God Provides Beyond Our Expectations

Ephesians 3:20a

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Please look with me at today’s verse, one that we know well, but when you begin to get into it, it
is incredible what it says. And it’s Ephesians 3:20, “Now to him who by the power at work within us
is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.” The word abundantly is a wild one
in Greek. It’s “huper-ek-perissou” which is kind of like the best of the best of the best,
“exceeding abundantly,” “beyond anything that you could measure.” And Paul is therefore doing
everything he can to say, “The God who holds all the stars in their places, the God who holds the
planets, the God who controls the mighty spaces of the universe, he is able to do exceedingly
abundantly beyond anything that you can think.”

And that’s what is says, “To him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or
think.” And actually the Greek runs, “To him who is able to do everything.” That’s actually the
way the first one goes. “To him who is able to do everything…” And of course it’s referring back
to the fact that he has done everything. I mean all the stars are his; all the spaces are his; he
holds the Pacific Ocean within its bounds; he takes care of all the spaces that even our telescopes
have not plumbed yet. So God is able to do everything.

And then the next bit goes, “…Exceedingly abundantly beyond what we are able to think or even ask.”
So, whatever you would think or ask, God is able to do away beyond that! I mean we found a little
of that in our own lives, but it’s such a tiny bit because we are such kids in interest in God, and
we are such kids in what we pray for and what we hope for. And we are so small in our aspirations
that we just have little tiny little trickles. You know them; there are things when suddenly you
find that God has given you something that you never thought you’d have.

I feel absolutely dumb Trish, because I know fine well that the weight under which people like
myself, brought up in Northern Ireland labor, is: “Whatever hurts is good for you. And don’t expect
things to come to easily.” It’s good training; it’s the old Puritan training. It’s good training.
It’s better to be that way than wanting ease all the time, and thinking everything comes easy. But
I know fine well that that is a tendency in people like myself who are brought up where I was
brought up. And so I know fine well that God is good, and God does want to give things to us, and
he’s generous, and everything that I have has come from him. And I know that. But it was — I
mean it was just like a thump in the back of my head when I realized — I know you’ll smile at this
because Americans take this kind of thing easier than this old ‘New American’ [referring to his
original immigrant status in the US]. I at last came to the point where I accepted that God did
want me to have that SL, that SL Mercedes [The Mercedes-Benz SL-Class, formerly known as the SL
Roadster, a grand tourer manufactured by Mercedes since 1954]. I mean you’ll say it’s stupid
because it doesn’t cost – it didn’t cost any more than what the girls [Sales Reps in the USA] pay
for their ‘new’ cars. But of course to me it was an SL Mercedes, and “I shouldn’t have that kind of
thing!”

And of course what you do with that — I don’t know if you’ve found yourself doing it. But what you
do with it is: you actually think that you got it yourself, and you might have offended God in
getting it. And so it takes away from all the fun of it, and the enjoyment. I mean it’s a
ridiculous attitude to take, but suddenly I realized that God had wanted me to have it.

I mean I believed it at the time when I bought it. But then I got into the –“No, no I shouldn’t
have this nice of a car as this!” I don’t know if you do it, but I suddenly realized that’s
dreadful. I mean all that I have has come from his loving kindness, from his generosity. There are
hundreds of things that I don’t deserve at all, and he’s given them to me. And of course everything
comes from God’s hand, so of course the good things come. And of course he knows I’ve got it, and
he wanted me to have it.

And it was such a lightening thing to realize that our Father wants us to have beautiful things.
That’s why he’s put us in the world, that’s why he’s given us all the gifts that we have around us,
that’s why he’s given us life, because he wants us to be happy today. He wants us to enjoy
ourselves. And it’s very easy for us to have the attitude, “No, I mean I’m here to use the
abilities I have to do what I’m supposed to do, and to get a little help from God from time to time,
but primarily it’s up to me to use my own efforts: ‘God helps those who help themselves,’ and I
ought not to expect too many wonderful and beautiful things.”

And so it’s very insulting to God. It’s very, it’s very offensive. It must be very offensive to
him, because there he is, knowing that every breath we take is because he arranged that it would
come to us, and everything we see and have delight in, it’s because he keeps our eyes connected with
that, with all kinds of complicated photogenic processes so that we are able to see the beauty of
the sunshine. And yet we somehow think it’s due to us, and it’s our ability to perceive that has
brought it about. But in fact God has of course given us everything we have. And he is able to
give us way beyond what we ask or think. And that’s why he puts us in places that are bigger than
we are able to deal with ourselves.

That’s why he says to Gideon, “You have too many men. Yes, you have 32 thousand, and that’s too
many. I know you’re going against thousands and thousands more, but you have too many. So cut it
down to ten thousand and then cut it down to 300, so that there’s no doubt in any of your minds that
it’s me that has brought the victory of the Mideonites.”

And I thought, “Yes it’s a bit like ourselves.” Martha often talks about “We few, we happy few.”
And it’s a bit like ourselves. It’s not the 1500 that we had at times at Campus Church. There are
15 of us. And I thought, “Yeah, well, it’s almost as bad as Gideon!” Then my little mathematical
mind went to work, and of course 300 is exactly one percent, more or less, of 32 thousand, and of
course, 15 is exactly one percent of 1500.

And it was just so plain that, of course, God must have it so, so that we are absolutely out on
limbs where we can be lifted out of ourselves, and out of our own smallness and can begin to enter
into this truth, that God is able to do way beyond anything that you or I can think of. And why he
puts us in places that are too big for us is, it prompts us to have to begin to ask for as much as
we can possibly think of. And so we have a world that — I think I would be saying a true thing if
I said, “All of us here really do know that the world would be transformed if it knew how much God
loves it.” I mean we do believe that. We believe that Iraq would be transformed if people began to
sense that there wasn’t just an inscrutable deity that had put them on the earth to make their own
way, but there was a dear loving Father who had made them in his own Son Jesus and who loved them
like his own Son, and who had already solved all the things that they were going to meet in their
lives ‘in Jesus’. It would transform them. It would change everything. And I think all of us
really do believe that, and we would want them to know that, and we want them to sense that. And
God has sent us into the world, in our interpretation of the Bible, to preach the gospel to all

nations.

And he’s done that so that we would see, “That’s what we have to do.” He has given us certain
advantages. He has given us the 25,000 great books; he has given us the ability to do radio and to
do the web; he has shown his ways to communicate with masses of people, and to get truth over in the
websites. But he’s asking us to grasp that, and to go out and grasp that with both hands, and to
ask him mightily to work and to answer our prayers, and to speak to thousands through his Holy
Spirit.

And so he puts us in positions that are too big for us, so that we will actually ask him for mighty
things, and we’ll form large prayers for him. And you know how important it is. Otherwise it’s
very easy to sink down into looking after your own ‘tent’, and taking care of yourself and being
preoccupied with, “Will I make it through another day?” And the Father wants us to live way above
ourselves, and way beyond our own little needs, and in these vast realms where only his power is
able to work.

Old Adam Clark, puts it like this, “All that we ask or think – We can ask every good of which we
have heard, every good which God has promised in his word; and we can think of, or imagine, goods
and blessings beyond all that we have either read of or seen: yes, we can imagine good things to
which it is impossible for us to give a name, we can go beyond the limits of all human descriptions;
we can imagine more than even God has specified in his word; and can feel no bounds to our
imagination of good, but impossibility and eternity: and after all, God is able to do more for us
than we can ask or think; and his ability here is so necessarily connected with his willingness,
that the one indisputably implies the other; for, of what consequence would it be to tell the Church
of God that he had power to do so and so, if there were not implied an assurance that he will do
what his power can, and what the soul of man needs to have done?”

I think we tend too much to calculate: “Well it’s unreasonable to ask God to do this; well probably
he wouldn’t be able to do this within the terms of his righteousness and the way he deals with
people.” And so often we ‘shoot ourselves in the foot’ and we fall short of what God has for us,
because we don’t ask and we don’t believe. And I think that’s why he’s put this verse in: “That he
is able to do exceeding and abundantly above all that we can ask or think.”

And how? “Through the power that is at work within us,” the power of the Holy Spirit. And who is
the Holy Spirit? The Lord is the Spirit: through the Lord Jesus himself who is within us, God is
able to do anything, and way beyond what we ask or think.

So, it’s worth, I think, thinking about; and thinking about in what we pray for ourselves. “Are we
limiting God, just because we don’t ask, or because we have certain ideas or principal that we think
govern prayer, and we forget that there’s a loving face looking down on us who has given us all that
we see around us and has given us magical things none of us can really explain?

We look even at that cedar tree out there, and you can’t explain how it has stayed there, year after
year down through centuries. And we can’t explain really how all the leaves and all the branches
are held in position and wave in the wind and don’t break. And we can’t explain why the air stays
as it does at exactly the right pressure. And we talk about the earth spinning through space but we
know we’re baffled. I mean we call it, “Law of gravity,” but we’re baffled as to why it is able to
spin exactly as it does so regularly through the centuries and in exactly the same orbit, and all
the meteorites and planets fly over the space – fly through space and yet don’t crash into it.

There are all kinds of things that remind us that we’re surrounded by God’s miraculous power, and
that it’s not surprising for this to be true, that “God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above
all that we can ask or think,” and that he has already proved to us by his gifts that he wants us to
be happier than we can imagine, and he wants us to have things that are way beyond what we think we
ought to have. And that is our dear Father, and I think that’s what he has given to us.

So I think, I think you all agree, we’ve done very well. I think the – I’m happy with million
dollar sales. I don’t know what you — or million pounds of sales [speaking to the group living in
the U.K.]. I think that’s great. I think we could live very happily and we could do what God wants
us to do with simply a million. I would just say this that “God had a reason for cutting Gideon’s
army down to 300. And it was so that it was plain and obvious to everybody that it was not this 300
that did the job.” And I think the Father has something in mind for us along the same lines, that
we would not just be a good little company in business, or we would not just be a good little group
of witnesses who got some things up on the web and did some radio work, but that God alone could do
the mighty things that were done during our watch.

So, it’s not something to cause a strain; it’s not something certainly to try harder at ourselves,
because that would be the very contradiction of what God is after. But I think it is our place to
grasp that our Father is “able to do exceedingly abundantly above what we are able to ask or think.”
And he is able to bring the sales into millions and millions of dollars and pounds, so that it’s
very obvious to everyone that only God could do this. And he is able to cover the world, I think,
with our radio and to make our websites accessed by people all over the world in all kinds of
nations.

And I think that the only thing that limits that is the size of our prayers, and of our ambitions
and our aspirations. And I think God is here saying, “See how big and how great and how magnanimous
I am. Take me as I am. Look up and see that you have someone who not only ‘is’ rich, but who loves
you with all his heart and wants you to do things that only he is able to bring about.”

Let us pray.

Dear Father, we thank you for Gideon and for the little David who brought down the mighty giant
Goliath. We thank you Lord for the little group of people that came to the edge of the Promised
Land, and believed that they would have the whole land and not just a little piece of it. We thank
you Lord for their ability to receive your vision, that they would take the land despite all the
Amalekites, all the Jebusites, all the Philistines. We thank you Lord for the way they set their
eyes upon you, their God.

We thank you Father, for the disciples and for their commitment to go out into the Roman Empire
whatever the hostility and criticism, and even if it meant to their own death, to give themselves
with all their hearts to telling the world about you. Father we thank you that you have called us
to the same life. And we thank you that you have not called us without equipping us. And you have
not called us without giving us the power. So we do thank you Lord, that you “are able to do
exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think through the power that works within us.”

So Lord we pray now that by your Holy Spirit you will fill us with your vision and fill us with your
desires. Save us from our own foolish ideas, and bring us Father into your presence where we can
see what you want, and we can see that there is nothing that can oppose your power, and nothing that
can frustrate your will, and that all you need is one little heart here on earth that believes you.

Lord, we would pray that you would make that heart, ours.

Now the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with each one of us now and evermore, amen.