In this group of posts, we’ve been looking at Paul’s apostolic prayer found in Ephesians. At first, we began dissecting the passage, then we looked at the symbolism of plant growth (I spoke of a tree, but I don’t know exactly what was on Paul’s mind). Now, let’s look at what all of this means for us practically.

When looking at the passage, I’m struck by the level to which Paul emphasizes the size of Jesus’ love. It is as if Paul uses every dimension that he can think of in order to stress the size and scope of God’s love, and even with the use of as much hyperbole as possible, he still runs short of being able to explain “the love for us that is in Christ Jesus.”

With that said, you might be wondering, “Yes, but how does this work? I thought you were going to give some application here!” Let us not forget that this passage is a prayer. That means that the only thing that we can functionally do with it is to replicate it. We don’t pray a prayer like this and expect the answer to come from ourselves or others. Paul is asking for some work to be done here by the Holy Spirit.

Do any of us fully comprehend how much God loves us? Who of us would answer “yes” to that question? We need God himself (God the Holy Spirit) to enable us to further understand His (God the Father) love for us in Jesus (God the Son). Isn’t that crazy? We can, with God’s help, continually grow (see all the plant-ish connections?) to understand and grasp God’s love.

And since this is a prayer, we can ask this of God on behalf of others. We need to ask this on behalf of others. After all, if you were a plant, would you rather grow in rocky sand or in miracle gro?

 

This post is part of a series. To view the previous post, click here.