My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!”
(Ephesians 3: 13 – 21 THE MESSAGE)
The “You God sees” is His fully restored, indescribably magnificent, regal Child, heir to His Kingdom, and Vice-regent in all that is being accomplished across the Universe.
Unfortunately we are so time-bound and earth oriented that the “cares of this life” distract us and worry us so completely that we cannot see these “Heavenly” things.
Knowing this Paul begs the believers who will read this letter to not “let his present troubles,” get them down even if they were the result of his service to them. These “present troubles” were no small matter. He’s currently imprisoned and facing a most uncertain future. In an earlier letter he described things he’d experienced as a Servant of Christ and His Church. “I've worked much harder, been jailed more often, beaten up more times than I can count, and at death's door time after time. I've been flogged five times with the Jews' thirty-nine lashes, (39 because 40 would have killed him) beaten by Roman rods three times, pummeled with rocks once. I've been shipwrecked three times, and immersed in the open sea for a night and a day. In hard traveling year in and year out, I've had to ford rivers, fend off robbers, struggle with friends, struggle with foes. I've been at risk in the city, at risk in the country, endangered by desert sun and sea storm, and betrayed by those I thought were my brothers. I've known drudgery and hard labor, many a long and lonely night without sleep, many a missed meal, blasted by the cold, naked to the weather.
And that's not the half of it, when you throw in the daily pressures and anxieties of all the churches. When someone gets to the end of his rope, I feel the desperation in my bones. When someone is duped into sin, an angry fire burns in my gut.” (2 Corinthians 11: 21 – 29 THE MESSAGE)
Despite such excessive suffering and immediate danger Paul writes, “My response is to get down on my knees before the Father …” And his prayer is for all of us; the believers he knew personally; Christ-followers in his generation and the generations to come. His prayer is for us. It’s a prayer to our “magnificent Father;” the “God who can do anything … far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!”
This prayer, as it’s quoted above, is one I urge you to pray for me and for one another! Pray it reflectively. Pray it routinely; even daily. The things Paul asks for are extremely important. When they’re granted we will “know” and live in the “truth,” which is Christ Himself. As Jesus Himself said, “… knowing this Truth we will be free.” (John 8: 32) Progressively more free from cares and worries that infect secular knowledge you will see yourself as the “You God sees.”
“Glory be to the Father; and to the Son; and to the Holy Spirit!”
