1. The Reason for his Prayer (3:14). 'With this in mind I make my prayer ...' Leonard Griffith says 'You really ought to having something in mind before you make a prayer. You can't pray out of a mental vacuum or you won't know what to pray for and you won't know whom you are praying to. In order to talk intelligently to God you have to pray out of a mind well furnished with ideas about God - what God is like, what he has done, what he is doing, what he can be expected to .... First comes theology; then comes prayer. We pray according to what we have in mind'. (50)

'For this cause' - what cause? Resuming the thought in verse 1, the great cause in Paul's mind is the reconciling role of the church in the world, as the complement of Christ. If this is to happen, the people who comprise the church have to be a special kind of people.

2. The Method of his Prayer (3:14). 'I bow my knees' - Prostrated prayer, in an agony of entreaty. The normal Jewish method apparently was standing, with arms raised to heaven, palms upwards. (cf Matthew 6:5 , Mark 11:25, Luke 18:11,13). Kneeling expressed deep emotion (cf Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane who 'fell on his face and prayed').

3. The Object of his Prayer. Paul's prayer is to God the Father. Barclay suggests six attributes of God the Father in Ephesians. (1) He is the Father of Jesus (1:2,3,17; 6:23). 'Paternity' is 'fathering' in the sense of physical creation. 'Fatherhood' is an intimate relationship of love and fellowship and care. Pagans, before Jesus, thought of God in the first sense: the gods were responsible for the creation of humans. Jesus' Father was kind, loving, merciful. 'To Paul God is not just God; that might mean anything or nothing; God was the Father of Jesus Christ'. (51) As the Jesus freaks used to say, 'If God is like Jesus, nothing is too good to be true'. (2) God is the Father to whom we have access (2:18; 3:12). Approach to the God of the Old Testament was forbidden (except, for example, by the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement when he went into the Holy of Holies). 'The very centre of Christian belief is the approachability of God'. (52) (3) God is the Father of glory, the glorious Father (3:14). A God who is only loving, kind, caring, could easily be sentimentalized. We must not forget the holiness and the glory of God. 'God welcomes the sinner, but not the sinner who trades on God's love in order to remain a sinner. God is holy and those who seek his friendship must be holy too. Our right of access to God does not give us the right to be and to do what we like. It lays upon us the obligation of seeking to be worthy of such a privilege'. (53) (4) God is the Father of all (6:4). No one or group has exclusive possession of God. The Jews made that mistake. (5) God is the Father to whom thanks must be given (6:20). God's fatherhood implies our indebtedness. We owe everything to him - great things like our salvation, but also life and breath and everyday gifts as well. (6) God is the pattern of all true fatherhood (3:15). 'The Greek word here translated 'fatherhood' has a more concrete sense than this English rendering might imply. It denotes any social group which owes its existence and unity to one ancestor. The origin of every human, or even angelic, grouping is God'. (54) Earthly fathers are to use God's fatherhood as a model. When 'we teach our children to call God father, the only conception of fatherhood they can have is the conception we give them'. (55)

4. The Content of his prayer.

A well-loved seminary professor in Australia, Principal G.H Morling, used to say, 'Pray theologically. Bring the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit into your prayers'. Paul certainly did this (1:17, 3:16-17).

4-1 The Glory of God (3:16) 'We beheld his doxa, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father' (John 1:14). The glory of God, in the Old and New Testaments combines notions of mystery, majesty and the numinous. The glory of God shines in light unapproachable (1 Timothy 6:16). 'Glory' denotes God's majesty (Romans 1:23). And yet to the request 'Show me your glory', Moses received an affirmation of God's goodness (Exodus 33:18, 19), and in the fourth gospel, glory pertains to the sufferings of Christ. The glory of God is also seen, as the ancient saying puts it, in humans fully alive.

4-2 The Power of the Spirit. J. B. Phillips translates 3:16'I pray that out of the glorious richness of his resources he will enable you to know the strength of the Spirit's inner reinforcement!'

4-3 The Love of Christ. In 3:17-19 Paul is struggling to contain some very powerful concepts in fragile word-vessels, striving with words to encompass the wordless. He is asking God that we might 'know the unknowable', 'experience the ineffable'. The Stoics used the expression 'breadth and length and height and depth' to mean the totality of the cosmos. Here the dimensions are those of the mystery of salvation, or more probably those of Christ's universal love on which the mystery depends. They surpass all human standards of measurement. (56)

Christ proved his love for us by accepting death (5:2,25, Galatians 2:20). One ancient commentator sees the physical cross as the symbol of this love: the upper arms of the cross points up; the lower arm of the cross points down; and the crossing arms of the cross point out to the widest horizons beyond the range of the eye to see. Jerome said that the love of Christ reaches up, to include the holy angels; it reaches down to include even the evil spirits and devils in hell; in its length it covers all who are striving on the upward way; and in its breadth it covers those who are drifting, wandering away from Christ on evil paths. In the breadth of its sweepit includes everyone in every age; in the length to which it would go, the love of Christ was obedient to death and accepted even the cross; in its depth it descended to experience even death, in its height, he still loves us in heaven, where he lives to make intercession for us (Hebrews 7:25). There is no one outside the love of Christ; there is no place is outside the reach of Christ; there is no experience which the love of Christ will refuse in order to gain one person. It is a love which passes knowledge, which, if we accept it, will fill us with nothing less than the life of God himself. (57)

Where is this love experienced? This love cannot be 'grasped' but can be 'known' by spiritual awareness of it through love (cf 1:17f, 3:3 f., Hosea 2:22, John 10:14). This awareness is something deeper than scientific knowledge (see 1 Corinthians 13) and is less a matter of knowledge than of awareness of being loved (cf Galatians 4:9). Even awareness of this sort, however, can never 'grasp' this sort of love. The expression 'comprehend' occurs only here in the New Testament. Gerhard Tersteegan says the same thing in his beautiful words, 'You do not need to search for God, you only have to realise him ... close your eyes like a child and confide yourself to the hidden Being who is so near to you inwardly'.

Just as I am, of that free love The breadth, length, depth, and height to prove; Here for a season, then above, O Lamb of God, I come.

This love is experienced with all God's people, that is, in the fellowship of the church. As we have said earlier, God knows nothing of solitary religion: no one ever went to heaven alone (John Wesley). The New Testament shows no interest in unattached Christians. Ignatius said 'He who has not the Church for his mother cannot have God for his Father.' It is in the fellowship of the church, with all its faults, that we find the love of God. Christ who is filled with the divine life fills Christians with it (Colossians 2:9) and in this way Christians enter both the church and the new cosmos which they help to build and which is the fullness of the total Christ (1:23, 2:122, 4:12-13, Colossians 2:10f.).

One of the old saints wrote, 'Whate'er thou lovest, that too become thou must. God, if thou lovest God; dust if thou lovest dust.' 'Read not the times', said Thoreau, 'read the eternities'.

So, as Monod says, 'After the grandest promises which human language can express, the Holy Spirit here closes by declaring that all which can be experienced is infinitely below the reality which is in God. Nothing can restrain or bind the power of God toward us; nothing in him, nothing even in us, no limits set to his power, for it knows no limits; not even the weakness of our prayers, and the imperfections of our knowledge, for he is able to transcend all our demands and our conceptions.' (58)

And yet, as we draw to the end of this study, it is sobering to note that although the Ephesian Christians are the first of the seven churches of Asia in Revelation 2-3 to receive a special message from the risen Christ, they had, over time, committed the grave error of departing from their initial enthusiastic love for their Lord.

5. Doxology

Paul has asked that God not only answer his prayer, but do for the church even more than he could ever dream of asking. Paul declares that faith in the mighty doxology which concludes the firest part of his letter to the Ephesians: 'Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we ask or think, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.'