Eyes of the Heart Enlightened

Scripture: Ephesians 1:15–23

Read Ephesians 1:15–23 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

…since the eyes of your heart have been enlightened—so that you can know what is the hope of his calling, what is the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the incomparable greatness of his power toward us who believe…

(Ephesians 1:18–19a)

From Eulogy to Prayer

The eulogy is over. Paul has finished his blessing of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit for everything God has accomplished for the saints in Christ. He now turns from blessing God to praying for the saints. The transition is immediate. “For this reason,” Paul begins (1:15), tying the prayer directly to the blessing he has just spoken, and the prayer, like the eulogy, runs in Greek as one long sentence. The same flow of thought continues. Having spoken about what the saints have, Paul now prays that the saints may know what they have.

This is the order of all sound Christian devotion. We do not begin by knowing. We begin with what God has done. The knowing follows. Even the saints in Ephesus, who already had received the gospel and been sealed by the Spirit, needed Paul to pray that they would understand what had happened to them. This is not because they were unusually slow. It is because the things God has done for the saints are larger than any saint’s grasp of them. Salvation comprehends us. We do not comprehend it. The knowing is the labor of a lifetime, and the Spirit must be the one who teaches us.

So Paul prays. And the prayer he prays here in chapter one is the first of two prayers in the letter. The second comes in chapter three. Together they bracket the doctrinal portion of the letter, from chapter one to chapter three. They are not interruptions in the argument; they are the argument’s living center. Paul does not write theology so that the saints may have correct ideas. He writes theology so that the saints may pray, and live, and stand. The prayers are where the argument turns Godward.

Watch what Paul prays for here, and watch what he does not pray for. He does not pray for relief from his chains. He does not pray for the Ephesians’ material prosperity, or for a quiet life, or for any of the things that are not wrong but that are not what the apostle has on his heart. He prays that they may know what God has given them. The blessings he announced in the eulogy are real, but the saints will not be able to live in them unless they can see them. Paul asks for the Spirit’s gifts of wisdom and revelation, so that they may see.

Paul’s Thanksgiving

Before Paul prays for the Ephesians, he gives thanks for them. The pattern is consistent across his letters. The Romans, the Corinthians, the Philippians, the Colossians, the Thessalonians: Paul opens nearly every letter with thanksgiving. He has learned to thank God for the people he is writing to before he asks God for anything on their behalf. This is more than a rhetorical convention. It is a discipline of the soul. Thanksgiving keeps prayer honest. Without it, prayer can drift into a list of complaints: about the saints’ failures, about the world’s hostility, about the apostle’s own circumstances. With thanksgiving, prayer stays anchored in what God has already done.

What does Paul give thanks for? Two things: their faith in the Lord Jesus and their love for all the saints. He has not seen the Ephesians for some time. He is in prison in Rome, and they are far away. But word has reached him. Their faith is being heard about. Their love is visible. The two go together (faith in Christ and love for the saints), and Paul will return to this pairing throughout the letter. Where there is real faith in Christ, there will be real love for the saints. Where there is real love for the saints, it will turn out to have been planted by faith in Christ. Faith is the root, love is the fruit, and both are gifts.

This is worth lingering on for a moment. Paul does not give thanks for Ephesus’s programs or its strength of numbers or its growth metrics. He gives thanks for the things that the Spirit produces and that no congregation can produce on its own: faith in Christ and love for the saints. The Christian life has not changed in this regard. What is worth giving thanks for in any congregation today is what was worth giving thanks for in Ephesus then. The signs of the Spirit’s work are still faith and love, and Paul’s prayer will assume that whatever else is given to the Ephesians, what they most need is more of these.

A Spirit of Wisdom and of Revelation

Paul’s prayer begins with an address. He prays to “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father” (Ephesians 1:17). The first half of that title echoes the eulogy’s opening (1:3). The second half is new. In Greek it reads, literally, the Father of glory; the NET renders it “the glorious Father.” The title names God by the splendor of His own being and by His relation to the glory He has shown in His Son. This is to whom Paul prays. Nothing less than the God of glory is in view, and Paul does not approach Him with anything less than full awareness of who He is.

What does Paul ask this Father to give? The NET renders it “spiritual wisdom and revelation in your growing knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17). The Greek is, more literally, a spirit of wisdom and revelation. Some translations capitalize the word Spirit and read this as a request for the Holy Spirit Himself. Others, like the NET, read it as a request for a spiritual gift of wisdom and revelation. The two readings are not finally far apart. The wisdom and revelation Paul is asking for can come only from the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit Himself is the giver of every gift named in the Christian life. Whether we read the word with a capital or a lowercase letter, what Paul is asking for is the Spirit’s work in the believer’s life.

And what is that work? It is the work of opening the believer’s eyes. The phrase Paul uses is striking. The eyes are not the eyes of the body but the eyes of the heart. The biblical heart (kardia in Greek) is not merely the seat of the emotions, as it tends to be in modern English. It is the center of the person, the place where the will and the mind and the affections together do their work. The heart is where one knows. The heart is where one decides. The heart is where one loves. To have the eyes of the heart enlightened is to have the whole person illumined: the will to choose, the mind to understand, the affections to love what is good.

Here the translations part ways in a small but instructive detail. Paul’s Greek uses a perfect participle, pephōtismenous, “having been enlightened.” Some translations fold it into the petition, as if Paul were asking that their eyes be enlightened. The NET reads it as something already true of them: “since the eyes of your heart have been enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18). On that reading, Paul prays for wisdom and knowledge precisely because the Spirit has already opened their eyes through the gospel, and eyes that have been opened can be given to see more. Either way, the enlightening is not the saints’ achievement. It is the Spirit’s gift, begun when they were called by the gospel and continued as He teaches them to see what they have been given.

This is what the Christian needs above all else. Not more information. Not more excitement. Not more strategies for living. The Christian needs the eyes of the heart enlightened, so that what God has revealed in His Word can be seen for what it is. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted on this. We do not come to faith by our own reason or strength; the Holy Spirit calls us by the Gospel and enlightens us with His gifts. Anyone who has prayed Luther’s explanation of the Third Article of the Creed in the Small Catechism will recognize the language: that no Christian comes to Jesus Christ by his own reason or strength, but the Holy Spirit calls him by the Gospel, enlightens him with His gifts, sanctifies and keeps him in the true faith. What Luther confessed in the Small Catechism is what Paul prays here in Ephesians 1: that the Father may give, and the Spirit may enlighten, and the saints may see.

The connection between Paul and Luther on this point is no accident. Luther read his Bible carefully, and he learned to confess what Paul confessed. The Christian’s knowing of God is not the Christian’s achievement. It is the Spirit’s gift. The prayer Paul prays here (that God may give wisdom and revelation to those whose hearts the Spirit has enlightened) is the prayer the Church has always needed, because the gifts of the gospel are larger than any of us can see without help.

Three Things to Know

The Spirit’s enlightening is not aimless. Paul names three things he wants the Ephesians to know. They are arranged in a progression: looking forward, looking inward, looking upward. They are the three things every Christian needs to see clearly, and none of them can be seen without the help of the Spirit whose gifts Paul has just asked for.

The first is “the hope of his calling” (Ephesians 1:18), the hope to which God has called the saints. The calling is the Spirit’s work: the same calling Luther names in the Small Catechism, the calling by the Gospel that brings the sinner to Christ. The hope is what that calling points toward. It is the future the Christian is moving into: the resurrection of the body, the new heavens and the new earth, the heading up of all things in Christ that the eulogy has just described. Paul wants the Ephesians to know what is coming. Christians who do not know what is coming will not be steady when the present makes them anxious. Hope is not optimism. It is the confident expectation, given by the Spirit, of what God has already promised to do.

The second is “the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints” (Ephesians 1:18). The eulogy has already touched on this: in Christ the saints have been claimed as God’s own possession (1:11), and the Spirit is the down payment of their inheritance (1:14). Paul now prays that they may know its wealth. The phrase can be read in two ways, and both readings have weight. It may mean the inheritance God gives, which the saints share together. Or, as the NET’s wording suggests and as verse 11 has already hinted, it may mean God’s own inheritance, which is the saints themselves, the people He has taken as His treasured portion. The inheritance is God’s: He has given it; it remains His to give, and His people are His own. And the inheritance is the saints’: they have received it; it is theirs to live in. The saints in Ephesus, surrounded by a city that valued the wealth of Artemis and the prestige of Caesar, needed to know that the wealth they themselves had been given was incomparable. So do we. Christians who do not know the wealth of their inheritance will be tempted to live as the spiritual poor, scrabbling for what God has already lavished upon them.

The third is “the incomparable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Ephesians 1:19). The Greek word the NET renders incomparable, hyperballon, means surpassing, beyond measure, beyond what can be reckoned. The power Paul is naming is not a finite power that God has, more or less, allocated to the saints. It is power without measure. And the direction of the power is toward the believers themselves: pointed at the saints, working in their direction, given to them as their portion of what God is presently doing in the world. Christians who do not know the incomparable greatness of God’s power will live as if their faith depended on their own strength.

Three things, then. Hope to know what is coming. Wealth to know what has been given. Power to know what is at work. Each of them is a gift. Each of them is to be received by faith. Each of them requires the Spirit’s enlightening of the heart’s eyes if the saint is going to see it for what it is. And each of them is what Paul wanted the saints in Ephesus (and wants the saints today) to be confident in.

The Working of His Great Might

Paul has named God’s power. He now shows the saints what that power has done.

He does not point to creation. He does not point to the splitting of the Red Sea, or the conquest of Canaan, or the return from exile, or any of the wonders of the Old Testament. He points to one event: the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus Christ. This is the demonstration of God’s power for the new covenant people. This is what God has done that displays His might. The saints in Ephesus, when they ask what God can do, are pointed first to Easter morning and then to the ascension that followed.

Look at the verbs. God raised Christ from the dead. God seated Him at His right hand. The two verbs go together. The resurrection without the ascension is incomplete. Christ is not merely alive again; He is enthroned. The empty tomb is followed by the heavenly throne, and the heavenly throne is the consequence of the empty tomb. The same God who reversed the verdict of death has placed the risen Christ at the position of supreme authority in the universe. This is “the exercise of his immense strength” (Ephesians 1:19). This is what He has done.

And the location of the throne is named. Christ is seated at God’s right hand “in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:20). The phrase recalls the eulogy: every spiritual blessing has been given to the saints in the heavenly realms (1:3). The same realm where the saints have been blessed is the realm where Christ is now enthroned. Where Christ reigns, there the saints already have their standing in Him. The Lutheran tradition has confessed this for centuries. The Augsburg Confession’s Article III, on the Son of God, names this seating directly: Christ ascended into heaven that He might sit on the right hand of the Father, and forever reign and have dominion over all creatures. Paul is teaching the doctrine here, and the Confession is following the apostle.

Then Paul lists what Christ is enthroned above: “every rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:21). The list is comprehensive. Paul is not naming a sequence of human offices: kings and senators and governors and magistrates. He is naming the powers, including the spiritual powers, that contest the gospel’s advance. The same letter that will end with the armor of God against the spiritual forces of evil (6:10–20) here begins by announcing that Christ has already been exalted above all of them. The battle that the Christian fights is not a battle for ground that has not yet been taken. It is a battle to live in territory that has already been conquered. Christ is above all of it. Whatever names the spiritual powers may give themselves, in this age or in the age to come, none of them is named at a level above Christ.

Notice the breadth of the claim. Paul is not speaking only of the present age but of the age to come. He is not making a temporary statement. The exaltation of Christ is not a present arrangement that may need renegotiation when the age changes. It is permanent. The Christ who is enthroned now will be enthroned in the new creation. The same Lord who is above every power now will be above every power then. The saints who are in Christ now belong to a Lord whose reign will never be renegotiated. The continuity is total.

Head Over All Things to the Church

The prayer-and-confession reaches its climax in two verses that contain more than most chapters of most letters can hold. Paul moves quickly here, but every phrase repays slow reading.

First, Paul says that “God put all things under Christ’s feet” (Ephesians 1:22). He is drawing on Psalm 8, the psalm that asks of what importance the human race is, that God should notice them, and answers that God has crowned mankind with honor and majesty and “placed everything under their authority” (Psalm 8:6). Paul’s wording follows the Greek of that verse, which speaks of all things placed under his feet. Paul reads the psalm as fulfilled in Christ. The dominion that was given to the first man, lost in the fall, and only partially exercised in the kingdoms of this world, has now been given without remainder to the second Adam. All things are under the feet of the risen and ascended Christ. The phrase is a picture, but it is no mere figure of speech. It is the language of conquest, of sovereignty, of supreme rule. Whatever exists, exists under His feet.

Second, Paul says God “gave him to the church as head over all things” (Ephesians 1:22). Here is one of the densest phrases in Paul. God has given Christ (given Him as a gift) to be head over all things, and the recipient of this gift is the Church. The grammar is striking. Christ is not merely the Church’s Lord, though He is. Christ is the universe’s Lord, given to the Church. The Church does not own a private Christ who has authority only inside her walls. The Church confesses a universal Christ whose authority over everything has been given for her benefit. This changes how the Church understands her place in the world. She is not a small interest group whose Lord is concerned only with religious matters. She is the people whose Lord is the Lord of all things, given to her, for her sake.

Third, Paul names the Church as Christ’s body: “Now the church is his body” (Ephesians 1:23). This is the first time the image appears in the letter, and it will return later. The image is intimate. The Church is not Christ’s organization. She is His body. Christ does not relate to her as a manager relates to a company; He relates to her as a head relates to its own flesh. He is in her; she is in Him. To touch the Church is to touch Christ, which is what He told Saul on the road to Damascus, the same Saul who is now writing this letter as Paul. The lesson has not been forgotten.

Fourth and last, Paul calls the Church “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23). The last phrase of the chapter is the most contested in the prayer, and it is also the most theologically rich. The word translated fullness is plērōma, a term Paul will use elsewhere in the letter and that Colossians will press even further. The Church is Christ’s plērōma. What does this mean?

Some have read the phrase to mean that the Church completes Christ, that He is somehow incomplete without her. If that means Christ lacks something in Himself without the Church, it cannot stand. Christ is the fullness of God; He needs nothing from the Church to be who He is. No reading that makes Christ dependent on the Church for His own fullness can be right. Christ does not need the Church to be Christ.

The better reading takes the phrase passively. The Church is the place where Christ’s fullness is poured out, where His presence is exhibited, where what He is in Himself is made manifest in the world. The Church is filled by Him. She is not His source; she is His vessel. And His filling reaches everywhere: He fills all in all. The same Christ who fills the Church fills everything that exists. Yet He does not give Himself to us in grace everywhere alike. He has bound Himself to be found for us in His Word and Sacraments, and there He gathers and fills His Church. The Church is the place where the One who is everywhere makes Himself known and gives Himself as Savior.

This is the Augsburg Confession’s doctrine of the Church in compressed form. The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered (the Augsburg Confession, Article VII). The Church is not defined by an institution or a hierarchy or a tradition. She is defined by the presence of Christ given to her in the means of grace. Where the Word is preached and the Sacraments are administered, there is the Church, because there is the Christ who fills her with His own fullness. The body of the cosmic Christ is the communion of those who truly believe. In this life that body is hidden within the outward assembly, where hypocrites may be mixed in among the saints (the Augsburg Confession, Article VIII); but it is never found apart from the gathering around Word and Sacrament. The Church’s Sunday gathering around Word and Sacrament is the place where His fullness becomes audible and visible to a watching world.

This is where the prayer ends. Paul has prayed that the Ephesians may know the hope, the inheritance, and the power. He has shown them the power in the resurrection and exaltation of Christ. And he has gathered them, as the Church, into the body of the Christ whose authority they confess. Where the prayer started (with the gift of wisdom and revelation that only the Spirit gives) is where the prayer must end, because seeing what Paul has just announced is itself the work of the Spirit. The saints in Ephesus, hearing this read aloud, would have known themselves to be the people Paul was describing. So are we. So we read.

For Discussion

1. Paul gives thanks for the Ephesians’ faith in Christ and love for the saints. What might it mean for your congregation to be known by these two things? What gets in the way of being known by these two things?

2. Paul prays for wisdom and revelation for those whose eyes of the heart have been enlightened. The biblical heart includes the will, the mind, and the affections. Where in your own life would you most want the Spirit to give you sight, and what do you suspect you cannot yet see?

3. The three things Paul wants the Ephesians to know are hope, inheritance, and power: looking forward, looking inward, looking upward. Which of the three do you find easiest to live in? Which is hardest? What would change if all three were equally clear?

4. Paul points to the resurrection and ascension of Christ as the demonstration of God’s power. How does it change your prayers, your worries, your reading of the news, to remember that Christ is presently enthroned above every authority that exists?

5. God gave Christ to the Church as head over all things. The Church does not own a private Christ; she confesses a universal one given to her. How does this reshape the way you think about your own congregation in its city or town?

6. The Church is called Christ’s fullness: not as one who completes Him but as one who is filled by Him. How does this change the way you understand what the Church is doing when she gathers? What is happening in her on a Sunday morning that is not visible by ordinary measures?

Closing Prayer

Father of glory, You raised our Lord Jesus from the dead and seated Him at Your right hand in the heavenly realms, far above every power that is named in this age and in the one to come. Send Your Spirit to give us wisdom and revelation. Enlighten the eyes of our hearts. Let us see the hope of Your calling, the wealth of Your glorious inheritance in the saints, and the incomparable greatness of Your power toward us who believe. Hold us in the body of Your Son. Fill us with His fullness. And let our faith and our love be such that, by Your mercy, others may give thanks to You for us, as Paul gave thanks to You for the saints in Ephesus. In Jesus Christ our Lord, whom You gave to the Church as head over all things. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we come to the Lutheran heart of the letter, Ephesians 2:1–10. Paul has spent chapter one looking up: the eternal counsel of God, the cosmic exaltation of Christ. He now looks down. The saints to whom God has given every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms were, in their natural condition, dead in their offenses and sins, living according to this world’s present path, children of wrath. The diagnosis is total. And then comes one of the most celebrated transitions in all of Paul’s writing: the two-word pivot But God, and the gospel comes flooding in. From the depth of human ruin to the height of God’s mercy in two small words. Out of that mercy come the sentences that the Reformation pressed back into the Church’s hearing: that the saints are saved by grace, through faith, as a pure gift, not from works, so that no one can boast. This is sola gratia and sola fide in the apostle’s own words. We will read it slowly and at length, with the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article IV, as a faithful guide.

Before next session, read Ephesians 2:1–10 at least twice. Read once for sense, taking in the full sweep of the passage. Read it a second time looking for two pivots: the But God of verse 4, and the For by grace of verse 8. Notice what is being said before each pivot, and what is being said after. Notice also that the passage closes with works (the good works God prepared beforehand so that the saints can do them, v.10) and that Paul’s denial of works as the cause of salvation is not a denial of works as the fruit of it. We will sit with this distinction at length.