God’s Wisdom is Imparted in Us 1

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you take your Bible please and turn to Ephesians; it’s the continuation of the verse that we
began last Sunday, though today we’ll just be able to comment briefly on it. Ephesians 1:16, “I do
not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of
him.” If I asked you, “Do you know the Queen of England?” You might answer that you do because you
know that what I meant was do you know who she is, and what she looks like, and have you ever seen
pictures of her and it’s the same with any of the other famous people that we all know of. If
somebody asked us, “Do you know them?” We’d say, “Oh yeah, we know them.”

But that’s very different from me asking Trish, “Do you know your Father?” And there she’s much
firmer and more confident and says, “Yes I know my Father.” And she means by that she knows him in
her heart, and she knows him personally, and an equally important conviction she has is that he
knows her. She knows fine well that those famous people don’t know her, but she knows her Father
knows her and she has a clear idea of what his attitude to her is. So obviously, there are
different kinds of knowing, that’s plain to us.

Even knowing a person you can see is different from knowing an object, because you can know to some
extent, that reading desk over there. But knowing that reading desk is very different from knowing
Joanne. So there’s knowing an object and there is knowing things about a person, and then there’s
knowing a person. And it’s good to see that in this verse in the last phrase “In the knowledge of
him,” that knowledge is designated by the Greek word “epignosis”. “Epignosis” is the kind of
knowledge of Jesus that you find in those early chapters of Colossians; it’s a very intense
knowledge, it’s a special knowledge.

One of the heresies that most of us know about in the first and second century is the heresy of
Gnosticism, and it’s the same word, it’s “gnosis” and Gnostic comes from that. The Gnostics took
this concept and said, “There’s a special knowledge that you have when you’re regenerated or when
you become a Christian, and that special knowledge is a secret knowledge.” They meant by that, that
there were all kinds of concepts and ideas and insights into God’s word that you had to have, and
only then could you be regarded as a real son or daughter of God. And they of course, would impart
that special knowledge to you through their teachers. So that’s why you often hear about Gnosticism
in connection with Gnostic teachers, because that’s what they specialized in.

They specialized in teachings, insights, and concepts of God and of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit
that they claimed only they understood fully. Gnosticism spread throughout a lot of Christianity in
those early years, because it seemed to have an authentic stamp of approval from verses like this;
that what we were here to do was to enter into a knowledge of God. And indeed that was reinforced
in that verse we read in the lesson, “For this is eternal life to know God and him who he had sent
even Jesus Christ.” So throughout the Bible there’s this emphasis on knowing God and yes we are to
have our sins forgiven and our hearts cleansed, but really the reason is so that we will know God.
The Gnostics came in and said, “Yes, we can teach you the things that you need to know about God.”

That is not the “knowing God” that the Father is talking about here, and that’s why he first of all
prays for the Ephesians, that they will have a spirit of wisdom and revelation, (and I hope to deal

with those in the next days), in the knowledge of God. He prays above everything else that the
converts, who obviously were quite advanced in Ephesus, and you see that in Ephesians chapter 1
where you can see all of those things he talked about; “You’ve been sealed with the Spirit, and
you’ve been created in Christ and born anew, and destined to be God’s sons from the beginning.” So
he listed quite a number of things that they had come through, but then he said, “But still I pray
that you will come into a knowledge of God.” And whenever we begin to grasp this, and only the Holy
Spirit can bring it home to your hearts today or in the coming years, but when we begin to grasp
this, we then start to pray the same way. That becomes our prayer burden for people, because we
realize that that’s the whole purpose for this life.

The whole purpose of this life is so that we would come to know God. To know him better than we
know our own fathers, and better than we know our own mothers, to know him from the inside, from his
own heart. One of the movies that sticks in my mind or one of the funny scenes in it I’ve told you
of before. It was Lee Marvin and it’s a fairly old picture, but he ended up as a half drunk cowboy
who rode a half drunk horse all the time. And there is one particular scene where they have him and
the horse propped up against the wall and his enemy is looking at him and saying “Your eyes are all
blood shot.” And this is the one that sticks in my silly little mind; Marvin replies, “You should
see them from my side.” And that’s the kind of knowledge of God that is meant here; knowledge from
the inside.

We’re meant to have knowledge from inside the dear person in whom each of us were created; knowledge
of his heart. Knowledge of him because we know what it is to be inside him, and we know what it is
for him to be inside us. And we’ve lived there so many hours, so many days, so many months, and so
many years that for us to live is Christ. He’s the world that we see, and he’s the world that we
know. Not that we know concepts about him, not that we know he is merciful, not that we know he is
gentle, not that we know he’s loving, but we feel as he feels. We feel his heart. We have entered
into a place through what has to be the leading of the Holy Spirit, what has to be the enlightening
of the Holy Spirit. We have entered into a place where we know him from the inside. Only then, do
we begin to do what is signified here.

There is a famous statue know as “La Pieta” by Michelangelo. It must mean “the pity” or “the
compassion”. And it’s said to be Mary holding Jesus in her lap after they had taken him down from
the cross. Christ on the cross bore all of us and bore everything that we are, and everything that
we feel, and everything that we have felt. He bore all the willful determination to have our own
way. He bore all the casual indifference to what God thought at certain moments in our lives. He
bore all the harshness that we have expressed to other people, all the hardness that we have
expressed that broke God’s merciful, weeping heart.

So that it’s true not only of the situation in the gas chamber as the German soldier pushed the
Jewish girl in with her brother, and he brought her into certain death, even as he said, “Your
brother has to go with the others, with the men,” and the little Jewish girl said, “My brother will
die with me.” He bore the pain of that, the agony of the little Jewish girl, the bewilderment of
the little brother, but he bore also the anger and the indifference and the hatred of the German
soldier. And he bore all the other pains and agonies in that gas chamber. We tend to think that
it’s obvious that that must have broken his heart but we, with our quick little flip expressions to
each other, with our lack of tenderness at certain moments to each other though it looks more
refined, it’s the same misery, same pain, same strain that holds that dear one on the cross. And so
the only way to lift him off the cross, the only way to relieve him of that is by us feeling his
heart in each situation from the inside. Feeling the way he feels every moment in our lives.

Only then do we release him from that terrible strain of bearing these incompatible feelings that we
have as we say, “Christ is in me,” and yet we express only ourselves. So it’s only through that
inner knowledge of God, and that inner knowledge of Christ that comes from dwelling inside him and
of him dwelling in us that we begin to stand back from these things that hold him on the cross, and
that we begin to do what this dear lady [Mary his mother] is pictured as doing where we lift him off
the cross, and we relieve him of the pain that he always bears in us when we are unlike him in our
whole attitude. So that’s why you can see deep down why Paul makes such a big thing of praying that
we would enter into a knowledge of God; that we would receive a spirit of wisdom and revelation in
the knowledge of God, because that’s the whole reason for our being here.

You might say that every time a husband by some action makes a wife feel that she doesn’t know him
at all, or he doesn’t know her at all, every time one of us does that, every time we act in a way
that sets the other person back, that shocks them and that makes them feel lonely, makes them feel,
“I thought I knew you. I thought I knew what we were about but I don’t know you at all.” Every
time that happens, that brings the same strain to our Savior. And of course, every time we act that
way in regard to him, we bring that strain to him. Only in coming to an inner knowledge of him do
we have that strong incentive not to hurt him. In other words, there’s a strong desire to soften,
and nurture, and strengthen those whom you know in your heart of hearts. And that’s why it’s vital
for all of us to enter into that inner knowledge of God’s own heart.

Let’s pray.