The
Strengthening of the Inner Person
Ephesians
3:14-21
I
have long thought that the least accurate way of finding out what a
person believes is to ask him what he believes.
As soon as we ask someone what he believes, he’s suspicious –
and rightly so. He wonders
immediately why we are asking the question, where we are coming from,
where we are going, what we plan to do with his reply.
We find out what a person really believes
when we overhear her, when she doesn’t think that anyone’s
listening, when she isn’t concerned to impress people.
We find out most accurately what someone believes, I’m certain,
if we overhear her praying. This
is the acid test: what we really believe about God (as opposed to what
we say we believe), what we believe about the Gospel, about life –
it’s all indicated about what we pray for; and not only what
we pray for, but also how
we pray for it.
Throughout Scripture we are privileged to
overhear people praying: Moses, David, Isaiah, Jesus, Stephen, Peter,
Paul. In the passage from
the Ephesian letter that forms the text of today’s sermon, we can
overhear Paul praying: not only what he prays for, but how he prays for
it.
In Ephesians 3 Paul reminds his readers
that concerning them (they are, after all, dear to him) he “bows the
knee”. Contrary to what we
modern types may think, to “bow the knee” doesn’t mean to get down
on one’s knees to pray, perhaps like a child saying “Now I lay me
down to sleep”. To “bow
the knees”, rather, is a Hebrew expression meaning “to collapse”:
to stumble, fall down, crumple. In
modern English we say that someone’s knees buckled.
Jewish people don’t kneel to pray: they stand.
(If you go to a synagogue today you will find Jewish worshipers
standing to pray.) In Luke
18 Jesus utters the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.
The parable begins this way: “Two men went to the temple to
pray…one standing here, the other standing there….”
Jews stand to pray.
Then why does Paul (a Jew) “bow the
knee”? We should recall
our Lord Jesus in the
Garden
of
Gethsemane
on the eve of his crucifixion wherein he would bear in himself the
Father’s just judgement on the sin of the whole world.
We are told that Jesus “knelt” to pray.
He didn’t calmly kneel down beside that flat-topped rock we see
in so many church pictures. The
Greek text uses a verb tense that indicates our Lord’s knees buckled;
he collapsed, got to his feet again and took a few steps, staggered once
more and collapsed as his knees “bowed” and buckled beneath him
repeatedly – all the while with perspiration running down his face,
Luke tells us, as though blood were pouring out of a forehead gash.
“Bow the knee” is an expression Jewish people used of that
pray-er who was preoccupied, intense, passionately concerned, in the
grip of something crucially important and therefore unmindful of all
else.
Paul is this concerned about the
congregation in
Ephesus
. He’s pleading for them.
He isn’t tossing off a pretty prayer before he hops into bed
and falls asleep. He’s
urgent, instant, constant, about something.
What
is it? What’s he so very
passionate about? He wants
the Christians in
Ephesus
to be strengthened in their “inner being”, their “inner man”
(woman). He wants them to be
fortified against the attacks, the difficulties, the disappointments and
dangers that life hurls at them. He
wants them to be fortified against the propaganda of a world that sneers
at truth and sets clever falsehood in its place. He
doesn’t tell them to strengthen themselves.
Regardless of how strong they might be in themselves (or might
not be), he insists they need an infusion of strength from outside
themselves, specifically from the Lord whose people they claim to be.
He prays ardently that Jesus Christ, the true man, new man, will
reside in them and preside in them so very thoroughly that his presence
within them will be their strength, and they will know it.
[1]
The apostle is so
very concerned about the strengthening of the inner person, in the first
place, because he knows that life has to be faced, ultimately, by the
individual and her Lord. On
the one hand, no one wants to minimize the comfort we receive from those
who gather around us and support us when upheavals come upon us.
Few things are worse than being abandoned just when we need
others as we have never needed them before.
On the other hand, however much our friends may sustain us (and
they do), all of us are aware that there is a dimension to us, an
innermost crevace, to which no one else has access.
There remains an innermost recess in all of us that not even the
best friend or the most loving spouse can penetrate.
It’s for this reason, I’m convinced,
that so many people feel awkward at funeral parlours.
They know that their concern at the time of the bereaved
person’s loss, and their support in the months afterward, however
genuine and generous, finally gets so far and no farther.
They know that their care and concern, genuinely helpful, can’t
ultimately access the innermost recesses of the person most recently
afflicted.
If they can’t access that person’s
innermost heart, then who can? One
alone can; namely, the one who said, “Abide in me and I shall keep on
abiding in you.” He alone
can “abide” in us. The
evening the widow goes to bed by herself, for the first time in decades,
her family is startled at their inability to reach someone who seems so
very close to them yet is ultimately out of reach.
The most effective thing any of us will be able to do at that
time is pray, even pray with bowed knee, that Jesus Christ will
strengthen her “inner being” as he dwells even deeper in her – to
use Paul’s language.
All of life is like this, not merely
bereavement situations. Parents
whose children are about to leave adolescence for adulthood are aware
that soon these young adults will strike out on their own.
Parents will be powerless. Weren’t
they powerless (or largely powerless) when their offspring were
adolescents? Yes.
But the move out of the adolescent world into the adult world
amplifies the realization that while our love for someone never stops
short of that person, our access to that person does.
Then we can only pray for the strengthening of the inner being,
the inner man or woman.
All of us need such strengthening.
Life is ceaseless stress. We
are released from our employment. We
fall ill. We are rebuffed.
We disappoint ourselves. Every
day brings a surprise, something that we haven’t been able to
anticipate and therefore that we haven’t been able to prepare
ourselves for. It comes upon
us without warning and moves on quickly.
We are left with the after-effects, as unable to understand it
all as we are unable to shed the after-effects.
There are many things we can do next, but most aren’t helpful.
We should always remember that we are spiritually most vulnerable
when we are emotionally most wounded.
It’s little wonder that the apostle prays ardently for the
strengthening of the inner being of those dear to him in
Ephesus
.
[2]
Yet the apostle has
more in mind. He contrasts
the inner man, the true man, the new man, with the old man, the old
woman. The new man is who we
are in view of Christ’s coming to us and taking us into his own life.
The Gospel-promises insist that all who keep company with Jesus
Christ are given a new nature, a new name, a new future.
The new man or woman is the creature God intended from the start,
unmarred by sin and corruption and self contradiction.
The new man or woman is the creature in whom God’s image shines
forth, the image no longer marred or obscured or defaced. This is who we
are as men and women “in Christ”.
But this isn’t all that we are, for the
old man, the old woman, the creature defaced by sin and difficult to
live with; this is still with us. To
be sure, the old being doesn’t determine our ultimate identity: Christ
does this. Still, the old being clings; it lingers.
And it is loathsome.
In the
Roman Empire
of antiquity, Roman authorities displayed limitless imagination and
cruelty in punishing law-breakers. One
of the most hideous punishments was that of strapping a corpse to the
back of a law-breaker. The
criminal had to carry it around for a day or two or three as a judge
decided. The corpse was
heavy. It was awkward.
It inhibited movement. It
always interfered with what the person was supposed to be doing.
Worst of all, it was revolting: it stank, it leaked.
It was hugely repulsive to the person who had to carry it,
repulsive as well to those who witnessed it.
In the 7th chapter of his letter
to the Christians in
Rome
, Paul glories in the new life that arises in God’s people as they
live in the company of Jesus Christ.
Then with shocking abruptness he deplores the life of the old
man, the old woman, the creature of sin that all believers have
repudiated – he deplores this as he cries, “O wretched man that I
am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”
On the one had he knows and glories in and is ceaselessly
grateful for the gift of new life at Christ’s hand.
On the other hand he’s only too aware that the old man slain at
the cross and therefore dead; this corpse is strapped to his back, and
it isn’t pretty.
Luther, with his customary earthiness, says
that you and I are new creatures in Christ to be sure, but the old
man/woman won’t die quietly. The
corpse still twitches, says Luther.
We know what he means.
While we are indeed new beings in Christ, the old being appears
stuck to us. It’s heavy;
it’s awkward; it interferes with the Kingdom-work we’re commissioned
to do. And it is repugnant.
How repugnant? If I
used the language right now that Luther used, you’d throw me out.
If ever we think Luther exaggerates, however, we need only ask
those who work with us or live with us.
To be sure, they may love us; just as surely they are burdened
with us precisely where we are most loathsome.
Temptation never ceases to pound on our
door. Sometimes we open the
door a crack “just to get a better look at it”, only to find that we
can’t get the door shut again. Eventually
we are startled, then staggered, and finally sick at heart to realize
that we could hate someone so intensely that seeing him undergo
adversity would make our day. Until
we did it we never thought we could wait, patiently, for three months,
to level someone in a public meeting – and the more people there were
to witness it, the merrier we felt.
Have you ever noticed that we don’t envy what strangers have;
we don’t envy what the super-rich have?
We envy what our very best friends or family members have.
We begin making tangential comments, snide remarks,
passive-aggressive remarks whose poison tips we both relish and deny at
the same time. Before long
another relationship has gone down, and we still manage to blame the
party we have slain.
You must have noticed
how much better most of us can cope with emergencies, major upheavals of
all sorts than we can cope with minor irritations and frustrations
wherein we appear childish, petulant, spiteful, rude.
While there are relatively few major upheavals in life, however,
there are countless minor vexations, cumulative vexations, and therefore
the people whose lives cross ours most frequently find the body of death
on our backs distressing to them and repugnant as well.
Yet
we mustn’t stop here, for in Romans 7, as soon as Paul cries out
“Who will deliver me from this body of death?” he exclaims “Thanks
be to God through our Lord Jesus Christ”.
There is deliverance.
Not instantaneous, not without a measure of pain on our part as
lingering depravity is burned out of us, not without the occasional
lapse whenever we become complacent; still, he who is our inner man and
who is ever strengthening us; he is at work within us to free us from
that burden we know to be oppressive and loathsome.
When Paul prays for the strengthening of
the inner man he’s praying the Lord will magnify, expand, his
redemptive work in us so that we whom he has declared new may become new
in fact. In his letter to
the Christians in
Philippi
, Paul reminds the people there that the one who has begun a good work
in them will unfailingly go on to complete it.
In a word, the apostle is praying that the Ephesian Christians
will find themselves increasingly conformed to Jesus Christ as the body
of death drops away from them.
[3]
The apostle has one
more thing in mind: he contrasts the inner man, the new man, not only
with the old man; he also contrasts the inner man with the outer man.
The inner person is who we are, who we are in ourselves because
first of who we are in Christ. The
outer person is what we are deemed to be by the 101 grids or diagnostic
tools or measuring rods by which we are measured.
We are all measured by our monetary net worth, by our level of
formal education, by our political affiliations, by our social
sophistication (so-called), by our physical beauty (or ugliness), by the
labels that adorn the clothes we wear, by the smoothness with which we
can handle ourselves at cocktail parties and assorted social events, by
the whiteness of our teeth and the non-whiteness of our hair, even by
and our sense of humour. (People with a cutting, sarcastic sense of
humour, I have found, are deemed to more clever, more “with it”, in
greater demand, than those with a gentle, non-victimising, sense of
humour.) We may be deemed to
be “cool”. (“Cool”
has a specific meaning in our informal understanding.)
We may also be deemed to be “hot”.
And because of the informal meanings of “cool” and “hot”,
we can be cool and hot at the same time.
It’s as if so many points, one to five, are awarded in each
category, the accumulation of points determining our place on the social
scale. By means of the
social scale we are regarded as “losers” or perchance “winners”
or, more likely, something in between.
Our place on the grid determines whether we are to be flattered
or forgotten. Yet Christians
know that our place on the social scale is a matter of utter
arbitrariness. If the grid
by which we are assessed is changed, our place on the scale changes.
Furthermore, the social grid deployed today wasn’t used
yesterday, and another grid will replace it next decade.
Then who are we?
Who was the apostle Paul? He
tells us that when he went to
Corinth
he was laughed at because of his speech impediment and his scrawny
physique. He replied to the Corinthians, “I am what I am by the grace
of God.” (1st Cor. 15:10)
And what was that? To
the Christians in Colosse he wrote, “Our real life is hid with Christ
in God.” In other words,
who we are is determined by Christ’s possession of us.
This is known only to God; it is known to us insofar as God
reflects it back to us. But
make no mistake: it’s real.
It’s real beyond the
unreality of the “outer person”.
Paul prays for the strengthening of the
inner person because he knows that if we become preoccupied with the
outer person, we shall deny our fellowship with Christ; we’ll forfeit
our integrity; we’ll conform ourselves to social expectation and sell
ourselves.
Are we afraid of looking like losers?
Tell me: did our Lord look like a winner when he was executed
with criminals at the city garbage dump?
In the company of Jesus Christ there are neither winners nor
losers, neither weak nor strong, neither successes nor failures, neither
the flatterable nor the forgettable.
There are simply children of God whom Jesus their elder brother
cherishes. His grip on them
makes them who they are, determines a truth about them that no social
arbitrariness can undo. In
view of the fact that it can’t be undone before God, we shouldn’t
act as if we can undo it before ourselves or before the world.
As our inner person is strengthened, the truth and reality of who
we are in Christ sinks deeper into us and increasingly characterizes our
thinking, our doing, our aspirations.
“Bow
the knees.” It doesn’t
mean to kneel down. It means
that some pray-er is pleading for fellow-Christians with an intensity,
an urgency, a persistence that we find startling.
Specifically, Paul is pleading for the
strengthening of the inner being of the Christians in
Ephesus
. He’s aware of the
downward pull of the old man/woman; he knows the preoccupation with the
outer man/woman.
But he knows too, as he concludes his prayer, of “the power at
work within us that is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or
think”. Then by God’s
grace may you and I ever want for ourselves what the apostle wants for
us, and may we want it with an intensity, an urgency and a persistence
no less than his.
Victor
Shepherd
September 2005
