Paul prays that the Father would grant this gift. He asks for a new, definite operation of God. He requests that God would do this according to the riches of His glory. It is surely not any common, trifling thing that he asks. He desires that God would remember and bring into play all the riches of His grace and strengthen these believers with might by His Spirit in the inner man.
Oh, Christian, learn at this point that your life daily depends on God's will, on God's grace, and on God's omnipotence. Yes, every moment God must work in your inner life and strengthen you by His Spirit; otherwise, you cannot live as He would have you live. Just as no creature in the natural world can exist for a moment if God does not work in it to sustain its life, so the gift of the Holy Spirit is the pledge that God Himself is to work everything in us from moment to moment.
Learn to know your entire, blessed dependence on God. Recognize the claim you have on Him as your Heavenly Father to begin in you a life in the mighty strengthening of the Spirit and to maintain it without the interruption of a single moment.
Paul tells these believers what he prays for in their behalf in order that they may know what they have need of and ask for it themselves. Expect everything from God alone. Bow your knees, ask, and expect from the Father His manifestation to you of the riches of His glory. Ask and expect that He would strengthen you with might by His Spirit who is already in you as an unknown, hidden, and slumbering seed.
Let this become the desire and confidence of your soul: "God will fill me with the Spirit: God will strengthen me through the Spirit with His Almighty energy." Let your whole life be daily permeated by this prayer and this expectation.
What Is God's Aim?
This is the glorious fruit of the divine strengthening with might in the inner man by the Spirit. The great work of the Father in eternity is to bring forth the Son.
In Him alone is the good pleasure of God realized. The Father can have no fellowship with the creature except through the Son. He can have no joy in it except as He beholds His Son in it. His great work in redemption is to reveal His Son in us that our life will be a visible expression of the life of Jesus.
This indwelling of Christ is not like that of a man who abides in a house and is in no sense identified with it. No, His indwelling is a possession of our hearts that is truly divine, quickening, and penetrating their innermost being with His life. The Father strengthens us inwardly with might by His Spirit, so that the Spirit animates our will and brings it, like the will of Jesus, into entire sympathy with His own.
~Andrew Murray~
(continued with # 37)
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