Prayer Requests 3

           I pray that out of His glorious riches, He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)

          As I typed this prayer, I remembered the prayer passages from the last two days. Both times, Paul prayed that the people to whom he wrote would be given power. Who does that? I suppose it makes sense because Paul saw these congregations as allies and what power he prayed for was fairly specific, but it still feels strange, dangerous, and even unnatural, at least to the natural mind. This may be because often, power means “power over” rather than “power to.”

          In this prayer, the first power is power to. Paul suggests that we must be strengthened with power in our inner being because, without it, our hearts could not survive His presence. Once again, I’m reminded of The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis. If you haven’t read it, you should.

          The second power is also the power to. In this case, it’s the power to grasp the dimensions of the love of Christ, or perhaps more correctly, the lack of dimension. It’s a power to know and to understand what cannot be understood by the natural mind. This idea makes me chuckle a little because we tend to think we understand so much. We talk about hundreds, thousands, and even millions of lightyears, billions and trillions of dollars, the vast array of knowledge and understanding we have of the universe, the climate, the animals and plants. Still, we don’t understand them, and we don’t understand their interrelationships, even if we observe them. Neither is it likely that we have a clue how our lives would change if we understood a tenth of the love of Christ.

           Something we need to keep in mind is that power creates power. If you lift weights or walk a certain distance, that builds in you the ability to lift heavier weights or walk farther. If God gave us too much power or knowledge, it would damage us like lifting weights that are too heavy does. In fact, in lifting weights, you’re supposed to do so until your muscles can’t repeat the move again, then let them rest. That’s how you build their power to lift more. The power of understanding works the same way.

          But let’s take it one step further. If you and I both exercise our muscles or our understanding and use that power together, we can likely do more together than we could on our own. That makes praying for others to have the power to understand vital to our own well-being.