The Love of Christ, the Fullness of God – Ephesians 3:18-19
In these verses, we reach the
pinnacle of Paul’s prayer for the saints in Ephesus, and, indeed, the pinnacle
and climax of all Christian experience.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in one of his sermons on this text, rightly said,
“There is no more staggering statement in the whole range of Scripture than
this.”[1] It is something we could not dare to pray for
were it not in Scripture itself. It is
this: “that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God.” That is what Paul is ultimately praying
for. The reason they needed to be
strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inner man was so that Christ would
dwell in their hearts by faith, so that, being rooted and grounded in love,
they might be able to comprehend the love of Christ so that they would be
filled with God’s fullness. It all leads
to that.
Now it is important to see that
the culmination of this prayer really explains what it means to be filled with
all the fullness of God. The structure
of Paul’s thought here requires that it be explained by knowing the love of
Christ which surpasses knowledge. That
is how we are filled with all the fullness of God. Recall that to the Colossians, Paul would
write of Christ, “For in him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead
bodily. And ye are complete in him”
(Col. 2:9-10). The only way for us to be
filled with all the fullness of God is to know most fully the love of Christ in
whom dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. The climax of spiritual experience is to know
and experience as much as humanly possible the love Christ for us. Which goes to show that many of us have very
little knowledge of the love of Christ.
One way to put this is to say
that the apostle is praying that the believers to whom he is writing would discover and experience God in ways that
they had not up to that point. Surely
there is no greater goal for which we should strive. God made us to do this. He put us on this planet so that we should
seek him and find him, as the apostle put it to the philosophers in Athens (cf.
Acts 17). It is the reason for which
Christ died. He died to bring us to God
(1 Pet. 3:18). The forgiveness of sins
is an important accomplishment of the death of Christ, but it is subservient to
this greatest of all ends, to bring us into the fellowship and presence of the
living God. And it is this in all its
fullness for which the apostle is ultimately praying for here.
And yet, so many, even in the
church, are left uninterested in the prospect of being filled with all the
fullness of God. Why? I think one reason is to be found in the fact
that we live in an age where technological discovery is proceeding at a
lightening pace. Our world is opening up
to wondrous technological marvels that just a generation ago would have seemed
like science fiction. And it is easy to
get sucked into the vortex of excitement generated by such discovery. There are many who would look at what they
doing and experiencing due to such scientific advancements, and look on this
passage and wonder what the relevance of it all is. They are not interested in discovering
God. They would rather discover the next
step towards quantum computing.
In fact, a lot of people would go
further. They would say that there is
nothing interesting about finding God.
God is just for the weak-minded, they would say. They look at themselves and think they are
too sophisticated for God. God is
boring, uninteresting, and a fable to boot.
Now I grant that if God is a
fable, then there is nothing in fact to discover. But if we proceed upon the assumption that he
is real (an assumption which can be backed by many solid arguments and
evidences), then it is manifest folly to
think that pursuing the next technological marvel is more interesting or more
important than pursuing the knowledge of God.
Every scientific discovery is but a discovery of something in a universe
that God created. So, if we consider it
from that point of view, then what they are doing is at least several levels
down from the discovery of the God of the universe itself. I’m not saying what they are doing is not
important. I’m just saying that it’s not
anywhere nearly as important or exciting as the discovery of the God who gave
the human mind the propensity for discovery and innovation and who gave us a
universe which can be harnessed to the service of human advancement through
scientific endeavor.
To pursue human advancement apart
from the knowledge and service of God is to build a Tower of Babel. It may be impressive, but it is doomed to
failure in the end.
But this is not the only reason
people put off seeking the presence of God. Another reason why people think
that the discovery of God is uninteresting is because they think they know all
there is to know about God. There is
this notion that the knowledge of God is elementary, something which is limited
to a few doctrines. You read your Bible
a few times, a couple of systematic theologies, and you’re done. Moving on!
But the apostle’s prayer here
shows us that this view of the knowledge of God is clearly insufficient. It is stupid to assume that we know all there
is to know about the fullness of God! He
is infinite, and I am finite. There is
simply no way a finite human being could know or experience all there is about
God in a finite amount of time. The
apostle himself interrupts such a line of thinking in these verses. In verse 19, he talks about knowing the love
of Christ, “which passeth knowledge.” He
is not saying that the love of Christ is unknowable since he is praying that
they might “know the love of Christ.”
Rather, he is saying that we can never exhaust the riches of the love of
Christ for us (cf. 3:8). No matter how much
we know about the love of Christ, there are still dimensions to his love which
we still have yet to discover. The love
of Christ is infinite, and it surpasses our ability to comprehend it
completely. The saints will spend the
rest of their lives and eternity exploring the vastness of Christ’s love for
them.
I think people also make this
mistake because they fail to realize that there are two levels upon which we
proceed in our knowledge of God. One is
intellectual, and the other is experiential.
It is agreed by the commentators upon these verses that they word Paul
uses for knowledge here encompasses both the intellectual and the experiential
components. Now those who think they
have exhausted the knowledge of the fullness of God and the love of Christ,
only approach this on an intellectual level.
Of course they are wrong even here; there is no way we can exhaust even
the knowledge of the love of Christ even on this level. Again, we are dealing with the fullness of
God here; a finite mind cannot completely grasp the infinite. Those who think God is boring simply fail to
come to terms with the reality of the infinity of God.
But there is also this
experiential aspect to the love of Christ and the fullness of God. You can know a lot of doctrine about God and
the love of Christ and yet know nothing of experiencing the richness of
fellowship with the living God. Here is
the test for those who think God is boring.
If they think that, it is because they have never really experienced
God. It is because they know nothing of
the love of Christ. Knowing the love of
Christ turned the persecutor Saul into the apostle Paul. It takes ordinary people and motivates them
to love others even when they are being persecuted by the people to whom they
are showing love. The love of Christ
constrains them, it controls them. It
causes them to rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory (1 Pet.
1:8). The saints will spend all eternity
exploring the vastness of the dimensions of Christ’s love for his people. And so we cannot say that we know all there
is to know about the love of Christ and the fullness of God. The fact of the matter is that we know little
of what we ought to know, even here.
Another reason why people find
discovering the fullness of God to be uninteresting is because they think it is
unpractical. There is this idea that to
be a top-of-the-line Christian, you must be an activist. You must be doing something, achieving something. On the other hand, they think that those who
spend their lives pursuing an experience of the love of Christ are selfish and
impractical and unhelpful. Their focus
is not upon a doctrinal knowledge of Christ’s love to them, or an experience of
Christ’s love for them, but upon doing something for Christ.
Now there is something true in
this perspective. We don’t want to
become Christians who just sit on their hands.
But we are in danger when we think that developing a real, experiential
knowledge of the love of Christ for us is impractical. Both Scripture and church history tell us
exactly the opposite. If you really want
to be useful in the kingdom of God, you must first revel in the love of Christ
to you. For the chief mission of the
church is to share the love of Christ.
But how can we do this if we ourselves don’t know it very well? To use an expression the Lloyd-Jones used,
the danger is that we become advocates for the gospel and not witnesses to the
gospel.
Moreover, it is going to be hard
to do real ministry in an unloving world if you are not empowered by a love
that is not tied to this world. Only the
love of Christ can keep us going when everything else is against us. It is what kept Paul going. He was not only persecuted by the unbelievers
in his day, he was also persecuted by other church leaders! You see this in his letters to the
Corinthians and Galatians, and you also see it in the first chapter of his
letter to the Philippians. How could he
keep going when he had so much negative feedback? It was because the love of Christ constrained
him (2 Co. 5:14). If you want to know
the secret of Paul’s ministry, it was that he knew and experienced what he here
prays for the Ephesians.
I do want to push back on this
idea that doing, doing, doing is the key to a successful Christian life and
ministry. I don’t think I’m wrong to say
that we live in a time where churches are doing a lot of things. There are a multitude of ministries out
there. And yet look at our society. It is getting worse, not better. Why? Could
it not be because so much of what the church does today is not empowered from
the knowledge of the love of Christ but rather out of a desire to produce
statistics? It seems unarguable that the
church today is more interested in statistics than it is in really knowing
Christ. And therein lies a great part of
our problem.
There are many illustrations from
church history to back up the fact that experiencing the fullness of God is
essential to true usefulness in the kingdom of God. As just one example, consider D. L.
Moody. There he was, preaching the
gospel, but doing it, as he put it, as “a great hustler,” in the energy and
power of the flesh. Then one day in 1871
as he was walking down Wall Street in New York, the power of God fell upon him
in such a powerful way, that he had to go into a nearby house where he
experienced such joy that “at last he had to ask God to withhold his hand, lest
he die on the spot from very joy.” He
pointed to that experience as a watershed event in his life, and although the
sermons that he preached afterward weren’t any different from those before,
they were accompanied by a power that led to the conversions of hundreds.[2] The power of God, the fullness of God! Note that he didn’t do anything different in
terms of external activity after as before.
But there was a power that was present, a power that could only be explained
in terms of his experience of God. We
are so confident in our methods, that we forget about the God apart from whose
power and enabling we can do nothing.
Now where are you and I at in
terms of knowing this love of Christ and experiencing this fullness of
God? Of course, if you are a Christian,
you do know something of the love of Christ.
But there is so much more that we could experience, and the more we
experience it the more we will realize how little we actually know. One of the reasons why I pursued graduate
school in mathematics is because when I finished my undergraduate degree, I
looked at all my books and they almost all had the words, “Elementary” or
“Introduction to…” in their titles. I
realized that even though I had obtained a bachelor’s degree, I still had only
been introduced to mathematics! So I
realized that if I really wanted to know what mathematics was all about, I had
to go on. The problem is that by the
time I finished graduate school I realized that I still was only scratching the
surface. In fact, I have a book in my
office with the title, Advanced Linear
Algebra, but which opens with the words, “This book is a thorough
introduction to linear algebra.” So even
advanced books in mathematics can only claim to be thorough introductions! If this is true in mathematics, it is even
truer in theology and the knowledge of God.
None of us can really claim to have gotten beyond an introduction to the
knowledge of God. And yet, for those who
go on, there are riches that make the journey more than worth it.
Edward Payson puts all this in a
way that I think is very helpful and instructive. He describes classes of believers who are
ranged in concentric circles about Christ:
Suppose
professors of religion to be ranged in different concentric circles around
Christ as their common centre. Some
value the presence of their Saviour so highly that they cannot bear to be at
any remove from Him. Even their work they
will bring up and do it in the light of His countenance, and while engaged in
it will be seen constantly raising their eyes to Him as if fearful of losing
one beam of His light.
Others, who, to
be sure, would not be content to live out of His presence, are yet less wholly
absorbed by it than these, and may be a little further off, engaged here and
there in their various callings, their eyes generally upon their work, but
often looking up for the light which they love.
A third class,
beyond these but yet within the life-giving rays, includes a doubtful
multitude, many of whom are so much engaged in their worldly schemes that they
may be seen standing sideways to Christ, looking mostly the other way, and only
now and then turning their faces towards the light. And yet further out, among the last scattered
rays, so distant that it is often doubtful whether they come at all within
their influence, is a mixed assemblage of busy ones, some with their backs
wholly turned upon the sun, and most of them so careful and troubled about
their many things as to spend but little time for their Saviour.[3]
I think this is a very accurate
way of putting it. The point is that we
are on one of these concentric circles, closer or further away from the center
who is Christ. The goal for every
Christian is to move toward to the center.
That is what Paul is essentially praying for here. He wants them to be so close to Christ that
everything in their life and work and play is flavored by their relationship to
him, and they don’t want to do anything that would endanger their nearness to
Christ.
Now I like the way Payson
describes those who are removed from the center. The further out you go, the more interested
in engulfed you are by the things of this world to the exclusion of Christ. The less the rays of Christ’s love enflame
you, the less you are interested in your relationship to him. The closer you get, the more you want of his
presence and nearness, the more you want to know of his love.
So in evaluating ourselves, we
need to pause and ask ourselves, “How attracted am I to the love of
Christ? How constant is my affection for
him?” As with gravity, distance affects the attraction we feel towards our Lord.
The closer we are to him, the more we want to move towards him, the more
we want to know of him and his love toward us, the more we want to experience
the fullness of God. Whereas, the further out we are, the less we will tend to
be attracted by the gospel and its glories.
Another way to put this is that
we are on a continuum between two poles.
At one end is Christ and at the other end is an idol of some form. For different people the idol may be
different. But the battle that is being
fought in this prayer is the battle against idolatry. It is the fight to move away from the idol
and towards Christ. The more you know of
the love of Christ, the less you are going to be interested in the idol. The more you are filled with the fullness of
God, the less room there is going to be in your heart for that idol.
The closer we move toward Christ,
the more we will realize that every idol is but a shadow of Christ and
therefore less desirable than Christ himself.
Most idols are gifts that God gives that we then put in the place of
God. Pleasure, power, fame, money: these
can all be legitimate gifts that can enrich our lives. The problem is that we begin to look to
pleasure or power or fame or money to give us what only God can give. We also tend to give to the gifts what only
God deserves: worship and affection and devotion and love. They cannot gives us what only God can give and we should not give to them what only God deserves.
It’s like exalting a sun beam
over the sun itself. The sun beam is
great. It is what makes flowers
grow. It’s what gives us warmth. But the sun beam would not exist without a
sun. To praise the sun beam while
ignoring the sun is stupid. Even so,
when we put God’s gifts in God’s place, we are praising the sun beam and
forgetting about the sun. Clearly, the
sun is greater and more important the beam of light it emits. And in the same way, God is infinitely
exalted and above his gifts. It is folly
when we idolize the sun beam. The Giver
is greater than any of his gifts.
How do we get there? How do we move towards the Center? To be completely honest, I do feel like I am
preaching more as an advocate here than as a witness. I don’t feel like I’ve experienced the
fullness of God anywhere nearly as I should.
But I want to get there. And we
should be encouraged in our journey, if we are related to Christ. Because the apostle prays that they “may be
able to comprehend with all saints
what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of
Christ.” This is not something that is
out of reach except only for a few super-saints. It is for all the saints, for every believer,
for anyone who knows Christ.
We ought to be intensely thankful
that our Lord has not put this on a level that only few can reach. This is one of the glories of the Christian
religion. It is not reserved only for
the intellectuals. It is not reserved
only for the wealthy. It is open to all
who know Christ, no matter their IQ or their status in society. Our Lord himself said, “I thank thee, O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the
wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Mt. 11:25). It is not only there for you, but our Lord
himself wants you to experience the fullness of God in his love. He stands at the door and knocks (Rev.
3:20). There is no reason, beyond those
of our own making, why we cannot attain to what the apostle prays for here.
However, it is not
automatic. When my wife and I were in
Colorado several years ago, we stopped by this mountain and near the top of it
you could see little people ascending to the peak. I decided that I wanted to do this, and so I
set off. However, I was not exactly in
shape, nor were my lungs conditioned for the rarified air at that elevation. At some point I had to give up and turn
back. In the same way, many of us are
spiritually out of shape. That doesn’t
mean we can’t ascend to the peak and behold the majesty of Christ’s love for
us; it just means that there has to be some conditioning for us to be able to
ascend to the top.
What are some of the things we
must do? Well, first, we have to want
it. If we want our idol more than
Christ, we are going to stay away from the Center. God does not reward those who do not seek him
diligently, with the whole heart. The
prophet put it, “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me
with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13). Our
Lord compares seeking him with a man who sells all that he has to have a field
for the treasure buried within it, or to a merchant who sells everything to
obtain that one pearl of great price. Do
we want the Lord that much? It is the
only way we will find him.
Unfortunately, even if we are
aware of our need, we are often also simultaneously aware of a lack of
desire. We feel the pull of the idol
even as we reach for the Center. It is
here that prayer is so important. We
must pray. We must pray for it when we
feel like we want it and we must pray for it when we don’t feel like we want
it. God hears prayer, and it is not for
no reason that Paul puts this in a prayer for the Ephesians.
And then, we must repent of our
idols. If we are aware that we are
putting something in the place of Christ, we must do what it takes to repent of
this. John’s first epistle begins with
an invitation to the fellowship of God, which is what the apostle Paul is
essentially praying for in this prayer. It
is therefore instructive that John ends with this exhortation: “Little
children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 Jn. 5:21). If we want this fellowship with God, if we
want to experience the fullness of God and the love of Christ, then we must
keep ourselves from idols.
Further, since this is all
centered on Christ, we must constantly remind ourselves of the gospel and what
Christ has done for us. This is not
something we do just on Christmas or during certain seasons of the year, but
every day of every year. It is only when
Christ dwells in our hearts by faith that we will be able to comprehend the
dimensions of his love for us and be filled with all the fullness of God.
So as we come to the end of this
year and look forward to a new year, let us resolve with the apostle in this
prayer, to go on through Christ our Lord and Savior, to know more of his love
for us and to be filled with all the fullness of God. Surely there is no greater resolution for a
Christian to have. In some sense, any
New Year’s resolution should be subservient to this one. May the Lord make it so for us in the year to
come.
[1] D.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Unsearchable
Riches of Christ, p. 278.
[3]
Quoted in Lloyd-Jones, p. 242-243.
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