Empowered to Love

     Paul wraps up the theological first-half of Ephesians not with a summary but on his knees in prayer. He has spent three chapters showing us what God has done for us in Christ. He has named the blessings, prayed for our sight, explained how the Spirit raised us from death, how the cross destroyed the dividing wall of hostility, how the church is the showcase of God's wisdom. And then, when he is finally ready to call us to walk worthy of all of it, he stops to pray.
     This posture tells us something about what Paul is teaching. Standing was the standard posture for Jewish prayer, and Paul almost never describes himself kneeling. The weight of what he is about to ask is heavy enough that his posture reflects his words. He is asking for something the church cannot manufacture on its own.
     He addresses the Father "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (3:15). Every form of belonging in the universe takes its name from the Father, the source of fatherhood itself. We are asking, in other words, inside the family He invented.
     What Paul asks for first is not love. It is power. "That according to the riches of His glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in your inner being" (3:16). The measure of the supply is set by the riches of God's glory, not by the size of our need. Paul piles up the language of strength, asking for the kind of strength only God can give, delivered by the Spirit to the deepest part of who we are.
     Many of us get the order wrong here. We assume the Christian life works like a self-improvement project. We learn what love looks like, we resolve to do better, we try harder, and we wonder why we run out. But the trouble runs deeper than effort. The trouble is that our reasons for withholding love are usually good ones. When I have wanted to give up on someone, the case was airtight. They hurt me. They let me down again. They made me feel less than. Cutting them out was the sensible thing to do, and I could have defended it to anyone. There is a logic to walking away, and most of the time the logic is correct.
     That correct logic is exactly what the gospel contends with. It made sense to hate our enemies. It made sense for God to cut His losses with us. Instead He loved us while we were still sinners, while we were His enemies, against every reason He had to do otherwise. So Paul does not pray for the Ephesians to try harder, and he does not pray for them to find better reasons. He prays for the Spirit to strengthen them in the inner person, because everything that follows happens there. The inner person is where Christ meets us, where He works, where He dwells. If that place is not fortified by God, no amount of moral effort and no amount of good reasoning will produce what the gospel calls for.
     The strengthening is for a specific purpose. "So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith" (v17). The word for "dwell" is not the word for a temporary stay. It is the word for permanent residence. Christ is not a guest in the heart of the believer, He is the inhabitant. The Spirit's work on the inner person is not the end of the prayer. The Spirit fortifies the room so that the Son takes up His settled home in it. The Father sends, the Spirit prepares, the Son dwells.
     The hinge of the prayer is the next line. "That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge" (3:17-19). Paul fuses two metaphors. The first is agricultural. The roots of a tree go down into soil and hold it in place against wind and storm. The second is architectural. The foundation is laid into bedrock, and the building rises on it. Trees and buildings do not usually share an image. Paul fuses them on purpose. Love is both the soil we grow from and the stone we stand on.
     Love is not the achievement of the mature Christian. Love is the medium the mature Christian grows in. We do not produce love by an act of will, and we do not arrive at it by working out the math. We are rooted in a love already given. The gardener does not manufacture the sun. The wall does not pour its own footing. The Christian who is finally able to love a person who has earned none of it is not a Christian who summoned more affection from her own reserves. They are a Christian whose roots have gone deeper into a love the Father has been supplying all along.
     The comprehension Paul prays for is corporate. "With all the saints" is not a decorative phrase. The dimensions of Christ's love are too large for any individual to grasp. Paul names a magnitude without naming an object, because the love is too big to be reduced to a slogan. The church, together, takes hold of what no one of us could hold alone. That is one of the reasons we are not Christians in isolation. We are saints comprehending with all the saints.
     Then Paul asks that we would "know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge" (3:19). The paradox is intentional. The love can be known, and the love always exceeds what can be known. The believer who thinks she has mapped the love of Christ has not yet begun. This is the answer to the church that is informed but not loving. The cure for cold orthodoxy is not less knowledge. It is the kind of knowing that exceeds knowledge, the kind only the Spirit can produce. We have all met Christians who know the doctrines but do not love the neighbor. The diagnosis is not too much theology. The diagnosis is too little of the knowing Paul prays for here, the knowing that comes through faith and ends in fullness.
     "That you may be filled with all the fullness of God" (3:19). Paul's language reaches its ceiling. The same God who in 1:23 fills all in all now fills His people. We are not asked to imitate God from a distance. We are asked to be filled with His own fullness, supplied by His own Spirit, on the basis of His own Son's indwelling. Counterfeit love runs dry because it draws from a finite supply. It can only love as far as the reasons reach, and the reasons always run out. The love we owe our neighbors and our enemies draws from the fullness of God Himself.
     This is why the love that stays inside the bounds of what makes sense will always collapse on itself. It starts with our energy, our resolve, our resources. It runs on the kindness we can summon and the case we can make. Paul prays for something different. He prays for a love that is given before it is shown, for a strengthening that precedes the action, for a Christ who dwells before He sends. The church that loves the world well is not the church that tries hardest, it is the church that asks.
     None of this means we are called to be doormats. Even Jesus did not let people treat Him as one. But what Jesus always does is leave room. He leaves room for forgiveness. He leaves the door open. The love Paul prays for does not require us to pretend the wounds did not happen. It frees us to say, yes, I have been hurt, and by the grace of God I leave the door open anyway.
     Paul closes the prayer with a doxology that catches the same fire. "Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen" (3:20-21). Paul piles up the language of excess because ordinary speech cannot carry the weight of what he is invoking. The God being asked is the God who does more than the asking. And the power Paul has been praying for is not theoretical or future. It is already at work within us, right now.
     The doxology has two arenas, the church and Jesus. The local congregation is not a side stage. It is one of the two places where the eternal glory of God is being put on display. Every Sunday gathering, every act of love that exceeds what we thought we had in us, every reconciliation that should not have been possible, is a flash of that glory in the only arena history has been given. The church matters because the glory of God matters, and the glory of God has chosen the church as one of its dwellings.
     This prayer asks something of us this week. It asks us to stop manufacturing. It asks us to stop equating Christian maturity with having the right answers about love, and to stop trusting the logic that tells us who is worth our love and who is not. It asks us to bow our knees and ask the Father to strengthen us by His Spirit in the inner person, so that Christ would dwell, so that we would be rooted, so that we would know what surpasses knowing. The work in the garden does not produce sunlight, it positions the plant to receive it. The work in our hearts is the same. We do not summon affection for the difficult people in our lives, and we do not reason our way into it. We bow our knees with Paul and we ask the Father to send His power. The love that will spill from us toward the world is the love that first filled us with His fullness. Anything less is counterfeit.
     The Spirit is already at work within us, and the One who hears this prayer is able to do far more than we know to ask. Bow your knees with Paul this week. Ask Him.