Praying in 2026 - Ephesians 3:14-21 (Sunday January 3, 2026)
Notes
Transcript
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
It is possible to know a great deal about an car—to know exactly how the engine, the ignition, the transmission, and so on operate. And yet never use that knowledge to drive anywhere. But that is what the car is for!
In the same way it is possible to know a great deal about the Bible—its doctrines, moral standards, promises, warnings, and so on—and yet not live by those truths.
Paul has spent the first two chapters describing how God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. He has spoken of how God chose us in Christ to be adopted as His children to form a new community of faith, the church.
Now in chapter 3 he prays that they would start driving the car. That God’s plan for the believers at Ephesus would be fulfilled in their experience as they walk with Christ.
REASON
REASON
Paul begins with talking about the reason for his prayer.
14 For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Because all the things he has told them about God’s plan in Christ for the church now need to be lived out in their lives.
Perhaps you have wrestled at one time or another with the question of the value of prayer. The question may come when we do not get the answer we pray for. We ask, What is the purpose of praying then if it doesn’t work?
Or some wonder about prayer theologically in its relationship to God’s sovereignty. “Why pray if God is going to do what He wants to do anyway?”
But questions like this do not deter people in the BIble from praying. Paul often wrote how he always prays, and he writes to us to “pray without ceasing”. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself prayed. And He gave the parable that we should not give up praying.
God in His sovereignty has chosen us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. That very knowledge that God has a purpose drives Paul to prayer and gives Him confidence God will answer His prayers.
Another reason can be seen when he prays to the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family on earth is named.
15 from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
One way to understand that phrase is that the whole family refers to the whole family of believers in Christ. In heaven and in earth refers to the church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven. We are one family of God, and He cares for us as a Father.
We pray for many persons, apart from their relationship or lack of relationship to Christ. We pray for kings and all others who are in authority. We pray for the those in places who have not heard the gospel, asking God to bless the testimony of missionaries. We pray for the lost in our own neighbourhood and families.
But at the same time, we do not pray for them with the same measure of confidence or in the same way as when we pray for those who are Christians. We do not know whom God is going to save. The preaching of the Word hardens some hearts, just as it softens others.
But when we pray for Christians we pray for those whom God has begun a good work in.
So we are confident in these prayers. We do not pray, “If it be your will.” We pray knowing that God will finish what He has started in their lives.
REQUESTS
REQUESTS
One of the best ways to discover a Christian’s chief worries and hopes is to listen to them pray. We all pray about what concerns us. We are evidently not concerned about matters we do not include in our prayers.
This prayer of Paul shows what He thinks is the chief thing to pray for the Christians in Ephesus. And because He is not just writing a private letter to his friends, but God is writing through Paul to you and me, Paul’s prayers show what God thinks are the most important things to pray for. Requests that He is sure to answer.
There are three main requests; each requests builds on the last like a prayer staircase.
Step 1: Christ’s Presence
Step 1: Christ’s Presence
For the first request, Paul prays
16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
The goal of this request is that Christ dwell in your hearts through faith. We will get to what that means in a moment. But in order for that to happen, Paul asks God to work richly with power by His Spirit in the heart of these believers so that their hearts would be a suitable place for Christ to dwell.
The inner person is the seat and centre of our being. The place where we take decisions and choose right or wrong. The place where Christ lives in a Christian.
Sometimes we suffer during oiur walk with Christ. We would rather not go through suffering, but if we must, it must be by God’s strength.
We also need God’s strength in times of temptation in order to resist it and be victorious.
We need God’s strength to take a tough moral choice at work to honour Jesus whom we serve.
We need God’s strength to witness. The Holy SPirit strengthens and helps us to do the right thing in difficult circumstances.
Most of all, we need God’s strength for Christ to dwell in our hearts.
But, you may say, doesn’t Christ already live in the heart of every believer? Yes He does! Paul himself wrote:
9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.
Paul is not contradicting himself in this prayer. The clue to his meaning is in his choice of the word for dwell. He could have used the word that means to stay in a place as a stranger, like in a hotel room.
But the word for dwell that Paul uses for Christ here has the sense of settling down in one place and making it your own home. Paul’s prayer is not for Christ to come into our hearts, but that Christ might settle down and be at home there.
Jesus is our Lord. For Him to be at home there, our heart must be tidied up from our rebellious ways and filled with His will.
23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.
ILLUSTRATION
In his booklet My Heart Christ’s Home, Robert Munger pictures the Christian life as a house, through which Jesus goes from room to room. In the library, which is the mind, Jesus finds all sorts of worthless things, which He proceeds to throw out and replace with His Word. In the dining room He finds many sinful desires listed on a worldly menu. In the place of such things as materialism and lust He puts humility, meekness, love. He goes through the living room of fellowship, where He finds worldly companions and activities, through the workshop, where only toys are being made, into the closet, where hidden sins are kept, and so on through the entire house. Only when every room is turned over to Him can He settle down and be at home.
Step 2: Christ’s Love
Step 2: Christ’s Love
When Christ is at home in our heart, something miraculously appears there. And that is love.
the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
Christ dwelling in our heart enables us to love one another.
Here Paul says when Christ dwells in our hearts, our lives are rooted and grounded in love.
17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
We have deep roots in love bringing us nourishment. We are building our lives on a foundation of love. The love here probably being the practical love of one another.
Biblical agapē love is a matter of the will and not a matter of feeling, though deep feelings usually accompany love. God’s loving the world was not a matter simply of feeling; it resulted in His sending His only Son to redeem the world (John 3:16). Love is selfless giving. It is the very nature and substance of love to deny self and to give to others.
Jesus did not say, “Greater love has no one than to have warm feelings for his friends,” but rather, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
When Christ has his proper place in our hearts, we do not have to be told to love—just as we do not have to be told to breathe. Loving is as natural to the spiritual person as breathing is to the natural person. When a Christian does not love he has to do so intentionally and with effort—just as he must do to hold his breath. To become habitually unloving he must habitually resist Christ as the Lord of his heart.
If a husband fails in his love for his wife, or she for him, it is never because of the other person, regardless of what the other person may have done. You do not fall either into or out of agapē love, because it is controlled by the will.
Strained relations between husbands and wives, between fellow workers, between brothers and sisters, or between any others is never a matter of incompatibility or personality conflict but is always a matter of resisting Christ.
But Paul goes on to bring his next request, having God’s love for ohers poured out into our heart he prays that we understand the magnitude of Christ’s love for us - its width, length, depth, and height.
In the last century, when Napoleon’s armies opened a prison that had been used by the Spanish Inquisition they found the remains of a prisoner who had been incarcerated for his faith. The body had long since decayed. But this prisoner, long since dead, had left a witness. On the wall of his dismal cell this faithful soldier of Christ had scratched a rough cross with four words surrounding it in Spanish. Above the cross was the Spanish word for “height.” Below it was the word for “depth.” To the left the word “width.” To the right, the word “length.” Clearly this prisoner wanted to testify to the surpassing greatness of the love of Christ, perceived even in his suffering.
On our own we can know a little of the love of Jesus. But Paul knows that it is when the saints are together, with all their differences, men and women, young and old, black and white, rich and poor that they can more fully understand Christ’s love.
Paul then gets the goal of this second request - that we would know the love of Christ that passes knowledge.
19 to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge;
We will never fuilly know all the greatness of God’s love for us in His Son. Happily we will have eternity to explore it. The idea of know here is not to have intellectual knowledge of it. But to experience it.
And so Paul has been praying that God would strength the believers with power by His Spirit so Christ would be at home in their hearts. WIth Christ at home their hearts are changed to be rooted and grounded in love, and Paul asks God to help them comprehend how much He loves them, and experience His love at work in their lives.
Step 3: Fulness
Step 3: Fulness
But Paul’s final step in his prayer is that you and I would be filled with all the fulness of God.
that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
What is Paul asking for?
Fulness of God could mean fulness from God. That is that God gives us fully His grace. But it is more likely that Paul is asking for the fulness that fills God Himself. In other words, the perfection of all that God is would fill them.
When we think of who God is, we think of His power. His Wisdom. His mercy, patience, kindness, longsuffering, And above all, His love that is beyond knowing. Paul is praying God would fill us with that character. This isn’t the only place Paul talks of this:
13 till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ;
A person filled with rage is dominated by their anger. A person filled with happiness is dominated by joy. To be filled to all the fulness of God neans to be totally dominated by the Lord, with nothing left of self.
We will not experience this fulness in this life. Paul is looking forward to our final state of perfection in heaven. As David wrote:
15 As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.
John wrote
2 Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.
But although it is a future goal, it is a challenge for today for each of us who know CHrist. God expects us to be moving towards that final fullness. Paul’s prayer is that we would be filled unto the fullness.
As the Holy Spirit strengthens our inner being so Christ makes His home in our heart, as we build our lives on love and grow in our experience of Christ’s infinite love, God transforms us into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another
18 But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
RESPONSE
RESPONSE
Paul bursts into praise at God who would want to do all this for us
20 Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, 21 to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
It might seem an impossible task to persever and grow in Christ in 2026 and become more like Him in our heart. We know the sin in our heart. But Paul knows God is able to do abundantly more that we can ask or think.
Application
Application
At this start of a new year there is good reason to pray. God is sovereign and working His purposes out through us the body of Christ. Prayer is not pointless, because chooses to work His purposes out in answer to our prayers.
We can pray this year confidently for one another, knowing God is at work in us. Perhaps we can base our prayers for each other on Paul’s prayer here. We can ask God for each other to be strengthened by His Spirit in our inner most being so Christ becomes more and more at home in our hearts. We can pray for each other to comprehend more of the greatness of Christ’s love for us and to experience that in our life together. And we can pray that God would change us day by day to be like Christ, to be filled with His fulness.
Sometimes when we pray we add that get out of jail clause on the end “if it be Your will”. That might be appropriate when we pray for temporal material things. If it be your will, let me get a pay rise. Or let me get better from this illness. But it would be wrong to add that on the end of these prayer requests of Paul because we know already it is God’s will that we should be strong in our inner being, that CHrist would be at home there, that we would be rooted in love and experience God’s love, and that we would become more like Christ so that at the end of 2026 we can say I’m not yet what I should be, but I am further on the road towards it than at the beggining of the year.
