Ephesians 1:15-23

Thanksgiving and Prayer

15For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 17I 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. 18I pray also 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 the saints, 19and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, 20which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.



Dig Deeper

Over a decade after the colonies of America had declared their independence, it became clear that the government they had chosen and implemented, the Articles of Confederation, was clearly not working. So, the leading and most powerful men in the new country convened a convention to fix the Articles. It quickly became clear that what they needed was a whole new form of government, so they began to craft a Constitution. One of the first things they decided was that all proceedings would be secret, in part because what they were doing was not exactly authorized. All of the men there worked together and compromised on many things, which was no small feat with such a collection of powerful men. Throughout the proceedings, George Washington had stayed virtually silent, but all the men knew who he was. One day, Washington went into a local restaurant and found a copy of someone's notes from the convention. The next day, Washington quietly and sternly asked whose notes they were. He demanded that the guilty party come up to his desk and claim their notes. Many delegates describe being convulsed with worry until they found their own notes either in their bags or later at their hotel rooms. Washington slammed the notes down on the table and they stayed their for the remainder of what we now know as the Constitutional Convention. In the midst of a great many who had claimed one form of power or another, it was George Washington who had demonstrated what true human power looks like. He had the kind of power that dwarfed any other claims to power. That is much of the reason why those same man eventually chose him to be the first Constitutional President of the United States.

The Roman world was familiar with the idea of power, and it was full of claims of that power. It makes sense, then, that power is such a central idea in the book of Ephesians. It was a topic with which Paul's readers were quite familiar. Yet, what Paul really wants to demonstrate is that all those other claims to power are mere pretenders that pale in comparison to the true, raw power that God had demonstrated in the life of the Messiah and through the work of the Holy Spirit.

Paul gives praise to God and was constantly giving thanks for the churches to whom this letter is addressed. He has been doing so since he heard of their faith in the life of Christ, implying that this was indeed a circular letter rather than a letter written to a church with which he was intimately involved. Paul was greatly encouraged by their faith in the Lord Jesus which, when genuine, always leads to love for all the saints. In our day, saints has often come to imply some sort of higher class of disciple, a distinction unknown to the earlier Christians. "Saints," for the early church was simply a general term for all Christians.

Paul's great desire, and the subject of much prayer on his part, is that these young Christians are given wisdom and revelation so that they may know God better. In essence, Paul is praying that the people will receive a Spirit-led revelation so that they might know what they have in their new life in Christ. Paul hopes that they can understand with the deepest part of themselves and their will, what he calls the eyes of their heart. The hope of the calling and the glorious inheritance to which Paul refers is a clear reference to the life of the age to come both in the present age and when it is fully consummated in God's restored creation. "Call" is Paul's normal word that he uses to refer to the moment of conversion. Paul, then, says they were called or saved to a glorious inheritance. The great hope of the early Christian faith, a point that is often lost in contemporary Christianity, was the resurrection of the Saints, and the life of resurrection made available now in the Messiah. The inheritance of the saints is the possession of God's new world, also available in the Messiah. Thus, Paul's prayer is that they may realize the incredible hope that we have for the future but also the glorious life of the age to come available now in the Messiah. Paul clearly doesn't imagine that all Christians will realize or even take advantage of the riches that they have in Christ, but his hope is that as many will as possible.

The concept of power was a popular one, not only in the Roman imperial world but also in the many pagan religions in the Empire. There were numerous cults and religions that focused on the power of magic to influence situations and people to make things happen, usually for the personal benefit of the individual invoking this power. The world of the Romans was ruled by the rule, authority, power, and dominion of the Roman government and local magistrates all the way to the spirits, gods, and goddesses and everything in between. Into that world and mindset, though, has broken an example of true power. The Roman world admired, envied, and paraded around examples that they considered power but none of that was real power in Paul's mind. It was the one true God who has demonstrated an incomparably great power. He did this not only through the transforming power of the life of Christ given to those who would believe, but that same power was exercised by God in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection was not a one-time event, but was the first stage that made the resurrection life available and is the promise of the future resurrection of all those in Christ.

Christians often walk around feeling defeated and unable to overcome the powers that are swirling all about us constantly, but the same power that raised the Holy Spirit is also at work in our lives. God's power might not be as readily evident in the life of each believer, but it is unarguably there for those who would have the eyes of their heart opened and take advantage of the power available to us. The power of God is far above any sort of parody of power that the world can muster. Paul's point in listing the five areas of worldly power in verse 21, is not to list any sort of spiritual hierarchy but rather to make that point that, basically, if you can think of it, it is in submission to the power of Christ. This is not only true of the age to come, which everyone would readily recognize, but also in the present age, something that we must always strive to understand and live in a manner consistent with that truth.

God has placed all things under Christ; he has authority of the entire world and everything in it. All things have been put under the feet of the Messiah, a quote from Psalm 8 which was a favorite passage of the early church. It is a passage that talks of God's original purpose for humankind to have dominion over his entire creation. What man had failed to do, though, because of sin, has been accomplished in he Messiah. This is the Messiah that has been given to the church, not just to rule over it, but to make his life available. It should not be missed that if Christ is the head, with all things under his feet, and the church is the body of Christ, then all things are also under the feet of the church that remains in Christ. What a church it would be that began to act with the authority of Christ rather than as helpless victims of an over-exaggerated Satan. Verse 23 is a bit of a translation challenge, but the overall point is that "fullness" refers to Jesus not to the church. Paul is not saying that the church is the fullness of Christ, but that Christ is the fullness of God (see Col. 2:9-10 for a similar thought). Just as the glory of God filled the Temple in the Old Testament, now the presence of God fills Christ, who in turn, fills his people, so that the church has access to the divine fullness.



Devotional Thought

Paul's prayer was that his original audience would become aware of and take advantage of the fullness of the life that they had available to them in Christ. In what areas of your life do you still need to do that?