Last Sunday, the Apostle Paul taught us to pray. Now, I don't mean that he stood in this pulpit, but we applied our hearts to a prayer that Paul prayed for the believers in Ephesus, prayed without ceasing. We learned that we must make it a habit to intercede for other believers. And when we pray for other believers, We should pray that they know God better. Can you say that with me? We need to pray that they know God better or know Christ better. If you ever wonder what you should pray for your children, you should pray that they will know God better. If you're a wife and you're wondering what to pray for your husband, pray that he will Know God better, and then you'll be able to more easily respect Him, submit to Him. If you're a husband, you need to pray that your wife will know God better so that you might love her as Christ loved the church, love her as your own body. Let me add one more to the list. If you ever wonder what to pray for yourself, pray that you will know God better. You can be certain that God will answer that prayer. You're praying according to God's will. 1 John 5 tells us that when we pray according to God's will, we can be confident that he will hear and that he will answer. So this morning, I will ask the Apostle Paul to return to the pulpit, as it were, and teach us more about how to pray, specifically how we know that God has answered this prayer. When we pray that others will know God better, and we look to see if God's answering that prayer, we can look for three results in their lives. Let's look again at Paul's model prayer here in Ephesians 1, beginning in verse 17. Paul prays. that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that you may know, number one, what is the hope of His calling, number two, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, And number three, what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in heavenly places far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him to behead over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. I hope you noticed the three whats. Did you notice them? That's why I enumerated them. They're in verses 18 and 19. If we pray for others, pray that they will come to know God better, come to know Christ better, come to know the Spirit better, then it will result in these three what's taking place in their lives. And remember the truth that I tried to drive home to you last Sunday. This knowledge of God is not knowledge about God. It's knowledge that we gain by personal experience with God, personal dealing with God. This past Friday evening, or was it Thursday evening? I can't remember now. Jeannie and I, anyhow, we were eating dinner with some old friends. And we learned that one of them had dated an old friend of mine back in college. And of course, she knew him in one way. Well, I knew him in a different way, because he was my assistant editor when I edited the yearbook at Bob Genge University my senior year. I knew him because I dealt with him personally nearly every day of my senior year there at BJU. Plus, he dated my sister as well as dating this girl. I knew Him personally. I knew Him from personal dealing. And when we pray for others, when we pray that they will know God better, we're praying that God would be at work in their lives, that they would know Him better through a personal relationship, through personal experience. And when we pray that prayer, when God answers that prayer, Those believers will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward that person. So we're going to work through these three what's this morning. And first, When we pray that other believers will know God and God answers, they will know what is the hope of His calling. Now Paul here links two very important concepts in the New Testament. Hope and calling. And he uses this phrase, the hope of our calling, again in Ephesians chapter 4. So this was a thing in Paul's thinking. So we need to get a hold of it. And we can do that by looking at both of these concepts. So let's talk, first of all, what is God's calling? Many of us, when we were saved, we called on the Lord. Some of us were led to Christ by means of the Romans' road. And so we remember Romans 10, 13, for whosoever shall Call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. But Paul is not talking here about our calling on the name of the Lord. Before we ever called on the name of the Lord, the Lord called us. Sometimes we sing a hymn in our hymnal by Ron Hamilton with these words, before I loved him, he loved me. Before I found him, he found me. Before I sought him, he sought me. And I might add, before I called him, he called me. And Paul describes this call of God in Romans 8 Verses 29 and 30. You don't need to look it up. It's on the screen here in front of you. Whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. Moreover, whom He predestined, these He also called. Whom He called, He also justified. Whom He justified, these He also glorified. So you've got a golden chain of five things that God does when he saves us. And in the middle of those five is called. Now when God calls in this way, it's not like a call you get on your cell phone from a number that you don't recognize. Those are the kind of calls you don't answer. When God calls in this way, we answer. And how do we know that? Because we're told here that before He ever calls us, He foreknew us and predestined us. And so when He calls, it's a call of faith and repentance. It's a call to holiness and sanctification. It's a call also to hope, to the hope of our calling, a hope that flows from God calling us and saving us and justifying us and someday glorifying us. Now, what is that hope? Well, in the New Testament, hope is not hope-so hope. You know what hope-so hope is, right? Hope-so-hope is when I say, I hope we're having barbecue ribs for dinner after the service this morning. Well, I don't have any idea whether we're having barbecue ribs after the service this morning. So that's hope-so-hope. Hope-so-hope is when a young wife comes to her husband and says, I'm pregnant. And he says, I hope it's a boy. That's hope-so-hope. He doesn't have any foundation for that hope. There aren't any medical tests yet. In the New Testament, when the New Testament uses the word hope, it's not ever hope so hope. In the New Testament, hope is always a confident expectation that has a foundation in the promises of God. We might say, We might say that hope is the flip side of faith. OK, stick with me here. So when I exercise faith, I'm looking back. I'm looking back to promises that God has already fulfilled. in the birth of Jesus, the life of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, my faith lays hold of those things that are in the past, and I have a certainty about those things. That faith gives me a certainty. Now, we have doubts from time to time, but if you ask a Christian, Do you have faith in Jesus Christ? A Christian will say, yes, I believe that Jesus truly came down from heaven, was incarnated, that He lived and died and rose again, and because of that my sins are forgiven. I'm certain of that. Well, hope is just the flip side of that with regard to the future. I'm just as certain about what God has in my future as I am about what God has already done in the past and the promises that God has made to me because of what happened in the past. That's the hope that flows from our calling. Now that hope, the hope of our calling, the hope of His calling, has a certain content. We confidently hope, we confidently expect certain events in the future. Our hope lays hold of the promises with regard to those events. So let me just tick off a list here of what God has promised us in the future, what we confidently hope for, what we confidently expect because God has called us and saved us. First of all, we confidently hope and expect that when we die, we will be absent from the body and present with the Lord. One of my most precious memories in recent days is the confident hope that Katie expressed. When Jeannie and I visited with her and Mick in the ER that night before she was diagnosed with leukemia, she said again and again, it's going to be okay. It's going to be all right. And I don't think she was just saying that to soothe our feelings. I believe that at that point she was coming to know her God and Savior in a way that none of the rest of us know Him yet. She came to know what the hope of God's calling meant in personal experience. Next, we confidently hope that Jesus is going to return soon. Job first expressed his hope when he said, For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth, that in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another, how my heart yearns within me. Yes, that is the hope of our calling, the hope which prompts many of us to pray regularly, even so, come Lord Jesus. And then we hope for perfection in glorified bodies. First John 3 tells us that when he is revealed, when Christ returns, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. We shall have bodies like His resurrected body, bodies adapted to the spiritual plane, bodies adapted to knowing God. And we shall be perfect like Adam and Eve in the garden before they sinned, except that we shall be confirmed in righteousness and true holiness and never again will we struggle with sin and temptation. You know, sometimes when we talk about that glorified body, we forget this part of it. That in that body, we shall be finally freed from sin forever. Is that not part of the blessed hope? And then we confidently hope and expect that we will face no condemnation at the great judgment of the end times, the great white throne judgment described in Revelation chapter 20. Christ will sit on the throne and he will judge both small and great. Theologians believe that we will not be there. We will not even be present. I'm not dogmatic about it. I'm not sure. But if we are before that great white throne someday, we confidently hope and expect that this promise in Romans chapter 8 will be true for us. There is therefore no condemnation. to those who are in Christ Jesus. When the books are opened, we shall be found to have the righteousness of Christ, while others will be found guilty of their sins and cast into the lake of fire forever. We will be welcomed into the new heaven and the new earth. And that brings me to the final point. We confidently hope and expect not heaven, I think a lot of Christians have a misconception that someday in eternity we're going to heaven. You can go to heaven if you want. You can be a disembodied spirit if you want to be. That's not what I'm after. God has promised me something better, that in a glorified body I will be on the new heaven and the new earth. I'll live in the new Jerusalem. And I can't even begin to fathom what that will be. That is the hope of our calling. Now, I need to make a final point about hope. Hope in the New Testament is a confident expectation of future blessings that God has promised to us. But there's another element in hope. This confident expectation that is focused on the future has results in the here and now. As I mentioned a moment ago, it is this hope that takes us through mortal disease. Armed with this hope, we face death with confidence, whether it's death from old age, or from disease, or from persecution, or from warfare, or from accident. Christians die well. That's part of the hope of our calling. And this hope also carries us through times of trouble and struggle in this life, because we know that this life is but a vapor. And whatever struggles and trials and temptations we face in this life, It is but a brief time and then we will enjoy for all eternity what God has promised. I love the way Paul puts it in Romans 8. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. Listen, when hope functions in this way in our lives, we do indeed come to know God better through the personal experience of the kind of encouragement, strength that comes only through this kind of hope. Well, there's a second what. listed in verse 18. What are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints? Now it's easy to misunderstand that phrase. What are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints? Many of us, we read those words and we think that that is describing our inheritance. But if it was describing our inheritance, it would be talking about the very same thing as the hope of our calling. The two of them would essentially mean the same thing. Paul would just be repeating himself in different words. Rather, Paul, I believe, is talking about something quite different. Paul is talking about the fact that we are God's inheritance. Has that thought ever struck you? We are God's riches. We are God's wealth. That is an amazing statement. God looks upon the people that he has redeemed as the riches that he will inherit someday when Christ returns. And let me tell you, when you grasp that, it will change you. But the question is, how can God take poor, wretched, sinners like all of us and make us his crown jewels, make us his dearest treasure. Now the four answers that I'm going to give you to that question come originally from a sermon by Charles Spurgeon on this passage. When I read that sermon this week, it just thrilled my soul. And while I'm going to develop these four points differently than Mr. Spurgeon, I need to acknowledge my indebtedness to him for these truths. First, we are God's treasure and inheritance simply because of how much he loves us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. That's the measure of the love with which God loved us. Sorry and sinful as we are, yet God loved us. While we were yet sinners, God commended His love toward us. Before the foundation of the world, God set His love on us. And what we love, we value. Do you have some trinket at home? Some keepsake? that you would not part with for all the gold and fork knots. You took it to a pawn shop, you probably couldn't get a dollar bill for it. But your soul is wrapped around that little thing, whatever it might be. If your house were to burn down, you'd miss it more than thousands of dollars worth of furniture and equipment that are burned up. I don't know, it might be some handiwork that your child made many years ago. It might be some ancient creased black and white photograph of your grandmother or great-grandmother. I don't know what it might be. But that little thing is wrapped in your love. And what we invest our love in increases in value exponentially. And God has invested His heart in you. Me he gave his only begotten son For you and me and so we are the riches That he waits to inherit what a thought And then second God not only invested his love in us he invested his great wisdom in us to his genius, if I can put it that way. In my office, I have a book on my shelf entitled Fumbling the Future. It's the story of the first billion dollar company in the world. Anybody guess what the first billion dollar company in the world was? I think somebody said it. Xerox. Back before the digital age began, back in the 50s and 60s, everything was done on paper. And Xerox invented and patented and marketed the first method for printing on plain paper. I'm old enough to remember copiers that did not copy on plain paper. You had to have this special kind of impregnated paper in order to print. But the first plain paper copier was invented by Xerox. And for many years under their patents, they were the only one who could sell plain paper copiers. And they made a mint. And what did they do with that windfall? What did they do with all that money? Well, they funded perhaps the greatest research center ever conceived, PARC, P-A-R-C, the Palo Alto Research Center. And with this big gob of money that they had, they brought geniuses in from all over the world in many different fields and just threw them in this place and said, go to it. And while they were doing all of this research, they invented the personal computer, and the mouse, and the GUI. Does anybody know what a GUI is? A G-U-I? What's the G stand for in GUI? Graphical. They invented the graphical user interface, and they invented the network. And they invented all those things just so they could communicate easily with one another inside of PARC. They didn't patent any of those things. They never intended to take any of them to market. This was just so that these geniuses could communicate with one another. And so guess what? Remember the name of the book? Fumbling the Future. People from places like Microsoft? And Apple came and saw what they were doing, and they went out. You know where the first mouse was that I ever saw? This was back in the mid-'80s. It was in a hobby shop on an old Macintosh. I thought, wow, this is a great toy for kids. You know who was the first trillion dollar company? Apple was the first trillion dollar company in 2018 because they took everything that Xerox had invented at PARC and took it to the market. Now that's a great story, but you got to get my point. These geniuses took stuff that cost just a few dollars and they turned it into something worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. And that's just exactly what God did with you and me. God and His eternal genius invented a way to transform sinners into saints. God's full wisdom was exhibited in the plan of salvation that redeemed us and reconciled us to God. And with the psalmist, we may exclaim, how precious also are your thoughts to me, O God. How great is the sum of them. And then God transformed worthless, hell-bound sinners into his treasure and inheritance in a third way. More than His love, more than His wisdom and genius, God was willing to spend a lifetime of suffering in order to transform us into the riches that He would inherit. Many of us find the greatest beauties in this world are the glories of nature. Sunset or sunrise. Austin the other night sent me a picture of just a cloud with the sun behind it. It's beautiful. The vastness of the ocean I hope to see in a few weeks. The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Grand Teton. We're willing to travel hundreds of miles, spend hundreds of dollars. to see these glories, and yet God created those glories with but a word. He spoke and they were. But when we're enjoying these natural beauties, let us remember that there are far costlier works of God sitting beside us every Sunday in this auditorium. For they cost our Lord an incarnation and a torturous death in order to transform us from the fodder of hell into something of eternal value to our God. Has the thought ever struck you that the Son of God can never go back? He will forevermore be the God-man. That's amazing to me. He didn't do that for angels. He did that for you and for me to transform us from spiritual nothings worth only of an eternal hell into the riches of the glorious inheritance of our God. And then the final meditation on this thought. Ephesians 2.10 makes a statement about us. that contributes to this thought. It calls us God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus. And the word in the original language is the word poema, from which we get our English word poem. But that doesn't quite catch the meaning. All things considered, the best translation, and I hesitate to say this, but the best translation of this word I found in the New Living Translation We are God's masterpieces. Let me tell you the story of one of the greatest masterpieces ever wrought by human hand. In 1408, a committee met to decide how to decorate a cathedral in Florence, Italy. And they proposed to make massive statues of biblical prophets and mythological figures. And the first two were completed in short order. A statue of Joshua by the artist Donatello, and then a statue of Hercules sculpted by one of Donatello's students, Agostino. And I'm a project manager. I can't imagine this kind of a project 50 years later, okay? 50 years after they started this project, in 1864, the committee ordered another statue in this series, a statue of David. And the commission went to Agostino, who by this time was a well-established artist, no longer a student, and a huge slab of marble was extracted from the Carrara quarries. Have you heard of Carrara marble? in Tuscany, Italy for this project. And for unknown reasons, Agostino abandoned the project after doing very little. Another sculptor, Antonio Rossellino, was hired to take over the project a dozen years later in 1476, and he backed out almost immediately, citing the poor quality of the marble. And in fact, modern scientific analysis has been done on this marble and it has indeed concluded it's mediocre. And so with no sculptor, this massive slab of marble sat out in the elements for a quarter century. Essentially abandoned, ruined. In the summer of 1501, a new effort was made to find a sculptor who could finish the statue, and a 26-year-old sculptor named Michelangelo was hired to complete it. The process was described by another artist in these words, the bringing back to life of one who was dead. When Michelangelo completed his work, it was one of the greatest sculptures ever created. Michelangelo took an abandoned, nearly ruined piece of marble and brought it to life as one of the greatest and most beautiful masterpieces ever created. And that is exactly what God did with you and me. He took a ruined, nearly worthless slab of humanity and turned it into a masterpiece. Into the riches that He looks forward to inheriting in eternity. Listen, when we come and sit in these pews on Sunday, we don't sit next to mere mortals. We sit next to God's masterpieces. And that's how we ought to treat one another. Every one of us is of inestimable value to God because of what He was willing to pay for us and what He is doing in our lives. And then there's a third what? in this passage. When we pray that another person will come to know God by experience, we will see the result in a third way. We will see what is the exceeding greatness of God's power toward us. Now, this last one, Paul kind of piles up a lot of words. I mean, this is almost It's like trying to get through a thicket to try to figure out what this is like. Let me try to untangle a few of these words so we get some of the idea of what Paul is talking about. First, at the beginning of verse 19, he uses the word exceeding to describe this power. And the natural question is, exceeding what? What does this power exceed? And I believe this was really on Paul's mind, because when you go into Ephesians 3, into the second prayer that we find in the book of Ephesians, he still is thinking about this. He says, now to him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us. He's still talking about the power that works in us and reminds us that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. One of the old Puritans said that because God is infinite and our minds are not infinite that we can't even conceive of what God is able to do in our lives through his power. And yet that is what Paul wants us to know. what the exceeding power of God can do in our lives. Now, in the second part of this description, again, Paul stacks up words. Notice the end of verse 19, according to the working of his mighty power. The working of his mighty power. Paul actually uses three different words here for power. Three synonyms. So I want to kind of take this apart so we really get an understanding of what Paul seems to be saying. So I'm going to go from the end to the beginning in reverse order. The last word translated power here in our New King James Version means inherent, essential power. Right now the entire world is concerned because the nation of Iran seems to be on the brink of war with Israel and Iran is enriching uranium. Why the concern? Because of the potential of that enriched uranium. Inherent in enriched uranium is the unbelievable power of the atomic bomb. enriched uranium has that kind of inherent essential power. And that's the idea here. Our God has inherent in His being, inherent in who He is, infinite power. We talk about God being all-powerful, omnipotent. That is part of the essence of who God is. So that's the meaning of this first word here. Then there's a second word that's translated mighty, the mighty power of God. It's actually a noun in the original language, not an adjective. And it speaks of strength that triumphs, that overcomes, that prevails. When it encounters resistance, it overcomes it. It never fails. The great preacher, D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, harked back to the book of Isaiah, and this is what he said about this word. It is the kind of strength which can make low every high mountain. It can exalt every valley. There is nothing that can stand before it. So you put this word together with the word power, mighty power, and it reveals that the power inherent in God and who He is, is a strength that always triumphs, that never fails. And then the first word, which is translated working, the working of the mighty power of God here, is actually a word from which we get our English word energy, It's a wonderful word. It has the idea of power actually at work. So what Paul is saying here is our God has this power inherent in His being, a power that can overcome any obstacle, a power essential to His being that cannot be stopped, but the glory of this power is that it is actually at work in your life and my life. Think about the power inherent in uranium, in the uranium atom. Inherent in the uranium atom that we can't even see. It lay unknown, untapped, for millennia. Uranium wasn't even discovered until 1789, when a German chemist extracted it from a mineral known as pitchblende. But there was still no inkling of the power inherent in this element until 1934. And then most of us know that a great deal of research was done during World War II. But think about the power inherent in uranium that has been released for good in the lives of human beings today. 10% of the electricity in the world comes from a little uranium atom. Nuclear power. Finally, that power has been unleashed. That's the idea here. God's power has been unleashed in our lives. What does that look like? What does it look like when this power that's inherent in God, that nothing can stop, what does it look like when that power is unleashed in our lives? Come back next Sunday and I'll tell you. Because you see Paul, once Paul got to this thought, I think it really pushed his button. Because he went on for three or four verses. You see that? We're only at verse 20. He goes on for three or four verses talking about what it meant that God unleashed His power in our lives. And so we'll talk about that next Sunday, Lord willing. But when we pray that other believers will come to know God better, When we pray that our wife will come to know God better, or our husband will come to know God better, or our children will come to know God better, or that we ourselves come to know God better, when God answers that prayer, the way we will know it is because we will come to understand what it is that the mighty power of God has been unleashed in our lives. Now, as I conclude this morning, I would ask, has God begun the work of transforming you into a masterpiece? That work begins when a person puts their faith and trust in Jesus Christ alone for the forgiveness of sin because of what he did on the cross. If your life is a mess, if you have no idea if God is at work in your life in a positive way, then what you need to do is put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ today. Turn from your sin and begin to follow Him. The New Testament uses the word repent and believe. Trust believe in Jesus Christ, believe that he died in your place on the cross to bear your sin, and then repent, turn from your way, turn from your sin to follow him. If you're here this morning and you've never taken those two steps, I beg you, I plead with you, to take those two steps this morning. God will begin to mold a masterpiece out of you.