Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Prayer from Ephesians 3:14-21
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
This is the Word of God. Let us bow in prayer.
Grant now, heavenly Father, that the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts may be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Children are great mimics. So much of what they learn in those early years is straight mimicry. My daughter the other day went up to my mother and asked for something. She received it, and then she gave something back, and my wife said, “Thank you.” Tiffany replied, “Oh, think nothing of it.” Then I realized she had gotten that from me.
Over the years, I’ve developed a whole variety of ways of saying, “You’re welcome.” “Think nothing of it,” or “You’re more than welcome,” and so on. So to hear a 3-year-old come up and say, “You’re more than welcome” is a bit like hearing an echo. But it’s not simply little children. Older children do the same thing. It’s simply that they begin to expand the horizons of what and whom they imitate. One of the major traumas when children go to school is that they start hearing words that you never taught them, and of course they bring those home too. They’re just imitating.
But it’s not just children of school age. When you start worrying about your teenager, it’s not that this teenager is becoming so wonderfully independent, as he or she may think. Oh no. The whole dilemma of the teenage years is that now there is so much peer pressure to be like a whole lot of other people who also think they’re very independent but who are, in fact, like a lot of sheep and follow each other into the latest trends and fads.
But we adults are above all that, aren’t we? Not according to Madison Avenue. Not according to advertising campaigns. Why do the companies spend millions and millions of dollars a year showing you this beautiful woman drinking Coke? It’s not because they’re so impressed with her beauty themselves. They want you to drink Coke, and somehow they think that you will think that if only you drink Coke, you will be beautiful too. It must work. They wouldn’t spend that kind of money if it didn’t.
So what happens as we get older is not that we copy less. In fact, what happens is simply that we have a greater variety of people and things to copy, so we are less dependent on copying just one of them. Also when we get older we start making decisions about what we copy, but even fairly mature people can make some terrible choices, even unwitting choices in that respect.
Before I got married (and I was rather late in that business), my best critic was my mother. One time I came home after being away for several years and preached in the area. My mother heard me. She said, “Don, where did you get that disgusting leer?” I said, “What disgusting leer?” “Well,” she said, “every once in a while you stop in the middle of a sermon and you go …”
I stopped to think about it, and I discovered, as I sort of analyzed what was going on, that I had picked up this mannerism quite without thinking from a chap who was a preacher whom I greatly admired. He had a way of stopping in the middle of a sermon and sort of pausing reflectively, and he screwed up his face in a very thoughtful sort of way. Only when I did it, without even realizing I was doing it, it didn’t look thoughtful; it looked stupid.
What I’m saying is that even in the spiritual arena, a great deal of what we learn we learn by mimicry. How did you learn to pray? Well, if you were reared in a Christian home, you learned to pray the way my daughter learns to pray: sheer rote. She hears us pray. She prays it back. “Tiffany’s turn!” she says, and then she repeats exactly the sort of thing I would say. She doesn’t have a clue what the words mean, but that’s how she’s learning to pray.
If you get converted a little later and you have no church background, then the way you learn to pray is still basically the same way. You go to church and you hear certain prayers out of the prayer book, and then you hear others pray spontaneously in a house group or whatever, and you discover that in certain backgrounds people pray with “thees” and “thous” and other people pray with “yous.”
You listen and listen, and then eventually, somewhere along the line, you want to speak up in public at a prayer meeting, and you utter your first public prayer. You feel very relieved once it’s done, and you learned to do it by listening to other people. But as in virtually every area of life, it becomes increasingly important for the Christian to choose the model. We learn by modeling. There’s no doubt about it. Other ways too, but a great deal by modeling.
It becomes extremely important, therefore, that we choose our models well, and in our praying, if we wish to renovate our praying, we can do no better than to examine thoughtfully, carefully, humbly, again and again, the prayers in Scripture, and we will learn to pray. We need to read the psalms, listen to the prayer of Solomon, and study the prayers of Paul with these sorts of questions in mind. “What are they praying for? Why are they praying it? What are the foci of their concerns?”
Now the prayer before us is only one prayer in the New Testament, but it is to that I wish to direct your attention this morning. It has two central petitions. It has two fundamental grounds to those petitions, and it ends in a moving doxology. The two central petitions are both for power. First, Paul prays that God might strengthen us with power through his Spirit in our inner being. That is what he says in verse 16. “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.”
A study of Paul’s prayers reveals how often he prays for power in some sense. Already, for instance, in this epistle (chapter 1, verse 18), we find Paul saying, “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.” The same theme of power recurs in 6:10 and in many other passages in Paul. Paul is interested in power.
Now the general parameters of this request, of this petition, are straightforward. The agent who mediates this power to us Paul understands to be the Spirit. He says, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” Moreover, the sphere in which we are to be strengthened, the sphere in which this power is to operate, is what the NIV here calls your inner being, literally the inner man.
The same phrase is used in 2 Corinthians 4:16 and following and gives us some idea of what is meant. There Paul says, “Though outwardly …” That is, in the outer man, to use the exact expression. “… we are wasting away, yet inwardly …” That is, in the inner man. “… we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.”
In other words, the outer man, what I am physically, is becoming more and more decrepit. I take a shower, 20 or 30 more hairs go down the plughole, and I’ll never see them replaced. I’m getting bald. I can’t do what I could do 15 years ago. I have arthritis in three joints. I am heading for the grave. Now I may not get there quite as quickly as some of your faculty members, but that’s the direction in which I’m heading. I’m wasting away.
The question is what happens to the inner man? That is, what’s left of you when your outer man has gone. There are some old people, for instance, who, as they get older, become more and more crotchety. They become miserable. I’m not talking about those who suffer from some organic disease, perhaps Alzheimer’s or something like that. I’m talking about those who just become more miserable, and you have a profound suspicion that as the outer man is wasting away, what you are seeing is simply more of what they are really like.
That is to say, the constraints of civility imposed by a normal healthy body become stripped away, and what they have really been all these years stands out: seething, bitter people. On the other hand, you also find some senior saints who, as the body gets weaker, simply burn more brightly. Their spirit, somehow the inner man, what they truly are, becomes more and more holy, more and more loving, more and more gentle, even humorous, as the outer man wastes away.
This inner man, then, this inner being, is the sharpest focus of our existence. It is what is left when the outer man disappears. It is what we truly are. If this is strengthened by God’s power, we are well equipped to handle merely external vicissitudes. But we must ask two further questions about this petition. What purpose does this power have? Many people want power in some “triumphalistic” sense.
Christians want power sometimes to be thought powerful. They want power so that they will be powerful in their ministry, which presumably means they will have a good congregation, or they want power so they can win many people to Christ or so they will be influential in the denomination or so that somehow they will appear in the eyes of others to walk above the damaging temptations and the wounds and hurts of lesser mortals.
These people are great conquering Christians. They know all of the secrets of the victorious Christian life. They are powerful Christians. But, in fact, this text directs the power to a specific end. What purpose does this power have? Paul writes, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” That’s all. What does it mean?
In this passage, there is a distinction made between the Spirit and Christ. In a passage like John 14, the Spirit is understood to be the one by whom the Father and the Son presence themselves with us. The Spirit is the means by which God lives in us, but here there is a distinction made in their roles. The Spirit is the one here who mediates the power, and Christ is the one who lives in our hearts through faith. What does it mean?
I think we begin to understand more of the idiom if we remember how when someone takes up residence in a dwelling (and this is a strong verb here; they take up residence and live there, dwell there), they shape that residence. If you move into a home and you live there for more than a few weeks or a few months, with time you begin to shape that home. You make it yours.
You put on wallpaper here. You might knock out a wall there. You put in a few flowerbeds in the garden. You decide you don’t like that wing, if you’re there long enough, and you smash it down. You put on a new roof. You perhaps put in a study in the basement. You put some paint in here. You don’t like the cupboards in the kitchen. You rip them out and put something else in … especially if you’re handy. If you don’t know which end of a screwdriver to hold, how much you do depends on your budget.
But basically, every family in time makes a place their own. Their inhabiting of that place inevitably shapes that place. So also when Christ inhabits us, he shapes us. This is, in effect, a way of saying that the power of God mediated through the Spirit will bring us to Christian maturity. If Christ inhabits our hearts through faith, we will be conformed to him. We will be shaped like him. We will be more and more mature.
The thought is similar, although the idiom is quite different, to one of the much loved expressions of the Puritans taken from Paul’s language in Galatians, chapter 4, verse 19. There Paul is in an agony until Christ, he says, is formed again in the Galatians. This, Paul says, is brought about by faith.
In other words, this power that Paul prays for goes beyond merely forensic Christianity. It goes beyond mere questions of justification to life-transforming vitality. That is what Paul prays for the Ephesians. But with what measure of resources is this prayer to be answered? It is one thing to ask. What of the supply? Paul says, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being.” For Paul, the glorious riches that are in God are ultimately those benefits that have been secured by Christ.
You find the same sort of expression in the well-known passage in Philippians, chapter 4. “My God will supply all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” That is, the glorious riches are, as it were, all of the blessings that accrue to us because of Christ. Because Christ has died and risen again, there is, as it were, a tremendous supply of life-transforming power, which is mediated to us by the Spirit, with the end that Christ inhabits us, with the end that we become spiritually mature, and that is what Paul prays for.
Now what is the second petition? Again it is a petition for power. It is a petition for power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God. Paul prays in the second half of verse 17, “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.” Once again, the thought finds antecedents earlier in the epistle.
Paul understands that the Ephesians have already been rooted and established in love. Indeed, if we go back to chapter 1, verses 3 and following, we begin to understand what Paul means. There he begins, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”
In love he predestined us. That is to say, we have been rooted and grounded in love. That is already the heritage we enjoy if we are Christians at all. Now Paul simply presupposes that. “All right,” he says, “I pray that you, having already been rooted and established in love, may now have power, together with all the saints … not in some splendid isolation, but together with all the saints … to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
This is a most remarkable prayer. This is not a prayer that we should love Christ more. That’s worth praying, but it’s not Paul’s prayer here. It’s a prayer rather that we should better grasp his love for us. He says, in effect, “Already you know you have been rooted and grounded in love. It’s a creedal point. But creedal points aren’t enough. I want you to have spiritual power to be able to grasp it.”
In fact, Paul runs out of ways of dealing with this notion of the love of God that are adequate, so he resorts to metaphor. “How do you measure love? Weigh it by the kilo? Length? An acre of love? Let me try with linear measure. How long? How wide? How high? How deep? Then he uses paradox. He says, “To know this love that surpasses knowledge.”
“I’ve run out of words,” he says, “to give you this in a kind of cut-and-dried formulation, a bit of knowledge you adopt for yourself and integrate into your theological package, but I want you to have power to know it, to experience it, to feel it beyond merely a creedal description.” You see, if the first danger was of a forensic Christianity devoid of power that transforms, the second danger is of an intellectual Christianity devoid of power that makes you know and feel the love of God. I suspect that we sometimes sing this theme better than we articulate it in other ways.
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star
And reaches to the deepest hell.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
Or were the sky of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
R.A. Torrey records that on one occasion, as this Scripture began to permeate his consciousness, he sought the Lord’s face day by day in his quiet devotions, asking that the Lord God would show to him his love. One day, as he lay prostrate before him, he was so flooded with such an overwhelming consciousness of God’s love for him that in tears he begged God to turn it off.
I think sometimes this knowledge of the love of God is experienced in suffering. Perhaps especially in suffering. I was a very sickly child when I grew up. I was in and out of the hospital. I spent months and months and months away from school. That was the only good part of it. I recall one day, after I’d been home from the hospital for another bout, waking up at home in my parents’ bed in the afternoon.
There as I laid in bed, my mother sat there, and she was weeping. Eleven-year-olds are heartless beings. I woke up and said, “Oh, Mom, you do love me,” which absolutely finished her off. She left the room. But I think I began to understand, to grasp the dimensions of their love, of the nights without sleep, of the endless care and attention, when I was so sick.
Now what’s important to notice again is that Paul sees an end to this prayer, a purpose. Listen again. Paul says, “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge …” Why? “… that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Again, that’s a Pauline locution that basically speaks of Christian maturity. That’s all he means. In other words, that you may be spiritually mature. The same sort of expression recurs in the next chapter, chapter 4, verse 13. There in a slightly different context, Paul wants certain things to take place in order that we all may become mature, “attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” A very similar expression.
What that means is that Paul understands that you and I cannot be mature. We cannot reach the fullness of the measure of Christ unless we have the power to grasp, to know, the limitless dimensions of the love of God. I’m a very cerebral person. I can debate. I can think through things, but the great danger in all of that is that somehow we domesticate theology and end up domesticating God.
I am not mature as a Christian if I can merely articulate Christian truth. That is no necessary proof of Christian maturity. I must ask myself, “Am I overwhelmed by the grace of God? Am I overwhelmed by the love of God?”
To grasp how wide and long and high and deep
The love of Christ, experience it when
Mere knowledge bursts its categories, then
Escape the fragile frame of language, reap
The richest crop salvation brings, and heap
Up memories of a sea of love, again
And yet again cascading o’er us—men
Can know no other bliss so rich and deep.
Lord God, in love you have established us
And rooted us in soil no less fine
Not single plants exposed to every gust
Of wind, but all the saints drink love sublime.
Make me to know—a creature hewn from sod—
The measure of all fullness found in God.
I began to understand what the connection was between felt love and Christian maturity when the Trinity faculty member with whom I drive into work every day and his wife started to foster children. They have two of their own, two girls in their teens, and they started taking in kids. They’ve had various children. They prefer children just a few days old, but on occasion they have taken in some tough cases.
On one occasion, about two and a half years ago, they took in a pair of black boys, twins. These boys were just 2 years old. They’d been born in the ghetto. These twins, although they were 2 years old, were judged irremediably psychologically damaged. They were not speaking. They were full of hate and violence. It was thought that their emotional disturbance was irreversible. They had lived in 17 homes and had already been psychologically and sexually abused.
Perry and Sandy picked them up. It was only supposed to be for six weeks, but nobody else would take them, so they had them for a year and a half until they were finally adopted. In that year and a half, those two little boys became normal little boys, for there was firm discipline and immense love, disciplined love, and those boys felt it. For you and I know that apart from the intervening grace of God, human beings cannot grow up to be mature unless they grow up in an environment of secure love.
That is why Western society is going to reap the whirlwind, for our homes are crumbling, and many of our homes where both parents are present are so full of spite and hatred and selfishness, with so little regard for the children, that we are producing a generation of emotional cripples. But precisely the same thing is true with respect to Christian maturity. You cannot be mature unless you know the love of God.
The difference is that in the human environment, very frequently these children grow up as cripples because it is the parents who are withholding that love. In the Christian model, God displays his love toward us in Christ Jesus, and we don’t want to be with him enough to explore its dimensions. We do not pray enough to ask for the power to know, to grasp, the limitless dimensions of the love of God.
Dare I ask you, when was the last time you prayed either of these petitions for yourself, your family, your church? Could it be that part of the spiritual weakness of the church lies in the fact that our prayers are too selfishly focused on incidentals instead of being focused on those things that are central to Paul, central to Scripture, central to the mind of God? Could it be that we have prayed for superficial things and ignored the central things?
Could it be that we have not because we ask not, and that when we ask we ask amiss in order to answer our own petty needs? I cannot speak for here. It’s probably a little less so in a church governed by a prayer book, but in many churches in America, there are many, many, many more hours of prayer devoted to somebody’s pain in a big toe than to these central issues in the church.
Now more quickly, let me note for you the two bases for these petitions, since they are extremely important. The first is bound up with the words for this reason in verse 14. “For this reason,” Paul says, “I kneel before the Father.” What reason? If I understand the flow of Ephesians correctly, you have to drop back to chapter 3, verse 1, where Paul says again, “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles …” Then he breaks off.
I think he was going to move into the prayer. “For this reason,” he says, “I, Paul, the prisoner, kneel before the Father and pray.” But before he gets to that, he breaks off the sentence and says a little bit more about the nature of his own ministry. That suggests, then, that the “this reason” to which he refers stands before 3:1. In other words, the reason that grounds the praying in 3:14 and following stands before 3:1. What reason then? Well, the reason is the entire structure of theology he has outlined in chapters 1–2. What is that reason?
Be of good cheer. I am not now about to embark on an exposition of chapters 1–2, but perhaps I could summarize it like this. Paul’s argument is that before time began, God, in his own predestinating and loving purposes, decided to bring together Jew and Gentile into one new humanity, one new organ, one new man, brought together by the cross work and mediating power of Christ, removing any enmity between them, to constitute a new temple, a new being, a new humanity that has access to the Father by one Spirit.
Then he ends up (chapter 2, verse 19), writing to Gentiles, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens …” That is, from the covenants of God associated with the Jewish people. “… but now you are fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. For this reason I kneel before the Father and I pray such-and-such.”
For what reason? For this reason: that it is the very purpose of God to build this new humanity, this church. In other words, Paul is simply saying, “When I pray these kinds of things, I am praying specifically in line with God’s expressed purposes from eternity past to eternity come. This is exactly what God’s purpose is: to build a church, to build this new humanity.”
Much of our praying is so narrow because it is not in line with God’s expressed purposes in Scripture. I don’t know whether God’s purpose is to heal Mrs. Smith’s big toe, but I do know that God’s purposes are for the maturity of the church. I do know that God’s purposes are that you and I, as Christians, should be growing in power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God, should be growing in power so that Christ might dwell in our hearts through faith.
Those are central things, and we may be assured that God will answer them, precisely because they are in line with his expressed and revealed purposes. “For this reason,” Paul says, “I kneel, and this is what I pray.” But there is a second basis to this petition. It is bound up with the fact that the God whom we address is the archetypal Father.
“For this reason,” Paul says, “I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” That’s very difficult Greek, but if I understand it aright, it means something like this. Every notion of fatherhood … at the tribal level, the clan level, the family level … ultimately finds its true archetype in the heavenly Father. There’s the best father of all. So although it is true that he’s the sovereign God who has these predestinating purposes from eternity past, he’s also our Father.
As Jesus teaches us to pray, if we who are evil fathers know how to give good gifts to our children, if when our children come to us and ask for bread we don’t give them a stone that sort of looks like a roll or a snake that looks like a fish, then don’t you think the heavenly Father knows how to give good gifts to his children?
In other words, we sometimes have an unwitting, unarticulated picture of a heavenly Father who is somewhat removed and not all that interested, who somehow has to be badgered with a lot of repetitious prayers, with the more people praying the better to increase the badgering (it’s like lobbying politicians, you understand); that somehow, thus, if you increase the pressure enough, he’ll dribble out a little blessing that will sort of surprise you, catch you on a day off, as it were.
That’s not Paul’s model. Paul’s model is of a Father who’s far more willing to give than his children are willing to ask and receive. I suggest to you that if we approach this heavenly Father with this sort of petition in our personal and private prayer life every day for six months, we will be transformed people, and only at the first stage, because we can go on with this sort of prayer until Jesus comes.
The prayer ends with a doxology. The doxology makes two points. Again it is addressed “to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or think.” It is almost as if Paul can hear what the Ephesians are saying. “Oh, it’s all very well for a spiritual person like you, Paul, to talk so compellingly about prayer, but quite frankly, our prayers don’t seem to pull down all that much. Well, I suppose if we pray this there will be some miniscule change here and there. I suppose we have to expect something.”
Paul almost challenges their faithlessness by presenting again another image of God that shows that our vacuum does not rest in God’s unwillingness but again in our slowness. Don’t you think that what Paul is asking for is immense, tremendous? But Paul says we offer praise “to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”
There is one final point to this doxology that caps it all. The ultimate purpose of God’s prayer is that there be glory to God in the church and in Christ Jesus. You see, it is even possible to pray for these sorts of things in a kind of selfish way. Even these good things. We may want to experience the love of Christ not quite so much that we may be mature … certainly it doesn’t enter our heads that God might be glorified thereby … but rather that we might feel a kind of warm glow.
We want to know the love of Christ so that we might feel a warm glow. We don’t think about entailments of service or the possibility that sometimes prayers like this are answered precisely in the matrix of tears. We don’t think about those things. What we want is the glow. But now the whole thing is reoriented so that there is a purpose beyond the purpose.
Yes, the purpose is our maturity; yes, the purpose is our conformity to Christ; yes, the purpose is our grasp of the love of God in Christ Jesus, but beyond that, all of these purposes serve one greater purpose: the glory of God in Christ Jesus and in the church. “You have not because you ask not, and you ask and receive not because you ask amiss to consume it upon your own lust.” Neither James nor Paul will allow that.
The ultimate purpose of the prayer of even Christian maturity is not Christian maturity but the praise of God. The Christian whose heart is right before God and man delights in nothing more than to find God praised. His own holiness contributes to that end, so he prays for his own holiness. His own grasp of Christian faith, his own power to grasp the love of God contributes to the glory of God, so he prays for that too, but always with this overriding sweeping concern that God may be glorified in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Let us pray.
Merciful God, we remember how the disciples approached the Lord Jesus and said, “Teach us to pray as John also taught his disciples,” and we feel as if we are only in the earliest grades of the school of prayer. We find it easier to study than to pray, easier to witness than to pray, easier to share and confess sins than to pray. Forgive our individual and corporate prayerlessness and teach us to pray.
Grant, merciful God, that our prayers will be increasingly shaped by your Word, that we may choose always your Word and its instruction as our supreme model, in prayer as in every area of life, that we may learn how to pray. Now we pray, merciful God, that you will pour out your power upon us by the Spirit in our inner being, that we may have the power that transforms us, that Christ might dwell in our hearts through faith, that we might have the power to grasp the limitless dimensions of your love for us in Christ Jesus.
Lord God, if you will not work in us, we are dead. If you will not take mercy upon us, to whom else shall we go? Have mercy upon us, we pray, for your dear Son’s sake, not because of our deserts, but because of your love for us in Christ Jesus. If you have not refused your own dear Son but freely delivered him up for us all, will you not also, with him, freely give us these things? Merciful God, we ask these in Jesus’ name, both for our good and for his glory, amen.
