There is a peculiar restlessness that afflicts the Western church. Every decade or so, a new movement emerges promising to finally unlock what the church has been missing—a new structure, a new sensibility, a new strategy. The Jesus Movement gave way to the Church Growth Movement, the Seeker-Sensitive Movement, the Emerging Church Movement, the Gospel-Centered Movement, the Young, Restless and Reformed Movement, and the current retrieval of classical liturgy. Each arrived with genuine enthusiasm and genuine insights. Each, in time, proved insufficient on its own terms.
As I reflect on what I have observed, read and lived through in that more than fifty years, this is what I am convinced of: the church is always looking for better methods, but God is looking for deeper people. I am not denying that some of these movements have helpful insights and merits. The problem is the underlying assumption they shared: that the church’s primary need is a better method.
Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 gives us a fourfold portrait of what spiritual depth looks like. It is worth examining each movement carefully, because together they constitute a vision of Christian formation— and one that the contemporary church must not lose sight of.
Stunned by Grace
Paul’s prayer begins not with petition but with posture: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father” (Eph 3:14). What has brought Paul to his knees is the canvas of gospel grace he has been painting across the first two chapters of the letter, culminating in that great hinge:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. (Ephesians 2:4–5)
This is the man who dragged Christians from their homes and consented to their deaths (Acts 8:3). And yet the same grace that arrested him on the Damascus Road continued, decades later, to arrest him still. He describes himself in 1 Timothy 1:15 as the foremost of sinners. He never allowed the horror of who he was to be eclipsed by the wonder of what God had done. This is the first mark of a genuinely deep Christian: grace does not wear off; it wears in.
Jonathan Edwards, in his Religious Affections, observes that one of the distinguishing marks of genuine spiritual experience is that it produces an ever-deepening sense of one’s own unworthiness alongside an ever-intensifying wonder at divine mercy. The two grow together. I can testify to this truth personally. Those whose evangelical experience has plateaued—for whom the gospel has become familiar furniture rather than living flame—are, on Edwards’ account, showing signs not of maturity but of declension. “The essence of grace,” he writes, “is not the excitement of the moment but the permanent renovation of the affections.”
There is a searching question here for those of us who have been Christians for decades. When did the news of God’s love in Christ last genuinely surprise us? The mark of depth is not theological sophistication about grace—it is being continually ambushed by it. This has massive implications for those of us who preach the gospel week in and week out. My greatest struggle as a preacher is not the application, and definitely not the exegesis; it is to have my heart set with wonder anew every time I proclaim the gospel. The blasé detailing of salvation facts is less than what gospelling entails.
Surrendered to Christ’s Will
Paul’s prayer moves from posture to petition: that the Father would grant his readers
to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in their inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. (Ephesians 3:16–17)
The word translated dwell (κατοικέω, katoikeō) is significant. Paul is not praying that Christ would occasionally visit the believer’s inner life. He is praying that Christ would take up settled, sovereign residence—and with it, rule.
The Spirit does not bypass the human person but penetrates and transforms the deepest centre of personal existence, the seat of cognition, affection, and volition—what Scripture calls the heart. The indwelling of Christ through the Spirit is not a mystical abstraction. It is the reorientation of the whole self around a new Lord.
What Paul is describing in practice is the progressive fulfillment of what he articulates so personally in Galatians 2:20: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” This is not quietism or the dissolution of personal agency. It is the deepest form of personal agency—a will so aligned with Christ’s that the distinction between his desires and the believer’s becomes increasingly fuzzy.
Churches filled with such people do not merely run better programs. They constitute a visible alternative social reality—what the New Testament calls a foretaste of the new creation. Lesslie Newbigin, writing on the church’s missionary encounter with Western culture, argued that the most powerful apologetic available to the church is “a congregation of men and women who believe [the gospel] and live by it.” Thirty-four years ago, when I first gathered people to plant a church, I challenged a group of young adults: “Give me ten people who love the Lord more than they love their life, and let’s see what the Lord would do.” Deep people matter more than great methods for church planting.
Secure in His Love
Having prayed for inner strength and indwelling, Paul now reaches for something audacious: that his readers 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. (Ephesians 3:18–19)
This is an extraordinary formulation: to know what surpasses knowledge. Paul is not collapsing into paradox for rhetorical effect. He is gesturing at the difference between propositional knowledge about love and the experiential knowledge of being loved—what John Owen, in his great work Communion with God, called the difference between knowing the doctrine of God’s love and “the soul’s actual tasting of it.”
The fourfold spatial metaphor—breadth, length, height, depth—has generated considerable discussion. Many commentators have noted that these dimensions implicitly trace the shape of a cross. Whether or not that is Paul’s conscious intent, the theological logic holds: the cross is the true measure of a love that has no measure. God does not merely declare his love from a safe distance. He enters the wreckage of human sin and absorbs its full consequences. At Calvary, the arms of Christ are extended as wide as they will reach, and they do not retract.
The practical significance of this security cannot be overestimated. Christians who are genuinely rooted and grounded in God’s love—who know at the level of the affections that nothing can separate them from it (Rom 8:38–39)—are freed from the anxious performance that characterises so much contemporary church life. Paul’s prayer here is specifically for comprehension “with all the saints” (Eph 3:18). The love of Christ is not fully grasped in isolation but in the corporate life of the church, as each member’s partial experience contributes to a fuller whole.
The result Paul anticipates is staggering: “that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (v. 19). Not merely forgiven. Not merely rescued. But filled with Someone—his goodness, his patience, his compassion, his joy, his holiness gradually and gloriously permeating their human lives. This is theosis without confusion: not the obliteration of creaturely limits, but their fulfilment through participation in divine life.[1]
Soaring in Doxology
The passage climaxes not with an exhortation but an eruption:
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. (Ephesians 3:20–21)
Paul does not turn immediately from theology to application. He turns first to worship. This sequence—doctrine to doxology to discipleship—is the Pauline order, and it matters enormously. Romans follows the same arc: eleven chapters of sustained doctrinal exposition give way at the end of chapter 11 to the great doxology—“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” it begins (v. 11:33)— before the practical imperatives of chapters 12–16.
Doxology is the engine of discipleship, not its ornament. Without it, discipleship becomes what John Piper, in Desiring God, describes as the moralistic treadmill of duty divorced from delight — Christianity as obligation rather than as participation in divine joy. With it, the commands of Scripture become the grateful response of those who have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
The Ephesian Christians would later receive a searching word from the risen Christ through John: “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance … But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev 2:2–4). They were still orthodox. Still defending the truth. Still active. Still enduring. But the doxological fire had gone out, and service had become a duty roster. What had been a love song had become a to-do list.
Christ’s prescription is the same for every generation: repent, and return to the first love. Not to sentimentality—but to the stunned, adoring, grateful response of those who have genuinely encountered the grace of the living God. The things “you did at first” are the work driven by first love. I’ve seen too many theological students gain much knowledge but lose their first love. We go earnestly from theology to “practical application” as if that is the chief business of theology.
The church will continue to produce new movements. Some will carry genuine insight; some will overcorrect and produce new distortions. The reforming work of the Spirit in the church is never finished on this side of the end. But the vision Paul sets before us in Ephesians 3 is more than a movement. It is a community of people so penetrated by grace, so surrendered to Christ’s rule, so secured in his love, and so aflame with doxological wonder that the city looks on and asks what accounts for it.
[1] A term that is especially common in Eastern Orthodox theology, meaning ‘becoming divine’, that refers to the transforming dimension of salvation. This terminology finds some biblical justification in 2 Peter 1:4, and was used by many theologians in the early church.
