Prayer focused on God's love

Today is Valentine’s Day…A day all of us will try and celebrate with loved ones. Some of us will make a wonderful dinner, others will go out to eat. Chocolate or flowers may well be part of the day…chocolate in this house for sure! Today is a specialday set out to express love towards one another…Can I suggest something totally different? How about a prayer focused on the source of love?….God Himself. God is the one who first expressed love. He is love. He is where love began and flows from. And the Lord Jesus Christ is the perfect expression of love. His life was based on love and our future is secure in His love.

Yesterday we looked at the book of Ephesians. In chapter 1 we found right away a prayer from Paul to the Church at Ephesus asking God to reveal more of His wisdom, more of His hope for their calling and more of His power. As we read just a bit further there is a second prayer. In this one Paul is asking for the Church to discover more of God’s love for them:

“For this reason I kneel before the Father,
From whom His whole family
In heaven and on earth derives its name.
I pray that out of His glorious riches
He may strengthen you with power
Through His Spirit in your inner being
So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
And I pray that you being rooted and established in love,
May have power together with all the saints
To grasp how wide and long
And high and deep
Is the love of Christ
And to know this love that surpasses knowledge
That you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Eph. 3:14-19

Here gain Paul begins with the confidence that he can pray because of his relationship to God…the Father. And he can pray with confidence again for these people that he loves because they derive their name “Christians” from Him. God’s people cross the whole creation from heaven to earth…there is only One Father and God’s family lives in both kingdoms, heavenly and earthly.
Then Paul, once he establishes whom he is praying for (God’s family) and to who he is praying (God the Father), he asks that these beloved ones would be strengthened with power derived from His glorious riches. And he asks that this strength, based on His riches, through the Holy Spirit, would be deposited in their inner beings…that means way down deep…their heart and mind and will. Then he says “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts” Paul knows that strengthening comes about by a change in the inner man. As one yields more and more to the Holy Spirit sin decreases and we have more of God’s riches. When we pray this way for our loved ones, we are asking God to “plug them into the full power source”. Notice he is not asking for God to fill them but for THEM to come to the full understanding of what they have. That is why he says in verse 19 “and that they may KNOW”. Paul asks that they may be reminded of this great power that God has given them. And that it may dwell in their hearts. The heart back in this time was the seat of intellect, and being, and affections. It was the whole man not just like we think of the heart today…the seat of emotion. That is why he says “your inner being”.
Then he says…”So that Christ may dwell in your hearts”. You can think of it like this….that they may be strengthen with power, through the Holy Spirit in their inner being so that Christ may “settle down” in you. So Christ would dwell…make a home…have His way…be at ease…in their hearts. That is when the fullness of God’s power is manifested…when Christ is at home in our hearts.

Can you imagine praying this way for our loved ones? That Christ may dwell, be at rest, settle down in their hearts! That’s when they will realize the glorious riches and the power given to them. They won't live a deafeted life. Is that a prayer you need?

Then the second half of his prayer asks God that now once they are “rooted and established in love” (that is because Christ has settled in their hearts…that is the greatest love available to us) that they would grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” This goes back to what we talked about yesterday….the difference between knowing Christ intellectually and knowing Christ intimately. To know Him intimately you must experience His love. Knowing Him this way surpasses knowledge of Him. So how can we know Him intimately? By knowing how wide (His outstretched bleeding hands) and long ( His pierced feet and bleeding thorny crown) and high and deep (from the pit of the earth to the highest heaven)…that is the Cross. To know Him intimately we must know Him through the cross…that is how the greatest love was expressed. And knowing Him this way surpasses any head, intellectual understanding of Him.
Then Paul finishes by this statement “ that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God”. His prayer and desire for these loved ones is that they would be filled with the “full measure “ of God . Christ, the Cross…is the full measure of God! God held nothing back!

Our desire, as we pray this way, is for those we love to live a life that matched the fullness of the Cross. We are all to live not a beggars but with the full power and grasp of the love of Christ. His fullness in full measure given to us in our inner being.

This is a prayer rooted in love….the love of God the Father through His Son.

Heavenly Father…no greater love has ever been expressed that in your Son. Lord Jesus no greater love has ever been demonstrated than your death for us who are undeserving. You express this love with outstretched hands that forgive as far as the East is from the West. Oh! that those I love would know this love! I pray for my friends who are living like paupers…forgetting the richness of this truth. I pray for David and the kids, that their hearts would be filled beyond measure with this great truth. Lord, that you would settle down, be at home in their hearts. That they would live to appropriate the infinite fullness of your power. That they would not feel defeated or overwhelmed but that through your Spirit and by faith, they would face this day with the power and love found in the Cross. That they would know your love in its wonderous fullness...
Amen