Ephesians 3:14-21.
[1879 330] It is of God's sovereign grace, and our precious privilege, to know that in Christ we are brought into an unchangeable place of blessing before Him. It is not only that we are made the righteousness of God in Him, nor that the righteousness of God never can rise in value in His sight, never can grow in us though we may understand it better, and can never justify us one whit more than it did the first moment that we were justified by His grace. And this is of immense moment for our souls to receive and rest on calmly, without fear of change. We require, as the very first answer for the need of our souls when we are awakened, that we should be thus established in peace with God for evermore. But God has wrought for His own glory, and according to His own counsels in Christ, quite apart from Adam or Israel, to bless us with Christ; and this we have in Ephesians 1, closing with the prayer that the saints should know it.
Besides this standing which should be known, we do need to be exercised in our souls, and to have our hearts drawn out to Christ, and to grow up to Him in all things. To be only unchangeable in righteousness, blessed as it is, would never meet the full wants of the saint, any more than it could suit the love and ways of God with us. We need that which should ever act on us in renewed affections toward Christ, changing us habitually and increasingly into His image, to whom we shall be conformed perfectly when we see Him as He is at His coming. But we are not in resurrection yet, though we seek more and more to know the power of it in Christ. The very reverse. We are in a body wherein we never act aright, unless we by the Spirit treat it as a mere instrument, reckoning it as dead. (Rom. 8:10.) Where and when we give it a place or title to act for itself, we are always wrong. "Therefore," says the apostle, "if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness." Let the body act independently, it will produce nothing but sin: reckon it as dead, and the Holy Ghost will prove that He is life in a practical sense, and will not fail to produce in us the fruit of righteousness which is by Jesus Christ unto God's glory.
Hence, while holding fast that place in Christ which never changes, we need to look at the other side, and to have it ever before us, that we should be transforming habitually. We should not allow as a fixed thing before our souls today what we had attained yesterday. It will be found that there is apt to be death in the pot wherever the soul sacrifices the one truth to the other, whether it be the foundation of grace, or the building up. Do we take our stand only upon that which is accomplished, and settled, and finished? Do we make only our standing to be Christianity? If so, it is and must be a sad coming short of Christ — a shutting out the present living power of the Lord Jesus, to the deepest practical loss to the soul. On the other hand, where an awakened soul only seeks after Christ as a means of heart enjoyment and present communion with God, without having the assured consciousness of establishment in Christ, without guilt, sin, blot, cloud, or question, there will always be weakness; and even, to say the least, the danger of self-righteousness, an habitual sense of struggling after this and that, leading into not only a self-occupied spirit, but also censoriousness as to others. Now our God would deliver us from all evil, not only as to guilt, but practically, and this, too, in the face of all that is against us.
He knows the power of Satan better than we do, and the wretchedness of the flesh; He knows what the world and its snares are incomparably beyond creature estimate. We best know it so far as we believe His word about it; but we never know it with any fulness if we make our experience to be the measure of our knowledge. Not that one would disparage experience by any means; but let your experience flow from faith, instead of being the standard you set up; let your faith rest on what God says about the flesh, the world, and Satan. Then you will find how true it is in the experience of your own souls. You must come down from what God says, and bow to it by faith in your hearts; you never can rise from your own thoughts or feelings up to God. When we begin with God and with the revelations of His own grace, all is changed. We may be overwhelmed by the sense of our sins, but we find ourselves entirely delivered by the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and there we are settled, where there never can be a shadow over our blessedness. If the measure of that blessedness is Christ risen and accepted in the presence of God, what can there be to compare with that? Less than that we are not even now to faith.
But then comes in another and a most important advance. It is what the apostle has before his soul here. In Ephesians 1 he gave them the revelation of God's purpose in Christ, founded on what God has already in Him, and for them even; and all this the apostle prays that they may know.
But in Ephesians 3 he prays, not merely that they should know what grace had thus wrought and given, but what God could now work by Christ in them, not what He had wrought for them in Christ. This leads him to show the all-importance of Christ dwelling in the heart by faith. It is not the Spirit of God dwelling in us; it is just as sure now that He has come and abides, as the work of Christ for us. The Holy Ghost, in virtue of that work, never leaves the Christian; when given, He never departs. But Christ may not be always dwelling in our hearts. Let us look well to it that we do not make this to be a part of the standing privilege of the believer. It is not so, but a question of spiritual experience after we are established in our place before God. He prays for them that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ would grant them according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man. It is not a place that is conferred. It is not our standing before God; but something that ought to be renewed day by day — to be "strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man." And how would this be proved? "That Christ," says he, "may dwell in your hearts by faith." Now we all know alas! what failure in respect of this is. We know what it is to have other objects occupying us, instead of our heart fixed on the Lord. We know what it is to have all kinds of objects that plead for notice, and that claim our thought and affection, distracting us from Christ. Then and thus we are weak, not "strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man."
The effect of the strengthening by the Spirit is that, instead of sensible things engrossing us, the things that are round about us, and that we can see and desire, Christ is before us. "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." It is not merely seasons of enjoyment, it goes farther. What the Christian has to seek is, that while one part of his blessing has to be held fast, as never waning, never changing, the other part should be one of constant growth. I do not mean by this our having recourse to the Lord by times merely; as if the Lord must vanish from us as the Messiah from the disciples after His resurrection. It might lead us to think that we are not entitled to the Lord dwelling in our hearts by faith, if we supposed that we could only look for Him again from time to time. It is not so; "that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." That dwelling may have effects in gradually enlarging and deepening enjoyment, in greater power over everything here below; but what he desires is the power of the Spirit in strengthening the inner man; that Christ should be pre-eminently, and always, too, the object of the heart's affections. What is the effect? In the measure in which Christ is before us, and dwells in our hearts, we have true enlargement of heart toward all the saints; as he says, "being rooted and grounded in love, that ye may be able to comprehend with all saints."
It is not beginning with the saints, and rising up to Christ, which is a great illusion for the Christian; but when we have Christ dwelling in the heart, then alone can we share in the affections of Christ, which embrace the whole church of God. "That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height." It is the whole question of that wondrous secret of God, in which He has joined together Christ and the church, and that over all things. That counsel of God the Spirit did not give him to express, to make man feel that it could not be expressed adequately, being beyond all utterance in the tongue of men. He does not say what it is. He speaks of the breadth, length, depth, and height, but not of the love of Christ, as so many make him say. And if he does not define it, neither should we. It is left in its own unmeasured vastness. He has brought you, with all saints, to apprehend this illimitable counsel of God. But the heart wants far more than glory; even a human heart could not be satisfied without more, not to speak of God's heart. If I could be in heaven, with all the glory that God could confer upon a creature, even so all would not suffice for what the heart feels the need of even now. Glory, therefore, bright as it is, is beneath what he next brings before us: "and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with [into] all the fulness of God." He who deserves and made possible for us the divine counsels of glory is far above all that will be shown throughout creation by-and-by.
There is a deeper glory than that which will be manifested. "Father, I will that they also, whom then hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." The glory enjoyed in the presence of God will far surpass that which will be a matter of display. But take even the lowest end of the glory, that which will be seen by the world: "When Christ who is our life shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory." We shall appear with Him, but it is to man on earth, to those that will be the theatre of divine government in that day. And when that glory does appear, the glory of Christ that we shall share along with Him, what is the design of God in it? What is the design of manifesting it to the world? "That the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast loved me." The love could not be entered into by the world. The glory that the world will see will be the proof of the love which, far from having to wait for, we are free to know and be enjoying even now. What a place is this into which Christ has introduced us, and which now rises above all creature things, into what God is — "That ye might be filled with all the fulness of God."
Now the latter verses show again, and increasingly, how this is a matter going on; and that it is a thing, too, that admits of no limits, because He who dwells in us has none, and He in whom He shows us this love has none. The Holy Ghost cannot be limited any more than Christ. Therefore he says, "To him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, world without end. Amen."
The Lord give to us that we may, everyone of us, rise up more consciously into the dignity, as well as the enjoyment, of that which is ours in Christ Jesus! May we be kept from every human thought which would limit us down to that which we may, or may not, have been! We are called by the Holy Ghost now to this familiar enjoyment of Christ dwelling in our hearts — called into this growing acquaintance with what God gives us in Him. We shall find that, however we may have enjoyed before, this will not suffice, and our perceptions of the truth are amazingly affected, Christ Himself thus dwelling in our hearts by faith. We can all look back upon the time when we felt the fresh power of the grace of God that brought us to Himself. But when we have gone on in the knowledge of Christ, what has been the effect? That what then we received is, however blessed, small compared with what we now know in Christ Himself, and so God would have it to he evermore. Nature always sets up a totally contrary thought. How natural it is, even for God's children, to make the first acquaintance with Christ the standard! How poor, how paltry, to make the learning the letters that compose the name of Christ to be sweeter than that knowledge of Him which opens everything to us, and fills all with His love! The Lord keep us from anything so human! It is easy to make even of Christ a stereotyped creed, to make the hour of mingled fear, and fear melting into the love of God, into a creed that repeats itself for all future time. Let us hold it fast, and rejoice in the energy that opened to us even the feeblest and scantiest knowledge of pardon and peace through Christ. But it is not this which is here pressed on us, but "that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith." Therefore it is that we find this enlarging, this taking in of all saints, of God's purposes and Christ's love, of God Himself. The Lord give us to know what we are called to, and how great a Saviour our Lord Jesus Christ is.