8. “Resurrection Power” (Ephesians 3)

 

Resurrection Power

Ephesians 3

 

Once upon a time, in a faraway land, a young prince lived in a shining castle. Although he had everything his heart desired, the prince was spoiled, selfish, and unkind. But then, one winter’s night, an old beggar woman came to the castle and offered him a single rose in return for shelter from the bitter cold. Repulsed by her haggard appearance, the prince sneered at the gift and turned the old woman away. But when he dismissed her, the old woman’s ugliness melted away to reveal a beautiful enchantress. As punishment, she transformed him into a hideous Beast, and placed a powerful spell on the castle, and all who lived there.

So begins the classic Disney animated movie “The Beauty and the Beast.” If you’ve watched it, or the more recent live-action film, you know how the story goes. Everything in the castle has been corrupted: the living plants die out, the beautiful castle becomes ugly, the servants are all turned into objects like a living clock or a candle, and the prince becomes a monster. And only love, we are told, has the ability to break this curse.

And in the end, that is what happens. In a moment where it appears all is over for the beast and the castle, there is something like a beam of power that somehow comes down upon the Beast and as it fills him, it transforms him into a restored, living human being. And that power doesn’t stop there: it then spreads outward. Wherever it goes, the curse that was there before is now lifted: the gargoyles on the castle become beautiful statues, the dead vines spring to life with flowers, and Lumiere and Cogsworth and Mrs Potts and Chip all become human. And they all live happily ever after.

Now this is, of course, a fairytale—and not just a fairytale, but the Disney version of the fairytale. It’s fiction. And yet, sometimes the fairytales we tell ourselves have more reality to them than the stories we believe to be true. They contain awareness of things that we have forgotten, intuitions buried deep within us about this world.

Because the truth is, this world really is under a curse. What’s more, there really is a different, better, fuller, more human version of life that we were meant to experience. And what we celebrate with awestruck wonder this Easter morning is the truth that something powerful has in fact happened; something that breaks the curse and makes us whole.

There Is a Curse

Does it seem strange to you for me to speak of this world as being under a curse? My guess is that you actually already know what I’m talking about, even if you might use a different word for it. For one of the strange things about human existence is the profound sense of dissatisfaction we feel about how things are.

We look around, and what do we see? Many good and beautiful things or course, but we also see wars taking place where many lives are lost, often senselessly. We see people, even children, getting sick from things like cancer. We see families torn apart by cruelty or infidelity. And, if we’re really honest, we also see things within ourselves that disturb us.

What’s striking about all of this is not that there are bad things. If in fact this world were just the product of chance and natural selection, one would expect violence and senselessness to be the norm. No, what’s striking is the fact that we all know that these things are bad. We sense that it shouldn’t be this way. There’s a part within us that cries no! when we see injustice, when we see warfare, when we see the life of a loved one taken too early. 

We know deep down that this world is a disfigured version of what it was meant to be. We know that there’s a brokenness to it, a corruption. We suspect that something really important is missing—and we’re right.

Around 5 centuries ago when Columbus and others began to explore the seas and be away from land for a long period of time, people started falling apart. I mean that quite literally. While they were away at sea, some sailors began to experience a deep and intense lethargy rendering them incapable of getting anything done. Their bodies felt weak, their joints ached. Soon their arms and legs began to swell; their skin would bruise at the slightest touch. As the days went by, their gums began to get spongey, their breath terrible, their teeth fell out. The mind would also begin to deteriorate; people would report deep senses of longing, longing for home; grown, hardened sailors would just sit down and begin to cry. Splotches appeared on their skin, old wounds opened again, and eventually, many of these sailors died.  

For the longest time, people didn’t understand why this was happening. The French called it “Land Sickness,” implying that this corruption of the body had to do with being out at sea, but that’s not what it was. Only after many years and 2 million deaths would it become widely understood that the cause of scurvy, for that’s what it was, was entirely due to a lack of Vitamin C. Without one simple thing, without vitamin C, the body breaks down at the cellular level, and everything goes wrong.

I want to suggest to you that in a very real sense, our entire world is like a ship that for a long time has been away at sea. We look around us and see evidence of a deep sickness: we see societies falling apart because of injustice, families coming apart because of anger and selfishness, our own selves lacking integrity as we see our own inner darkness, our bodies falling apart ultimately unto death. There is what we might call a spiritual scurvy everywhere. And just like in the time of Columbus, it’s because there’s something missing. This fatal spiritual sickness is what happens to human beings when we are cut off from a relationship with the one who made us. Without the wisdom found in God, we become foolish; without the righteousness of God, we become unjust; without the love of God, we become cruel; without the life of God, we die. When we are lacking a connection to God, everything goes wrong. We fall apart.

This is the curse we are all under. Long ago humanity turned our back on God; we broke our relationship with him. Ever since we have been alienated from the only one who can make us whole, and everything we see around us that is wrong, this spiritual scurvy, is the consequence. 

End to the Curse

But in our passage, we find a vision of the alternative. In these verses Paul prays for people like you and me, and it’s a prayer for a different kind of existence from what is all around us. Paul prays for a life that experiences healing from this spiritual scurvy, that finds freedom from this curse—life how it was originally intended to be. What Paul prays for is a deep, life-changing connection with God. 

He prays for this different life with three closely related requests.

First, in verse 17, he prays that Christ would “dwell in your hearts.” 

Now what does that even mean? When I was a kid I first heard someone say that becoming a Christian involved asking Jesus into your heart, and I found that idea kind of confusing. Like, how would he fit? Would it be uncomfortable? 

But consider how other people can be a part of us in a real way. People we love, like parents and children and spouses take up residence in our minds and our desires—they shape us, our connection to them makes us who we are. They get inside us. That’s what Christ dwelling in our hearts is describing: it’s speaking of Jesus being the centermost person who shapes us; it’s speaking of the Son of God becoming intimately a part of who we are, forming our sense of identity, his words teaching us how to live, encouraging us. It’s God dwelling with us, the end to our alienation from him.

But what would that even feel like, to have Christ dwelling in our hearts? Is it like those cartoons where now we have a shoulder angel always telling us what to do? While Jesus certainly does promise to lead us out of our self-destructiveness into what is good, our passage tells us that the primary change that happens as Christ dwells in our hearts is not an increased sense of guilt or a sense of a loss of freedom. No, the way we know Christ has taken residency in our hearts and that we are becoming more human is when we become more aware of his love.

This is the second thing we see in Paul’s prayer for our healing.  

In verses 18 and 19, Paul prays, “that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength 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.” This is what it’s really like to be reconnected to God. Here’s how you’ll know Christ is truly dwelling in you—when you begin to know at a deep, personal level that you are loved by God through Jesus.

Do you know what it is to be loved deeply by another? To know that someone else in the world has you on their heart; to know that someone would drop whatever they are doing, would give up just about anything to care for you? Maybe it’s your father or mother. Maybe it’s your spouse or a close friend. If you have someone in your life like that—and, what’s more, if you confidently know that you are loved like this, well, that is life-changing.

The extraordinary teaching of the Bible is that as much as someone else might love you, the God of the universe loves you even more. Your Creator never stops paying attention to you—not with a hall monitor kind of attention, watching out for you to do something wrong, but with the attention of love, seeking your good. God doesn’t just tell us that he loves us like this; he has shown it. When Jesus went to the cross, God was giving his Son, and his Son was giving his life. Jesus experienced unimaginable agony in his death to rescue us from that curse of alienation that we brought upon ourselves. Because our God loves us beyond what we can imagine. 

I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon. But I’ve heard that when you stand on the edge, the sheer bigness is overwhelming, it’s too much to take in. Your senses short circuit as you try to understand how wide and how deep and how long it all is. That, Paul says, is how the love of God through Christ is: the sheer enormity of how deeply and eternally and completely God loves us is, well, it’s a love that surpasses knowledge. 

And as Jesus takes up his dwelling in our hearts, as we begin to be healed, this nevertheless is something we begin to know. We begin to find ourselves experientially tasting, experiencing that we are loved, really loved by God, loved more than we can possibly imagine.

And with this knowledge, something else happens, which we see in the third request in Paul’s prayer for our healing in verse 19. As Christ dwells in you, as you come to know this love of Christ, it says you will be filled with ALL the fullness of God.”

The curse, as we’ve said, is about a lack, a deficiency of God in our lives. And so we are healed as we are filled with God.

Actually, not just filled with God, but “filled with ALL the fullness of God.”  See, God, the Bible tells us, is beyond full. It’s not just that God is completely satisfied and content and joyful and needs nothing; it’s that he overflows. He is so full of love and life that it moves outward in love. 

That’s what Paul envisions for us: when Jesus really has taken up his dwelling in us, when we really deeply grasp how deeply God loves us and are secure in that love, we will find ourselves becoming full in the way that God himself is full. God will be so present in us, his life and beauty and joy will be so much a part of us that we also overflow, that we find ourselves spilling out to the world around us with the love of God, so that others through us experience God’s love as well.

It’s easy for us to just look around at how things are and think this is all that there is, this is all that could be. But Paul’s prayer opens up our eyes to what could be: it tells us, this is what it truly looks like to be human. This is the healed life, freed from the curse. Jesus dwelling in us, so deeply convincing us of his love that we overflow.

A Power

That sounds lovely. But it also sounds impossible. How in the world could this kind of change happen to us? 

Here’s where we get to the part of this passage that makes it perfect for Easter Sunday. (You might wonder if I had forgotten about that). See, there’s one other element we need to notice in this prayer. Backing up to the beginning, notice that before Paul prays for Christ to dwell in you, first he prays for something else for us. Paul prays that God would give you and me POWER: “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” Paul is agreeing with us; yes, it is in fact impossible for us on our own to have Christ dwell in us, to be filled by knowing his love. We need a power that comes from outside of us.  

Because our spiritual scurvy is too far advanced. Our alienation from God has left us too weak, too blind, too confused, too fearful. On our own, we are too afraid to allow Christ in, too darkened in understanding to be able to believe in God’s love. We need something to change us. We need power from outside of us so that we can be strengthened for Christ to dwell in us. We need a power from outside of us so that we can have strength to comprehend the love of God.  

And Paul’s point in recognizing our need for this power is not to cause a wistful longing—oh, if only that could happen to us, but rather to instill hope. Because as Paul has said in a previous chapter, that power has already entered the world: it broke through into human history at Christ’s resurrection.  

When Jesus went to the cross, he carried unto death our sin-corrupted humanity, our guilt, our shame—our curse—all of this, Jesus put to death in his death. And when he rose, something utterly extraordinary happened, not just to him, but to all of reality. 

On that Easter morning, God the Father poured down power from on high, filling the dead human body of Jesus, his Son with life; not just physical life, but the supernatural powerful life of the Holy Spirit; a power that brings perfect and complete connection between humanity and God. Jesus gasped awake with a new kind of breath filling his lungs—a breath that would never leave him again. His body was transformed to immortal flesh; he opened his eyes and, as the very beginning of God’s new creation, Jesus arose. As remarkable and unworldly and as strange as it all might seem, this really happened on this earth, nearly 2000 years ago, as many witnesses testify.

And here is where the fairy tale once again contains echoes of something gloriously true. For the new life-giving power that first filled Jesus did not stop there but is now spreading throughout this world, and wherever this power of the Spirit goes, it brings life. We’re talking here about more than dead vines blooming with flowers or gargoyles becoming beautiful statues. What we’re talking about is as this power spreads, deep healing happens, the curse is being lifted, the spiritual dead are brought back to life.  

When Paul prays that you would be strengthened with power through his Spirit, this is what he is praying for us: that the power of the resurrection would wake you up, so that you could see and believe and experience life as Christ enters your heart.

And ever since that first Easter, everyone who has a story of becoming a Christian has experienced this power for themselves.

Do you know that hymn, “Amazing Grace?” There’s a line in it, “I once was lost, but now am found—was blind, but now I see.” It’s not just a line of a hymn; it’s a personal testimony. 

The man who wrote Amazing Grace, John Newton had a mother who sought to raise him as a Christian, but she died early. And as he became a teen and then an adult, the challenges of life and the company Newton kept made it so that all of this stuff about God just seemed so unreal, so unimportant. Newton’s life went down a pretty dark path;  eventually he became a slave trader. Until one night on the seas the storms seemed almost certain to kill him. In a moment of helplessness, he cried out a weak helpless prayer, and in that moment, and over the course of the next few months things began to change. Things began to come into focus—he began to see everything differently. With grief he saw more clearly the mistakes he had made—but then he saw something even more remarkable. That despite it all, God loved him. He began to know the height and width and breadth and depth. “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”

Something happened to him. Resurrection power touched him, it gave him a strength, an ability to see what he before could not. And he was forever changed. He began to be healed: and his life became more and more beautiful, it overflowed so that he himself became instrumental in bringing an end to slavery.

Some of you who have become Christians as adults know a bit of what that’s like. No, you weren’t slave traders. But you know what it’s like for things to come into focus. Maybe for quite a while you assumed that the reason you’re not a Christian is because there’s not enough evidence for it; it all seems so far-fetched. But then, maybe in a moment, or maybe over the course of many weeks, something happens inside of you. It’s not that you get new information. It’s that you start being able to see in a new way. It’s like a light has been turned on and you notice things you completely missed before. The power of the resurrection is changing you; you are experiencing for the first time the love of God. And now, you are being made whole.

We can see why Paul prays this prayer, can’t we? Paul knows that some of the people he’s praying for have already tasted of this resurrection power, and his longing for them is that they would know it more—that they would experience even more deeply the fullness that comes in knowing God’s love. 

Paul also is aware that some of the people he’s praying for have yet to experience this at all. Maybe that’s you. Maybe right now you feel the fact that certain things haven’t yet come into focus. Maybe you have a longing to experience what I’m describing, but it feels just out of reach. You need to be Christ’s resurrection power to touch you. 

What you need to do is simple: ask for it. This is what we all need: to ask for this power. This is what Paul is showing us here—to ask God who rose Jesus from the dead to touch us with that same power. 

And he tells us that we who ask can be expectant, expect something big, something even more than a happily ever after. Because, you see, our God is able to do more abundantly than all that we ask—in fact, he is able to do more than all we even imagine. And he is the God who loves us with a love that surpasses knowledge. So on this Easter morning, let us ask.