Paul's s Second Prayer As Recorded In The Epistle To The Ephesians

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.” —Ephesians 3:14–21

We have two prayers in this precious epistle. In the first chapter, we have the prayer for knowledge and in the second, the prayer for love. After reading the first prayer, we naturally find ourselves looking out over the great sphere of God’s eternal purpose trying to take in the scope of His wonderful prearranged divine plan. But, as we read the second prayer and meditate upon it, we find ourselves looking up in adoring gratitude, with our hearts going out in love to the One who first loved us.

As we try to expound this prayer, I want you to think of seven words that I believe will help us to get its scope. We read in verse fourteen, “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The expression, “I bow my knees” is a very beautiful one and suggests intensity of feeling. Have you ever noticed that if you are just quietly engaged in prayer or meditation, you may sit, perhaps, as I often do, in a comfortable big chair with your open Bible before you and as one thought or another comes, you close your eyes and lift your heart to God in prayer? Or, when you come together with God’s people, you love to stand in holy silence before God joining with someone who is leading in prayer. But when you are intensely in earnest, when something had fairly gripped you that stirs you to deepest supplication, you find yourself almost irresistibly forced to your knees.

“For this cause—” For what cause? Because of his deep interest in the people of God, because of his desire that they should enter fully into their privileges in Christ and understand the great mystery of which He had spoken. “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” We noticed that the first prayer is addressed to the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, for God as such is the source of all counsels, but this second prayer, which has to do more with family relationship, is addressed to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Divine titles are used most discriminatingly in the Word of God; never in the careless way that we so often use them. We might not think it made any difference whether one said, I address myself to the God of our Lord Jesus” or “I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus” but it made a great deal of difference to the apostle. It indicated the different thoughts that were in his mind.

When I think of God, I think of the Maker of all things, the Planner of all things who fitted the ages together. But I think of the Father, as the one from whose bosom the eternal Son came into this world becoming man for our salvation. Ere He left this scene He said to Mary, “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). There, you see, you have the two thoughts: God the source of all counsels, the Father, the source of all affections—family affection, the very center of family relationship.

“I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” “The whole family” is undoubtedly a correct rendering here and yet “every family” would be just as correct and you probably will want to ask yourself the question: “What conveys to my mind the most precious thought?” “The whole family”—that means that all saints in Earth and heaven constitute one great family of born again ones and are thus linked up with the Father. But I am thinking, too, of the great hosts of angels never redeemed by the blood of Christ because they have never fallen and even those who fell found no Saviour. The angels, too, own the fatherhood of God, but they are servants, waiting on the family. And then there is the family of the Old Testament saints. There was the antediluvian family, the patriarchal family, the Israelites, those who were truly of Israel. All these families through the past dispensations. And then there is the church of this age of grace, and by and by there will be the glorious kingdom family. There are dispensational distinctions but all receive life from the same blessed person and all together adore and worship Him. Notice that the whole family is located in heaven and on Earth. Those who are dead to us are living to God above.

Now you have the prayer proper. First there is our endowment. “That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory.” You may come to God in prayer for anything and realize that since you have such a marvelous endowment as that you do not need to fear to present your petitions to God. You cannot ask too much. You remember the one who came to the king asking for something and the king gave to him out of his abundant treasure until the man said, “Your Majesty, that is too much, that is too much.” The king smiled and said, “It may seem too much for you to take but it is not too much for me to give.” And so our blessed God gives out of His abundance. “Able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” He does not say, as we sometimes think, “Able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think,” for we could be like little children asking for the moon, but he says that He does for us, “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” When we come to Him in the name of Jesus, bringing our petitions, there is more in that great endowment fund than we can ever exhaust.

“According to the riches of his glory.” “According to,” not “out of the riches of His glory.” What is the difference? A man of enormous wealth might give a thousand dollars to missions. That would be out of his treasure. But would it be according to his wealth? Surely not. But suppose he were to hand over a checkbook with each check signed by him and made payable to the Missionary Fund and say, “Fill them out, just draw out whatever you need for the great work of sending the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That would be “according to” his riches! And our blessed Lord says, “Here is the blank checkbook, fill out the checks and draw according to My riches in glory.”

Then notice the next thing. We have the enduement. “To be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man.” Do you sometimes feel your limitations, your weakness, your lack of intensity of purpose, your powerlessness when it comes to living for God and witnessing for Him? Do you sometimes feel as though you might as well give up for the little you accomplish? Do you say, “If I only had more strength, how different it might be”? Listen, the excellency of the power is of God, not of us, and the Holy Spirit who dwells within us is ready to work in and through us to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So the prayer is that we may be “strengthened with might by His Spirt in the inner man.” You know we are not walking storage batteries. Some people have an idea that this is practically what the Christian should be. You hear people pray, “O God give me more power, fill me with power.” The idea they have is that the old battery is pretty well run down—“put another one in, Lord” is what they seem to say. No, you are not a storage batter, you are in connection with the great eternal dynamo and the Holy Spirit works in and through you to the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ as you are yielded to Him. He himself is the source of all power and that power is to be used by the people of God.

The next word is enthronement. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” Is this not the same thing as when in another epistle he speaks of Christ reigning? Is it not Christ sitting upon the throne of our hearts dominating, controlling you for the glory of God; His blessed pierced hands guiding and directing everything? It is not Christ received as an occasional visitor, not Christ recognized merely as a guest, but Christ abiding within as our living, loving, blessed Lord; Christ dwelling in the heart by faith. You remember the little couplet, “If Christ is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all.” He does not want the second place. He must have the first if your life is going to be that which it should.

The next thing is our establishment. “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love.” He uses a figure here that you will find in other of his epistles, “rooted and grounded.” The two terms are very different. When I was a boy, the school teacher used to tell me that I must not mix my metaphors, for instance, I should not start with a figure of a ship and change to a railroad in the same sentence. But the Holy Ghost is wonderfully independent in His use of metaphors. “That ye, being rooted and grounded in love.” Rooted like a tree and grounded like a building which is raised upon a great foundation. Rooted and grounded in what? In love. What is love? That is the great rock foundation upon which we build, for God is love, and he who is rooted in love is rooted in God, and therefore, the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree. The believer is like the trees for they draw their nourishment from the living God himself. What a Christian character will be built when one is founded upon this Rock, building upon God Himself, rooted and grounded in love!

And now we have our enlightenment. “That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints.” “You will never be able to take it all in, but you comprehend a little, and another a little, and I a little, and with all the saints together we begin to get some idea of God’s wonderful purpose of grace. Therefore, we need one another, we need fellowship, we need to be helpers of each other’s faults. The feeblest, the weakest member of the body of Christ is necessary, for God may give to some feeble crippled brother what some strong active Christian may never get at all. “That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height.” Of what? Some say of love. What has He been speaking about in this chapter? God’s wonderful purpose of the ages, God’s great plan. It is that by the Spirit you may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height of that vast system of grace which God is working out through the ages of time and which will be consummated in the ages to come.

In school I was told that no solid could have more than three dimensions, length, breadth, and thickness; but we have here length, breadth, depth, and height—four dimensions. Could you draw a picture of this? Could you draw an illustration of length, breadth, depth, and height? How would you do it? Some of the old Greek philosophers used to reason about a possible fourth dimension and with them it was a kind of weird spiritual dimension. After all, that is not so bad. You remember that Spanish prisoner whose bones were discovered when Napoleon’s soldiers opened the prison of the inquisition. There in an underground dungeon they found the skeleton of the prisoner, flesh and clothing all long since gone, but the remnants of an ankle bone with a chain attached to it were still there. There upon the wall they saw cut into the rock with a sharp piece of metal a cross and above it in Spanish, the word for height and below it the word for depth and on the one arm the word for length and on the other the word for breadth. As that poor prisoner of so long ago was starving to death, his soul was contemplating the wonder of God’s purpose of grace and to Him the figure of the cross summed it all up, the length, the breadth, the depth, the height!

Next he prays that we may “Know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” Surely this is our enlargement. We glory as we enter into the knowledge of the love of Christ; but what a strange expression is this! He prays that we may know the unknowable. “The love of Christ that passeth knowledge.” See that darling little babe in the mother’s arms, looking up and cooling and responding to the mother’s smile. You or I might say, “Let me take the little one,” and hold out our hands and it would look at us and cling the more tightly to the mother and if we should insist on taking it, it might utter a piercing cry which would say, “I do not know you; I do not know whether you love babies or not but I know my mother’s love and can trust her.” And yet, what does the baby know of the love of a mother? What does it understand about the feeling of a mother’s love? But it enjoys it nevertheless. And so the youngest saint in Christ knows the love of the Saviour and the oldest saint, the most mature saint, is still seeking to know in greater fulness that love that passeth knowledge.

“Oh, the love of Christ is boundless,
Broad and long and deep and high.
Every doubt and fear is groundless,
Now the word of faith is nigh.
Jesus Christ for our salvation,
Came and shed His precious blood.
Clear we stand from condemnation
In the risen Son of God.”

Then notice the last point in this prayer. “That ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.” Or properly, “That ye might be filled unto the fulness of God.” This is our enrichment. When our translators said, “Filled with all the fulness of God,” they meant well but you could not hold all the fulness of God. Solomon said, “Even the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee.” Yet we read that He dwells in the heart of him that is humble and contrite. Walking by the seaside one time, some one touched the real meaning of this word. He picked up one of the beautiful sea shells and put it down there in the sand as the water had ebbed for a moment or two, and then as they watched, the sea came rolling in and the shell was filled, and he said, “See, filled unto all the fulness of the ocean.” So you and I as we live in fellowship with God may be filled unto His fulness. We are in Him and He is in us and thus the prayer is answered.

And now notice the closing wonderful benediction. “Now unto him that is able to do above all we ask?” No, that is not enough. Is it, “Able to do abundantly above all that we ask?” That is not enough. It is, “Able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask?” Still that does not reach the limit. “Unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” You need not fear to come to God about anything. Are you troubled about present circumstances? Have you availed yourself of the abundant resources of God? If things are right in your heart and you come to God and make connections there, you can be sure of a wonderful answer. “Unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.”—This divine energy which works through poor feeble creatures such as we are.—“Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.” He is the One in whom God will find His pleasure throughout all eternity.”