Prayer for love
Intro: BOLDNESS
In 1540 Luther’s good friend and assistant, Friedrich Myconius, became sick and was expected to die within a short time. From his bed he wrote a tender farewell letter to Luther. When Luther received the message, he immediately sent back a reply: “I command thee in the name of God to live because I still have need of thee in the work of reforming the church.… The Lord will never let me hear that thou art dead, but will permit thee to survive me. For this I am praying, this is my will, and may my will be done, because I seek only to glorify the name of God.”
Those words seem harsh and insensitive to modern ears, but God apparently honored the prayer. Although Myconius had already lost the ability to speak when Luther’s reply came, he soon recovered. He lived six more years and died two months after Luther.
What he described in 2:11–22 is now the subject of his prayer. He desired for the church to be united experientially. He wanted them to know and experience Christ’s love and share it with one another.
It is worth noting that both of these prayers, as well as the other prison prayers (Phil. 1:9–11; Col. 1:9–12), deal with the spiritual condition of the inner man, and not the material needs of the body. Certainly it is not wrong to pray for physical and material needs, but the emphasis in these petitions is on the spiritual.
Though the sentence begins in verse 14 and ends in verse 19, Paul’s request begins in verse 16. In this prayer he asked for only one thing.
The reason about which Paul speaks is therefore found in chapter 2. Christ makes us spiritually alive in Him (2:5), we are “His workmanship” (v. 10), “no longer strangers and aliens, but … fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household” (v. 19), “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets” (v. 20), and “are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit” (v. 22). For this reason, therefore (that our new identity makes us the dwelling place of God), Paul prays for the Ephesians to use the power that their great status in Christ provides.
In this great prayer of entreaty to God and exhortation to His children, Paul prays specifically for the inner strength of the Spirit, for the indwelling of Christ in the believer’s heart, for incomprehensible love to permeate their lives, for them to have God’s own fullness, and for God’s glory thereby to be manifested and proclaimed. Each element builds on the previous ones, making
In this great prayer of entreaty to God and exhortation to His children, Paul prays specifically for the inner strength of the Spirit, for the indwelling of Christ in the believer’s heart, for incomprehensible love to permeate their lives, for them to have God’s own fullness, and for God’s glory thereby to be manifested and proclaimed. Each element builds on the previous ones, making a grand progression of enablement.
While we could understand the three “that” (hina) clauses as parallel, so that Paul prays for three things (the Spirit’s power, Christ’s indwelling, and fullness), more likely Paul prayed for only one thing, the empowering of the Spirit. All else in the prayer explains the meaning and result of that empowering.
It is a prayer like that of 1:15–23, but it has an even greater intensity, as is implied in the words I bow my knees before the Father. Among the Jews it was usual to stand to pray (see Matt. 6:5 and Luke 18:11, 13). Kneeling for prayer, though it has become a regular Christian attitude, was formerly an expression of deep emotion or earnestness, and on that basis we must understand Paul’s words here. Solomon knelt at the dedication of the temple (1 Kgs 8:54); Stephen at the time of his martyrdom (Acts 7:60); Peter at the death-bed of Dorcas (Acts 9:40); Paul at the time of his farewells on his last journey to Jerusalem (Acts 20:36; 21:5); our Lord himself in his agony in Gethsemane (Luke 22:41).
When someone asked the famed jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong to explain jazz, he replied, “Man, if I’ve got to explain it, you ain’t got it.”
When someone asked the famed jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong to explain jazz, he replied, “Man, if I’ve got to explain it, you ain’t got it.” In some ways that simplistic idea applies to love. It cannot truly be understood and comprehended until it is experienced.
Katoikeō (dwell) is a compound word, formed from kata (down) and oikeō (to inhabit a house), In the context of this passage the connotation is not simply that of being inside the house of our hearts but of being at home there, settled down as a family member. Christ cannot be “at home” in our hearts until our inner person submits to the strengthening of His Spirit. Until the Spirit controls our lives, Jesus Christ cannot be comfortable there, but only stays like a tolerated visitor. Paul’s teaching here does not relate to the fact of Jesus’ presence in the hearts of believers but to the quality of His presence.
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 trash and all sorts of worthless things, which He proceeds to throw out and replace with His Word. In the dining room of appetite He finds many sinful desires listed on a worldly menu. In the place of such things as prestige, materialism, and lust He puts humility, meekness, love, and all the other virtues for which believers are to hunger and thirst. He goes through the living room of fellowship, where He finds many 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 He had cleaned every room, closet, and corner of sin and foolishness could He settle down and be at home.
How awesome and wonderful that the almighty and holy God wants to live in our hearts, be at home there, and rule there! Yet Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him” (John 14:23).
At least two of Jesus’ parables focus on persistent prayer—the parable of the man who knocks on his neighbor’s door at midnight asking for food to give an unexpected guest (Luke 11:5–10) and the parable of the importunate widow who eventually obtained help from a wicked judge because she refused to stop petitioning him (Luke 18:1–8).
From the beginning of the letter Paul has been exulting over those divine riches—God blessing us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (1:3), His choosing us for Himself before the foundation of the world (1:4), His redemption and forgiveness (1:7), His making known to us the mystery of His will (1:9), His giving us an inheritance with His Son, Jesus Christ (1:11), and so on throughout the first two and a half chapters. The phrase of His glory testifies that these riches belong to God because of who He is. They belong innately to His Person, which is to say, His glory (cf. 1:17, where Paul calls God, “the Father of glory” and Ex. 33:18ff., where God reveals His personal attributes as glory).
Those, and many others, are the riches that every believer has in Jesus Christ. Paul is not praying for God to give these riches to believers, but that He would grant believers to be strengthened by God according to the riches they already possess. He wants them to live lives that correspond to the spiritual wealth they have in Christ.
A certain rich English eccentric named Julian Ellis Morris liked to dress like a tramp and sell razor blades, soap, and shampoo door-to-door. After a day’s work he would return to his beautiful mansion, put on formal attire and have his chauffeur drive him to an exclusive restaurant in his limousine. Sometimes he would catch a flight to Paris and spend the evening there.
Many Christians live something like Mr. Morris, spending their day-by-day lives in apparent spiritual poverty and only occasionally enjoying the vast riches of His glory that their heavenly Father has given them. How tragic to go around in the tattered rags of our own inadequacy when we could be living sumptuously in the superabundance of God’s unspeakable riches.
Although the NIV begins verse 17 with “so that,” the indwelling of Christ does not result from the Spirit’s strengthening; it is the manner in which the Spirit strengthens. In other words, verse 17 explains verse 16. Christ indwells us through the work of the Spirit. The Spirit’s empowering or indwelling and the indwelling of Christ are not separate things. In 2:20–22, the church was called “a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” This lofty description of the church is now paralleled by an equally lofty description of the individual believer, who has experienced salvation and transformation. By the Spirit’s work Christ takes up residence in the person. Paul prays here that Christ will permeate one’s whole being. It is the equivalent of the command in 5:18 to be continually filled with the Spirit.
“Dwell” (katoikēsai) refers not to the beginning of Christ’s indwelling at the moment of salvation. Instead it denotes the desire that Christ may, literally, “be at home in,” that is, at the very center of or deeply rooted in, believers’ lives. They are to let Christ become the dominating factor in their attitudes and conduct.
3:17 dwell. Not Christ’s initial dwelling at the moment of salvation but his controlling presence over our attitudes and conduct as we continually trust him. hearts. The center of one’s being (see notes on v. 16; 1:18–19).
3:17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts. Every believer is indwelt by Christ at the moment of salvation (Rom. 8:9; 1 Cor. 12:13), but He is “at home,” finding comfort and satisfaction, only where hearts are cleansed of sin and filled with His Spirit (cf. John 14:23). through faith. This speaks of Christians’ continuing trust in Christ to exercise His lordship over them.
How marvelous that God does not give the Spirit’s power to us “out of His riches” but “according to”—which is a far greater thing. If I am a billionaire and I give you ten dollars, I have given you out of my riches; but if I give you a million dollars, I have given to you according to my riches. The first is a portion; the second is a proportion.
The verb dwell literally means (and here I follow Dr. Kenneth Wuest) “to settle down and feel at home.” Certainly Christ was already resident in the hearts of the Ephesians, or else Paul would not have addressed them as “saints” in Ephesians 1:1. What Paul is praying for is a deeper experience between Christ and His people. He yearns for Christ to settle down and feel at home in their hearts—not a surface relationship, but an ever-deepening fellowship.
The main idea is this: just as the ill or infirm need to be strengthened so they can take in all that life has to offer, so also God’s children need to be inwardly strengthened to receive all the blessings God desires for them. Paper bags are not fit containers for valuables.
As Stuart Briscoe has remarked, we need to be like the little boy who was heard to say when he fell into a barrel of molasses, “Lord, make my capacity equal to this opportunity.”
The greater a person’s wealth, the greater his gift must be to qualify for giving according to his wealth. For God to give according to the riches of His glory is absolutely staggering, because His riches are limitless, completely without bounds! Yet that is exactly the measure by which Paul implores God to empower the Ephesians.
When the inner man is fed regularly on the Word of God and seeks the Spirit’s will in all the decisions of life, the believer can be sure he will be strengthened with power through His Spirit. Spiritual power is not the mark of a special class of Christian but is the mark of every Christian who submits to God’s Word and Spirit. Like physical growth and strength, spiritual growth and strength do not come overnight. As we discipline our minds and spirits to study God’s Word, understand it, and live by it, we are nourished and strengthened. Every bit of spiritual food and every bit of spiritual exercise add to our strength and endurance.
Spiritual growth can be defined as the decreasing frequency of sin. The more we exercise our spiritual muscles, yielding to the Spirit’s control of our lives, the less sin is present. Where the strength of God increases, sin necessarily decreases. The nearer we come to God, the further we go from sin.
So that translates hina, a Greek word used to introduce purpose clauses. The purpose of our being “strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man” is that Christ may dwell in [our] hearts through faith.
It is the constant assumption, or specific emphasis, of the teaching of the New Testament, that strength for the Christian life comes by the personal indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit comes into the ‘inner being’ (NEB). The expression is used which in 2 Corinthians 4:16 speaks of the contrast with all that is external, as Paul says ‘Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day’.
strengthen (krataiōthēnai, “be strong to overcome resistance,” cf. kratous in 1:19 and kratei in 6:10)
I bow my knees. Not an instruction for physical posture during prayer, but suggesting an attitude of submission, reverence, and intense passion (cf. Ezra 9:5, 6; Ps. 95:1–6; Dan. 6:10; Acts 20:36).
If we are properly rooted and properly constructed on a foundation of love, nothing will be able to shake us.
We must be careful not to be too fanciful about these, as Augustine and Ambrose have been. Nevertheless, these dimensions can be said to suggest:
1) A love which is wide enough to embrace the world. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
2) A love which is long enough to last forever (1 Corinthians 13:8). As Spurgeon said, “It is so long that your old age cannot wear it out, so long your continual tribulation cannot exhaust it, your successive temptations shall not drain it dry; like eternity itself it knows no bounds.”
3) A love which is high enough to take sinners to Heaven (1 John 3:1, 2).
4) A love which is deep enough to take Christ to the very depths to reach the lowest sinner (Philippians 2:8).
The Four Magnitudes describe an infinite, incomprehensible love. In A. W. Tozer’s words,
… because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning, because he is eternal, his love can have no end, because he is infinite it has no limit, because he is holy it is the quintessence of all spotless purity, because he is immense, his love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea.…
But — and here is the key — this is not to be our solitary, individualistic, isolated occupation, for we are to do it “together with all the saints.” We can only come to a better, fuller understanding of his love in community! This happens when we sit under the preaching of his Word. It happens when we study it together and discuss it. It happens when we share our knowledge of God’s love with each other. It happens when we observe it in our brothers and sisters. It happens as our hearts go upward in the worship of him. We need each other in order to comprehend his Word.
Paul’s main petition is for Spirit-given strength in our inner being (v. 16). The specific nature of this strength is the ability to comprehend the incomprehensible love of Christ (vv. 18–19). We will not be fully mature until this love is planted in our hearts. We will not live as God’s holy ones until we know that we are first of all his beloved ones. We will not treat our neighbors with mercy until we apprehend Christ’s mercy toward us. We do not know anything about Christianity until we know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
The content of this comprehension is to know experientially the love of Christ that supersedes all knowledge (cf. Phil. 4:7). The more a Christian knows about Christ, the more amazed he is at Christ’s love for him.
The verb rooted moves us into the plant world. The tree must get its roots deep into the soil if it is to have both nourishment and stability; and the Christian must have his spiritual roots deep into the love of God. Psalm 1:1–3 is a perfect description of this word, and Jeremiah 17:5–8 is a good commentary on it. One of the most important questions a Christian can ask himself is, “From what do I draw my nourishment and my stability?” If there is to be power in the Christian life, then there must be depth. The roots must go deeper and deeper into the love of Christ.
Grounded is an architectural term; it refers to the foundations on which we build. In the first two churches I pastored, we were privileged to construct new buildings, and in both projects it seemed we would never get out of the ground. In my second building program, we had to spend several thousand dollars taking soil tests because we were building over an old lake bed. For weeks, the men were laying out and pouring the footings. One day I complained to the architect, and he replied, “Pastor, the most important part of this building is the foundation. If you don’t go deep, you can’t go high.” That sentence has been a sermon to me ever since.
The word translated may have power (Gk. exischysēte) and also the verb comprehend (katalabesthai), meaning ‘an earnest grasping’, suggest the difficulty of the task envisaged, simply because it is no mere intellectual feat, but a matter of practical experience, a living together in love which is inevitably costly.
19. However we interpret the dimensions of verse 17, the definite goal to which the Christian life must move, and for which therefore the apostle prays, is for his readers to know the love of Christ, to know how he loved and loves, and to experience his love in loving him and loving others for his sake.
“By this,” John says, “the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has beheld God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.… We love, because He first loved us” (1 John 4:9–12, 19).
His confidence in prayer was grounded not in his abilities or his readers’ but completely in God’s abundant power. Astoundingly he claimed that God can do abundantly more than we can ask or even imagine (3:20). Following these majestic words the apostle concluded with a beautiful doxology (3:21).
The reason we doubt God’s ability to do far more abundantly than “all that we ask or think” is that we grossly underestimate the power at work within us. We do not have a little 9-volt battery of spiritual power inside of us, but an entire nuclear power plant of divine might. The same power that raised Christ from the dead now indwells us by his presence and Spirit. We ought to anticipate, and request, that God will overcome big sins, change bad habits, and make us into better followers of Christ. As long as he desires to get glory through the church and in Christ Jesus, we can be sure that God, in ways that are surprising and at times imperceptible, will magnificently exceed our expectations, to his everlasting honor and our everlasting joy.
filled … fullness of God. Just as the presence and glory of God filled the temple in the OT (1 Kgs 8:10–11), so also Paul prays that God would fill the church to the full measure of himself—his presence, moral excellence, power, and love. See notes on 1:23; 2:21–22; 4:13; 5:18.
that one is totally dominated by the Lord with nothing left of self. Human comprehension of the fullness of God is impossible, because even the most spiritual and wise believer cannot completely grasp the full extent of God’s attributes and characteristics—His power, majesty, wisdom, love, mercy, patience, kindness, and everything He is and does. But believers can experience the greatness of God in their lives as a result of total devotion to Him. Note the fullness of God, here; the fullness of Christ in 4:13; and the fullness of the Spirit in 5:18. Paul prayed for believers to become as Godlike as possible (Matt. 5:48; 1 Pet. 1:15, 16).
We saw in connection with 1:23 that “the fullness of God” refers to the way God makes his presence and power felt.
A problem. Paul prays for power and strength for his readers and asserts that God is both able and at work in them. This is a lofty goal and description. But if this is so, if the Spirit is supposed to empower Christians, why don’t we experience this power more?
In answer, the problem is with us, not with God. The Spirit of Christ does not work in us without our willingness, nor does he move us to the desired goal overnight. He lives with us, and this life is a growth process. We are finite, limited, and prone to failure. The real problem is that we do not care enough. We do not have the necessary discontent within ourselves that will lead to change. We like the privileges without the bother. But nothing in this life happens that way. What the Spirit seeks is the willingness to hear. Faith does come by hearing.
We do not cause his activity; the point of 3:20 is that the power of the Spirit—the Spirit given to all believers—is already working in us. What we seek is our spirit being brought into line with God’s Spirit’s. What is required is the openness to allow God to work, the willingness to hear, and attention given to life with God.
For his own life, and for those to whom he ministers, Paul wants no less than the Spirit’s full indwelling (5:18). Of his fullness, and not just of a part of his nature, all may receive (John 1:16); and the goal for the individual and for the body must be nothing short of ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ’ (4:13).
Within this amazing torrent of devotion Paul has prayed for our strength, our love, and our fullness.
1) prayer for an inner strengthening so as to enhance our capacity to hold what he has for us, 2) prayer for love so our practical lives will be rooted in love and so we will further understand and experience his unfathomable love, and, 3) prayer for ever-growing fullness in this life and in eternity.
J. Wilbur Chapman often told of the testimony given by a certain man in one of his meetings:
I got off at the Pennsylvania depot as a tramp, and for a year I begged on the streets for a living. One day I touched a man on the shoulder and said, “Hey, mister, can you give me a dime?” As soon as I saw his face I was shocked to see that it was my own father. I said, “Father, Father, do you know me?” Throwing his arms around me and with tears in his eyes, he said, “Oh my son, at last I’ve found you! I’ve found you. You want a dime? Everything I have is yours.” Think of it. I was a tramp. I stood begging my own father for ten cents, when for 18 years he had been looking for me to give me all that he had.
Even to begin to grasp the magnitude of that truth, we must think of every attribute and every characteristic of God. We must think of His power, majesty, wisdom, love, mercy, patience, kindness, longsuffering, and every other thing that God is and does. That Paul is not exaggerating is clear from the fact that in this letter he repeatedly mentions the fullness of God’s blessings to those who belong to Him through Christ. He tells us that the church is Christ’s “body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). He tells us that “He who descended is Himself also He who ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things” (4:10). And he tells us that God wants every believer to “be filled with the Spirit” (5:18).
Plēroō means to make full, or fill to the full, and is used many times in the New Testament. It speaks of total dominance. A person filled with rage is totally dominated by hatred. A person filled with happiness is totally dominated by joy. To be filled up to all the fulness of God therefore means to be totally dominated by Him, with nothing left of self or any part of the old man. By definition, then, to be filled with God is to be emptied of self. It is not to have much of God and little of self, but all of God and none of self. This is a recurring theme in Ephesians. Here Paul talks about the fulness of God; in 4:13 it is “the fulness of Christ”; and in 5:18 it is the fulness of the Spirit.