Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
All right, verse 14. We gotta. We gotta get into this. Here's what he says. Ephesians, chapter 3, verse 14. For this reason, we're gonna come back to that. I bow my knees before the Father. So here's what Paul is starting verse 14 with this idea of prayer, okay? So he comes to God because of everything that he's been talking about in 11 and 12 and 13.
Mark Clark [00:00:24]:
And now he gets to 14. He says, for all these reasons, for everything that I've unpacked here, now I bow my knee, I'm coming before God in prayer because I believe prayer is powerful. I believe that God will move and shake and do things in light of me coming to him and praying. And so prayer becomes the heartbeat of Paul's life. And we believe, honestly, that prayer is the engine that drives the church. It should be the engine that drives our lives, because it actually does something. It's not just a magical mantra that you say before you eat. And then if your kids don't get it all out before they put that first thing in their mouth, you're like, oh, don't do that.
Mark Clark [00:01:04]:
Cause you're gonna, ah, food poisoning if you don't pray first. All right? That's not the idea. All right? It's not this religious thing. You don't have to pray. You get to pray. You get to talk to a loving father. And some of us grew up without fathers, with deadbeat fathers, with drunken fathers, with fathers who abandoned us. And Paul says this beautiful thing.
Mark Clark [00:01:29]:
I bow my knees before the Father, that in Jesus Christ you get a father maybe that you never had. And so prayer for some of us is this really difficult thing. In Revelation, chapter 8, the writer unpacking the power of prayer says in verse three, and another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer. And he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne. This idea that all the saints all through history that had prayed for their loved ones, prayed for God to move, prayed for their neighbors, prayed for sicknesses, prayed for all these things, and they're before the throne. And the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints rose before God from the angel of the Lord. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth. That's a beautiful image.
Mark Clark [00:02:22]:
It's what George Herbert, who is an old poet, he said, this is reversed thunder. This is. Our prayers go up. And then God listens to them and he throws them back down and there were peels of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. That what we pray actually has impact, actually moves the universe forward, actually changes things. And even if it never changes anything, it changes you as a person. Because now you're connecting to God as father and it's changing who you are and it's making you humble and making. And it's making you dependent.
Mark Clark [00:02:54]:
Because every time you come to God and you say, can you move this way? Can you do this? Can you act in this way, you're literally saying, I'm not the one who's in control of anything. You are. And so while I'm not in control, I got to get close to the one who is in control. I can't control the universe. I can't be the loudest guy in the room. There has to be humility because I'm coming to God as a father and saying, I want you to move. Because I can't move the hearts of people. I can't move the hearts of King.
Mark Clark [00:03:20]:
I can't even move the hearts of my kids. I can try, but my responsibility is to pray for them, to lead them, to show them how to pray, show them how to love Jesus. And so some of us approach prayer and we're not really sure what to do with it. It's extremely hard. It is a discipline. It's becoming harder in our social media world where there's constant stimulation in our lives. And so we can be on the Twitter and be on our iPhone and be on our galaxy and be on our BlackBerry and constantly be stimulated. And so coming before the father and actually listening and speaking and talking, this is becoming harder.
Mark Clark [00:03:53]:
We just get distracted. It's a difficult thing to do. And so some of you who are new Christians, there's a lot of new Christians at Village, you find it hard to pray or your experience with prayer has been weird. And so you, you know, you kind of do the hand, You've seen people do the hand holding thing and that's not really for you. All right. Especially if you're a man, you don't want to hold other guys hands. All right. Ever.
Mark Clark [00:04:12]:
All right, so maybe you've had that experience. When I came to, when I met Aaron and Aaron's family was a big hand holding family. All right, So I came into the church, I was 19. I walked in, we go to eat dinner and it's like, hold hands. I'm like, I'm gonna touch your hands. I gotta eat. What are you touching your hands for? And then you get Sweaty guy beside ya. All right? And then you get the guy who does a little squeeze at the end, and you're like, what? Why are you squeezing me? What's happening right now? This is just affirmation that we're all done.
Mark Clark [00:04:40]:
All right? It's kind of an encouraging. It's like, hey, buddy, it's like a slap. Hey, good prayer. So. And maybe that's been your experience, and so you're not really sure what to do with prayer. Or maybe you've been. You're a new Christian, you're trying to learn how to pray. You're in community group.
Mark Clark [00:04:56]:
People wax eloquently because they think they're religious. And Jesus taught against that. And he said, don't pray with a bunch of words. Just come to the Father with your heart and tell him who you are and tell him what you're feeling and what you're looking for and how you might be angry with them or do this or love you that, and appreciate that. Jesus said, don't pray with many words. Don't act religious. Don't you. Don't impress God with your many words.
Mark Clark [00:05:17]:
Be someone who is humble and goes and is alone and prays to God. That's the image he gives in the Sermon on the Mount of someone who prays. It's not someone. I heard a story years ago about a guy who was praying with many words, and he's trying to impress everybody and be all religious and use all the religious language. He starts going crazy with metaphors. And he said, God, you know that Satan's an octopus and he has this entire city in his testicles. What, for the little guys? He meant to say tentacles, right? But the testicles. All right, so sometimes you're like, what, tweeting that right in there.
Mark Clark [00:06:02]:
So sometimes we kind of. These pompous religious activities get away from us, and we think prayer becomes this thing where God. You know, it's a magical mantra if I say the right words and I do the right things. But Paul's saying, no, this is just relationship. Even if it never changes you, or even if it never changes the circumstance, even if it never does change the world, even if everything you've ever prayed for, none of it happens, you get to change. You change. You connect with God as a father, as a spouse, as a friend, you. You communicate.
Mark Clark [00:06:34]:
That's the foundation of what prayer is. And so the way that. This is why we pray for you, pray for our city, pray in our community groups, Pray on Tuesday morning, pray on Tuesday night. We wanna be a Church of Prayer. Because we believe God can meet you, change you, transform you, change our city. And so we pray and we come to the Father and we say, God, we want you to do this thing. Now, generally speaking, God has three different answers to pray to prayers, yes, no, and later. Sometimes he'll say yes.
Mark Clark [00:07:05]:
Sometimes we come to God and we say, we want you to do this. And he'll move and he'll do that thing. We want you to heal this and bless this. And he'll do that. Or sometimes he'll say no, right? So his answer is just no. Because he knows the end from the beginning. He's smarter than you. I know that's hard for us to understand.
Mark Clark [00:07:20]:
We walk in here, he's smarter than me. He's smarter than you on your best day and on his worst day. And so when we pray and we look to him, we want you to answer this way. He'll sometimes answer no, but it's for your ultimate good. And some of you guys know this. You prayed to marry that girl in high school, all right? You wanted that girl. All right? That girl was the one. And Lord, give me that girl.
Mark Clark [00:07:41]:
I want to pray. And she rejected you. And you stayed in your room depressed for a month, listening to Everybody Hurts. Just going through it, all right? I'm just working my own stuff out a little bit, but I'm just. And so God never gave you that girl. And then, man, 10 years later, you saw her in a grocery store. You're like, praise Jesus. Thank you, Lord.
Mark Clark [00:08:04]:
There was jogging pants involved. All right. No good. All right. So sometimes God, all right, will save you. And he'll say no to the things that you pray. And sometimes he'll say yes. And it's beautiful when he does.
Mark Clark [00:08:22]:
My grandma had. The doctors had seen cancer about a year ago, and I prayed with her over the phone, and then they didn't see cancer. We praise God for that. And I was going through a really difficult time in my life, and Aaron and I couldn't make finances work a long time ago. And we're trying to figure out how to do. How do we get the books right? And I was preaching at the time, and someone came up to me, and they said when I was worshiping God and. And after the service today, and God just impressed on me to come up and give you all the money in my pocket. And I don't know why, but here.
Mark Clark [00:08:51]:
And I was like, she gave me 70 bucks. I'm like, do you have any more? Like, is there back pockets? Is there something you sure, Just let me. No, okay. But kind of a. I mean, a huge blood to be able to hear from God. So sometimes God answers, yes, it's a beautiful thing when he does. And you get to see him work and see him act and move. Prayer is one of the quotes up there from Mark Driscoll was the idea of prayer is the opposite of grumbling.
Mark Clark [00:09:22]:
Meaning grumbling is when you talk to people about other people. And prayer is when you talk to Jesus about other people. And I think that we tend to get in a mode in our life where it's easier to talk to people about other people. It's easier to. To put them down, to gossip about them, to slander them, to talk about them, than to go to Jesus and say, I want you to change this person. Instead of going around with your girlfriends and going, did you hear about so and so? Did you hear about what they do and how they live and what they do? All right? No, it's. Talk to Jesus about that person. Cause your friends can't change the heart of that person.
Mark Clark [00:09:57]:
Jesus can. All right? So grumbling about people, critiquing people, gossiping about people is moving you nowhere forward. And so prayer is when you, on behalf of that person, say, jesus, I want you to change them. That's how much I love them. And some of you, you need to apply this to your spouse. There are things about your spouse, habits, ways they react, things that they do that really deep down, you wouldn't say this to them, but it annoys you and you start to resent them over time. You need to pray to Jesus that He changes them. God help to change them or change my heart so I can actually like them.
Mark Clark [00:10:36]:
Cause they're annoying me. See, instead of going out with your girlfriends or your boyfriends, I don't think he called them boyfriends, the guys. All right, you pray God, can you change them? Can you do something in their heart? And this is what Paul's doing. He's going, how do we communicate? How do we love God? Because here's what praying does. It shows us that we're not in control of anything. It shows us that we should be slow to preach and slow to speak and have humility and slow to offer advice. Because every time you come before God and you go, I need you to move in this way, it's saying that you're not in control of anything. And that's the kind of humility that comes about.
Mark Clark [00:11:14]:
Now, Paul has said in verse 14, for this reason. And the question arises, what do you mean for this reason I'm praying, for this reason I become a person where this is the rhythm and the pattern of my life, to pray to God, to come to the Father. And so what he means for this reason is everything he just said in 11, 12 and 13, in verse 12, we talked about this a few weeks ago. He said, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. Here's what the Apostle Paul is saying. We talked about a few weeks ago. The idea of boldness in the context of being bold in front of men, in front of people, that we fear God more than we fear people. And how Christianity sometimes is pitched as.
Mark Clark [00:11:56]:
Like this very, like flaky. You do it between Lamaze class and watching the bachelor kind of faith. And he's going, no, this is. This is boldness. This is this. Paul calls it war, Peter calls it war. This idea that this is tough. When Jesus called disciples, he said, this is going to be costly.
Mark Clark [00:12:13]:
This costs everything. This costs your life. This is going to be hard. And sometimes we're pitched Christianity like, it's easy. Everything's going to be easy. Don't worry. God's going to take care of all your problems. And then we come at it like that.
Mark Clark [00:12:24]:
When I meet with young couples and they're doing premarital counseling and they say, I love Jesus and I love the Bible and we pray, we're working together, I say, you're sleeping together? Yeah. You living together? Yeah. Why? How does this connect with how the fact that you love Jesus when you know this isn't his will for your life? And then they give me the reason because it's hard not to. What crazy. Let me write that down. It's hard not to sleep. That's Revelation. We know it's hard.
Mark Clark [00:12:54]:
You can't read the Gospels and come away going, boy, this Christianity thing's gonna be easy. It's gonna be a dream. Of course it's hard. Anything worth having is difficult. So stop sleeping with her for three months. Three months. I dated my wife five years. Check that out.
Mark Clark [00:13:18]:
That's tough, right? I'm not a bad looking guy. So it wasn't easy to keep the paws and the. Of course it's hard. Christianity is hard. And so boldness and access and confidence. This is the whole point. What does it mean to be bold? And so we have a whole church full of skeptics and people investigating Christianity. That's awesome.
Mark Clark [00:13:49]:
We love that you're here. You're beginning to wonder, what does Christianity look like? What does it mean to follow Jesus. And that's why you're here, you're investigating and a whole bunch of skeptics. And that's awesome. That was me growing up. And some of you look at this text and you go, here's the issue. Paul's asking Christians to be bold. But the last thing Christians need in your experience of this thing, is boldness.
Mark Clark [00:14:11]:
Because Christians are arrogant, they're triumphalistic. And that has kept you away from Christianity. That Christians in your mind are the people who scream at you while you're at 711 trying to get a Slurpee about the Bible in your life without context. Guy with the megaphone, not walking with you, not knowing your life, just telling you from a distance. And that is your understanding of what Christianity is. And you go, man, that kind of boldness, that kind of arrogance, that's the last thing we need. And Paul's not trying to get at that. He's trying to, man, everything I've said in chapter one, in chapter two and chapter three, you've got to understand, even if you're a Christian, this is not the kind of boldness before people where you're the loudest guy in the room.
Mark Clark [00:14:57]:
It's the kind of boldness because Paul, everything he said in 1, 2 and 3 leads to this. There's a mystery to this thing that we can't figure out. And that mystery has got to humble you. Over and over and over again he's talking about the mystery that you can't figure all this out. And therefore who are you to act haughty, to walk with a swagger, to be bold in that sense, the way we're defining it, that's not what he's talking about. I come to a place, I get humbled by my kids and begin to realize there's a mystery I can't understand. Yesterday I, I don't know why I did this, but it just got into my head. I picked up my 6 year old on the couch and I put her on me.
Mark Clark [00:15:35]:
I said, sienna, do you have any questions for me today? She said, what do you mean? I said, about anything, history, life. I don't know where I got this idea. All of a sudden I could answer these questions. I started reading George Washington's biography and all of a sudden I think I'm a historian. So I'm like, why don't you just ask me anything about history? And she's like, okay, how Abby and I were talking about this the other day. Dad, how can God be pregnant with all of us? At the same time, what's that? Dinner, right? Cause I can't answer. What doesn't make any sense. Where did God come from? She said, how long has God been around? And I said, oh, honey, he's been around forever.
Mark Clark [00:16:31]:
God never started. He's infinite, he's eternal. And she just started crying. She was tired, she started crying. She said, that doesn't make any sense. There's a humility that come in. There's a mystery I can't figure out since Newtown, all right, that shooting with all those kids, man. There's a mystery that I have been wrestling with the Lord about because I've swung between, between just tears and absolute anger.
Mark Clark [00:17:00]:
Because I, even as a pastor, I know where I'm supposed to land with this stuff, all right? I've read the Bible. I know that he's meticulously sovereign over all things. I know he has the power to stop Daisy, the little eight year old girl that I talked about a few weeks ago with cancer. I read last night that she passed away this past weekend. I just read that last night, tweet from her dad, she's gonna be with Jesus. And I know as I read this, I'm like, man, he's sovereign over all things. Nothing happens without it going through his hands. And he's good and he's holy.
Mark Clark [00:17:35]:
I know all of that. So what do I do with this? And I live in this tension. Where am I supposed to go? Where am I supposed to land? And. And you know, where I end up landing because of this mystery. And it's very humbling. At the comfort place of my own ignorance. That's where you gotta go. Where you go.
Mark Clark [00:17:52]:
I don't know the answer. That's the answer. I don't know. And this constantly happened. If you flip in your Bible a few books over, from Ephesians to the book of Acts, Acts chapter one, the disciples run into the same scenario. They have all these questions. They want Jesus to answer all these questions. In Acts chapter one and verse six, it says, lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.
Mark Clark [00:18:22]:
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the utter end of the earth. Here's what he's trying to say. They come at him and they ask him a question and he doesn't answer their question. When we hate this because we think, because here's the thing, to God, some of our questions don't even make any logical sense. Asking God some of the questions that we come with is like saying, hey, is yellow round or square? How many miles are there in an hour? Just to God. It's not that he can't answer them, it's that he doesn't. We don't even know how to pose the question.
Mark Clark [00:18:59]:
So Jesus right here he goes, it's not for you to know. He. Here's what this text just said, and we hate this. There's some things God is never gonna tell you. And you gotta just rest in that this isn't gonna compute. To a boldness, like an arrogance, being the loudest guy in the room. That's not gonna. This is gonna go, man, this mystery of who God is.
Mark Clark [00:19:19]:
The fact that he could have stopped that shooting and could have taken away her cancer, but he didn't. Why Bible just doesn't do it. Goes, hey, there's not a sparrow falls without the Father's involvement. But Jesus never answers why. And so those of you who are skeptical in this room, skeptical of God, skeptical. This is what we have in common. We both know there's evil and we don't understand it. And sometimes God's not going to give you answers to all of your questions.
Mark Clark [00:19:59]:
And there's a humility in it. But what Paul means when he's talking about the boldness and the access with confidence through our faith in him, what he's talking about is a boldness in the context of the presence of God, that we not only have boldness before men, but we actually have boldness in the context of the presence of God. Meaning our identity has shifted from sinner, if you're in Jesus Christ, to saint. See, some of you, you don't really believe that God is for you. I mean, deep down, you, you don't think he's really about you. He's not for you. He doesn't have what you. The good things in your mind for you.
Mark Clark [00:20:44]:
You think God is out there. He's gonna. You kind of step on bamboo, and that's how we function. And he's going, man, in the presence of God, there's a boldness, there's a confidence, there's an access that is only found in Jesus. There's an assurance. And this is radical stuff because in the history of ideas, in the history of religious thought, you would only come into the presence of God. The question here, the word access, you would only have access to the God of the Universe and all these kind of religious ideas by going into the temple, even in, even in Judaism, they had the temple, they had the holy of holies. And once a year the high priest would be able to go into the holy of holies, all right, but he would have to prep himself.
Mark Clark [00:21:33]:
He would do certain food things, he would wash himself in a particular way, he would go by himself and read the scriptures all night, he would pray all night, all of these preparation points to be able to enter into the presence of God. And even then they'd put a rope around his foot so that when he went in, they could pull him out when he died. Best job ever. What are you doing? You could probably die in there. What? What? And Paul's going. The presence of God historically has been this thing that you need all this prep for. You need to do all. You need to kill certain animals, wash a particular way, give certain money, go to particular temples.
Mark Clark [00:22:16]:
And now he's saying in Jesus you get access. It's an amazing reality. And here's the thing, it's actually the answer to one of the ultimate questions. Because in our lives, in our heart, even if you're not a Christian here, there's an angst in you that you know deep down the world is wrong. There's pain, there's suffering, there's tragedy. Eight year old girls die of cancer, kids get killed. The world is a messed up place and you feel like something's wrong and you don't belong. And there's this longing in you for a better world.
Mark Clark [00:22:56]:
And what the Bible constantly says, the reason for that is because, listen to me, you have known in Adam and Eve, you have known what it means to have access. You walked with God in the cool of the day. Genesis 1 and 2. You were with, you were in the presence. And then we sinned and we chose ourself over God. And since then, because it's built in our system, we have this longing. That's why we know there's something wrong with the universe, because it's a longing to get back. And C.S.
Mark Clark [00:23:25]:
lewis describes it this way in his sermon called the Weight of Glory. He says in speaking of this desire for our far off country, the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like nostalgia and romanticism and adolescence. We cannot tell it because it's a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if it had settled the matter. But all this is a cheat. If we had gone back to those moments in the past, we would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them.
Mark Clark [00:24:13]:
It was not in them. It only came through them. And what came through them was longing. These things, the beauty, the memory of our own past, are good images of what we really desire. But if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself. They are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard news from, a country we have never visited. There's something in our heart that goes, man, there's a country I belong to, and it ain't this.
Mark Clark [00:24:52]:
And he's going. The reason is because you walked with him, you were in his presence. And to this point in history, that access, that boldness, that confidence has been shut down for you. But now, in Jesus, it's open for you. And we see this Moses, right? He was up in the mountain. The presence of God descended on this mountain. It was something that. He came down and he was glowing.
Mark Clark [00:25:16]:
Remember, you've seen Charlton Heston, all right? He comes down the mountain. His hair's all. And he's like. He's radiant, all right? He's glowing. And the thing is, he was kind of in the presence of God. And so there was this kind of glowing. But here's the thing. He's coming down and he's reflecting the glory of God being in the presence of God, but he's reflecting it like the moon reflects the light of the sun.
Mark Clark [00:25:41]:
But then you get to Mark chapter nine, and Jesus has his own mountain moment, right? He transfigures. Jesus gets bright. And they say we couldn't even describe how white he was. But the difference is, he's not reflecting the glory of God. He's producing it in and of himself. And then this crazy thing happens. Peter, James and John are in his presence. They're in the glory of God.
Mark Clark [00:26:05]:
Remember, God had said, you can't be in my presence and survive. And here they are in the presence of Jesus, and. And they all survive. Why? Because Jesus did that which Moses and Elijah who gathered on that mountain in Mark, chapter nine. Then they disappear, and it's only Jesus left. Jesus comes and does that which the law and the prophets could not do. And now he's the presence of God. He's the glory of God.
Mark Clark [00:26:28]:
And this is what Paul's trying to get at. The boldness, the access, the confidence comes from the fact that your identity shifts from sinner to saint only through, as verse 12 says, faith in him, in the one who came and did the work for you, not in your own work, only in him. Your identity is now in Christ. That when God looks at you, he doesn't see sinner, he sees saint who sins. But there's been a shift because he looks at you and he's like, man, I see you through the filter of Jesus. Now, all this is done through Jesus. Now, here's the critique, here's the way this works. Boldness, access, confidence.
Mark Clark [00:27:13]:
This criticizes and challenges the two greatest worldviews that we have in Canadian culture. If you're here and you're not a Christian, you're just investigating Christianity. You come in here with probably holding one of two worldviews. Now, you might not know it and you might not call them by these names, but you've been influenced through media, through your parents, through education, through your girlfriend, whatever it is, to come up with a particular way of viewing the world. The two ways are very popular in Canadian culture are deism and pantheism. What Paul is saying here about access critiques and dismantles both of those worldviews. The first one is deism. This is what I was born and bred on.
Mark Clark [00:27:57]:
Deism is the idea that there is a God. But he's distant. All right, so in your mind, he's Bette Midler. All right? He's from a distance, right? He's watching us. He might look like Zeus. He might throw stuff down on people once in a while, other versions of it. He never gets mad anyway. He's just kind of in the garden and winks at us.
Mark Clark [00:28:15]:
Hey, wanna be on my team? But he's distant. He's removed. That's the concept of God. He kind of spun the world around. He backed up. And when you come in here, the reason we don't ask you, do you believe in God? A lot? Is because by that you could say, yes, I believe in God. But you could just dump whatever meaning you wanted into that. So we ask you, what about Jesus? Let's take all the God talk off the table.
Mark Clark [00:28:42]:
Jesus, what do you do with him? He claimed to be God. He rose from the dead because you can dump anything you want into God. He could be Zeus. He could have his. He could be Poseidon. That's not what we're interested in. And if that's Your view of God. When people come and they talk to me and they say, you know, my view of God is this.
Mark Clark [00:28:58]:
I say, well, so I don't believe in God. Well, I don't believe in that God either. I would never wake up on Sunday morning for that God. Distant, remote, uninvolved. Forget it. Sleeping in. Paul's going. Access, boldness, confidence.
Mark Clark [00:29:18]:
The cross of Christ looks at us and says, I came for you. I entered in. I'm not distant. I'm not hanging back. See, this is a progression in religious thought, right? Paul's saying, God's not trying to drag us back into some primitive view of God, some 1950s traditionalist, leave it to Beaver family. He's trying to progress us forward and go. You used to have to go in a temple. You used to have to offer sacrifices.
Mark Clark [00:29:48]:
You used to have to do these things. But now in Jesus, you have access. This is the end of religion. And that's a difficult thing because what that literally is saying is God says, listen, I'm not going to go after your begrudging submission to me. I'm not going to go after a whole list of things and give them Jesus. Do these. He's saying, I want you to love me from your heart. Which is an act.
Mark Clark [00:30:10]:
Very difficult. Shift. I went to a parenting conference, and they tried to get us to function as fathers and mothers toward our kids this way. They said, don't, Because, I mean, in my world, man, you tell a kid what to do if he doesn't do it up in his room. But then I had three girls I was getting ready to be, you know, like, literally. I was sitting in a community group. We had just had our first child, and I didn't realize how much my wife changes. What's true about the world going in.
Mark Clark [00:30:40]:
All right, So I went in with. They said, are you gonna spank your children? Yeah, you're darn right we're gonna spank our children. How else do kids. Listen, My wife's like, we'll never touch our child. I'm like, what's that? What? What? We got two different. But now we have a kid. We gotta work this out. Yeah, we'll do what I say.
Mark Clark [00:30:55]:
Okay, so. So that's what happened. So we went to this conference. Like, how are you gonna shepherd your child's heart? Shepherd my child's heart? What do you mean? He said, you don't have to tell your kids what to do. All you gotta do is get them to love Jesus so much that they're gonna love Jesus. And then Their hearts are gonna change. Then they're just gonna do what he tells them to do, and it'll become everything you. Oh, that sounds good.
Mark Clark [00:31:17]:
So I tried this. We were at Indigo a little bit ago, and there was Hayden, she's 4, and Sienna, she's 6. And Sienna grabbed Hayden's toy and ripped it out of her hand. Little Indigo toy, took it off the shelf. Boom. So I said, okay, here we go. Now I wrote it down because here's what they said the conversation would sound like when you shepherd a child's heart. Okay, this is gospel.
Mark Clark [00:31:43]:
They said it would sound like me. What's the matter? Sienna? I want that toy and Hayden won't give it to me. Why do you want the toy? Because it will be fun to play with. Do you think she is having fun playing with the toy right now? Yes. Would it make her sad to take the toy away? Yes. Do you like to make your sister sad? No. You know, Jesus tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. That means loving your sister the way you would want to be loved.
Mark Clark [00:32:22]:
Would you like to love her by letting her play with the two toy for a while? Yes, I would, Father. So that was written down in the book. That's how it was going to play out. So here's what actually went down. What's the matter, Sienna? I want that toy and she won't give it to me. Why do you want the toy? I don't think about it. Honey, use your brain. I guess I just want the toy.
Mark Clark [00:32:55]:
Yes, but why? I don't know. Okay, abandon all why questions. Do you think Hayden is having fun playing with the toy right now? No. Really? Have you ever considered that maybe you're being mean by taking the toy from her quivering hands? I don't know. This isn't working. I'm going right to the Jesus part. Jesus wants us to love one another. I don't know.
Mark Clark [00:33:26]:
I didn't ask a question. Can I have fishy crackers? We're not talking about fishy crackers. We're talking about the gospel. Jesus loves you. He died for you. He wants you to love your sister, too. So then I just lunged for the toy, I grabbed it from her and I said, I'm gonna throw this toy in the garbage if you don't pay attention to this. And then the lady at Indigo said, no, you can't throw that in the garbage.
Mark Clark [00:33:58]:
That's our toy. And everything got awkward and weird. Cause so deism. All right, says, I'm so disengaged. I'm so out here. I don't get involved and shift the hearts of people. And I want to be a good father to my kid. So my job's to love and pray that she meets you, that her heart gets right.
Mark Clark [00:34:23]:
But ultimately, I can't control that. And so this religious way versus gospel way is a real tension because religious way seems to be quicker. It's just like, do these things begrudgingly submit to me and God in the cross? We're going to do communion later. And the cross is this great image of you could never succeed in earning this, so I had to come and make the first move for you. And that's ultimately seen in Jesus, this glaring acknowledgment that I had to come for you and that this thing needs to be personal, not something that someone just tells you to follow a bunch of rules. How does your heart get engaged in this thing? All right, so deism. God is removed. The cross says he's very intimately involved.
Mark Clark [00:35:15]:
And then second is pantheism. The word pan is the Greek word for all. And the idea of pantheism, theism is God is that God is everything. This is very popular in the west coast, the idea that God is everywhere. God is everything. The Bible would say God is everywhere, but it would make a distinction and say, no, God is not everything. This is. This is very increasingly popular in the West Coast.
Mark Clark [00:35:39]:
It's Pocahontas theology, Avatar theology. All right? God is the rocks, God is the trees. God is in the rivers. It's animism, the idea that nothing is separated from God. God is all. God is everything. And so the problem with this is, is you can have a conversation with people, as I've had, and try to convince them that Jesus is divine. But the problem is, is they'll say, yes, I believe Jesus is divine.
Mark Clark [00:36:07]:
Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus claimed to be God. And then they'll say, but so am I, and so are you, and so is my pet rabbit. We're all divine. I had an email two weeks ago. I was doing an exchange with a guy about some of this stuff, and he said it is impossible to be separate from God. So it is not salvation that we need, but simply to reconnect with our inherent divinity and live from a place of love and forgiveness. A moral life is not an attempt to.
Mark Clark [00:36:44]:
To placate an angry God, but the simple response to a person who recognizes that they're already part of the divine. The divine is you. The divine is in you. You are part of it. This is pantheism. And some of you Believe this. Right now, there's two major problems with it that Paul in verse 12 is saying here, and you can talk to people in Eastern religions, they'll identify that this is part of the problem. The first one is that it is by its definition a logical contradiction because when you say God is everything, it means that evil is God.
Mark Clark [00:37:19]:
It means that God is murder, God is rape, God is cancer, God is hurricanes, God is tornadoes, God is bumblebees. Everything together is God. And therefore there's nothing that isn't God. Therefore God is evil. Well, to save themselves from that, they say, well no, we can't make God evil. So what we'll do is say evil isn't a illusion, that there's no such thing as evil. So we came to the end of the 20th century and post modernity grabbed ahold of that Eastern mysticism and said, yeah, there's no such thing as evil. Doesn't matter that we just killed 150 million of our own people in the last century, bloodiest century in history.
Mark Clark [00:37:49]:
Let's come to the end of it and say there's no such thing as evil. And the problem with it is a logical contradiction because it means there's no good and there's no bad, which becomes the foundation for life. There's no cruelty and non cruelty. They're all the same. It's all God. And so Francis Schaefer, who's a philosopher touching on this point, writes this in one of his books. He says, one day I was talking to a group of people in a room in Cambridge University. Among others, there was a young man who was of Sikh background, but of Hindu by religion.
Mark Clark [00:38:18]:
He started to speak strongly against Christianity, but did not really understand the problem of his own beliefs. So I said, am I not correct in saying that on the basis of your system cruelty and non cruelty are ultimately equal and, and that there is no intrinsic difference between them? He agreed. The student in whose room we met who had clearly understood the implications of what he had admitted, picked up his kettle of boiling water with which he was about to make tea and stood with it steaming over the young man's head. The man looked up and asked him what he was doing. And he said with a cold yet gentle finality, there is no difference between cruelty and non cruelty. Thereupon the young man walked out into the night. This is the logical contradiction of saying everything is God. And secondly, and more importantly, it says that you and me, this is all there is.
Mark Clark [00:39:08]:
So there's no hope, there's no future, there's no rescue. All that I have in regard to salvation is you, which is scary. There's no higher court, there's no hope, there's no future. This is it. You are God. I am God. You want rescue, come to me. And Paul's going, you want rescue, come to Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:39:35]:
You want access, boldness, confidence. This is the answer to one of the ultimate questions. How do you come? How do you get. This is not about heaven. See, when he says. When he says access with confidence through our faith in him. This is not about heaven in the future. This is about salvation in the now power transformation.
Mark Clark [00:40:10]:
This is not about you earning it, becoming part of the great cosmic divinity. This is about you being a sinner, saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ and made into a saint. When you're in him and you put your faith in him and stop putting your faith in systems and yourself, then you have access and you have boldness and you have confidence that comes from that. And so as we partake of communion, think on how the cross of Christ broken body for you because of you. And instead of you, he died shed blood to forgive you so that you could have access the thing that all throughout history, everyone is trying to how do I get into the holy of holies? How do I get into the presence of God? Because presence is everything. How do I get back to the presence? Ask anybody in here who's lost a loved one in the last year, in the last two years, what they miss most. They're gonna say, their presents. Their presents at the kitchen table, their presents on the couch, their presents in bed, their presents at Christmas.
Mark Clark [00:41:24]:
And the story of the Bible is, man, you didn't have access, you couldn't get in. And so Jesus came to provide a way. And so let me pray. Father, as we sit here, some of us are just in different places. Some of us have never come to believe in you yet. We're thinking and investigating and maybe we're deists and we have this concept of you that you're a far off, distant God who doesn't really care, who spun the world into existence and just watches cancer happen and watches disaster after disaster and can do nothing. And this text comes all the way through Ephesians and you've challenged and you've dismantled and you've broken down that entire worldview. And you've said, because when we look at the cross, we know whatever the answer is to human suffering and evil that we see, that seems to.
Mark Clark [00:42:27]:
Yet you do nothing about the answer. We know that the answer is not that you didn't care because you've shown us in Jesus that you care, that you came, that you entered in. Or those of us who are pantheists who believe that we're divine and we've got this wrong thinking because people have preached at us, all of our inherent value as humans, that we're going to be the solution to every problem. And we lack humility, we lack the motivation to come before you with bowed knee and go, you're the Father, not us. You're in control, not us. Use us. So as we come to the table and we partake of the body and of the blood, if we don't know you in this room, I pray that we would understand this table to be an invitation that today we can believe in Jesus and be saved and partake of the body and the blood. And if we do know you, that we would bring our sin and partake of communion and sing these couple songs in worship out of a place of.
Mark Clark [00:43:50]:
You gave us this access, and we're gonna be bold in it and humble in it, but confident in it. And know that we can't lose it. We're never gonna fall out of your hand. It's secure. And thus the confidence that he talks about in verse 12, do that work in every heart and mind here in Jesus great name we pray. Amen.