Introduction
Elvis Presley’s former home in Memphis, Tennessee, known as Graceland, is the second-most visited private home tourist destination in the USA. Only the White House attracts more. Graceland welcomes around 600,000 visitors every year.
Upon entering this impressive mansion, a smiling member of staff presents you with a glossy guidebook which says, “Graceland – Where Elvis Lives.” Not “lived” (past tense) but “lives.” I think they probably mean that the house kind of keeps his legacy going through his artefacts and his personal touch on that house.
No doubt his former residence provides some kind of insight into the king of rock and roll. But it’s not a home, it’s a museum, and the stark truth is that Elvis has in fact permanently left the building, and since 16 August 1977 Elvis very much does not live at Graceland or indeed anywhere else.
Saying “Elvis lives here” is a way of talking that clearly doesn’t align with reality. And I start with that thought this morning because I want to ask you how much does what you claim as a Christian truly match your lived experience?
How much, for example, would you say you know and experience the power of God? Be honest. The Bible claims that the power of God in us who believe is the same as God’s mighty power that raised Jesus from the dead and exalted him on high. And it’s in today’s passage of scripture that it says it, as we’ll see shortly. It’s a fantastic truth and no wonder people marvel at it.
But, truthfully speaking, how much is that just theory for you, just words on a page, and how much is it what you live and breathe every day? Is “the resurrection power of God at work in me” feel a bit like, “Graceland – where Elvis lives?”
The supremacy of Christ
We’re picking up today from where Michael left off last Sunday. He had the privilege of expounding one of the richest, lushest, most resonant and power-packed passages in the whole Bible. Ephesians 1.3-14 positively revels in how God’s grand and wise plan of salvation magnifies his glory.
In brief, last week’s passage sums up God’s lavish grace in Christ as a sweeping cascade of blessings. It affirms that through Jesus’ saving death, you are forgiven and set free from sin’s deadly power, and that God chose you before time began, to be adopted as his child, because he loves you.
It adds that if you are a believer, you receive a secure everlasting inheritance that showcases his glory. And it ends by asserting that the Holy Spirit seals you as God’s own, which guarantees the security of your eternal future. That’s the multidimensional beauty of grace and from it should rightly flow continual and grateful praise to God.
We could easily have spent months on end savouring the pleasures and delights of those twelve verses in a long preaching series and not said half of all there is to say about the Lord Jesus and all he has won for us.
People speak of Alexander the Great, Napoleon the Great, Catherine the Great, Charles the Great and Peter the Great; but we never speak of Jesus the Great. Because the word “great” is inadequate to express his supreme excellence and magnificence.
He is far above every human measure of greatness. He stands alone. He is unique. His majesty has no equal, his mercy has no bounds, his wisdom has no peer, his love has no limit, his authority knows no rival, his power has no match and his kingdom will have no end.
How do you follow that? How do you follow Ephesians 1.3-14? Paul, inspired by the Holy Spirit, follows it with a prayer. Not a prayer that God would give you new blessings, because there is no more blessing possible to get! You have been blessed in the heavenly places with every spiritual blessing in Christ. Your cup is already overflowing!
Rather, Paul’s prayer is that you would fully know, fully realise, fully appreciate, what is already yours. And this is what we’re going to feast on today.
As always with Paul’s writing, it’s very tightly packed together with lots of abstract nouns and long subordinate clauses all piled one on top of the other.
Nehemiah 8 talks about the Levites who “read from the Book of the Law of God, making it clear and giving the meaning so that the people understood.”
So I’m going to try and do the same now, doing my best to break it all down to make it plain… Here’s what it says, starting in chapter 1 and verse 15.
For this reason, [that is, what he’s just been talking about, the grace of God opening the floodgates of every spiritual blessing for you, for that reason] ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, [notice, this is not a quick, one-off prayer; it’s more like a lifestyle, it’s persistent] remembering you in my prayers.
[And there’s not only repeated thanksgiving, there’s also continual intercession because he then adds…]
I keep asking that [firstly] the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.
[That’s the first request – that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit will lead you to know him better. And then secondly…]
I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order [again, notice these words] that you may know [know what? That you may know] the hope to which he has called you, [and what is this hope to which he has called you? It’s (a)] the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, [in other words, what is yours, fully yours as a child of God] and [b] his incomparably great power for us who believe.
Let’s just pause that right there. Remember what I said earlier; Paul is not asking God for additional blessings, as if what he has done for us in Christ is insufficient or lacking in some way. Instead, he asks, in fact keeps on asking, for an eye-opening, soul-enlightening revelation of how much is already ours.
Knowing our God
And, I’ve highlighted it on the screen for you, he asks God not once, but twice, that “you may know.” Know what? Firstly, know God better. Not know about God, not know of God, but know him… personally, as a friend, as one who is with you, who is for you.
Actually, in Philippians 3.10, and we saw this last year, Paul said, “I want to know Christ.” Why would the great apostle Paul say that? Surely, he knew Christ already? I get the feeling he knew Christ far better than I do.
But his relentless ambition was to know him ever more deeply. He was so aware of how far he still had to go. And he knew there is a clear difference between knowing about someone and truly knowing them.
Possibly my first crush was on a young woman called Jo. She was beautiful, blonde, and she had a perfect figure. She was the sister of a friend of mine, but I can’t say I really knew her. I might boast to my friends that I knew her but the truth is that I maybe said hello to her once and she ignored me. I knew of her.
I had no chance of really getting to know her closely as a friend. Firstly, she was a model and dating the guitarist of a world-famous rock band that everyone in this room will have heard of. And secondly, she was in her early twenties, and I was about nine.
In French, there are two words for the English verb to know. Savoir is what you say when you talk about knowing facts. But they have another word, connaître, to talk about personally knowing people.
In John 8.32, Jesus says, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” In a French Bible, you might expect it to be translated savoir because surely the truth is factual. But no, it’s actually translated connaître, because the truth is a person; Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And so he is talking about personal, intimate, relational knowledge.
Some of us have known the Lord for a long time. Others have got to know him only recently. And perhaps still others among us don’t know him yet. Why don’t you step out and make the decision today, if that’s you, that you will open the door of your heart, let him in, and get to know him personally?
Wherever you are on your spiritual journey, saturate yourself in the Gospels, reflect deeply on Jesus’ life and humility and authority and self-control and prayerfulness and truthfulness, savour his teaching, and get to know him as you pray through what you read. Wait on him. The more you spend time with Jesus, the more you will become like him.
Knowing our hope
And secondly, Paul prays for us to know, deeply know, that our indestructible hope (the gift of eternal life) is kept safely in heaven for us. The apostle Peter says elsewhere in the New Testament that this heavenly inheritance is like exquisite, refined gold that can never perish, or spoil, or fade.
John Lennon imagined a world with no heaven or no religion. We don’t have to imagine. We already have a place on earth where there is no religion and no heaven called North Korea and people risk their lives trying desperately to get away from it.
It’s much healthier for your soul to imagine an eternity with heaven, where God will remove every aspect of weakness in your body. Your eyes will be sharper to enjoy greater beauty. Your mind will be brighter to perceive and remember deeper wisdom. Your ears will be clearer making everything sound more glorious. Your vocal chords won’t get hoarse and weary from singing. Your legs won’t get tired from dancing. Your arms will never become heavy from being lifted in praise.
C.S. Lewis ends his Narnia series with this brilliant, imaginative vision of the new heavens and the new earth: “The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
This is our inheritance, this is our confident hope; this is what is laid up for us, and Paul’s prayer is that we would know it and treasure it.
Knowing his power
And in the meantime, in this earthly life, he prays for us to know the incomparably great power of God, which is more than sufficient to keep us from falling and get us to the finishing line. The power of God to keep us on track and bring us safely to our eternal inheritance, what is that like? Here’s how Paul describes it…
That power [for all who believe] is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, [that is to say over all things] and every name that is invoked, [that is to say over all people] not only in the present age but also in the one to come [that is to say over all time].
And [just to make it abundantly clear, in case you didn’t get it] God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
See how comprehensive and complete God’s resurrection power is! I’ve highlighted the alls and the everys on the screen for you to see.
Nicky Gumbel, of the Alpha Course, talks about a young man at his church in London who worked in the library of a major national newspaper. The head office has a basement with an extensive archive of old cuttings, stories, pictures and quotes about every well-known person you can imagine. Entertainers, royalty, sportsmen and women, artists, politicians, criminals, war heroes, scientists, you name it… The files are kept in rows of long shelves and are separated into ‘living people’ and ‘dead people’.
One day, the young man was looking through the files of dead people and he came across a large file marked ‘Jesus Christ’. He glanced over his shoulder to check that no one was looking, and he quickly moved the file from the ‘dead people’ section to the ‘living people’ section.
He was right! Jesus may have died in shame and disgrace, alone and humiliated. But on the third day, as his lifeless, breathless, cold corpse lay motionless on a slab of rock in a Jerusalem garden tomb, suddenly everything changed.
Because his heart began to beat, and his blood began to flow, and his toes began to wriggle, and his lungs began to breathe, and his eyes flickered open, and he got to his feet – victorious – and now, forever he stands as heaven’s champion, sin’s conqueror and death’s master.
The great Methodist preacher W. E. Sangster lay ill in bed with a throat infection one Easter Sunday. He was able though to scribble a quick note to his daughter Margaret. “It is terrible,” he wrote, “to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice with which to shout. But it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to.”
Amen to that. Because, as we’ll see next Sunday, it’s not that we were bad and needed to be improved. We were dead, in our sins, and needed to be raised.
God the Father raised Christ from the dead. The power, the might, to raise a man three-days-dead, to eternal and immortal and invincible life, having now dominion over all things… that’s exactly the same spiritual force that’s at work in you and me.
In 1835, Charles Darwin embarked on a journey to the south Pacific. Observing the aboriginal inhabitants of Melanesia, he thought of them, particularly the cannibals, as a kind of savage sub-species, a less advanced version of human, (especially ‘civilised’ Europeans like him), in line with his evolutionary views.
However, years later, Darwin was amazed to hear of schools, churches and nice homes, now inhabited by these very same supposedly primitive people. How do you account for the rapid transformation of that society? It’s because, in the meantime, a Scotsman called John Paton had, at great risk to his own life, left his home and preached the gospel among them.
Charles Darwin was not a Christian believer and he died an agnostic, but it’s said that reports of beautiful new life among those south sea islanders moved him and profoundly challenged his unbelief. He even began to generously support the London Missionary Society in its work of evangelising the world.
That’s the resurrection power of God that softens hearts, changes lives, regenerates societies and transforms nations.
Well, I asked at the beginning, how much do you know the power of God? Is it what you experience every day?
I would guess that many of you listening to me now rarely feel that power at work in you. For many Christians it seems unrealistic. In all honesty, it does not correspond to everyday living. And if that’s the case for you, I get it. There are exceptions to the rule, but I often feel exactly the same way.
A simple reminder of my critical tongue, my impatience, my self-pity, my prideful inflated view of myself… I have to admit it, I don’t display the resurrection power of God enough either. I feel it acutely at times.
My suspicion is that the Ephesians felt that way too. Even though people were coming to faith in great numbers there, as we have seen over the last few weeks, even though the gospel was impacting the city in dramatic and miraculous ways, there must have been days for them of lust and bad temper and jealousy and behaving badly. Otherwise Paul wouldn’t have to tell them what holy living looks like in chapters 4-6.
And here’s the key to today’s passage. That’s exactly why the Bible contains this prayer. It is designed to show us that we must contend on our knees for these realities to be our felt experience. Paul falls to his knees and prays - and keeps on praying, he says - because he knows, no doubt from his own personal experience, that we need to ask, and keep asking, God to open our eyes to see and perceive the spiritual realities all around us.
We fail to see so much, our spiritual vision is blurred, because of our own spiritual dullness. Sin massively distorts our perception of reality. I mean, human depravity is the most easily provable thing on earth; just watch the news on any day of the year. But nothing is more resisted by the human mind than the assertion that we are all sinners who need a saviour.
So we need the grace of God to open our eyes to that. And our spiritual vision is dulled also because there is an attritional spiritual battle that rages around us, constantly grinding down the joy of our salvation. Remember what Martyn Lloyd-Jones said, “the Christian life is a battle ground, not a playground.” There’s a spiritual civil war going on in every one of us.
Paul will go on in this letter to speak of rulers, authorities, powers of this dark world and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. We need the power of God to open our eyes to that too.
Ending
So I’m going to end now by praying this pray over you, putting Paul’s thoughts here in my own words. If you’re able to do so, would you please stand.
Lord, knowing the trust these people here at King’s have in you and their genuine love for one another, I can’t stop thanking you for them. Every time I think of them, I’m just so thankful. Thank you, Lord, for this gathering of people you love so much.
But I want to do more than thank you. I want to ask you, God of glory, to give everyone here intelligence and discernment to know you personally and determination know you increasingly well.
I ask Lord, that our spiritual eyes will be focused and clear, so that we can see exactly what it is you are calling us to.
And Lord God, give us grace us to grasp the immensity of the glorious way of life you want for us, as followers of Christ. Help us see and draw on the utter extravagance of the power, the Easter power, the grave-busting power, you give to all who trust you. Amen, let it be so.
Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 8 February 2026.
