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In Ephesians 3:14-21 Christ is revealed as the Settler in the hearts of the saints. In this passage Paul prays that God the Father would strengthen us according to the riches of His glory with power through His Spirit into our inner man, that Christ may make His home in our hearts through faith, that we may be full of strength to apprehend with all the saints the universal dimensions of Christ and to know the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ, that we may be filled unto all the fullness of God. Following this prayer, Paul praises God: To God be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all the generations forever and ever.
Ephesians 3:14-16 records Paul’s prayer to the Father for the believers in Ephesus: “He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into the inner man.” The apostle’s prayer in 1:15-23 is that the saints would receive revelation concerning the church. Here in 3:14-21 his prayer is that the saints would experience Christ for the church. This requires us to be strengthened into our spirit.
In verse 16 the word strengthened is modified by four phrases: according to the riches of His glory, with power, through His Spirit, and into the inner man. First, we are strengthened according to the riches of the Father’s glory. Glory is the expression of God. John 1:18 says, “No one has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him.” There is glory in the Son’s declaration of God, for the declaration of God is the manifestation of God, which is glory. When the Lord Jesus expressed God on earth, God’s glory was manifested.
All the families in the heavens and on earth express God to some extent. As they express God, there are the riches of His glory. The apostle prayed that the Gentile believers might experience God in a full way according to the riches of His glory, that He might be expressed through the Gentile believers by their experiencing Him in a full way.
What then are the riches of God’s glory? The riches of glory in Ephesians 3:16 are related to every family in verse 15. Every family is an expression of God to a certain degree. Because the Father is the source, the origin, of every family in the heavens and on earth, every family is His expression. The family that expresses the Father the most is the family of the believers. Therefore, Paul prayed to the Father that we might be strengthened for the purpose of expressing Him to the uttermost.
We are strengthened also with power. This power is the power that is referred to in 1:19-22 and that raised Christ from the dead, seated Christ at the right hand of God in the heavenlies, subjected all things under Christ’s feet, and gave Christ to be Head over all things to the church. Such power operates in us (3:20), and with such power God strengthens us for the church.
It is through the Spirit that the Father strengthens us. He strengthens us by the indwelling Spirit. This does not mean that the Spirit is not with us or that the Spirit will come down from the heavens to strengthen us. The strengthening Spirit has been with us since He regenerated us. He is still within us. Through this indwelling Spirit, the Father strengthens us from within.
Ephesians 3:16 also says that we are strengthened into the inner man. The inner man is our regenerated spirit with God’s life as its life. It is our spirit regenerated by the Spirit of God (John 3:6), indwelt by the Spirit of God (Rom. 8:11, 16), and mingled with the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 6:17). In order that we may experience Christ unto all the fullness of God, we need to be strengthened into the inner man. This implies that we need to be strengthened into our spirit through the Holy Spirit.
It is very difficult to remain in the spirit. We are accustomed to going out from the spirit, not to going into the spirit and staying there. According to our experience, we can testify that we are not inclined to stay in the spirit. Because it is so easy for us to get out of the spirit, we need to learn to remain in the spirit. Whenever we stay in the spirit, we are strengthened, but whenever we go out from the spirit, we are weakened. This is the reason we need the Father to strengthen us into our inner man so that we may remain in our spirit. The more we are strengthened, the more the parts of our inner being are brought back into the spirit, into our inner man.
We need to be strengthened in order to stay in our spirit and not be distracted by thoughts regarding so many things. In order to pray without being distracted, we need to be strengthened into our inner man. Oh, how we need to be strengthened so that our whole being may come back to the inner man and stay there! We need to be strengthened so that our whole being may be brought back to our spirit.
We all need to follow Paul in being strengthened into our inner man. When Paul bowed his knees to the Father, he was so strong in his inner man that nothing could shake him or disturb him. Because his whole being was in his spirit, nothing outward could trouble him. We also need to be strengthened to such an extent that nothing will be able to carry us away from our inner man. We need to practice praying to the Father that He would strengthen us with power through His Spirit into our inner man. We should experience the Father’s strengthening us into our inner man every day by spending time with the Lord in prayer.
In Ephesians Paul tells us that our inner man needs to be strengthened and that we need to pray at every time in spirit (3:16; 6:18). The secret we need to learn is to exercise our spirit constantly so that our spirit can be strengthened. If we learn to exercise our spirit constantly, we will live not in the old man but in the new man, and we will live not in the outer man but in the inner man. The way to exercise our spirit constantly is to pray and contact the Lord unceasingly (1 Thes. 5:17). Others may not see that we are praying, but in fact we are praying because at all times and in all things we are exercising our spirit to contact God.
Ephesians 3:17 indicates that the result of the Father’s strengthening us into our inner man is that Christ makes His home in our hearts through faith. Our heart is composed of all the parts of our soul — the mind, the emotion, and the will — plus our conscience, the main part of our spirit (Heb. 4:12; Acts 11:23; John 16:6, 22; Heb. 10:22). These are the inward parts of our being. Through regeneration, Christ came into our spirit (2 Tim. 4:22). After this, we should allow Him to spread Himself into every part of our heart. Since our heart is the totality of all our inward parts and the center of our inward being, when Christ makes His home in our heart, He controls our entire inward being and supplies and strengthens every inward part with Himself.
The expression make His home is a translation of the Greek word katoikeo, which means to settle down in a dwelling, or to make a dwelling place. The prefix of this word, kata, means “down.” This indicates that Christ desires to make His home downward in our heart. Christ is not only in us (Col. 1:27); He is also making His home deep down in our heart.
In Ephesians 3:17 Paul says that it is through faith that Christ makes His home in our hearts. Faith is the substantiation of things not seen (Heb. 11:1). Christ’s indwelling is mysterious and abstract. We realize it not by our physical senses but by the sense of faith.
We need Christ to make His home in our hearts so that we may be wholly occupied and possessed by Him. When we were saved, Christ came into our spirit. Now we must give Him the opportunity to spread Himself throughout all the parts of our inner being. As we are strengthened into the inner man, the door is opened for Christ to spread in us, to spread from our spirit to every part of our mind, emotion, and will. The more Christ spreads within us, the more He settles down in us and makes His home in us. This means that He occupies every part of our inner being, possessing all these parts and saturating them with Himself. As a result, we are filled with Christ.
Christ desires to make His home in our heart, that is, to occupy every part of our heart, our inner being. Yet He is now imprisoned in our spirit because our mind is set on other things and our conscience is not exercised. Because Christ is imprisoned in our spirit, we need to repent by turning our mind from other things to Him. When we repent in this way, our conscience will be exercised to bear witness concerning where we are wrong and what we specifically need to confess. By repentance we turn our mind to the Lord, and by confession we exercise our conscience. It is by repentance and confession that the two main parts of our heart, our mind and our conscience, are opened for the Lord. When we repent and confess in this way, our emotion follows with love for the Lord, and our will also chooses to seek the Lord. Consequently, our entire heart, as the gateway to our spirit, is opened for Christ to fill and strengthen our spirit. When our spirit is strengthened, Christ will increasingly make His home in all the parts of our heart. As a result, He will spread Himself from our spirit into our heart to make His home in our heart so that our whole inner being will be His dwelling place and His home.
When we exercise our spirit so that our spirit is strengthened through the Spirit, we will automatically forget about our self, reject our self, and thereby put off the old man. Spontaneously, Christ will have the opportunity and the full ground to take possession of our entire inner being. When Christ makes His home in our heart in this way, He takes over our whole inner being. Christ then becomes the Host of our heart and not merely a Guest. We need to allow Christ to make His home within us so that our heart, our inner being, will be His residence.
Christ is not simply dwelling within us; He is seeking the opportunity to make His home in our heart. This is to mingle Himself with every part of our being. Christ, the Son of God and the embodiment of the Triune God, is the life-giving Spirit indwelling our spirit to spread into all of our inward parts. The result of this is not only holiness, spirituality, and victory but the marvelous mingling of divinity with humanity to produce the church.
In order for Christ to make His home in our heart, we need to take Him not only as our life but also as our person. Because the church is not only the Body with Christ as life but also the new man with Christ as the person, Paul in Ephesians 3:17 emphasizes the importance of Christ’s making His home in our heart. Paul prayed that the believers would take Christ as their person by allowing Him to make His home in their heart. When Christ is in our spirit, He is our life, but when Christ spreads into our heart, He becomes our person. We need to take Christ not only as life in our spirit but also as the person in our heart.
If we take Christ as our person, allowing Him to spread into our heart, the person living in our heart will not be the self but Christ (Gal. 2:20). In a practical way our heart needs to become Christ’s home. He must be able to live in us and to settle down in us. He, not the self, must be the One who occupies our heart. The crucial question is who is living in our heart and who is the person taking up residence in our heart. As long as we are still the person living in our heart, our heart is the home of the self, not the home of Christ. For this reason, we need to pray for ourselves and for others to have the reality of taking Christ as our person in our daily living. Everything we do should be done not by the self but by Christ. His tastes and preferences need to become ours. Then Christ will be not only our life but also our person. The Lord will thus expand in our heart, take possession of our heart, and make His home in our heart in a full way. Eventually, He will saturate our whole being with Himself, and we will live no longer by the self but by Christ.
The genuine church life is the issue of Christ personally making His home in our heart to occupy every corner of our inner being. The content of the church is the Christ whom we take as our person, the Christ who is wrought into our being. In order for Christ’s word in Matthew 16:18 concerning the building up of the church to be fulfilled, the church must enter into a state where many saints allow Christ to make His home in their heart, possessing, occupying, and saturating their entire inner being. The more Christ occupies our inner being, the more we will be able to be built up with others in the Body (Eph. 2:21-22; 4:16). The reality of the Body life is such an inner experience of the indwelling Christ. The Body of Christ is the consummation of our enjoyment of the unsearchable riches of Christ and the consummation of the experience of the unlimited Christ making His home in our entire inward being. The New Jerusalem is the ultimate issue of Christ making His home in our heart.
According to Ephesians 3:18-19, the result of Christ’s making His home in our hearts is that we are full of strength to apprehend the dimensions of Christ — the breadth, length, height, and depth — and to know the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ. To apprehend the dimensions of Christ, we need all the saints, not individually but corporately. The breadth, length, height, and depth in verse 18 are the dimensions of Christ. In our experience of Christ, we first experience the breadth of what He is and then the length. This is horizontal. When we advance in Christ, we experience the height and depth of His riches. This is vertical. Our experience of Christ must become three-dimensional, like a cube, and must not be one-dimensional, like a line. In our experience of Christ we must go back and forth and up and down, that eventually our experience of Him may be a solid “cube.” When our experience is like this, we cannot fall or be broken.
We become strong not only to apprehend the dimensions of Christ but also to know the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ. The love of Christ is Christ Himself. Just as Christ is immeasurable, so also is His love; hence, it is knowledge-surpassing. Yet, we can know it in our spirit by experiencing it. If we compare what we have thus far experienced of the immeasurable love of Christ to all that there is to experience, it is like comparing a raindrop to the ocean. Christ in His universal dimensions and in His immeasurable love is like a vast, limitless ocean for us to experience.
The result of apprehending the dimensions of Christ and knowing the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ is that we are filled unto all the fullness of God. Here the expression the fullness of God denotes the overflow of the riches of Christ that have been constituted into us. The fullness of God implies that the riches of all that God is have become His expression. When the riches of God are in God Himself, they are His riches, but when the riches of God are expressed, they become His fullness (John 1:16). All the fullness of God dwells in Christ (Col. 1:19; 2:9). Through His indwelling, Christ imparts the fullness of God into our being that we may be filled even unto the fullness of God to be the practical manifestation of the church, in which God may be glorified in His expression (Eph. 3:21).
Our Christ is unsearchable and immeasurable, and yet He is intimately making His home in our heart. Because all the fullness of God is in Him, He is the embodiment of God. Therefore, as He makes home in our heart, we are filled unto all the fullness of God.
In the New Testament the fullness is the expression through the completeness of the riches. This is the reason that in verse 8 Paul speaks of the unsearchable riches of Christ and that in 1:23 and then in 4:13 he speaks of the fullness of Christ. The riches of Christ are all that Christ is and has and all that He has accomplished, attained, and obtained. The fullness of Christ is the result and issue of our enjoyment of these riches. When the riches of Christ are assimilated into our being metabolically, they constitute us to be the fullness of Christ, the Body of Christ, the church, as His expression. First, in 1:23 this expression is the fullness of Christ, and then in 3:19 it is the fullness of God, for the fullness of Christ, the embodiment of God, is the fullness of the Triune God.
The Father (v. 14) answers and fulfills the apostle’s prayer through the Spirit (v. 16) that Christ, the Son (v. 17), may make His home in our hearts. Thus we are filled unto the fullness of God — the Triune God. This is the issue of the dispensing of the Triune God into our entire being. Paul’s prayer regarding our becoming filled unto all the fullness of God will be ultimately fulfilled in the New Jerusalem as the fullness of God.
Verses 20 and 21 say, “But to Him who is able to do superabundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power which operates in us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto all the generations forever and ever. Amen.” Verses 16 through 19 are the apostle’s prayer. The word but makes verses 20 and 21 a doxology. In his prayer the apostle prayed that the Father would strengthen the saints according to the riches of His glory. This implies that the glory of God can be wrought into the saints. In the doxology he said, “To Him be the glory” (v. 21), implying that the glory of God, which has been wrought into the saints, returns to God. First, the glory of God is wrought into us; then it returns to God for His glorification. Isaac’s wealth was first given to Rebekah for her beautification; then all the wealth came back to Isaac, with Rebekah, for his glorification (Gen. 24:47, 53, 61-67). The apostle prayed that God would strengthen the saints according to His glory, “but” eventually God’s glory, after being wrought into them, returns to Him along with the strengthened saints. This is the way in which God is glorified in the church.
We are being strengthened into our inner man according to the riches of God’s glory (v. 16). This glory comes to us with God and, after being worked into us, will return to God with us. By means of this two-way traffic the church, as the firstfruits in the universe (James 1:18), takes the lead to give glory to God. All the other families both in heaven and on earth will follow the church to glorify Him.
God’s glory is wrought into the church, and He is expressed in the church. Hence, to God is the glory in the church; that is, God is glorified in the church. Moreover, God is glorified not only in the church but also in Christ. The word and is used in Ephesians 3:21 to stress this point emphatically. In the church the sphere of God’s glorification is narrow, being limited to the household of the faith, but in Christ the sphere is much broader because Christ is the Head of all the families in the heavens and on earth (1:22; 3:15). Hence, God’s glorification in Christ is in the realm of all the families created by God, not only on earth but also in the heavens. This is in accord with unto all the generations forever and ever, which means for eternity. All the generations forever and ever constitute eternity. God’s glorification in the church is mainly in this age, whereas God’s glorification in Christ is for eternity.
In summary, we should experience and enjoy Christ not only as the Dweller in us but also as the Settler in our hearts. Through regeneration Christ has been revealed in our spirit. Christ is the hidden treasure in our spirit; He lives in our spirit. Yet Paul prayed that this Christ in our spirit would have an opportunity to make His home in our heart, that is, to make our heart His own home. Our heart is different from our spirit. The heart is composed of the mind, emotion, will, and conscience. Our conscience is a main part of our spirit. Therefore, our spirit is within our heart; in fact, our spirit is the center of our heart. Christ has been revealed into the saints’ spirit, yet with a great many saints, Christ does not have any ground in their hearts. Yes, all believers have Christ in their spirit, but most of the believers do not have Christ wrought into various parts of their heart. This means that Christ still does not have a home in their heart. For this reason, Paul prayed that Christ, who is in our spirit, may have an opportunity to make His home in our heart; that is, Christ may spread Himself from our spirit into all the parts of our heart in order to make His home and be settled in our heart. For Christ to make His home in our heart means that we experience and enjoy Him to such an extent that He not only lives in our spirit but also occupies our entire heart. When Christ makes His home in our heart, we will apprehend with all the saints the unlimited dimensions of Christ, which are the dimensions of the universe, and we will know the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ. This results in our being filled unto all the fullness of God to be His expression.
