in order that He may give to you according to the riches of His glory, power to be strong through His Spirit, to the inner-man, for Christ to dwell through the faith in your hearts, being firmly rooted and grounded in love, in order that you may have strength enough to grasp for yourself, along with all the holy ones, what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ, which is surpassing of knowledge, in order that you may be filled into all the fullness of God.
In this passage, there are three "in orders" or 'hina' in the Greek. Here, they are used to show what the desired outcome of the previous statement is. Now Ephesians 3:16-19 is a prayer prayed by Paul for the Ephesians. Borrowing from Mark Dever in a sermon on Paul's prayer in I Thessalonians, I find it interesting that the thing Paul seems most concerned about is the spiritual health of the Ephesians...specifically, their knowledge of the love of Christ. So what can we as believers take away from Paul's prayer?
I believe we see a 'prayer chain' if you will, a prayer to pray and results that are to be desired from that prayer. So, hopefully, I won't botch this, but here we go.
We pray for the Spirit to strengthen us in the inner man. We can't live this life on our own. We need help. If righteousness could be achieved on our own accord, there was no need for Christ. And, dare I say, when we attempt to live the Christian life on our own, we render useless the power of God, proclaim with our actions that we have no need for Jesus, and reap the fruits of what we alone can accomplish (which, by the way, Isaiah says is filthy rags). Instead, the Spirit guides, encourages, strengthens, and accomplishes the Christian life for us, if only we will get out of the way and let Him. It's kinda like the squirrel from Hoodwinked. They good guys needed to get a message to the cops at the bottom of the mountain, but it couldn't be accomplished by anyone there on their own accord. So, the fed the already hyper squirrel some coffee and away he went, thriving on a strength that was not his own. Now, it's just an illustration, and ALL illustration break down, but the truth is there. We need a strength that is not our own.
Second, we pray for this strength so that we may grasp God's love. I've been making up a couple of chapel assignments the past few days, and one sermon I listened to was all about increasing our trust in God's compassion. God's love is vast, unmeasured, tried and true, or so and so the song goes. It is a love unlike any of us will ever find on this earth. I love my son, but not like my Dad loves me. Your father loves you, but not like your Father does. Spouses, brothers, sisters, boyfriends and girlfriends...they may claim to love you, but the best and deepest love comes from the Father. What's even more, the love of God is so deep that even though we seek and should continue to seek to know it, it's unknowable. I don't think that Paul is saying we'll never know a bit of it, but that we can make knowing God's love our life-long pursuit (and we should), but we will still never grasp the whole of it. Oh what a wonderful love. But notice, we need to be strengthened in the inner-man to know this love (remember the first part of the prayer?)
Lastly, we pray for the Spirit to strengthen us in order that we may know God so that grasping God's love would fill us up. Eric Samuel Timm from no1underground.com has a painting that fascinates me. It is a painting of a man with a hole in his chest that somewhat resembles the form of a dove. Beside him are three shapes, a pyramid, a cube and a sphere. His intention with the painting? To try and communicate the fact that we all have a God-shaped vacuum in our lives, and nothing of this world can fill it (or something along those lines is the way that Pascal would have said it). The thing that is most interesting, perhaps, is that we can try and fill our lives with other things. Other shapes can be crammed into our vacuum, but it never fills to the full. It always leaves one wanting more. And so more and more we try to consume. And yet, it never fills us. I heard an evangelist named Jamie Dukes (who knew some very wealthy individuals) saw that those individuals (two specifically named) were the most miserable people he'd ever met. Both of them were lost. Both of them had more money than we could spend. They consumed in order to fill their void, but were missing the One that could really fill it. God fills to the point of overflowing. He fills according to His abundance. He fills us up exceedingly. Why would we want anything more?
Maybe if we are strengthened in the inner man in order to grasp God's unknowable love so that we can be filled by God, we will begin to see a mighty work in our lives and the lives of our churches. I am going to make it a point to begin praying this for my life and the life of those I get the opportunity to pour into. Will you join me in this endeavor?
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