Paul at Prayer No.1 The Father

Jesus looked toward heaven and prayed, Father, the time has come. Glorify your son, that your son may glorify you. For you granted him authority over all people, that he might give eternal life to all those you have given him.

Now this is eternal life, that they may know you. The only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do.

And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began. I have revealed you to those whom you gave me out of the world. They were yours.

You gave them to me, and they have obeyed your word. Now they know that everything you have given me comes from you. For I gave them the words you gave me, and they accepted them.

They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me. I pray for them. I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me.

For they are yours. All I have is yours, and all you have is mine. And glory has come to me through them.

I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name, the name you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them, and kept them safe by that name you gave me.

None has been lost, except the one doomed to destruction, so that scripture would be fulfilled. I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them, for they are not of the world any more than I am of the world.

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world, but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by the truth.

Your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.

My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me, and I am in you. May they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one, as we are one, I in them, and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity, to let the world know that you sent me, and have loved them, even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.

Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known, in order that the love you have for me may be in them, and that I myself may be in them. Now may God be pleased to add his blessing to that reading from his word.

Be glad if you'd have your Bibles open at Ephesians in chapter 3. Ephesians in chapter 3, and in a moment I shall read from the 14th verse and onwards. By now you might have fixed on your minds the quotation that I kept repeating during that brief series on experiencing God, a quotation that fell from the lips of the great Scottish preacher Robert Murray MacShane, when he said that a man is what he is on his knees, and nothing more. You can measure a man by the time that he spends on his knees in an attitude of prayer.

He's that, and he's nothing more in the sight of God. That was MacShane's own comment, and it seems to me that he has a great deal of scriptural weight that he could bring to bear to justify his assertion. Now, during that little series which I thoroughly enjoyed bringing to you on experiencing God, I had occasion on far more times to quote from the Apostle Paul's prayer here in Ephesians 3 than what I did from Murray MacShane, because the Apostle Paul is a man who experienced God, perhaps more than any other, certainly as much as any other in New Testament times.

And what I want to do is for a few Sundays to look into the concept of Paul at prayer, the Apostle Paul at prayer, and in watching him, and in listening to what he has to say, we will discover that our analysis will help to build on what I shared with you during the last few weeks on the experience of God. However long you may live in this world, whatever orator may arise, you will never hear anything equal to this for eloquence, for elevation of thought, for profundity of language and conception. That was Dr. Lloyd-Jones' opinion of this prayer of Paul that I now read to you.

For this reason, I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through the Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the saints to grasp how wide and long and deep 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.

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. There is hardly anything more wonderful in the whole of the epistles than this great and glorious prayer. Here is Paul on the Himalayas of spiritual heights.

Here is Paul ascending his Everest, and he has in mind the well-being of those dear poor people at Ephesus who have come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ as a result of his ministry. And he dares to suggest that those handful of slaves, those men and women who have been rescued from the permissiveness and promiscuity of Ephesus with its idol worship, that they might be filled with all the fullness of God himself. This is what Paul has in mind.

And let's remember as we just look at the first two verses where the apostle Paul was as he utters this prayer. It's not that he's been on some invigorating holiday with a youth group. He has not been on some retreat with the rest of the apostles coming back to his base for preaching, charged with emotion and refreshed with his knowledge of the teachings of Jesus.

No, not a bit. The first verse of the fourth chapter reminds us that Paul is writing from prison, probably from Rome, though the location is unimportant for the point that I want to stress. This is the gist of the matter, that here is a man whose freedom has been taken from him.

He is in one of the Roman prisons, maybe a dungeon, perhaps malaria or rat infested, deprived of human liberties. And what does this great man have in mind? His personal freedom? The material advantage of those whom he loves? No, neither of those things. This man has in mind the spiritual growth of a humble community of followers of Jesus at Ephesus.

Learn this, my friend. Even if you are restricted from being in the swim of things evangelistically, no longer are you able to go track distributing or engaged in student evangelism or so on and so forth. Maybe in that sense your own condition is parallel with that of the apostle Paul.

There is something that you can do, something that is great, something that is significant, something that advances the kingdom and builds men and women up in the most holy faith. You can pray. And it's not a question of I can only pray now.

When you're praying, you're at your finest. When a man or a woman is on his knees, on her knees, when they're in some posture of prayer, they're at the apex. The great thing that God created them for, they are doing.

Erase that phraseology from your vocabulary. It's a nonsense. Here is Paul sweating it out in this dungeon in the Roman Empire.

And he has the Ephesians and their needs in his mind. But even more so, he has in mind the fact of God. And he commences this great prayer, of which there are few in Scripture to compare it with, with the exception of the one that Andrew read of our Lord Jesus Christ.

He commences by saying, I kneel before the Father. For this reason. Well, why is Paul kneeling before the Father in some Roman cell? The explanation would take me some length to do it justice.

But you would have to read the second chapter and the third chapter, the verses that proceed in the third chapter, to understand what he means for this reason. You see, Paul is not engaged in some mechanical quiet time here. It's not just that the hour has come.

It's seven o'clock in the morning. It's nine o'clock or eleven o'clock or six or nine at night, as the case may be. Therefore I shall be at prayer.

The mechanics of a quiet time. I'm not speaking against it. But I am saying that this is not the reason why Paul is praying.

Not mechanically. He's stimulated to pray for this reason. What reason, Paul? Well, he tells us in the second chapter of the great way in which God has brought Jew and Gentile together through Jesus Christ.

Broken down the middle wall of partition which separated them and brought into one family unit, believing people, be they naturally from Abraham's loins or be they from Adam's loins and purely Gentiles. This is a great thing, says the apostle. And it seems even then that he's going to break out into prayer.

But no, when you get to the third chapter in the first verse which leads in as though he will continue to pray, he then directs us from the second verse right through to the thirteenth verse in a little bit of teaching which is more or less autobiographical. That means to say it concerns Paul himself. He has been brought into the Christian community.

He who was a persecutor of the church, a blasphemer against God, though to some degree unwittingly, has now been made a new man in Christ. And so he says in the seventh verse of chapter three, I became a servant of this gospel by the gift of God's grace given me through the working of His power. Although I am less than the least of all God's people, this grace was given to me.

And says, Paul, I didn't just keep it to myself but that grace, the knowledge that I have of the gospel entrusted to me was spread around the Gentile world. And I'm still an ambassador though in chains. And when I recognize this, what God has done for humanity, Jew and Gentile as a whole, what He has done for me as an individual, then in this damp, smelly jail, I bow my knees to the Father.

The Apostle Paul in the posture of prayer. I bow my knees, as the Authorized Version puts it. I kneel before, as the NIV puts it, the Father.

And the word before or unto, if you're following the AV, is most important. It's a link word, a preposition, but nonetheless it has great significance. For this reason, I kneel before.

I kneel unto. What does the word denote? What does it indicate? Well, it's the language of theophany. Now you all should be understanding what that word means as a result of the studies that I brought during these past couple of months or so.

Here is Moses on Horeb. Why is he there? He wants to see God. Show me yourself.

Show me your glory. Here is Elijah, similarly on Horeb. They're living hundreds of years later.

Here is Daniel in Babylon. Or go back to the beginnings of Scripture. Here is Jacob at Peniel.

And what do they have? They have an encounter with God. Now I am arguing that an encounter with God is exactly what Paul means when he uses that little preposition. I kneel before the Father.

Where is he? Well, as I say, he's not on a mountaintop in some sort of evangelical retreat in Switzerland, though possibly he would have preferred that to where he was. Though would he? Is not God made even more great when he reveals himself in the most uncongenial environment? You see, Rome has got Paul shackled. At least that's what they think.

But he's not really a prisoner. Not if you recognize that the spirit of the man cannot be shackled, fettered by Rome, with a God perhaps on duty, but nonetheless his spirit is as free as a butterfly. It's as free as a bird.

And God is not concerned about damp and smelly dungeons. When Connie Ten Boom, you remember, and her sister in that great story during the last world war, punished because of their help that they gave to Jewish people when they moved to what did they call the concentration camp, Ravensbrück? It was Connie who told her sister, or the other way around, that God would be there in the rat-infested dormitory where those naked bodies of so many women were crammed together. They encountered God.

They could kneel before his great person. Don't feel that you must be on some retreat, you must be in some monastic order, you've got to be a reverend or a father or whatever the professional terminology might be before you can experience something like this. No, here is Paul in this dungeon and he says, for this reason I kneel.

I kneel before the Father. I kneel. Why does he kneel? Perhaps he's not literally kneeling at the time that he actually writes this letter, but there is something to be said for taking stock of our posture in prayer.

The word posture means the way that you hold your body. Now I don't want to push this too far, because I realise that there are certain qualifications that need to be made, and indeed if you're just engaged with the idea of posture, of bowing and kneeling and so on and so forth, your heart itself may not be broken, you may not be kneeling in your spirit even if you're kneeling in your body, so I don't want to push it too far. But it seems to me very, very important, because scripture underlines the fact that when men and women in Old Testament times and New Testament times engaged in prayer, they were often very careful as to the posture that they adopted.

So you get the occasion of Ezra standing before the Lord, and Solomon prostrate in the temple, and here is Paul kneeling before God. What do these things seem to indicate? Well, if you were to come into my home, say one of my older friends here, I was not expecting you, and you came into my living room, and I'm sitting down, what do I do? I stand up. Why do I stand? Well, because it's courteous so to do, and because I have a loving respect for you.

Now this whole business of kneeling, or standing, or lying prostrate, which I often find is a convenient way for myself privately, before the Lord, in prayer, to engage in my intercessions. What does it denote? And it's what denotes that is more important than the actual action. It denotes respect.

Here is this great God, this glorious, ineffable majesty, this great Creator who brought the worlds into existence. And as a result of the miracle of the Spirit, His glory, His presence, it pervades this cell. And Paul bows his knees before this great God.

And the bowing of the knee is indicative of the bowing of the heart, and of the two, the latter is the more important. So any older friends, don't get hung up by what I'm saying here. But I make the point that when we approach this great and holy God, we do so acknowledging His majesty, His greatness.

He is other than I am. He's all that I am not. I respect this God.

I come into His presence with boldness, yes, but not presumption. I come with confidence, but not with cheek. He is my God, my Heavenly Father.

And I bow my knee before Him. Yes, says Paul, for this reason. The reasons that I've already expressed in the preceding sentences of my letter.

I kneel. I kneel indicating the respect that I have. I kneel before something has happened.

Someone has come into this dungeon that's completely changed the whole ethos, the whole atmosphere. I kneel before God. No, he doesn't just say, I kneel before God.

He says, I kneel before the Father. The Father. There is a distinction between calling God, God, and calling Him Father.

You say, what is the distinction? Is it just purely an academic point that you are laboring? No, not at all. When I think of Father, a rich and a luscious word, I think of compassion. I think of faithfulness.

I think of an anchorage. And this is what Paul is to tell the Corinthians in the second letter that he writes about the Father. He is the God of all comforts, the Father of all comforts, and the Father of all mercies.

It says James, the book that we have been studying down there in Exmas during these last weeks, when he refers to the Father, he is the unchanging Father. The sun and the moon, they are constant in the heavens. You can anticipate seeing them with a reasonable degree of regularity.

But the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, you can have even greater confidence in Him. Because sometimes the sun and the moon are eclipsed, they are out of sight, the cloud covers them. But this great Father, whose mercies are new every morning, whose compassions are constant, He is the one who reveals Himself to us through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Have you ever noticed how intoxicated, if I can use that word, the Apostle Paul is with the concept of God as Father. If there was time, I would read through one verse of every epistle that Paul wrote. And you will discover in the opening comments that he uses this phraseology.

Listen to him in Rome, as he writes to the Romans. And he speaks about the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we're told in the seventh verse, as he addresses the saints in the capital, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

When he writes to the Corinthians, the first chapter, and the second verse, to the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy. Verse 3, Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Thessalonians, go right through the whole catalog of the letters that he writes.

And Paul will always send greetings in the name of the Father. There was a book published as a corrective a couple of years ago called The Forgotten Father. And what the author had in mind was to supply the balance that there is these days regarding the tendency to dwell our attention purely on the Holy Spirit or, and I speak with great respect, on the Lord Jesus Christ.

Very often you will discover that modern hymns and choruses are taken up, if not exclusively, certainly with an undegree of bias towards the Son and the Spirit. Now I'm on delicate ground and I don't want to push my point too far. But the essence of the matter is this, that when you approach the Trinity in prayer, you come in the power of the Spirit through the name of the Son into the presence of the Father.

I always feel it's a grave error when parents teach their children to pray, I speak with respect, simply to the Lord Jesus, as though later on when you get more mature, the Father will have something to do with you. Now parents don't mean that, but the implication is there. No, the fatherhood of God is so wonderful, it's so impressing, that a little child can come to Him and appreciate Him.

And praise and prayer has as its final destination the great Father of glory. Well, this is what Paul tells us here, for this reason I kneel before the Father. And he goes on, if you're following the authorized version, to make reference to the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or through our Lord Jesus Christ.

That little phrase is not in the new international version or the modern versions of Scripture. The fact that it's excluded is not terribly important, nor the fact that it's included important. For Paul has already made it clear in the second chapter, that we can approach the Father only through the Lord Jesus.

He is the one who introduces us to the Father. I know that God is my Father because Jesus Christ has said so. And He's made it very clear that as I trust Him as my Lord and Savior, then I am reconciled to the Father.

If I were to sum up the ministry of Jesus in a phrase, I would say that He is the one who has the secret of the Fatherhood of God. He contains the secret of the Fatherhood of God. You say, what do you mean? Well, if you have a Bible in front of you, turn rapidly to Matthew chapter 11, if you please.

And as you're finding it, I'll sketch the context. Our Lord Jesus is engaging in a piece of prayer Himself. Later on, at the end of the chapter, He's going to make that grand invitation, Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. But prior to that great invitation, He continues His prayer, or if you please, His thanksgiving to the Heavenly Father. This is verse 25 of Matthew 11.

At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure. All things have been committed to me by my Father.

No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. You see the point. It's put so perfectly clearly, I need make no further comment.

We are introduced to God, and we recognize that He is Father, because Jesus Christ reveals Him as such, and in one sense no one can address the Lord God as Father, unless they have acknowledged Jesus Christ as their own Savior. There is one Father who brings together the believing community throughout the world. Look at Ephesians 2 and verse 18 to make that point even more precise, as Paul argues it, for through Him, that is the Lord Jesus, for through Him, we both have access to the Father by the one Spirit.

Well then, let's move on, and in the remaining few minutes, just take in the last part of verse 15, or rather the whole of verse 15, from whom His whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name, or as the A.V. puts it, of whom the whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. What does Paul mean by this? Well, think it through at a natural level. Every clan in Scotland could be traced back to one ancestor.

Every family circle here in the tabernacle could be traced back to grandfather or great-grandfather. If you have the records, great-great-grandfather. We all have our ancestors, and ultimately we all trace our human ancestry back to Adam.

But here is Paul, and he eclipses this notion by saying that true humanity traces its origin back to the Heavenly Father from whom His whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. The Jews were accustomed to call the angels in heaven God's upper family, and the people on earth His lower family. And what Paul has in mind here is that this great God, the God of the angels, the God of the redeemed who are already in heaven, according to Hebrews chapter 12, is also the God and Father of all those who have trusted Jesus as Lord.

You see, it doesn't really matter to these Ephesians that they were Gentiles. Neither does it matter to Jews who have confessed Jesus that they used to be descendants of Abraham. There is a new entity that has been born by the ministry of Jesus in His death at Calvary.

He has brought together Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, free and slave, influential and insignificant. He's brought them into one great family. And who is the chief of that family? It is none other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom His whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

And one day, there's going to be a family reunion. All those who've gone on into the glory and those who remain behind at the second coming of Christ will be caught up together. We used to sing in our hymn book back in my home city of Sheffield, what a gathering, what a gathering, what a gathering of the ransomed in that happy land above.

A bit of sentimentality. That I confess. But nonetheless, there's great scriptural justification in looking to the day for the family reunion when with our Heavenly Father and our brothers and sisters we are together.

And until then, how do you live? Well, you live with the name of God upon you. You live with the name of God upon you. If you belong to this family, then you recognize that the one who governs your activity on this earth is none other than the Father God.

Live up to your name. You've got his name upon you. The Lord Jesus in John 17 says, Protect them by the power of your name.

Nevertheless, as Paul writing to Timothy, God's solid foundation stands firm. Sealed with this inscription, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must depart from iniquity.

You've got the picture. We've hardly looked at the prayer. Just at the commencing two verses, but they're most significant.

Here is this Apostle Paul. Are you sorry for him? He doesn't want your sorrow. He wants you to take him as an example.

And here in this damp, dark dungeon, maybe still in the company of a Roman soldier, he bows his knees. Why? Because God's in the place. He bows his knees, not just because God, an anonymous sort of God is there, but God the Father, the Father of our Lord Jesus.

He's pervaded the cell by the power of the Spirit. And Paul is looking up, as in the mirror, beholding the glory of God. And so he bows the knee.

And in this just so, he recognizes that those Ephesian Christians, they need him to focus his prayer on them and their spiritual requirements. And we'll see him doing that on Sunday week. May God bless this meditation to your hearts.

And may you live as those who have the name of God imprinted upon your heart and your personality. Amen. Confidence, Father, we commit ourselves into your care, asking that day by day we might have an encounter with you and that your presence might penetrate any situation into which we might find ourselves.

And we ask that either literally or certainly in the heart we might be disposed often to bow our knees before the great God and Father. Amen.