Shane Hughes 6-1-25

So here's the cool thing about Ephesians, if you haven't noticed it. Paul begins Ephesians in prayer, and then when we get to the middle of Ephesians, he bursts into prayer. And when it's time to finish the letter to this church, it ends in prayer. Paul begins, and in the middle he stays centered in prayer. And he ends up at the end praying.

And that's also the life of the church. Eugene Peterson says that the church begins in prayer, stays centered by prayer, and ends the end of all things, ends up praying. And I want you to pay attention today as Charles reads these three prayers about how often you hear words like all and everything.

Eugene Peterson also said that prayer is not getting in touch with your true self as it is so often said. It is the preoccupy. It is the practice of shifting preoccupation away from yourself toward attentiveness and responsiveness to God. It is the deliberate walking away from a me centered way of life to a Christ centered way of life. Would you join me in prayer, Father?

We're grateful for this room. We're grateful to be able to worship you, to gather around your table. We're grateful for the saints that surround us, those that we see and those that have gone before, those that have poured into us through their life, those who poured into us through their prayers. Even Paul, as he prays for this house church in Ephesus, we hear the reverberations through scripture of his power, of the passion of the efficacy of his prayers. And so, Father, now in this time of worship, turn our hearts to your word that I might speak your love to these, your people.

It's together that the church says amen. So for millennia, the prayer book of the church is the book of Psalms. It's a psalms. And I know that in our world, more often than not, we tend to value the extemporaneous prayer. It's the prayer that somebody says off the cuff because it seems more authentic to us.

But I think there's some real power in using words that people of God have used for thousands of years. When we speak to God, these are the better words. Peterson argues that we, we live in the Psalter precisely for the reason that it shifts our prayers away from our own. Because on our own, our prayers become about our own needs. But in the Psalter, it turns my prayer into the very kingdom oriented way of thinking and seeing, seeing the hurt in the world and the pain in the world.

And then we begin interceding for that instead of ourselves and so today I want you to invite, I want to invite you to listen to Paul's prayer life. And this week, as I was studying these texts and I was thinking about what it means to pray like Paul, I couldn't help but think of Francis Chan. And Francis wrote some books about 10, 15 years ago. But what you may not know is he actually was a preacher. He was a pastor in a church in the Bay Area.

And I happened to be with working in the Bay Area at the time when Francis Chan was there. So he and I were kind of like co laborers. You know, Francis and I, we hung out. We actually did because he was the superstar author, but he was also a preacher that answered the emails of local ministers. And this is what you have to know about the Bay Area.

The Bay Area was not a place where it, it was not very church. It was one of the most unchurched parts of America. And if, if you had one person that would show up on a Sunday who wasn't part of your church, it felt like a tremendous win. It felt incredibly powerful. Even if somebody just showed up from Texas to, to be apart for four or five years before they moved back because they had kids, it felt like a win.

But Francis, he would, he answered our emails. And one of my friends, he said, hey, can we come out and talk with you? And he said, yeah. And so he began hosting local ministers in the Bay Area. And over and over, when he would talk to us over and over, he said the same thing.

He said, root yourself in prayer. Root yourself in the prayer that your churches would know God. And that was it. That was all he said, over and over and over. There was no five point plan for strategic growth.

There was no secret to small group ministry that's going to make disciples thrive. There was no way to catch that newcomer and integrate them into part of your church. The only thing that Chan cared about is that you would pray so that your church would know God. And he believed that that would change the world. But you already knew that if you'd read any book from what he wrote, you already knew that he believed that the power of the Spirit was more effective than the power of any person in the building.

That God could do more than we could ask or imagine if we just asked or imagined. And when he would pray sometimes in his church, sometimes before his sermon, he would get down on his knees and he would pray with his church. And sometimes he would get so caught up in the act of prayer that, that he would forget to preach. It was the prayer that Would go on for 20 or 30 minutes, and then he would stand up and he'd say, well, I got a sermon now. I guess we'll save it for next week.

He believed it with his entire self that the most important thing that a church could do was have their eyes opened that they might see God. He thought that would change the world.

And so when Paul begins to pray in Ephesians chapter one, we. We see his passion, we hear his passion, and we know, because we know about how the New Testament is formed and how letters are written in the new in the first century, that. That when. When a person offers a prayer at the beginning of the book, we know it's kind of an introduction. It's going to give us a clue of all the other things that he's going to say, the content that's going to be covered later.

But these are actual prayers he says, I keep asking. This is verse 17 of chapter 1. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you might know him better.

Paul is seeming to indicate that prayer is an invitation into the mystery of the living God. Maybe the easiest way for us to understand the mystery of. Of the living God is to travel to Sam's. Sam's Club, just on Antley Road. If you traveled to Sam's Club with my family, you would have two very distinct experiences.

If you. If my sons, when they travel with my. My wife to Sam's Club, my wife is not interested in going inside of that building. She orders everything by her phone. She pulls up to one of those pickup spots, she types in the number, they come out and they deliver things for the most part.

When my kids go to Sam's, and they were. The first experience was with their wife. They just thought it was a building where people brought stuff out. Like that's all they thought Sam's was for. But every now and then they go to Sam's with me, and I'm not.

I'm not using the app. I'm just gonna go in and get what I need. I'm gonna buy it, I'm gonna get out. But when they go to Sam's with me, they enter into the building, and the experience is entirely different. Now, I'm not saying it's better, I'm just saying it's different.

But they like it better because there's samples.

And so we don't just hurry to get the three things that I need so that we can get out. We wander every aisle. We search for those little kiosks to figure out what they're going to offer and if we're going to take it and if we're going to like.

Seems that Paul is trying to say, if you want to understand the mystery of God, you need to go in the building. You need to enter into a time and a place and a space where you can begin to explore the meaning of God. The mystery of God is not unknowable. The mystery of God is infinitely knowable. This week I came across the most beautiful book.

It's by Robert McFarland, and he wrote it. He's an English author, and basically he. It's called Landmarks, and in it he catalogs the names of things and geography and nature that were being lost in the English language. And the book started because he went to a place in Wales and he found this old Gaelic book. And in the Gaelic book, it was kind of a dictionary, and it had over a hundred words for Pete.

And I thought, that's crazy, because I would probably step on Pete and not even know what it was. But there was a more than 100 words for Pete. It's kind of like the Inuit story that they have over 50 words of snow. And so he began to find all the words of nature, landmarks that describe things precisely what they were. And so there's this Shetlandic word, it's purr, and it means the light breath of wind, such as it will make a cat's paw on the water.

Have you ever been at a lake that's so completely still, and then just the slightest breeze makes the ripple? There's a name for that. It's purr. Emil is the. The Devon term for that fine film of silver ice that coats leaves and twigs and grass when freeze follows thaw.

And it's a. It's a beautifully exact word for a phenomenon that I had seen several times but I had never been able to name. And so what McFarland's book does is it gives you this vocabulary, it gives you this way of describing the things, it gives you the names for all the stuff when you enter into the building of God. It's kind of like Forrest Gump's good friend Bubba, who begins the day listing the hundred different types of ways to cook shrimp. The more deeply you are steeped in the knowledge of something, the bigger it is and the more precise the language you need.

And we know this in our songs. I don't know if we always know this in our prayers. Come, thou fount of every blessing Tune my heart to sing thy Praise. Every verb and noun in that sentence is profound. Oh, to grace, how great a debtor I am daily constrained to be.

Let that grace now like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Diving into the mystery of God, you can stay on the surface.

You can get the takeout order and never go in the building, or you can go in and experience how big that place really is. But when you go in, you have to realize that you're going to need a whole new vocabulary to talk about the things of God, the mystery of God. But then there's this other place to it, because not all of the language that we have seems to ring true. It's kind of like quantum physics. This is so much like quantum physics.

And I could give you all of these quotes like, quantum mechanics makes absolutely no sense. Or if it is correct, it signifies the end of physics. And if you are not completely confused by quantum mechanics, you don't understand it. No one understands quantum physics. I could give you those four quotes and you'd be like, yeah, it's difficult to understand.

That's why you have to get a PhD. Except these are the guys in the 20th century that were doing the quantum mechanic work. That was Roger Penrose, Albert Einstein, John Wheeler, and Richard Feynman. These are the people that spent the most time at it. And that's not to say that they were ignorant about their work.

They actually knew their work very deeply and intricately. They were the most intelligent people doing the most profound work. What they were trying to say is when it gets to that subatomic level, level, all of the Capernian understanding, all of the math, it no longer applies. It's different.

When we dive into the mystery of God, what we have to understand is that all of the formulas are going to change. So much of Ephesians seems to be telling people what we already know and believe. And Paul's deepest prayer is that we will know it more fully, that they're going to get it downloaded into their guts where it matters, and that they're going to get it as a community. And again, it's not just like, you just take this little prayer and go and pray in the corner. And we might do that at times, that's fine.

But it's this community prayer that we're praying that y' all might know these kind of things. Things like the hope to which he has called you. And then in verse 18, the riches of his glorious inheritance and his hol. People, his incomparably great power for us who believe. And then right after that is the is the center of the Gospel.

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. And right after he said that, he exerted his power when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at the right hand. These prayers are the gospel lived out. These prayers are gospel put on flesh. This means everything to those little churches, these little house churches meeting in groups of a dozen or two in a largely pagan city full of idolatry and greed.

It meant everything to these little Ephesians, and it meant everything to those pastors struggling to survive in the bare area and figure out what these little churches that were trying to to mean and how do we live into that reality? And it means everything in our city.

In a. In a city, you need a story with bigger horizons. We need a story that's worthy of the people God has called to live out. It means everything to them and it means everything to us that we are the church, we are the body of Christ.

And I just imagine that if we could grasp what we already know, if we could root it deeply inside of us, into our hearts, I think it might just change what we do. And one of the places that we begin to understand that not through knowing, because not always is our intellectual knowledge what we need. Sometimes it's a deeper level of knowing is at the table.

The table is an invitation to dwell, to abide, to rest, to Sabbath, in the person, in the mystery, in the wonder of God.

In just a moment, our servers are going to come forward. You're going to receive two cups. And if you could take them and, and hold them, we're all going to take communion together. So hold those two cups and we will share communion in just a moment. Servers, would you come forward please?

Jesus, let us come to know you. Let us see you face to face.

Touch us, hold us, use us, hold us holy. Let us live in you, Jesus.

Hold us in your loving us.

Grab us in your gentle presence. When the end comes, bring us home.

I want to know cross and the power of his rising, sharing his suffering. Conform to his death. When I pour out my life to be filled with His Spirit, Joy follows suffering and life follows death. I want to know Christ and the power of his rising. Share in his suffering, conform to his death.

When I pour out my life to be filled with His Spirit. Joy follows suffering and life follows Him.

It.

Let's pray together.

Father, open the eyes of our hearts that we might grasp how wide and tall and deep and wide is the mystery of your love.

Root our hearts deeply in your presence. Where neither storm nor drought can move us. We are grateful for the sacrifice of your son. We are grateful for the love and the life that he led. It is through Christ we pray.

Amen. The body of Christ, The blood of Christ. The cup of your salvation.

The Lord be with you.

We would like to offer this time now to dismiss our kids to his kids worship. So if that's your age, you can head back to the worship room where Ms. Ashley is ready for you. For the rest of us, would you please stand as we collect our communion cups and as we sing.

Of grace Is Jesus my Redeemer There is no more for heaven now to give he is my joy My righteousness and freedom My steadfast love My deep and boundless peace to this I hold My hope is only Jesus for my life is wholly bound to his oh, how strange and divine I can sing all is mine yet not I But through Christ in me.

The night is dark But I am not forsaken for by my side the Savior he will stay I labor on in weakness and rejoicing for in my need his power is display to this I hold My shepherd will defend me through the deepest valley he will lead oh, the night has been won and I shall overcome yet not I But through Christ in me.

No fate I dread I know I am forgiven the future sure the price it has been paid For Jesus fled and suffered for my par and he was raised to you overthrow the grave to this I hold My sin has been defeated Jesus now and never is My feet oh, the chains are released I can see I am free and not I But through Christ in me.

With every breath I long to follow Jesus for he has said that he will bring me home and day by day I know he will renew me Until I stand with before the throne to this I hope My hope is only Jesus all the glory ever more to him when the race is complete still my l shall repeat and not I But through Christ in me to this I hope My hope is only Jesus all the glory ever more to him when the race is complete still my lips shall repeat Not I But through Christ in me when the race is complete still my lips shall repeat and not I But through Christ in me yet not I But through Christ in me yet not I But through Christ in me.

We'll be reading from Ephesians, chapter 3. For this reason I bow my knee before the Father for whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with the fullness of God now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

Amen. The word of the Lord. Please be seated. Do you hear that at the end?

Do you hear that at the end? It's almost like Paul in his prayer shifts to singing. He can't help but exclaim of the glory, of the wonder, of the majesty of God. So maybe, maybe Peterson is right. Maybe prayer shifts us to a posture of listening, of receiving, of transformation.

I mean, and of course, some of our prayers are going to be focused on our own needs. They're going to be centered there. Prayers. Prayers for my kids, prayers for my family, prayers for my job, prayers that things will go okay. I've prayed for my kids almost nearly every night that they were brave, almost nearly night since they were born.

And I pray that. That God would make them brave, that God would make them kind. And one of my deepest hopes is that they won't have to suffer in life. And so I ask God for that. But I also know that.

I also know that they will.

As a ministry staff, we've been telling our stories this season. We've been gathering together on Mondays, and we've been sharing about our family of origins, about what it was like to grow up as me and what happened. And one of the things I noticed that was in common across all of us is that in all of our families, there was not one family that was not deeply steeped in pain and suffering. And I wondered for a minute, is this. Is this what draws people into ministry?

Some suffering that happens early in their life turns them into a place of compassion, where they want to serve others. I don't think that's the case. I think it's just reality that there is pain and suffering in everyone's life. Everybody experiences that.

So more than comfort, what I want to pray for is that my kids, my kids will have the eyes of their heart, enlightened to know the hope and the riches and the power of God. Mike told this story a while back. He told the story that, you know, when he was a minister, he got lots of requests for prayer, but nobody ever said, would you pray that the eyes of my heart would be enlightened to know the riches of the inheritance? And then he said, well, in all fairness, now that he's no longer a minister, when I ask people for prayers, when he asks people for prayers, it's usually a crisis. He doesn't ask his minister for that prayer either.

I know, and I'm not trying to make Mike feel guilty about that. It's just that your life matters, your circumstance matters. And God cares about that moment where you're deeply crying out to him.

When you're in your dad's last hours of his life, when it's cancer that seems like a Mack truck sideswiped the story that you were supposed to have. It's not to diminish any of those prayers. God cares deeply about all those things and acts deeply in all those issues. But Paul wants us to raise our eyes and see the greater horizon. And I'm thankful that Paul's prayer has this echo in the.

In the liturgy in the language of Highland. I love this, don't you? How high and wide and deep and long. We love all of this. And this is what he's actually praying for.

Here it is. Here, here, listen to this, if you can, in this moment, pray with me in this. For this reason, I kneel before the Father with whom every family on earth has arrived this day. And I pray out of his glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his spirit and in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith. And I pray that us being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all of God's holy, the Lord's holy people.

To God grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ to know that love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. He's not praying so much that. That they will get these things. He's praying that they will know that they have these things, that there'll be a deepening of the understanding in the life of this church. I think one of the ways that Max Lucado fundamentally changed Oak Hills was that he changed that church.

He made it a praying church before it became Oak Hills, the megachurch, before Max became Max Lucado, the super author, Oak Hills became a church that prayed it became a church that elders in the foyer when they heard about circumstances that needed prayer, they just stopped what they were doing and they prayed over those people. Max, when he was at the end of the service, you'd more often see him than not praying with somebody up front who deeply needed the comfort and the protection or the presence of God. And I'm not saying that the success of becoming a praying church is how you get big. In fact, that's not the point at all.

Instead, think about how we might expand our prayer life. Let's go in with one another to the prayer room.

What a jarring thing it would be to pray for these kind of things. That we would know the love of God. And I wonder what we would look like on the other side. Let's stand and sing together. There.

Your will be done My God and Father as in heaven so my heart is drawn to self exalting Help me sing your to as Jesus walk so I shall walk Held by your same unchanging Be still, my soul I'll lift your voice and pray Father, not my will but yours.

How in the garden he persisted I may never fully know the fearful weight of true obedience it was held by him alone what wondrous faith to bear the cross to bear my sin what wondrous love My hope was sure when there my Savior Great Father, not my will but yours.

When I am lost When I am broken in the night of fear and doubt Still I will trust in my good Father yes, to one great king I bow as Jesus rose shall I shall rise in ransom Glory at the throne My heart restored with all your saints I sing Father, not my will but yours be done Sa.

World made See your glory and your name be lifted high and in this day we overcome for you shall see us safely home now at your church we lift our voice and say Father, not my will but yours be done and in this name we overcome for you shall see us safely home now at your church we lift our voice and pray Father, not my will but yours be done Father, not my will but yours be done Father, not my will but yours be done Sa.

Speak, O Lord, as we come to you to receive the food of your holy word. Take your truth planted deep in us Shape and fashion us in your likeness that the light of Christ may be seen today in our acts of love and our deeds of faith. Speak, O Lord, and fulfill in us all your purposes for your glory.

Teach us, Lord, Full obedience, holy reverence, true humility Test our thoughts and our in the radiance of Your purity Cause our faith to rise Cause our eyes to see your majestic love and authority.

Words of power that can never fail Let their truth prevail over unbelief.

Let's sing this out. Church Speak, O Lord. Speak, O Lord, and renew our mind. Help us grasp the heights of your plans for us. Truths unchanged from the dawn of time that will echo down through eternity and by grace will stand on your promises and by faith we'll walk as you walk with us Speak, O Lord, till your church is filled and the earth is filled with your glory.

Ephesians, chapter 6. Pray in the Spirit at all times and in every prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints. Pray also for me so that when I speak a message may be given to me to make known with the boldness the mystery of the gospel for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly as I must speak the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Paul begins and ends the book of Ephesians in prayer. But when he ends, he wants to end again where he started in the mysteries of God. It takes us back to chapter one, but this time Paul wants something more. There's a hinge in the book of Ephesians. It starts about chapter four.

Paul begins to use imperatives. He says, this is what you ought to do. This is how we ought to live. This is how we ought to think about this world in light of what Jesus Christ has done for us. It's not merely that God might open the eyes of our hearts, but that we would pray for one another.

It would be that we pray for the church here at Highland, but not only our church here, but because in Ephesians, the church, when Paul uses that term, he's talking about the big little sea church, the universal church in all of its gorgeous color and variety. And we can't miss what comes right before this prayer. In chapter six, Paul spends time talking about the necessary spiritual armor a believer needs and the way that a. A coach might talk about the helmet and pads that a football player needs to get on the field. And in this prayer, Paul is vulnerable.

He talks about his weakness and fear in proclaiming the mystery of God. And maybe here he's talking about that thorn in his flesh that he speaks of in Second Corinthians. Maybe that was some sort of speech impediment. We don't know. Maybe it was something that.

That made it difficult for him to preach. It reminds Me, though. The story of Steven Spielberg and John Williams. Steven Spielberg had just finished creating his masterpiece, Schindler's List. It's the.

The best film he ever made. And he needed John Williams to write the score. And so he brought John Williams into this, this private screening of the film. And afterwards, John has to go outside to the lot and then compose himself. He was so moved by the movie.

And he comes back and he tells Spielberg, I think you need a better composer.

What a statement of humility. And then Spielberg says, I think you're right. The problem is they're all dead.

And that's, that's not Spielberg knocking on John Williams. He believed John Williams was the best composer, living composer at the time. But he, but he, he was just saying that he was giving him a compliment and John Williams was expressing this kind of humility. And I, I think that's what we hear in Paul's words, that somehow the prayer of the church turns into the. The gospel of the church.

The time we spend in prayer turns into the. The announcement that we make that we become heralds. Notice the alls in this prayer that Paul uses. Pray in the spirit at all times, in all prayers and supplications. Always persevere in prayer for all the church.

When should we pray? All the time. Who should I pray for? All the church. I should pray for you.

You should pray for the person on your left and your right.

And maybe it'd be good if we knew something about one another. Maybe it might be good to know that this is going to be a tough week for the couple on your right because this is the anniversary of their son's death. Or this is going to be a tired week for the couple on your left because the baby is still colicky and no one's sleeping well. We bring one another before the throne of God in prayer because we love each other, because we care for each other.

I want to end today with Francis Chan.

If we actually knew what prayer could do to invite the creator of heaven and earth to attend to our needs. If we could possibly understand how prayer so deeply shapes us into the image of Jesus, aligns us, aligns our will with the kingdom, work around us, empowered by the spirit. If we actually believed what prayer could do, it might become the only thing we do.

Or at least we might understand it's the most important thing we do.

The prayers of the church fosters the mission of the church. If you want to see God's kingdom come and God's will be done, then we begin in prayer. Stand and sing.