How to Pray When… We Are Weak
June 22, 2025
Preached by Ron Smith
Scripture Reading
Ephesians 3:14-21
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, 16 that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, 21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
All right, let’s shoot straight. If you are sitting in prison and are writing out a prayer, what is your number one prayer request? 1. PRAY THAT I GET OUT OF JAIL. That’s mine. Or, like Paul, if you are writing out your prayer for the church, what are you praying? Growth, people’s needs: jobs for those who need jobs, healing for those who need healing. Or maybe for God’s blessings in general. Even financial blessings.
Have you noticed that none of these things are in Paul’s prayer? Even though Paul is in prison as he writes this letter he does not even ask them to pray that he would be freed!
This prayer is perhaps the most well-known of Paul’s prayers. There is something about the language of it that is exhilarating. It is over-the-top language. “Riches of his glory… strengthened with power… know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.” But through the years, I have heard this prayer used wrongly.
The idea in those prayers is that God, who gives far more abundantly than all that I ask or think, will answer my prayer the way I have prayed it—and even do more than I’m asking. So, if I am asking for a new job, He is going to give me a new job at a higher position and a whole lot more money—and I can work fewer hours. But that’s not the gist of Paul’s prayer.
In his prayer, he asks for divine supernatural strength because the truth of the matter is that we are too weak to do what God has called us to do. We need his power. We need to know his love. We need to be filled with the fulness of God. That is what God gives in abundance—above all that we ask or think.
This morning let’s explore this prayer by answering two simple questions that I hope will change the way we pray: Why is Paul praying this prayer? What exactly is he praying? And, then we will wrap it all up.
1. Why is Paul praying this prayer?
Look with me again at verses 14 and 15 in chapter 3,
14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,
The phrase “for this reason” signals that Paul is about to pray—just as he did when he began his prayer back in chapter 1, as we saw last week. So the question here is: for what reason?
To figure it out, we have to go all the way back to chapter 2. There we see the glorious salvation that God has brought about through Jesus Christ. He points out that without Christ we were dead in our sins but by grace God made us alive. We gentiles were far away and alienated from God, but he brought us close in Christ. We have been brought into the household of God, we are children of God, and God is now our Father. And then he ends chapter 2 with these words, In him [Christ] you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
Did you catch that? Because of all that God has done for us in Christ, we are being built into the very dwelling place for God! The God who created all things, who sovereignly rules over all things, who is all powerful, all knowing, who is the judge of the earth, who is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, dwells in us.
This requires prayer! This process of being built into the very dwelling place of God requires prayer. We need to be strengthened with his power, we need strength to know the love of Christ, we need to be filled with the fulness of God. We need this prayer because as we go through life we need the implications of God dwelling in us to overflow to those around us, to give us direction, and to shape the way we see the world and interact with others.
We need this prayer.
I want you to think about the last prayer meeting you were part of. What were the things you prayed for? What were the request that others asked the group to pray for? What did you ask prayer for? Maybe it was for salvation for loved ones, healing, wise decision to be made, reconciliation where relationships have been broken, praying for the nations, peace in the world. * All of these things are not wrong. We should pray these things for one another.
But that’s not this prayer. I think we will see in this prayer that there is something deeper to pray that effects all those requests. So, let’s turn our attention now to what he prays. What are the prayer requests that Paul prays? We’ll spend the bulk of our time here.
2. What does Paul pray?
Let’s read verses 16-19 again.
that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Paul starts off telling us where the answers to his requests are going to come from. They come from the storehouse of God’s glory. God has inexhaustible resources to give us exactly what we need.
From God’s infinite resources, Paul prays that God would grant that we would be strengthened with power through the Spirit in the inner man (16). This power is foreign to us. It is something that is given to us. It is through the Spirit. It is a kind of power that only God possesses.
What we need is to be strengthened with God’s power in the inner being. We need that part of our life that controls our character, that prepares us for heaven to be strengthened.[1] We need the strength to keep going no matter what is happening to us. We need strength to trust God when we don’t know where the next paycheck is coming from. We need the power to forgive and not hold a grudge. Because real power is forgiving not getting even.
Then Paul adds to his prayer. He asked for power, now he is asking that God would grant that Christ would dwell in your hearts through faith (17a). Does this strike you as a bit odd? Wouldn’t we say that Christ dwells in every believer? Yes. He does. But I think what Paul is focusing on here is the renovating effect that Christ’s presence has in our life. He has moved in, and now he is remodeling. He is making it more and more his house, decorated and structured the way he wants.
If you have ever remodeled your house this make sense to you. When you move in you might make a few changes, but over time you do more and more remodeling and the home ends up reflecting who you are. That’s what Jesus is doing in us. Our response is faith in him to carry out his renovation project the best way he sees fit. To trust him completely.
So, he asks for us to be strengthened with power, he asks that Christ might dwell in our hearts, and now, we come to perhaps one of the more memorable parts of this prayer. The request to have strength to comprehend and know the unknowable love of Christ (17b-19a). To explore the width, the length, the depth, and the height of this vast inexhaustible love. It’s a complete and perfect love. Paul prays this because we are already rooted and grounded in love (17). Love is the fertile ground in which the Christian grows. Love is the foundation on which Christians build their life. And yet, when pondering the love of Christ, we realize that there is so much that we don’t know about it.
We need strength to comprehend and to know this love so that it can shape us, molds us, and help us to show the love of Christ to those around us.
And finally, Paul prays that we might be filled with the all the fulness of God (19b). Here we come full circle. Remember that he began this prayer by saying, “for this reason.” That reason was because we are being built into the dwelling place of God. In way, I think that this request to be filled with the fullness of God is the main request here. All the others tie into it. We know that we are filled with all the fullness of God when we are strengthened in the inner being, when we are undergoing the transformative process of Christ dwelling in our hearts, when we have the strength to comprehend and know the love of Christ.
But what does the fullness of God mean? It certainly at least means his presence. We are filled in such a way that we are marked by the very presence of God. It distinguishes us from the world. It marks us as belonging to him. His power is in us to give us all that we need to live according to his good design for our life.
The fullness of God also incorporates the blessings of God that are ours through Jesus. Paul listed these blessings in chapter 1 as he traced all the spiritual blessings we have. We have been chosen by him, adopted by him, redeemed through the blood of Christ, we have been forgiven, his grace has been lavishly poured out upon us, we have an inheritance having been sealed by the Holy Spirit.
The fullness of God also points us to spiritual maturity. As we mature in our walk with the Lord, we experience more and more of the fullness of God. Or as he says in chapter 4, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. Presence of God, blessings of God, maturity in Christ.
The fulness of God is not just a theological concept, head knowledge, but it is something that is experiential. This whole prayer is experiential. We need to be filled with the fullness of God when we go through life, in every situation we find ourselves in.
Because of this, this prayer comes at a pivotal point in the letter of Ephesians. It bridges the theological with the practical. In the first three chapters Paul lays out rich weighty theological truths. Then in the last three chapters he gets practical and shows us how that theology plays out in our everyday life.
So, this prayer is a prayer for us to have the strength to live out the theological truths he just expounded. Being filled with the fullness of God will have an impact on our daily life. For me this idea made a light bulb come on. Think about it. Being filled with the fullness of God impacts the way you treat others. It impacts the way you do your job. It impacts the way you think.
Just a quick scan of the practical things he says in the rest of the letter gives us insight into this:
Chapter 4
26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger,
Anyone mastered being angry without sinning? We need power in the inner man through the Spirit for that.
29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.
Anyone said some things they would rather not have said? We need the transformative work of Christ in our hearts to change the way we talk.
32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Isn’t that a nice verse? But what about when someone wrongs us? Do we have to be kind then? We need strength to comprehend and know the love of Christ so that we might show that to those around us.
Chapter 5
4 Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving.
12 For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret.
We need to be filled with the fullness of God instead of the filthiness of this world.
And then at the end of chapter 5 and beginning of chapter 6 Paul brings it to the home – to relationships within our own family. And we all know that sometimes those are the most difficult relationships. Husbands and wives are called to love one another, respect one another. Children are called to obey their parents. And parents aren’t always right. They don’t always treat their kids the way they should. So, Paul says to fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. Ok fine, but when that child is not obedient, does not honor you, things get difficult. We need the fullness of God in our families.
Being filled with the fullness of God will have an impact on our daily life. There are lots of thing I pray for, but the most important thing is that these truths in this prayer come to fruition in me and in the people I pray for. Being filled with the fullness of God does not guarantee healing, but it will affect the way you face sickness. It will affect the way you face broken relationships. When the God, who has forgiven you of so many wretched sins, lives in you, how can you not respond with forgiveness to those who have hurt you? Being filled with the presence of God should affect what we tolerate in our own lives that is nothing but spiritual junk – the racial jokes, the sexual jokes, the general dismissing of God’s standards because we are surrounded by a culture that makes light of them.
We need this prayer! We are too weak to live the way God wants us to live. We are weaker than what we want to recognize. We need strength. We need power that comes from the storehouses of God’s abundant grace and glory.
And the good news is we serve a God ready and willing to give us exactly what we need. Not just exactly, but far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.
Don’t hijack this prayer making it something that it is not meant to be. This is important. People leave the faith because their prayers are not answered. At least when they don’t receive the answers they want. Pray for healing, pray for restored relationships, for jobs, for hard choices that have to be made, all of that, but hold it with an open hand. More than those things, pray that the person will be strengthened in their inner being, that Christ would dwell in their heart through faith, that they would comprehend and know the love of Christ, and that they would be filled with all the fullness of God.
That is what Paul is praying in this prayer. Now, let’s wrap this all up.
In the 1990s there was an experiment done in Arizona called Biosphere 2. The goal was to create an enclosed ecosystem that would be self-staining so that we could learn what it would take to live in space. There were lots of reasons it did not go well, but one was because of the trees. The trees that were planted matured and grew well. But before they reached their full height, they fell over. And the reason they fell over was because there was no wind inside the dome. Trees need wind to strengthen. When they face adversity, they grow their roots deeper. The cellular structure of the wood changes to become stronger.
Relating this to us, when we face the hardships of life, we tend to pray that the Lord would take us out of the difficulty. But the Lord wants to do something in us. He wants to strengthen us. Give us his power. Renovate our hearts. Cause us to know more of his love. To fill us with his fullness. Let’s pray these things.
We see this kind of prayer modeled from Jesus himself. Just before he was crucified, Jesus went to the garden of Gethsemane to pray with his disciples. His prayer was that if it were possible the hour might pass from him. “Take me out of this difficult situation.” But he doesn’t stop there. He prayed, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” (Mark 14:35-36). Then he goes on to tell his disciples who had fallen asleep, Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak (14:38). May we follow Jesus’ example in praying this way, because in him where we find the strength we need.
[1] Carson. A Call to Spiritual Reformation. 185
Sermon Discussion Questions
If you would pray like Paul does in this prayer, how would your prayers change? Are there expectations about prayer that need to be changed? Are there requests that you should stop praying? Are there requests you need to tweak? Are there requests you need to add in light of this prayer?
How does being filled with the fullness of God impact your life? How does it impact the way you treat others? How does it impact the way you do your job? How does it impact the way you think?
If you were to pick just one of these requests to pray over the next week, which one would you pick and why?
Why do you think Paul prays that the Ephesians would know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge? How can we know something that is unknowable?
Why is it important to be strengthened in the inner being?