God’s Power in You:  Part 2

“The Presence of Christ in You”
Ephesians 3:17

Introduction
	We are studying Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians.  Paul progesses through five steps to verses 19 and 20, which is one of the highest peaks in the whole mountain range of Scripture.  Sometimes, as you’re traveling through the Himalaya Mountains of God’s Word, there is a peak that goes jutting up so far into the clouds that it just makes you stop and stare.  Usually it is a statement (peak) about God that just blows our minds with His greatness.  This time, it is not only a statement about God – it is a statement about what is possible for us.  
We are fortunate because this particular mountain peak has a stairway.  (Some of those great peaks are blocked off and inaccessible until the Second Coming.)  But this one is open to us now.  By verse 20, we have the view from the top of this particular peak.
Make this climb and it will be the greatest thing you could achieve in your Christian life.  It is worth any sacrifice because of what is at the top.

Step One – Pray for Strength
Every climb begins with the first step.  Last week we began to put our foot on step one:

Ephesians 3:16  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.

	Remember that glorious riches refers to the splendor of the attributes of God.  Paul is talking about power that is fitting given the glorious, splendor of the nature of God and strength that is at a level that is in proportion to the essential nature of God.  That power must be sought through the Holy Spirit.
There are four examples from Scripture of ways to gain that kind of inner strength:
•	Endure suffering
•	Put on the armor – especially becoming mighty in the Scriptures and in faith
•	Put yourself in a position of being strengthened by the spiritual gifts of others which requires deep involvement in the Church
•	Rejoice in the Lord.  Joy in God strengthens the inner man.

Those are just four avenues but I want to remind you again that those are just examples.  What this text says is simply that the strengthening comes through the Holy Spirit so everything the Bible says about gaining strength from the Holy Spirit would apply.  The primary ways the Spirit strengthens us is through suffering, through the Scriptures, through faith and the rest of the armor, through spiritual gifts, and though joy.  But there are others as well.  For example, in Ephesians 5:18, Paul talks about being filled with the Spirit, which comes through subjecting yourself to His influence.  But, anything you can find in the Bible that talks about how to put yourself in proximity to the influence of the Holy Spirit is a method that you can use to become strengthened.  Once you are strong, the result is step two.

Step Two – Pray for the Presence of Christ in Your Life
Ephesians 3:17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. 
You might think last week’s message would stand alone.  It is worth pursuing inner strength just so we don’t have to go through life being spiritually weak – overwhelmed, overcome, injured and defeated all the time.  But in this passage, strength in the inner man is just step one.  We are still just in the foothills.  You want inner strength just so you can get to step two – Christ dwelling in your heart.

Christ Indwells All Believers
At first that sounds really strange.  Doesn’t Christ dwell in every Christian’s heart all the time?

Galatians 2:20  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. 

Romans 8:10  But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. 

John 14:23  Jesus replied, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.

If you are a Christian, then you love God.  If you love Him, Christ lives in you and has made His home in you.  So if Christ is already in every believer at every moment, what is Paul talking about here? Why is he praying that Christ would dwell in our hearts? Why is the prerequisite that we be strengthened with power in our inner man?  
Why do you need so much power and so much strength in order for Christ to dwell in you?  You might expect that it would be just the reverse – that you would need Christ to dwell in you first in order for you to have power.  But that’s not what it says.  First you need the power, and only then can Christ dwell within you.  To understand the reason for that, you need to understand what it means to have Christ dwell in you.
What does it mean for an omnipresent God to dwell in some specific place?  We talked about that at length at the end of chapter two.  Jesus Christ is everywhere and fully present at all times.  Everywhere in the universe is His presence to sustain, presence to know, and presence to work.  But there are only certain, localized places where you find His presence to bless.  When the Bible talks about Christ living in a person, it is talking about the presence of God to bless and to reveal His power being localized in that person.  When you become saved, God’s presence to bless is in your life.  That is true of every Christian.  

To Varying Degrees
But it’s not true of every Christian to the same degree.  It is possible to have God’s presence to bless in greater or lesser degrees.  There are some circumstances under which the Lord will withdraw His favorable presence in your life.  And there are other circumstances in which He will be present in your life in such a pronounced way that it is far beyond what most Christians experience.  When that happens, and God’s presence is especially operational in you, the result is that God does great things through you.  God is always doing great things, but only where His presence to bless resides.  By being the home of His abiding presence, you become the gateway through which divine power comes into this world.  For example, other people carry out ministry with minimal fruit.  But when Christ dwells in your life, you carry out ministry with net-tearing, boat-sinking types of results.  Some people struggle to make tiny bits of progress in their character such as becoming ever-so-slightly more loving, becoming a tiny bit more humble, or showing only trace amounts of faith, contentment, patience and wisdom.  Meanwhile, the progress in your life is so dramatic that people, who knew you six months ago, barely recognize you today.  On the other hand, the presence of Christ in other Christians is so faint that, even after years and years, their neighbors and coworkers don’t even know they are Christians.  
Meanwhile His presence in you is so explicit and obvious that nobody ever spends any time with you without walking away with thoughts about God.  When people encounter you, they encounter the power of God.  Interaction with you leaves people changed. Your life is a portal of heaven; it bears the marks of greatness and has the flavor of eternity. While other people are just making conversation, your speech raises people up to a higher level.

Why Strength is Required 
Can you see why you have to have a powerful, strong inner man before that can happen?  Being a focal point of the presence of God requires a strong vessel.  It is like the little boy who fell into a vat of whipped cream and prayed, “Lord, make my capacity equal to this opportunity.”  When you are praying to become strengthened in the inner man, you are praying that God would make your capacity equal to the opportunity to have the presence of Christ dwell in you in a great way.  The power of the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ is so potent that you have to be super-strengthened with the omnipotent, mighty power of God just to be the container of it or to be the pipeline through which it comes.  
Also, when the presence of God is in your life is such a great way, there are consequences.  This world doesn’t react well to the presence of God.  Many times even people in the church don’t react well to it.  His Presence convicts people of sin and humbles them, and proud hearts will react against that.  Your family might react against it.  The devil will surely react.  And the reactions will be targeted at the one bearing the presence of God.  God isn’t going to put His favorable presence in someone who is too weak and frail spiritually to handle the reactions and consequences.
Remember, step one is to become strengthened.  If that doesn’t happen, you will never get to step two.  This is a glorious mountain but it is a rugged mountain.  Part of the point of step one is to get in you shape for the climb ahead. 
You may ask, “But doesn’t God tend to work through weak vessels?  I thought He delighted in doing His greatest acts through the lowliest and weakest tools to show His glory.”  That’s true.  But that is in reference to physical or emotional weakness.  If you are physically weak or limited, that is okay.  God can and will do great things through you, even if you are sick, disabled, or physically frail.  Physical weakness does not limit God’s willingness to have is presence in your life.  God will even use you in mighty ways if you are weak emotionally.  Maybe you are a person who is very fragile in your emotions, and you feel emotional pain very acutely compared to others.  That is okay, too.  What is not acceptable, though, is to be spiritually weak in the inner man.  God does work through the physically weak, but He does not bestow His powerful presence in any great measure on the spiritually weak.  Spiritual strength is essential.  The less spiritual strength you have, the less the power of the presence of God will be in you.

God’s Continuing Presence
There is also a sense of permanence in the word dwell .  It means an unleashing of the power of God in your life that doesn’t come and go.  (That is the flavor of this whole prayer.  Everywhere you look in this prayer you see something about stability, steadfastness – rooted like a tree, established like a foundation.  You see it in the word dwell, also.)  God’s powerful presence in your life won’t be something that comes and goes or fades in and out – especially if you go through step one, become strengthened with power in your inner being so that you don’t have cycles of drifting from God and coming back; getting excited, then cooling off; or periods of commitment and periods of apathy.  Step one makes you stable and firm.  Once you get that kind of stability, the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ will be at home in your life in a continual dwelling.  
So many people will make spiritual progress for a while, then something happens and they get depressed.  While they are depressed, their whole spiritual life falls apart.  They rarely pray except for relief.  Their time in the Word dries up.  They don’t have the energy for fellowship.  They drop out of ministry.  Their worship is hollow because they are so self-focused.  When they finally come out of all that, they have to start rebuilding their relationship with God.  Unfortunately, just about the time they get back to where they were before, something else happens to send them back into depression.  It may go on like that for years, and the next thing they know, they look back and find that they have wasted ten or twenty years.  Their relationship with God could have been light-years beyond where they were; instead, they wasted and squandered their time that could have been spent with God.  
Spiritual weakness leaves you vulnerable to defeat after defeat by Satan in the day to day battles.  Even worse, you can end up on judgment day watching your whole life’s work go up in smoke because it was wood, hay and stubble – built out of temporary materials instead of solid, permanent materials.  Once you become strengthened in the inner man, though, the result is that the powerful presence of Christ dwells in your life continuously.  The power and blessing from God is there in your good days, your bad days.  It is there when you are sick, when you are tired, when your emotions are stable or when they’re in turmoil.  It is constant.  Spiritual life and power from God course through your being regardless of circumstances.  That is the way it is when Christ dwells in your heart in this way.  But that won’t happen until you are strengthened with power in your inner being.  Once you become strengthened, it turns into an upward cycle.  He strengthens you which enlarges your capacity to appropriate and riches of Christ.  Then Christ dwells all the more richly in your heart, which strengthens you further, which enlarges your capacity still more, and on it goes.

Your Role: Faith
Once you are strengthened, does Christ dwell in your heart in that way automatically?  Or is there something you must to do?  Notice what verse 17 states: 

17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. 

Just like salvation comes only through faith, so the powerful presence of God in your life is through faith alone.  There is no other way.  That is also another reason why you need to be strengthened first - because faith is hard.  It requires great spiritual strength.  Living your life in a way different from what your physical eyes dictate is very hard.  For example, every once in a while you hear about a plane that crashed because the pilot feels like the plane is doing one thing, but the instruments say something else.  But he just can’t bring himself to trust his instruments over how he feels. God’s Word is the instrument panel – and the way things appear from the perspective of our human wisdom is very often way off because you can’t see the spiritual realm.  Living by faith takes a lot of spiritual strength in the inner man but it is faith to which God responds.  You can be the most religious and most busy person on the planet, but, if you don’t have faith, God is not going to dwell in any powerful way in your heart.  
God is accomplishing His eternal purposes in this world, and He’s doing it through the Church.  And when He looks down on earth to find a headquarters to be the center of His activity in the Church, He chooses the heart of faith.  Don’t just trust Him to save you.  Trust Him with everything.   
Believe everything the Bible says just because God said it.  Live your life as a person who is 100% convinced that those things are true.  Don’t be the kind of person who says, “Yes, I can see that the Bible says that.  But I’m waiting to decide if I really believe it;” or “Once it’s verified in my own experience, then I’ll believe it;” or “Once I can see that it’s compatible with what the naturalistic scientists believe, then I’ll accept it.”  It is appropriate to research the evidence to find out whether the Bible is God’s Word.  I’m not saying you should just accept that on blind faith.  Look into the evidence carefully and make sure there is a good rational basis for believing it is God’s Word.  Once you’ve done that, though, and you know it’s God’s Word, it is irrational to ever question it.  In other words, you can question an interpretation; you can question an application, or even a translation (if you know Greek or Hebrew); but once it’s clear that the Bible is saying something, don’t ever question that.  Believe it – and don’t just believe it, but live your life based on that belief.  
Real faith doesn’t hedge its bets.  The person who says, “I’ll stand on God’s Word with one foot, but keep the other foot planted solidly in my own human wisdom” does not have a heart of faith.  The presence of Christ is not going to dwell in a powerful way in that person.
God calls you to make such a wholesale, headlong plunge into the Christian life that, if the Bible turned out to be wrong, your life would be a complete disaster.  You should have everything riding on the fact that God’s Word is true – everything. 

How Can I Build My Faith?
So maybe you are thinking, “OK, I really want Christ to dwell in my life continuously and with a great revelation of His glory in my life and I realize that only happens through faith.  So how do I build my faith?”  The answer is to expose yourself to the truth with an open heart.

Romans 10:17  faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. 

There are two parts to faith:
1.	Believe what God says is true.
That’s the mental part.  You can’t make yourself start believing something you don’t think is true.  You have to be convinced.  Y must to consider the evidence with a willing heart.  If you don’t have a willing heart, don’t even bother because no amount of evidence will be enough to convince you.  But, if you have a soft, willing heart and you look into the evidence, you will find it to be compelling, and you will be persuaded. So being convinced of the truth is one element to faith. 
2.	Trust.
This is an action.  Trust is when you make decisions based on your belief that someone is trustworthy.  If I tell one of my kids to jump off a ledge into my arms, belief is when he is convinced that I can catch him – trust is when he jumps.  Belief is when I’m convinced that a certain investment is a good investment – trust is when I put my money into it.

Faith is believing to the point of trust; trust comes through hearing.  Expose yourself to as much Bible teaching as you can because faith comes through hearing God’s Word preached.  When you hear something you’re not sure about, research it.  (Don’t base your belief on whether or not you liked what you heard – find out if it’s true.)  When God’s Word calls you to act – then act!   Don’t second guess whether it’s a good idea.  Entrust the outcome of your life to Him.

How Do I Know if I Have Faith?
If you ever want to test your faith to see if it’s real, there are two things you can do:

1.	Examine your life and identify which things can only be explained by true faith.
Lots of people who don’t really believe will go to church, pray a prayer and invite Jesus into their heart.  Those things can be explained apart from true faith.  Lots of people who don’t have genuine faith will read the Bible and work hard in the church – maybe even become a deacon or a pastor.  There are other motivations that will drive people to do those things besides faith.  Ask yourself, “What parts of my life can only be explained by the fact that I really do believe, and I really do trust God with my life?”

2.	Look back at how you have responded to trials and suffering.
Times of suffering are always the best way to discover the genuiness of someone’s faith – that is why the Bible calls those times trials or tests.  Phony faith can do a lot of things, but one thing it can’t handle is suffering.  When people with phony faith face suffering, they are driven away from God.  They get mad at God, and then they stop reading the Bible, drop out of church, and their prayers dry up.  On the other hand, people with real faith can go through exactly the same trial and it drives them toward God. They seek after God like they never have before.  The more they suffer, the more intense their prayers become.  The more pain they encounter, the more they run to God’s Word and fellowship.  Their attitude is like Job’s:  “Though He kill me, yet will I trust in Him.”  

Step 3 – Become Rooted and Established in Love
17 …And I pray that you, having been rooted and established in love… 

For your information, the words And I pray that you are not in the Greek language.  Greek has only two passive participles: having been rooted and having been established in love.
	Both participles are in the perfect tense, which refers to an action with a resulting state, and it emphasizes the resulting state.  For example, if a Greek wanted to emphasize his wedding day, he might say, “I got married” and use the aorist tense.  But if he wanted to emphasize the fact that he has been married all these years, he might say, “I got married” using the perfect tense.  That would point to the moment he entered into the condition he is now in, but he’s emphasizing the resulting condition – not the particular moment.
	Paul uses the perfect tense here; he is pointing to an ongoing condition of being rooted and established in love.  Some have taken that to refer to conversion.  That’s the moment in the past when you entered into the condition of being rooted and established in love.  But, to me, that would go against the flow of the verse.  
(Remember, this entire passage is a progression. – one step leads to the next.  The event that happened that brought you to a condition of being rooted and established in love is step two.  Paul says, “I pray that you will go through step one and become strengthened with power in your inner being.  Then you will get to step two, where the powerful presence of Christ dwells continuously in your life through faith.  Then, once you get to that point, you will have entered into a condition of having been rooted and established in love.”)
Once your heart becomes the headquarters for the presence of Christ, the result is you become rooted and established in love.

First Christ, then Deep Love
The order is interesting, isn’t it?  It’s the opposite of the approach of human religion.  Most religious people think it works the other way.  First you seek to deepen your love, and then you will begin to enjoy the presence of God.  Religious people will get into all kinds of mystical “deeper life” efforts – eastern meditation, ascetic self-denial, or whatever because they are trying to find a deep spirituality.  They think once they find their deep spirituality, they will find God.  That’s just the opposite of what this text is talking about.  You don’t start by seeking a deep spirituality.  You start by seeking God.  The greater your knowledge of God, the deeper your spirituality will be by necessity. That is why it is so important to pursue intimacy with God.  The intellectual side is crucial because you can’t love Him without knowing of Him and your love for Him will always be limited by your level of knowledge of Him.  But don’t ever stop at theoretical knowledge. How easy it is for us to slip into thinking of God like some kind of abstraction instead of a person we love.  We talk about Him, debate about Him, argue about Him, and glibly say He should have done this or that.  We impersonalize Him and reduce Him to a philosophical abstraction like “The Uncaused Cause”  and turn Him into a category or idea or force instead of a person.  Our whole concept of God becomes theoretical.  Some Christians even joke about Him, use His name as a cheap epithet (“O my God!”).  It’s so easy for “God” to be a just word.  We might spend hours a week gathering information about Him which is good.  Every one of us should be doing that because that’s the only way we can really come to love Him - but that, alone, is useless.  If we simply gather information, and we don’t use it to seek Him as a person in love, what have we accomplished?  How easy it is to read the Bible just to get ammo for our next theological debate, or to impress someone with our vast knowledge of Scripture.   First come to know the powerful presence of Christ in your life, then you can become in love.
Both rooted and established refer to strength and stability.  If you have ever tried to carry a sheet of plywood on a windy day – or even in a mild breeze, you understand a little about the wind’s force.  Can you imagine making a tree that could withstand wind?  If you had to build something with the mass of a large tree and able to withstand a hard wind, you would have to have dozens of cables coming down and locking in to anchors cemented into the ground in every direction.  Even that wouldn’t be as stable as what holds a tree firm – the root system.  I love to watch the wisdom of God in the creation.  If man created the world instead of God, trees wouldn’t be much good for shade because they would be big at the bottom and small at the top.  Everything would be pyramid shaped because that’s the only way we can keep something from tipping over.  God wanted trees big at the top and small at the bottom so he made roots to keep the trees stable.  The roots of a tree are anchored so solidly, so deep, and tangle around so much earth and rock that, even if there is a strong-enough wind to knock a tree down, the wind will generally break the tree trunk before it will pull up the roots.  That is the way you are by the time you get to step three.  You are anchored and cemented in place.  That’s the first image.  
The second image (translated established) refers to a foundation for a building. Some foundation stones from buildings in Paul’s day were massive.  For example, in the ancient Western Wall in Jerusalem, the smallest stone in the wall way up on top weighs as much as an elephant (about 2 tons).  Lower in the wall there is one that is 44 ft. long, 10 feet high and 12-16 feet deep and weighs 570 tons.  The people back then knew a little something about solid foundations!  Once you get to step three, you are anchored into a solid, immovable foundation that is drilled into bedrock.  Everything else will give before your foundation will pull out. 
What is your bedrock?  Love.  Is it God’s love for us, our love for God, or our love for each other?  The answer is, in a context like this, I’m not sure you can make a sharp distinction between those.  Llove is the fundamental, driving principle of the Christian faith.  Love is not just one of the virtues.  It describes the Christian faith from beginning to end.
	First and foremost, it’s God’s love for us.  He’s mentioned that already in the book.  

Ephesians 1:5  In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ

It all started before the foundation of the world when God decided to love you before the world even existed.  Out of that love, God predestined you to be one of His own dear children.  Then, after the creation He acted on that love again. He orchestrated 4000 years of redemptive history from Adam to Jesus to bring about redemption for us.  That’s what John.3:16 is talking about when it says, God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.
	We also see God’s love in Chapter two.

Eph.2:3-5 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ 

While we were yet His enemies, in love He gave His own Son to save us.  Also, in Ephesians 1:6 it says God did all that through Jesus, but he doesn’t call him “Jesus.”  Instead he just calls Him, the one He loves.  It began with the love between the Father and the Son, which resulted in their love for us expressed through the Son – planned in eternity past and carried out after the creation, culminating in the cross.  And the way He loved us was by enabling us to love Him.  That’s what it means to be a Christian from our end:  being a Christian is simply loving God.
That’s why Paul ends the book by saying Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love. (6:24)  The Father loved the Son, the Son loved the Father, and in their love for one another they brought each other glory and pleasure by loving us.  They loved us before time began by predestining us to be God’s children.  They loved us through history by bringing about redemption which culminated in the cross.  The most specific and personal application of their love for you came on the day you were called and became a Christian – the day you who were dead were made alive with Christ.  The result of all that is that we now have a nature of love, so that we love one another.

Ephesians 1:15-16 For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you

Paul is saying, “I couldn’t stop giving thanks because once I heard about your love for each other I knew without a doubt that you were truly saved.”  
Loving God is what it means to be a Christian, and loving others is the inevitable result.  That is why Scripture says over and over, in the Old Testament and New, that the summary of the entire law is very simple:  Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.
When it comes to understanding how to live the Christian life, it can be summed up with a single word – love.  All progress and all advancement comes only out of love.  Just as a tree grows from its roots and a building is built on its foundation, so the Christian life grows only out of the soil of love.
Dr. Barnhouse said love is the basis of all the fruit of the Spirit.  
Joy is love singing.  
Peace is love resting.  
Patience is love enduring.  
Kindness is love’s touch.  
Goodness is love’s character.  
Faithfulness is love’s habit.  
Gentleness is love’s self-forgetfulness.  
Self-control is love holding the reins.
So, the imagery of this passage is that this bedrock of love is there, but you aren’t really drilled down in and anchored to it until you get through steps one and two.  First, you becomes strengthened in power through His Spirit in your inner man. Then, once you have the strength to handle it, the awesome, powerful presence of the Lord Jesus Christ dwells continuously in your life.  The result of that is you become rooted and established in love.  You get cemented into that anchor.  
If you want to know what that means, just picture the alternative.  One thing that will give you insight into the Scriptures is whenever you see a metaphor or some other figure of speech, to consider the opposite of what is being pictured.  What happens if you aren’t rooted and established in love?  The foundation for the Sears Tower in Chicago started with a 100 ft. hole filled with 150,000 tons of concrete – enough to build an eight-lane highway five miles long.  Plus it has 114 gigantic piles that go deep, down into bedrock.  
What if they had just started the building right at the ground level?  It would have fallen over before it was a quarter of the way built.  
What would happen if you took a huge oak tree and just set it on the ground with no roots – it just ended at the trunk?   Even if by some miracle you could get it to balance and stay upright for a moment, as soon as the slightest breeze came it would topple. 
That’s what Christian life is like if you haven’t made it though step two.  You just sit there on the surface without any grounding or stability, and almost any force is enough to knock you off the foundation of love.  
We all know what that’s like.  Your love is a jumble of fits and starts.  You have patterns of self-centeredness and anger, interspersed with occasional spasms of Christian love on days when our mood is right.  On a regular basis you find yourself drifting away from a solid understanding and awareness of God’s love which results in a weakening, hollow love for God.  Then it is almost impossible to love others around you who are unlovely – except for occasional flashes of love that are helped along by circumstances.   The foundation of love is there, but you’re not anchored to it so you keep slipping from the principle of love.  Your family suffers because you don’t love them enough to set aside self-love.  Your ministry suffers because you don’t love the Church enough to really sacrifice.  Your relationship with God suffers because you don’t love Him enough to really seek Him, and so He has to withdraw the His powerful presence to bless in your life.  You try your hardest to live the Christian life, but you just keep getting knocked off your feet by the enemy because you’re not grounded in love.

Relative Progress
I need to stop at this point and explain something important.  At this point you might be thinking, “Wait a minute.  Aren’t all these things promised to all believers?  Isn’t every believer promised strength and empowerment from the indwelling Holy Spirit?”  The answer is yes.  “And isn’t Christ present in the heart of every Christian?”  Absolutely.  “And isn’t every Christian characterized by love for God and others?  Otherwise he’s not a true Christian.”  That’s right.
These are all true of all Christians to some extent but to varying degrees.  What Paul is praying for here is that they will be true of you in exceedingly abundant, cosmically transcendent degrees.  Every one of us has reached all these steps at some level.  But every one of us has yet to reach each of them at a higher level.  
Don’t listen to this and try to figure out which step you are on at this period in your life.  Just strive to advance through the steps at a higher level than you have in the past.

Conclusion
So far we’ve made it through three steps.  First, through the Holy Spirit, we were strengthened with power in our inner man.  Second, the powerful presence of Christ began to be more of a continuous, steadfast reality in our lives.  Third, our lives became anchored in the bedrock principle of love.  The result is steadfastness in love.  Now we don’t forget about God’s love for us – we live in constant and acute awareness of it.  Our love for God doesn’t fade in and out; it just keeps strengthening and intensifying.  We become consistent in our love for others instead of mustering a little love here and there for unlovely people once in a while or having love in some areas of our lives while other areas are grossly lacking.  No part of our lives drift away from love.  Our whole existence is anchored there.  Love is what gives vitality and life to your Christian walk. 
When we become apathetic, or less committed, or less enthusiastic in ministry…
When we lack zeal and energy in our prayer life…
When our eyes glaze over as we look at Scripture…
	When we find that we really don’t care enough about corporate prayer to make the effort…
	The solution is love!  It is love that gives energy to our pursuit of God.
When we are not zealous for God, it’s because we barely love Him.  When we complain about our ministry instead of rejoicing in it, it’s because of a lack of love for the one we are serving.
Remember when Jacob fell in love with Rachel and really, really wanted to marry her?  Laban said, “You can marry her, but you have to work for me for seven years before you can touch her.”

Genesis 29:20  So Jacob served seven years to get Rachel, but they seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her. 
No matter what your ministry is there are always going to be parts of it that are difficult and unpleasant and draining.   We want to get to the point where we can say, “The hours I spent doing those things seemed like just a few minutes because of my love for God.”
How could the Apostle Paul be so devoted and committed that he would give up everything and subject himself to unbelievable pain and hardship and never slow down? - for example, in Lystra, where they stoned him until they thought he was dead.  Imagine that happening to you.  Do you think that would slow you down just a little bit?  Paul didn’t even take the next day off.  Once he revived, the very next day he set out immediately to preach in the next town.  After winning a bunch of people to Christ there, he came back to Lystra.  You would say, “Paul, you’re a madman!”   And his only response is We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God. (Acts 14:22)  What an attitude!  	
Today, if somebody in the church is a little insensitive to one of us, we drop out of ministry for ten years!  Meanwhile Paul is saying, “Look, I’m not going to miss a day of ministry just because the people stoned me.”  How did he get like that?  He tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:14  The love of Christ love compels us.  
It is love for God that give life and energy to ministry and to everything else.  Is it your desire to be like that – rooted and established in love?  I hope so because that’s where you have to be before you can get to step four.

Benediction - 2 Corinthians 13:14  
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

          

Review Questions:

1.	What does it mean for Christ to dwell in your heart?
It refers to the powerful revelation of the presence of God to bless to be headquartered in your life continuously.  

2.	How does one strengthen his faith?
By exposing himself to the preaching of God’s Word with an open heart.