Listen for God’s word to you from Ephesians 1:15-23…
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. 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 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, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
Thanksgiving
Paul begins almost every one of his letters with a word of thanksgiving to God and prayer for the people to whom he is writing. The thanksgiving and prayer in Ephesians 1 are perhaps Paul’s most elaborate.
Paul’s prayer makes me wonder: how might our lives be transformed if, in every interaction with others, we mentally and spiritually would give thanks for the other person? What a positive world this would be if we began every thought, every interaction with other people with thanksgiving!
You might say, “But why should I give thanks for other people? You don’t know how irritating the people are that I must deal with.” That may be so. But thankfully, Paul gives us a reason for thanksgiving. He gives thanks “for this reason”. And what is his reason? He gives thanks because of all that he has told us in the first fourteen verses of his letter. He gives thanks for the Ephesians because of what God has done and is doing in and through them. Yes, Paul gives thanks to God because of the Ephesians’ faith in the Lord Jesus and because of their love for all God’s people. But their faith and their love are the result of what God has done. God is the one who has made the first move. And God is the one to whom all thanks are due.
If we have no other reason to give thanks for other people, we have at least two reasons. (1) Because every person we meet is made in the image of God. (2) Because every person we meet is someone for whom Christ died.
Notice too that Paul says, “I have not stopped giving thanks for you.” Prayer was not a one-time event for Paul. Prayer was the expression for him of an ongoing, daily, moment by moment, hour by hour, relationship with Jesus Christ. And that makes me wonder: is prayer just a one-off for us, or is it an ongoing conversation with our creator and redeemer and sustainer?
Prayer
That question leads me to want to investigate more deeply precisely what it is that Paul prays for the Ephesians in this passage. What Paul prays might just be a good model for us. Essentially, Paul prays for two things that are parallel with one another…
First, Paul says he keeps “asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit…” Notice whom Paul is addressing in prayer. He is praying to the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father. Paul is not addressing just any old god. He is addressing his prayer to the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus should shape all our understanding about God and about prayer to God. And it is from Jesus that we get the idea and the permission to address God as Father in the first place. Think of it: no one addressed God as Father before Jesus came along. Jesus was the first person in human history to address God, not only as Father, but as Abba, Daddy. And Jesus taught his disciples to do the same. Jesus taught his disciples to pray saying, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” The God whom we are privileged to address in prayer is our glorious heavenly Father.
And what does Paul ask his heavenly Father to do for the Ephesians? He asks the Father of Jesus to give to the Ephesians his Spirit. And that is a prayer we can be certain God is going to answer in the affirmative. Remember what Jesus said in Luke 11:13? “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children: how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
Now, notice what Paul calls the Spirit. He calls him the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. The Greek word for wisdom is σοφίας. This is a word that both Greeks and Jews could relate to. The Greeks were famous for seeking after Sophia, wisdom. And for the Jews, wisdom was personified as a woman in the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament, namely in the book of Proverbs.
When Jesus came along, he was the fulfillment of everything the Greeks and the Jews were looking for, even though they did not know it. That’s why John calls Jesus the Logos. John says, at the beginning of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God… and the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” Think of it: the reasoning power behind the universe, that created all that is, became a human being and brought us wisdom. And that wisdom is now available to us and conveyed to us by the Holy Spirit.
Notice too that Paul calls the Spirit, the Spirit of revelation. The Greek word is ἀποκαλύψεως. From this we get our English words, apocalypse and apocalyptic. Have you noticed how the use of the word “apocalyptic” has been on the rise since the Covid pandemic? People all over the media have been using the word “apocalyptic” but they have been using it incorrectly. Most people today use the word “apocalyptic” to refer to the end of the world, perhaps because the Apocalypse (the Greek name for the book of Revelation) seems to be about the end of the world. But that is not what the word means. “Apocalypse” simply means “revelation”, or more literally, “unveiling”. Events which are “apocalyptic” in nature, reveal, or unveil, some truth about God, or God himself.
So, Paul prays for the Ephesians that God the Father of Jesus Christ might give them his Holy Spirit so that they might have wisdom and revelation. But to what end? Paul tells us the purpose of the Ephesians’ reception of the Holy Spirit of wisdom and revelation. The purpose is that they might know God better. That’s what Paul wants for the Ephesians and, I believe, it is what God most wants for us. God wants us to know him better. He wants to have a relationship of love with us. And I can tell you one thing with complete confidence. If you pray this prayer for yourself, God will do it, because he wants to know you, he wants you to know him, and he wants to give you his Holy Spirit; God literally wants to put his Spirit inside of you to make a relationship with him possible.
So, that’s the first thing Paul prays for the Ephesians. The second thing he prays for them is this… He says, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened…” Paul prays for enlightenment for the Ephesians.
Isn’t it amazing that what human beings call the Age of Enlightenment, which began in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, was a philosophical movement that led many people away from faith in Jesus Christ? Perhaps it should have been called “The Endarklement”. Paul tells us in this passage where true enlightenment comes from. It comes through prayer; it comes through a relationship with God through his Son Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Paul uses a very interesting expression here. He prays for the Ephesians that the eyes of their heart might be enlightened. The Greek word for eyes is ὀφθαλμοὺς. From this we get our English word, ophthalmology (the study of eyes) and ophthalmologist (one who studies eyes or an eye doctor).
The word for heart in Greek is καρδίας. We obviously get many English words related to the heart from this Greek word. Intriguingly, the heart is mentioned over 800 times in the Bible, but the word never refers to the organ that pumps blood in our chest. The word is always used figuratively.
Think about how our physical eyes are enlightened. When the sun shines on our faces and our eyes are open, our eyes sparkle as the sun enlightens them. And it is by the light of the sun that we see, physically speaking.
Now Paul uses that same word-picture to help us understand spiritual enlightenment. Such enlightenment comes through the eyes but not our physical eyes. It comes through the eyes of our hearts.
For Paul, as a Jew, the heart does not symbolize the emotions, but rather the inner core of who a person really is. The heart symbolizes the spiritual person. So, Paul is talking about our spiritual eyes being enlightened. And how does that happen? Well, just as the physical sun enlightens our physical eyes and helps us to see physical things, so the Son of God enlightens our spiritual eyes and helps us to see spiritual things.
Specifically, Paul talks about three things that the enlightenment of the Son of God can help us to know. First, the enlightenment brought by the Spirit of Jesus can enable us to know the hope to which God has called us. And what is that hope? Paul uses the word “hope” four times in Ephesians, but he never spells out in this letter what the Christian hope is. Thankfully, Paul does elaborate on this in his other letters. The main place where Paul talks about the Christian hope is in Romans 8 where he writes…
For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
So then, the hope of the Christian is the hope of redemption, not only for us and our bodies, but the hope of redemption for all of creation. God is in the business of redeeming, perfecting, the whole cosmos. And we are part of that project, the culmination of which will involve the redemption and resurrection of our bodies to be like Jesus’ resurrection body—bodies that will never get sick, never grow old, never die. That is our Christian hope.
Secondly, the enlightenment brought by the Spirit of Jesus will help us to know the richesof his glorious inheritance in the saints. It is interesting to note that in the Old Testament the inheritance of God’s people Israel was the land. In the New Testament the inheritance of followers of Jesus is so much more.
In Paul’s letters the word “inheritance” may refer to one of two things. It may refer to the riches of God’s blessings to us in eternal life, what one person has called “the eternal blessedness in the consummated kingdom of God which is to be expected after the visible return of Christ.” But the inheritance Paul speaks of could also be a reference to God’s inheritance of us. We are God’s possession, bought by the precious blood of God’s Son Jesus, shed on the cross.
Either way you look at it, this is a beautiful expression. The hymn-writer put it this way: “I am his and he is mine.” That is to say: God is our inheritance, and we are his inheritance. What we inherit is an eternal, positive relationship with him. What God inherits is an eternal, positive relationship with us.
The third thing that Paul says the enlightenment of the Spirit of Jesus can bring to us is knowledge of God’s incomparably great power for us who believe. The Greek word for “power” that is used here is δυνάμεως from which we get our English word “dynamite”. God offers incomparably great power, power that cannot even be compared to any other power, for those of us who believe in him. That is to say: God offers power not just to those who believe he exists, but to those who trust in him through his Son Jesus Christ. In short, God offers us dynamite, explosive power, but it is a power that God can harness to recreate us and to recreate the universe. The New Testament is the story of that power, that dynamite, at work. The New Testament is quite literally T.N.T.!
Power
In the last part of Ephesians 1, Paul spells out exactly what God’s power is like and what it can accomplish. Paul says…
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, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
In short, what Paul tells us is that God gives us the same power that was demonstrated in Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. God exerted dynamite power when he raised Christ from the dead and when he seated him in the heavenly realms. That latter bit is a reference to the ascension.
Do you remember the way that the ascension of Jesus is pictured in the book of Acts. It is pictured as Jesus rising in the sky until he disappears from the physical sight of the disciples. Now, I know that most modern people want to ask, “Did Jesus really ascend like a balloon in the air? And if so, where did he go?” Personally, I am not really concerned with whether Jesus literally ascended into the physical atmosphere around the earth. I imagine that whatever Jesus did, it was something that we cannot understand with our limited human brains. At the same time, it would not surprise me that this is how his ascension appeared to his disciples. How else could Jesus demonstrate to his first disciples that he was the conquering king returning to his throne next to his heavenly father? Would moving sideways or down into the earth have demonstrated Jesus’ power half so well to the disciples as moving upward through the air?
More important than what Jesus did physically in the ascension is what he accomplished spiritually. Paul calls Satan “the prince of the power of the air” in Ephesians 2:2. And so Paul implies that when Jesus ascended to heaven, he broke through Satan’s ranks. The ascension is symbolic of Jesus’ literal triumph over all evil. Jesus ascended over all rule, authority, power, and dominion. These are terms that Paul uses to refer to various levels of demonic power. Paul is going to return to this topic and use this terminology again in Ephesians 6. But for now, all we need to see is that Jesus has conquered every other power there is in the universe, and everything is placed under his feet, under his authority, by his heavenly Father. And that includes the Church. Jesus is, quite literally, the head of the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all.
Speaking of power… have you ever wondered how much power it would take to make a world? My father sat down to figure it out one day using Einstein’s formula, E=MC2. Here is what he wrote about that experiment…
Following Einstein’s formula, if we take two and two-tenths pounds of matter (a kilogram) and we reduce it to fragments, or as we say until our chain of fission is complete, we will end up with 25 billion kilowatt hours of energy, which is equivalent, approximately, to the total output of all of our power sources in the whole of the United States operating at peak efficiency 24 hours a day for 60 days.
Of course, the reverse of this then would be true in determining how much energy it would take to bring into existence a kilogram of matter. Again, it would take 25 billion kilowatt hours of energy.
The world in which we live weighs 6.5 septillion tons. Then to determine the kilowatt hours of energy necessary to bring into existence a world you would multiply 6.5 septillion tons by 25 billion. This then would give us in kilowatt hours the energy necessary to bring into existence a world.
The question then is where you can get that much energy, even if you used all the power sources in the whole of the world, operating these at peak efficiency, 24 hours a day, including not only the power plants as sources of energy but all our working atomic piles. Work all these peak efficiency 24 hours a day for 20 billion years, even then you only have a fraction of the energy necessary to bring into existence a world.
That’s why I like the way in which this is expressed in the Old Testament. “God spoke and the worlds were formed.” Or in other words, God expressed His power and the worlds were formed.
The same power that made the universe raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly realms far above every other power in the universe. And that same power is available to us today. I believe it is the power of God’s love. The only question is: will we plug into it?
In Ephesians 1, we learn once again that there is no problem too great for God’s power, and there is no person too small for his love. Paul shows us that Thanksgiving + Prayer = Power.
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