Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Prayer in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every 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 Lord’s holy people, 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 the Lord. Let us pray.
Open our minds and hearts, our affections to grasp not only what the words in this passage say, but so to absorb them into our very being that they become part of our lived experience. We remember the apostles said, “Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” So we beg of you, from your most Holy Word, teach us to pray; and then, as we learn to pray such prayers as these in our own lives and our own churches, we beg of you to answer such prayers beyond all we ask or imagine, as this passage promises. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
How did you learn to pray? I was brought up in French Canada, so it was a bilingual home. We learned to pray in English and French. The English Bible we used in those days was the King James Version, which was very old-fashioned, Elizabethan English, and the French version was the Louis Segond, which wasn’t quite as old-fashioned, but trying hard.
Because we tended to pray using the language of the Bibles we read, the prayers I learned to pray when I was a child were very old-fashioned. Of course, when I was just an infant, my parents, who were both Christians (my father was a church planter, himself), would pray over me. Later on we prayed childhood prayers, “Now I lay me down to sleep …” and that sort of thing.
When I started praying out loud in the family … family devotions, maybe even at a children’s meeting or something like that.… I’m sure in English it sounded something like this: “We beseech thee, almighty God, that in the plentitude of thy great mercies thou wilt vouchsafe to us the mercies of thy dear Son who hast sacrificed himself on our behalf that we might walk with thee in righteousness.”
On the other hand, if you were converted as an atheist at university and the first time you screwed up your stomach muscles tightly enough to pray out loud in campus Bible fellowship, or whatever, it probably sounded like this: “Jesus, we just want to thank you for being here.” Not for a moment am I suggesting one prayer is better than the other. I am merely saying most of us pray in the fashion in which we have heard others pray.
We have learned to pray by copying, which means if we’ve been exposed to people whose prayers are really are rich, thick, and fat then we’ve learned to use similar words. Whether we really are praying and interceding with God that way or not might be another issue. If instead we’ve learned from people who’ve barely learned to pray themselves, then probably our praying is also just a wee bit stumbling.
There are many, many things in Christian life and thought and practice that really depend on mentoring of some sort or another, whether planned or unplanned. If you come from a non-Christian home how do you have family devotions and make them fun and rich and wonderful? The easiest way is to live for a while with a family where they’re doing it right, or at very least they’ll come along and make suggestions and tell you what they do and fill it in a wee bit, because a great number of things in the Christian life are caught as much as they’re taught.
Supposing then what you really want to do above all is to reform your praying in line with the Word of God. Where do you start? It’s very helpful to have some people who are steeped in the Word of God and who have framed a lot of their praying along similar lines, transparently; but one of the things you can do for yourself is study the prayers of Scripture.
A number of years ago I wrote a book on the prayers of Paul. Recently I’ve been preaching through a series, Praying with Moses. Obviously, you could do another series, “Praying with Daniel.” The series of “Praying with David” would be endless. This is merely another way of saying if the Word of God is to shape our lives and our preaching and our understanding of the Gospel and our grasp of what the church is and so on, one of the things it ought similarly to shape is how we pray.
I want to focus on one of the Pauline prayers, one of the prayers of the apostle Paul, this morning, the one we have just looked at. This is certainly not the only one. I want to focus first of all on its two central petitions, then on the grounds Paul gives for praying it, and then on its final doxology.
1. Paul asks that God might strengthen us with power through his Spirit in our inner being.
I’ve taken that right from the text, verse 16. “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being …” Whatever else this is, it’s a prayer for power. “I pray that he may strengthen you with power.” One of the things you should do immediately is see how much of this power theme is found in the book of Ephesians. Is Paul praying in line with the development of his thought already in this book?
Then, you immediately toss your mind back to chapter 1, verse 18, another prayer of Paul. “I pray 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 his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.” That’s what he prays for.
Then he explains what that power is so we make no mistake, “That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms …” Paul is praying for his people, that they will experience the same power of God in their lives that actually was exerted when Jesus was raised from the dead, and now he is still praying for power. He prays God may strengthen us with power through his Spirit in our inner being.
The agent who mediates this power to us in the prayer is the Holy Spirit, and the sphere of operation of this power is what Paul calls our inner being, or in some translations our inner man. To get a good idea of what he means by that it is worth looking at one or two other passages where he uses exactly the same expression.
For example, in 2 Corinthians 4:16–18 we read these words: “Though outwardly …” Literally, in our outer man. “… we are wasting away, yet inwardly …” Literally, in our inner man, in our inner being. Same expression as here. “… 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. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporal, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Every time I take a shower a few more hairs go down the plughole, never to be seen again. I now have some mild osteoarthritis in my left knee. I’ve had four pieces of skin taken off my face in the last few years because they were cancerous. The outer man is wasting away. “Change and decay in all around I see.” Then I remember my mother died of Alzheimer’s. It could happen to me. My father died in six weeks of pneumonia. It could happen to me. It is appointed to all of us once to die, except for those in the last generation. The outer man wastes away.
The inner man, our inner being, to use the NIV’s expression, is the sharpest focus of our existence. It is what is still there even when our body is put into the grave. If this is strengthened with God’s power, the sphere of the operation of God’s resurrection power in us, we are well equipped to handle merely external vicissitudes. Old age is coming. Sometimes opposition and persecution are coming, but we are well equipped to handle those things if our inner being is strengthened with the resurrection power of Christ. We may ask two further questions about this petition.
A. What purpose does it have?
There are a lot of people who want power for triumphalistic reasons, or as Simon Magus in Acts 8 wants, power in order to be powerful. Peter turns on him and says, literally … although you can’t say this in English, but it is literally what he says, “To hell with you and your money.” May you and your money go to hell.
People want power for all kinds of disgusting reasons, condemnatory reasons, but here there is an explicit purpose. Verse 17: “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.” You may well say, “Wait a minute. These are Christians to whom Paul is writing. Doesn’t Christ already dwell in their hearts through faith? Why is he praying that Christ may dwell in their hearts through faith?”
There is a sense in which, if we’re Christians, we already know Christ. Yet Paul can say in Philippians, chapter 3, “Oh, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering.” So also, Christ already dwells within us. Yes, he does. If we’re Christians, he dwells in us by his Spirit. The particular verb that is used here is a very strong one, and it has the additional overtone, if you like, of taking up dwelling, establishing his residence there.
The first house my wife and I bought many, many moons ago was a bit of a shanty. The previous owners had a couple of dogs they rarely let out. When we moved in, apart from the smell, we found dog poo in most of the cupboards. They seemed to be entranced by black and silver wallpaper in the bedroom. The general disrepair around the place was.… Well, you had to see it to believe it; but it was our home.
Gradually, I started tackling jobs. I knocked out one wall with some hideous arch that came out of the wrong century and stripped it all down and re-plastered. I remember to this day, feeling guilty yet, the morning I got up very, very early with an industrial sander and sanded down all my plastering, which of course made a spectacular mess throughout the entire house, whereupon I took a shower and went to seminary to teach and left my wife in tears. Yes, moments to be proud of.
Over the years we did this and we did that, and then eventually we’d trade up. Some people stay in the same house and add an extension. The third child is coming along. The fourth child is coming along. You need space for a home office. Pretty soon, you look back after 20 years and you say, “I like this house. Not bad. It’s our house.”
Everything you see you’ve touched. You’ve painted, put in the double-glazing, put in the air-conditioning, added the extra room, changed the plumbing, and changed the wiring. Everything you see is your house. You’re comfortable there. So Christ moves into us, and he finds us to be the people of the dog poo in the cupboards, the people of the black and silver wallpaper. Pretty disgusting, but he’s there to take up residence.
Gradually, he transforms us until, as it were, he’s comfortable there, because a house begins to reflect the owner. A house begins to reflect the person who lives there. What Christ does is take up residence within us and exerting the same mighty power that raised him from the dead, uses that power in our inner being as he takes up residence within us to make us a suitable residence.
To use a different figure of speech entirely, but is equally Pauline, in Galatians 4:19 the apostle Paul says, “How I wish I could be with you, because I want to know that Christ is formed in you.” Transparently, Christ is already formed. Christ is who he is, but the question is whether he is formed in us. It’s another way of getting at maturation. There’s a second question we should look at as well.
B. With what measure of resources is this prayer to be answered?
It is one thing to ask, “What of the supply? Is this a prayer God is going to answer?” Verse 16: “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.” This expression, out of his riches or out of glorious riches crops up once or twice, and in every case it’s bound up with what is secured for us in Christ.
For example, Philippians 4:19: “My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.” That is, according to all that is secured for us by Christ Jesus. The question “Is there adequate supply?” really is, “Is there adequate supply in Christ Jesus and what he has secured for us on the cross?”
Our justification is bound with what Christ has secured on the cross and in his resurrection. Our sanctification is grounded the same way. The prospect of resurrection existence on the last day is grounded the same way. The new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, is grounded the same way. All of our growth and conformity to Christ, all of the transformation we need in order to be Christ’s own dwelling place, all secured by the cross.
It was paid for. Christ was vindicated. Because of his death where he bequeathed his powerful spirit, it is part of God’s redemptive purpose to bring all things to a culmination and to submission to him in a sweeping move by which he declares himself Lord of the universe. To think there is an inadequate supply would be massively insulting to the Christ who died on the cross. When we come to pray this prayer we should remember that its answer is guaranteed on a little hill outside Jerusalem. It’s guaranteed by an empty tomb.
“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.” In other words, this is a petition that we may be holy. Salvation is more than forensic justification. It is more than simply being reconciled to God, though it is never less than that. Justification still remains, as Luther put it, the test doctrine of the church.
Yet at the same time, salvation is more than justification. It is also the transformation of our entire existence to conformity with Christ, increasingly so in this age and ultimately in transformation to ultimate alignment as perfect as human beings can be made such by the cross work of Christ. That’s the first petition.
The question, obviously, to ask is.… When was the last time you prayed this prayer? In all our praying for our immediate concerns, an adequate music leader Sunday morning, not too many families leave of Auckland, all of which are good prayers, we need to remember the central prayers of the apostle Paul are nestled in this sweeping line of redemptive history. We pray that purpose of God in salvation will be worked out in our lives and in the lives of our people.
2. Paul asks that we may have power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God.
This petition is also a petition for power. Verse 17b: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.”
Paul begins this petition by saying we have already been rooted and established in love (verse 17). Of course, what he is referring to is what he has already written back in chapter 1, which we looked at two days ago. So we read chapter 1, verse 4: “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 for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”
Small wonder then that Paul says we’ve been rooted and established in love; but now, although we’ve been rooted and established in love, he prays that we may have power to grasp how long and wide and high and deep it is. Note that this is not a prayer to have power to love God more. That’s a good prayer, but it’s not this prayer.
Sometimes in contemporary singing we sing too much about how much we love God and don’t reflect enough on how much he loves us. It takes a great deal to grasp the dimensions of God’s love. It takes immense heavenly Christ-raising love. Just as the first petition was, at least in part, an answer to the danger of thinking of Christianity as merely forensic, mere justification, so the second is an answer to the danger of thinking of Christianity as merely intellectual confessionalism.
We can be passionate about the truth of the gospel and its need in our lives, in our churches, in our country and still not bask in a self-conscious awareness of the love of God in our lives. I know there are some cultures and some denominations where there is such an unhealthy emphasis on emotions that clear thinking and accurate exegesis slip out the backdoor. Then you swim in endless subjectivism and endless introspection. Your eyes are no longer on the finished work of Christ. I know about those dangers.
The inverse danger is all of our confessionalism and our affirmation of the truth is without profound impact on our affections. Listen to such texts as these. Ephesians 5:18: “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit …” In other words, the contrast means if you’re going to get high, don’t get high on that spirit; get high on this Spirit.
Psalms 73: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Galatians 2: “… the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” First Peter 2: “… you have tasted [and seen] that the Lord is good.” Such an experiential way of putting it, isn’t it?
Not, “You have intellectually recognized that the Lord is good.” It’s a great creedal point. No. “You have tasted that the Lord is good.” Romans 14: “For the kingdom of God is a matter of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Romans 5: “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” First Peter 1: “You believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy.”
There is a huge emphasis on the transformation of our affections bound up with the growth of the gospel in our lives. Now Paul prays that we may have power.… It takes power to effect this transformation. It’s not a question of drumming it up or manipulating it. It takes the power of God, the miraculous power that raised Jesus from the dead. He prays that we “may have power to grasp the limitless dimensions of the love of God.”
How do you measure the love of God? Three tons? Four acres? What Paul does is use linear measure metaphorically, how long and wide and high and deep it is. Then he uses paradox. He says, “that you may know this love that surpasses knowledge.” That you may know what outstrips your knowledge. We sometimes say these things in songs and poetry better than in straightforward prose.
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell. […]
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies 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.
Or, in an older hymn, God’s love is “as shoreless and as endless as eternity.”
Sometimes this is experienced in suffering when we really do come to an end of ourselves. I went through a period of time when I was a kid that I was quite sickly, in and out of the hospital. I almost died once. You don’t realize that when you’re 10 years old, but I knew I was pretty sick. I lost half a year of school that particular year.
I came home from the children’s hospital after some major surgery. During the day, my parents put me downstairs in their bedroom, and I sat there and tried to sleep. One afternoon I woke up from sleeping endlessly, trying to regain strength again. I was improving. I looked up and there was my mother sitting. She sat there with her eyes slightly wet with tears.
I said to her, as only a 10-year-old could, “Mom, you love me,” which, of course, finished her off completely; she left the room. It’s not as if she was doing something different. It’s that I was learning to articulate her love for me, however clumsily and stupidly. Nevertheless, that’s what I was learning to do. It’s one thing to say, “God is love. The truth says so. Read John 3:16,” and it’s another to look in the face of God and say, “God, you love me.”
Moreover, and this is why I chose this passage for a conference on churches and church planting, ideally this is not to be an individualized experience. Do you see what the text says? “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints … together with all the Lord’s holy people.” Ideally, this should be working out in a congregation so an entire congregation is growing in self-conscious awareness of the love of God for them … a church experience.
Moreover, this petition, too, has a further aim. Did you notice it at the end of verse 19? “And I pray that you … may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, 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 that’s a Pauline idiom for Christian maturity, to be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
You find something similar said, for example, in chapter 4, verse 13: “… until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.” There are various ways of talking about Christian maturity. In other words, Paul presupposes you cannot become genuinely mature in Christ unless you experience the power of God, to bask in the limitless dimensions of his love for us. Christianity is more than creedal. It transforms our affections. Not our love for him alone, but being awash in our awareness of his love for us.
Of course, you’re not a pastor for very long before you see how this is very often a huge component in the conversion of men and women and in their transformation, especially when you’re dealing with people who are broken and shattered, swept under horrible addictions. A woman who has been abused and abused as a child and comes out of it in her mid-30s feeling dirty and guilty and ashamed and unable to enter into normal human affective relationships.
One of the places where you start is with the gospel. The gospel of God, in which God displays his love for us in Christ Jesus, and then teaches the individual Christian, in the context of the whole church, together with all the saints, how long and wide and high and deep is this love of God in Christ Jesus, to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. That woman doesn’t have a chance of growing to genuine spiritual maturity unless she learns to wallow in the love of God.
We know these things intuitively, even in human relationships. One of my colleagues at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Perry Downs, has stepped down now to a part-time role. He is teaching about a quarter-time, and so forth. They had two daughters; both are happily married with their own children. Over the course of the last few decades they fostered 30 children, some for a few weeks at a time, some for a few years at a time, sometimes with several in their house at once, sometimes with only one or two. The last one, who was a crack cocaine baby, they adopted.
One pair of boys that they looked after was brought to them under emergency circumstances. This pair of boys … they were twins … were 3-1/2 years old, and they had already been in eight different foster homes. At that point, Perry and Sandy had another couple of foster kids. When the agency came to them and said, “Can you take these two?” they said, “No. Our hands are full. We don’t have any more energy for two more.” They said, “It’s only for six weeks. We’ve got another family lined up for them. It’s just six weeks. Would you take them for six weeks?”
They had their arms twisted, and they took them for six weeks. The first night they were in their beds Perry went in to see them, after they had been in their room quiet. Imagine two 3-1/2-year-old boys quiet, absolutely quiet for half an hour. Perry went in and he found both their pillows were soaked with tears, but they hadn’t uttered a peep. Eventually, as he found out more about their background, in five of the eight families where these boys had been temporarily fostered they had been beaten every time time they cried.
These boys remained with Perry and Sandy for another three and a half years. They took them for testing and screening. A child psychologist said they were irremediably damaged, that they would never grow up to normal emotionally mature human beings, but in the context of the disciplined love of that home for those three and a half years, by the time those two boys were adopted into a lovely Christian family when they were 7 years old they were judged within an entirely normal range of responses emotionally and intellectually.
One went on to be an Olympian. The other teaches high school today. You and I know, just by reading our newspapers, looking around, being involved in life, working in the inner city that, all things being equal (and they never are), you do not grow up to be an emotionally mature adult unless you grow up in a context of vast disciplined love. It just doesn’t happen.
Having said that, all things are not equal. God can reach down into the most broken society and transform people by his grace. Some people are brought up in very secure contexts, yet nevertheless choose to rebel and junk it all over. I am not preaching a kind of determinism by sociological stratum. Yet, all things being equal, human beings do not, on the whole, grow to normal physical human maturity apart from the safety and context of disciplined love.
What Paul is saying is you don’t grow up spiritually unless you have the power of God to grow, to experience more of the overwhelming love of God for you. The difference, however, in the parallel is this. When Perry and Sandy’s two boys didn’t have that love, it wasn’t the boys’ fault, but when we don’t experience the love of God it is our fault, because we’re still so closely trying to hold the reins ourselves, wanting to sing with Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way,” rather than “Have Thine own way, Lord,” because we don’t ask. Isn’t that what James says, “You have not because you ask not.”
The obvious question to ask once again is.… When was the last time you prayed this prayer? For yourself, your family, your children, your church?
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
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.
Those are the two petitions, but before offering these two petitions Paul provides two bases for his petitions.
A. Paul’s petitions are in line with God’s purposes.…
Verse 14: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” The first basis is bound up with a “for this reason” phrase. For what reason? Transparently, you have to look at the preceding verses.
“For this reason I kneel before the Father …” For what reason? What’s the basis for this petition? When you look at the preceding verses you quickly discover there’s a “for this reason” at the beginning of chapter 3. Chapter 3, verse 1, where Paul starts a sentence and doesn’t finish it. He’s probably dictating. That’s the way he handled most of his letters.
There he says (3:1): “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles—” Dash. “Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you …” and then you find out a whole lot more about his apostolic ministry. That makes it look, then, as if the “for this reason,” which generates Paul’s prayer is not found in 3:1–14 but in material before chapter 3, verse 1, and then 3:1–14 is a kind of hiatus.
Paul reasons his way through chapters 1 and 2, and then he says, “For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles …” He’s about to give his prayer, when instead he gives some more explanation of his apostolic ministry, and then he picks it up again, “For this reason I kneel before the Father and I pray.”
That means that “this reason” is bound up in chapters 1 and 2. For what reason? The whole point of chapters 1 and 2 we’ve already begun to explore. It pleased God in eternity past, in his elective and predestinating purposes, to call out a new humanity of men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, Jew and Gentile alike, whom he transformed by his Spirit. He redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, and he made them into one new humanity, and is now building them up, building them together, a household for God.
Chapter 2, verse 20: “… built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” He’s building the church in him, in Christ Jesus. This 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 bow my knee and I pray. In other words, the reason is these are the purposes of God and the gospel. You learn to pray in line with the purposes of God and the gospel.
Chapter 2, verse 22: “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” Paul prays that you may have power, that Christ may dwell in you. This is the gospel purpose … that God lives in you, that Christ lives in you, that the Spirit lives in you … so to transform you. That is the gospel purpose. You learn to pray in line with the gospel purposes that God himself has declared. They are massively transformative. There is a second basis for the petition.
B. Paul’s petitions are addressed to the heavenly Father.
The God to whom we pray is supremely our Father. “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” The original is very hard to render. I think what it means is all true notions of fatherhood find their archetype in the heavenly Father. It’s not that we project “fatherness” on God.
It’s that he’s the ultimate Father. He becomes the archetype of all true fatherness on earth, “… from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” The one to whom we appeal, the one to whom we pray, the one whom we approach in prayers is our heavenly Father. “Do you not think he knows how to give good gifts to his children,” Jesus says?
Finally, the doxology. The passage is asking God for the immeasurably great, so Paul adds a final doxology, which puts the prayer into perspective, 20 and 21. It has two parts. The prayer, this doxology, is addressed: “To him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or think.” It’s almost as if Paul says, “Does this sound like I’m asking for too much?”
You get in a church that it’s in a bit of a rut, and then you get some enthusiastic preacher getting up and promising all kinds of things. “We’ve been here before. We’ve had preachers move us, and all of that. It’ll pass. Get over it. You’re just asking for too much. In this life you cannot have genuine reformation and revival. In this life you cannot have experiences of God of that order. Just get on with the ministry and plug away.” Paul says, “Your problem is that your vision of God is too small.”
To him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according not to our limited imagination but according to his power that is at work within us, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and will transform us on the last day. God is a much bigger God with much greater desire to pour out these spiritual gospel blessings on us than we are even able to imagine.
It’s a bit like the question Paul asks in Acts 26 when he is giving his testimony in the imperial court. “Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?” Isn’t that a great question? To a secular world it just sounds so bizarre. “God raises the dead. Give me a break.” But granted, just for a moment, who this God is, why should it be thought incredible that God raises the dead? Small potatoes. Do you realize that for omnipotence there cannot even be degrees of difficulty?
My dear friend, Tim Keller, likes to say, “For the Christian optimism is naÔve, but pessimism is atheistic.” We don’t adopt some Pollyannaish stance in which everything is going to turn out in sweetness and light because we’re doing it. We believe in the doctrine of sin. We believe in human depravity. We expect opposition, and Satan is furious because he knows his time is short. Optimism is naÔve, but pessimism is atheistic, for our God reigns.
Finally, the ultimate purpose of Paul’s prayer in this doxology is articulated. It is that there be glory to God in the church and in Christ Jesus. “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.”
So as we plant our churches we pray in line with Scripture and to this ultimate end that God be glorified in the church, by such massive transformation as is effected by this kind of praying, and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen. Let us pray.
Make my life a bright outshining
Of Thy life, that all may see
Thine own resurrection power
Mightily put forth in me;
Ever let my heart become
Yet more consciously Thy home.
So, we dare to pray that out of your glorious riches you may strengthen us with power through your Spirit in our inner being that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith.
And we pray that we, having been rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord’s holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God, and we dare pray this that you, our heavenly Father, may be glorified in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.
