Ephesians 3:14-21, July 24-30, Year B:

This passage is another of Paul's wonderful pastoral prayers.  This prayer hearkens back to the beginning of the chapter and the thought of love.  Paul prays for Others, though a prisoner himself.  Prayer is powerful--sometimes especially so amid restrictions and adversity.  Prayer is as necessary and as vital to the life of the church as is sound teaching.  Prayer is a chosen tool of God, and must be a deliberate act of all God's people.  It is an act of worship, a means of building spiritual strength to resist evil.  Let's look specifically at the Requests Paul makes of God in this prayer.

 

He prays that the Ephesians would be strengthened in the inner man.  (See Romans 7:22.)  Paul recognizes that there are stages of growth in the Christian life.  He desires that these Ephesians would be strengthened and enabled to overcome the temptations around them--temptations of daily living, of false doctrine, of compromise with the secular powers.  In order to do this, Christ must be at home within us.  We must be strengthened by the in-dwelling Holy Spirit.  We must always be, in a sense, ascending with Christ, in communion with Him.  We should be always eager to respond to Christ.  The church should be supporting us in this.  In fact, for the Christian, the church should be the most unthreatening place to be.  

 

Paul prays that these Christians would be apprehending the love of Christ in all its dimensions.  Consider the length of His love--it is eternal.  Consider the breadth of it--for every age and culture.  Consider the height of it--as Christ ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God.  Consider the depth of it--as Christ descended into hell and died for our sins.  Christ's love is infinite in all its dimensions.  We cannot possibly understand or exhaust that imagery.  Yet, Paul desires that we grasp this "according to the riches of His glory," a concept we can only contemplate in wonder.

 

And Paul wants us to be established together in this love--not taking this fellowship for granted.    His final ascription in this chapter reminds us that God fills all in all.

 

In his pastoral prayers, Paul does not pray for the physical welfare of the believers, or the financial prosperity of those early Christians.  Those things are not of primary significance to the spiritual welfare of the body; and it is the spiritual welfare of the church for which Paul is mainly concerned.  He recognized that it is not always possible for the Christian community to eliminate physical woes or financial deprivation.  It is true today as well.  The church cannot always take away the hurt and the pain or the effects of sin.  What we can do is pray for the strength to cope with those conditions.  What we can do is pray to bear witness to that incomprehensible love of God--the God who fills all in all.