Lessons.—1. If we estimate the dignity of men from the families with which they are connected, how honourable is the believer! 2. We see our obligations to mutual condescension, peaceableness, and love. 3. Let those who are not of this family be solicitous to obtain a place in it.—Lathrop.
Vers. 16–19. Paul’s Prayer for the Ephesians.
I. For spiritual strength.—It was not bodily strength, civil power, or worldly distinction; it was the grace of fortitude and patience.
II. For an indwelling Christ.—As we become united to Christ by faith, so by faith He dwells in our hearts.
III. For establishment in love.—True love is rooted in the heart. It is a spiritual affection towards Christ. Its fruits are love to men, imitation of Christ’s example, obedience to His commands, zeal for His honour, and diligence in His service.
IV. For increase of knowledge in the love of Christ.—The love of Christ passeth all known examples of love. This love passeth our comprehension in respect of its breadth or extent, its length, its depth, as the benefits it has procured exceed all human estimate. Though the love of Christ passeth knowledge, there is a sense in which it is known to the saints. They have an experimental knowledge, an influential knowledge, an assimilating knowledge of the love of Christ.
V. For the fulness of God.—That they may have such a supply of Divine influence as would cause them to abound in knowledge, faith, love, and all virtues and good works.—Lathrop.
Ver. 19. The Love of Christ.
I. The love of Christ passeth knowledge.—1. He Himself furnishes an illustrative instance when Paul says, “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die”—a merely just and righteous man would be admired; but he would not so take hold of the heart of another to produce a willingness to die for him;—“yet peradventure,” in some rare case, “for a good man,” a man of benevolence, adorned with the softer virtues and abounding in the distribution of his favours—for such a one “some might even dare to die”; some one, overcoming even the love of life in the fulness of his gratitude, might venture to give his own life to preserve that of such a one. But we were neither just nor good; we were sinners, and “God commendeth His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.” Passes it not, then, all knowledge, all reasonable conception and probability, that this fallen nature should be so sympathised with that these flagrant rebellions should excite, not an inexorable anger, but pity and love? And such love that our Saviour—looking not so much on man as offending, but as His creature, and as His creature still capable of restoration—should melt in compassion and die to effect his redemption; this is indeed love “that passeth knowledge.”
2. The manner in which this love is manifested carries the principle beyond all conception and expression.—It was love to the death. It was death for sinners, death in their stead; death, that the penal claims of law, and that law the unchangeable, unrelaxable law of God, might be fully satisfied. The redemption price was fixed by a spotless justice, and the love of Christ to the sinner was to be tested by the vastness of the claims to be made upon Him. But the wages of sin is death; and His love shrank not from the full and awful satisfaction required. It was death in our stead. Then it must be attended with anxious forebodings. Of what mysteries have I suggested the recollection to you? Can you comprehend them? That feeling with which He spoke of the baptism of blood? That last mysterious agony? That complaint of being forsaken of God? You feel you cannot. They transcend all your thought; and the love which made Him stoop to them is therefore love “which passeth knowledge.”