Latest / The Daily Word / June 5 – Knowing Him Better
Transcript
- Cory Barnes: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good wee hours of the night, whatever time it is for you. Welcome to the Daily Word Podcast from Lakeshore Christian Fellowship. My name is Corey Barnes, and it's my privilege to pastor Arkitava Campus. Excited to be sitting down with you for another episode where we're going to be doing a devotion from today's New Testament portion of our life journal reading plan that Lakeshore is on. ⁓ today is June the 5th, and we are launching into the book of Ephesians. Now, this is Paul's epistle, his letter to the church at Ephesus, and we can see in Acts 19, Paul's ministry in Ephesus. He started off ⁓ kind of sensational, and his whole time there really was. ⁓ his time in Ephesus began by encountering 12 disciples, people that had already met Jesus, had already accepted him as Lord and Savior. ⁓ then Paul asks them, Well, well, ⁓ guys seem to have a lot going for you. Have you received the Holy Spirit? They said, We haven't even so much as heard that there was a Holy Spirit. So Paul teaches them ⁓ the Holy Spirit. They receive baptism and the Holy Spirit began praying in tongues, ⁓ and that's just the start ⁓ Paul's ministry there. It was so fruitful his time in Ephesus. That he stayed for over two years in Acts 1911 tells us that God worked unusual, is the way the New King James Version puts it, miracles by the hands of Paul, so that people were healed when even ⁓ handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul's body were taken to them. ⁓ they received it when they touched the cloth that had touched Paul's body. ⁓ some believe that this was. like sweat rags and aprons that Paul was using because he was earning a living while he was there as a tent maker. And some people believe that these were literally sweat rags that he wiped his brow with while he's in the middle of earning a living and being able to preach the gospel. Then they took them to people and they received healing. That's not explicitly in scripture, but it's a cool little fun detail. Paul experienced while he was here one of the greatest revivals we see in the Bible. ⁓ kind of this revival here in Ephesus and the revival in Nineveh after the prophet Jonah ⁓ got out of the belly of the whale and told them to repent. Those are kind of the two greatest revivals we see in the Bible, ⁓ where people were walking against God and turned around and came back to him. And with revival, it was pretty cool. ⁓ Because so many people who had previously been practicing magic and ⁓ the occult practices and things like that, they came and they brought their spell books and they burned them because they didn't need them. They had a bonfire that was about a six million dollar bonfire with all these materials. ⁓ it's pretty it's pretty crazy. ⁓ all the amazing things we see happening here just in two years with Paul. He did eventually leave because opponents of the faith struck up a riot against against Christianity, and Paul ended up moving on from Ephesus and continuing to travel. And it wasn't until years later that Paul sat down in a dank, dirty Roman jail cell and began writing this letter that we know as the book of Ephesians. Now, the structure of this chapter is pretty straightforward. ⁓ Paul greets the church in verses one through two, and then in verses three through fourteen, he shares what scholars believe to be either a hymn or a creed, ⁓ a known writing to the praise of God. They don't believe that Paul authored necessarily what he wrote there, they believe that he was sharing something with them. That they would potentially have already known it was a doxology, a writing to the praise of God for what he had done through Jesus. And then after that, beginning in verse 15, he begins sharing with the church at Ephesus ⁓ a prayer that he he often prayed ⁓ over them. And what find really interesting in this prayer that Paul said he prayed over and over and over again over these Ephesians. And you might remember this prayer from back in November when we did our Praying Like Paul series. We taught on this as one of those messages. I think it was the last, next to last message in the series, if my memory serves me correctly. You can go back and catch that. But he he shares while he's praying with them that this church that it had such spectacular occurrences and manifestations and all the things that give you goosebumps ⁓ with what the Holy Spirit can do, the flash, the pizzazz, the really intense stuff. ⁓ when Paul prays for them and he prays about what the spirit would do in their life, it's not actually any of that pop. that he prays for it's actually something quite different. We can see that in verse seventeen, reading out of the NIV I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit, capital S, Spirit, Holy Spirit, of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. How beautiful is it that this church who had already experienced the outward working of the Holy Spirit, Paul is now praying for them to each individually experience the inward working of the Holy Spirit. Where the Holy Spirit would come in and begin giving these people wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of who God is. He wasn't praying. That God would come in and continue to work miracles with sweat rags. He wasn't praying for another, you know, the first bonfire was six million. Maybe we can get an eight million dollar one next. He wasn't doing any of that. He was praying. I pray that the Holy Spirit would do inner work inside of you and just show you who God is. Mm-mm-mm. So I guess our application here. Is that as we consider our relationship with God, are we more focused on what He wants us to do in our lives externally? Are we are we so focused on the healing that we need for ourselves or a loved one? Are we so focused on the financial miracle that we need? Or or him to restore a relationship? Are we so focused on that that we don't hold room for him to just reveal himself to us in small step by step ways through wisdom and revelation by the Holy Spirit? I'm not saying that it's wrong to believe in any of those other things, to have faith for all those other things. In fact, it's a very good thing to have faith for the Lord to move in your life. We believe in As a church, that we should be believing for those things. I'm just saying, are we doing that either exclusively or at the expense of also asking him to do a work inside of us to show us who he is? See, when he begins to truly show us who he is, it opens the door for us to become more and more like him. when we understand. His nature, his character, his beauty, his love. It starts doing a work inside of us and it begins the process of conforming us into his image so that we look more and more and more like him, talk like him, walk like him. So as we're believing for all the external stuff, are we also believing for that internal work from the Holy Spirit? Let's pray. Father, I just thank you. I thank you for your great love. I thank you that you have given us the gift of the presence of the Holy Spirit, who comes in our lives to do so many beautiful things. One of which is to give us wisdom and revelation and the knowledge of who you are, so that we can understand you and know you better. You never desired. To be so mysterious that we couldn't know you. You always wanted us to know you. And I thank you that you've given us the Holy Spirit so that He can show us and speak to us and reveal you in a way that we can understand. We thank you, Lord, for your goodness and your grace and your great power. So we ask that you would do the same thing within us, that you would work in us through your Holy Spirit so that we can know you and so that we can look like you, walk like you, and talk like you. We thank you that every time we come to your scripture, you open it up and you show us something beautiful, something brand new. We love you, Jesus. We really do. Amen.