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3 Incredible Requests Paul Prays for the Ephesians (and for You)
For the Fullness of God and His Glory
The immediacy of our daily needs can veil thinking about the needs of the world and our playing a role in the betterment of things for all of humanity. We need to plan for children’s braces, the ACT, and college applications. There are later years past retirement for which we must make financial planning, and aged parents for whom we must care. There are present health issues we must monitor, decisions needing to be made about job transitions, and the realities of many forms of deep disappointments and pains that occupy our feelings and thoughts.
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to suffering and concerns for immediate needs, as one who was imprisoned at the time of the writing of Ephesians. As he prayed for the Lord to work his blessing into the lives of the Ephesians, he asked for God to do for believers things that both would fully encompass the issues of regular life while also using the individual Ephesians, their church, and us to give our all to participating in something far grander than routine, immediate concerns. In his prayer, Paul gives insight into the very reasons we exist and why and how our existence must meet the challenges to the gospel going to the ends of the earth. For the apostle, we are here to experience the fullness of God and to live for God’s glory now, in the future generations, and forever.
Paul’s prayer makes three simple-sounding yet incredible requests for the Ephesians and us, and we should direct our prayers and our lives to these very ends: He prays for God to strengthen us, for God to make us know his love, and for God to be glorified.
Ephesians
Eric C. Redmond
In this 12-week study through the book of Ephesians, Eric Redmond opens our eyes to Paul’s teaching about the astonishing grace of God that enables us to walk in love, holiness, and wisdom.
1. Paul prays for us to be strengthened (Eph. 3:14–17a).
Doing what brings God glory has led to Paul suffering imprisonment. The Ephesians needed strengthening so as not to be discouraged by the reality of Paul being treated like a criminal for proclaiming the gospel.
Through Paul’s faithfulness before God, two things happened: (1) the Gentiles heard the message that revealed to them the same inheritance as Jewish believers by the Spirit’s working through faith, and (2) the mystery of Christ’s work to redeem believers was made known even in the realms of the unseen spiritual beings. For the Ephesians and us likewise to be faithful to God in the face of potential suffering for the calling of Christ will take strength that is beyond human abilities.
Twice in Ephesians, Paul directs this kind of prayer to the Father. In 1 Corinthians 15:28, Paul writes that in the end Christ will hand over to the Father all his own reign so that the Father might be all in all. Paul, humbly, desires the Creator of all persons and angelic beings to reach into his unlimited repository of wealth in glory to give us strength.
When we make our confession, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” and when Paul bows to this same Father, we are falling before the one far more powerful than the billions of galaxies of stars he commands. It is he whom Paul seeks to strengthen us for tasks related to the full universe he has made. And in his strength, we can face all challenges posed in this life while not losing sight of participating in his plan that is greater than any one of our individual lives.
2. Paul prays for God to make us know his love (Eph. 3:17b–19a).
Already having love as that which steadies the believer, like a tree steadied by its roots and a house laid on a firm foundation, Paul’s request seeks strengthened ability to comprehend or grasp something that is beyond grasping. The four terms of measurement point to the vastness of what Paul wants believers to comprehend. Yet he describes the love of Christ to be beyond the ability to be known fully in this world. Analogously, it like asking a three-year old to grasp the mechanics of quantum physics, the difference being that a savant possibly could grasp quantum physics because it is knowable. But the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love God has for us goes beyond any ability to fully grasp.
All this rooting and grounding and comprehending and knowing of that which surpasses human knowing is so that each of us might be filled up with God to the fullest measure in our knowledge and experience. We need a powerful working of Spirit to assure us of Christ’s love when it seems like all the underworld has been released against us.
We are here to experience the fullness of God and to live for God’s glory now, in the future generations, and forever.
3. Paul prays for God to be glorified (Eph. 3:20–21).
Everything in this prayer is moving toward us being full of the fullness of God with the glory of God as the reason for all. The fullness of God is penultimate—and that takes care of us having the ability to make it through this life. But God being glorified in all is ultimate, which drives us in this life and the life to come.
Again, as Paul bows, he grabs a full cache of associated ideas to modify the singular request. The request is, “Now to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus.” But the surrounding modifiers magnify the basic request so we understand that Paul is again talking about us being part of something cosmos-sized and worth pursuing in this current age.
As a benediction, Ephesians 3:20–21 close out the request in Ephesians 3:14-19 and all of Ephesians 1:1-3:21. The conclusion of all Paul has said from Ephesians 1:1 about the working of God in salvation from before the foundation of the world through the making of one new man in Christ is about God being glorified in his church and in Christ. Christ stepping into our deadness in sin to make us alive by mercy and save us by giving us grace and faith in Ephesians 2 is all about God being glorified in the church and in Christ.
Everything that has happened in life toward us since the time we have trusted Christ is so that we would see God’s glory in the church and his glory in Christ as the reasons for our being. Our being here is not to win every argument; prove to our parents we are not failures; make life so that our children can compete at the highest academic, musical, sport, and creative arts levels; that we could be blissfully married; or awarded with the highest awards in our arenas of service. All of these things are nice; if the Lord gives them to us, we should enjoy them, and if we have responsibilities in those arenas, we must be faithful to them. But none of that is ultimate. The motivation, purpose, and goal of life is the glory of God in us and in Christ, or Paul would have prayed something else for us.
The prayer asks that God be glorified—that he be magnified and displayed as the greatest thing—perfect, more lovely, more beautiful, and more desirable than all; for him to be praised for all, and for this to be done for generations beyond the Ephesians’ finite lifetimes, and for generations beyond our lifetimes. So Paul speaks of him (God) who is able to do “far more abundantly.” For “far more abundantly,” Paul coins a word made up of three words that, when strung together, speak of doing something to an extraordinary degree, involving a considerable excess over what would be expected.1 It means infinitely beyond.
On these same verses, N. T. Wright, New Testament scholar and former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, writes,
Read verse 20 carefully. Then think of what God might do in you and through you—you as a community, you as an individual. Now reflect on the fact that God is perfectly capable of doubling that, tripling that, going far beyond it in ways that you would look back at the present moment and wonder how you could be so short-sighted.2
God is to be glorified in our thinking of what to ask him to be in us, do through and for us, and give to each of us and each local assembly of believers. He is to be glorified the same way in those who will come in the generations after us, our children, and our grandchildren, wherever the name of Christ is spoken, and for all eternity. For this to happen, we need all of God we can experience—the full assurance of the incredible way Christ loves us and the full power of the Spirit of God working in us.
Notes:
- Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 688.
- Tom Wright, Paul for Everyone: The Prison Letters: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), 61.
Eric Redmond is the author of Ephesians: A 12-Week Study.
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