Eph 3.14-21
pastoral prayers 2021: roots
(ephesians 3.14-21)
Jason Procopio
If you were here last week you know that we’re kicking off 2021 with two weeks in Paul’s prayers for the church in Ephesus. We’re coming here because, in part, these are two prayers I repeatedly came back to over the last few months—prayers I prayed, and still pray, for all of you.
Last week we saw the prayer in Ephesians 1.15-23, that God would enlighten the eyes of your heart—that you would deeply know what God has done for you in Jesus Christ, and have confidence that if he started that work in you, he will finish it.
This week we’ll be in Ephesians 3.14-21, and even if it’s a simpler text, it’s no less profound for that.
My son and I were talking this week about what it means to follow Christ. On a practical level, what does that look like? It’s learning to know him in his Word, and learning to live like him through his Spirit. That’s it—there’s no method, no simple formula to apply. Learn to know Christ in his Word, and learn to live like him through his Spirit.
But of course even if knowing how to follow Christ is essentially simple, actually doing it is a lot harder. Because there will be times in our lives when we don’t really want to do it. There will be times when we’re suffering, and suffering puts blinders on our eyes—makes it a lot harder to discern what we should do in any given situation. There will be times when we know that if we do this, we will stand to lose a lot—maybe everything in this world that’s important to us.
It’s easy to follow Christ when everything’s going well. But what will keep us going when things aren’t going so well? What will keep us following Christ when we don’t want to, or when we’re in pain, or when we stand to lose everything if we do?
That’s what Paul prays for today; that’s what I’ve been praying for all of you for months, and particularly this week.
So let’s read the text together, then we’ll get into it. Ephesians 3.14-21:
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 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, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Now before Paul really gets into his prayer, he gives a bit of an introduction. He says in v. 14, FOR THIS REASON. Any time you read words like that in the Bible—words like so, because of this, for, for this reason, etc.—you should always take a minute to ask yourself what he’s talking about. “For what reason?”
It’s especially tricky here because what Paul said just before doesn’t really seem to lead into the prayer he’s going to pray. But if we look a little further up the page, to v. 1 of chapter 3, we see him use the same words “FOR THIS REASON”… And then in v. 2, he interrupts himself and kind of changes subjects for a few verses. So here in v. 14, he picks his thought up again with the same words.
So what is the reason? It would be what he was saying before his first thought in v. 1. At the end of chapter 2, Paul talks about the unity that the gospel creates amongst people from all over the world. Before Christ, belonging to God meant belonging to a specific ethnic group: the Jews. They were the people to whom and through whom God would enact his saving plans for the world. What changed here is that God did that. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to the world; Christ lived his life as a Jewish man among Jews; and he offered himself up as a perfect sacrifice—not only for the Jews this time, but for everyone.
Where before, there was distance between nations, in Christ there is unity. Where before there was hostility between nations, in Christ there is peace. (And every historical example we have to the contrary—of wars being fought in the name of Christ—is simply proof that many people who claim Christ don’t actually understand what he came to do.)
So this is what Paul is celebrating here—in Christ, the household of God, his family, is being built, springing up out of all nations, cultures and tribes. And this worldwide reconciliation God offers in Christ is so amazing, so all-encompassing, that Paul’s appropriate response is to humbly bow before God in worship and pray that we might know how great he is.
We see his humility in v. 14-15, when he says,
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named…
Now verse 15 can seem a bit obscure; it’s actually simpler than it looks. In the Bible, the name of a person is a kind of representation of their identity. What he’s saying is that every person, every family on earth, owes their existence to God, because he is our Creator. There is no us without him. Paul mentions this at the beginning for two reasons: firstly, to give further explanation as to why he is bowing his knees before the Father; and secondly, to explain his confidence that God will answer his prayer. (And he’ll come back to that at the end.)
So he bows his knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named… And when he does this, what does he pray for? What do I pray for you, when I come before the Father?
Power (v. 16-17)
Firstly, he prays for power. V. 16:
...that according to the riches of his glory [which are INFINITE!] he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being...
So think back to what we saw just a second ago. Paul praised God for this enormous, global work of salvation to unite people from all nations to himself. It’s a massive work; and if you know the Old Testament, you’ll automatically see this in terms of God’s people. God takes his covenant people, the Jews, and he doesn’t reject them—rather, he opens the doors to ALL nations, ALL peoples, bringing them into his covenant people.
And the Spirit takes this huge, all-encompassing, global work of God, and applies it to the hearts of individual believers. This is what we mean in our members’ class when we talk about the gospel being both collective (dealing with the whole of the Christian church) and personal (dealing with individuals).
I’ve often said, “God doesn’t just save individuals; he saves a people.” And that’s true—some people can make the mistake of assuming that we can be Christians without the church, so it’s important to emphasize that Christianity without the church isn’t Christianity.
But we shouldn’t go to the other extreme of imagining that God’s work applies only to the church collectively. God doesn’t just save people, he saves a people—absolutely. But at the same time, he doesn’t just save a people; he saves people. Individuals.
He takes this huge work that he applies to his church over the whole world and throughout human history, and he applies it to each and every one of us, individually, inside of us.
In other words, God doesn’t just look at the big picture; he looks at and gives attention to the tiniest details of his plan, even going so far as to give us power through his Spirit to live for him and honor him in the most mundane details of our lives.
So Paul prays simply that God would do what he does—that through his Spirit, he would apply the gospel to our hearts—our inner beings—with power, to give us strength for our lives with him.
The question is, what does that strength look like? How does it manifest itself?
That’s where Paul goes next. He prays that God would strengthen us with power through his Spirit (v. 17):
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith...
Now this is a tricky one, because people often have a misunderstanding of what this means. For example, we speak very often about “inviting Christ into our hearts” or our lives. And while this is at least partially true—there is an element of choice in our conversion—if we put all the emphasis here then it could be easy to imagine that being a Christian is merely a question of praying a prayer at the end of a service: “Just say these words, ask Jesus in, and BOOM—you’re a Christian!” It doesn’t work like that.
As N.T. Wright notes, “Paul speaks far more often of Christians being ‘in Christ’ than of Christ being ‘in Christians.’ It’s important to see our individual experience within the larger picture of our membership in God’s family in the Messiah, within the worldwide plan Paul has been talking of in these three chapters.”
To put it simply, we’re not Christians—in the biblical sense of the word—because we prayed the right prayer, or said the right words, or went through a certain ritual. We’re not Christians because we invited Christ into our lives. We are Christians because Christ brought us into his life. We are Christians because Christ saved us.
But that being said, once it is clear that it’s not just a question of saying the right words—that God’s action here is far more important than ours—then we can joyfully remind ourselves that when Christ brings us to himself through faith, he does come, and he does make his dwelling in us, through his Spirit.
So what Paul is praying here is not that Christ would do this simply (he’s speaking to Christians after all); he’s praying that Christ may dwell in us with power, through faith (as we saw in v. 16).
In other words, that Christ’s presence in us may push us to live as people indwelt by him. That his presence in us may give us wisdom and strength to know who he is, and what he has done for us, and how to respond to his work.
He talks later on about how that power manifests itself practically—in the life of the church in chapter 4, in our interpersonal relationships in chapter 5, in our life of prayer and holiness in chapter 6. But the first thing that Christ’s powerful, indwelling Spirit in us does is that he gives us roots—and those roots find their source in God’s own love for us.
Which is exactly what Paul prays for next.
Rooted in Love (v. 17)
...that you, being rooted and grounded in love...
Now I know it’s weird to dedicate an entire point to an incomplete sentence, but we actually need to stay here for quite some time. Because this little phrase is the key—a kind of summary statement—of this entire passage.
When Paul prays that we might be rooted and grounded in love, he’s not talking about love in general, or our love for one another, but God’s love for us. (We see this a little more clearly further down, in v. 19—which we’ll get to in a minute.) To put it simply, God’s love is the soil into which the Christian sinks his roots; it the foundation on which the Christian’s spiritual house is built.
This is kind of a basic question, but what do roots do? They keep plants from flying away when the wind blows. The bigger the plant is, the bigger the roots need to be—a redwood tree [sequoia] has roots that can extend 15 meters (50 feet). In the same way, a Christian grows by sinking his roots deeper and deeper to support him and keep him steady; and what keeps us steady—the soil our roots sink into—is our growing understanding of God’s love for us.
So let’s just think about what this changes for us. We saw it last week: God’s love for us doesn’t depend on our ability to perform, to be obedient, to pray a certain number of hours or read a certain number of pages in the Bible. He loves us not because we are good, but because we are his, and he has made us his own.
His love for us shows itself in the past—in that he sent his Son to live our life and die our death and be raised for our eternal life.
His love for us is unconditional—not that there are no conditions, but that there are no conditions that we have to meet: Christ has already met every condition for us. And because he fulfilled God’s law for us and suffered our punishment for us, he gives us unconditional forgiveness—all of our sin, past, present and future, is already forgiven. He gives us unconditional protection—protection from anything which will cause us eternal harm, anything that will indefinitely pull us away from him. He gives us unconditional growth—not based on what we do, but based on what he has already done.
Knowing this—knowing that God’s love is already ours, already secured and protected for us in Christ, and that nothing we do can possibly change that—knowing that God has shown us this love is the only way that we can live our lives as Christians. Being rooted in God’s love for us is the only way we will grow. Because if we aren’t rooted in his love for us, one of two things will happen.
The first thing is pride. If we aren’t rooted in God’s love for us, we’ll imagine that we need to gain God’s approval.
You efficient people will understand this. You have a goal, so what do you do? You think about how you are going to achieve that goal. So you make a list: what do I need to do to earn God’s approval?
Well, read your Bible. Check.
Pray. Check.
Stop telling lies. Check.
Stop looking at porn. Check.
Stop sleeping with your girlfriend. Check.
Give to the homeless. Check.
Help old ladies cross the road. Check.
And so on—there are a million things on this checklist.
Here’s the problem though: these commandments are task-oriented: they are things God tells us to do or not to do. And nearly all of these task-oriented commandments, we can do under our own steam. Anyone can be honest. Anyone can refrain from sex. Anyone can be generous. We just have to teach ourselves to be disciplined enough to do it.
So what ends up happening? We delude ourselves into imagining that because I managed to do all these things, God must love me. God must be proud of me.
So you'll start thinking wonderful things about yourself—after all, if God is proud of you, you should be proud of yourself. And when you start thinking high thoughts about yourself, you’ll almost necessarily start thinking low thoughts about others. Why can’t they just get their act together? It really isn’t that hard to be generous—look how much money I give to the poor!
And here’s the second problem. Prideful Christians look at all the commandments they manage to keep, and they feel good about themselves. But somehow they always manage to overlook all the commandments that have nothing to do with their behavior, and focus on their hearts.
Just one example, but it’s a pretty devastating one. Matthew 10.37: Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. You can’t pull that one off on your own. You can’t make yourself love something you don’t naturally love. The only thing that can bring about true love for God in us is recognizing and rejoicing in God’s love for us.
So if you are not rooted and grounded in God’s love for you, all you’ll manage is behavior modification, which isn’t bad—it’s good for the people around you, and it’ll make you feel good about yourself—but you’ll miss all these other things below the surface that are far more consequential. You’ll be like someone polishing brass on the Titanic—sure, you’re doing a good job making it nice and shiny, but the boat’s still sinking.
If we are not rooted and grounded in God’s love for us, we will sink into pridefully seeking to wins God’s approval through our behavior.
The second thing we will fall into if we’re not rooted in God’s love for us is fear. We’l think that God’s approval of us is conditional on our good behavior, or on our unwavering faith, or on our Bible reading or prayer—which will terrify us, because no one can be good enough to earn his approval.
When I was a kid I went to Vacation Bible School—basically a week-long day care at church during the summer. Mostly I loved it—all my best friends were there so we had a great time—but I vividly remember a song we sang that year. This song was taught by our VBS monitor, and it was a funny, but very mean-spirited song about how much God hates liars. (I won’t sing it—it wouldn’t work in French—but the final lyrics were, “Liars go to hell, liars go to hell—burn, burn, burn! Burn, burn, burn!”
Now of course it was well-intentioned; it made us laugh (because it was really mean, and kids get a kick out of meanness), and they wanted to teach us the importance of honesty. But all I could think as I was clapping my hands and laughing uncomfortably was, “Yay! God hates me!” Because I had lied to my parents that morning.
All our stories may not be this blatant, but we do this all the time. We focus our attention on behavior—don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t lust, don’t steal. Now of course we need to talk about behavior; we need to talk about sin, and why sin is abhorrent to God. But when we’re not rooted in love, we focus on behavior, without ever seeming to get around to talking about why we want to obey his commandments, why we want to behave like that.
We want to behave like that because God loves us. Not so that he will love us; because he loves us.
We’re not generous so that God will be generous to us; we are generous because he is generous with us, and his generosity teaches us how good it is to be generous.
We’re not patient with others so that God will be patient with us; we are patient with others because God has been patient with us, and his patience teaches us how good patience is.
My dad told me a story about his struggle with this when he was a younger Christian (I would have been six or seven years old when this happened). He was a youth pastor at the time, and although the other pastors he worked with were very kind, he was working in a very conservative church context, and my dad is not a traditionally conservative guy. He felt an incredible amount of pressure—a lot of it coming from himself—to speak a certain way, to calm down some of the zanier aspects of his personality, to fit into a certain type of mold. Some of those things he felt pressure to do were good and legitimate commands of the Bible; many of them had nothing to do with the Bible at all (like he had to cut his hair short and not wear jeans with holes in them).
The accumulated weight of these things was like an anvil hanging from his neck: no matter how hard he tried, he never quite managed to live up to this idea he had in his own mind of what Christians were supposed to be like.
He was talking to my uncle about this struggle one day, about all the things he was trying to do to live up to this standard, and my uncle—in this wonderfully simple and innocent way he still has today—just asked him, “Why do you do all those things?”
Dad said, “Because that’s what Christians do.”
“No, but why?”
“Because that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
“No, but specifically—why are you doing all these things?”
And Dad finally blurted out what he was actually thinking: “Because I want God to like me.”
Uncle Vencil just looked at him for a moment and then said, “He already does. He already showed you how he feels about you because he saved you; he sent Jesus for you. Do you really think your behavior is going to weigh heavier in the balance than Jesus’s sacrifice for you?”
It’s so simple…but somehow we always manage to forget it. We always manage to overlook it. Even when we read the Bible we do that: we misread the Bible according to our own preconceived ideas.
For example, take Ephesians 2.1-10.
We read this passage last week. Paul talks about how we were dead in our sin, and then he says (v. 4):
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
So he lays it all out: we were dead in our sins. Dead. DEAD. Dead people don’t choose to not sin.
And what did God do? He saved us—he raised us up with him—he seated us with Christ so that for all eternity he might show us his riches in kindness in Christ.
Why did he do it? V. 4—because of the great love with which he loved us. His love came first. Because he loved us, he saved us, he made us alive with Christ.
And it’s only after all of this that we come to the verse everyone remembers—v. 10: 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
We don’t do good works so that God will love us; we do good works because he loved us. Being rooted and grounded in God’s love for us is what ensures our growth in holiness. If you want to become more like Christ, if you want to put your sin to death, the absolute first thing you must do is understand how much God love you, and live in that knowledge. Rest in it. Let that knowledge sink down roots into your heart.
Now rather than changing subjects after v. 17, Paul keeps going, and he ups the ante. He prays that the Ephesians might understand that God’s love is bigger than we think.
…being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Let me summarize this very simply: Paul is praying that over time, as they walk with the Lord and come to know him better, might realize more and more that his love for us is way bigger than we think it is.
Imagine you’re coming to Paris for the first time; you’ve never been here, you’ve never seen the city outside of photos. You take the train directly from the airport to Pigalle, because you want to walk up that really steep hill to Sacre Cœur. When you’re at the bottom of the hill, with your back to Sacre Cœur looking out at Pigalle, what do you see? You see a bunch of seedy stores; it’s pretty rough.
So you walk up a little bit towards Sacre Cœur, and then you turn around. What you do see? You can now see some of that cute little street with the gift shops leading up to the carrousel.
You walk a little higher, and you reach the carrousel. You turn around. What do you see? Now you can see the tops of some of the roofs.
You walk a little higher, and a little higher, and a little higher—and every time you turn around you are more and more wowed, because you can see more of the city.
Then you finally reach Sacre Cœur, at the top of the hill. You turn around, and you can see the city laid out beneath your eyes like a work of art. It’s more beautiful—and way bigger—than you ever could have imagined from the street.
This is what Paul is talking about. God takes the dead people we were, and he saves us. He helps us understand his love for us—that he loved us so much that he sent his Son, so that we could be saved from our sins. This is a wonderful truth, and even if we don’t understand much, we at least understand that, and we rejoice.
Then we spend some time with God, and we walk with him. And we learn that God doesn’t just forgive our sins today, but ALL of our sins—past, present and future. That nothing we can do is ever going to change his love for us. And we realize that his love is even bigger than we thought.
And we keep walking with him. And we learn that not only does he love us with this great love now, but he has loved us like this since before the creation of the world.
And we keep walking with him, and we suffer. And we learn that he is with us in that suffering, using it for his glory and for our joy in him—that we might learn from our trials that he is faithful.
And so on it goes, for all eternity. Every time we think we know everything we need to know about his love, he surprises us with another mind-blowing revelation about just how huge his love for us actually is. We take better and better measurements. We get a better feel for his love for us. We realize just how high and deep and wide and far it goes.
Until before we know it, we die—and we go to be with him. And from that day on, nothing else matters. For all eternity, we enjoy his presence, we rejoice in his love, we are filled with all the fullness of God. This is what Paul prays for the Ephesians—and this is what I pray for you.
But what is the basis of our confidence? What is the foundation of this prayer? We end today where we ended last week
Power to Respond (v. 20-21)
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, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
However good we think this gets, it gets better still.
However strong we think he is, he is stronger still.
And this goodness, this power, is at work in us.
I hope you can see why we wanted to begin the year speaking about this. My prayer for you is that you might know Christ in this way: that God would enlighten the eyes of your heart, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you; the pleasure Christ has in receiving his church, his bride, as his inheritance; and the power of God to accomplish his plan in us. I pray that the Spirit would work in you, so that Christ might dwell in your hearts with power, that you might be rooted and grounded in the love of God for you.
There are many things we can do to help this process—to practically express our desire to know God. These things are the subject of most of what we do together as a body: to help one another grow in our understanding of that love. But the first action, the first step in the process, must be done by God himself.
And so the application of this text—what we must do in response to what Paul says here—is not a task to fulfill. The first thing we must do is pray. Pray with Paul that God would do this in our lives and in our hearts, because he is the only one who can do it. I’d like to invite you to a moment of silence, keeping this text before your eyes. Humbly ask God to do this in you. Pray with the confidence that he can do infinitely more than we can ask or even imagine, and that he will do it, because this is his will for his children.
