The Eyes of Your Understanding

For nine years Funke paid rent on a two-bedroom flat in Surulere. Some years were easier than others. There were seasons when the landlord’s knock on the door made her stomach tighten, when she borrowed from friends to keep a roof over her children, when she wondered whether she would ever own anything. Her father had died when she was in her twenties. He was a quiet man who never spoke much about his affairs.

Then her uncle fell ill, and while the family was sorting through his papers, someone found a brown envelope with Funke’s name written on it in her father’s handwriting. Inside was the title document to a plot of land in Ibadan with a small house on it. Her father had bought it in her name more than fifteen years earlier. It had been hers the entire time she was struggling to pay rent.

Think about that for a moment. Nothing about the property changed on the day she opened the envelope. The land had been in her name all along. What changed was her knowledge of it. She had been living as a tenant while holding the title of an owner.

Have you ever read a familiar passage of Scripture and suddenly realised that you had been looking at the words for years without seeing what they carried? The passage did not change. Something in your understanding did. That moment is a small taste of what Paul prays for in one of the richest prayers in the Bible.

A believer may possess something in Christ and remain poorly acquainted with it. We can speak about redemption while living with the assumptions of slavery. We can call God our Father and still approach Him as though we were unwanted visitors. Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1:15-23 addresses exactly that gap, the distance between what belongs to us in Christ and what we have actually understood.

A prayer for people who already have everything

Punchline

The first thing to notice is who Paul is praying for. He has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus and their love toward all the saints. These are not unbelievers. They are not even struggling believers. They are healthy, faithful Christians whose reputation for faith and love has travelled far enough for an apostle in prison to hear about it.

And look at what Paul has just finished saying about them. The chapter opens with a burst of praise:

All spiritual blessings. Chosen before the foundation of the world. Predestinated unto the adoption of children. Accepted in the Beloved. Redeemed through His blood. Forgiven according to the riches of His grace. A few verses later Paul adds that they have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the earnest of their inheritance (Ephesians 1:13-14). The word earnest is the deposit you pay to guarantee that the full amount will follow.

So here is a church that has everything. Then Paul says, in effect, “And because you have all this, I keep praying for you.” He does not ask God to bless them again. He does not ask the Father to repeat what Christ has already done. He asks that they would see it.

This tells us something important about the Christian life. Our great need is rarely more blessing. It is more sight. God is not holding back what Christ purchased. He has blessed us with all spiritual blessings. The difference between a defeated believer and a victorious one is very often the difference between Funke before the envelope and Funke after it.

There is a lesson here, too, for how we pray for one another. Most of us know how to pray about a bill, a journey or an illness, and we should. Those needs are real, and God cares about them. But how often do we pray that a brother will understand his standing in Christ, or that a sister will come to know the Father more deeply? A person can have one urgent problem solved and remain deeply unsettled, because the root of their anxiety was never the problem. It was what they did not yet know about God.

Notice also that Paul begins with thanksgiving. He gives thanks for what God has already done in them before he describes the growth still needed. A teacher who sees only what is missing in people will train them to overlook grace already at work in their lives. We can celebrate genuine faith and still help that faith mature. Both are an act of love.

Nugget

Our great need is rarely more blessing. It is more sight. God has already blessed us with all spiritual blessings in Christ.

The Spirit of wisdom and revelation

Paul addresses his prayer to “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,” and he asks that the Father would give them “the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17). Bible teachers discuss whether Paul means the Holy Spirit directly or a spiritual disposition that the Spirit produces. Either way, the request is for God-given understanding that leads to knowing God. The Spirit who sealed these believers is not absent from the process. He is the One who opens their eyes.

We need to be careful with the word revelation, because it has been badly misused. In Paul’s mind, revelation is not permission to invent new doctrine. He is writing an apostolic letter that already announces God’s purpose in Christ. In Ephesians 3 he explains that the mystery made known to him concerns the inclusion of the Gentiles as fellow heirs in Christ through the gospel. That mystery has now been written down for the whole church to read. Paul’s readers are being brought into God’s revealed purpose. They are not being invited into a competition for secret information unavailable in Scripture.

Some of us have been around ministries where every service brings a new “revelation” that nobody can find in the Bible, and where the people who receive the most revelations seem to be beyond correction. That is not what Paul is praying for. The revelation he wants for the Ephesians is the illumination of what God has already said. It is the moment when the words on the page become living truth in the heart. You read Romans 8:1 for the hundredth time and suddenly you know that there is no condemnation for you. The verse did not change. The light came on.

Wisdom works alongside revelation. Revelation shows you what is true. Wisdom shows you how that truth applies to your life. A person may correctly recite a verse about forgiveness and still nurse revenge for months. That person has information without wisdom. James tells us that if any of us lacks wisdom, we should ask God, who gives liberally and does not scold us for asking (James 1:5). A few verses later he warns against being hearers of the word who never become doers (James 1:22). Wisdom is truth walking around in shoes.

So pray this prayer with an open Bible and a teachable heart. Read the passage patiently. Ask what the writer is actually saying. Notice how it connects with the verses around it. Where something remains difficult, ask for help and keep learning. Dependence on the Spirit never excuses careless reading. It makes us humble readers who expect God to speak through what He has written.

The eyes of your heart

Paul’s phrase in verse 18 is beautiful: “The eyes of your understanding being enlightened.” Many translations render it “the eyes of your heart.” In biblical language, the heart is not just the seat of emotions. It is the inward person, the centre of thought, desire, will and response. Paul uses the picture of sight to describe a kind of perception. God enables His people to see the significance of what He has done.

There is a wonderful story in 2 Kings that shows what this looks like. The king of Syria was furious with the prophet Elisha, and he sent a great army by night to surround the town of Dothan where Elisha was staying. Early the next morning Elisha’s servant stepped outside and saw horses and chariots everywhere. He ran back in, terrified.

Elisha did not pray for an army to come. The army was already there. He prayed that his servant’s eyes would be opened. The mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire before the young man saw them, and it would have been full of them if he had never seen them at all. But seeing changed everything for him. His fear dissolved. The circumstances outside the house had not changed. Syria’s army was still there. What changed was his perception of who stood with him.

That is the eyes of the heart being enlightened. It is not an instruction to expect visible lights, pictures behind closed eyelids or unusual sensations in the body. God may do unusual things, but we must never make such experiences the measure of enlightenment. Most often, the opening of the eyes is quiet. A person comes to understand a passage, and it slowly reshapes years of fearful thinking. The fruit is steady trust more often than excitement.

Let me tell you about a woman I will call Ruth. She had served in her church for many years: choir, ushering, children’s church, every vigil. She was the person you called when something needed doing. Underneath all that service was an assumption she had never examined. She believed God valued her because she was useful.

Then she became ill, and for several months she could not serve at all. She felt spiritually disposable, like a worker who had been laid off. In that season she began to study Ephesians 1 slowly, and the word adoption stopped her. She had been adopted as a child of God before the foundation of the world. She had been accepted in the Beloved. Her service was precious to God, but the Father had not taken her in as a temporary employee.

Understanding did not remove her illness overnight. It did something just as important. It changed the meaning she attached to her interrupted service. She stopped asking, “What use am I now?” and began to rest as a daughter in her Father’s house. When she was well again and returned to serving, she said it felt completely different. She was serving from love, where before she had been serving to stay loved.

We should welcome testimonies like Ruth’s. We should also test the content of any claimed insight. Does it agree with Scripture? Does it exalt Christ? Does it produce humility and love? An insight that makes someone unteachable has already given us reason for concern. Genuine light from God makes people more like Jesus, and Jesus was meek and lowly in heart.

Paul now names three things he wants them to see. Each one deserves our attention.

The hope of His calling

The first is “the hope of his calling.” Biblical hope is not wishful thinking. When we say in everyday speech, “I hope it does not rain,” we mean we are uncertain. When the Bible speaks of hope, it means confident expectation grounded in God’s promise. It is certainty about the future that has not yet arrived.

Paul has already pointed toward that future. The Holy Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance “until the redemption of the purchased possession” (Ephesians 1:14). Later in the letter he speaks of “one hope of your calling” (Ephesians 4:4). God has called His people into His saving purpose in Christ, and that purpose is heading somewhere: the resurrection of the body, the renewal of all things, and the day when we see Him as He is.

We must be careful not to shrink this hope down to the size of our personal ambitions. In some circles, “the hope of His calling” has been turned into a message about discovering your career, your ministry office or your personal dream. Those questions may have a legitimate place in our lives, and God does care about the details of your work. But Paul’s concern here is far bigger. He wants believers to grasp that they belong to God’s eternal purpose, and that their future is secured in Christ.

Why does this matter so much? Because hope changes how we endure the present. Paul tells the Romans that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us (Romans 8:18). He does not deny the sufferings. He weighs them against what is coming, and the scales are not even close.

Think of a believer standing at the graveside of someone they love. The gospel does not ask that person to pretend death is painless. Paul writes to the Thessalonians “that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Paul does not forbid sorrow. He forbids a particular kind of sorrow, the grief of people who have no hope. We grieve, and we grieve with a horizon. We mourn knowing that Jesus died and rose again, and that those who sleep in Him will rise.

When the eyes of your heart are opened to the hope of His calling, you begin to resist the claim that the present moment is the final verdict on your life. A difficult season may call for practical changes and honest lament. It cannot cancel God’s promise concerning those who are in Christ. This is how believers through the centuries have remained faithful in prisons, in poverty and in persecution when there was no immediate reward in sight. They saw something the world could not see.

The riches of His inheritance in the saints

Punchline

The second thing Paul wants them to see is “the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.” Read that carefully. Paul does not say your inheritance. He says His inheritance, and he locates it in the saints.

The phrase has been understood in two ways. Many careful readers take it to mean that God’s inheritance consists of His people. We are His treasured possession. Others connect it with the inheritance God gives among His people. The wider chapter holds both truths together: God possesses a redeemed people, and those people receive an inheritance in Christ (Ephesians 1:11, 14). Whichever emphasis you favour, we must not force this verse to carry a financial promise it does not make.

Let me dwell for a moment on the first meaning, because it is deeply moving. God looks at the church and sees His inheritance. Moses told Israel, “For the LORD’S portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his inheritance” (Deuteronomy 32:9). Peter writes that believers are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people, a people for God’s own possession (1 Peter 2:9). The value of the redeemed community is not measured by its wealth, its influence or its buildings. It is measured by the price God paid for it.

Notice the plural. Paul says the saints. He is teaching us to see the people of God together. Some believers seem to think that spiritual maturity means needing other Christians less. Paul thinks the opposite. A believer who claims great revelation while despising other members of Christ’s body has missed the whole setting of this prayer. The person whose background you dismiss, whose accent you mock or whose church you look down on may be one whom Christ has redeemed and joined to you. They are part of God’s inheritance.

This should change how we do church. We do not use people as disposable labour for a programme and then discard them when they burn out. We correct wrongdoing without treating the offender as worthless. We recognise gifts without turning gifted people into superior beings. God’s people deserve careful handling because they belong to Him, and every leader will answer to Him for how that care was given.

The exceeding greatness of His power

The third request is the one that makes Paul’s language almost overflow. He wants them to know “the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe.” Then he tells us how to measure it:

How great is God’s power toward you? Paul gives the measuring rod: it is the same power God worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places. Death had claimed the body of Jesus. Every power of darkness had done its worst. The stone was sealed and the guards were posted. Then God acted, and death could not hold Him.

That resurrection power did not stop at the empty tomb. It carried Christ up “far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named.” Every authority in this age and the age to come is beneath His feet. And God gave Him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body.

Paul continues the thought straight into chapter 2. The same power that raised Christ has raised us. We who were dead in trespasses and sins have been made alive together with Christ, raised up together, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:5-6). Our union with Christ explains our changed position. Where He is, we are.

This truth must be handled with care, because it has often been distorted. The focus of Paul’s prayer is first on God’s action and Christ’s supremacy. He is not describing an independent spiritual force that believers can switch on by technique. We depend on the God who raised Jesus. His power is not increased by the volume of our declarations, and His wisdom is not placed under our command. Being seated with Christ means we share in His life and victory. It does not make us rival heads of the church.

And this power is meant for much more than dramatic moments. In chapter 3 Paul prays that believers would be “strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:16), so that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith and they might know the love of Christ. In chapter 6 he calls them to be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might, and to stand. Resurrection power is the power to endure, to obey, to love and to stand firm, as well as the power behind extraordinary answers to prayer.

Remember where Paul was when he wrote this. He was a prisoner. The man praying that the church would know the exceeding greatness of God’s power was writing in chains. He did not think his imprisonment disproved anything he was saying. So when you face a difficult circumstance, it should move you to pray boldly, seek appropriate help and remain faithful. It should never make you conclude that Christ has lost His place above all authority. And we must never condemn suffering believers by assuming that every unresolved problem proves a lack of revelation. Paul himself would fail that test.

Living with opened eyes

How do we respond to this prayer? Start by making it your own. Many believers have found it life-changing to pray Ephesians 1:17-19 daily, for themselves and for others by name. But do not recite it as a technique to force an experience. Address the Father. Thank Him for what He has done in Christ. Ask Him, as a son or daughter, for wisdom and understanding. Then read the passage again and let its concerns slowly become your concerns.

Next, let understanding move into conduct. If you have seen the church as God’s cherished inheritance, change how you speak about its members. If you have understood the hope of His calling, examine the decisions you have made out of panic. If you confess that Christ is far above every principality and power, stop treating every frightening rumour as though it outranks His Word.

Be patient with yourself. Growth is often gradual. Keep company with believers who read carefully and allow honest questions. Refuse the pressure to claim understanding you do not yet have. The Father is not honoured by borrowed spiritual language that hides confusion. You can say, “Lord, help me understand this,” and remain a person of great faith. In fact, that prayer is exactly the one Paul prayed.

Let me take you back to Funke one last time. When she opened that brown envelope, she did not need anyone to persuade her to stop paying rent. She did not need a motivational speech about thinking like a property owner. She simply needed to see what was already hers. The moment she saw it, she began to live differently.

That is what God wants for you. Every spiritual blessing in heavenly places is already in your name. You have been chosen, adopted, accepted, redeemed, forgiven and sealed. The hope of your calling is secure. You are part of God’s treasured inheritance. And the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is working toward you who believe. The envelope is open in front of you. Ask the Father of glory to open the eyes of your heart, so that you see it.