Ephesians Blows My Mind!

As I wrote my sermon today, on Ephesians 3:14-21, I realized that the book of Ephesians is already a sermon. So how would it be if I just stood up and read the book of Ephesians during the sermon time on Sunday morning?

That's what it was written for, wasn't it? The way I understand it, Ephesians was written not as a letter to a specific church dealing with a specific issue, but rather as an encyclical letter, meant to be read in a many different churches.

It is a remarkable book, and the brief section I'm focusing on for this week is a prayer for the hearers. The prayer has some truly amazing phrases:

"...from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name."

"...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love."

This one totally blows my mind:
"...that you may have the power 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, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."

Really? "All the fullness?" And how are we supposed to know something that "surpasses knowledge?" WHOA!!!

But the line that grabs me and will not let me go is this one. The end of the prayer affirms that God "is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine..." YES! Amen to that. And lucky for us that's true, huh? I mean, what would the world be like if God was limited to only the things we ask for? How would it be if God was defined by our meager imaginations?

This passage gives me hope. In the midst of contention and strife, disagreement and bitterness, it is ever so important to affirm that God is not contained by human understandings. Even our fundamentalist-est sisters and brothers who claim to have access to the absolute truth of God know deep down that they have their own lenses, as well. We all do. In a beautiful, paradoxical and one might say ironic way, Scripture itself makes that very clear.

God is more. God can do more. God is bigger than all of our biggest dreams multiplied together.

How big is the space that you are creating for the possibilities of the future that God has in store for you?