This past week I had two very special conversations with two church members, both of whom had just lost a parent to death. Those conversations are always hard to have, but also very meaningful to me, because they give me an opportunity to share a moment that comes into everyone’s life at some time or other when we most clearly and most strongly feel the impact of our faith. Losing someone you love is always painful, of course, and the grieving process is difficult, but as so often happens when I share a word or two with surviving family members, in both visits last week each person on the other end of the line found themselves strengthened and supported by the knowledge of God’s love for them and of the promise that their loved one was now alive with God in heaven. The occasion of death is perhaps the most profound example of this simple truth that every Christian knows, that faith in God through the Lord Jesus Christ is what takes us through the hardest times of life. Knowing Jesus is the surest source of strength and power for living that you and I can have.

Throughout this fall we have been learning about the essential realities and dynamics of the Christian life. Our guide has been Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We have learned that God has blessed us with grace and peace that has put us into a right relationship with God and with each other. In the person and work of Jesus, God has been at work restoring his wayward creation. The final word about the lives you and I live is a positive one: despite the problems and pain of life, God’s desire to save us will prevail. The final word is good news.

The portion of Ephesians that we are looking at today is essentially the conclusion to the first half of the letter. It is as if Paul looks back at all he has said up to this point and he tries to summarize his thoughts before he launches into the second half of the letter, in which he will spell out in some detail how the good news of the cosmic realignment God has brought about in Jesus plays itself out in the everyday lives of Jesus’ followers. As he pauses, then, to look back, he breaks into a prayer of thanksgiving to God for what God is doing and then he moves into prayer for those who believe, that they would be forever strengthened and encouraged with the presence and knowledge of Jesus Christ, who is still at work in his followers, still about the business of restoring the creation.

Several years ago a little slogan became popular in some Christian circles that was then reduced to an acronym that was printed on simple little fabric bracelets that many people wore. The slogan is one you know: What would Jesus do? “WWJD” became a great little reminder that Christians are about the business of doing what Jesus would have done. But we can take that thought further. Leonard Sweet, a very insightful Christian author, in commenting on a book by another equally insightful author named Brian McLaren, spoke of “God who is waiting for the church to stop asking WWJD, ‘What would Jesus do?’ and start asking WIJD, ‘What is Jesus doing?’” Sweet has it right. Classic Christian doctrine understands that Jesus is alive and living in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus is still “doing” in the world. God is still blessing the world through him.

That is why Paul prays that Christ would dwell in the hearts of his followers. Jesus is not just a memory. Jesus is a present and vital Lord who still has business with his people. Last week we noted that the church’s mission is to share the good news about the blessings God makes available to us. This is the church’s mission because that was and still is Christ’s mission. Sometimes it seems that the people who believe in Jesus tend to forget that Jesus is still here. And when we forget that Jesus is still here, we lose contact with the things that Jesus did in bodily form while he lived in ancient Palestine and we lose contact with the things that he still wants to do through us. Have you ever stashed some extra cash in an envelope somewhere and then forgotten about it? When you find the money again, months or even years later, it gives you a great feeling, but it also makes you feel a little stupid. You wish you had remembered you had it that time that you were a little short, or that time that you needed some cash but the machine down at the bank was broken. Now, magnify this effect a billion times over, and that’s what it’s like when we forget that the Spirit of the Risen Lord Jesus Christ is living in us. He’s been here all along, but unless we remember he’s there, we miss out on all he has to offer us.

I don’t want to make Jesus sound like some sort of internal blessing machine whose purpose is just to make your life better. The fact that we accept by faith is that God is blessing the whole world through the continued ministry of Christ by the action of the Spirit. And if we want to be part of the action, if we want to have a role in this drama of salvation, if we want to participate in the most important movement the world will ever see, and if in the process we want to be showered with those same blessings, then we need to pray as Paul prayed, that Christ might dwell in our own hearts and live through our own actions.

There are many ways to describe the impact of Christ in us. Paul wants to talk here in terms of power: “strengthened in your inner being with power;” “that you may have the power to comprehend;” “to him who by the power at work within us.” The power of God is an amazing thing. By his power, God created all things, including life. By his power, God spoke and acted through the history of the people of Abraham, of the nation of Israel, of the prophets. By his power, God raised Jesus from death and then inspired the first disciples to create the community of faith that survives and thrives to this very day in this very place. In this instance, Paul connects the reality of God’s power with something that we don’t always describe in terms of power, the reality of God’s love. There is power, Paul says, in comprehending the limitless reaches of God’s love. There is power when we begin to see the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of God that welcomes all people—not just the Jews—into the blessings of knowing the Creator. Knowing the love of God is the foundation, the root, of the Christian life and the Christian confidence in the power that is available to us and for us.

When we think of the power of God, our thoughts most often turn to God’s ability to make the planets and the stars. Or we think of God’s ability to zap people with bolts of lightening when they are not behaving properly. Or we think of God’s involvement in creating life. While all of those forms of power are certainly within the capability of the Divine, the most compelling demonstration of God’s power is wrapped in the expression of love. God created us from out of his love for us. God is now restoring us from out of that same love. Love is at the very heart and nature of God’s purpose. Love in human relationships is, therefore, the logical outcome of the presence of God’s power in the world. Paul had experienced God’s love when Jesus met him on the road to Damascus and set him off on a totally different journey of faith in the Risen Christ. Paul was now in the business of trying to share that love with other people, in the process calling them to transcend all their former religious divisions and instead embrace each other as the brothers and sisters God intended them to be. For Paul, the surest evidence of the presence of faith in a person was the presence of love. To the Christians in Corinth Paul would write that love is the one thing that remains in the next life, outlasting even faith and hope. To be a loving person is to be a person who is filled with the presence of Christ, to be filled with the fullness of God.

There is an old story told of an ancient Christian monastery that had fallen on hard times. Over the years, fewer and fewer men had come to enter the life of a monk, until now, only a handful of very old men inhabited the monastery, and it was in danger shortly of dying out altogether as these last monks finished their lives. A messenger came one day to the monastery, and told the amazing news of a secret contained within its walls. The secret was that one of the monks was actually Jesus himself, come to live among them and to walk on earth again. The news transformed the old monks. None of them knew exactly who it was that was Christ among them, but because they didn’t know, they started living differently. Each man began to pray a little more fervently, to worship a little more faithfully, to study a little more carefully, to treat his fellow monks with more care and love and respect than ever before. It was not long before the townspeople began to notice a different spirit in the old monastery, and soon there were younger men who found themselves attracted to the love and devotion in the place, and they began to join. The whole character of the monastery was changed, and it became once again a vital center of prayer and service, of worship and fellowship, of love. The place was transformed by the knowledge that Christ was alive and real and living in someone there, and indeed, Christ had come to live there, and not just in one man, but in them all.

What happens when Christ takes up residence in a person’s heart? That person becomes a loving person, a faithful person, a hopeful person, a person filled with confidence and peace and the ability to nurture loving relationships. What happens when Christ takes up residence in the hearts of a whole community of people? That community becomes an example of how God means for all of his children to live together. When Christ is present in a church, that church reaches out to the world to tell it the good news and to demonstrate that good news in acts of loving service, that church reaches in to nurture and train its younger members in the ways of the faith of Jesus, to care for and encourage its older members as they face the challenges of aging, to educate and mobilize its adult members to take their Christian ethics and morality into their homes and their workplace, and that church reaches up to God and seeks God’s renewing power to help it continue to be a place where each of its members learns how to become like Jesus. When Christ is present in an individual Christian life or in the life of a Christian community, God’s grace and peace begin to flow into every corner of the sphere of influence of that one believer or that group of believers. And amazing things begin to happen.

Paul wanted to be sure that the first Christians didn’t shortchange the Savior, that they didn’t squelch the amazing things that God was planning to do through them. In the final sentence of this first half of his letter, Paul makes an astounding claim: that the power of Christ continues to be present in the lives of the believers and the life of the church, and that this power is going to accomplish things that are beyond the dreams and imaginations of those in whom the power works. God is doing something so big, Paul believes, that we cannot even begin to dream just how big it really is. Nothing is beyond God’s power of love.

One day a man was walking along a deserted beach and he came upon an old bottle that had washed ashore. The man picked up the bottle, and when he popped the cork, out came a magic genie. The genie was overjoyed that he finally had been released from the bottle, and so he told the man that he would grant him one wish, anything he wanted. The man thought a while and then said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to go to Hawaii, but I’m afraid to fly and I’m afraid to sail, so could you please build me a bridge so I can drive to Hawaii?” The genie stammered and stuttered a moment, and then said, “You know, to build a bridge all the way from here to Hawaii would take an amazing amount of steel and concrete and asphalt, and it would involve the most difficult engineering imaginable, and it would take years and years to finish, and I’m just not sure that it would even be possible. Can you think of something else you would like to ask me to do for you?” So the man said, “Well, okay. If you can’t build me a bridge to Hawaii, then could you please do just this one thing for me? Would you please explain women to me?” And the genie said, “Would you like your bridge to be two lanes or four?”

What is God trying to do in your life that is so big you can hardly imagine it? What is God trying to get you to do with your life that is so amazing you have barely begun to dream it? What is God leading this community of believers to do that is so daring we can scarcely fathom it? Where is the living Christ working in your life to redeem it, to renew it, to restore it, to remake it into something wonderful, something creative, something that will be a blessing to you and to those around you? God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, and now Christ is in us, continuing the task of bringing all things back to their intended purpose and glory. God has unlimited resources, and those resources are available to us. God is planning for unlimited results, and you and I are part of his workforce here in the world that is making them happen. The power to live the good life, to live the God life, is in you through the presence of the indwelling Christ. I pray, that according to the riches of his glory with which he has already blessed you, that you would be strengthened to dream big dreams and to attempt great things, for your own sake and for the sakes of those around you.

Amen.

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