Ephesians 3:14-21 – Growing up in Christ – Week 7
Working out the dimensions of Christ’s love
Introduction
We’re back to Ephesians this week, our last week in Chapter 3, so while we’re more than halfway through the series, after today, we’re halfway through the book itself.
This week’s reading begins with the words “For this reason”, which means what follows flows from the thoughts of what we looked at last time, that the mystery that was planned and hinted at all along has been revealed. That is, it was always God’s plan to bring the promises in our Old Testament to fulfilment in Jesus, that the church is like the shop window, if you will, that God is using to display God’s plan. The presence of this church, this new humanity, is a pledge of the coming healing of all division and disruption that God is bringing about, that the cosmos will be restored to harmony in Jesus.
That sounds like a big job, a high calling. A privileged participation.
Key to this, the author we’re calling Paul says, is being rooted in the Love of God.
It’s a bit hard for our imaginations to grasp. Paul knows we may need some help.
So our passage can help us see that for us to take in the dimensions of Christ’s love, we can work out our understanding in prayer, helped by Christ, our inner person, and as we put down roots in that love, we find fullness of life with God.
Prayer is where we learn who God is
So Paul says, For this reason, I kneel before the Father.
He is praying again. Although, as we’ve said previously, the whole of the last three chapters has been more or less a prayer for the Ephesians. All along it has been praising God and praying for the young church.
The letter’s been talking about big ideas and God’s work on a grand cosmic scale. We could say these first three chapters have been all about doctrine, or right belief, or as we did at the start of the series, the ingredients for our cake.
We may tend to think of doctrine as perhaps something cold, hard, strict, impersonal.
But it seems that Paul thinks the best sort of doctrine is that worked out in the warmth of very personal prayer and worship. Something that is done in relation to God and with others.
Paul isn’t downloading all of this to the Ephesians in a lecture, perhaps you could call it a sermon, but it is most definitely a prayer.
These days if we want to communicate big ideas, we might write a book or deliver a lecture. We’d probably make a podcast series or distil it down into a 10-minute TED talk.
Maybe, we’d even craft a sermon series around it.
While we can say that Paul writes a letter, he shows us that he is working out this God business in the form of worshipful prayer.
The inference is our prayer, our worship, shapes who we are and how we understand God and how we are in the world.
In our modern world, there is much scepticism about prayer. Whether it makes any difference, who it’s for, and why we would do it.
We can pray for someone or something, and at the same time feel like we’ve done nothing.
But if prayer is the place where God and human beings meet, then Paul would say it is something we have to keep returning to.
More than that, it is where we work out our understanding and experience of this expansive love of Christ.
We might think of this in terms of relationships; we figure out and experience the depth of love and friendship in our relationships by how we open ourselves up to them and they to us.
When we have lifelong friendships or are married to someone, we may know we are good friends, and we may know cognitively that the other person says they love us. But it’s as we open ourselves to the other that we discover just how good a friend they are, and the depth of their love for us.
In prayer, we are vulnerable with God. Even kneeling, as Paul describes himself doing, is a posture of defencelessness. When we kneel physically or in our heart’s posture, we are not in a position to flex our muscles. We are recognising this is a relationship.
This prayer is personal, honest.
It’s a place where we discover the dimensions of God’s love as we wrestle, cry out and whimper. As we praise, celebrate and simply be and behold and to be held.
Prayer is where we learn who God is.
Helped by Christ, our inner person
Paul is praying here, too, because he thinks we, and he, need some help.
If the Church is going to become an effective window display for God’s wisdom, if the Church is a preview of God’s plan of a restored and renewed creation, then it is going to need to be shaped and energised by God.
So, Paul intercedes for the Ephesian church, he prays for them. He prays for their energising, their strengthening.
Paul prays that the Ephesians would be strengthened in their inner being. Or as the New English Translation puts it, the inner person, that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith.
This being strengthened in our inner person may sound like it’s talking about increasing our personal resilience or our fortitude. We talk about people having an inner strength.
But Paul isn’t praying that the Ephesians become stoic, that they keep calm and carry on.
He’s praying that the Spirit of Jesus would live in their hearts through faith.
Christian culture sometimes talks about inviting Jesus to live in our hearts, like maybe like something special we carry around with us. Something that brings us comfort and assurance.
In our me-centred world, it can be too easy to make this individualistic. Perhaps something private. But this is more than just the feeling of Jesus in your heart.
It’s important that we don’t forget the grand cosmic scale of God’s presence from our previous chapters of God’s expansive family that obliterates our human boundaries. It is this family, the Church, that is Christ’s body after all and Paul more often than not talks about us being in Christ than Christ being in us.
But Jesus does make his home in our inner being. We talk of our union with Christ. This is why St Teresa of Avila could speak of the Interior Castle, and our Soul’s or innermost beings’ journey toward transformational Union with God.
As followers of Jesus, our inner person is Messiah Jesus. That is what strengthens and renews us in our inner being. The presence of Christ.
Paul prays for the Ephesians, and for us, that Christ makes his permanent home in our hearts. Not our fleshy, blood-pumping heart, but at the core of our personalities, at the centre of our existence. So that through this relationship, this fusion, this union of faith,: Who Jesus is: his way of life, his way of dying and his resurrection, shapes our living, our values, our speech, our action, and our loving.
When we pray then, plumbing the depths and attempting to scale the heights of this divine love, we are not alone. Jesus, our inner person is there. Praying with us. Ministering to us. We are participating with Him and He with us.
But, not just when we pray, this power of Jesus is “at work within us”. Always working.
Throughout his life, Scottish Presbyterian Minister John Baillie wrote thoughtfully about the questions of how and why we know God. In his brief theology of sleep, he said we “wake up better [people] than when we went to bed”. He wasn’t thinking physiologically. There are many reasons why our bodies need sleep. But through the lens of faith, he had in mind the renewing and healing work of Christ, our inner person at work in us while we rest.
That may seem a bit far-fetched. But… Paul is, after all, talking about the God who is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. Surrendering to sleep can be an act of prayer, trusting in Jesus, our inner person, to strengthen us for the day ahead.
Christ, our inner person, helps us experience and know the dimensions of God’s love.
To find fullness of life with God.
The last two verses are a doxology, a closing of this prayer that has been going on since the beginning of Chapter 1.
It ends where it began, with praise to God.
That God would be glorified in Christ Jesus, and in the Church, throughout all generations, forever and ever.
The church, in the very same breath as Christ, the Church is spoken of as the dwelling of God’s glory.
The church, the imperfect, shop window that we are, is paired with Christ.
Christ and Church, Church and Christ. By now, as we’ve gone through chapters 1 to 3, we can see that Paul cannot see one without the other.
Church and Christ are inextricably intertwined.
Throughout the New Testament, this is the case, but more here in Ephesians than anywhere else. Eleven times Christ and Church are paired together. In Paul’s imagination, they are inseparable.
Christ and His people are so united, they can only be spoken of as one.
Christ-in-His-church.
That sounds an awful lot like the city we live in, doesn’t it? Christchurch?
Maybe that could be our illustration.
The name of our city is effectively a compound word, a single word made of two other words with their own meanings. But that doesn’t mean when we’re talking about the place where we live, we can drop one of those words, couldn’t drop one half of it and for it to still have a valid meaning.
When someone asks us “where we live”, we couldn’t answer ‘Christ’, or ‘church’ for short. However, those would be fantastic theological answers!
To be understood, we must say ‘Christchurch’, and if we need to shorten it, we may say CH-CH. But even there, both parts are acknowledged as the whole.
For us to talk about Church, we must talk about Christ, and to speak of Christ, we must speak of His church.
Paul prays that the church, that we, may be filled with the fullness of God.
This fullness can more than compensate for our imperfection or insufficiency.
We travelled the story of Moses last week, with all of his inadequacies and weaknesses. But, like Moses, our problems and our weaknesses don’t define us. God does.
Paul knows there is no perfect church, no church not filled with broken people who mess up.
A belief that, a few hundred years later, drove Augustine to speak up against Donatus Magnus and his followers, the Donatists, who believed that the minister’s sinfulness invalidated any sacraments they administered. For them, the purity, or rather the impurity, of the minister jeopardised the faithful. But Augustine saw the sufficiency of the fullness of God, whose power is made perfect in weakness.
Paul knows this, and knows God’s boundless grace, but Paul is praying for signs of a church maturing, of God’s people growing up in Christ and in this resurrection life.
As the Church tastes more of Jesus—His saving work, His Spirit’s presence, His boundless love—it grows into the community God intended.
We grow into the fullness of God’s self.
Closing
As Paul’s prayer is worked out in our lives, as we explore and experience and come to know more fully the dimensions of God’s love,
We begin in prayer: Prayer is where we learn who God is
We stay centred in prayer: Helped by Christ, our inner person
And we end up living a praying life: living in the fullness of God’s self.
And all glory is to God, down all the generations, through all millennia!
Amen.