Imagine that you are a jewelry clerk in a store. Someone comes in to your store and says, “I would like to buy something for a friend to bless him.” You say, “Well we have many items that could be a blessing to someone. Can you be more specific?” “Yes,” they reply, “Something that would give them a special blessing.” Frustrated, you respond, “Good you told me that. Now can you narrow down what it is you are looking for?” You can see that this conversation is going nowhere. But isn’t that how many people pray? God bless this person and bless the missionaries and bless our church. What is this saying? You might get further with a jewelry clerk. I see these prayers of Paul and the other apostles in the New Testament as clear models for how we ought to pray. But perhaps it’s because we don’t bother to look at their significance that we miss what it is we should be praying for.
The key idea of this passage is that we must direct our prayer to God with the purpose of petitioning Him to reveal Himself to us so that we might reflect His character and accomplish His work in our lives. From this prayer we see that there are three requests that we must make to God on our behalf (and as we pray for others).
1. We Need to Pray for the Strength of God (vv. 16-17)
For what does Paul say we need to ask God first? We need to pray for the strength of God. There are three characteristics of this prayer for the strength of God that we notice from verses 16-17. Let’s read those verses. Here Paul says, [I pray] “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”
A. It occurs by His Spirit
The first characteristic that we notice here is that it occurs by His Spirit. Do you realize that our only source of spiritual strength comes from God’s Spirit? It is not our own strength. It is not strength that we somehow muster or conjure up by ourselves. We don’t have any power of our own to resist temptation. If our resolve to obey is of ourselves then when we seek to do God’s will we will fail. My friends, we are completely incapable of pleasing God in our strength. And until we learn this and apply it to EVERY aspect of our lives we will fail in trying to obey God. I can remember so clearly as an young believer recognizing that God wanted me to quit getting drunk and in my personal resolve I determined to do so. But every time the opportunity came up for me to resist, in my strength, I failed to resist. It wasn’t until I called out to God for His strength through Christ alone was I able to overcome.
In this section, we are already starting to hearken back to previous chapters. Why can we rely on the strength of the Spirit of God to overcome temptation and live a life pleasing in His sight? It is because, as Paul noted in Ephesians 1, the Holy Spirit is living within you. The Christian life is one that is lived by the Spirit of God and through His mighty power. Do you realize that the same mighty power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead is available to you through God’s Holy Spirit? If the power to raise a dead man is available for you to live godly is there any reason for not being able to? The only reasons exist in the excuses of our heart. And those aren’t real reasons.
B. It starts on the inside
The second characteristic that we notice here is that it starts on the inside. Paul says that you may be strengthened . . . in the inner man. As you read the Word of God and remain sensitive to the Spirit of God He begins to work inside. If you are not being changed on the inside then any external changes taking place are not honoring to God. For the Scripture says that “Whatever is not of faith [that is, whatever is not of trusting Christ alone] is sin. This is why is it so important to rely on God’s power. For without God working on the inside we become religious shells, Pharisees that have this outward appearance with no inward reality of God working.
I think there are two types of these Pharisees, these people with no inward reality of the Spirit’s work. The first are the ones we think of most often when use the word Pharisee. These are the zealots. Those making up a lot of rules that have no basis in Scriptural command or principle. They are the acting Holy Spirit in the lives of those with whom they come in contact. As Jesus described them, “They load down people with burdens too heavy to carry but will not lift a finger to help them.” The second type are more subtle but they have no inward spiritual reality either. These are the anti-type of the zealots. They are the cynics. They doubt everything and in doing so they miss the power of God available to them because of their criticism of those on the other side of the spectrum. Both are wrong because they are not recognizing that it is they themselves who are the ones in need of God working on their inside. I hope you don’t think that because I preach to you each week that somehow I do not need God to work on my inside or that I don’t think I need it. I simply have the wonderful privilege of telling you what God’s Word says. And as I prepare these messages each week God shouts His message to my soul as well. We must stop pointing fingers unless they are directed inwardly. And when we remove the log out of our own eye we may be able to assist our brother or sister remove the speck out of his or her eye.
But the change that we have must start on the inside. Don’t cover your ears to God’s Word when He speaks to you, don’t block out the conviction over your sin, whether it is a sin of activity, participating in doing wrong, or passivity, refusing to do right. Let the Spirit of God do His work on the inside so that you might be transformed on the outside.
When we reject the strength of the Spirit of God to rule our lives inside we find ourselves covering up the empty inside with outward trappings. What kind of outward trappings are only dependent upon what makes us most comfortable when we leave the inward unattended. So let God work on who you are on the inside.
C. It results in Christ settling down in your heart
The third characteristic of this prayer for spiritual strength is that it results in Christ settling down in your heart. Paul notes this in verse 17. He says, “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” Paul is not speaking about people accepting Christ as their Savior. He is writing to those who are believers in Ephesus. He is not calling for them to be saved. He has already declared that they have believed and been sealed by the Holy Spirit. About what then is Paul speaking? The word translated “dwell” means to feel at home or settle in. You understand what this means. You may live somewhere but you may not be settled in or feel at home. You may have experienced this when you first moved into a place. There are unpacked boxes sitting around, things aren’t straightened up as you would like. You are not yet settled into your place.
Paul wants Christ to feel at home in the hearts of these believers. We too ought to desire and long for Christ to feel at home in our hearts. Are there places in your life into which Christ isn’t invited, into which He is not welcome? Do you push Him out of activities in your life because frankly, you can’t really think about Him while you are doing or thinking or saying those things? Let God’s Spirit strengthen you that you may set your mind on things above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God and let Him feel at home in the deepest recesses of your heart. Truly if Christ is not Lord of all in your life He is not Lord at all in your life.
2. We Need to Pray for the Knowledge of God’s love in Christ
Next Paul says, not only to we need to pray for the strength of God but also we need to pray for the knowledge of the love of God in Christ. We need to know God’s love. Specifically we need to know Christ’s love. In verses 18 & 19 Paul describes this in these words, “[That you] may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.” There are three features in knowing God.
A. It is inclusive
The first feature in knowing the love of God in Christ is that it is inclusive. Paul says, “[that] you may be able to comprehend WITH ALL THE SAINTS.” What Paul is praying for is not some limited special knowledge that only certain select Christians can obtain. This is not the case at all. And the way in which he says it, “WITH ALL THE SAINTS” shows that Paul believed it to be a normal part of the Christian life.” You should be experiencing, by God’s work in your life, a knowledge of Christ’s love for you.
B. It is expansive
The second feature in knowing God’s love in Christ is that it is expansive. Paul wants these believers to know the “breadth and length and height and depth” of the love that Christ has for us. There is no limit to the love that Christ has for us. It is expansive. Nothing is able to breach that love that Christ has for us. Paul notes this in Romans 8:38-39, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.
The love of Christ for us does not wax and wane with our feelings to Him. The love of Christ does not ebb and flow depending upon our obedience. The love of Christ for us who believe does not have a limit and it does not change. This love spilled out on the cross for us. Though Christ knew all your sin that you would commit He came for you. Though He understood the rebellion in which you would be He still came for you and wooed you to Himself. What a great God we have.
What Paul wanted these believers to understand is just how great this love is so that they might themselves carry it out in their lives unto others. What we need to understand about this divine love is how enduring and lasting it is. Whoever deserved this love of Christ? None of us. And yet Christ poured it out upon us anyway. How different would our families, neighborhoods, workplaces and churches be if we fully recognized the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love? We desperately need to know the expansiveness of Christ’s love so that it may be working in our lives.
C. It is experiential
The third feature in knowing God’s love in Christ is that it is experiential. In verse 19 Paul says, “And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” How does the love of Christ surpass knowledge? And in that case how can you know something that surpasses knowledge? The love of Christ that we must know is experiential. If we do not experience the love of Christ we will never know it.
You are never going to know this love of Christ unless God reveals to you how great it is. Many people speak about the love of God but do not know it firsthand. They can quote verses on love but it doesn’t move them to action. It doesn’t affect their being. It has never reached the core of who they are and therefore they act as if love were something merely academic.
They behave as if the love of Christ doesn’t call us to give of our lives for others. They are completely nonplussed by it. They speak of it as if it were mathematics (or worse, English grammar). Yet how wonderful is the love of Christ that took our place. How can we fathom such love? Yet when we truly experience it how can it leave us unmoved?
Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, said Christ’s love controlled Him. And when we experience this love it should control us too. What was it about the love of Christ that changed Paul? He said, “Having concluded this, “that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.” What is Paul saying? We were separated from God. Our lives were in the grave. And Christ died and rose again so that we might live. But it was not that we would live just any life but a life filled with the purpose of living for Him. This is what the love of Christ has done for us. When God truly allows us to comprehend and experience it must it not change us? We need to pray for the experiential knowledge of God’s love in Christ.
3. We Need to Pray for the Fullness of God (v. 19b)
Finally this morning we need to pray for the fullness of God. This is how Paul ends verse 19, “that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” Did you know that God wants you to be filled up with all His fullness? He wants you to know and experience Him in an amazingly wonderful way. What does it mean to be filled with all the fullness of God? It means that we are so filled with the experiential knowledge and wonder of who God is that we reflect that fullness to the astonished gaze of those around us. Perhaps an analogy might help to explain this concept.
Since I was a child I have always had a fascination with the ocean. When I was a child I would go to the beach and I would love to find hermit crabs and other critters at the edge of the ocean. And taking my pail full of ocean water I would travel to show my catches to my mother to her chagrin. However, though my bucket was filled with the ocean it was not the fullness of the ocean. I had a mere drop of it. The fullness of the ocean waited beyond the shore, it waited beyond the continental shelf, it waited beyond rays of sunshine flooding the first several hundred feet of ocean depth. It waited. But it beckoned. And I will never forget being captivated by the first glimpses of the ocean bottom as a young boy.
I watched a PBS special on the first DSRV trip to some of the deepest parts of the ocean. There they found astonishing things. Pillow lava seeped out of volcanic cracks in the ocean floor. But because the water was so cold the material resembled toothpaste squeezed out of the tube. I saw plants that derived their sustenance by the heat released from under the earth’s crust, instead of through photosynthesis. There were animals, like tubeworms, though blind and immobile, they found nourishment in the mineral rich epi-crust waters flowing around them. It was a world that no one had seen before. And yet these men were simply experiencing the fringe of the fullness of the ocean.
I experienced more wonders of the ocean in the Navy, though mostly from the surfaced position. I even had an opportunity to snorkel in Puerto Rico on some coral reefs. But perhaps I didn’t experience as much of the ocean I would have liked in the Navy. There is only a little of all the ocean’s vastness that you can experience in a submerged submarine with no windows or cameras.
What is the point of describing my love-affair with the ocean? Most people, including myself, never experience, firsthand, the vastness, the fullness, of the ocean. Their experience is simply a trip to the aquarium. Now don’t get me wrong the aquarium is nice. But it is merely someone’s interpretation of the ocean. You get glimpses of its wonder secondhand. It is being given to you. Or many learn about the oceans’ vastness in books but do not experience it.
I am afraid that there are many here today who are content to grab pails of water out of the fullness of who God is. They are content to stay on the shore filling their buckets but never want to get their feet wet. They refuse to lose themselves in the vastness of all that God is. They have some fear about really finding out who God is and discovering that He would want too much from them. Oh my friends, it is safe on the shore but our reward is in the ocean. Someone once noted that, “If Christopher Columbus had turned back, no one would have blamed him – but no one would have remembered him either.” Who can blame us for staying on the shore where it is comfortable in the sun? Who can blame us if we stay with what is familiar? But if we stay we will never know the wonder of all the fullness of God. And it is only in Him that we can find real satisfaction.
So many of us are too easily satisfied. When we realize that God wants us to be filled up with all His fullness so that we may reflect His character to others but we are content to stand on the shore of God and His beauty and say, “Wow” when, truthfully, He beckons us to dive in so that we might experience what is unknowable through lecture or sermon. And we can only find this when we begin to pray for ourselves what Paul is asking the Father on behalf of the Ephesians.
Perhaps some of us are unwilling to consistently pray this prayer because it reveals the fact that we are not in control. We are not the one in charge of how much we know about God. Only God can reveal Himself to us and to this we must confine ourselves. Just Paul’s language describes how helpless we are, “that He would grant you to be strengthened through His Spirit . . . so that you might be able to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”
Perhaps some of us are unwilling to consistently prayer this prayer because it may cause us to face some things that we don’t want to face. Perhaps it is such a thing as repentance. You know that if you want to know Christ’s love in this transcendent way you will need to repent of actions and attitudes in your life with which you don’t want to part. It is for anyone who will not repent because they love their sin more than they would love to know God that I feel most sorry for.
My friends, I am not in some Deep Submersible Research Vehicle experiencing things that no one else ever has. I am not even a scuba diver in the things of God. I am merely snorkeling in the wonderful reefs of the full ocean of God’s wondrous beauty. And I am calling to you to dive in with me.
Has the analogy served its purpose? May I return to the real world and speak in plain terms now? What am I saying? I am not a spiritual giant. God has not used me in great ways like many awesome brothers and sisters of the past and present. But I do know the joy that comes from seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. I have passed days crying out to God to give me a greater glimpse of Himself. And I can say that experiencing the love of Christ is far greater than merely hearing about it. I do know God’s close presence in the midst of loss and pain. But I also know that these times of His close presence are far too few for me. I don’t know about you but I need to seek Him more diligently. I need to cry out that He would fill me with all His fullness. I need to see Him work in me that I might more clearly reflect His character to others. And it is only when we are wearing this beauty of God’s fullness that we will see Him do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us.
Why should we settle for mediocrity when God promises us His power? Why should we dabble with our sin when it is only His presence that can satisfy us? Acknowledging our utter helplessness and asking for His limitless power is the only thing that will allow Him to work in us. God brings us to the point of utter frustration until we rely on Him solely. I wrestled with this as a young man. Perhaps it is most difficult to admit this complete helplessness in the strength of youth. But this is not just the struggle of youth, is it? I wrestle today. Do you wrestle with this? It is the struggle of every day. Everyday we must call out to God for His mercy lest we seek to live by our own pitiful strength. Don’t you too want to experience all the fullness of God? We have too many things today that beckon us away from the shore. There are too many things with which we would rather busy ourselves than to preoccupy ourselves with God. Call out to God in repentance and humble your heart before Him. Admit your need for His strength and love and fullness and let us explore the fullness of God together.