June 12, 2022 - Do You Know What You Have? - Pastor Paul Vallee

Ephesians 1 Within the pages of the Bible, we discover that Christians are the wealthiest people on this planet. I’m not speaking of material wealth, but instead of the great blessings, money cannot buy. Things like a clean conscience, a pure heart, peace of mind, healthy and loving relationships, and the guarantee of a Father’s love and care. Our relationship with God is the key to appropriating or receiving these riches. It believes that what God says is true and that acting upon those promises is the greater reality of our lives than what our feelings dictate to us, but it all begins in prayer. How can we be transformed? How can we experience the richness of life that Jesus Christ promised us? In writing to the Ephesians, Paul focuses on our spiritual riches. In Ephesians chapter one, we discover what it means to be a Christian and learn about our spiritual identity. It is one thing to hear about what we possess but another to experience its reality in our lives. How can we share the blessings that God has for us? How do they come to us? It begins by asking. As we move away from that incredible sentence found in the first chapter, we conclude the chapter with the apostle Paul praying for the believers. As we begin to commune with God in prayer, much of what God has promised becomes ours. Our problem so often is that we struggle with prayer. We struggle with how we ought to pray and what we ought to pray for. Here in the conclusion of chapter one, we find one of the most powerful prayers in the Bible. Paul begins by giving us his reasons for why he prayed the way he did, and as we shall discover, the apostle Paul shows us how to go about praying for God’s riches to be our portion.