praying for illumination

Read Ephesians 1:17-23

Paul’s prayer for the people of Ephesus begins by echoing the prayer we heard last week from James. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. Last week we heard from James that if any of us lacks wisdom we should ask God and he will give it to us, and then we learned that one way God gives us wisdom is through revelation. God reveals himself and his will to us through times of prayer, through the scriptures and through the words of insight and understanding from others. But Paul goes on here and says, I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, and this is a prayer for illumination. Not only do we need to pray for ourselves and for others and for wisdom, we also need to pray for illumination, we need to pray that the eyes of our hearts might be opened so that we can begin to see what God sees.

To help us understand what all this means, let’s look at a story from the OT. In 2 Kings 6 we find the people of Israel fighting against the Arameans. Every time the Arameans set an ambush for Israel, Elisha the prophet tells the king of Israel about the coming attack and the people of Israel are able to avoid it. After a while the king of Aram is convinced there is a traitor among his leaders so he asks them, which one of you is on the side of the king of Israel, and they all answer him, No, it is none of us, my Lord, it is Elisha, the prophet, who is in Israel. He is telling the king the very words you speak, even the words you whisper in your bedroom. So the king of Aram sets out to capture Elisha and he sends a huge army with horses and chariots to surround the city of Dotham where Elisha is staying. The king of Aram sends the troops at night so they have the element of surprise and when Elisha’s servant wakes up in the morning he is surprised because everywhere he looks around the city he sees armed men on horses and in chariots. They are completely surrounded. There is no hope.

The servant runs to Elisha and says, look, we are surrounded. What are we going to do? And Elisha very calmly says, don’t be afraid, those who are with us are more than those are with them. Now the servant must have thought Elisha was either a little crazy, didn’t know his math, or maybe was still a little bleary eyed from sleep because there was certainly more troops surrounding the city then there were men within the city. The problem wasn’t math, the problem was that Elisha’s servant could not see what Elisha could see, so Elisha prays, God open the eyes of my servant so he may see and God opened his eyes and as the servant looked around the city beyond the horses and chariots of Aram, he saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire. The enemy was surrounded by the army of God and that was why Elisha was so calm and confident.

Elisha prayed for illumination because he knew it was important for his servant to be able to see the reality of God and that is what Paul is praying for us. Paul is asking God to open the eyes and the hearts of the people so they could see the love of God and the power of God at work within them and around them. For us to experience the fullness of our faith and live out our faith in ways that will change us and change the world around us, we need to see the reality of God. We need to see the power and the love of God at work in us and we need to see ourselves and our church the way God sees us. So with Paul, we need to pray for illumination and we need to ask God to open our eyes and the eyes of our heart so that we may see the hope to which he has called us, the riches of our glorious inheritance in the saints, and the incomparably great power for those of us who believe. When we look at this specific prayer, we see Paul asking God for three things, to help us see ourselves the way God sees us, for us to see the blessing we have in the church and then to see the power of God that is available for us today.

Let’s start by looking at seeing ourselves the way God sees us. I pray that you may know or see the hope to which God has called you. God has called each and every one of us. First and foremost, God calls us by name. God knows who we are. God is the one who created us and loves us and God does sees who we are in all our brokenness and sin, God sees us for who he created us to be. God sees the potential and the power that lies in each of us.
God has also called each of us for a purpose and God has given us a part in his plan for the world. If we turn to Ephesians 2:10 it says we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Think about it, from before the beginning of creation, God not only had us in mind, God had a clear purpose and plan for our lives. God has a mission and a ministry for each and every one of us today and we need to pray for illumination so that we can see that purpose and plan.

The New Testament makes clear that as members of the body of Christ we have each been given a spiritual gift that is to be used to build up the church and to reach out to the world. Look at Ephesians 4:11-13. God has given each of us gifts to be used as part of his purpose and if we are going to use them, we need to know what they are, so we need to pray for God to open our eyes so that we can see ourselves the way God does, as called and gifted men and women of faith who have a part in God’s plan for the world.

If you are searching for God’s purpose and plan but aren’t sure what it is or how God has uniquely gifted and called you, one way to find out is to start living out the things God has already made clear. Many times when we ask God to help us see the big picture - we forget that God will reveal that big picture to us as we walk with him one step at a time. If we will follow God in all the little areas of life and faith first – then God will be able to reveal to us the bigger plans he has for us. The question is, are we willing to follow God in all the little areas of life first? Are we willing to be faithful in the little things so that God can lead us to ever greater things?

There are so many things that God has already made clear to us. If you look at the notes page at the back of the bulletin you will see a list of things that God has made clear to us through his word and these are just some of the things that if we follow, God can reveal to us more of his purpose and plan for our lives.
God has called us to:

John 13:34 love one another
Romans 12:10 honor one another
Romans 15:7 welcome or receive one another
1 Corinthians 1:4 comfort one another
1 Corinthians 12:25 care for one another
Galatians 5:13 serve one another
Ephesians 4:32 be kind and forgive one another
Ephesians 5:21 submit to one another
Colossians 3:16 teach one another
1 Thessalonians 5:11 encourage one another
Hebrews 3:13 exhort one another
James 5:16 confess to and pray for one another
1 Peter 4:10 serve and minister to one another
1 John 1:7 have fellowship with one another

These are things that God has made perfectly clear to us and we have to be obedient in these things before God will reveal to us the more specific plans for our lives. We see this principle at work in the early church. If you look at Acts 11:25 it says that Barnabas and Saul were together in Antioch for an entire year with the church and what they did was live out all these things. They had fellowship with the people of God, they taught and were taught by the people of God, they encourage one another and we see that they served one another by taking an offering to the church in Jerusalem (11:29-30). They were hard at work living out all the things God had made clear to them and it was only after they had been faithful in all these things that they were then set aside for something larger.

It’s in Acts 13:2 that we find Barnabas and Paul set aside and then sent out by the church to do God’s work. This is the first missionary journey for Paul and it leads not only to the establishment of churches throughout the area, but the letters to these churches will be the word God uses to establish the church through all time. Most of the New Testament are letters that Paul sent to the churches he established on this missionary journey, but the journey only took place because Paul and Barnabas had been faithful in all the things God had first made clear to them. We begin to see God’s purpose and plan for our lives when we are willing to be faithful in the things God has already made clear.

God not only wants us to see who we really are, he also wants us to see the blessings we have when we are part of the church. Paul prays for illumination so that we may see the riches of our glorious inheritance in the saints. The good thing about this inheritance in the saints is that it is not something that awaits us in heaven; we can have the riches of this inheritance right here - right now because we are surrounded by the saints when we are part of the church. Stop and think about what we have when we are part of the body of Christ. We have people all around us who are right here to love us, honor us, welcome us, comfort us, care for us, serve us, forgive us, teach us, encourage us, minister to us, and most of all people to just be with, people to have fellowship with. There are riches that are ours when we are part of the church and when we see those riches we will work harder to stay connected to the people of God.

And then the last part of Paul’s prayer for illumination is that we would see the power of God at work in us and around us. Paul is pretty intense about our need to see God’s power– look at all the words he uses in his prayer: incomparably great power, working of God’s mighty strength which he exerted in Christ. Paul wants our eyes opened so that we can see the power of God and it’s not that he wants us to see the power of God that was at work in Jesus when he was raised him from the dead, Paul wants us to see that the power of God which raised Jesus from the dead is at work in you and me. Jesus said to his disciples that they would do even greater things than he did and it’s not because his disciples were extraordinary men, they were quite ordinary, but they would do even greater things than Jesus because the power of God was at work in them and it was working through them. The disciples changed their world. In the course of a generation, what started as a regional teaching among the Jewish people had become a powerful new religion that was taking on the powers of Rome. Great things were happening because of the power of God.

We need to see that the power of God that was at work in Jesus and the power of God that was at work in the disciples and the early church is still at work in us today and the power of God is here to open our eyes so that we might see who we really are in Christ Jesus and what riches and blessings we have because we are part of the church. The power of God that helped Jesus overcome Satan, death and the gates of hell is available to us today so that we can be victorious in any and all situations in life. If we go back to the Old Testament story of Elisha, the people of God found victory not because they outnumbered their enemy or because they were stronger than their enemy – it was because God was on their side. God is still on our side. The power of God is still on our side and it is still fighting for us. The victory might simply be finding stillness in the storms of our lives, or patience in the midst of persecution and problems, the victory might simply be seeing that the love of God is here to hold us and help us in times of need, but the victory is here if we will reach out and take hold of the power God supplies.

Paul said, greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world. Greater is God who is in us and with us and for us, than all the forces at work against us. May God open our eyes and the eyes of our heart so that we may see this.