Three Important Words

Some things are just hard to describe. You search your brain for the right word, but you can’t seem to find it.

Like trying to explain the view of a cloud-filled sky from an airplane window seat at 36,000 feet. Or an unusually moving worship service where God’s presence was particularly near and tangible. Sometimes even our most spectacular vernacular still seems insufficient to communicate what we really want to share.

Perhaps none of the apostle Paul’s New Testament works gives us a better example of this feeling than his letter to the Ephesians—what some scholars consider to be the pinnacle of all his writings.

In each chapter you’ll find an author who, under the sacred inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is grasping and lunging for just the right words for portraying the greatness and grandeur of God, the vast scope of His wondrous acts, the hugeness of His love, and the wealth of our inheritance in Christ.

In the first three chapters of the book, he takes us to heavenly places that stretch far above all rule and authority and power and dominion. He travels back in time before the foundation of the world, then zooms us forward to a future so rich with eternal purpose, it comes complete with an inheritance reserved under our name and with all things in subjection under [Jesus’] feet.

This apostle, who’d met Jesus in a bright and blinding light while on a journey to Damascus (Acts 9:3–5), awakens us from being dead in our sins—strangers, separate, excluded, aliens—to being made alive together with Christ, having the grace of God lavished on us for no other reason than the kind intention of His will. He tells us of a divine love that not only runs the breadth and length and height and depth of our wild- est imagination but actually makes it possible for us to be filled up to all the fullness of God—right here in these tired ol’ bodies of ours.

That’s some extravagant language to describe God’s extravagant power and love.

Then he prays some extravagant prayers for his readers— for us—praying that our hearts would be thoroughly enlightened, that we would somehow grasp the riches of God’s mercy and the grand hope of His calling, that we would see everything that’s been made available to us in Christ, everything we’ve been given access to experience.

But he’s just warming up.

Because right there in the middle of this stunning recounting of God’s glory and grace, Paul hits us with one sentence so powerful, it is almost too much to bear: chapter 3, verses 20 and 21:

Now to Him who is able to do exceeding abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.

These two verses are a doxology. A majestic declaration of praise to God. An outpouring of divine honor. Sort of a gushing burst of worship that puts an exclamation point (or two, or three) at the end of all these breathtaking insights Paul’s been sharing in the first portion of the book.

It’s a crescendo. Crashing cymbals. The big moment.The cherry on top.

Join me as we explore the first phrase of this beautiful doxology together. In this five-day devotional, I pray you’ll discover anew God’s colossal comfort contained in three important words, and you’ll be solidly encouraged for days and weeks to come.