A Prayer to See

Ordinary Means · An Ephesians Study · No. 3

After twelve verses of blessing God — chosen, redeemed, sealed — Paul turns and prays for the Ephesians. And his prayer is not what you might expect. He does not ask God to give them more. He asks God to help them see what they already have.

Think about how most of us pray. God, give me — patience, provision, a way through, some thing we don't yet have. Paul's first prayer for this church runs the other direction. He has just spent a whole doxology cataloguing what is already theirs in Christ, and now he asks for the one thing that would let them live inside it: eyes to see it. Not new blessings. The wisdom to grasp the blessings already given.

That word heart — kardia in the Greek — doesn't mean what we usually mean by it. In the Bible the heart is not the seat of the feelings; it is the center of the person, the place where thinking and willing and feeling all converge — the inner self. To have its eyes opened is to be given sight you did not have: to see, with the inner person, what the physical eye cannot report. The Christian sees more than the world sees — not because he is cleverer, but because the Spirit has turned the lights on. Luther said no one understands Scripture rightly except by the gift of the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit who breathed out the Word illumines it for the one who reads in faith.

There is quiet comfort in that. If you have read the Bible and felt you weren't grasping it, heard the Gospel preached and sensed you were missing what others seemed to see, known the doctrines without quite feeling their weight — Paul is praying for exactly you. The petition is already on the table: open the eyes of his heart. Show him what You have given him. Let him see, however dimly at first, what is already his.

Then Paul gets specific. He wants them to see three things they already possess: the hope of God's calling, the riches of God's inheritance, and the power of God toward those who believe. Hold onto that third one. Paul does not say God has power in the abstract; he says God's power is toward us — and then he names which power: the same might God exerted when He raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand. The power that rolled the stone away is the power now at work in you. Not a lesser version. Not a trickle from the source. The very power that conquered death is the power holding you to Christ, carrying you through, and raising you on the last day.

And here Paul's prayer does something remarkable: it cannot stay small. Once he begins to describe that power, it lifts him off the ground — up past the resurrection and ascension to the throne itself, Christ seated at the right hand of God, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, above every name that is named. For Ephesians living in a city crowded with rival powers — the temple, the magicians, the emperor's cult — this was the consolation: every one of those powers sits under His feet. (A Lutheran footnote worth keeping: that "right hand of God" is not a place Christ went away to. It is the place of His authority — which reaches everywhere — so He is present with His Church still, and supremely at the altar, where He gives us His body and blood.)

Paul lands the prayer on the highest note of all: this exalted Christ has been given as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. You are not a struggling minority among bigger powers. You are the body of the One who reigns above them — the place where the Christ who fills all things has chosen to be fully present, through Word and Sacrament. Your identity is settled. Your future is sure. Paul simply wants you to see it.

Next time the letter turns a corner. Paul stops describing what God has done and tells us what we were before He did it — dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked — and then comes the two-word hinge on which the whole Gospel turns: But God. Read Ephesians 2:1–10 before then, and watch for it.

Get the book here: [EPHESIANS]