Faith, Love, Thanksgiving and Petition Pt. 1

Proverbs 7 and the Warning Against the Forbidden Woman

Our Old Testament reading is Proverbs 7, 1 through 5. Please stand for the reading of the word. My son, keep my words and treasure up my commandments with you. Keep my commandments and live. Keep my teachings as the apple of your eye.

Bind them on your fingers, write them on a tablet of your heart. Say to wisdom, you are my sister, and call insight to your intimate friend. To keep you from the forbidden woman, from the adulterous with her smooth words.

Ephesians 4 and the Old Self Put Off, the New Self Put On

The New Testament reading this morning is in the book of Ephesians, chapter four, verses 17 through 24, and your Pew Bibles, that's page 978, if you'd like to read along. Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.

They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity.

But that is not the way that you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus. To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness.

You may be seated.

Spiritual Blessings, Inheritance, and the Sealing of the Holy Spirit

Open your Bibles to Ephesians chapter one, please. Ephesians chapter one. Ephesians chapter one, I'll, I think I'll start in 11. In him, we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him, who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we, who are the first to hope in Christ, might be to the praise of his glory.

In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. He is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of his glory.

So for this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the spirit of wisdom and of revelation and the knowledge of him.

Having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance and the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power towards us who believe according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come.

And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is the body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Father in heaven, oh Lord, how much we're in need of your help this morning.

Lord, we're always in need of your help and it is a blessed thing for us when we acknowledge this great need. Oftentimes with me, Lord, I lament my weakness and it can discourage me, Father, but I know that your purpose for my weakness and my acknowledgement of it is for me to glory in Jesus.

So I pray God that even the people before me, that they would even lament their own weaknesses now of our hard hearts often, our ears that will not hear. And may we lament about that together, but may our lamenting find its end in Jesus.

And may we find our strength in him. Lord, I thank you for the blessings we have in him. May the blessings that we find in him, may it produce in us a lifelong, a life of thanksgiving to you through prayers.

And may it produce in us love for one another and a desire to grow more after the image of Jesus with one another and love for one another. Oh Lord in heaven, please be with my words and I pray that you'd be with the ears of those before me so that in all things we would believe upon Jesus, live for him and grow in our identity with him.

Thank you for this gift of love. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, we just got done with that very long sentence by Paul in which he begins it with that, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenlies with every spiritual blessing in Jesus.

And then he lays it out and we detailed how we have been called for adoption through redemption with an inheritance. And one thing that I hit hard on that's going to see itself play out further in the writings of Paul here is that the Holy Spirit seals this to us in our daily life through belief in Jesus.

And what we talked about is that what that means is that the inheritance laid up for us in the heavenlies in eternity has a way of affecting our lives today that we looked differently. In fact, if the great inheritance that we have in Jesus does not affect your daily life, there is something very wrong with your understanding of it.

It has a way of affecting your daily life. And this is what the Spirit does in sealing. We are sealed with him, which then produces this kind of changed life in light of this inheritance. And now moving forward, we get this blessed prayer from Paul.

And really it's a prayer indeed of thanksgiving, a petition, but really what we see in Paul is an example of how we can live a life in keeping with that inheritance. Paul becomes the exemplar, the example for us, the one who shows what it looks like to have a life living in reality of that eternal inheritance that we have waiting for us, what it looks like to be sealed with the Spirit.

What does that look like? And Paul shows us. And we see that the cornerstone of these passages of verses in 15 to 23 is him saying, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers.

So these verses are a prayer in light of the spiritual blessings that we have in Jesus in eternity. And it's a prayer of thanksgiving and a petition. And this really, we're gonna see, he's the example that whenever we want to experience the inheritance laid up for us as we should, we do that through prayer of thanksgiving, of petition.

Prayer, life, our prayer needs to be one, as Christians, a life of prayer. One good way to look at it is that if you think about it, the inheritance that we're speaking of, the spiritual inheritance, it can sound a lot like pie in the sky.

It can sound a lot like, oh, it's a lot of good stuff that we would be righteous, perfectly righteous and together with God forever. And it sounds like a lot of pie in the sky. But prayer is what takes that future inheritance and it makes it at home in our hearts today, which then displays itself in the way that we think, do and everything.

Prayer is significant in making that pie in the sky, eternal inheritance that we have and making it a reality, something tangible today in the way that we act. And we see again, Paul is an example of that.

We'll see in these just first few verses is all we'll have time going through of being the example of how these spiritual blessings can be applied even in our lives today. And we see that cornerstone being his prayer life of Thanksgiving and petitions for all the saints.

So look at me, look with me at verse 15. He says, for this reason, he says, for this reason, he's connecting the last major section with now this section. So we cannot forget about the last major section as we are going into this new section.

Again, as you read scripture, when you're doing your own study, when you see those kind of connecting sentences that kind of connect two points, in your head, if you don't know what he means by that, go back and read again and get what is he talking about so you know what he's meaning with the context of where we're at now.

And so we see that connecting mark. He says, for this reason, Paul says, I live a life of thanksgiving and petition, right? I do not cease to give thanks to you, right? I live a life of thanksgiving and petition to God for this major reason.

And it's gonna be because of what he's heard. He says, because I have heard of something. I heard of something. Now, you remember, Paul is writing this in prison, in Rome. He's in prison in Rome. He's in prison and you would hear reports of how things are going in churches around the Roman Empire, around the world.

And we could see that he's heard of certain things. He's heard of something. And really, if you put your mind to it, if you try to get in the shoes or in the sandals of Paul, you could see that he's about to say, I rejoice unceasingly.

And he'd say, for this reason, it's for this reason. And I can imagine it would be difficult considering that he's in prison. And in our lives, it can be easy for us to be so enamored with bad circumstances like that that perhaps we would try to think that Paul's about to say, for this reason, because I heard that you're sending a lawyer to help me get out of prison.

Or I heard you are sending me money so I can bribe the guard to get out. Or I heard that you came with a bigger coat for me so I could be warmer. It's very fascinating that Paul, while he's in prison, he hears something that causes him to continuously rejoice.

And it's really important to put our minds to what is it. And he gets to that when he says, when I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus. So he has consistent, unceasing prayers of thanksgiving to God.

Real quick, so that's not just words. Imagine that life right there. Imagine your life being filled with thanksgiving to God. That would cause you to get away from sin every day, every moment. A life of gratitude is a life indeed.

And Paul's saying, that is my life because of this that I've heard. That I heard of your faith, he says, in the Lord Jesus. Now, again, that's connecting with the last set of verses. What does that mean, that their faith in the Lord Jesus?

Well, you remember, that's very significant. You remember in verse 13, what does he say? In him, you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him. So remember what we talked about, belief in Jesus, the hearing of the word belief in Jesus is the beginning of the experience inheritance that we have in Jesus.

It is the first step of our experience of the inheritance in eternity in today's life. Now, the reason why I said it's our, oh, I got a fly coming at me. The reason why I say it's the beginning of our experience is that we know, overall, what we've seen in the spiritual blessings, that the beginning of our inheritance was when?

In eternity past, because we were chosen before time began. But as our experience, as we see it, as we experience it ourselves, as we see other people experiencing that inheritance, it is when the first, is when they place their trust in Jesus.

That is the fountainhead of all blessings is your trust and confidence in looking to Jesus. And so Paul, what gets him excited, what gets him full of thanksgiving, despite his circumstances of being in prison, is the fact that he's heard that that fountainhead has began in Ephesus.

This is what gets Paul thankful, a life of thanksgiving. Not that he might be getting out of prison, not that he has money to bribe, but that he heard that the blessings of Jesus are being manifested at the beginning in Ephesus.

In fact, he not only says that, but he says, and your love towards all the saints, because I've heard of your faith and your love towards all the saints. Now, if you remember going back to the last set of passages, even in verse 13, you remember, in him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed, what then happens?

You were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit. And we talked about, what does that mean? It means that your faith, your belief in Jesus is sealed, or it's shown to be genuine in the way that it transforms your life in that day.

That your trust in Jesus is proved to be genuine by a work of the Spirit in the way that it changes your life each day. That's what the Spirit does. And so this is what Paul's saying, I heard of your faith, and I heard that it's changing the way you live your life each day.

And how is that specifically? In your love for the saints, in your love for the saints. I've heard of your faith, I've heard of your belief, and I've heard of your love towards all the saints, or the sealing of the Spirit, and it's manifest in itself, marking you authentic in the way that you're loving each other.

So, something to first settle our hearts and minds on, and apply to ourselves, is Paul is in prison, not living his best life now, and he is living a life of thanksgiving.

Why?

Because he heard that the Ephesians were evidencing in their lives that they are enjoying the inheritance in their lives too. And this jazzes, this gets Paul thankful, a life of thanksgiving, a life of prayer of thanksgiving to God.

And this cannot be said enough in the counseling room, and while you're declaring the gospel to yourself each morning, it cannot be said enough that a Christian is not a slave of their circumstances. You need to know that and understand that, because each morning you're going to want to not live a life of thanksgiving, you're gonna wanna not live a life of prayer of thanksgiving to God, you're not gonna wanna enjoy the inheritance set up for you in Jesus today, because we believe that we are a slave of our circumstances.

And Paul's an example to us to say he's not a slave of his circumstances. He's in prison, but yet he's living a life of thanksgiving in prison, because he hears of the gospel being played out in other people.

And that gets him thankful. He is not a slave of circumstances. The enjoyment of the future inheritance today transcends all earthly circumstances.

You get that?

The enjoyment of your future inheritance today transcends any earthly circumstances you can go through. Your bad circumstances might be a gift from God to give you a greater sensitivity to your own and your fellow brother and sister's union with Christ.

You get that?

Your present bad circumstances may be a gift from God to give you a greater sensitivity of the inheritance waiting for you, appreciation of it. Is that what your brain and mind and heart thirsts for when you're faced with a bad circumstance, or is it rather a desire to murmur?

Instead, we should grab hold of this and say, God, how are you using this to give me a greater sensitivity and enjoyment, appreciation of my eternal inheritance? And here, I think Paul, as this is a prison epistle, is exemplifying that.

Thanksgiving in Prison and Joy in the Saints

Look at Philippians with me too. Go to Philippians. It's a quick jump to the right. Philippians, this topic here, which we're just gonna minor in, about rejoicing and having Thanksgiving and praises despite negative circumstances.

If that is something that you know, oh my goodness, it's not happening in my life, go to Philippians and meditate because it's all about that hope of the inheritance that just shows itself now despite bad circumstances.

But we see in verse three, he says, I thank my God. Again, look at that, Thanksgiving. In all my remembrance, again, chapter one, verse three of Philippians, in all my remembrance of you, notice again his thankfulness as he considers other saints, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

And I'm sure this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion in the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart for you are all partakers with me of grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.

For God is my witness how I yearn for you all with the affection of Christ Jesus. And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment so that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ through the glory and praise of God.

He goes on to say, I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel so that it has become known throughout the whole imperial guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ.

And most of the brothers, having become confident in the Lord by my imprisonment, are much more bold to speak the word without fear. Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill.

The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely, but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment.

What then?

Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice. Yes, I will rejoice. And the point that I'm getting at here is that Paul is centered on the enjoyment of the inheritance that's laid up for him, the hope he has, and that enjoyment sees itself that when he sees other people joining in to that choir, it produces in him thanksgiving and joy.

In fact, he sees his negative circumstance as being used by God for that further purpose. So in your bad circumstance, is your flesh lusting after murmuring, or are you looking for ways this ordeal is making your future inheritance more real for you today?

And so thanksgiving is bursting at the seams of your soul. I think Paul here is living a life of thankful prayer because he has heard the Ephesians are living a life of enjoying the future inheritance, and their love for all the saints is manifesting that.

And this is what gets Paul thankful, even in his circumstance. Now, one thing that we need to remark before we move on to verse 16 is what does it mean, the love of the saints? Now, that's how Paul knows that their faith is genuine, right, it's a seal of the Holy Spirit, it's showing its genuineness, is that you have faith in Jesus, that's a fountainhead at all beginning, and you're showing that faith in your love for the saints.

What does that mean to have love for the saints? That's something that we need to highlight in our own day and age, because it's really the word love itself is in the death grip of Satan, the leader of lies.

One thing Satan loves to do is he loves to take a nice biblical word and redefine it so that we are confused when we use that word. The word love is one of those huge words that is just completely mystifying.

It is used by Satan as a shackle to keep us to himself instead of as a true expression of what is true. And so what is love? What does it mean to love saints? And I think the major lie that he hits, it's not anything new, but he says love is someone making us internally feel good.

Okay, you get where I'm saying? That to love someone or have love with one another is that someone, it makes you, he or she makes you feel internally good. If you remember what we talked about the last few weeks, I believe, at least the last week, is that Satan loves to shackle us to this idol of feeling good, right?

That our end is to feel good emotionally, right? This is why it's hard for us to hear the word of offense because we like to feel good so much. And so here, I think love is trapped under the same lie from Satan that what it means to love is an internal feeling of good, right?

So that if someone's not making us feel good, we say, that's not love. That's not love. You're not loving because you're not making me feel good. So there's not love. That's why we see a lot of divorces, right?

We just fell out of love.

What they're saying is,.

I no longer internally feel good anymore, so there's no deeper root than that. And I believe that that is not love. That's not biblical love at all. This is an idol of our hearts to feel good. And if someone's doing it, then we say, well, that's love.

If they're not, we say, well, that's not love. But love is not an inward focus of good feelings, but it is an outward focus of wanting what's best for our neighbor. You get what I'm saying there? Love is not an inward focus of good feelings, but it is an outward focus of wanting what's best for our neighbor.

And Paul is saying here is that you have shown your faith and your love for the saints. And so what that means is not a bunch of people coming together wanting to feel good inside about one another, because that will create division.

That will create strife. That will create church splits. That will create mayhem. But rather, what he's saying is, is that you love for the saints manifesting your faith is that you have a desire for what is good for one another, for good for neighbor.

Now we got to ask the question, what is good for neighbor? What does it mean for me seeing my neighbor and saying I want what's best for him? Is it to confirm him or her in their feelings or in their desires?

We've already talked about, no, that's not what it is. That's not for their good. But again, the lie of Satan is that love is to confirm them in there, make them feel good. And if you say anything that makes them hurt, then you are no longer loving.

But that is not what biblical love is. It is an outward focus of wanting and doing what's best for your neighbor and what is best for their neighbor, but for them to be enjoying the future inheritance laid up for them now.

And how do we enjoy the future inheritance laid up for us now? Is a turning away from sin and grabbing hold of righteousness. That's what, again, if I could say over and over again, that's what inheritance means.

It's perfect righteousness, togetherness through Jesus with the Father. That is heaven. That is eternity. That is eternal life. And so the best thing, the love for saints, is seeing our neighbor, our Christian neighbor, brother and sister, and saying I want what's best for you.

I want you to be away from sin. I want you to be near Christ's righteousness so you can enjoy that inheritance even in today's life. This is what it means to love neighbor. It always means to flee sin no matter how good Satan has packaged it, which means helping others to offend their flesh.

Look at, we look at an example. Love is not mentioned explicitly, but we see them acting in this way in Acts 19, in Acts 19. We see the Ephesians acting in this way together, working against sin to enjoy the righteousness that is laid up for us in Christ.

Look at Acts 19. So Paul's in Ephesus here. Church was already there. Paul, in verse 18, we see the fruit of proper preaching and evangelism, and that also many of those who were now believers came confessing and divulging their practices.

And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to 50 ,000 pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily.

So what's happening there? Now, a really bad, wrong way of doing reading and studying scripture is to say, well, we don't have any magical books in our house. You know, we don't have no pagan books. And so that doesn't really apply.

Yes, it does. We have a community of believers that once was ingrained in society of sin and have come together and said, nope, that's not who we are anymore. We're going to work against sin, and that's gonna show itself practically in the way that we burn these books that are magical arts and sinful things.

And that is by definition the very foundational purpose of the church, to come together and to enjoy Christ together by leaving our sins and helping one another to do that. But the problem is, is that requires us willingness to offend our flesh.

It requires a willingness for us to offend our flesh, turn away from sin, grab hold of Christ, and for a brother and sister to aid us in that same thing and to do so with another. But if our minds aren't fixated on the inheritance, if our minds aren't fixated on the righteousness found in Jesus, when someone tries to come to us and help us with our sin, it is going to offend us and we will, instead of joining in that with the inheritance, we will be very offended and that'll be it.

But what the point here that Paul's getting at is that your faith in Jesus was shown in the fact that you had love for one another and you cannot separate that love for one another, you can't separate that from a fleeing from sin with one another.

And this is what Paul was excited about, is that I've heard that you are fleeing sin together. I heard that you have a unity together, a love for one another, a grab and hold of Jesus together. And that is spreading in your midst.

And again, this is what got Paul as a lifestyle of thanksgiving even while he was in prison. Loving the saints is evidence of true faith and that is striving together to flee sin for the sake of enjoying our future inheritance together today in Jesus.

This is what it means to love the saints. And so he says in verse 16, I do not cease to give thanks for you. He says in verse 16, he heard these things of the inheritance being made manifested there and it causes Paul to say, I do not cease to give thanks for you.

Paul lived a life of thanksgiving to God. He lived a life of praising and worshiping and thankfulness to God for what he was doing in Christ. And what's amazing for us, and we should really focus on who is saying this, he says, I do not cease to give thanks to you.

This is Paul saying this. If you know anything about Paul, his name used to be, or his name was still Saul, it's just he used the different names depending on who his audience was. But as we consider who Paul was, Paul was once one who rejoiced in seeing the death of believers, and now he's rejoicing to see the death of sin in believers.

What changed here with Paul, and that's something that's gonna be remarkable to us, is what changed for Paul, for him to rejoice and have this lifestyle of thanksgiving to see this Christ being played out in other people, is the fact that he joined in that inheritance himself, and him joining in that inheritance caused him to have a lifestyle of thanksgiving for others who are now enjoying that inheritance.

We see that, we wanna go back to Philippians, we see that in Philippians 3, five. Philippians 3, he says in verse five, I was circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisees.

He's chalking up his life before Christ, thinking, man, I did everything for the sake of righteousness. He says in verse six, exezeel, I was a persecutor of the church, right? That used to be what Paul did.

That's what his passion was. That's what his desire was, to see the church persecuted. As to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and share in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible, I may attain the resurrection of the dead.

He says, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal of the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if anything, you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. Brothers, join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us, for many of whom I have often told you and now tell you, even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and their glory is their shame, with their minds set on earthly things, but our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and you're my crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved. So you see that Paul, for he turned away from the things that were before, and he turned to Jesus instead, and that became his prize.

And we see that involved with that as in the saints become his prize too, as his joy is to see them join in that same kind of inheritance. See, without Paul joining into that inheritance and finding his joy and life in there, forgetting everything that went behind, he would have no love and joy for the saints that he sees coming in as well.

And so the bottom line of what I'm saying is that for us to find that life of thanksgiving, that life of joy, that inheritance now, as we see other saints coming in, is that we would be enjoying the inheritance ourselves so much that as we see others joining in, as we see others participating, it gives us a life of thanksgiving, it feeds itself of thanksgiving.

And so if our joy, as we consider our prayer life, if we consider our own relationship with God, if we fail or if we rarely ever consider other brothers and sisters that we are in fellowship, as we thank God for their growth and for their faith and how their encouragement, if we rarely do that, it is speaking of something of a lack of our own enjoyment, of our own inheritance.

As we're enjoying the inheritance ourselves, we then have a thankful heart as others as they enjoy it as well. And it feeds this life of thanksgiving, of prayers of thanksgiving to our God. Another aspect I want to point with in verse 16, I do not cease to thank you for their manifestation of the faith and joining in the inheritance, is that Paul is saying, I don't cease in thanking God for your faith and the show of it.

And it's interesting,.

It's despite the fact that they need somewhat of correction later on in Ephesians. In other words, Paul doesn't allow the later teachings or exhortations they need to ruin his thanksgiving of their progress now.

One really interesting picture of this that's even more marked out is the church in Corinth. The church in Corinth had a lot of issues, a lot of problems, so many that it would cause us to forget about anything good Christ is doing in them.

If you look at them, if you spend time studying that church, it would be as, at least for me and many of us, as we consider the problems in their lives, we would fail to have any thanksgiving at all in what Jesus might be doing in them now.

But even in Corinth, Paul says a similar thing. I give thanks to my God always for you, in 1 Corinthians 1, 4, because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus. And so even Paul had an attitude, a heart of thanksgiving, because his mind is so centered on that inheritance that's marked for him, that as he sees others, even if it's a dim reality of it, nevertheless, he has a heart of thanksgiving as he sees that played out in other saints.