Turning Point

Guest (Male): When life around you is chaotic and troubling, wouldn't it be nice to feel calm and peaceful on the inside? The Holy Spirit can make that happen. Today on Turning Point, Dr. David Jeremiah reveals how to pray for the Spirit's help in protecting your inner being from outer turmoil. From his series, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, here's David to introduce today's powerful message, The Strength of the Spirit.

Dr. David Jeremiah: And we're looking in our Bibles in the third chapter of Ephesians. If you have a copy of the book, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, or the study guide, you can follow along with us. Find your place in the book, find your place in the study guide as we talk about this important subject, the strength of the Holy Spirit. It is a wonderful truth, and we're going to explore it in just a moment as we open our Bibles together.

The book, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, is the resource for the month of June. I am so excited about this book because it completes the trilogy on the Godhead. We now have a book called The God You May Not Know, The Jesus You May Not Know, and now The Holy Spirit You May Not Know. These three books are meant to help you understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the three persons of the Trinity.

I am sure that for many of you, the Holy Spirit is the most mysterious of the three. The least known about him seems to be true for many people, but we've captured everything. We've captured a lot of it and put it in writing, and it's on the CDs that you would get if you got that series. It's in this book, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, which you can have this month for a gift of any size to Turning Point. Just send a gift of any size, do the best you can, and as God enables you to give, ask for your copy of the book. It's 250 pages, a hardback, wonderful book for your library. I told you earlier many of my friends are reading this book right now and giving me feedback, and it's really encouraging. So, we'll begin that study of the strength of the Holy Spirit as we open our Bibles together right now.

Mary Slessor was a single young woman who left Scotland at the turn of the century to go be a part of the missionary force in Africa, a place that was filled with incredible danger. But she had this inward spirit that kept her going when a lot of others broke down, gave up, and went home. One night, after a particularly exhausting day, she found herself trying to sleep in a crude jungle hut, and she wrote about it in her diary.

This is what she wrote: "I'm not very particular about my bed these days. I lay on a few dirty sticks laid across and covered with a litter of dirty corn shells, with plenty of rats and insects, three women and an infant three days old in the tent, and a dozen sheep and goats and cows outside. You probably don't wonder that I slept very little." Then she added these words: "But I had a comfortable quiet night in my own heart."

And that is quite amazing, isn't it? That you can be in the midst of that kind of confusion and have a comfortable quiet night in your own heart. I know most of us will never sleep in a hut surrounded by goats and rats like Mary Slessor did, but our challenges are just as real. They look different. We face busy schedules and financial difficulties, pressures at school or work, we have relationship problems, and we have the same kind of need.

And we need a quiet heart. We need an inner strength to face up to the challenges that are part of all of our daily lives. And today we're going to explore what is, in my estimation, the most wonderful prayer in the New Testament apart from the prayers of our Lord. It's a wonderful prayer that I hope will be realized in your life and mine as we study it together. That prayer is found in Ephesians chapter 3, verses 14 through 16.

Here's what it says: "For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man." Let's look first of all at the posture of this prayer. The first thing we notice is that Paul specifically calls out this posture.

He says, "For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named." Notice he's bowing to pray. And I know this doesn't sound strange to us because maybe before we go to bed at night, we bow to pray. But it was very strange in those days for a Jew to do that because they never did that. They stood to pray. It wasn't common for ancient Jewish people to bow their knees in prayer, especially in public.

We learn from history that they stood upright while praying, using their hands uplifted toward heaven. Remember Jesus and the Pharisee and the tax collector? Here's what he said: "The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself." The Pharisee stood to pray as was the custom. Even the tax collector was standing afar off. Most Jewish people stood when they prayed.

But Paul tells us that he was kneeling in prayer for them, for the Ephesians. And I think he wanted to highlight the intensity of that moment, the intensity of his prayer. This was serious business. It was the kind of prayer that brought him to his knees. And Paul wasn't alone in adopting this posture. Luke 22:41 tells us that Jesus was withdrawn from them about a stone's throw, and He knelt down and prayed.

And when Stephen was assassinated, we are told he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin." And of course, we all know the famous prayer in Philippians where we're told that one day at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. When I was a student in seminary back years ago, Donna and I remember the first time we ever went to the First Baptist Church of Dallas.

We'd heard about it most of our lives. It was pastored by a very famous pastor named W.A. Criswell, a Southern Baptist leader who was well known around the world. That first Sunday when we walked into the sanctuary and sat up in the balcony, I was surprised to see that in this church, they had installed kneeling benches connected to all the pews. I mean, that was common in more liturgical churches, but it was strange to find that in a Baptist church.

Pretty quickly, I realized it wasn't strange at all. When it came time to pray, Dr. Criswell would say, "Let us all bow together," and you would hear the crashing of these kneeling benches being pulled out, kind of like a thunderous sound throughout the church. When that settled down, you'd look and here was this whole congregation from the balcony. We could see it really well, all on their knees in prayer before God. It was very special.

In a similar way, there's something special about our experience of prayer when we kneel. Doing so says outwardly what should be true inwardly: that we are submitting ourselves to the Lord. When you kneel before Him, you're saying, "Lord, You're in control." I remember writing in one of my journals on an occasion that prayer is our declaration of dependence. And that is true. When we pray, we're saying, "Lord, we're counting on You."

Quite often it's true that we've tried everything else first, and now we come and we bow before the Lord and say, "Lord, we need Your help." And we're counting on You. So the posture of Paul's prayer tells us that what we're talking about today is pretty important. It was important to him, and he wants it to be important to us. Now, there's much more to glean from this prayer apart from Paul's physical posture. In verses 16 through 19, we learn about the possibilities of this prayer.

Ephesians 3:16 says, "Here's what I pray: that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man." Paul asks God to fill the Ephesians with inward power, with inward strength. All the strong words he uses in verse 16: riches, glory, strengthened, might. And the word might appears over and over in the New Testament, over 120 times in total. It refers to the power that God gives to His people.

God gives might to us through the inner part of our being. I'm so taken by the verse in 2 Corinthians 4:16 that the outward man is wasting away, but the inner man is being renewed day by day. That's true. I don't think anybody has to convince us of that. We know it. We experience it, especially the outward man part of it. But the interesting thing is the Bible tells us that while we may be seeming to be weakened in the outward person, we can become strengthened in the inward person.

And that's what Paul is praying about. He wants his people, he wants us to have a strong center so that whatever happens, whatever takes place in our lives, we have this power, this might, this strength that carries us through. One of our friends here at Shadow Mountain is a man named Rob Morgan. He preaches often when I'm not here, and he wrote a book some years ago that became a very special book to me because it was during the early days of my illness.

The book was on strength. The book was called The Strength You Need. I was feeling pretty weak then, and I was looking for strength anywhere I could find it. I remember picking up that book and Rob had taken all of the passages in the Bible that talk about strength and written a chapter about them, and I was blessed by that book and helped by it. In this book, he said we're living in a difficult age and events on the world stage are disconcerting.

In times like these, we need to be stronger: stronger as husbands, we need to be stronger wives, stronger people. We need stronger children, stronger families, stronger churches, stronger determination to tackle each day for good and for God. And he said, "If you're like me, you want stronger faith, stronger peace, stronger joy, and more stamina to do the work the Lord assigns each day." And I kept saying to myself, "Amen, that's what I want."

I want to be strong in my spirit. I want to be able to have the resilience and the strength and the stamina to face challenges that come my way, no matter what they may be. Not because I'm strong, but because there's a strength in me that is greater than me. The Bible says God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. And when you're strengthened by the Holy Spirit, Paul says three things will happen in your life.

These are things we might not think about, but Paul wants us to know that when, first of all, we are strengthened in the Spirit, we sense the presence of God in our life. Now, this is a little bit delicate, but let me see if I can help us grab hold of it. He says that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, verse 17. The Bible says that Christ comes to live within our hearts when we become Christians.

And Paul is writing this to Christian people and he's praying that Christ might dwell in their hearts. There must be a difference between dwelling and living, and there is. The word dwell there means to be at home. Paul says, "My prayer for you is that Christ may be at home in your heart." Have you ever been in a place where you were in the house, but you weren't at home in the house? Maybe they talked to you as close to the door as possible so that as fast as you came in, you would leave, and you do not feel welcome. You do not feel at home.

The Bible says that God's prayer for us is that Jesus Christ might live in our hearts and be at home there, that He might dwell there, that He might be comfortable there. Is Christ comfortable in your heart? Are you comfortable with Christ in your heart? It's interesting to think about that in terms of the scripture that we have here from Paul. John 14:23 says, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and the Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him."

That's what Almighty God wants. Paul is praying for the believers in Ephesus to experience this. Christ wants not just to be a resident in your life, not just your ticket to heaven. He wants you to be comfortable with Him. He wants Him to be a part of your daily existence. I don't know if this happens to you, but for me, when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I think about when I wake up is the Lord, and I pray and I talk to Him, even before I'm totally awake.

And many days, the last thing that I think about before I go to sleep is the Lord and what He's done and what He's working in my life. He wants you to be in that vein. He wants the Holy Spirit to bring Jesus Christ into your life and that He would not just be a resident, but He'd be the president and He'd be at home there. So here's a question to ask yourself: Is Christ at home in your heart?

I'm not asking you if He's in your heart because most of you already you've taken Jesus into your heart. But have you made Him comfortable? And I don't need to go into all the details of the things that can make Jesus uncomfortable, but you know what I'm talking about. Give Him a place of honor and comfort in your heart. He says when you have this inner strength in the Holy Spirit in your heart, first of all, Christ will be at home in your heart.

And then secondly, he says you will be able to comprehend the love that Christ has for you. Verse 17: "That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge." I don't know if you can get your arms around this, what an incredible thing it is to know that somebody loves you.

And what a wonderful thing to know that God has you as the object of His love. I know that we know God loves us. We read that, but just think about that for a moment. You are loved by the Creator of the universe. He loves you, and Paul wants us to understand that with such desire that he actually gives us the four dimensions of God's love. I don't know if you've ever noticed this before, the width and length and depth and height of His love.

Now, I've read a lot of sermons on these, a lot of pastors have taken these four things and created some fanciful sermons. I don't have one of those for you today, but I want to illustrate it for you by taking you to John 3:16. You don't have to turn to it because you all know it: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Now, let's look at that verse in terms of the dimensions of the love of God.

For God so loved the world. That's the width of God's love. How wide is His love? It's as wide as the world. And anybody teaches you any different than that, they're not teaching the Gospel. God loves the whole world. He loves everyone in the world. For God so loved the world. That's the width of His love. That He gave His only begotten Son. How much did He love us? He loved us so much that He dispatched His only begotten Son to this earth.

That's the length He went to show us His love. He didn't just say, "I love you." He said, "I love you," and sent Jesus as the person of His love. That whosoever believes in Him should not perish. That's the depth of God's love. God loves us so much that He doesn't want us to go into the depth of the earth in hell. He wants to save us from that, and His love reaches to the very depth of life.

And His love is also a love that has height to it. He loves us so much that we might have eternal life. Every time you read John 3:16, just remember John 3:16 is the four dimensions of God's love. I remember reading that many atrocities were committed during the period of history known as the Spanish Inquisition. I once read a story about a Spanish prisoner whose bones were discovered when soldiers opened up one of the underground dungeons used by the leaders of the Inquisition.

What they found was that flesh and clothing had long since dissolved, but the soldiers found the remnants of bones chained to a wall. And that wasn't all they found. On the wall of that prison, cut into the rock with a sharp piece of metal, was a cross. And above the cross in Spanish was the word "height," and below the cross was the word "depth," and one arm was "length" and the other arm was "breadth."

So not only does John 3:16 teach us the four-dimensional love of God, but so does the cross. I'm sure you have noticed in recent days how many people on business and talk shows are wearing crosses. Everybody wears a cross. But you have to wonder, do they understand that that cross is a symbol of the four dimensions of God's love? He came down to us and reached out to us that we might not go down but that we might go up to be with Him.

That's what the scripture says. Love that passes, the Bible says, all understanding. That's what you call an oxymoron. How can love be understood if it passes understanding? Well, the point is that we can't know this love by human knowledge. We can only know this love through the Holy Spirit who is in our heart. Remember, Paul was praying this prayer at a very certain time.

I think this is instructive because when we read this prayer in Ephesians, it's right in the context of the anger that was being expressed by the Jews toward the Gentiles and the Gentiles toward the Jews. And Paul was trying to help them understand that God has enough love to bring these two entities together in one thing called the church. The love of God inspires us to go into the worst parts of town and minister to the down and outers.

And we can't do that on our own strength, but when we have the Holy Spirit in our lives, when the Holy Spirit is filling us and giving us strength, then we can do what we would not otherwise be able to do and we can be emissaries of the love of Christ. We should love others in the same way that God loves us. We should reach into the reservoir of God's love for us, and out of that reservoir we should find a way to love other people.

Then, not only is it true when the Holy Spirit strengthens you, you will sense Christ's presence in your life, and the Holy Spirit will strengthen you so that you can comprehend God's love in your life, but when the Holy Spirit strengthens you, you will be filled with the fullness of God. 3:19 Ephesians: "That you may be filled with the fullness of God." These progressions come in the right order. The inner strength of the Holy Spirit leads us to the indwelling of Christ.

The indwelling of Christ leads us to the knowledge of God's love for us, and now His abundant love leads us to experience the fullness of God's presence within us. I know over the years when you read about being filled with the Spirit, it sends questions running through your mind. I told you earlier, it doesn't mean filled up like filled up to your knees or your shoulders. It means to be controlled by. When some people read this, they don't understand it because it doesn't mean what it normally would mean in English.

It means to be filled by, to be controlled by. When you're filled with God, you're controlled by God. Look at the illustration Paul used later in his book. He said we aren't to be drunk with wine, but to be filled with the Spirit. In the same way that a person is controlled by inebriation, the Bible says we're to be controlled by the Spirit of God. We're to be controlled by God. He was telling us that when we are allowing the Spirit of God to live His life in us, when we acknowledge that He is there for us, the one thing that will happen is we'll begin to learn what it means for God to control our life.

Do you ask God about stuff? Do you ever see somebody in need and you say, "God, should I help this person?" Do you think God will answer you, not out loud but in your heart, in your spirit He will? Do you ever do things that you do and people question it? "What are you doing that for?" Did you ever say, "Because God told me to"? And they look at you like you're some weird person, "God talks to you?" Yes, if you're controlled by God, you have the impressions and the sense in your heart that what you're doing is a God thing.

And He gives you great joy to do that, even when some people may not understand it. I told you once before that one of the things I did during Christmas and I've continued to do it is to carry a little extra cash around and when you see somebody that you'd like to bless, just to bless them. And it's so interesting, Donna could tell you we've had so many interesting stories when you do that, people don't want to take it. "I can't take that. What's that for?" And you know what I tell them? "God told me to do this." "Oh, okay."

And then they say thank you and put it in their pocket. Listen to me: God wants to tell us what to do and help us do it. He wants to be in control of our lives. And that sometimes seems so out of perspective for most people. "God wants to control my life?" Absolutely. When you let the Holy Spirit have His way in your heart, God will control your life. And the possibilities of that are overwhelming.

You know the thing that is so important for you to understand is that God wants the best for your life. I think sometimes people are afraid to let God control their life because they are afraid He's going to take away their joy or take away their fun or take away the thing that makes life meaningful to them. God knows how you are made and He wants your happiness and your joy more than you do. You turn your life over to Him and you'll discover His way is best, way better than anything you can come up with in your own wisdom.

We are so excited about this particular part of the study of the Holy Spirit. We'll continue it tomorrow here on Turning Point, and then Thursday and Friday we're going to talk about the best evidence of the Spirit in your life. How can you tell by looking at somebody from the outside in whether or not they are filled with the Spirit? I'm going to give you the number one key when we meet together Thursday and Friday. Don't forget to ask for your copy of the book, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, when you send your gift to Turning Point. And don't forget, time's running out in June and that offer goes away at the end of the month, so get your request in right away.

Guest (Male): Today's message originated from Shadow Mountain Community Church and Senior Pastor Dr. David Jeremiah. Drop us a note to let us know how God is using this ministry in your life. Write to Turning Point, Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California 92163. Visit our website at DavidJeremiah.org/radio or call 800-947-1993. Ask for your copy of David's new book, The Holy Spirit You May Not Know, a valuable resource that's yours for a gift of any amount. The prayerful support we receive from listeners like you makes this program possible. Thank you for partnering with us to deliver the unchanging Word of God to an ever-changing world. This is David Michael Jeremiah. Join us tomorrow as we continue The Holy Spirit You May Not Know on Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.