In Tight Spaces

I mentioned before that these two verses, Ephesians 3:20–21, are what’s known as a doxology. If you attend a more traditional church, you may sing the “Doxology” as part of your worship service sometimes: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow . . .” You know the one? Doxologies, for us, whenever they occur, usually happen in our Sunday best. With the organ playing. With the choir singing. With the oven timer or the crock pot clicking on at home.

But Paul wasn’t sitting in church or the synagogue when he filled the page with these words of uncontainable praise. Nope, he penned these words of worship while sitting on the cold-floor, cold-food, maddening reality of Roman confinement. House arrest. Guards at the door, preventing his escape. When he wrote this glorious sentence, he was under a sentence himself, probably for as much as two years. Locked up. Locked down. Imprisoned. For serving God.

That’s why Ephesians is one of four New Testament letters that have been called “prison epistles.” The same words that still inspire us today in our living rooms and classrooms and in comfortable chairs at the kitchen table were actually composed from the cruel confines of jail time.

So this is not just a doxology.
It’s a prison doxology.
Wrap your head around that for a moment.

Don’t equate this grand phrase of Scripture with a coat and tie, a lady’s dress hat, a gleaming church building, and a well-fed preacher. No, these were not easy words for Paul to write or say. They represented something he couldn’t see with his eyes in the darkness of his current, personal condition, where loneliness cried out and the walls closed in, accentuating the stark restraints of his reality. His now was bleak and dismal. And yet somehow a doxology bubbled up within his spirit until, unable to be contained, it burst forth onto parchment paper. Paul experienced and exclaimed the ability of God amid his limited mobility, the greatness of God amid his tightly trapped existence, the awesome presence of God amid his frustrating lack of freedom.

What kind of believer do you have to be to voice a doxology from within a tight space and a tense situation you really, really want to get out of?

The kind who knows that timing is everything. The kind who draws the connection between their current circumstances and the power of God, the way Paul chose to do it. The kind who leaves the mountain of crisis long enough to cross the sturdy bridge of faith that leads directly to God’s ability. The kind who knows that if God has allowed it now, He must have plans to display His glory now. The kind of man or woman who knows that right now is the time God can act on their behalf.

The same kind that you have the potential to be—right now, by the power of the Holy Spirit—even in your impossible circumstance.