.png)
I feel honored when others pray for me, and I hope you do too. It means they care and will take the time to mention us or our needs to God.
People in the Bible prayed for us too, as Jesus did in John 17, and as Apostle Paul prayed in Ephesians.
Paul prays, “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” — Ephesians 3:14 He continues, “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.” — Ephesians 3:20 Paul earnestly desired that his friends know God and all about His love.
He used an agricultural example, rooted, to communicate we can be firmly established in God’s love — as well as the architectural example, grounded, to communicate that the love of God gives us a firm and stable foundation for living.
Building our lives on such stability enables us to grasp the fulness of God’s love and how powerful it really is.
Paul concluded with verse 20, declaring that God is able to do this for us.
As I researched the word “do,” I learned it includes form, produce, provide, appoint and perform-a-promise. Isn’t that the best news ever?
Paul closed his prayer saying that — NOW — “to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever.”
The phrase “all generations” includes you and me, and our ‘grands and great-‘grands — how wonderful.
Poet Meir Ben Isaac Nehorai, 1096, expressed his own inability to fully comprehend Christ’s love when he wrote the third stanza of the hymn “The Love of God.”
The stirring background of his writing and this hymn can be found online at israelmyglory.org/ article/the-love-of-god-isgreater- far/.
Until next week, Anita
Onarecker, a writer, author and minister to women and adults, earned a Master of Christian Education from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2007.
