“…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.”
— Ephesians 3:17-19
Context & Key Themes
Paul starts the chapter with For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles — and then breaks off. He doesn’t finish the sentence. He will not pick that thread back up until verse 14. What happens in between is one of the most important excursions in the New Testament: Paul pauses mid-prayer to explain why his ministry exists and what the mystery of the gospel actually is. The Greek word mysterion does not mean a puzzle to be solved; in Paul’s vocabulary it means a secret God has now revealed. Something hidden for ages has been unveiled in the present generation, and Paul is the one God has commissioned to announce it.
The content of the mystery is stated plainly in verse 6: the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. This is not a soft rephrasing of something everyone already knew. For two thousand years God had worked through one family — Abraham’s line, Israel, the covenant people marked by circumcision and the Law. The Old Testament hinted repeatedly that Gentiles would eventually be drawn in, but no one saw the shape it would take: not Gentiles adopted as junior partners under Jewish covenantal privilege, but Gentiles as full co-heirs in a new body that is neither Jewish nor Gentile but something new entirely. That this could be said at all — that a Jewish apostle trained under Gamaliel could write it from a Roman prison cell — is itself evidence of what God was doing.
Summary
Paul describes his own role within the mystery as an almost embarrassed wonder. He calls himself the very least of all the saints — not false modesty, but reckoning with the fact that he once persecuted the church he now serves. And yet to this one, grace was given to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. The phrase is staggering: anexichniaston, riches that cannot be tracked out, whose trail cannot be traced to the end. The gospel is not a set of concepts to master but a territory to explore without ever exhausting it. And the audience for this unveiling is larger than just humanity — Paul says the wisdom of God is now being made known through the church to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. The church itself has become a display cabinet in which the unseen realms watch God’s multicolored wisdom unfold.
Then Paul returns to the prayer he started and never finished. He kneels before the Father and asks four things that build like an ascending staircase: that they be strengthened with power through the Spirit in their inner being; that Christ would dwell in their hearts through faith; that being rooted and grounded in love they would have strength to comprehend with all the saints the breadth and length and height and depth; and that they would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so as to be filled with all the fullness of God. The prayer closes with a doxology: to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all 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.
Reflection
The prayer Paul offers in this chapter contains a paradox worth sitting with. He prays that the Ephesians would comprehend the love of Christ — and then that they would know a love that surpasses knowledge. The verbs are deliberate. To comprehend, in Paul’s Greek, is to grasp something with effort, to take hold of it the way a climber grips a handhold. But the object of that grasping is a love whose dimensions — breadth, length, height, depth — explicitly cannot be fully measured. Paul is describing a pursuit that never finishes, and asking God to give strength for it.
This is one of the passages that quietly dismantles the cheap-grace misreading. Paul is not instructing the Ephesians to receive an abstract pardon and then go on with their lives unchanged. He is asking God to give them strength — strength enough to take hold of what has been given them, strength enough to be rooted in love, strength enough to keep growing into a love they will never fully contain. The gospel is a gift, entirely unearned, but the gift is Christ dwelling in the heart through faith, and a heart with Christ dwelling in it does not stay the same. It is being filled, continually, with all the fullness of God. The person who says God will take me as I am so I don’t need to seek him has not heard what Paul is praying here. Paul is on his knees asking that the saints would have the strength to keep pressing into a love that cannot be reached the end of, because that pressing is the life the gospel actually gives. The God who does far more abundantly than all we ask or think is not worth tracking down with half-attention.