A Prayer For Power

As you're taking your seat, if you could just kind of stay in an attitude of prayer. Father, I know that the words that I say cannot have the power that they need unless your spirit appropriates them in the hearts of your people. So, would you take the water of my words and turn it into wine in the hearts of every hearer, that you might be glorified and that we might experience your presence among us? In Jesus' name. Amen. I'm gonna tell you right out of the gate what I want you to learn to do today, and it's simple and it's this, pray for power, pray for power. This is what we're going to see in a moment in Ephesians 3, that Paul prays for the church of Ephesus, and it's what I want to encourage you to pray for yourself and for our church. And you're going to be doing that, I'm gonna give you some space to be able to do that, to actually take time to pray for power at the close of this message. But before we get to Ephesians 3, I need to make sure that we understand what we're saying when we say that, because I wanna make sure that we adjust our minds and we get in the right head space and the right heart space when it comes to the kind of power that we're praying for. See, power is an inescapable desire in the world that we live in. It's been why empires and nations rise and fall. It's been the desire to end of both the oppressors in history and the rebelling factions. And the desire for power is not just a historical footnote in our modern Western culture that we look back on in the past and observe from a distance. The desire for power shows itself every day. We see it in the desire for political power that can unfortunately even spawn political violence. In our nation's history, around 15 presidents have been the subject of political violence or even assassination or attempted assassination, whether it was Lincoln or Garfield or McKinley or Kennedy or Ford or Reagan or the attempt on President Trump's life most recently. But political violence has spread to those who are in politics, but not the president. People like Martin Luther King Jr, Robert Kennedy, congressmen that were practicing baseball in 2017, Minnesota lawmakers who were targeted and killed recently, and even the horrific political assassination that we just viewed this past week, and it was on every news cycle, on every social media, when we saw the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Whatever else is motivating all of these types of things, there does lie underneath it a lust for power that is spawned by evil, and it's heart-rending. Because as I've talked to people, we can't make sense of evil. Evil is by nature senseless. When we talk about senseless evil that happens in the world that we live in, of course it is, because evil by its very nature is senseless, it makes no sense. Evil is a foreign invader into the beautiful world that God created. And evil is not meant to be understood, it's meant to be avoided, it's meant to be ultimately defeated. But the desire for power is not just in political power, the desire for power is all over the place. We see it with every posturing employee in an organization. We see it with every posturing athlete who wants to ascend to the next level of power and influence. We see it in domineering relationships, whether those are in our school or whether those are in our home or whether those are at the job. And it's been a mainstay in our cultural conversation for decades. Look no further than some of the songs that have permeated our culture in recent decades. If you're a child of the '80s like I am, you heard Tears for Fears singing, "Everybody wants to rule the world." And regardless of the fact that it had a little poppy kind of dance rhythm with it, it was telling of our culture that everybody actually does want that kind of power. Or maybe you're a child of the '90s and it was a more aggressive time and you listened to Rage Against the Machine who was singing about take the power back. They were looking for there to be an exchange between those who had power and those who did not. Or maybe it was in 2010 when Kanye West and Jay-Z teamed up to sing a song called "Power" that actually looked at the desire for power and the pitfalls that come with power. Or maybe it's as recent as 2021 when the pop artist Halsey released an album called "If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power." See, make sure you understand something, I'm not recommending these songs, I'm pointing out what our culture has been saying to us through a medium like music for decades, that power is what we need and power is what we want and power is what we're pursuing. But this kind of power that's being permeated in our culture and sung about and run after, this kind of power is also a trap. You may be familiar with the famous aphorism that was offered up by Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, shortened Lord Acton. In a letter that he pinned in 1887, he was writing to Anglican Bishop Mandell Creighton, where he was arguing for the same moral standards to apply to popes and kings and all those in authority as it would be applied to everybody else. And here's what he wrote famously, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Now, from the human experience, I agree with him, but I would also suggest that I think it could be expanded even further, because it's not just the powerful, those in power, who get corrupted by power, it's also those without power that want it. Recent research from Jessica Lee, who's out of the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, shows that those with little or no power in organizations tend to be unethical as well in their pursuit of power, especially in the form of self-promotional lying. So power and the desire for it can be downright evil. In fact, friends, the story of evil from a Christian worldview actually started as a prideful desire for power from an angel named Lucifer. And that now fallen angel still loves to use power to tempt people even now into being a corrupted version of what God's desire for them is. All the power that I'm just describing right here, all of it is corruptible. That's power's nature inherently, it's corruptible, it's corruptible unless it's God's, unless it's God's. The power that the apostle Paul describes as he prays for the Ephesians and what we now know as the third chapter of this letter to the Ephesians, it's not a corruptible power like the world has on offer. That's why we need to learn to pray boldly for it, it's why I told you at the very beginning that what we need to learn to do is to pray for power, but not power like the world is offering us, but power like Paul is describing. Now, this is the second prayer in the letter to the Ephesians. We looked last week, Pastor Jonathan talked about the first prayer in the Book of Ephesians in chapter number one. This week we're gonna be looking in chapter number three, and as we look in chapter three, what we see about this prayer is we kind of figure out immediately when we're reading about it that it's emotional, that it's educational, it informs us of some things, and that it's also experiential in nature. That's really the heartbeat behind this prayer, is that it would be experienced, not just learned about. So I want you to see with me in Ephesians 3, beginning of verse number 14, how Paul begins this prayer, he says, "For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name." Now, what's interesting here is that you can see right away the emotional nature of this prayer. Here's what Paul says, he kneels. Did you catch that when you were reading that? He kneels. You say, well, why is that signifying that this is kind of an emotional prayer? Because kneeling was not the normal posture of prayer in the ancient world among Jewish men, standing was. So Paul's doing something actually unique here where he is on his knees, he's showing his heartfelt humility in praying for the church at Ephesus and he's showing his posture of need before the Lord. But he also says, "For this reason I kneel." Right? That's what we were just looking at. "For this reason I kneel." This is kind of the educational part, because for this reason, when Paul says, "For this reason I kneel," that means it obviously relates to something that came before where he's talking about right now, right? For this reason, and I think he may be picking up where he got sidebared as he started thinking. I don't know if this ever happens to you. It happens to me a lot of times when I'm in a conversation with my wife because my wife oftentimes has 14 windows open in her mind and she can flutter like a butterfly between them all. And half the time I'm just calling a timeout when I'm talking to her and I'm like, "Finish a sentence so that I know where I am. Orient me, I need a GPS to this conversation because I just don't know what is happening right now. I need you to finish a whole sentence, a whole thought, 'cause I'm concrete and I'm actually walking through this in this way and you're all over the place." Or I'll say something and she'll say, "I was just talking about that," and what she means is last week. Oh, you mean last week when we were talking about that, right? But Paul has a tendency to sometimes start a thought and stop it as well. It's not just a wife thing, my wife or your, it's not just a female, Paul does it too. He starts a thought and then he stops a thought. And right here in the beginning part of the prayer, he says, "For this reason I kneel," but he's already said that in the beginning of chapter three. Look at what he says in verse number one. "For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles." In other words, he's starting a thought that came before that. So when we look at his prayer, we know for this reason means something before that. But then we go to the very beginning of chapter three and he says, "For this reason," which means there's something before that, which means what Paul is doing is he's pointing our attention to what he was saying in chapter one and saying in chapter two, and in those chapters, Paul is speaking of the sacrificial love of Christ for sinners who were dead in their sin and under the wrath of God, but who've been rescued by the blood of Jesus, both Jew and Gentile. And now what God has done, Paul tells us in chapter two, is he's made one new human out of the two. It's no longer about Jew and Gentile, it's about now whoever you are, if you've put your faith in Jesus Christ, you become one new kind of humanity, the church, the body of Christ, which was a mystery in ages past, but now has been made known to the whole world. And it's in light of those incredible truths that Paul prays for the church of Ephesus and he prays for power. And I'm gonna show you two ways he's praying for power, and here's the first. Paul prays for power that Christ may be at home in their hearts. This is the first way that Paul prays for power, that Christ may be at home in their hearts. Watch what Paul writes in verse number 16 and the first part of verse 17, he says, "I pray that out of his," meaning God's, "glorious riches, he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." Now, when he talks about power here, this is the first of three uses of power in these verses, kind of the next set of verses, he uses the word power three different times. It's interesting because Paul uses one word for power in the Greek here in this verse, then in verse number 18, he uses a different word for power, and then in verse 20, he returns to this same word for power. And this word translated power, dunamis, where we get our word dynamite, it's always subject to the context and how it's used, and in this context, it's the Spirit's power that's being referenced, right? He says that "He may strengthen you with power through his Spirit." But what is the Spirit's power doing? The Spirit's power is maturing believers, watch this, in their inner being, strengthening them in the secret places of who they really are so that Christ may dwell in their hearts through faith. So Paul is praying for the Spirit to do the work in their hearts such that Jesus would feel at home in their hearts. Now, let's answer a question or two because a couple of them emerge when we're looking at these. First of all, what's this inner being that Paul speaks of? Let me see if I can simplify it. Here you go. The inner being is what's left of you when the outer being goes away. The inner being is what's left of you when the outer being goes away. And listen to me, friends, I say this soberly, the outer being is going away. No matter how much we try to stem the tide, in the gym or with Botox or whatever, no matter how much we try to stem the tide, our outer being is going away. In fact, Paul told the Corinthians this in his second letter. He said, "So we don't lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day." You see, the true and the deepest you is in your inner being. Everything about you matters, including the box that you came in. Being in fleshed matters because God the Son was in fleshed. It matters that we are in dwelling bodies, but there is a you inside of you in the deep spaces of who you are, and Paul prays that the Spirit's power strengthens you and I in that place toward the end of having Christ dwell in our hearts by faith. But this emerges a second question, doesn't it? Isn't Christ already dwelling in us? I know you're probably reading that, thinking, isn't that? Listen, if you have turned from your sin and you've put your faith in the one who died in your place, sinless though he was, but took upon himself the wrath of God against sin, dying for your sin, rising from the grave for your justification, if you put your faith in what Jesus has done and turn from your sin, then absolutely Jesus is living inside of you. And Paul is here not suggesting that Jesus is gonna move out of your hearts, that's why he chose the Greek word for dwell here that means permanence, not the one that means temporary. And there are two different Greek words to describe dwelling. Paul's praying that the Spirit's power will be at work in our inner being so that our hearts are a fitting home for Jesus. Let me see if we could think about it a different way. Many of you have bought a home before that was previously owned. In other words, you didn't build a house, you bought something that was owned by people before you. That's what my wife and I did when we moved here when our boys were little. They were five and two when we moved to Buffalo 23 years ago. We bought a home that people already owned. It was interesting because when we did, we realized that we moved into a home that wasn't our home, it was different than what we thought. The previous owners had girls, thus the bedrooms were pink. That was not going to work for my two dudes, it was not gonna work for their dad, it was not gonna work for their mom, so those rooms needed painting. The decor in the house was not representative of our taste or of our family. In fact, when we looked at the house, none of the pictures on the wall were of our family, they were from a different family, which was weird. I'm buying a house with pictures on the walls of people that I don't know. The carpet, it needed replacing, and eventually we did that. The kitchen needed updating, and eventually we got to that. The basement was unfinished, so eventually we finished a little part of that basement. You get the idea. The door was rotting out on the front, we had to replace the door, all the stuff. Some of the people that worked on that are in this room right now, in fact. I see you, Alan. So after a couple of decades, the home started to feel like it was increasingly a representation of us, we who were the ones who were dwelling in it, and it began to take on more and more of really who we are, though not fully and though not perfectly and though things were always going to have to get done. Listen to me. Friends, our hearts are that house and Jesus is now the occupant and the renovator. And what we need is we need the Spirit's power, watch this, to accept the changes he wants to make so that it becomes a place where he feels at home. I can't overstate how important this is because too often we're living as people with souls that are not conducive to Christ's comfort. And instead, what we need to do is we need to allow the power of the Spirit to mold and to shape and to renovate our hearts. Here's why. Because there are, listen, there are powers that are molding your heart, there are powers that are shaping your heart. And what Paul is doing is he's praying for the Ephesians that it would be the power of the Spirit of the living God that is shaping you more and more into the likeness of Christ instead of the powers that exist all around us in the world. So that's the first part of Paul's prayer for power. He's praying that Christ may be at home in their hearts, but he's also praying secondarily that they will be able to grasp the love of Christ. Paul says, "I'm praying for power that you might be able to grasp the love of Christ." Stay with me here, please, and if you don't have to get up or move or anything, I would really appreciate it. You guys have been so awesome today for listening. This is so rich and so powerful. Listen to what Paul writes. He says, "I pray that you," this is in the second part of verse 17 following, "I pray that you, being rooted in established in love, may have power, together with all the lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Here Paul prays for them together corporately, that they would have the power to grasp the massive love of Christ. Now, this is a different usage of the word power, it's a different Greek word, and what this word power means, it means imminently able or strong enough. In other words, Paul is saying, "I'm praying for the power that is strong enough to grasp the massive love of Christ." Here's what's interesting about this. Paul here doesn't pray for believers to love Christ more. By the way, that's a really good prayer to pray and there are other places in scripture that reaffirm that. In fact, in chapter one, the prayer we learned about last week, it gives us some of that idea. But Paul here is not praying for believers to love Christ more, he's actually praying that we will have power to know Christ's love because it is what will mature us. We would be filled to the measure of the fullness of God when we can recognize the love of Christ. But if we read carefully in this passage, and you are reading carefully, I know you, if we read carefully, it seems like there's a bit of a contrast or maybe even a conflict of sorts in this passage, because here's what Paul says, Paul says, "I'm praying that you would know this love that surpasses knowledge." Wait, what? You want us to know what is unknowable. That is in essence what we are reading right there, and it makes us ask the question, how do we know the love that is unknowable? How do we measure what is measureless? How can we possibly grasp that? Well, that's why I love the translation here of the Greek word where we get the word grasp, it means to lay hold of or to apprehend. Listen carefully to this, this will help you. Because when you read that and you say, man, I like, he's praying that we would know the unknowable. He says, "I want you to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge." So we can't wrap our minds around this. No, we can't. But he's talking about the word grasp, which means to apprehend, so in other words, here's what we could say about the love of Christ. We can't comprehend it, but we can apprehend it. Or maybe if I wanted to say it in a little more sticky way for you guys to be able to grab hold of and to grasp, it would be this, we can't conceive it, but we can receive it. You see, this is what Paul's talking about here. And listen to me, when we get into the presence of Christ and we allow his truth to wash over us and we spend time at his feet, we can experience his love in ways that are beyond, watch this, beyond our mind's ability to categorize it. Because this is functionally experiential. It's not just about a feeling, though, by the way, it's about building in us an identity that is rooted and grounded in the foundation of the massive love of Christ. Paul doesn't even really know how to describe it, that's why he starts using illustration. I mean, Paul ends up going to, trying to describe it with dimensions, wide and long and high and deep. This is how he's trying to describe all of these things, and maybe that is the only way to talk about it. Now, I think it's worth our time to just pause there for just a moment and let that sit with us, that God may speak to us about the massive love of Christ. Friends, listen to me, Christ's love is wide, his love is so wide for the church that every single person in the church, birds of every feather, I'm looking at a lot of birds, birds of every feather, no matter what your backstory, no matter what your personality type, no matter your political persuasion, no matter your ethnicity or your social status, his love is encompassing all of that, it's so wide in the church, but it's wider than the church. His love actually is encompassing the whole of the world, right? Because Jesus says the Son and the reign are for the righteous and the unrighteous. There's a common grace in the width of his love and in his kindness and in his desire for everyone to come into a love relationship with him. His love encompasses friends and his love encompasses enemies. His love is as wide as the world, but it's even wider than that because this world only has a 25,000 miles circumference encompassing 8 billion people, and the earth that we live on is only a dot in a galaxy called the Milky Way, which is 5 trillion miles wide. But the Milky Way is only one galaxy of an estimated over 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe, and that which is not observable, now science is saying they believe it's estimated at around 2 trillion galaxies, and all of it, all of it was made through the wide, wide love of Christ. Listen to me. If we will ever experience his love being so wide, then would ask this question, why is our love so narrow?  If we will ever experience his love being so wide, then I would ask this question, why is our love so narrow? The love of Christ is wide. The love of Christ is long. The love of Christ is a love that endures the ages. With every changing season and every changing generation, the long love of Christ continues. It's eternal. It's not given and taken away, it's forever. The same one in eternity past who brought this world. It gets on me in the second service too. The one in eternity past who brought this world and everything in it into existence out of love is the one who does not change and still loves with an everlasting love. We're so used to conditional love, love that can come and go, short love, that's what we're conditioned to, but that's not Christ's love. His love doesn't change because of your behavior. Christ doesn't love you more when you do good and love you less when you mess up, his love is longer than that. The long love of Christ should comfort those who've only known conditional love. Maybe your parent left you and you always struggled because you felt like love was conditional. Maybe you were made to think that way in a relationship. Be comforted, God doesn't know anything about short, conditional love. The love of Christ is long, it endures, it never fails. For others of you, the long love of Christ serves as a humbling reminder. You decided to try and run from Jesus. You tried living in the pigpen. You thought you would get as muddy as you could. You went away and you got as far from Christ as possible and you tried to put him out of your mind, and then you realize something, his love is long, you can't outrun it, it's already ahead of you, you will not backtrack, it's already behind you, hemming you in. When we really begin to grasp the long love of Christ, it releases us to love others unconditionally as we are loved, it releases us to serve others willingly as we have been served, it releases us to sacrifice for others freely as we have been sacrificed for. Long love changes us, short love just short changes us. Christ's love is long and it's high. Christ's love is high. The love of Christ is so high it can't help but raise us up. If we were looking just in Ephesians, we'd note this, that the high love of Christ raises us up to life when we were dead in our sins. The high love of Christ raises us up to rest when we were trying to live life in our own power and we kept on failing. The high love of Christ raises us up to reign because we are seated in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus. And the high love of Christ raises us up to royalty because now we are sons and daughters of the most high king of love. His love is so high that we don't have to walk low anymore. And his love is deep. Your sin may run deep, but his love is deeper still. Part of why we can't comprehend the depth of the love of Christ is because we can't fully comprehend the depth of our sin. The cost of our salvation is beyond any category that we have in our mind. That the king of love willingly bore the wrath of God so that through what he did on our behalf, we could be reconciled in love to God. In all of our talk about love, we sometimes forget wrath and we should not, friends, because wrath teaches us about love's depth. Wrath is the necessary flip side of love, in fact, it's inseparable from it. Anything that rages against Christ's love, namely sin, must be judged and dealt with. This actually helps us to see the depth of love that God has for us in Christ. You see, when we look at the cross, we see the deep, deep love of God expressed in both his mercy and his wrath. And we need to understand both to gain an understanding of the depth of Christ's love. We can't just look at the cross and say, look how much God loves us. We must also look at the cross and say, look how much God hates sin. The natural response to the rejection of Christ's love is wrath because wrath is the flip side of love, they are inseparable. That's maybe why when we read pictures that are given to us in the gospels and in the Book of Revelation about those who reject the love of God and where they end up, that the Bible describes it as a bottomless pit for those who reject this love, because maybe a bottomless pit is the only way to image the flip side of a bottomless love. We need power to grasp the love of Christ. We need power to be strengthened in our inner being so that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith. And to this twofold prayer that Paul prays, Paul adds a doxology, a word of praise to God, that also talks about power. Here's what he says in the very end of chapter three, verse 20 and 21, he says, "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Friends, if you ever wondered how this prayer Paul prayed can even be possible for you and me, it's because of a God that can do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. And what's the outcome of this kind of praying? The glory of God in the church and in Christ Jesus. That's the outcome of this kind of praying, the glory of God. That's what Paul says. So let me add to what I told you I was teaching you today, which is pray for power, but let me be a little more specific, pray for the power that results in God's glory. Pray for the power that results in God's glory. Listen to me. We do not pray for a corruptible power. We are not praying for a power to put ourselves on display or a power that brings glory to ourselves, that's actually the power of the enemy, that's actually the power of the world. We pray for a power that results in God's glory, a power to be strengthened in our inner being so Christ has a dwelling in our hearts that he feels at home in, and for power to experience the immeasurable, uncontainable love of Christ. When that power is at work in us, we can't help but be more conformed into the image of Jesus. We act more like him. We think like him. We rest in him. We hope in him. We talk like him. We serve like him. We need to pray for the power that Paul taught us to pray for, the uncorruptible power that the Spirit gives. We all need it, don't we? Maybe, listen, maybe you've been chasing the wrong kind of power in your life. This prayer is for you. Maybe you've never really been able to receive love. This prayer is for you. Maybe you've lived at the level of trying to intellectually understand Christ's love, but not really experiencing it. This prayer is for you. Maybe you're concerned about the state of the world, the hate, the violence. This prayer is for you. Here's why. Because the world needs to see a church where the glory of God is on display, beautifying the lives of his people to act, think, talk, walk like Jesus. So why don't we apply this by praying it, and we're gonna do that in just a moment. Here's what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna ask you not to be disruptive to people around you, this is literally going to be a time of prayer, and I'm gonna put on the screens in just a moment, I'm gonna put on the screen the actual text of this prayer that we just read, that we just taught through. I'm just gonna put the whole thing up there and I want you to pray, watch this, I want you to pray in three ways from that passage. The first, I want you to personalize it and I want you to pray this is true of you. The second, I want you to pray this for our church, pray it for our church. And thirdly, listen, pray it for our church in light of a nation that needs to see God's people acting like God's people, shaped into the image of Jesus. Now, when you see this prayer, you're like, well, do you want me to just pray it word for word? Feel free to do that. The Spirit of God preserved this in his sovereignty so that we would have it. And if you wanna pray it word for word where you're seated right there, feel free to use it and just pray it word for word, personalize it, pray it for the church, pray it that we would show this to the nations. Or if you wanna use it as a foundation to pray from, you can do that too. Either one's perfectly fine. But see, the reason, listen, the reason that I'm pointing you to pray as an application is because God is the only one who can affect this in your life. You can't just come here, take some notes, and then go like, you gotta ask God for this. I'm not here to just teach a prayer, we're here to pray this prayer. These are prayers for the church. So I'm gonna give you a few moments, a few minutes. The scripture's gonna come up on the screen and we're gonna take a few minutes to pray in those directions, and then I'll conclude us in just a moment. So take time now to pray. If you're still praying, just continue to do that and I'd ask you just to remain in a spirit of prayer with your heads bowed and your eyes closed here for a moment. I'm gonna pray for us as a church in just a few moments, but I also realize that in a room this size, not everybody here has put their faith and their trust in Jesus, turn from their sin and surrendered their lives to him. I wanna say this, that the love of Jesus is a love that you don't have a category for. The God who made everything, the universe, the world that we live in, that God saw how desperately we were in need, that our sin had separated us from him, so he came, he put on flesh 2,000 years ago in a little town called Bethlehem, born of a virgin. Jesus lived a sinless life in order that he would be able to go to a cruel, horrific cross so that upon himself, the sinless one, he might take upon himself willingly the wrath of God against sin. Because his sacrifice was sufficient where ours could never be. The just Jesus for the unjust us. But he didn't stay dead, he's not just somebody we look back on for inspiration, he got up from the grave by the same power of the Spirit that we are asking to now shape us into his image. And he got up from that grave so that we would be justified before God, sin debt paid. And now we could be in relationship with the Father, not on our own works, but because of what he's done. And if you've never turned from your sin and put your faith in Jesus Christ, I pray that today would be the day that you do that. In just a few moments down front, they're already making their way here, there's some men and women that'll be standing right down front and they're gonna be here to receive you. If you're saying, you know what? I wanna entrust my life to Jesus, I wanna put my faith and my trust in him, would you just come and take one of these men or women by the hand and just say, that's what I want, that's what I need? They'd love to take a moment and pray with you a prayer of faith to surrender your life to Jesus. You won't, listen to me, you won't make a more important decision in the entirety of your life. This is a decision that reverberates into eternity, nothing will be more important, nothing. So I encourage you, if that's your need, would you do that? When we dismiss in just a moment, would you just make your way to one of these men or women and say, I wanna put my trust in Jesus? And they'd love to maybe pray with you and send you home with something that's gonna help you in your journey of faith. There's no bait and switch, there's no hook, we wanna help you, okay? Maybe for some of the rest of us, you might wanna just stay where you are and continue to pray, you can feel free to do that. You might wanna come and say, you know what? I wanna verbalize, I wanna have somebody pray for me this prayer that we've been praying, you can do that too. Feel free, they're here for you, so you feel free to do as God leads you to do. Father, as Paul got on his knees for the church of Ephesus, I get on my knee for The Chapel. And I pray that out of your glorious riches, you may strengthen us with power through your spirit in our inner being so that Christ would dwell in our hearts by faith. And Father, I pray that all of us being rooted and established in love would have power, all of us together, the Lord's people, to grasp, to apprehend, to receive how wide and long and high and deep is your love, Lord Jesus. And that you would give us an ability to know a love that we don't have a category for, so that we might be filled to the fullest measure of the fullness of God, so that we might be people who put on display in a world around us the beauty, the strength, the truth, the grace of Jesus Christ. We can't do that by ourselves, we can't do that in our own power, we can't do that in our own flesh, we need you Spirit to give us that power for your glory. And I pray you would do this in your church. In Jesus' name. Amen.