Today in our journey along Route 66 we come to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians...
Author
The author identifies himself as Paul in Ephesians 1:1; 3:1,7,13; 4:1; 6:19-20, and the early church recognized Ephesians as a Pauline letter. However, some modern biblical scholars doubt Pauline authorship. Though Ephesians has the typical form of a Pauline letter and echoes some important themes from the undisputed letters of Paul, Ephesians also differs in some ways.
The differences between Ephesians and the undisputed letters of Paul include both style and subject matter. Some scholars note the following differences…
- In Ephesians, many of the sentences are very long, unlike the commonly short and energized sentences of Paul’s undisputed letters. For example, Ephesians 1:3-14 is one sentence in Greek, as is Ephesians 1:15-23.
- Differences in subject matter include the emphasis in Ephesians on “the church” and the so-called “household codes” featured in Ephesians 5 and 6.
In addition, we cannot be certain that this letter was originally addressed to the Church in Ephesus. The best ancient manuscripts lack the words “in Ephesus” in verse 1. This may then have been a circular letter that included Ephesus, or the letter may have been written from Ephesus to other churches around the area. The author’s use of the word “church” in this letter also suggests a circular letter. In Paul’s undisputed letters the word “church” always refers to a specific local church. In Ephesians the word seems to refer to what we might call the church universal.
While these differences between Ephesians and Paul’s undisputed letters are significant, I do not find these differences sufficient to doubt Pauline authorship. If this is a circular letter, then that fact provides sufficient explanation for the lack of personal references in this letter. Furthermore, we must remember that Paul’s letters were always written by a secretary. Paul dictated and Paul’s various secretaries tried to capture what Paul was saying on paper. This, to me, explains the differences in style that we find between Ephesians and the undisputed letters of Paul. As to differences in content, I do not find those differences significant enough to doubt Pauline authorship.
No less a scholar than Markus Barth concluded:
The apostle Paul himself wrote the epistle to the Ephesians from a prison in Rome toward the end of his life. Paul addresses not the whole church in Ephesus but only the members of Gentile origin, people whom he did not know personally and who had been converted and baptized after his final departure from that city. The strange diction occasionally found in Ephesians stems from hymns and other traditional materials that are quoted in this epistle much more frequently and extensively than in the earlier writings of Paul. Ephesians represents a development of Paul’s thought and a summary of his message which are prepared by his undisputed letters and contribute to their proper understanding.[1]
Date
If Paul is the author of this letter, then it may have been written around AD 60 while Paul was a prisoner in Rome. Or it may have been written earlier during one of Paul’s other imprisonments like the one at Caesarea by the Sea. If this letter was not written by Paul, then it may have been written by a disciple of Paul writing as late as AD 90.
Themes
One of my sons’ favorite attractions when we took them to London over twenty years ago was the London Eye. It’s like a giant Ferris wheel. It rises to 450 feet above the Thames. Its 32 capsules can each hold 20 people, and it takes 30 minutes to make the whole circuit. It is one of the places from which you can get the best view of London.
N. T. Wright points out that…
The letter to the Ephesians stands in relation to the rest of Paul’s letters rather like the London Eye. It isn’t the longest or fullest of his writings, but it offers a breathtaking view of the entire landscape. From here, as the wheel turns, you get a bird’s-eye view of one theme after another within early Christian reflection: God, the world, Jesus, the church, the means of salvation, Christian behaviour, marriage and the family, and spiritual warfare. Like someone used to strolling around London and now suddenly able to see familiar places from unfamiliar angles—and to see more easily how they relate to each other within the city as a whole—the reader who comes to Ephesians after reading the rest of Paul will get a new angle on the way in which his thinking holds together.[2]
Structure
The structure of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians works out like this…
- Greetings (1:1-2)
- The Divine Purpose: The Glory and Headship of Christ (1:3-14)
- Prayer that Christians May Realize God’s Purpose and Power (1:15-23)
- Steps Toward the Fulfillment of God’s Purpose (2-3)
- Practical Ways to Fulfill God’s Purpose in the Church (4:1-6:20)
- Conclusion, Final Greetings and Benediction (6:21-24)
Key Concept—Spiritual EKG
When I think of Paul’s letter to the Church at Ephesus, I often think of the word “love”. Thus, in preparing this message, I did a search to find out how many times Paul uses the word “love” in this letter. The answer is “17” times in the New International Version of the Bible. Now, Paul uses the word “love” 18 times in Romans and 17 times in 1 Corinthians, but those letters are longer than this one. So proportionately, love more greatly saturates this letter than any other letter of Paul. The word “love” appears in every chapter of Ephesians. In particular, the word “love” appears three times in the English translation of Ephesians 3, in Paul’s great prayer of love. And that is the prayer I would like to focus on for the rest of our time this morning. Listen for God’s word to you from Ephesians 3:14-21…
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.
You all know what an EKG is right? The doctor places electrodes on various points of your body and those electrodes send signals via wires to a machine called an electrocardiogram, which records the electrical signal from the heart to check for different heart conditions.
With this prayer, Paul is offering us what I would like to call a spiritual EKG. What he prays for is also what we can test our hearts for. Paul basically prays for three things. He prays for the recipients of his letter to be established in love, to know love, and to grasp love. E…K…G. Got it?
I wonder: how is your heart doing with regard to being established in love, knowing love, and grasping love?
Let’s look at each of these points in turn…
Established in Love
First, Paul prays for his readers to be established in love. It’s interesting that Paul prays for his readers to be both “rooted” and “established” in love. It seems like Paul is mixing his metaphors here. Trees need to be firmly rooted in good soil if they are going to grow effectively. Houses need to be established on a firm foundation if they are going to withstand the storms of nature. So, Paul seems to be saying, in one breath, that our lives need to be firmly rooted, and that we need to build our lives on a firm foundation.
As the saying goes, every human being needs roots and wings. We need to be rooted in God’s love, but we also need the wings of the Spirit to take us where God wants us to go.
The soil in which we need to be rooted and the foundation on which we need to be established are the same: the love of Christ for us. That’s where we must start in the Christian life and that is what we must always go back to. If our lives are not firmly rooted and established in Christ’s love for us then we will never grow healthy, productive, happy spiritual lives.
My first encounter with this prayer came through reading The Living Bible that my parents gave me one Christmas when I was ten years old. The Living Bible paraphrases Paul in this way: “May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love.” I love that paraphrase!
But you might ask, how do we get rooted and established in love? It happens through having God’s Spirit in our inner being. It happens by Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. That’s how we get God’s love inside of us. As Paul says in Romans 5:5, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
But how do I get the Holy Spirit in me? How do I get Christ in me? Well, I think these two are the same thing. To have Christ in you is to have the Holy Spirit in you, and vice versa. And Jesus tells us how it happens. In Luke 11:13 Jesus says,
If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
So, all we must do is ask our Heavenly Father to give us the Holy Spirit and he will. That’s how we get the Holy Spirit inside of us. That’s the beginning. Paul talks about Christ dwelling in our hearts through faith. Literally, Christ wants to make his home in us by the Holy Spirit.
Grasping Love
After Paul talks about the “E” of being established in love, Paul talks about the “G” of the EKG. So, let’s look at the “G” next.
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…
Once we are rooted and established in love, we have the love of God in our hearts. But Paul doesn’t want us to stop there. He wants us to try to grasp the full dimensions of the love of Christ. Paul’s prayer leads me to picture a tree, rooted in rich soil, with its branches reaching out in all directions, trying to grasp what is around it. The Greek word translated as “grasp” means to “seize tight hold of”, to “catch”, or “capture”.
How can we ever grasp the breadth, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ? I am not sure that we can ever fully do it. But I do believe the only way we can begin to do it is by looking to the cross. Is there a reason why Paul gives four dimensions by which to measure the love of Christ? I wonder if these four dimensions indicate the four points of the cross. Maybe I am being fanciful. But it is not fanciful to think that in the cross is displayed the ultimate sign of God’s love for us. On the cross Jesus went down to the very depths. Yet, the cross was also the beginning of his exaltation, his lifting up, to the heights of heaven. On the cross Jesus was stretching out his arms to the length and breadth, saying, “I love you this much.”
John Stott puts this a different way. He says,
The love of Christ is ‘broad’ enough to encompass all mankind (especially Jews and Gentiles, the theme of these chapters), ‘long’ enough to last for eternity, ‘deep enough to reach the most degraded sinner, and ‘high’ enough to exalt him to heaven.[3]
Knowing Love
Thirdly, Paul talks about knowing the love of Christ. He writes, “…and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
In Greek Paul uses some unusual phrasing. Literally, he writes: “to know then the surpassing knowledge love of Christ.” In other words, the love of Christ is something that surpasses knowledge. Yet, Paul prays for his readers to know it, nonetheless.
The words for knowledge and knowing that Paul uses here speak of the knowledge of personal experience. It is the same word that Mary uses when she asks the angel, “How will this be since I do not know a man.” Thus, knowing can refer to sexual intimacy.
So, this raises the question: “How do we know the love of Christ by personal experience? How do we develop intimate knowledge of this love?”
Again, as we have already seen, this can only happen as Christ and the Holy Spirit indwell us. We become intimately aware of the love of Christ as we are filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
Paul is not praying for his readers to have intellectual knowledge of the love of Christ. This is not something that can be known the way one knows the times table. The love of Christ is something that must be known personally or not at all.
As I have recounted many times from this pulpit, one of my first experiences of the love of Christ happened when I was twelve years old. I was watching Robert Schuller on television with my mother. Schuller preached a message about how we can be forgiven through Jesus’ death on the cross. That was the first time I really understood that Jesus had died for me because he loved me. Somehow, I felt that love come into me that day in 1975, sitting on our living room sofa in La Jolla, California. My eyes filled with tears.
Years later I read a book by Dr. William P. Wilson, MD, entitled The Grace to Grow. In that book Wilson described a divine encounter similar to my own. He said he felt like he was dipped in a bucket of love. I felt like that bucket of love was poured into me.
Have you been established in the love of Christ? Are your roots going down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love? Are you beginning to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ? Do you have personal knowledge of this love? What does your spiritual EKG readout tell you?
If you are not sure whether you have experienced the love of Christ before, you can experience Jesus’ love today. Simply ask Jesus to come into you by the Holy Spirit. Ask God to pour his love into your heart, and he will do it.
Why not pray Paul’s prayer for yourself? Everywhere that Paul uses the word “you”, substitute “I” or “me”. And after you pray this prayer for yourself, pray it for others, substituting their names where Paul says “you”.
You may be thinking, “But if God knows everything about me, he can’t possibly love me because he will know what a sinner I am.”
I’m here today to tell you that God not only can love you, but he will love you, and he does love you, despite your sin. God can do this, because, as Paul says, God “is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us”.
Do you know what the result will be, once God pours the love of Christ into your heart through the Holy Spirit? The result will be glory.
“Now to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
Isn’t that amazing?! I mean, I can understand how Jesus gives God glory. But in the same breath, Paul says that the church can give God glory, right alongside of Christ Jesus. The church! That’s you and me. We can give glory to God. We can act as spotlights that call the attention of others to the love of God, once we have experienced that love for ourselves. Once you’ve experienced his love, you will have that love to share with others. In fact, you won’t be able to help but share it.
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