Know God’s Incomprehensible Power for Us

Scripture — Ephesians 1:17-20 (NRSV)

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places.

Devotion

Words are fantastic tools for communication. But sometimes our words fail us. When someone has done something unusually wonderful for us, “Thank you” seems so inadequate. “Thank you very much” seems weak as well. So often we end up heaping words on top of words to convey the magnitude of our gratitude: “Oh, thank you so much. I am very, very, very, grateful. This is great. I appreciate what you did for me. Thank you.”

In Paul’s prayer for the readers of Ephesians, he does something very similar to this. As you may recall, Paul had already prayed that we would know God better, including the hope we have in God and the fact that we are God’s treasured inheritance. In verses 19-20 Paul adds one further request, “[I pray that you may know God better . . .] and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead.”

English translators struggle to render Paul’s exuberant Greek into coherent English. In the original language, however, we have one, long, connected thought, which reads something like this: “[I pray that you might know] what is the exceeding greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the energetic working of the might of his strength.” You’ll notice there are four words here with more or less the same meaning: power, working, might, and strength. Why is Paul heaping up these synonyms? Because he wants to underscore the exceeding greatness of God’s power, what the NIV rightly renders as “the immeasurable greatness of [God’s] power” (Ephesians 1:19).

To put it more casually, God’s power is really, really, really, really great. Did you catch that? God’s strength is mightily strong. God’s power exceeds our ability to grasp it, not to mention finding words to represent it. Yet, Paul’s prayer assumes that we can truly know God’s power. We can experience it, at least to an extent. We can understand it, in part. Thus, we join Paul in praying for the knowledge of God’s power as we grow to know God better.

I’ll have more to say about this in tomorrow’s Life for Leaders devotion. For now, let me encourage you to consider the following questions.

Banner image by Murat Onder on Unsplash.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the High Calling archive, hosted by the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: The True Source of Inner Power.

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