'That ye may know ... what is the exceeding greatness of His power
to usward who believe, according to the working of His mighty
power, which He wrought in Christ.'--Eph. i. 19, 20.
'The riches of the glory of the inheritance' will sometimes quench
rather than stimulate hope. He can have little depth of religion who has
not often felt that the transcendent glory of that promised future
sharpens the doubt--'and can _I_ ever hope to reach it?' Our paths are
strewn with battlefields where we were defeated; how should we expect
the victor's wreath? And so Paul does not think that he has asked all
which his friends in Ephesus need when he has asked that they may know
the hope and the inheritance. There is something more wanted, something
more even for our knowledge of these, and that is the knowledge of the
power which alone can fulfil the hope and bring the inheritance. His
language swells and peals and becomes exuberant and noble with his
theme. He catches fire, as it were, as he thinks about this power that
worketh in us. It is 'exceeding.' Exceeding what? He does not tell us,
but other words in this letter, in the other great prayer which it
contains, may help us to supply the missing words. He speaks of the
'love of Christ which passeth knowledge,' and of God being 'able to do
exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.' The power
which is really at work in Christian men to-day is in its nature
properly transcendent and immeasurable, and passes thought and desire
and knowledge.
And yet it has a measure. 'According to the working of the strength of
the might which He wrought in Christ.' Is that heaping together of
synonyms or all but synonyms, mere tautology? Surely not. Commentators
tell us that they can distinguish differences of meaning between the
words, in that the first of them is the more active and outward, and the
last of them is the more inward. And so they liken them to fruit and
branch and root; but we need simply say that the gathering together of
words so nearly co-extensive in their meaning is witness to the effort
to condense the infinite within the bounds of human tongue, to speak the
unspeakable; and that these reiterated expressions, like the blows of
the billows that succeed one another on the beach, are hints of the
force of the infinite ocean that lies behind.
And then the Apostle, when he has once come in sight of his risen Lord,
as is his wont, is swept away by the ardour of his faith and the
clearness of his vision, and breaks from his purpose in order to dilate
on the glories of his King. We do not need to follow him into that. I
limit myself now to the words which I have read as my text, with only
such reference to the magnificent passage which succeeds as may be
necessary for the exposition of this.
I. So, then, I ask you to look, first, at the measure and example of the
immeasurable power that works in Christian men.
'According to the working of the strength of the might which He wrought
in Christ'--the Resurrection, the Ascension, the session at the right
hand of God, the rule over all creatures, and the exaltation above all
things on earth or in the heavens--these are the facts which the Apostle
brings before us as the pattern-works, the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the
power that is operating in all Christians. The present glories of the
ascended Christ are glories possessed by a Man, and, that being so, they
are available as evidences and measures of the power which works in
believing souls. In them we see the possibilities of humanity, the ideal
for man which God had when He created and breathed His blessing upon
him. It is one of ourselves who has strength enough to bear the burden
of the glory, one of ourselves who can stand within the blaze of
encircling and indwelling Divinity and be unconsumed. The possibilities
of human nature are manifest there. If we want to know what the Divine
Power can make of us, let us turn to look with the eye of faith upon
what it has made of Jesus Christ.
But such a thought, glorious as it is, still leaves room for doubt as to
my personal attainment of such an ideal. Possibility is much, but we
need solid certainty. And we find it in the truth that the bond between
Christ and those who truly love and trust Him is such as that the
possibility must become a reality and be consolidated into a certainty.
The Vine and its branches, their Head and the members, the Christ and
His Church, are knit together by such closeness of union as that
wheresoever and whatsoever the one is, there and that must the others
also be. Therefore, when doubts and fears, and consciousness of our own
weakness, creep across us, and all our hopes are dimmed, as some star in
the heavens is, when a light mist floats between us and it, let us turn
away to Him our brother, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, and
think that He, in His calm exaltation and regal authority and infinite
blessedness, is not only the pattern of what humanity may be, but the
pledge of what His Church must be. 'Where I am, there shall also My
servant be.' 'The glory that Thou gavest Me I have given them.'
Nor is that all. Not only a possibility and a certainty for the future
are for us the measure of the power that worketh in us, but as this same
letter teaches us, we have, as Christians, a present scale by which we
may estimate the greatness of the power. For in the next chapter, after
that glorious burst as to the dignity of his Lord, which we have not the
heart to call a digression, the Apostle, recurring to the theme of my
text, goes on to say, 'And you hath He quickened,' and then, catching it
up again a verse or two afterwards, he reiterates, clause by clause,
what had been done on Jesus as having been done on us Christians. If
that Divine Spirit raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own
right hand in the heavenly places, it is as true that the same power
hath 'raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places
in Christ Jesus.' And so not only the far-off, though real and
brilliant, and eye and heart-filling glories of the ascended Christ give
us the measure of the power, but also the limited experience of the
present Christian life, the fact of the resurrection from the true
death, the death of sin, the fact of union with Jesus Christ so real and
close as that they who truly experience it do live, as far as the roots
of their lives and the scope and the aim of them are concerned, 'in the
heavens,' and 'sit with Him in heavenly places'--these things afford us
the measure of the power that worketh in us.
Then, because a Man is King of kings and Lord of lords; and because He
who is our Life 'is exalted high above all principalities and powers';
and because from His throne He has quickened us from the death of sin,
and has drawn us so near to Himself that if we are His we truly live
beside Him, even whilst we stumble here in the darkness, we may know the
exceeding greatness of His power, according to the working of the
strength of the might which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him from
the dead.