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Paul prays for the church • Sermon • Submitted
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Such is Paul’s vision. And now he prays that the dream may come true. He begins ‘for this reason’ (14), resuming his train of thought where he left it in verse 1. For what reason does he pray? Surely because of the greatness of God’s reconciliation and because of his personal responsibility as apostle to the Gentiles to make this good news known.
‘I bow my knees before the Father,’ he says. Now the normal posture for prayer among Jews was standing. In Jesus’ parable of the pharisee and the publican both men ‘stood to pray’ (Lk. 18:11, 13). So kneeling was unusual; it indicated an exceptional degree of earnestness, as when Jesus knelt in the garden of Gethsemane, falling on his face to the ground. Scripture lays down no rule about the posture we should adopt when praying. It is possible to pray kneeling, standing, sitting, walking and even lying. But I think we may agree with William Hendriksen that ‘the slouching position of the body while one is supposed to be praying is an abomination to the Lord’!
His prayer is addressed ‘to the Father’, of whose family or household Jews and Gentiles are now through Christ equal members (2:19). He is the ‘one God and Father of us all’ (4:5). It is natural therefore that Paul should go on to affirm that from this one heavenly Father ‘the whole family’ is named. Since the emphasis of these chapters is on the unity of God’s family, it seems unlikely that the right translation should be ‘every family’ (rsv, neb). It refers rather to ‘the whole family of believers’ (niv). This family includes ‘heaven and earth’, that is, the church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven. Although separated by death, they are still both part of the one family of God.
At the same time, there is a deliberate play on words, ‘Father’ being patēr and ‘family’ being patria. It is this which has led some translators to try to keep the verbal assonance and render ‘the Father from whom all fatherhood …’. This seems legitimate because, although patria means ‘family’ not ‘fatherhood’ in the abstract, yet it is a family descended from the same father and therefore the concept of fatherhood is implied.
It may be, then, that Paul is saying not only that the whole Christian family is named from the Father, but that the very concepts of fatherhood and family are derived from God. In this case the true relationship between human fatherhood and the divine fatherhood is neither one of analogy (God is a Father like human fathers), nor one of projection (Freud’s theory that men have invented God because they needed a heavenly father-figure), but one of derivation (God’s fatherhood being the archetypal reality, what Armitage Robinson calls ‘the source of all conceivable fatherhood’).
To this Father Paul prays that God will give certain gifts ‘out of the riches of his glory’. His prayer is like a staircase by which he ascends higher and higher in his aspiration for them. His prayer-staircase has four steps whose keywords are ‘strength’ (that they might be strengthened by Christ’s indwelling through the Spirit), secondly ‘love’ (that they might be rooted and grounded in love), thirdly ‘knowledge’ (that they might know Christ’s love in all its dimensions, although it is beyond knowledge), and fourthly ‘fullness’ (that they might be filled up to the very fullness of God).