay, this is faith. I mean, this is like faith of a different quality. David is saying that God is for him, and he's not just saying that God is for him, but he's saying, I know God is for me.

It's one thing to say God is for me. It's another thing to say. I know that God. I know he's for the same ideas repeated in someone 18, verse six in the summer says, They're always on my side. I will not fear you always on my side. He's on my side. He's looking at his innocence. He's not on your side.

He's on my side. God on my side. God For me, we see in the New Testament, we see this in the new This is not an ancient Hebraic story. We see this in the New Testament. And in Romans chapter eight, verse 31, when Paul says, If God is for us, who can be against us? It's the same. It's the same thing.

Romans eight is the New Testament version of Psalm 56. Paul is saying God is for me, bring it home. But what do you what do you have? God is for me, there's a fearlessness here. There's an invincibility here. And and I, I just I want some of that. We see this in Ephesians chapter one that Paul prays for the church.

This is assurance is the concept of assurance. Paul prays for the church to have the eyes of their hearts enlightened so that they may know their hope, which is an interesting thing to say. Paul doesn't pray that the church have hope. He prays at the church. No, their hope. He wants them to know the hope to which they've been called.

Then in Ephesians three, we have to deal with the fees in chapter three, Paul prays that God would strengthen the church with God's power in their inner being. In their hearts, we pray about Paul prays that God would strengthen the hearts of the church in their inner truth, in their hearts, so that they would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Which means what? Paul's pray. He's not praying that these Christians become Christians. He's praying that these Christians know what it means to be a Christian. He wants them to experience the assurance of their salvation in Christ. That's what Paul prayed for the church. That's what Paul labored for. This is assurance. This is the deepest experience of faith in this world.

And I think that's a good definition for assurance. Assurance is a special word of the Holy Spirit in Christian maturity. That is the deepest experience of faith in this world. And the key word here is experience. Sometimes we can confuse the security of our salvation with our assurance of salvation, but they're different. The security of our salvation is the reliability of our salvation.

Because of God's faithfulness. The assurance of our salvation is our experience of that security in the here and now. And that is such a powerful experience that when Thomas Brooks, the Puritan, wrote about assurance in 1654, he titled the book Heaven on Earth, the topic of assurance was a topic that reemerged in the Reformation air. And there's no wonder why.

Because people were reading the Bible, more people were learning about who God is and what the Scriptures say. So assurance became a thing as people were taking their faith more seriously. In this book, Brooks is right here in paperback, in this book, in this, Brooks Thomas books wrote this, he defines assurance as the gift of not of having grace, but of knowing you have grace.

He says it is one mercy for God to love. The soul is another mercy for God to assure the soul of his love. And that's what we see in Paul's prayers. Paul doesn't just want the church to have hope or grace or whatever. He wants them to know that they have hope. And Paul is not content with the entry level basic knowledge of God's love in Christ, but He wants the church to know every dimension of the love of Christ so that they would be filled with all the fullness of God.

The Apostle Paul does not undersell the Christian but He wants us to go deeper. He wants us to experience more because we can. And this goes back to the very beginning. How much like Jesus do you hope we can become? Is progress in this life possible? Well, here's the question Was Paul wrong to pray the way he did in Ephesians three that we would, with all the Saints, comprehend the height and breadth and length and get to know the love of Christ?

Pastor Paul prayed that for you to pray that we have two options. You either Paul was wrong to pray that way, either he was wrong to pray the way you did, or indications three of us comprehending the love of Jesus or He was not wrong. And if he was not wrong, if Ephesians three is a good prayer, then why don't we live in expectation that God might actually answer?

Do you want to know more? Do we want more? I believe we can have more. I believe we can experience assurance.

Assurance is a work of the Holy Spirit. It's not a formula, so it's not something that we hit a few buttons, do a few things and boom, we have it. That's not how it works, right? But what we can do is there are means through which God is pleased to work. And so the way to think about these means is we don't make the wind blow, but we can lift the sails, right?

And so what we want to do is we want to live our lives in such a way and expectation that God would would give us what Paul prays for. And so we live our lives. We ourselves and God, give me more show me more. Assure me, assure me of your love for me.

He has in the past. He has in the past. And I believe he can answer for us today, for us as individuals, for us in our homes and in the church, in our city and beyond.

So, let me pray,

Father, we want to echo the prayer of the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 3, and we want to ask that you would give us strength by your spirit in our being that we would comprehend with all the saints what is the height and breadth and length and depth of the love of Christ.

We want to know more Jesus. You want to have more of Jesus, We want to the Christian and and to experience more of your love for us. Not creating love for us, not making you love us more.

We want to be overcome by that fact. We want to be overwhelmed by the truth of who you are and what you've done. And we want our lives. And because of that, to overflow and poured out in love for others. We want to magnify your going with our lives. Now we thank you in Jesus name, Amen.