For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:14–19
The prayer above is well known and well loved, so much so that it can be easy to miss what is so unusual about it. Paul prays, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts” (3:17). And yet, the letter to the Ephesians is addressed to those who already know Christ (1:1). Elsewhere Paul makes it clear that a follower of Jesus is, by definition, one in whom Christ dwells (Rom. 8:9). So why does he ask for Christ to dwell in their hearts? Why does Paul pray for what must already be the case?
Ephesians 3 is a prayer for what preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones once called “experiential knowledge.” 1 To return to the theme we touched on in the introduction to this book, it’s one thing to know the truth, but it’s another thing altogether for this truth to come alive, capture our imaginations, and change our lives. Our imagination must be renewed by the reality of our union with Christ.
To bring our book around full circle, this is a prayer that acknowledges the gap between the inheritance we’ve been given and our present experience of how we see ourselves (filled with all the fullness of God, really?). This is a prayer for the gap to be closed, or at least narrowed, that we may know the riches of our glorious inheritance, that we may know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,” that we “may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
This is no small request! Paul does pray for strength and power to comprehend it, after all. But nevertheless, he prays. Not for the supersaints, not for only the most deeply committed or those furthest along. Paul prays for all of his readers, for the names with which we began this book, for Melissa and Thom, for Lucy and Bill, for you and for me. He prays that we might know our union with Christ in all its cosmic dimensions—its “breadth and length and height and depth.” This is a prayer that we might experience what we believe.
In light of all we have touched on in this book, “every spiritual blessing” that has been given to you “in Christ” (Eph. 1:3) and the glorious inheritance that is yours in him (v. 18), it must be asked: Do you know the riches of your inheritance?
Imagine you inherited a bank account with $100 million in it, bequeathed to you by someone who loved you dearly. You are aware of this treasure. You have been given a deposit guaranteeing your inheritance (Eph. 1:14). You receive weekly statements reminding you of your substantial balance (that is, you go to church). But suppose you have never drawn down on this fortune. You remain in dire poverty, living paycheck to paycheck. From one point of view, you are exceedingly wealthy, but insofar as how you live, you remain poor. You know you are wealthy beyond imagining, but you don’t really know your wealth.
If your reluctance to draw on your inheritance were born of a true modesty, it might be commendable. But perhaps it stems from a refusal to accept such a lavish gift: “Oh no, I don’t deserve anything like that. That would be too much. I’ll just keep the life I have.” Or maybe it stems from fear or an unwillingness to risk, or even begin to imagine how, and how much, your life can change. “I’ll just remain as I am, thank you.”
Does this not describe how so many of us are living?
It’s like living in a trailer while millions of dollars worth of oil course underneath the land you own. Untapped. All this time untold riches have been right under our noses, but most of us keep on living the life we know. Even if we aren’t particularly happy with it, at least it’s familiar. We modestly decline rather than embrace a risk-filled, unknown future.
The children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness, yearned to return to Egypt. They actually preferred the idea of returning to slavery (Num. 11:5) because the Promised Land ahead was unknown and terrifying to them (Deut. 1:28). But unlike those children of God who went before us, our promised land, our horizon, is known (Heb. 11:12–16). What they sought and looked forward to, a better country, a heavenly one—the door to this city has now been opened to us.
On this journey, we walk along the narrow road, taking the hard, uphill way. Yet we do not labor under the threat or suspicion that God is disappointed in us or that we must arrive before he will embrace us. He is near, closer to us than any other relationship we have, closer than we can imagine. God is with us—that is his name. And so, like a child learning to pedal his own bicycle, we press on, day after day, pedal by pedal, in faith and repentance, confident that our Father is not only with us but also for us. He’s got you. We can move forward on this journey in confidence and joy to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus has already taken hold of us.
Along the way, Paul prays for us because he is all too aware that it is one thing to have this inheritance but another thing altogether to live out of it so that it changes the substance of our daily lives.
Paul isn’t praying for Christ to be present with you. If you are a Christian, Christ already is. He is praying for you to know of yourself “I am one in whom Christ Jesus dwells.” He is praying for your awareness of your union with Christ. He is praying that you would know what you know—for the gap to be narrowed—until the day when faith becomes sight and we see him, face to face, who has already, all this time, been there beside us.
Until that day, how can we possibly participate in these heavenly realities as we walk around in our mundane lives of grocery shopping, bill paying, traffic jams, and CAT scans? That’s been the driving question of this book. It will take some imagination—not to call to mind what is unreal, but to set your mind on what is real yet unseen.
What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him. (1 Cor. 2:9)
My hope is that, as we recover union with Christ—the depth and the wonder of it, the mystery and beauty of it—we will recover something greater than we could ever understand. For while it is beyond our understanding (it “surpasses knowledge,” Paul says), it is not beyond our possessing.