Ephesians 3
v.2
Surely you have heard about the administration of God’s grace that was given to me for you,
v.5
which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.
See 2022-08-22 21 56 Pages 1280-1300 for other proof-texts that the New Testament apostles were the counterpart to Old Testament prophets.
v.6
This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.
v.8
Although I am less than the least of all God’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,
But while Paul was thus thankful for his office, his success in it greatly humbled him. The fuller a vessel becomes the deeper it sinks in the water. A plenitude of grace is a cure for pride.
Preachers ought to grow in grace, for their very calling places them at a great advantage, since they are bound to search the Scriptures, and to be much in prayer. It is a choice mercy to be permitted to preach the gospel. I wish some of you would be ambitious of it, for earnest preachers are wanted.
I am bold to tell you that my Master’s riches of grace are so unsearchable, that he delights to forgive and forget enormous sin; the bigger the sin the more glory to his grace. If you are over head and ears in debt, he is rich enough to discharge your liabilities. If you are at the very gates of hell, he is able to pluck you from the jaws of destruction.
v.10
His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms,
Paul’s implication is that God’s wisdom is becoming known, even among angels of the spiritual realm, as a result of what is taking place through the church… This also means angelic beings are not omniscient; they can learn and grow in wisdom.
And, lastly, what think some of you, would angels say of your walk and conversation? Well, I suppose you don’t care much about them, and yet you should. For who but angels will be the reapers at the last, and who but they shall be the convoy to our spirits across the last dark stream?
v.12
In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.
v.13
I ask you, therefore, not to be discouraged because of my sufferings for you, which are your glory.
I struggled so much with discouragement while leading house church and house of prayer. Attendance and engagement were low. The fruit wasn’t tangible. I would fuss over how any of my weaknesses in leadership hindered the night from being more engaging. But when I see Christ’s suffering, I hear his command to not lose heart. Trials and tribulations are part of sanctification: I just needed to be steadfast and sow in spirit for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
v.15
from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.
The whole “family of God,” means all his children; and the idea is, that they all bear the same name, derived from the Redeemer; all are Christians.
v.16
I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,
Roughly speaking, the prayer is divided into four petitions, of which each is the cause of the following and the result of the preceding-’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 is the first. ‘In order that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,’ ‘ye being rooted and grounded in love’-such is the second, the result of the first, and the preparation for the third. ‘That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints … and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,’ such is the third, and all lead up at last to that wonderful desire beyond which nothing is possible-’that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.’
You and I act upon one another from without, He acts upon us within. We wish one another blessings; He gives the blessings. We try to train, to educate, to incline, and dispose, by the presentation of motives and the urging of reasons; He can plant in a heart by His own divine husbandry the seed that shall blossom into immortal life. And so the Christian Church is a great, continuous, supernatural community in the midst of the material world; and every believing soul, because it possesses something of the life of Jesus Christ, has been the seat of a miracle as real and true as when He said ‘Lazarus, come forth!’
It is not any one aspect of it that is to be strengthened, but it is the whole intellect, affections, desires, tastes, powers of attention, conscience, imagination, memory, will. The whole inner man in all its corners is to be filled, and to come under the influence of this power, ‘until there be no part dark, as when the bright shining of a candle giveth thee light
That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering. The parallel passage to this in the twin epistle to the Colossians is-’strengthened with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with gentleness.’ Ah, brethren! unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is every life; so full at times of discouragements, of dreariness, of sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the human heart become, that if we are to be strong we must have a strength that will manifest itself most chiefly in this, that it teaches us how to bear, how to weep, how to submit.
And it will be a power for conflict. We have all of us, in the discharge of duty and in the meeting of temptation, to face such tremendous antagonisms that unless we have grace given to us which will enable us to resist, we shall be overcome and swept away. God’s power given by the Divine Spirit does not absolve us from the fight, but it fits us for the fight. It is not given in order that, holiness may be won without a struggle, as some people seem to think, but it is given to us in order that in the struggle for holiness we may never lose ‘one jot of heart or hope,’ but may be ‘able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand.’
And so we appropriate and enclose, as it were, within our own little fence, a tiny portion of the great prairie that rolls boundlessly to the horizon. But to-morrow we may enclose more, if we will, and more and more; and so ever onwards, for all that is God’s is ours, and He has given us His whole self to use and to possess through our faith in His Son. A thimble can only take up a thimbleful of the ocean, but what if the thimble be endowed with a power of expansion which has no term known to men? May it not, then, be that some time or other it shall be able to hold so much of the infinite depth as now seems a dream too audacious to be realised?
So it is with us and God. He lets us come into the vaults, as it were, where in piles and masses the ingots of uncoined and uncounted gold are stored and stacked; and He says, ‘Take as much as you like to carry.’ There is no limit except the riches of His glory.
And now, dear friends, remember that this great gift, offered to each of us, is offered on conditions. To you professing Christians especially I speak. You will never get it unless you want it, and some of you do not want it. There are plenty of people who call themselves Christian men that would not for the life of them know what to do with this great gift if they had it. You will get it if you desire it. ‘Ye have not because ye ask not.’
v.17
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
It is not to be weakened down into any notion of participation in His likeness, sympathy with His character, submission to His influence, following His example, listening to His instruction, or the like. A dead Plato may so influence his followers, but that is not how a living Christ influences His disciples. What is meant is no mere influence derived but separable from Him, however blessed and gracious that influence might be, but it is the presence of His own self, exercising influences which are inseparable from His presence, and only to be realised when He dwells in us.
And so we are called ‘mystics’ when we preach Christ in the heart. Ah, brother! unless your Christianity be in the good deep sense of the word ‘mystical,’ it is mechanical, which is worse. I preach, and rejoice that I have to preach, a ‘Christ that died, yea! rather that is risen again; who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.’ Nor do I stop there, but I preach a Christ that is in us, dwelling in our hearts if we be His at all.
Well, then, further observe that the special emphasis of the prayer here is that this ‘indwelling’ may be an unbroken and permanent one. Any of you who can consult the original for yourselves will see that the Apostle here uses a compound word which conveys the idea of intensity and continuity. What he desires, then, is not merely that these Ephesian Christians may have occasional visits of the indwelling Lord, or that at some lofty moments of spiritual enthusiasm they may be conscious that He is with them, but that always, in an unbroken line of deep, calm receptiveness, they may possess, and know that they possess, an indwelling Saviour.
And this, I think, is one of the reasons why we may and must distinguish between the apparently very similar petition in the previous verse, about which we spoke in the last sermon, and the petition which is now occupying us; for, as I shall have to show you, it is only as ‘strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man’ that we are capable of the continuous abiding of that Lord within us.
It is Christ in the heart that makes the heart fit for Christ to dwell in the heart. You cannot do it by your own power; turn to Him and let Him make you temples meet for Himself.
Rivers do not run on the mountain tops, but down in the valleys. So the heart that is lifted up and self-complacent has no dew of His blessing resting upon it, but has the curse of Gilboa adhering to its barrenness; but the low lands, the humble and the lowly hearts, are they in which the waters that go softly scoop their course and diffuse their blessings. Faith is self-distrust. Self-distrust brings the Christ.
Mystical Christianity of the false sort has much to say about the indwelling of God in the soul, but it spoils all its teaching by insisting upon it that the condition on which God dwells in the soul is the soul’s purifying itself to receive Him. But you cannot cleanse your hearts so as to bring Christ into them, you must let Him come and cleanse them by the process of His coming, and fit them thereby for His own indwelling. And, assuredly, He will so come, purging us from our evil and abiding in our hearts.
Where Christ abides in a man’s heart, love will be the very soil in which his life will be rooted and grow.
v.18
may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ,
There be two kinds of knowledge: the mere rattle of notions in a man’s brain, like the seeds of a withered poppy-head; very many, very dry, very hard; that will make a noise when you shake them. And there is another kind of knowledge which goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling by the name; and that knowledge is the child, as my text has it, of love.
And that is so, not because Christianity, being a foolish system, can only address itself to fools; not because Christianity, contradicting wisdom, cannot expect to be received by the wise and the cultured, but because a man’s brains have as little to do with his trustful acceptance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a man’s eyes have to do with his capacity of hearing a voice. Therefore, seeing that the wise and prudent, and the cultured, and the clever, and the men of genius are always the minority of the race, let us vulgar folk that are neither wise, nor clever, nor cultured, nor geniuses, be thankful that all that has nothing to do with our power of knowing and possessing the best wisdom and the highest treasures, but that upon this path the wayfaring man though a fool shall not err, and all narrow foreheads and limited understandings, and poor, simple uneducated people as well as philosophers and geniuses have to learn love by their hearts and not by their heads, and by a sense of need and a humble trust and a daily experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in the love of Jesus Christ.
v.19
and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
If you will trust Jesus Christ, if you will distrust yourselves, if you will turn your thoughts and your hearts to Him, if you will let Him come into your souls, and not shut Him out because your souls are so full that there is no room for Him there, then when He comes He will not come empty-handed, but will bring the full Godhead with Him. There must be the emptying of self, if there is to be the filling with God. And the emptying of self is realised in that faith which forsakes self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-dependence, self-control, self-pleasing, and yields itself wholly to the dear Lord.
It means here, “that you may have the richest measures of divine consolation and of the divine presence; that you may partake of the entire enjoyment of God in the most ample measure in which he bestows his favors on his people.”
v.20
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,
See also v.9.