I was wearing my new jumper last Sunday evening, purchased just the Friday before in the very fashionable shop Zara. I did feel a bit of a fish out of water there, but I needed to exchange my sister-in-law’s Christmas present, which was too small for me.

I was wearing this new jumper and I was quite overwhelmed by the lovely comments I received, such as “That’s really nice”; “I do like that colour”; “That’s very lovely”, complete with a little tweak of the material. But you know what as really lovely about those comments was that each one was from a young lady – we’re talking people aged 18-23, and they thought what I was wearing was so good.

Well to borrow from Churchill: Never in the field of human flattery has so much be offered by so young to so old. I was very flattered; I shall wear that jumper with pride.

Now just as the flattery was piled for me, in our passage from Ephesians today, Paul is piling up the amazing spiritual outpourings from God: Never in the field of human relationships with God has so much been offered by so great and holy a God to so undeserving and unready a people, but for their faith in Jesus Christ.

Tim’s helpful talk last week went through the wonderful foundations of our identity in Christ, each a gift from God, and now, “for this reason” (Eph 1:15), the Apostle Paul writes of how he is in constant prayer for the Ephesian believers. He certainly had a warm relationship: Acts 20:17-38 tells of his last face to face meeting with them and how:
[Paul] knelt down with all of them and prayed. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. (Acts 20:36-38)

Not surprising then that he doesn’t stop giving thanks to God for them (v.16) and that he keeps asking on their behalf (v.17). What then does he prayed for? He piles up, one on top of another, the most encouraging and inspiring requests.

Piling up the requests
a) The understanding – Paul’s first request was that God would give the Ephesians the Spirit of wisdom and revelation (v.17). And all for the practical reason of helping them to know Jesus Christ better.

Why is it important to know Jesus Christ better, because as Jesus put it himself, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9). If we are to know God – what he is like, what he does and why – then we are to look at Jesus Christ. That’s why it’s important to know about Jesus.

Paul understands this completely and so he prays for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to be given to the Ephesians. Wisdom will give us a practical understanding of all of Christ’s accomplishments – in other words of all the benefits that Jesus earned for us by his life, death, resurrection and ascension: such things as our forgiveness, our new purpose, our adoption as God’s children, our relationship with God, our service for his Kingdom.

As we grab hold of these truths, we will understand our new identity and hope in Jesus, as Tim explained last week (Eph 1:3-14).

Not only does Paul ask for wisdom, but also revelation. Now this is different than wisdom – something that we can search out for ourselves through prayer and study. Revelation is by its very nature something we cannot search out but only receive.

The revelation we need is what we cannot discover for ourselves: the salvation plan of God. In other words, how God intends to rescue humankind from its turning away from him, graphically illustrated in the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and then seen time and again throughout the pages of Scripture and even into our own lives. That is the salvation story revealed to us and when we understand that, we will want to praise and glorify God more and more.

b) The hope – Paul prays that the Ephesians will know and understand the hope (v.18) that has been given them. Not some uncertain vague wish, but the sure hope and expectation for all God has called.

You see, what God promises he delivers. Often you’ll see companies promising their service but when something goes wrong, the promise has lots of terms and conditions. With God what he promises he delivers and there are no get out clauses, and what he promises is our hope, “the riches of his glorious inheritance” (v.18).

This comment of Paul’s is just like his similar saying in Col 1:12: “… the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.” We will inherit just as Christ does as the Son of God and as the saints down the ages have done.

Our inheritance, as far as the NT suggests, includes such wonders of being able to see God and his Son, Jesus, to worship God, to be transformed into perfection, to enjoy perfect fellowship with God, to be part of the great crowd that stands before God’s throne.

This is the inheritance that we should hope for, that we should glory in (humbly of course because it is a gift and never earned) and that we should know in our hearts and minds. All that sense is encapsulated in v.18

c) The Power – Paul says that we who believe will receive power beyond all other power (v.19). All of us know in our own lives that on our own we cannot fulfil the requirements of God’s laws and commands, we might try but we do fail. We need a power greater than ourselves and this is promised by God. We know this power as the Holy Spirit and we need to constantly call that power to dwell in us, constantly filling us and constantly overflowing from us.

And it’s a power that nothing else can compare with and it’s a power granted to us who believe. That’s all, just believe and we receive this power that is both great and without comparison in our world. Those of us who have allowed the Holy Spirit to so work in our lives will testify to that amazing power.

It might be that at this point Paul realised what amazing and overwhelming thing he was suggesting as gifts from God and the Ephesians perhaps rightly and understandably could have asked him, “How can you be sure?”

In the 12 days before Christmas, BBC Radio 4 programme Today run a series on “Who runs Britain?” They’d had a poll of listeners and the suggested names included:
1: José Manuel Barroso 22%
2: Rupert Murdoch 15%
3: Parliament 14%
4: The British People 12%
5: Sir Gus O'Donnell 10%
6: Terry Leahy 7%
7: Tony Blair 7%
8: Google 6%
9: Gordon Brown 4%
10: Shami Chakrabarti 3%

In the final discussion on Christmas Eve amongst the invited panel of so-called experts or commentators, there was hardly unanimity of views, so it at least made good radio. But ultimately no one person or institution could be clearly named as being so powerful that he/she/it ran Britain. Their power was seen as being very little indeed.
But for Paul, God is powerful and there is some clear demonstrable evidence that he is powerful and that because he is powerful he can do whatever he likes and so he can powerfully pour out these blessings Paul prays for, blessings of wisdom and revelation, hope and power.

God’s power is demonstrated in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ. It is God who raised Christ from death (v.20). It is God who seated Christ at his right hand (v.20). It is God who placed Christ far above all other rulers, authorities, powers and dominions (v.21) so that it is God who placed everything under Christ’s feet (v.22).

Someone who has the power to conquer death, to sit in equal status with God, to have authority over all things like God, the one who can do that is truly powerful. It sort of makes the Radio 4 Today programme list look all rather puny really.

But, we might think Paul is overdoing the blessings of God, we might think he is laying it on a bit thick, a sort of flattery through prayerful good wishes. Paul’s description of the power of God, a power this is incomparable, a power that is great, goes to show us incontrovertibly how possible it is for God to pour out these blessings on those who believe.

And we are the believers today, along with all other Christians who truly hope in Christ as their Lord and Saviour. But let’s be aware here: this is not something passive, a sort of lie back and be filled, dwelling in some blissful experience of God’s blessing.

These blessings of God, these gifts from him, flowing out of the identity we have in Jesus as Paul wrote about in the opening verses of this chapter, are for action, not inaction. That is what the Ephesians did. Paul ‘heard’ about their faith and their love (v.15) and he knew that their active faith was and is an expression of Jesus Christ, whose very being is now seen and heard in the church (v.23).

Now that Jesus has ascended to sit as his Father’s right hand side, his Spirit is sent upon his followers (i.e. all believers) so that they become Jesus’ eyes and ears and hands and feet in the world, expressing Christ in our words, in our deeds and our actions.

That is the aim and desire of Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians and it is the same aim and desire he would have for us today: that we would be the eyes and ears, hands and feet of our Lord and Saviour.

Can you see the link here to the thinking of the PCC the other day – a link we shall constantly see in this letter if we look for it? If we are to be a church that is ‘living to love God and you’ then that can only be expressed as we live lives that show God’s love and because of our love for God we love the people of our world.

For that we need to take up the example of the Ephesians – their faith and love was both seen and heard. They were on their way to becoming mature followers of Jesus, shown in their faith.

For us today, that is our call. To let our faith show. How does it influence your life at work, at home, at school, in your street, as you shop? Do you show God’s love and how could you do that tomorrow?

Can we pile on to those around us the love of Christ, revealing Christ and allowing him to draw them to know him and in turn to follow him?