Ephesians 3.14–21
A sermon from St Margaret’s Nedlands 16th August 2026
The first two years as a minister in the Anglican Church is usually a curacy, a kind of apprenticeship where you are seconded to an experienced minister. I did mine at Christ Church Claremont. Bishop Howell Witt came for a mission. I remember a Dialogue Meeting in a Nedlands home. I outlined what Christians believe, and opened it up for questions and objections. There was a professor of music there who made it clear he had no time for Christianity. The idea of someone (God) wanting people to adore him, grovel before him, worship him was repugnant. What sort of God would want that? I didn’t do too well with my answer. Later, with help from C.S. Lewis, I realized what I should have said.
Today’s reading brings us to the end of the first half of Ephesians. Paul has been dealing with God’s final plan for his people and for the universe, a plan to bring the whole creation under the kingship of Jesus. He is writing to believers explaining what this means for them—what it means for individual men, women, and children: salvation; and what it means for the nations of the world: peace. To appreciate this we need to know that the Roman emperor called himself “Lord of all,” and boasted of the Roman peace, the Pax Romana. Nero was the emperor before Paul’s case would be heard; he boasted about the Roman peace, which held because at his word a hundred thousand swords would be drawn. It was peace through pacification. Christians knew there was a Lord of all above and beyond Caesar, who promised peace, but not like Caesar.
In last week’s reading Paul explained the task God had given him to make Jesus known amongst the non-Jewish nations. This morning is a conclusion—how he feels in the light of everything he has been saying, and it gives us a hint for answering the professor. Listen to Ephesians 3.14–21.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 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.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
Paul is overwhelmed by the magnitude of what God is doing, and his natural response is worship. The first thing we should say about worship is that it is natural.
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named …
The idea is going around that church is not about worship, but fellowship. What they say is that when the New Testament speaks of what we do in church it rarely uses the language of worship; worship is the response of our whole life to God’s goodness. Rather, it uses the language of fellowship. This is true, but it begs a question: what do we do when we come together in fellowship to encourage one another? There are any number of things, and one of them is worship. It would be odd if our whole life was about worship, but not at church.
Worship is about the whole of life, and that includes our gatherings. In our corporate worship we tell God and each other how great God is and that encourages us. Paul prostrates himself before God, and he expects we will too, when we understand the great thing he is doing.
But we encounter a problem right at the beginning of his outburst of praise: “I bow my knees before the Father …” Not good, Paul! You are privileging men; this is not politically correct. Surely you could as well call God mother, or find some neutral term. But no, this is to forget we are reading Holy Scripture. Paul is the spokesman of King Jesus; he speaks the words of God, and he is calling God Father, not in some thoughtless way.
I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family (fatherhood–patria) in heaven and on earth is named …
There is something big here. Patria is translated here as family, but we shouldn’t miss that for Paul the family is a “fatherhood.” Families are patriarchal, if I may use that word. My father’s family was matriarchal; I never knew my grandfathers. Gran, from her wheelchair, presided over an extended family of 10 children, a grandchild, and a foster child. My immediate family was definitely patriarchal; my father did a fine job of it; he was never overbearing, and was loved and respected by all. But our own experience is not the point; there is a norm, and that is what Paul speaks of. Fathers are seen as the beginning, the source, the head of their family, and God as the fountainhead, the Father of us all. Why do we call God our Father, and not our Mother? We don’t know—not fully. But this is the way God reveals himself to us, and so this is the way we worship him. Someone introduces themselves as he, and you call them she, you insult them; calling God “Mother” is offensive, if he asks us to call him “Father”.[1] The point is, God’s fatherhood comes first, whatever it means, and the human system at this point derives from him. It is not, as many say, that we have a concept of father, and we project it onto God. It is quite the opposite. It is one of the reasons we must preserve our notion of normality. If we monkey around with it too much we do damage to our relationship with God, damage to women, damage to men, damage to children, and damage to society. It is happening all around us.
But this is an aside, not the heart of what Paul wishes to say to us.
[I pray] that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 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.
If we stand back from this passage for a moment and ignore the detail, we can see that Paul expects the Christian person to be marked by inner transformation. The heart of Christianness is the heart! This is something Jesus made clear in the Sermon on the Mount.
For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.[2]
How do you get a good heart? It certainly doesn’t come naturally. You may watch a movie and decide you don’t want to be a selfish person. But you will keep being selfish. A young man may hear a sermon and want not to treat women any more as sex objects. But only if the heart is changed will behaviour flow with it. “You must be born again,” Jesus said to Nicodemus.[3] We call it experiential Christianity! The Spirit of God actually enters in and changes us. Churchgoing and sacraments are not enough. This is what George Whitefield and John Wesley preached and were hated for it. But it led to social transformation in England and America, such as the world had never seen. In our passage Paul prays for this transformation in the hearts of the Ephesians; he prays it for us too. He prays that we be strengthened in our inner being (it takes power to be good, and that power can only come from God). He prays that Christ will live in our heart through faith—the Holy Spirit in us—and faith too is God’s gift, though we need to exercise it. And he prays that we be rooted and grounded in love. We pray each week for forgiveness because we have not loved our neighbour as ourselves. We find it difficult to love our wife or husband, let alone our neighbours. Love is difficult. True love springs from a transformed heart—love comes from God—Paul sees this and prays that God will help us. We should be praying it for ourselves and each other. If we find hatred welling up in our heart, we should cry out to God to change us in our inner being.
And there is something else that may help us. Paul prays:
[That we] might 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 …
Power to understand! Understand what? Power to understand the extent of Christ’s love! Love begets love. If you have not been loved, you will find it difficult to love. There are communities that have suffered mistreatment. They want to hit back. Sometimes it is impossible for them to hurt those who have hurt them, so they will turn on each other, and as often as one person is hurt, they will hurt someone else. A cycle of violence results. Many of us have not been loved. The people we expected to love us let us down. We find there is no love in our hearts. I once heard a young clergyman cry out in anguish, “I hate people.” He had good reason: his daughter drowned while people looked on. A plain clothes policeman asked him for the facts, but turned out not to be a policeman but a reporter. How does a person love, who has known only indifference and hurt? The answer is by discovering the love of Christ. “The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and give himself up for me,” says St Paul, who once was a man of hate and violence.[4] Jesus loves me. Discovering this makes a difference.
When he died on the cross, he did it for me. He loved me, and loves me, and will love me for eternity. Such love goes beyond our knowing. The most difficult thing in the Christian life is just to know that God loves me. If we can grasp that, even in small part, it will transform us. And how will we discover the love of Christ? Only by the power of the Holy Spirit. But how does the Spirit do it? He awakens faith, faith in Jesus and faith in his words. The Spirit shows us Jesus, in his word, but also in all the ways in which his word becomes clear to us: in reading, in sermons, in study.
Paul prays finally that we might be filled with all the fulness of God. What does that mean? I don’t know. But in the Acts of the Apostles Luke speaks again and again of people who were “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Barnabas “was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith.”[5] This is what Paul is praying for each of us, that our hearts be full of God.
Paul finishes with what we call a doxology, a giving of glory to God.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
This is worship, and here is the answer to the music professor’s problem. He spends his working life helping students tell the difference between good music and bad. He teaches them to recognize what is good and what is not good, and to enjoy what is excellent. He praises the good. He recognizes worth and praises it: this is worship. C.S. Lewis points out how the whole world is full of worship: people praising their team, artists praising a painting, literary critics praising a new novel. What is God worth? That is the question. What do we think of him? And as our music professor should have known, and I wish I had pointed it out to him, when a person refuses to see, or cannot see the excellence of a piece of music, he diminishes himself, not the piece of music. That is why we worship; it makes us human.
The prayer Paul had his mind on here is just the prayer that God will work in each one of us to know the height and length and breadth of the love of Christ, which is beyond knowing—that we be filled with the fulness of God. God can and will do a lot more that we ever think to ask.
God will be glorified. This means that people will see for themselves how wonderful he is; and not just the world of men; also the world of angels and the world of the evil powers. They will see for themselves how good and wise God is, and they will see it in what he is doing in Christ—that we are probably clear about—but what we may not realize is that they will also see in the Church, the people in whom God is doing more than we know.
[1] Luke 11.2.
[2] Luke 6.43–45.
[3] John 3.
[4] Galatians 2.20.
[5] Acts 11.24.