“Love is layered throughout this passage and the dominate theme. But none of our core samples of love are the same. In fact, this prayer passage itself suggests God’s diversity. The further away from the center of God’s fullness, the love textures become more dimensioned with reason and truth. They all have love in them but the closer we get to God’s fullness, the more dense is the love surrounding ‘fullness’.”
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, … … …
So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith
That you, being rooted and grounded in love,
May have strength to comprehend with all the saints
What is the breadth, and length and height and depth,
And to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
That you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”
Paul layers steps into the fullness of God from the posture of prayer. We examined rooted and grounded in the previous layer; its a similar couplet used in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, Col 2:7. But here, in Ephesians, its one deliberate layering of God’s requisites, including, knowing the love of Christ surpassing knowledge, the breadth and depths, having the strength to contain Christ, being rooted and grounded and now the dwelling residence of Christ by Faith within our hearts. Here, in this layer, to know the fullness of God as a personal experience faith is vital.
The dwelling presence of Jesus within our heart is accomplished by unlocking faith. But this unlocking is accomplished in strengthening with power through the Holy Spirit, Eph. 3:16. But for the moment we are looking through glasses of faith and will look at strengthening with power another time.
Faith invites the dwelling of Christ’s presence. Biblical faith, as we will see, is, first, grasping God’s truth and taking ownership. It sounds like a circular argument since it also requires the strengthening work of the Holy Spirit. Our will to grasp truth becomes the hinge but the Holy Spirit needs to oil the hinges to actually move open the door.
This is both the joy the glory of grace. It is circular! Jesus is knocking at our door (Rev. 3:20) and we must hear to open our heart to faith and enjoy the fellowship of God’s dwelling presence. How blessed it is that Jesus is knocking, continuously, waiting for our ears to hear and our will to open our heart!
“Our faith is based upon our knowledge of the person of Jesus Christ and our relationship with Him as a person. A regenerated believer, one who has been born again, knows what it means to have new life. It is easy to identify by our experience of faith when Jesus Christ came into our life. But this new birth is an embryo of life in Christ. It begins a gestation period introducing us into grace accessible by faith. Being born again is receiving Jesus factually! We literally receive the resurrected life of the person, Jesus Christ.”
Jesus was passing through Samaria and stopped at Jacob’s well, John 4:7ff. At the same time a woman from Sychar, the local town, came to get water from the well. Jesus asked her for a drink since she brought a water jar. A dialogue ensued revealing amazing truth but our take away, here, is the effect on this woman. She left her water jar at the well, probably empty, ran back to town to tell everybody about her meeting with Jesus. She didn’t know it at the time but she was actually drinking “the living water” while talking with Jesus. I suspect one of the younger disciples returned her jar filled with water.
Jesus’s presence is pictured as living water. An oxymoron? Water by definition is inorganic. It cannot be “living” since it has no carbon! When Jesus turned water into wine (John 2:1-11), He changed inorganic water into organic wine. How fitting our creator breaks the rules of creation. It is what we call a miracle, demonstrating power and authority over natural laws. He did it again in us (2Cor. 5:17) by creating eternal resurrection life (living water) capable of bubbling up within the mortality of our flesh.
I have been invited to minister to the Church in Ethiopia this fall, pray! In preparation, I’m learning about Ethiopian culture and history. The ancient Nile River flowing these past centuries through Egypt is sourced primarily from the Blue Nile coming out of the highlands of Ethiopia at lake Tana. It journeys southeast over the inspiring Tisiset Falls making a big sweep south, then west through a canyon more spectacular in many ways than our own Grand Canyon. One of the interesting features is its water sources. A primary source is not typical runoff. Its an eternal spring welling up making a fluent connection into the lake from the south. It is considered a “holy” place forming its own stream, “The Little Abbay,” flowing into this massive lake source for the Blue Nile (Abbay) and eventually, the Nile itself. Some identify the Abbay (Blue Nile) as the ancient Gihon River surrounding the land of Cush in Gen. 2:13.
Jesus describes His living water as bubbling up within the believer (John 4:14) constantly providing life, not just life, but divine life. It is powerful and eternal. This is the milieu, the divine setting where our faith resides. This is our water source for our lake of faith. It is here we are able to grasp faith in our mind and absorb it in our heart. It contains all things pertaining to life and godliness, 2Peter 1:3. It is the source for our grace in which we stand and “so much more,” Romans 5. It provides the mind of Christ (1Cor. 2:16) and divine attributes including love and faith.
We need to remind ourselves, ours is a divine life, sourced, as it were, outside the natural springs of human experience. Our newly created life is from God Eternal and made flesh through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the God-Man, John 1:1-14, 1Cor. 15:4, John 4:10. It is life itself and it is what God creates in each believer who enters into a grace relationship in Christ by faith.
This is what is meant by the logos (λογοs) of God in John 1. This theological or philosophic idea of God is born alive through the person of Jesus. He was outside of time and flesh and born of God into flesh and time. It was God’s plan to provide Himself as our source for His divine life through Jesus, the λογοs of God. This is who He creates within the person who accepts His gift of life by faith. God’s truth and grace come into us out of this relationship created within us through our new birth, John 1:14, John 3:1ff.
Love and faith are embedded within this great Biblical principle of grace and truth. We have previously seen how grace is a relationship to accommodate God’s provision of love for fallen man. Here we have joined both the relationship of grace with the doctrinal provisions of truth declared in God’s word. This is agape love, a selfless provision of everything pertaining to life and godliness requiring our personal attention and care. It is a gift beyond anything this world can offer and it includes a self help package called faith!
Faith is the aspect man uses within his natural soul to process and absorb God’s truth into his own heart and mind. Here, man grapples with God’s truth transitioning from his own temporal view of life and is divinely provisioned to enter into God’s eternal view of life, through God’s truth and power. This transition process, this transmutation, is man responding to God’s work within him, Phil. 2:13. The front end work is getting our will in synch with God’s work within our soul. If this again sounds circular, it is, because it is! We are by nature totally isolated from God and the qualities defining Him. Only in His grace and love are we able to both enter and absorb His truth and it is by faith, Heb. 11:1ff, 2Cor. 5:7. We can see why Paul speaks of the mystery of godliness, 1Tim. 3:16.
This transmutation from a temporal perspective of life often gets detained at a halfway station, the “Christian Worldview Station.” We believe we have reasoned through faith and now understand the scripture. We get off at this station equipped to do by intellect the things listed in the scripture. This is a good thing but it is just a first step, we may not be drinking our living water. There is no power in what we do unless it is driven in grace. We may have grasped some truth, God’s grace includes this but as Paul explains in Romans 5, there is so much more! We need His eternal view which comes from Him through His working in us. It is the sword of the Spirit in the hands of the Holy Spirit. It His organic life added to the doctrine of truth.
The male gender has the propensity to see truth through reason. Yes, God’s revelation is through the orderly arrangement of knowledge. Since the male gender is also the one who stands in our pulpits and teaches seminary classes, this view gets exposure while the ladies in our Body of Christ smile to themselves in quiet submission knowing the wisdom of love, its strength, its power, its pervasive current in the divine system of God’s eternal ways. Women look at each other with knowing smiles at the macho bravado of men who miss the love in faith. Women need to lead from behind!
Love is not the caboose in our gospel of grace, as a bible teacher recently explained to me. Love is the engine driving the train, knowledge and reason may be in the tender providing fuel, but it is Love driving grace and preparing the heart for resurrection power.
Love is the heart of our relationship with Jesus Christ. Not just His love for us, but our reciprocal response. Faith is not simply an intellectual expression of will. Faith is an expression of love for Jesus, i.e., our intellect marinated in desire. This is key. We are to love our redeemer who resurrected our heart, mind and will, our total soul! This life process is contained in the living water bubbling up from the well of God’s grace within our soul, John 4:13-14. It is in the water!
YES, we can grasp faith … and own it through knowledge but we need to ingest it from the well of organic , living water within us, from Jesus Himself, quenching our thirst and producing peace, introducing the resurrection power of Jesus Christ into our temporal experience. YES, even while we are still wrapped in human flesh.
The connection between love and faith is implicit, Gal. 5:6. These two elements produce a grace relationship complicit in both spiritual growth and knowledge. Grace is produced by God’s love and our faith creates our capacity blending in our will to do. Remember, we are not only in Christ but we have the enabling provisions of Christ in us, Col. 1:27. Working together with Him, His love and our faith, we can do, produce the evidence of who we have become in Him.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the ministry of reconciliation. Therefore we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
“Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain.”
Our God is a holy God. He has chosen to make us holy as well, if we accept His love, becoming one in Him as He has made provision through Jesus Christ, who is the Son of Man, our Savior, our Redeemer, our friend and intimate lover. He has chosen us to be His instruments of righteousness through His resurrection power in us.
This is the relationship of grace given to us by faith. May we glorify Him in this flesh in while we wait for His appearing one more time. :)