Going to the Next Level with God

Steve Scoggins / Ephesians 1:15-17 / Feb 12, 2012

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Introduction:

Jere Colley and I have been playing golf together for about ten years. Golf was new to him when we started but he soon caught up with me. The problem is that after all of these years we seem to have hit a plateau — playing around bogey golf, which is mediocre golf. Colley had dreams of playing the Senior PGA when we started, but now, after most games, Colley asks me, “When are we going to the next level in golf?”

Many Christians seem to have hit a similar plateau. They have the basics down but they never seem to go to the next level. In these verses, Paul indicates what the basics are and what  the next level in the Christian life is. Paul is grateful that these Christians had reached the basic level, but he prays they may go on to the next.

I.          One basic of the Christian life is leading someone to place his or her faith in Christ: “I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus” (1:15).

Any time someone puts faith in Jesus, we should get down on our knees and thank God!

In recent weeks, several men my age and beyond have stopped me and shared how God has changed their lives. These men had spent most of their lives never even thinking about God; now they love church, they love the Bible, and they know they are saved. After each of those conversations, I have taken a moment to thank God for the way faith in Jesus has changed them.

However, one of my concerns as a pastor in the religious South is that too many people are church members but they have never put their faith in Jesus. They haven’t been saved; they have only joined a church, which is the thing to do in this part of the country. In one of my previous churches I heard a grandmother from that church say to her 12-year-old grandson, “Boy, you are 12 years old. It’s time you joined the church.” I would gladly welcome a 12-year-old into the church if he or she has trusted Jesus. But joining a church doesn’t make you a Christian.

James Kennedy had a helpful way of finding out if someone was a church member but not a Christian. He asked this question: “If you were to die today and God were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into my Heaven?’ what would you answer?” If someone said, “Lord, you know I went to church, I tried to help people, and I was a good family person,” that person is not trusting in Christ but in his own good works to get to Heaven.

II.                 Another basic of the Christian life is leading someone to love all God’s people (1:15).

The updated NIV does a good job in substituting “God’s people” for “saints,” which has become a troublesome word for Christianity. The second basic in the Christian life is to begin to love all God’s people.

The essence of our sin nature is a deep self-centeredness. One way you can tell someone has been saved is when he or she begins to show concern for others. Jesus said that a proof that we really are His disciples is that we love one another: “‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another’” (John 13:34-35).

Occasionally I meet “Lone Ranger” Christians. They say things such as, “I don’t need to go to church, I can just worship God in the woods.  My religion is a personal thing.” However, you won’t find Lone Ranger Christianity in the Bible; you cannot fulfill the commands of the New Testament unless you are in a relationship with other Christians.

One of the most common phrases in the Bible is “one Another.” It’s used in verses such as these:

“Love one another” (John 13:35)

“Bear one another’s burden” (Galatians 6:2)

“Pray for one another” (James 5:16)

“Encourage one another” (Hebrews 3:13). 

We must especially encourage new Christians to develop relationships with other Christians.

While going door-to-door witnessing in Loganville, I led a couple to Christ. They had no church background at all. I was leading a small group Bible study that met once a week, and I invited them, to join. People in that group developed great friendships, going from house to house, sharing their hearts and food with each other. About six months after joining this small group, Randy said, “Six months ago I didn’t know any of you. Now I feel I know you all so well that I could borrow money from anybody in this room!” He was joking, of course, but you can see the point he was making.

A person could stay anonymous in a large church like ours, so we encourage people to get into small groups like our Sunday school classes, or to plunge in and work with other adults in meeting the needs of children and teens. When I see someone beginning to develop good relationships and friendships with other Christians, I stop and say a prayer of thanks to God. That is not something to be taken for granted.

III.               We must go beyond the basics to the next level of the Christian life.

Paul was grateful when he heard these Christians had placed their faith in Jesus and loved all God’s people. But he didn’t say, “You can relax now. You have gone as far as you need to go in the Christian life.” No, he prayed for something more. This prayer extends to the end of the chapter and is a prayer for God to bring these Christians to the next level.

You find this emphasis on going further many places in the New Testament.

-     Paul lamented that the Corinthian Christians had not gone to the next level: “You are still on milk. By now you should be on meat!” (1 Cor. 3:1-2).

-     The author of Hebrews urges Christians to go beyond the basics: “Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity” (Heb. 6:1). 

-     Peter closes his second letter with this appeal: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).

According to Paul’s prayer, what is this “next level”?

IV.               The next level of the Christian life is knowing God better (1:17)

Look at this verse in the NIV: “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (1:17).  

The word translated here as “know” is the word for “relationship knowledge.” Two Greek verbs can be translated “know”: gnosis, which Paul uses here and which means to “know intimately” as you would know a person; and eideo, from which we get our English word “idea” and which means to know facts. Obviously, there’s a world of difference between knowing a person and knowing the capitals of all fifty states. But Paul adds an interesting prefix, epi, to  gnosis. Adding “epi” means you really know someone. That is why the NIV translates this, “So that you many know God better.”

James Boice was holding a question-and-answer time with members of his church. Someone asked him what he thought was the greatest need among American Christians. He hadn’t thought about that question before, but he answered, “Too many Christians don’t know God.” Many Christians only know and believe facts about God. Knowing God facts about God is not the same as knowing God.

When I was 17, a friend of mine and I took the Macon public bus to the other side of town to do some door-to-door evangelism. I walked up to a drunk man sitting on his porch and started witnessing to him. To my surprise he started quoting Bible verse after Bible verse. He knew the Bible, but he obviously was not walking with God.

In this day of Facebook and the Internet, you can know facts about a lot of people. Let me tell you some facts about my sweet wife Karen:

Karen was born in 1959. She graduated from the Alabama School of Fine Arts with a major in voice and starred in an Alabama PBS presentation of the opera Hansel and Gretel when she was 17. She took several years of voice and music after high school. Karen is a mother of five and soon to be a grandmother to six. Karen is a rabid Auburn football fan, although when we moved here she did not even know the rules of the game. Karen was praying regularly with Libba Herring for their children. When Libba’s son Will became a starter during his freshman year, we had to be at the games!

Now, knowing all of these facts about Karen still does not mean you know Karen. Some of you may never have even spoken to her. Knowing these facts will help you get to know her when you meet her — you know you can talk music and fine arts, and you can talk Auburn football (but not Alabama football!). Still, in order to get to know her, there is no substitute for spending time and developing a friendship with Karen.

One of the purposes of the Christian life is that we will come to know God in a real way. The following verses speak on that subject:

“This is what the LORD says:  ‘Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom or the strong man boast of his strength or the rich man boast of his riches, but let him who boasts boast about this:

that he understands and knows me,
that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,’
declares the LORD” (Jeremiah 9:23-24).

“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is not a mansion in Heaven. It is a relationship with God that starts here and lasts forever.

“That is why I am suffering as I am. Yet I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day” (2 Tim. 1:12). Note that Paul didn’t say “I know what I have believed.” He said, “I know Whom I have believed.”

V.                 How do you come to know God better?

      1.     To get to know God better, ask Him in prayer to reveal Himself to you.

Paul prays that the Spirit of revelation will help the Ephesians know God better. The word “revelation” literally means “to unveil” someone or something. He is asking that God will pull the curtain back and reveal Himself to these Christians.

We learn spiritual truth differently than we learn any other subject. If you want to learn math, you can go take courses at AU. But if you want to learn spiritual truths, only the Spirit can teach you those truths (see 1 Cor. 2:13-16).

One of the greatest Bible teachers was Harry Ironside, the longtime pastor of Moody Church. Early in his ministry he spent time learning spiritual truths from a godly older man – truths that brought tears to Ironside’s eyes as he heard them. Ironside asked the man, “Sir where did you learn these truths? Did you go to seminary?” The man, who had never been to seminary, answered, “My dear young man, I learned these things on my knees on the mud floor of a little sod cottage in the north of Ireland. There, with my open Bible before me, I used to kneel for hours at a time and ask the Spirit of God to reveal Christ to my soul and to open the Word to my heart. He taught me more on my knees on that mud floor than I ever could have learned in all the seminaries or colleges in the world.”

     2.     To get to know God better, get to know the Bible.

The Bible helps us to know God in two important ways:

1)    The Bible does give us facts about God. You can’t really know someone without learning facts about him or her. The feeling of love at first sight, for instance, is not love — it is infatuation. Love doesn’t come until you know the person warts and all! I want to know who God is, what He loves, what He hates, etc.

2)    The Bible helps us to know God because it is a holy record of how a real God has dealt with real people. The way God treated others in the past will give me a clue to what He is doing in my life now.

One pattern found throughout the Bible of God’s dealing with people has been described as a three-step process: 1) Birth of a vision; 2) Death of a vision, 3) Supernatural rebirth of a vision.

God told Abraham he would be the father of many nations. At age 99, he had given up on this dream because he and Sarah were too old to have children. Then God broke through with a miracle baby, little Isaac.

God gave 17-year-old Joseph a dream that one day his brothers would bow before him.  What did his brothers do? They sold him into slavery and told his father an animal had killed him. His dream died. But by age 39 God had promoted him from slavery to being the second highest ruler in Egypt. He lived to see his brothers brought into his presence bowing before him.

Moses was a miracle baby as well. Even though Pharaoh had ordered all male babies to be killed, Moses’ mother and sister put him in a basket and floated him right into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter. The very deliverer of the Israelites would be raised as a grandson of Pharaoh himself. Told he would be the great deliverer, at the age of 40 he decided to do something about this and killed an Egyptian who was harming an Israelite. Instead of the Israelites following his leadership, he ended up running for his life and hiding in the wilderness for another 40 years. He was 80 years old before his dream came true.

Some of you are in phase two of this pattern. You may be ready to give up on God. But if you read the Bible and see what God’s patterns have been in the past, you will see that God does not change. By reading this record of His dealings I can know what God is up to in my life.

     3.     To get to know God better, walk with God.

There is no substitute for spending time with God, talking to God about your needs, and keeping your eyes open so that you can notice what He is up to in your life. One of life’s great joys is the privilege of walking with God over a period of years. After such a time, you become confident of His faithfulness.

David said, “I was young and now I am old,  yet I have never seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread” (Ps. 37:25).

The more we get to know God, the less likely we are to panic when life’s problems plague us. Peter panicked big-time when Jesus was arrested. He denied he knew Christ three times, yet a few years later Peter faced his own death as a prisoner. Herod had arrested and then shockingly killed James, one of the inner three disciples. When he saw that pleased the crowd in Jerusalem, he arrested Peter and intended to kill him the very next morning. What would you be doing if you were in prison and were to be executed the next day? The rest of the church held an all-night prayer meeting for Peter. But Peter went quickly to sleep while chained between two guards. The angel had to wake him up to get him out of the prison. Why no panic this time? He had walked with God long enough to know he was in God’s hands, live or die.

Conclusion:

One of our old hymns shows this intimacy in a walk with God:
“And He walks with me and He talks with me. He tells me I am his own. The joys we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.”

If you have placed your faith in Christ, I rejoice! We don’t want to take that for granted. I rejoice if you have found your place in church and are growing in love for God’s people. But I want much more for you. I want you to come to know God in the deepest way possible! Will you start along that road today?