Do you ever wonder if there is more to the Christian life? We trust Christ, worship faithfully, and seek to live rightly, yet still feel that there is so much more to experience. In Ephesians 3:14–21, the apostle Paul addresses this longing not with a command to try harder, but with a prayer.
Paul reminds us that Christians are not spiritually impoverished. Scripture declares that God has blessed us “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” and lavished upon us the immeasurable riches of His grace (Eph. 1:3). Through Christ’s resurrection, we share in His power, His position, and His inheritance. Yet knowing these truths is not the same as living in them. What is needed is divine enablement, and Paul teaches us to seek it through prayer.
This prayer unfolds in a beautiful, intentional progression, like a staircase leading upward into a deeper experience of God. Paul begins by bowing his knees before the Father and prays with bold confidence, asking not for small favors but for blessings given “according to the riches of His glory.” God does not give sparingly; He gives in proportion to His infinite resources.
The first request is that believers would be strengthened with power through the Holy Spirit in their inner being. The Christian life cannot be lived by human willpower or moral effort alone. We need internal empowerment and inner spiritual strength. This strengthening results in Christ truly dwelling in our hearts through faith, not as a temporary guest, but as One who settles in and makes Himself at home.
From this inner strengthening flows the following request: that we would be rooted and grounded in love. Paul combines two vivid images, a deeply rooted tree and a firmly founded building, to describe stability and depth. Love is both the soil that nourishes our growth and the foundation that holds us steady. Without love, spiritual life becomes shallow and unstable. Only as Christ’s love takes root in us can we grow strong and secure.
Next, Paul prays that we would have the strength to comprehend the dimensions of Christ’s love, its width and length and height and depth, and to truly know this love that surpasses knowledge. This is more than intellectual understanding. It is an experienced, relational knowing. The love of Christ reaches into the depths of human sin, spans every divide, and stretches across all of time.
Finally, Paul reaches the summit of his prayer: that believers would be filled with all the fullness of God. This request is staggering. Paul dares to pray that finite, earthly people of dust and clay would overflow with the life, character, and presence of the Triune God. This fullness does not come instantly or independently, but as the culmination of the Spirit’s strengthening, Christ’s indwelling, and deep-rooted love.
Paul closes with a doxology that anchors our hope: God is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or imagine, according to the power already at work within us. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is present in His people. When we pray boldly and trust God fully, He ignites that power and leads us into a life far richer than we could imagine.
May we be a church that learns this prayer, prays it often, and believes it deeply, for ourselves, our families, and one another, trusting God to awaken and fulfill our potential in Christ.
-Jacob Brunjes