Jesus Bore Our Strain and Stress

Ephesians 1:20

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Let’s look, loved ones, at Ephesians 1:20 and I would be inclined to say that this is where position
creates condition, which is something we talked of years ago. The position is whether you’re up
there [pointing skyward] or down here in the tomb; whether your eyes are down there or up there
[pointing skyward], and that determines your condition. We get into a lot of our own troubles
because we think that we can change a condition by concentrating on it and by introspection, and
actually all we’re doing is looking at whatever is in there. The condition is determined by the
position, and all we can do is determine where we set our eyes and what position we live in.

Now that’s what Paul is talking about when he says in Ephesians 1:15 “For this reason, because I
have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, 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.”
Because he knows the most important thing is that we would know what our position is. He says in
verse 18, “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know” and first thing about your
position, “what is the hope to which he has called you.” And you remember we said very clearly that
the hope to which God has called us is that we ourselves will be part of Jesus. That we will
actually be part of Jesus and that we will live as part of Jesus forever, and that’s the hope that
he has called us to.

So he says, “that you may know the hope to which he has called you.” Also, “what are the riches of
his glorious inheritance in the saints,” because we are in Jesus and Jesus is in us, and that is the
glorious riches that God has in his inheritance. His inheritance is Jesus in each one of us. And
we so often let this sink into a kind of generic, general understanding and a theological concept
and we don’t grasp clearly enough that Jesus in Marty is different from Jesus in Trish, and Jesus in
Trish is different than Jesus in Irene, or in me, or in Joe. And it is Jesus in each of us that is
God’s inheritance. And that old illustration of Sir Malcom Sergeant is true: when he was conducting
the orchestra in the Albert Hall he stopped the whole orchestra all of a sudden and points in the
symphony and says, “You missed your note.” And he looks, not at the leading violinist, but he looks
at the little guy with the triangle who missed the triangle.

And of course the truth is that God misses the smallest note and so God will miss Jesus in us, both
because he misses his son, and because we are a vital part of his son, we are a part of his son that
he willed from before the foundation of the world. So that is the riches of his glorious
inheritance. And then you remember we talked last time about what is the immeasurable greatness of
his power in us who believe. And I think you’ll remember some of the words that they use in the
Greek, the immeasurable is “uper ballo” and it means something that is beyond conception. It’s a
greatness that is beyond our conception, an immeasurable greatness of his “Dunamis” of his power in
us who believe. And that power comes from our position, because that’s what this verse 20 states.
Towards the end of verse 19 it says, “the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe,
according to the working of his great might.”

The word “working” is actually the word for “energeo´” its energy, so it’s working in the sense of
something that brings about a movement, an active energy. And so according to the working of the

might actually is “Kratos” and it means might or strength, so it’s the working of his great might or
according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from
the dead. And what Paul is saying is that all of us were created in Jesus, and it was our humanity
that weighed Jesus’ humanity down. So Jesus himself, when he was born of God had his divine spirit
and then he also had a human spirit, and human flesh and that was what he had us in; he as a mother
begot us in his own human spirit, and his own human flesh.

And when we determined that we would do what we wanted to do and that we would live apart from his
Spirit and apart from his Father, then there was a tremendous wrench that took place inside Jesus as
his human spirit and his human flesh and his emotions and feelings were borne down by the weight of
every one of us that ever had a stain on our conscience, every one of us that has used our emotions
in ways that hate or were filled with anger, or strain, or irritability. All those weighed down his
own human flesh, and his human emotions, and his mind. And I think we have talked about this
before; you’ve known what it is like to live in strain with someone else, well I think we’ve all
known that, not only in our families, and not only maybe even with each other here but certainly
with others.

You know the strain and the stress it is in your emotions if you’re not at ease with someone else,
and of course it can be very intense depending on the degree of hostility, or the degree of
resentment that is there. Now Christ in his feelings bore all of that in all of us. In other
words, there isn’t one human being on the earth that has felt anger that has not borne Jesus down,
because all of us are created in him. And you remember in Colossians it’s very clear; all of us
were made by him and through him, and we hold together in him, and he is the one that sustains us
all.

So it’s easy to think of Milosevic, and it’s not easy to think that he actually is part of Jesus and
Jesus has borne his attitudes. Sometimes we are able to use that as an illustration, but it seems
to be difficult for us to realize that every time our emotions have roiled in worry or anger or
anxiety, Jesus himself has borne that and I think you can see that. I’ve shared with you before
that our God is not irresponsible. He is not a God who is insincere. He cannot make things, and
then in an irresponsible kind of detached way let them go on by themselves. He feels everything
that he has made. He feels every movement of every creature that he has ever created, and he feels
every emotion that you and I have ever felt. But he felt them in Jesus as his own, and that’s why I
put it that way; that Jesus had a divine Spirit and then his whole human side had a human spirit,
which was what was being touched on the earth in the first century. He has human emotions and a
human mind, and those all are the ones that have begotten all of us, and all of us come from him,
from his human spirit, and his human mind, and his human emotions. We are all part of him, and
that’s what it means in Colossians where it says, “He sustains us all and we are all held together
in him.”

In other words, I know it sounds incredible, but there isn’t a movement of our mind that he himself
does not feel. Think of how at times you see a blood vessel protruding in someone’s forehead and
you think they must be angry or something like that. There isn’t a blood vessel that Jesus himself
did not feel within himself. He bore all of that and when he went down into death, he went because
of all those things that weighed him down and held him down from his Father’s Spirit.

So if you can think how coarse it is when somebody swears or uses a wretched, foul word, and uses it
close to the name of Christ or of God, or if for some strange reason when it happens in connection
with a church or a holy place or time of seriousness, you suddenly feel, “This is not only

incongruous, this is disgusting, it’s hateful, it destroys.” And it does actually; it can destroy a
whole atmosphere in a moment. We talk in sorrow about some of the ways they deal now with
Shakespeare’s plays, and the way they introduce nudity in order to create interest in people and in
the audience. But one thing we do feel is that this destroys the beauty that was there. It makes a
mockery of it, the two can’t exist together and that’s a little of what you can see happened as
Christ went down into the grave.

Which is why it says he tasted death for every man, because there is only one reaction that can take
place from a pure, loving, holy and honest God when he faces dishonesty, un-holiness, dirt and
filth; the one must destroy the other, and that’s what happened as Jesus went down into the grave.
The grave was only the local expression of a death and destruction in eternity that obviously took
place outside time so that he was “the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.” But at
that moment, all the feelings that we have had, all the anger, all the misunderstanding, all the
wretchedness, all the selfishness, all the self-assertion, all of that he bore inside himself, and
that was destroyed there and it destroyed him.

And it was at that moment that only the might and power and strength of a God who was willing to
bear all those things and to allow his very own home to be utterly desecrated and his own son to be
mutilated, it was only the strength and might of that kind of God that could then determine, “I will
raise this up. I will raise up this wretched thing that has been created. This wretched thing that
I have created inside my son, I will raise it up. I will bear these things. I will bear the
Hitler’s who will destroy my little children; I will bear the Milosevic’s who will mutilate my own
sons and daughters. I will bear the pain and the agony that everyone has borne, and I will bear the
hatred and anger and destruction that everyone has felt. And that’s part of what it means that in
accordance with the energy which he worked when he raised Jesus from the dead, so great is the power
that he gives us.

And that’s what “that you might know what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who
believe” means in accordance with the working that he did when he raised Jesus from the dead,
because of course, both are the same. It was because God raised us up from the dead with Jesus that
we now have this power coming down to us and into us. And that’s why there should be little doubt
in our minds that that power is available to us, because of course God dealt with all that back
then. There might be a tendency in us to ask, “Well what is the immeasurable greatness of his power
in us who believe? I’m so wretched or I’m so miserable, I can’t expect that power. I can see how
somebody great can expect it, or some saint can expect it, but I can’t expect that power.” But that
power is the power that has already raised us up from the dead with Jesus. That power has already
been given to us in that we’re alive today. We wouldn’t be alive today if he had not been willing
to give that power to us, and that immeasurable greatness of power is still what’s available to us
moment-by-moment in our life today.

But it depends on where your eyes are; it depends on whether our eyes are in our position in Jesus.
Watchman Nee had a simple illustration; you put this piece of paper in a book and wherever the book
goes, the paper goes. So if this piece of paper is one of us and the book is Jesus and you put us in
the book then wherever Jesus goes we go. If he goes over there, that’s where we are, and if we
believe that, and live in it in every second, and set our eyes upon it this immeasurable greatness
of power streams down to us. I don’t know if you’ve experienced it, but here at God’s right hand is
Christ and all of us, and the moment that we down here set our eyes up there, that moment that
greatness of power streams down and into us. And it lifts you, it just lifts you. You can
virtually – not always feel it, but often you can feel it.

If you actually do reckon you’re no longer in existence and you’re part of Jesus and he’s everything
and he’s the only one that matters, then when your eyes are upon him he sends this greatness of
power down to you, and you don’t at all lose your individuality. In fact, you find your
individuality because it’s him alive in you. The truth actually is that when we’re not doing that,
when our eyes are on ourselves, we are conformed to the image of this world, and we all become just
numbers, and we are all just cyphers, and we’re variations on each other. When our eyes are not on
ourselves and on this position in the grave, but our eyes are on ourselves in Jesus and actually on
Jesus himself, then his greatness of power comes down and makes us individuals. And you remember
there’s a hymn that says, “We are most truly men when we are in Christ.”

So the greatness of his power is not something that we have to imagine ourselves being worthy of or
that we have to imagine coming down to us, it is just a fact that power comes down to us because God
has already raised us in his son, and that’s what it means if you look again at verse 19, “that you
may know what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according,” and some
have said “as a result,” or “in consequence of,” “the working of his great might which he
accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead.”(cid:9)

In other words, when God raised Jesus from the dead he raised all of us, and he set us in the same
position Jesus is, and therefore the greatness of his power is in each one of us as we need it. Now
if you say, “Why do you not experience it or why do we not feel it?” Undoubtedly because we’re
utterly preoccupied with the world and with all the other six billion little people. We’re utterly
preoccupied with what he does to him or what he says to her or what they are doing to us. We’re
utterly preoccupied with the things and the people and the circumstances around us; our eyes are on
that continually. We’re reading about it the newspapers, we’re reading about it the magazines but
most of all our minds are filled with this.

This is the realm in which we move, we live in the world, and we become of the world. And of
course, it’s unreal because all of that is under the cross and under the condemnation of God, so it
all has a desolation and a loneliness and a dryness about it that fills us every time because he has
moved this world up, he has moved it all into that position. All of us have been moved into this
position and that is a real place, and when we set our minds on the things that are above where
Christ is seated at the right hand of God, then that immeasurable greatness of power comes down to
us.

If you say to me, “Do you really believe it in a practical way — like when you go into a store and
your mind is filled with Jesus at the right hand of God? Do you really mean that you’ll feel
lifting?” Yeah I do. You’ll feel a lifting, you will. You’ll feel it lifting the whole mind and
emotions, everything is lifted, there’s a lifting spirit occurs within you. If you look down and
you look at the people and the dusty shop and the person’s face you take your messages from their
face which is discouraging, and you sink into it. Yes it’s almost like clockwork. Every time you
look away and you look up to him and think “Lord, how are things? What are you doing there?”
There’s a lifting in your spirit, and his Spirit begins to live in you and then to your customers
you’re very alive and very vivid. Actually you are not vivid to yourself because you’re preoccupied
with Jesus, but they see a new liveliness. And so it is just like that.

It’s the same story when you’re driving the car; you’re preoccupied with the guy in front so the
second we even notice that the guy cut in in front of us, that second your eyes are down. So it is
very much that our position creates or determines our condition. Immediately the Jacobs ladder is

set up and the angels are going up and down, immediately your eyes go up there. And of course you
can apply it to so many situations; you can apply it to afternoon tea this afternoon. If you’re
immediate response is “Oh the tea is what I hoped it would be” then you’re eyes are on the tea and
not on him. And you know fine well you can certainly do seven or eight things at once. So you can
have your mind doing many things that it normally does without thinking while your spirit and your
attention is there in him. And of course you can see yourselves that it’s not just a case of
forgetting that Joe sits there, and Martha sits there, it’s a case of saying, “Here we are and we’re
all encompassed in this wonderful person who has his arms around us, and we’re all in him.” So
you’re looking at him there but you see all of these people in that situation and it transforms
everything.

What is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe? In accordance or as result of
the work that he did in Christ when he raised him from the dead and actually raised us up with him.
Let’s pray.