More Than We Ask

You have prayed prayers you no longer remember. You bowed your head, laid your burden out, and somewhere along the way the answer came, or it did not, or it came in a shape you did not recognize until years later. The prayer was forgotten. Life kept moving.

There are other prayers on your mind right now. Ones you have been praying for a long time. A child. A marriage. A health issue. A door you keep knocking on. You have been specific. You have named the thing. The answer has not come the way you asked.

Paul ends his prayer for the Ephesians with a doxology, a sudden burst of praise. He has just asked that the saints there be strengthened in the inner man, that Christ would dwell in their hearts, that they would comprehend the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge. Lavish requests. Before the prayer can even settle, he breaks into worship, because the God he is praying to is not a small God.

That is the God Paul knew. That is the God this church has served for thirty years. The doxology Paul wrote from a Roman prison still rings true over every congregation that has trusted Christ in every century since.

The God Who Exceeds Us

Paul stacks language on top of language because no single phrase will hold what he is trying to say. Able to do. Not able to consider. Not able to wish. Able to do. Capability and action together. God is not a sympathetic bystander to our prayers. He is the One who acts on them.

Then come the intensifiers. “Far more abundantly beyond.” The Greek behind that phrase is a triple compound, what one scholar called a Pauline coinage, a word the apostle had to invent to get at the largeness of God. Paul is straining language to its breaking point. Beyond. Beyond beyond. Beyond beyond beyond.

The measure of that beyond is “all that we ask or understand.” The Legacy Standard rightly reads understand, not think. The King James gives us think, and that is a fair rendering, but the LSB sharpens the edge. The measure takes in the prayers we pray and everything we are capable of comprehending. God exceeds our requests. He exceeds our categories. He outruns our imagination.

Then comes the metric. “According to the power that works within us.” The God who exceeds our asking does so according to a specific standard, and that standard is not effort or worthiness. It is the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who indwells every believer. The measure of God’s exceeding is the measure of His own Spirit at work in the church.

A child asks his father for a glass of water. The father pours the glass, then sits down and tells the child where the water came from, the well dug a hundred years ago, the river that feeds the well, the rain that fills the river, the sea that holds the rain. The child asked for a glass. The father gave the glass, and gave the world that made the glass possible. God hears the prayer, and He hears it from the throne of all things.

We come to God thinking we know the question. Sometimes we are bold enough to think we know the answer. In reality, we do not even know the right question to ask. He knows the inside and the outside, and He has the right answer prepared.

A prayer prayed five years ago, ten, twenty, is rarely answered the way the petitioner expected. Sometimes it was answered straight. Sometimes sideways. Sometimes the answer was no, and the no turned out to be a mercy not understood at the time.

Thirty years ago a small group of believers in this part of Georgia bowed their heads and prayed for God to bless a work. They asked for a church. Three decades have followed. Preaching. Conversions. Saints walking into eternity with Christ’s name on their lips. Children raised under the Word. The gospel sent out from this body to places the founders never set foot in. They asked for a church. God gave a generation of saints.

There are saints in this congregation who have walked through this past year with prayers that have not been answered the way they wanted. Doors locked when they wanted them open. A dispute they wanted resolved months ago. A friend they thought would stand with them who did not. God’s power is not measured by the speed of the answer or the shape of the answer. It is measured by His own Spirit at work in His people. He is doing more than we see. He always has been.

We used to call ours a microwave society. It is worse now. Fiber-optic internet and AI have piled on top of it. We ask for something, we want it now, and most of the time we get it. We are spoiled rotten. But God is never late. Ephesians 3:20 still applies to the believer who has been praying the same prayer for a week, a year, or five years. Keep praying.

The Glory He Receives in the Church

Paul moves from God’s capability to God’s glory, the weightiness of God, His visible worth, the gravity of who He is. He asks that this glory be given to God in a specific place. “In the church and in Christ Jesus.”

The phrase has been misread, and the misreadings have made the church more than it should be. The text does not say to the church but in the church. The church is not the recipient of glory but the venue, the room where the glory is on display. Christ Jesus is the first and forever location of the Father’s glory. The church is the second, and only because she is joined to Him.

A clarification is in order. Every believer ought to be baptized and joined to one of the Lord’s churches. That is the plain teaching of the New Testament, and we hold to it without apology. The warning in this text is not against church membership. It is against putting the church on a higher pedestal than the Scripture allows. The church is the venue of the glory, not the source of it.

Why does Paul pair these two? Because the church without Christ is nothing. Strip Christ out of any congregation and what remains is a social club with religious vocabulary. Christ is the head, the foundation, the cornerstone. The glory of God shines in Christ Jesus first. Then, through Christ Jesus, it shines in His church. The order matters. The pairing is permanent. The one cannot stand without the other.

Consider a stained-glass window on a Sunday morning. Light passes through it, and the window glows. Reds, blues, golds, the whole image lit from within. The window did not make the light. The light does not need the window to exist. But the window was made for this, made to be a place where the light is seen. That is what the church is. Believers do not make the glory. The glory does not need them. God in His pleasure has chosen the church as the window through which His glory in Christ shines into the world.

That is why the saints gather. Not because any local church has the corner market on the truth, but because the God who exceeds our asking has chosen this particular gathering, this particular preaching, this particular communion as a venue for His glory in Christ. When the saints sing, His glory is on display. When the Word is opened, His glory is on display. When the saints pray, His glory is on display. When believers love one another through hard things, His glory is on display.

We have been reminded of that this year. Wherever the saints of Sovereign Grace gather under the preached Word, the glory of God in Christ Jesus is in the room, whether the meeting is in a church building, a living room, or a park. That is comfort and calling. Comfort, because no lock can shut down what God has chosen to put on display. Calling, because the believer who walks into the gathering is walking into a venue of divine glory.

Hard times are easy times to give up. But the doxology does not stop with one generation. Paul will not let the prayer end there. He reaches forward.

The Generations That Carry It Forward

Two phrases close the doxology. “To all generations,” and then, as if that were not enough, “forever and ever.” Paul is reaching for words that can hold the sweep of what he is praying. He starts with the temporal sweep, every generation of believers, in every place, until the Lord returns. Then he reaches past time itself. “Forever and ever.” The literal Greek reads, unto all the generations of the age of the ages. He has stretched language across history, and then he stretches it past history into eternity. The glory of God in the church does not stop when the last generation is done. It is not buried in the cemetery or filed away in photo albums. It carries into the eternal state.

Then one word. Amen. We say it casually. Paul does not. Amen is not a closing. It is a covenantal seal. Truly. So be it. The whole prayer presses on this one word at the end, and that word locks the doxology shut. God will be glorified in His church forever. Amen.

There are hymns in our book written hundreds of years ago by men who died in counties none of us has ever visited. They sang those hymns in their own churches, their children sang them after them, the saints in their towns sang them after the children, and on the line goes, generation to generation, voice to voice, until the songs land in our hymnal and the saints sing them on Sunday mornings in Brunswick, Georgia, in 2026. The voices change. The praise does not stop. That is verse 21 written on a thousand-year scale. Looking back is easier than looking forward, but the doxology demands both.

For this church, thirty years is not the end. Thirty years is a chapter. We have buried saints, and we will bury more. We have baptized children, and God willing, we will baptize more. If the Lord wills it, someone none of us has met yet will sit in this congregation in 2056. They will sing the same psalms. They will hear the same gospel from the same Bible. They will eat the same bread and drink the same cup at the same Table. They will know nothing of the trial we are walking through in 2026, because by the time they sit down it will be a paragraph in a history they did not live.

Our calling is not to maintain a building or to protect the legacy of any one pastor. It is to hand off faithfully what was handed to us. The doctrine. The Word. The fellowship. The gospel. We are not building a monument to ourselves. We are passing a torch.

Someone may ask thirty years from now who pastored Sovereign Grace in 2026 and have to dig through records to find the name. That is fine. The truth needs to survive. The church needs to survive. That is what matters.

For the individual believer, faithfulness this week is not a small thing. The God who exceeds asking, the God who is glorified in the church across every generation, is at work in obedience right now. The way a parent raises a child. The way a brother serves the body. The way a saint gives. The way a believer sits under the Word. He is using these things. He is glorifying Himself through them. If all someone can give to the Lord’s work this week is ten dollars, it helps. Whether anyone sees it or not, the praise carries forward.

A Word to the Soul Outside of Christ

The question this text presses on every soul is the question of verse 20. God works “according to the power that works within us.” Within us. Within the believer. If you are not in Christ, that power is not at work in you. The doxology is not yours. The glory in the church is not yours.

That is the hard truth. The gospel is this. The same God who exceeds asking has done more for sinners than they ever knew to ask. He sent His Son into a world that was not asking for Him. He paid a debt you did not know you owed. He offers a salvation you could not earn. The cross of Christ is the proof that God does far more abundantly beyond what we ask. You asked for nothing. He gave His Son.

If you have never trusted Christ, come to Him. Lay down your sin. Trust His finished work, His death in your place, His resurrection that vindicates the whole thing. We serve a risen Savior. Believe Him. The power that works within us will work within you. The doxology becomes yours. The generations forever and ever become yours.