AP

Ephesians 3:14-19  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.

The Apostle Paul is writing to the fledgling Church at Ephesus consisting of Jews who have come to recognise Jesus as their Messiah and their Lord and Saviour, and Gentiles who have turned from their pagan idol worship to the One True God who has sent his Son into the world to die for man’s sin.  People with these two fundamentally different backgrounds have been traditionally total strangers: for the Jews, their commitment to Judaism identified them as God’s chosen people, an exclusive ‘race-apart’,  and therefore barred them from any fellowship with Gentiles. For the Gentiles, Jews generally were hated because of their arrogant exclusivity.

These two were now, because of their shared faith in Jesus as Lord and Saviour, all thrown into a ‘church’ together – a recipe for disaster!  Paul begins his letter to them by pointing out the absolute sovereignty of God, and how it was only through his electing grace (‘predestination’) that anyone, Jew or Gentile, came to trust in Jesus and be saved, and that because of our commonly shared sinful disposition we are all, by nature, ‘dead in our trespasses and sins’ and need to be ‘made alive’ by God’s grace alone.  Yes, it is God who takes the initiative in bringing us to himself, and it is for the purpose of our doing ‘good works’ which he had ‘prepared in advance for us to do’.

So, at this point in his letter (Chapter 2, verse 11), Paul begins to remind them that everything in their thinking, in the life and culture of the Church, is now completely changed from what it had been traditionally.  Now, they all belong to the same family, under God’s family name, in the same way our ‘family’ names on earth identify us as belonging to one another in a very special way.  (This fact has become more meaningful to us since the scientifc discovery of DNA and the ability to trace our ancestry.  If Paul were alive today he might even want to talk about our ‘spiritual DNA’ in the fellowship of the Church.)

And more importantly, this doesn’t only connect us solidly with each other, it connects us solidly, in the same way, with Christ our Head, as members of his body.  In today’s verses, the Apostle draws our attention to the implications of all this for our being ‘strengthened with power through his Spirit in our inner being, so that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith.  And … … being rooted and established in love, we 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 we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God’.  O that all this ‘love’ and ‘power’ might be our shared daily experience in the fellowship of Christian community, whatever form(s) that may take!

– Bruce Christian