The Crescendo of Ephesians

Why Ephesians 3 is the summit of the first half, and what the mystery is for

Family Matters · Part 4 · Ephesians 1–3, and the pivot at 4:1

In 1949, on the Isle of Lewis off the coast of Scotland, two elderly sisters could no longer make it to church. Peggy Smith was eighty-four and blind. Her sister Christine was bent with arthritis. So they turned their cottage into a house of prayer, two members of one family, united before God twice a week, often into the night, pleading one promise: "I will pour water on him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground" (Isaiah 44:3). Across the parish, a handful of men began praying the same way in a barn. One night a young deacon read Psalm 24, "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? He who has clean hands and a pure heart," and the presence of God fell on that barn before it ever reached a pulpit.

You may remember what followed from last week. Services that ended but nobody went home. Crowds gathered outside a church at midnight, summoned by no one but God. Men struck with conviction at their looms and in the fields. And here is the detail I want you to notice this time: the lights. Witnesses described cottages lit up across the parish in the middle of the night, because inside them, ordinary households were praying. The revival didn't just fill a church building. It moved into the homes. Family worship that had gone cold was rekindled at kitchen tables all over the island. When Duncan Campbell called it "a community saturated with God," he was describing something that had happened house by house, family by family.

Two sisters united in prayer created a dwelling place, and God moved into a whole island's homes. So let me ask the question that this whole series has been climbing toward: when God comes, what is the experience of having him at the center of a home, a family, a people? What are we actually built to be filled with?

Ephesians has been answering that question for three chapters. And this week I want to show you something about how the book itself is built, because when you see the architecture, you'll see that everything we've studied so far has been climbing to one summit, and the summit is Ephesians 3.

Reading The Mountain Range

Over the past month we've walked through the first half of the letter. Week one: you belong to the Father, chosen and adopted (Ephesians 1). Week two: we belong to Jesus together, and Paul prays constantly that the eyes of our hearts would be flooded with light (Ephesians 1:17). Week three: we are his dwelling place, one new family being built into a home where God lives by his Spirit (Ephesians 2), with a first look into chapter 3.

Now stand back and look at the whole range. Students of Scripture who study books inductively, observing how a text is actually put together before interpreting it, look for structural signals: which words and phrases recur, where a book pivots, and where it crescendos to a climax, the way Exodus climbs for forty chapters until the glory of God fills the tabernacle in the final scene. Run those observations on Ephesians, and the letter opens up like a map.

The Trail Of "In Him"

Start with the phrase we traced in week one. In the first eleven verses of the letter alone, Paul locates everything inside Christ eight times:

• v. 1: faithful in Christ Jesus

• v. 3: blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing

• v. 4: he chose us in him before the foundation of the world

• v. 6: blessed us in the Beloved

• v. 7: In him we have redemption through his blood

• v. 9: his purpose, which he set forth in Christ

• v. 10: a plan to unite all things in him

• v. 11: In him we have obtained an inheritance

And the trail doesn't stop at verse 11. The whole structure is "joined together in him" and rises "in the Lord"; "in him you also are being built together" (2:21–22); "in whom we have boldness and access with confidence" (3:12). Every blessing, every stone, every prayer sits inside Christ. That's recurrence, and recurrence is an author telling you what the book is about. Nothing in this letter exists outside of him.

The Trail Of The Mystery

Now trace a second thread. The Greek word mysterion, a secret once hidden and now unveiled, appears six times in Ephesians: 1:9, 3:3, 3:4, 3:9, 5:32, and 6:19, with its companion language of "hidden" and "revealed" clustered around it (3:5, 3:9). Look at the distribution. The word appears once in chapter 1, almost in passing: "God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ" (1:9). Then it goes quiet through chapter 2. And then in chapter 3 it erupts: three occurrences plus the hidden-and-revealed language, half the letter's total, packed into thirteen verses. Chapter 3 is where the secret comes out.

And what is the secret? Paul says it plainly: "This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" (3:6, ESV). The nations have been joined with the Jews. The people who were far off and the people who were near have been reconciled into one body under Christ, one family, one dwelling place. The mystery hidden for ages in God, kept secret through every prior generation, is the very thing we studied in chapter 2: a multi-ethnic household where God himself lives by his Spirit. The wall is down. The family is one. God has moved in.

Two Prayers, One Frame

Here's the architecture that ties it together. The first half of Ephesians is framed by two prayers to the Father, and they function like bookends.

The first bookend is Ephesians 1:17. Before Paul has explained anything, he prays: "asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light..." In other words: Father, give them eyes, because what I am about to tell them cannot be grasped by the natural mind. He is praying in advance for revelation of the mystery he is about to unveil.

The second bookend is Ephesians 3:14, and watch how carefully Paul builds up to it. He actually begins the prayer at 3:1: "For this reason I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles..." and then he interrupts himself. For thirteen verses the prayer hangs suspended while he makes sure they understand what the reason is. He names the mystery specifically in 3:6: the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus. Then in 3:7–13 he tells them how much weight this mystery carries: he was made a servant of it by grace, commissioned to preach its unsearchable riches to the nations, and through this reconciled church the manifold wisdom of God is now being displayed to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places, which is why we have boldness and confident access, and why his sufferings for them are glory, not defeat. Only then, in 3:14, does he pick the sentence back up with the very same phrase: "For this reason I kneel before the Father."

So what is the reason Paul kneels? Because God has a plan to make the Gentiles heirs of all God's promises, together, in Christ Jesus. The mystery is not a footnote to the prayer. The mystery is the ground of the prayer. And notice the difference between the two bookend prayers. The first asks that we would understand. The second, kneeling on the finished revelation of the mystery, prays that we would be filled: strengthened in the inner being, Christ at home in our hearts, rooted and grounded in love, knowing the love that surpasses knowledge, "made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God" (3:19).

That's the progression of the entire first half. Understanding unto fullness. Revelation unto habitation. God doesn't unveil the mystery so that we can admire it. He unveils it so that the family the mystery created can be filled with the One who created it. Ephesians 3 tells us what the dwelling place is for.

The Doxology Test

How do you know you're standing on a book's summit? The author starts to sing. Ephesians 3 ends in a doxology: "Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen" (3:20–21). You don't break into "forever and ever, Amen" in the middle of an argument. A doxology is a summit marker, the same way Romans crests at the end of chapter 11: "Oh, the depth of the riches... to him be glory forever."

And watch the fullness thread climb to it. Chapter 1 ends with the church as Christ's body, "made full and complete by Christ, who fills all things everywhere with himself" (1:23). Chapter 3 ends with us "filled with all the fullness of God" (3:19). The letter has been ascending the whole time: from blessed, to chosen, to adopted, to made alive, to seated, to brought near, to built together, to filled. Every peak we've climbed in this series was a ridge on the way to this one. Which means we now know how to read everything that came before: adoption was never the end goal, and neither was information, and neither was even reconciliation. They were all unto something. God chose a family in order to build a house, and he built a house in order to fill it with himself.

The Crescendo Is Always Love

Now look even closer at the summit, because at the very top of the climax Paul does something he does everywhere: he crescendos to love. The center of the second prayer is not power for its own sake. It is that we, "together with all God's people," would grasp "how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is," and "experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully" (3:18–19). The fullness of God arrives through the knowledge of a love that outruns knowledge.

This is a pattern in Paul, and once you see it you can't unsee it. In 1 Corinthians, he spends chapter 12 teaching on spiritual gifts, and just when the Corinthians are ready to rank themselves by them, he interrupts: "And now I will show you a way of life that is best of all" (12:31), and delivers the love chapter: tongues without love are noise, prophecy and knowledge without love are nothing, and when everything else passes away, "the greatest of these is love" (13:13). Then 14:1 resumes: "Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts." Love is the summit between the gift chapters. He does it in Romans, where the ethical section crests at "love fulfills the requirements of God's law" (13:10). He does it in Colossians: "Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony" (3:14). He does it in Galatians: "What is important is faith expressing itself in love" (5:6).

And he does it across all of Ephesians. The letter begins "in love he predestined us" (1:4–5). Its first-half climax is rooted-and-grounded, four-dimensional love (3:17–19). Its second half walks it out: "speaking the truth in love... the body builds itself up in love" (4:15–16), "walk in love, as Christ loved us" (5:1–2), husbands loving as Christ loved the church (5:25). And the letter's very last sentence is a blessing on "all who love our Lord Jesus Christ" (6:24). Paul crescendos to love because God's fullness is love at full strength. A dwelling place of God will always be, at its center, a family that loves.

The pivot at 4:1

One more structural observation, and it changes how you read the rest of the book. Immediately after the doxology, the letter turns on a hinge: "Therefore I, a prisoner for serving the Lord, beg you to walk worthy of the calling you have received" (4:1). This is the moment of cruciality, the pivot of the entire letter, and you can measure it in the verbs.

Before 4:1, the verbs belong to God: he blessed, he chose, he predestined, he adopted, he redeemed, he made known, he made us alive, he raised us, he seated us, he created us, he brought us near, he made us one, he is building us together, he strengthens us, he fills us. We are grammatically on the receiving end of the entire first half. After 4:1, the verbs become ours: walk, be humble, bear with one another, keep the unity, speak the truth in love, put off, put on, be kind, forgive, imitate, give thanks, submit, love, honor, be strong, stand, pray. The first half is what God has done. The second half is how we respond. And the order is everything: God never asks for the verbs of chapters 4 through 6 from people who haven't received the verbs of chapters 1 through 3. The walk flows out of the fullness, never in place of it.

Filled to fill

Now lift your eyes to the widest frame, because Paul hides the endgame in plain sight back in chapter 1: God's plan for the fullness of time is "to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (1:10, ESV). And in chapter 4 he says Christ ascended "that he might fill all things" (4:10, ESV). Hold those together with everything we've seen and the story becomes breathtaking. God created us to fill us and to unite us, as a preview of the day when he will fill and unite all creation through Christ at his return and the consummation of the eternal age. The church, this reconciled, multi-ethnic, love-saturated family, is the first room of a renovated cosmos. What God is doing in your household of faith now is a rehearsal of what he will do with heaven and earth then. When your family gathers and his presence fills the room, you are getting a taste of the end of the story.

Which brings us back to a cottage on the Isle of Lewis. Two sisters, one family, united in prayer, and God filled their home, and then their island. That's not just a revival story. That's Ephesians 1 through 3 happening in miniature: a family, indwelt, filled, and overflowing. And the question for us is the one the whole first half of the letter presses on us: will we let him fill what he has built? When God is at the center of a home, his presence shepherds and leads, provides and guides. Anxiety meets peace, and hard seasons are faced side by side in his presence. The atmosphere itself changes, because the home has become what homes were always meant to be: a small sanctuary in a world he intends to fill completely.

The call

Pray the bookends. This week, pray Ephesians 1:17 and Ephesians 3:14–19 as one prayer in two movements: Father, flood our hearts with light to see the mystery, and fill us with all your fullness. Pray it over your home by name.

Read the first half in one sitting. Ephesians 1–3 takes about twelve minutes aloud. Read it as a single ascent and stop at the doxology. Let the architecture preach to you.

Crescendo to love. Whatever God is teaching you right now, in your marriage, your parenting, your group, let it resolve where Paul always resolves: a concrete act of love this week toward someone in the family of God.

Live on the right side of the pivot. Walk worthy, not to earn the first three chapters, but because they are already true. The verbs of response only work in people who keep receiving the verbs of grace.

God has created us to fill us, and to unite us, until the day he fills and unites all things. The mystery is out. The house is built.

Let it be filled.