New Year's Revolutions Message #1 Ephesians 3:14-21

Learn To Live Loved

The other night my family and I sat down and watched a great movie, entitled: Saving Sarah Cain, that had been given to us for Christmas. It was about a woman who was caught in the trap of constantly having to do and say things that she thought would make people think well of her, and be impressed with her, and admire her, and ultimately love her. And what was utterly ridiculous about it all was that she was already very much loved by those around her but just couldn’t see it because she was too busy trying to earn it.

As I watched the movie, I didn’t miss the producer’s point, which is that probably most of us struggle with the same thing that his main character Sarah Cain did—being so busy trying to do whatever it takes in our minds to compel others to respect, admire, appreciate, and ultimately love us that we don’t realize how loved we already are. But more than that—I think the problem most of us as Christians have is that we are so busy trying to prove to God how much we love Him that we don’t take into account the most important thing, which is realizing how much God loves us.

Just like Sarah Cain had to learn to be loved by others—we as Christians need to learn to be loved by God. This is the New Year’s Revolutionary Challenge I want to leave you with today—to learn to live as loved by God—as the Bible teaches you are.”

The reason I am calling this a revolutionary challenge is, number one, it is so foreign to how most of us live our lives and number two, it truly will revolutionize your life as it frees you from feeling as though you constantly have to perform and be firing on all eight cylinders 100 % of the time so as to earn the love of God or keep from losing it. It is revolutionary in that once you learn to live as a person loved by God you’ll find it so much easier to live as a person loved by others as well.

In many of the towns and villages in Iraq, there are marketplaces where the people come to buy and sell all kinds of things from food to crafts to farm tools and even small birds like quail and pigeons. The men who sell the quail and the pigeons have them tied to a pole, which they walk around in circles as long as the string is tied to their feet. When a customer buys one of the birds and it is taken off the string and put in a box or even left on the ground—the bird does the most interesting thing—it continues to walk in circles even though it is free.

Sometimes we act a lot like those birds. Even though God has done the great and wonderful work of freeing us from the penalty and power of our sins so as to enable us to freely experience the promise of His all-encompassing, totally unconditional, and fully accepting love—we just can’t believe that God really does love us—especially when we fail. So we just keep walking in circles frantically trying to earn His love and make up for our failings.

In other words, instead of believing that you as a child of God are freely loved by God without any strings attached like the Bible teaches—you are still walking in circles unable to spread your wings and fly because you don’t really believe God loves you the way the Bible says He does. And the interesting thing about this for most of us is that we have no problem believing God loves everyone else the way the Bible says He does—we just struggle with thinking that those wonderful and truly freeing promises of such a great love for sinners applies to us.

I also think we struggle with experiencing the love of God in our lives because for many of us our greatest sins and our most devastating failures occurred, not before we were saved, but after we came to Christ. In other words, we knew better and had no excuse for our behavior and our sin and even now have no excuse for our sin habits and this make us doubt even if ever so slightly whether God’s love for us may have changed—even if ever so slightly.

When we doubt God’s unbelievably great and all-encompassing, and fully embracing love for us, to even the slightest degree, we begin to die inside and unless through the grace of God and the power of God’s Spirit and the promises of God’s Word—we begin to finally see that God’s love for us is as deep and as high and as wide and as long as the Bible says it is—we will begin a journey down a path of spiritual suicide, in which whereas we continue to go through all the motions of Christianity—inside—we are dying as we lose more and more interest in the things of God, as we find less and less satisfaction in God Himself, as we isolate ourselves further and further from God’s people, as we grow increasingly more cynical, critical, and bitter about life, as the vitality and the passion for worship disappears--until we finally give it up altogether—having too much integrity to continue on as a hypocrite or simply becoming too tired to fake it anymore.

Because the real battle of the Christian Faith and the real fight that we are all in is the fight to believe the promises of God especially as they relate to us as individuals and especially as they have to do with God’s love for us and His acceptance of us—I think we are all prone to falling into this great trap of living our lives thinking we are not loved and thus we begin to make decisions and behave in that fashion until we either burn out, rust out, or just cash out. And because of this proneness that we all have to doubt the love of Christ—NOT FOR OTHERS, BUT FOR US—the Bible goes to great lengths to repeat over and over and in a variety of different ways—just how much Christ loves us and accepts us and treasures us and delights in us and finds great joy in us who have trusted in Him for salvation.

So, go with me to one of those places—Ephesians 3:14-21, where I want us to see that:

If you are not experiencing the fullness of joy and the unbelievably great power of God at work in your life—more than likely it is because you have not learned how to live your life as one who is intensely, unconditionally, and passionately loved by Jesus Christ.

For you see, we cannot even begin to experience the fullness and power of God in our lives until we first learn to live as people who are indeed loved by God.

This is the first New Year’s Revolutionary Challenge I want to leave you with today—to learn to live as one who is as loved by God as the Bible teaches you are.”


1. Being able to comprehend Christ’s love for you so as to learn how to live as one who is loved by God will be a great fight. (3:14-16)

A. It requires prayer and especially the prayers of others on your behalf who also make it a point to tell you that this is what they are praying for in regard to you. (3:1, 14)

I have no doubt that we as individuals can go to the Lord in prayer on our own behalf so as to beseech Him to unleash His power in our lives so that we can begin to comprehend the love that He has for us. However, I also know it to be true and find it demonstrated here in Paul’s words that the battle of unbelief is won with fewer personal casualties when we enlist the help and the support of others in it and ask for prayer especially in this area of doubting God’s love for us. Even if we are not asked—this is probably the greatest thing you can pray for in regard to any of us here.

Furthermore, whereas, Paul did not have to tell us that this was his prayer for us—he did. And the reason he did is because knowing someone else is praying for you that you would be able to know and understand and experience how much Christ loves you—is in itself an affirmation of His very love for us in that He moved one of His own to begin praying for us in this regard.


B. It requires that God’s unlimited and infinite power be unleashed in our hearts through the Person of the Holy Spirit so as to overcome our tendency to disbelieve and doubt God when it comes to His promises regarding us. (3:16; Rom. 5:5)

Even though we have been saved and have been made into a new creation in Christ Jesus, we still live in sinful flesh. This flesh is still opposed to God and wants to run from Him every chance it gets. And this sinful flesh with its sinful lusts, which will not be removed from us until glory is continually assaulting our soul, Peter tells us in 1 Peter 2:11 so that we doubt the promises of God in regard to us.

In addition to our own personal sin struggles and doubts brought about by giving into the temptations of our sinful flesh, we also are being assailed by the world, and the demonic forces of Satan Himself whose favorite target is our conception of the love of God and the acceptance of God for us especially when we fail. And thus, with enemies as strong as this assailing our confidence in the promises of God and especially the promise of His great love for us—we must be strengthened with God’s Power as it is released to us through God’s Spirit in the very place where the battle of belief takes place—our inner man.


2. Being able to comprehend Christ’s love so as to learn how to live as one who is loved by God will make all the difference in the world in whether Christ and His joy are truly experienced in your life. (17a)

If I were to doubt Nancy’s love for me, even though she continually affirmed her love through her words and her actions—we would experience a strain in our relationship with each other. In fact, if I were to continually doubt and question her love for me regardless of how much she truly demonstrated her love for me the strain that would result would be such that neither her nor I would be able to be comfortable with each other. And whereas, given our convictions, we would not divorce—we would not be very happy either. Our marriage would lack joy, happiness, and vitality. You can be sure—we wouldn’t be recommending marriage to anyone.

A similar thing happens to us when we continually doubt Christ’s love for us. Whereas, Christ will never leave us nor forsake us, He isn’t very comfortable with us either and neither are we with Him and the result is a Christian life that lacks joy, happiness, and spiritual vitality. Just as I would never be able to experience the fullness of all that Nancy can be for me in our marriage if I doubted her love for me—The fullness of Christ as your Lord and Savior, as your friend, as your source of joy, meaning, and spiritual vitality cannot be experienced in the life of a believer who has given into his doubts so as to no longer believe that Christ loves him the way the Bible says He does.


3. Being able to comprehend Christ’s love for you so as to learn how to live as one who is loved by God so that you are rooted and grounded in love requires that you know just how much Christ really does love you. (17b-19)

In using the words that he does in verses 18-19, Paul is making the point that whereas, the great goal of the Christian is to comprehend Christ’s love for him—this love is incomprehensible. He is saying in effect that Christ’s love for the believer is inescapable regardless of which direction you take in life. His love for us is all-encompassing and knows no limits. And according to verse 19, it surpasses knowledge. In other words, just when you think you understand how much He loves you—you find that His love is exceeds anything you thought you knew. It also means that just when you thought you had come to the end of His love—having taken advantage of it to the point where you think—He could not possibly love me anymore—you find that He does and that His love for you cannot be diminished.

Once you begin to understand all this you’ll begin to understand that God’s love for you is as infinite as He is. And once you begin to understand this and believe this and appropriate this in your life you will find yourself as the end of verse 19 puts it, “filled up to all the fullness of God”. In other words, your capacity to experience God and all that God desires to be for you in and through Christ Jesus is dependent upon your comprehension of God’s love for you. If you don’t think God loves you very much then you will not experience God’s life and God’s fullness in yours to the degree that you could otherwise if you were to merely start accepting the fact that God does love you.

Now I realize that this is much easier said than done for many of us. As I said in my first point, living like a person who is loved by God, is a battle and in fact, may be the greatest battle we fight as sinners who have been saved by grace. You see, if we weren’t sinners any longer and were in our glorified estate right now where sin didn’t even exist we would have no problem receiving and accepting and reveling in Christ’s love for us and acceptance of us. But—right now, we are still sinners—oh we are saved and born again justified sinners—but the fact of the matter is we still sin and at time sin very badly. And this makes it very difficult for us when it comes to living like people who are loved unconditionally by God regardless of what we do or not do.

When we sin and we sin all the time—we lose sight of two essential things that we must be able to see and experience to live as Christians. First, we lose sight of God’s unconditional grace toward us and begin to feel as though we are no longer acceptable to God and must somehow make up for our sin and our deficiency so as to earn back our worthiness, so to speak, before God.

Second, we lose sight of God’s unconditional love for us and feel as though His love for us has diminished in proportion to the seriousness of our sin and therefore, we must make up for our sin so as to make ourselves worthy of His love once again.

These are the two traps we fall into every time we sin and these are the two traps that Satan delights in seeing us fall into because both of them put us on the road to spiritual destruction and powerlessness.

Folks, we have never been worthy of anything God can give us except Hell. His grace toward you and love for us is not, has never been, and never will be based upon our worthiness because the fact is we have never been worthy and are not worthy and never will be worthy of being loved by God. God loves us unconditionally in and through Christ Jesus Whose love for us is always and forever greater than our sin and our perpetual unworthiness in and of ourselves to be loved by Him.

You see if God’s love for us were conditioned upon our worthiness to be loved it would not be of grace and it would not be unconditional. But to live as an unworthy sinner in a state of unconditional love in which you believe and behave as a person who is deeply loved by God even in the midst of great and shameful failure or just plain constant failure is the fight of the Christian Life we are all in. And to win this fight—especially when we are so broken over our sin and our failings and feel so despictable and utterly worthless in God’s sight and are moving toward despondency and tempted to run from God—we need His power and His ability to help us regain our footing and His perspective on our lives and our sins. With that in mind, look at Ephesians 3:20-21.

You see, God not only loves you and I unconditionally in Christ Jesus—He also promises to enable us to experience that love and thus live as people who are loved—all for His glory and our satisfaction. The fight of faith for the Christian is to believe he is loved unconditionally, passionately, and powerfully by God all the time regardless of how he feels and in spite of all of Satan’s lies. And the fight of faith in believing you are loved unconditionally by God is empowered by God Himself as He promises the power to win the fight regardless of how unloveable you may feel.

CONCLUSION

I think my favorite story in the whole Bible is the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15. I have brought it up in many sermons. And I’d like to ask you to bear with me again as I bring it up again and share with you something I had not noticed before.

In verse 18, after the prodigal wayward son finally comes to the end of himself and decides to go home—he doesn’t say anything about going home. Rather, what he says is, “I will get up and go to my father.” That is always the start of the journey of living as one who is loved—you must get up and go to your Father in Heaven.