and thus to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you will be filled up to all the fullness of God.
We know about the sacrifice of Christ, the words of Christ, the blood of Christ, the incarnation of Christ, the warnings of Christ, the power of Christ, the miracles of Christ, the resurrection of christ, the divinity of Christ. But what about the love of Christ?
Remember, this is a prayer to the Father. We have learned about the power of the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 3:16-19), and it is leading us to the point of being filled with all the fullness of God, but it is really about knowing the love of Christ.
He used the word "comprehension"; now he is using the word "know". Meaning it should not just be theoretically, rather a living expression in our lives.
Paul is praying that the intangible becomes tangible. That what surpasses knowledge be known. And for that to happen, as he had prayed, they needed an expanded/fortified spiritual capacity, which will involve being strengthen with might by God's Spirit in thier inner person.
The expansion is not something we can boast about, it is not for a chip on our shoulder, its not to earn a point but an endless refrain of divine pulsations in our heart.
It is not just the love from Christ, but the love of Christ, the love with which the Father loved Christ.
God is love (1 John 4:8). And the strongest express of that love is between the Father and the Son, so the love of Christ is not something theoretical, rather it is spiritual, it is eternal, it is unending.
And when God forsook the Son on the cross, that same love was given room of more expression to us. Do you believe that? Christ's loss was our gain, in the ultimate divine exchange. The punishment that Jesus took will not come on us.
In this prayer, we are being told about the endlessness of the love of God, the limitlessness, the incomprehensible nature of the love of God. It is the love centered on Christ. All we have is because of Christ, including the showing of the love of God to us.
What Paul wants is a shift in our spirit, in the confidence in our step, in the hope that fills us, as we increasingly come into the reality of the love of Christ, so that it becomes the air we breathe, the world we live in, what we wake up to and what lulls us to sleep at night, that we revel in it.
Paul is banking that that will really cause a seismic shift in the Ephesians. He does not just want them to theorize about salvation, but to embody what it means through and through.
You can see the tone of the prayer, it is different from the tone of his teaching. In his teaching he was laying down the facts layer by layer, but now he is shooting for the moon, talking about being filled with all the fullness of God, talking about being strengthened with power through God spirit‘s in the inner man.
In the teaching, he tells us what the commonality among believers is, what we share with others, but he zeros in on each person when he mentions being strengthened with might by God's Spirit in the inner person. That is personal, that is individual, that is person-to-person.
Paul's prayer is an expression of his hunger. What about you? Are you hungry for yourself what Paul is hungry for this church for? Then pray the prayer yourself and do not stop praying it. if is it good enough for the church in Ephesians, it is good enough for me.
And when He began his prayer with the need for us to be strengthened with power by God spirit in the inner person, it is telling me that the resistance to God is within us.
He has mentioned unseen forces in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 1:20–21), but there are inner forces (the inward realms, if you will) that needs to be made to align with God, that needs restructuring, strengthening, and love rootedness; the ignorance and darkness within that needs the dawning of the light of spiritual understanding.
With the prayer of Paul, we can see what we need, or what we lack. We lack strength in the inner person; we are not rooted and grounded in love by default; we do not know the love of Christ; we are not filled with all the fullness of God. So the question is, if we are not strong in the Spirit, what are we strong in? If we are not filled with all the fullness of God, what are we filled with? And I believe he will start to address things like that beginning from chapter four.