CHRISTIAN COURAGE AND OPTIMISM
Sermon Text: Ephesians 3:13-21 (EHV). So I ask you not to lose heart because of what I am suffering for you, because it is your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the entire family in heaven and on earth receives its name. I pray that, according to the riches of His glory, He would strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner self, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Then, being rooted and grounded in love, I pray that you would be able to comprehend, along with all the saints, how wide and long and high and deep [His love is], and that you would be able to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled to all the fullness of God. Now to Him, who is able, according to the power that is at work within us, to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever! Amen.
Lord, this is Your Word, and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth. We pray You to send us Your Holy Spirit in Your Word, so that we will know how Christ loves us more than we know. Amen!
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ: Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
These verses are a prayer of the apostle Paul for the church in Ephesus. But he didn’t just pray this prayer privately. It’s published in his epistle to the Ephesians, a book in our Bible. So it’s not only a prayer for them. It’s a prayer for all Christians. It’s divinely inspired; this is God’s Word for us.
It’s also a prayer that teaches us about God. It’s not as if we don’t know this. There’s very elementary information about God here. It’s the teaching of the creed. St. Paul begins with a prayer to the Father – “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” – then talks about what comes to us “through the Spirit,” and it all centers in Jesus – “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” This is the knowledge of the Triune God, the one God in three Persons. In the Large Catechism, Martin Luther says that, based on these verses, “God has opened the deepest abyss of His fatherly heart and His pure, inexpressible love” (LC 64).
But when St. Paul prays that you would “know the love of Christ,” and that it’s “by faith” that Christ dwells in your heart, he isn’t speaking about knowing it like knowing a fact, merely having information in your head.
This is about knowing it with the heart. It’s where Christian confidence and optimism come from. The flip side of that coin is that, if you don’t know it with the heart but only with your head, if it’s mere information, then Satan and the godless world use it against you to take your confidence away, make you pessimistic about the future, to feel only weak and unsteady. This is done through sadnesses, griefs, fears, opposition, dangers, losses, and other trials.
It might be unclear that this is Paul’s message here. But it becomes clear if you imagine what’s behind his prayer. Why is he praying this for them? Why do we need this prayer? Well, think of when you need to pray. You pray when you have a need or a worry. You pray when you’ve tried and tried, but nothing seems to work. You pray at your wits’ end. You pray when your hope is low. Often you pray when you feel pessimistic or lack confidence, yet the catechism tells us to ask the Father with all boldness and confidence.
This is why St. Paul prays, first, that the Father “would strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner self.” Notice it’s about what’s “in your inner self.” That refers to your new nature, which is always in a battle with your old nature, your sinful self, the old Adam. Your old Adam is the part in you that’s not only unable to do good but also un-willing. It’s the part that’s unwilling, unable to trust God, to hope, to accept God’s will in misfortune, to receive from His hand. Your old Adam refuses to be comforted. It’s your sinful weakness. It’s the voice of pessimism and fear.
Secondly Paul prays “that Christ would dwell in your hearts by faith,” and this points up our being in need and what we lack. We might object that we believe in Jesus already, why do we need this prayer? Because Satan is always trying to expel Christ from your heart. It works this way: you believe in Christ, you believe He was born for you, died and rose for you. But when you have a grief or sadness, or some adversity, even intense or severe, and if it were put to you that “the light of Jesus gladdens and sweetens every woe,” or that Jesus is your true eternal good, you might say, “yes, yes, I believe in Jesus but what practical good is that right now?” Again: Old Adam talking.
The third thing in Paul’s prayer is for us to be “rooted and grounded in love.” It’s in suffering, fear and sadness when life gets so narrow as to only think of yourself and forsake love. Again, it’s the old Adam asserting itself.
So let’s pause just to talk about optimism and pessimism. If anyone should be optimistic, and not pessimistic, it’s Christians. We have Christ. We have the Gospel. We know the end of the story. But Christians do experience pessimism and lose confidence. It should be clear now, this is because of our sinful self, the old Adam. We don’t always listen to the Gospel. We get look-around-ism. That is, you look around and judge from what you see. You can only end up pessimistic when you look around, and you see what the world is like, and the sickness and death in this fallen world, and also the troubles and suffering in your life. When you’re pessimistic, it’s old Adam talking.
But we also have a new nature. It’s created by the Spirit, made possible by Jesus’ work of redeeming us. The world is pessimistic because it won’t accept that people are born sinful. The irony is that knowing there’s an old Adam in everyone actually leads to optimism. Everyone is redeemed, and redeemable. Christ came to heal our sinful nature by taking on our flesh apart from sin. This is where Christian courage and optimism come from: from God’s love as He reveals it in Scripture. Courage and optimism come from looking away from what’s around, and looking to His promises in the Scripture. That’s what this prayer presents: God reveals the depths of His love here.
First, He promises to give you His Holy Spirit who will give you strength: Paul says the Father “will strengthen you with power through His Spirit.” The Holy Spirit gives you many gifts in His Word and Sacrament. First it’s the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. Then it’s the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, etc. But here’s one more: the strength to not lose hope. This is courage. It’s a gift from the Spirit: Christian courage.
You look at what’s happening to you and around you. Again, this is look-around-ism. You feel what’s going against you. How can you stand? You feel too weak. But the Holy Spirit gives you courage. You can’t give it to yourself. He gives it to you, in the Gospel that in Christ God is for you and with you. He’ll fill you with the courage you lack. It’s a promise written here for you. It’s also how He guides you in sanctification. The godly life the Spirit leads us to live isn’t only good works to others. It’s also saying no to doubt and pessi-mism, it’s living by faith and saying yes to hope – which looks like courage.
Second, He promises “that Christ will dwell in your hearts by faith.” This is the promise that God Himself – Christ, with the Holy Spirit and the Father – will dwell in you to make your heart His home, your body His temple. It’s “by faith” that He dwells in you. This is “the mystical union,” that He is one with you – actually is in you. Due to your sins and His holiness this should be impossible. But when He takes away your sins and you receive it by faith, He comes to dwell in you. In the post-communion hymn we sing that after partaking of His body and blood in faith, “my Savior dwells within me now!”
Along with this, Paul says, it’s also “that you would be able to know the love of Christ that passes knowledge” – to know the unknowable, to know how Christ loves you but more than you can ever know this side of heaven. You know what He did for you. But it isn’t just information. What’s behind that – His love – is way more than you can know. Paul says it’s “wide and long and high and deep.” This means you can’t ever find its extent or limit. With God’s love there’s always more. You never outrun His love. You are never without His love. His love is wider than the universe, higher than the heavens, its length is longer than anything, lasting to eternity, and its depth is deeper than the oceans’ depths and deeper than the earth’s foundations. It’s deep, inexhaustible, and it all flows from God’s own heart.
I like what Luther said about this: “No matter how long or wide I measure, I find Him everywhere. Depressed or exalted, confined in whatever way, dragged here or there, I still find Christ. He holds everything in His hand. Therefore, so long as He dwells in my heart, I have courage. Sinful reason despairs if deprived of tangible things. But we are better fortified. We’re sure that He dwells with us everywhere: be it in honor or dishonor, hunger, sorrow, illness, death or life, affliction or blessing.”
That Christ dwells with us and in us by faith, and that we know His love that you can’t find the bottom of, that’s how we have courage and optimism. Who cares what the world is like? Who cares what devil and death can do? You have Christ. He’s even in you. He’s the reason for your optimism.
The last thing here is what Paul says about love. He says the goal is also that we are “rooted and grounded in love.” It’s his prayer, but since this is inspired by God, this is a promise being revealed. You are and will be, in God’s eyes, rooted and grounded in love, that your roots sink more and more deeply into that love. What’s the love we’re grounded in? It doesn’t start with our love. We love because He first loved us. We’re grounded in “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”Especially in trials and in sorrow, you need His love, you want to gaze on His love, dwell inside His love for you, to be face to face with Love Incarnate – Christ. Then your love grows from this.
This is “the power at work in us” – as Paul says in the closing doxology to this prayer – by which He, the Triune God, “is able to do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.” He does infinitely more with you, in you, through you, by His grace. This is where Christian courage and optimism come from – from Him, by the strength He gives. As Luther said, “As long as Christ dwells in my heart, I have courage. We are better fortified.” Amen!