The Awe That Unites

Well, my name is René, another one of the pastors here at TLC, and I want to start with a true story. There's a man named Joseph Needleman who was there at the launch of the very last Apollo spacecraft, Apollo 17. This was also the very first nighttime launch, so you can imagine how spectacular that was, right? I love his description of the event, and I know you're gonna love it too.

He says, "I was an observer at the launch of Apollo 17. There were hundreds of cynical reporters all over the lawn, drinking beer, wisecracking, waiting for the 35-story rocket. The countdown came, and then the launch. The first thing you see is this extraordinary white light, which is just at the limit of what you can bear to look at. Everything is illuminated with this light, and then comes this thing slowly rising up in total silence at first, because it takes a few seconds for the sound to come across. Then you hear the sound: whoosh! It enters right into you. You can practically hear jaws dropping. The sense of wonder fills everyone in the place as this thing goes up and up. It becomes like a star, but you realize there are humans on it. And then there's total silence. People just get out quietly, helping each other. They're kind. They open doors; they look at one another, speaking quietly and interestedly. These were suddenly moral people because the sense of wonder, the experience of wonder, had made them moral."

Now, let me just read that last paragraph again. Remember, he talked about wisecracking, cynical, beer-drinking reporters unimpressed by anything. They were suddenly moral people because the sense of wonder, the experience of wonder, had made them moral. What he's talking about is the power of awe. Here is how critically important awe is to our society right now.

Last weekend, we talked about that us versus them mindset, right? How polarization over politics and pop culture and public policies is tearing families and fellowships and friends apart. We talked about how to get past that. Well, check this out: an article I saw this week. Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner, our social psychologists who have done research on polarization—that's sort of their specialty—and they say one factor is most important in shifting people away from tribalism and polarization. One factor, one ingredient, one experience, and that one factor is awe.

They describe awe as a sense of vastness in which something overwhelms us, and we feel small. They say, apparently, humans are meant to have these moments of self-transcendence because here is what awe does for you. According to research that they quote, a sense of awe makes you kinder, makes you calmer, makes you less anxious, and critically for what we're talking about today, it somehow makes you less tribal. Now, why do you think that is? Well, because awe, somebody said, right-sizes you. You feel small in a good way, like when you look at this famous big blue marble photograph of the earth that that same mission Apollo 17 took from space.

You know, have you seen this picture? Have you felt awe like when you're looking at the Grand Canyon or our redwoods or our ocean or the stars? Awe just feels good, right? But what do you do when you can't see the stars? What if you're in a prison cell awaiting your own death, like the Apostle Paul in the Bible passage we look at today? What if your soul right now feels like that June gloom that we've been experiencing? Yeah, well, spiritually, you're in June gloom. You know, your faith seems stale, and you feel depressed. Is there awe that can reach into that prison cell and change you?

Well, grab your message notes. Your true self is our series in the first half of the book of Ephesians in the Bible. Next weekend, we're gonna start the second half. We call that your true purpose. But let's wrap up this first half with one of my favorite parts of the Bible: Ephesians 3:14–21. You heard Elizabeth read this earlier. Just a quick recap of this series: last weekend, we talked about how something amazing, something history-altering, was happening in those very first Christian churches. All of these different kinds of people are all gathering together in one place as equals. It had never happened before in human history.

They're not one from any shared ancestry or shared background or shared nationality or ethnicity or anything. They're all so different—slaves and free, citizens and non-citizens—all meeting together on the same level playing field. Absolutely world-shatteringly innovative. But already, prejudice is creeping in, driving them apart, the us versus them mindset. One of the leaders of these early Christians, a man named Paul, knows he has to get them past that. So he picks up his pen, even in a prison cell, and he writes this letter because if he's not successful, the entire Christian movement is doomed to splinter before it even starts.

Honestly, that's a problem that I feel too right now as a pastor. How do we keep us united as believers in Jesus in this very politically polarized world? Well, how will Paul do it? He does not scold them. He does not lecture them. He does not command them. He does not make them feel bad. Instead, he goes for the awe that unites.

The other day, Russell Moore said maybe the reason we as Christians find our loyalties in tribal factions is because we've lost that sense of worship awe. Before a God is not a set of doctrines or a national deity or a political mascot. Maybe our clamoring for these sorts of hive minds is because we've just become bored, unsurprised by joy, by grace. This is why I totally agree with that, and Paul was suspecting the same exact thing was happening in these very first Christians. And this is why, instead of just scolding them, "All you people ought to get along with each other," what he does is he says, "Let's build a ladder so that we can poke our heads above this marine layer of division and let's see the sun that's beyond all of this."

Watch the way he does it. Ephesians 3, he starts in verse 1. But watch this; it's kind of funny. He says, "When I think of all this," all of what? All of these beautiful things that he's been talking about so far—how we're all blessed and chosen and adopted and saved by grace alone. Nobody's better than anybody else. When I think of all of this, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the benefit of you Gentiles," and he's about to launch into a very, very astonishingly beautiful poetic prayer about awe. But it's so classic Paul; he interrupts himself and he goes off on this kind of rabbit trail almost from verses 2 through 13. Those 11 verses are one long run-on sentence in the original Greek language that the New Testament was written in, where he just kind of keeps going off on—it's just so amazing about how we're all one in Christ. It's like, I just blows my mind that I get to be a messenger of that.

Then I want to skip to verse 14 because we covered that whole topic last weekend. In verse 14, Paul kind of goes, "Uh, where was I? What was I talking about? Oh, yeah, as I was saying, for this reason, I kneel before..." and look at how he addresses God the Father. Part of awe is thinking about what this means. Think of all the things that ever made you feel awe right on this planet. We are able to approach that God as a beloved child of a loving father. I mean, that alone ought to just bring you a deep sense of awe.

He's saying this is what I do: I kneel before that Father. In English, we kind of miss the Greek wordplay here. The Greek word for father is "pater," and the word for family is "patria," which could refer to any family, any nation, any tribe, any group. What he's saying is, I kneel before the potter from whom all patria comes. He's saying I kneel before the Father of all families. He's saying this is the first step: to see God as our Father. Jesus taught us to pray, "Our Father in heaven," not just "my Father." He's the potter of all pottery. He's saying see the people that you're mad at or disagree with as your brothers and sisters, not enemies. They're family. He's the potter of patria. He's the Father of us all. He loves you, and he loves them so much. That is the first step to us: see God as our Father.

And then second, savor the presence of Christ with you, in you, around you. Watch this: "I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." Now, you might be thinking, wait a second, when I accepted Jesus into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior, he came to dwell in my heart through faith, right? So why here in verse 17 is Paul praying this for Christians? That's a contradiction.

Well, here again is one of the places where an understanding of the Greek really opens this up. In the original Greek language that the New Testament was written in, watch this: the word for dwell is "katoikei," and that's made up of two words: "oikei," which means home. Have you ever had Oikos Greek yogurt? Well, that's where this comes from: it's home. It's home-style yogurt, right? Well, "oikei" is the verb form of this; it means to be at home. Now stick with me here, and the prefix "kata" intensifies the verb; that's the way Greek works in this case. So the word means to really, really, really, really, really be at home, to settle down, to be exactly at home with you.

By way of illustration, early in our marriage, Lori and I had a cat, and the cat lived with us for quite a long time as an outside cat, which was fine with me because I never saw her. Then Lori said, "Hey, let's just let her stay in the garage just for the winter." And then, "Well, it's so cold out there. How about the laundry room?" And then, "Let's just make a little basket for her to sleep in our bedroom." But she shall not be allowed to sleep on our bed. Soon, she slept between us, which I only discovered in the middle of the night one time. I rolled over to kind of snuggle my face in Lori's hair and thought it smelled like tuna, and I opened my eyes to something like this: that cat used to live there. Then she dwelled there. You get the idea.

Well, not to be irreverent, but that's kind of the meaning here. May Jesus really, really, really be at home in your heart so that you can savor his presence every day. That will lead you to awe. This is very practical. The last two weeks, I've been visiting a woman who's very ill, very close to death. She was raised in church; she hasn't been a church attender regularly. She's never really attended church here, and when I began visiting her, she was very, very afraid of death. I was able to pray with her a prayer of trust in Jesus. But she told me, "But I don't know what to do. I don't know how to pray." And I said, "Just think of Jesus right here with you because he is with you, and you can talk to him because he's your friend. In fact, I want you to think of him holding your hand just like I'm holding your hand right now."

And without any further prompting or instruction from me, she began to pray out loud, "Jesus, I trust you, but I need your help. I need your help to cross this bridge. Come and hold my hand and lead me over to be with you." As she held my hand, she fell asleep and at peace. This is not some placebo; it's true. Jesus is with you, and this is what Paul is saying: he is with you. I pray that he becomes part of your daily life, part of your awareness. Because once you see God as our Father, man, that's awesome. And then you just see and savor the presence of Christ with you every day, then you get to the third thing he talks about: you can just soak yourself in his love.

Paul really starts to pick up speed here. He says, "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power." Power for what? Of all things Paul could pray for power, together with all the saints. This is a prayer for all that unifies. Remember, I pray that all of you together would have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. What a sentence! Think about that: his love is wide enough to cover anyone, to cover billions and billions of people from every nation, tribe, and language; long enough to last forever; high enough to cross any barrier; deep enough to touch any sin, to touch any need. It's amazing.

Now, why would Paul pray that we would have power to understand the love of God for us? Well, to paraphrase Daryl Johnson, it's because some of us experience things in childhood that continue to haunt us. It's because some of us have loops running in our own head telling us that we are unlovable. It's because some of us have done things in our past that we can't forget. It's because some of us have been hurt by Christians, and we associate that with God. And so Paul is praying for you that you would have power to see through all those obstacles, all those hurts, and all those past sins and all those lies to really grasp the love of Jesus for you, that you would be empowered to see that today.

You know, last night, a woman who was at our Saturday night service sent me an email, and I just want to read you part of this because it's on this point. She says, "I was 60 years old, had been raised in an abusive alcoholic home by a stepdad. My real dad was not in the picture, so I felt worthless, unlovable, and not good enough even for God to love me. I yearned for something, but I looked in all the wrong places, only to have more pain piled on my already low self-esteem. I thought, I'm an addict, alcoholic, terrible person, terrible mother, terrible daughter. How could God ever love me? Well, I went to a Christian support group, and I put a crack in my hard heart and opened me to the idea that maybe, just maybe, God might love me. And then I was shown a Bible chapter that made me cry: Psalm 139, that God formed me in my mother's womb, and I felt like God was just there waiting for me to come home to him.

And so I started a journey to get to know this Father who might love somebody like me. I started reading the Bible, and at the age of 61, I was recently saved, and I gave my life to Jesus. My husband and I both got baptized, and we are still blown away at the love Jesus shows over and over unconditionally to us. I write this to say, René, it can happen at any age. We are so blessed!" Isn't that awesome? She is living in awe of the breadth of God's love. Paul says, "I pray that you would all have power to see this, that you would be amazed by grace again." And then he says, "And I pray that you would know this love that surpasses knowledge." Now, that's poetic and beautiful, but how does that make sense? How can you know something that you cannot know?

I pray that you know something that you can't—that is unknowable. Well, here's the sort of thing I think Paul is talking about. It's kind of like apricots. Soon, it will be the most wonderful time of the year, in my opinion, apricot season. Now, you can describe apricot taste to somebody. Well, apricots are kind of sweet like a peach, but they've got a tiny punch of sour flavor that kind of gets you right back here. But the taste of apricots is really indescribable; it's really unknowable until you bite into a fresh apricot, and then you can know the unknowable. And this is really exactly what Paul is talking about here. You may know all the facts available about God, but are you tasting? Are you experiencing him?

When that happens, you get the next thing in Paul's prayer: that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. That means to be filled to the brim, to be soaked with God. You know, I have been soaked with anger in my life. I have been soaked with anxiety. I've been soaked with lust. I've been soaked with just bone-deep weariness. Haven't you? Wouldn't you love to be soaked with God?

Now, right about now, some people are thinking, "Well, this prayer is all about emotion and feeling, and I'm just not one of those charismatic emotional types." Do you know who Blaise Pascal was, the famous mathematician? A few days after Pascal's death in 1662, a servant happened to find in the lining of his master's coat a little piece of parchment paper covered with his own handwriting. Apparently, for eight years, Pascal had kept this memory close to himself, and he would bring it out and read it again to remind himself of the time he was filled to the brim with God. And here is what he had written on it: "In the year of grace 1654, Monday the 23rd of November, from about half past 10 in the evening till about half past 12: fire! God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ." This mathematician, who was used to writing formulas and equations, wrote this beautiful description of what it's like to be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Now, I want to be clear: I'm not talking about trying to conjure up some feeling. I'm not saying if you are always on a God buzz of some kind, then you're not a good Christian. Of course not! But you can prime the pump. You know why we're not filled with the fullness of God like that more often? Here's my theory: we don't think about God enough or even at all. I mean, every 12 seconds, if you're most people, there's another notification or text or alert or post or email. Some influencer is saying something; some celebrity is saying something stupid; some scandal is brewing; there's a new disaster in the world, and our devices are filling our brains with these little pebbles of trivia. What's happened is we've become filled to the full measure of all the fullness of the world, not God, because that's what we allow to fill us. And it divides us and polarizes us.

And there's another great danger facing the church. There's so much outrageous stuff going on in the world that it's very tempting to focus on that instead of God. When I was getting my hair cut up in Portland, the barber says, "Well, what do you do?" I know that when I say I'm a pastor, it's either gonna shut down the conversation or it's just gonna explode. So I said, "I'm a pastor," and boy, did she give me an earful. It was very interesting, and I was kind of scared because, I mean, she was cutting my hair; she had sharp implements, and she was getting angry. She said, "I went to a Christian high school here in Oregon, and you know what turned me off to Christianity? All those speakers they had in high school." Now, she had gone to high school in the 80s, and so I knew exactly what she was talking about because especially back in those days, they would just have a parade of speakers who would talk about the evils of this world and how we shouldn't wear makeup or listen to rock music or especially do not play rock music backwards, kids, and all this kind of stuff. And she said, "That turned all of us off, and now I never go to church anymore, and neither do most of my friends I went to high school with." I thought, yeah, that's a real common error of youth groups and of churches.

You know, we want to protect people; we want to keep people pure. But what we do, the mistake we can make, is talk all so much about sin and so much about how rotten the world is instead of how amazing God is. Those speakers essentially prayed this prayer, but they were praying that these kids would be filled to the measure of all the fullness of an awareness of how sinful the world is. Their focus was on sin, and guess what? Whatever you focus on, that's what you move toward every single time. And that's why here at TLC, we don't talk about politics; we don't talk about the issue of the month. We talk about Jesus because there needs to be a place where you can climb a ladder above the marine layer of this polarized culture and see the stars because that's what changes you.

And that brings me to number four: I need to shift my focus to God's power. Here's the way Paul wraps up his prayer. He says, "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine, according to the power that's at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen." Now, think, look at this phrase; just break that down a little bit. God's able to do all we can ask. In fact, he says more than all we can ask. In fact, he says immeasurably more than all we can ask. In fact, immeasurably more than all we can ask or even imagine. And I could imagine a lot.

And you know what really is amazing to me? All this beautiful stuff is not being written by some self-help guru on a Caribbean island hideaway. All this rich, beautiful imagery is being written in a jail cell. And that shows me even if your life circumstances are not great, this is accessible to you right now. You can live in this reality, this beauty, this awe of God. And I want you to notice something here: notice Paul is not praying for a lot of action from the Ephesians. He's not telling us, "Here's what you need to go out and do." He's praying about what they see, what they savor, what they soak in, what they've shifted their focus to. It's what they're thinking about. He's saying, "I pray that, like a rocket launch, the light and the power of the love of God thunders in your soul and lights up your darkness because that awe is what changes you."

Do you remember Joseph Needleman's observation? These were suddenly moral people because the sense of wonder, the experience of wonder had made them moral. And that is why Paul prays all this. You know, you could summarize his whole prayer with these words: help them to know your love. Can you say that phrase with me? Help them to know your love. Can you say, help me to know your love? Help me to know your love. Let me promise you something: this is what I'm gonna be praying for you, church. I'm still gonna be praying for the things on our church prayer list—your marriages and illnesses, very much so—but I want my first prayer for you, like for the rest of the year at least, to be, "God, let them know your love." I pray that at some point this year, there's a moment when you're thinking of a verse or looking at a sunrise or hearing a worship song or taking communion when all of a sudden there are just tears of joy.

There's a moment that you're filled to the brim of all the fullness of God. There's a time that you know, yes, Jesus loves me completely and unconditionally and infinitely and presently. You know why I prayed this for you? Because inevitably, there's gonna be times in your life that there are questions you can't answer, and there's sorrows that you can't even comprehend, and there's illnesses you never expected, and there's doubts that surprise you. And one thing will help propel you through all of that, and it's this: when you really know that God loves you. So can't we agree to pray that for each other? Pray this for your friends; pray this for the people you disagree with; pray for your kids. Say, "Help them to know your love." You know, parents, you tend to pray for grades and safety for your kids. Go ahead and pray that, but even more, pray that your kids would be enthralled with the love of Jesus.

I pray this. I pray that my kids and my grandkids will come to a moment in their lives when they say, "Wow! How wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus for me and for everyone on this planet?" And I pray that they would just be one day brought to tears of joy, like maybe they're driving and they had to pull over because they're just crying tears of joy because they sense that they're embraced by Jesus. Say, "Help them to know your love" with me again: help them to know your love. And that's what I want to pray for you right now. All right, let's bow our heads together.

Father, help us to know your love. Because if there's anything that has the power to pull us away from the idols of this world, it's your love. So help us every day to live in your love. In fact, I would invite everybody here in this room, everybody on the live stream, just pray in your heart right now, "Lord, help me to know your love." And if there's anyone here for the very first time in their lives who wants to say, "Jesus, help me to know your love. I want to place my trust in you as my loving Savior," you can do that right now. And you can pray that same prayer: "Help me to know your love. I put myself in your hands. I want to follow you." And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.