A Word in Season: The Greatness of God’s Power (Ephesians 1:19-20)

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How do you pray? Specifically, what do you pray for? Very often our prayers fall into grooves that, if we're honest, are actually ruts in terms of the way that we address

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God, in terms of the way that we confess sin, in terms of the way that we offer praise, and in terms of the way that we bring our petitions.

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And whether or not you pray often, in public, or whether or not you pray mainly in private, or in your families, you'll know how easy it is just to end up rolling out some stock phrases.

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That often happens with regard to particular petitions, when we're asking God to bless other people.

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It may just be that we use that kind of language, bless this person, bless that person, or help them, or be with them, or take care of them.

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Perhaps we don't often rise much higher than, may they have a good day, or a good night. And yet when you look at the substance of biblical prayer, and not least apostolic prayer, you get a sense of the richness, and the depth, and the height of the requests that the apostles make known to God.

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You'll find something of that in Ephesians and chapter one, where the apostle Paul tells the church in Ephesus how he's praying for them.

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And I imagine that if you, like me, read that, you realize what a shade it throws on our own prayers, how petty, and shallow, and almost faithless some of our expectations can be in coming to what is a throne of grace.

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And so among the petitions, and that's wonderful, not just the only one, but among the petitions that the apostle brings before God on behalf of this church, is in chapter one and verse 19, that they might know, and the sense there is of an experimental knowledge, or experiential knowledge, that they might enter by experience into the reality of the exceeding greatness of God's power toward us who believe according to the working of his mighty power which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.

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Paul wants us to have a real and increasing sense in our own experience of the exceeding greatness of God's power toward us, to understand something more, and to reveal or manifest the realities of the incomparably great exercise of divine might toward us.

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But that's not just a blanket phrase, that's not just a generic statement.

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That power has been revealed in certain ways, and it's that pattern that Paul wants to see in the

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Ephesians. God's mighty power, God's exceedingly great power has been worked in us according to, or after the pattern of, the working of his mighty power which he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenlies.

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So Paul is seeing these Ephesian believers in terms of their union and communion with the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and he's thinking of the pattern of the experience of the

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Jesus from death through resurrection to glory. And he understands that in Christ the power of God was revealed then along a certain trajectory, that his beloved son, having laid down his life for his people, was then raised again from the dead, and he now sits in the heavenly places in the very presence of his

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God and his Father, and there he is dwelling in and enjoying all the fruits of his accomplishments.

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And Paul says that in the same way that God worked in Christ to raise him physically from the dead, to bring him into that highest state, and to bestow upon him that greatest honour by virtue of his finished work, in the same way, along the same line, in the same direction, with the same trajectory,

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Paul wants to see the same power at work in us. That these men and women, like you and me if we're real believers, having been brought from death to life, would go on knowing the outworking of that mighty power in us, working

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Christlikeness in us, having made us alive, bringing more and more of the evidences and fruits of that life into manifestation in our experience, and all with a view ultimately to our being raised together with Christ in the last day that we should enjoy all the fruits of his finished work.