Finding Our Identity in the Love of Christ

The Church: God’s Plan for God’s People

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

Feb 18, 2024

Finding Our Identity in the Love of Christ

We’ll be bringing to a close our series on the church and I thought an appropriate place to conclude it would be with Paul’s amazing prayer for the church found in the closing verses of Eph. 3. I don’t think it’s an accident that Paul segues from the three chapters describing what God has done to the three chapters prescribing what we should do to live the Christian life with this prayer. Reading from NKJV this morning.

¹⁴ For this reason I bow my knees to the Father ^[f]of our Lord Jesus Christ, ¹⁵ from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, ¹⁶ that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, ¹⁷ that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height— ¹⁹ to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Eph. 3:8-19 NKJV

And let’s ourselves pause to pray for God’s blessing on His word.

This week I was listening to an interview with Tim Keller, the late pastor and author who founded Redeemer Church in Manhattan and he was describing how there is a strong emphasis in today’s culture on identity especially among young people. The message obey the Bible doesn’t mean anything to this generation, instead the message today is you have to be true to yourself. Identity is one of the biggest priorities in our culture today.

The paradox is that with all this focus on identity, has come a lot of anxiety, insecurity, and division. People work to create or rebrand their identity but then wonder if the identity everyone knows them as is really who they are, deep inside. With all the talk about inclusivity, acceptance, and tolerance, it’s never been more dangerous be yourself if it doesn’t toe the line of accepted behavior and thinking. Saying or posting one wrong thing can be devastating someone’s “identity”.

Tim Keller: Christianity gives you the only identity that is received and not achieved.

In today’s culture, identity is performative. Not the Christian faith. Because Jesus left glory to come and give his life on the cross, when I believe that, I can know that God loves me unconditionally and forever. Jesus gives me his righteousness so I can know that God loves me as much today as He will a million years from now when I have been perfected in righteousness.

Paul prays a prayer in Eph. 3 that goes to the identity of the believer and the identity of the church. He opens in verse with For this reason which tells us that what he just said leads him to what he’s about to say. He identifies himself as the least of all believers. Not false humility. He is secure enough in who he is by grace to admit that in his flesh he is the least of all saints because he tried to destroy the church. But in God’s economy the lower we go, the higher He will exalt us, and Paul confesses that God had entrusted the mystery to him that the gospel of Christ isn’t just for the Jews but through Christ God is reaching out to the whole world – Jew and Gentile – to bring them into the family of God.

For that reason – because God’s grace and love has extended to all the world and all must be saved through faith in Jesus Christ – Paul bows his knee in prayer to the Father fromwhom every family (or all fatherhood)in heaven and earth is named. God the Father is the perfect version of what all earthly fathers should be. Good families and loving fathers reflect His fatherly qualities. Broken families and bad fathers distort God’s fatherly qualities.

Paul prays for three things:

1. First that we might be strengthened with power by the Holy Spirit in our inner man (person). We have an inner man (person) and that inner person, like our outer person, is weak until strengthened by the Holy Spirit. If someone put a gold bar inside a wet paper bag, the container wouldn’t have the strength to hold the treasure inside. Our inner man isn’t be strong enough to contain the treasure of Christ’s love unless we are strengthened on the inside by the Holy Spirit so that’s the first thing Paul prays for.
2. Second that Christ might live in our hearts through faith so that we would be rooted and grounded in love. When we ask Jesus to be our Lord and Savior, he makes his home in our hearts through the Person of the Holy Spirit but sin and the world has so clogged our hearts that it takes faith for his presence to seem real to us. As faith helps us experience Christ in our hearts we become rooted and established in his love.

Identity speaks to who we are at our core. For the believer our identity is rooted and grounded in the love of Christ. But Paul’s prayer goes further.

¹⁸ may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height— ¹⁹ to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

3. Paul prays that you and I and they are able to comprehend with all the saints…this is a prayer that the church, the community of believers might help each other understand and experience the vastness – the width, length, depth, and height – of the love of Christ.

Paul is praying that we – you and I – would have power to know how much Jesus loves us, and that as a church community we would help each other know and experience that love so that all the fullness of God might fill us.

One of the reasons for insecurity about and lack of rootedness in our identity is a fear of losing the love and acceptance of those around us. Those who were brought up in a family where acceptance was dependent on performance might feel that all their relationships depend on their performance. Am I saying the right things, doing the right things, NOT saying the wrong things, and there’s an inner fear that we will lose the acceptance and love if we don’t perform just right.

That creates a pressure to make up an identity that conforms to people’s expectations. Instead of being who we are at our core (identity) we act like what we think is acceptable to others. This creates a sense of isolation – people don’t really know me and wouldn’t love me if they did. A lot of loneliness isn’t from being alone, it’s from not being real.

Another sign is when we feel very happy when we receive affirmation of someone’s love and acceptance and that lasts for a while then we start to crave a new affirmation of it. Or we get worried and insecure if we fear we have lost someone we care about love and acceptance and crave getting it back. Our identity (and worth) feels like it’s on an emotional roller coaster.

With Jesus, we don’t have to live like that. When we come to Christ we receive an identity (we don’t have to achieve it) and that identity is loved by God. Loved by Jesus. More than we can know but oh, Paul prays that we do know how much Christ loves us!

Paul uses four dimensions to measure the love of Christ: breadth, length, depth, and height. How broad is Christ’s love? John 3:16 – for God so loved the world He gave His only Son. He loves all the world – every nation, race, status, class, person. How long is Christ’s love? Eph. 1:4-5 says He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world and in love predestined us for adoption. He has loved you and me from before the world existed. And He loves us with an everlasting love. 1 Cor. 13 says “love never fails”. God will love you forever and ever. He has loved you from forever past and He will love you into forever future. That is the length of God’s love.

What about the depth? When we were dead in our sins Jesus left his glory and humbled himself to the point of becoming a man, a servant, and even to the point of death and burial. His love reached to the depths of the grave and Sheol.

And the height? Eph. 2 says God has raised us up and seated us with Christ in the heavenlies. 1 John 3 says the Father has so lavished His love on us so much that we are called children of God and that is what we are!

In Christ we have received an identity that is rooted and grounded and surrounded by the immeasurable love of God. We didn’t earn that love, we can’t lose that love, and nothing can separate us from that love (Rom. 8) Our identity is secure in Christ. Paul prays we get that, that our inner man is strengthened with power by the Spirit so much that we can know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. The Greek for “surpasses knowledge” means to throw beyond. He’s asking that the Spirit gives us a knowledge that is beyond ourselves. It’s like having a peace that passes understanding. It’s knowing a peace and a love that is beyond us, but not beyond God’s ability to reveal to us.

So that we – the church - might be filled with all the fullness of God. Not just filled with God, but with all the fullness of God. If you were to take a small cup down to the ocean, it would be easy to fill it with ocean water. But Paul’s prayer isn’t that the cup be filled with the ocean, he’s praying that the cup be filled with all the ocean. We might be filled with all the fullness of God. I don’t know how that’s possible, or what it would look like, but Paul envisions the church as the dearly love people of God, who reflect to the world who God is.

Paul is praying big, and he invites us too as he closes his prayer and the indicative section of his letter (in chapter 4 he will begin to lay out the imperatives of the Christian life) with a doxology that continues to challenge our faith and prayers to be bigger:

²⁰ Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, ²¹ to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Paul ends his prayer by inviting us to pray big prayers for the church by piling words on top of words. He could have said, Now to Him who is able to do more than we ask or think…and that would have conveyed his meaning! He could have said now to Him who is able to do abundantly more than we ask or think. But he piles words on words: to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. So pray church!

He will answer our prayers according to the power that is working in us in order to bring glory to His name in the church. Glory is a word that feels far removed from our lives, but it’s what our hearts long for. I don’t mean glory for ourselves although that is what our pride longs for. But that is a distortion of the God-given longing for glory. Glory is the opposite of shame. Glory is the opposite of a small life lived for small things. When we see shafts of sunlight beaming around and through the edges of the clouds, when we see the beauty of an amazing sunset, it is a small taste of the glory of God and His eternal kingdom.

When we see an act of heroism, or selflessness, or compassion, or nobility, we see glory. God’s glory is what everything is working towards and as we pray God is eager to display His glory in our lives and in His church.

So the challenge for us is straight from Paul’s prayer: pray for ourselves and each other to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit to know and experience the measureless love of Christ and pray that God will be glorified in and through His church.