God's Immeasurable Power

The Measure of His Immeasurable Power

Ephesians 3:20

"Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that woreth in us."

“The riches of the glory of the inheritance” will sometimes quench us in our spirit rather than stimulate hope for us. Some may ask “Can I ever hope to reach it?” Our lives are filled with battlefields where we were defeated; somehow can we expect to wear a wreath of victory? Paul is asking his friends at Ephesus do they really know the hope and the inheritance. Paul wants us to know that we must have the knowledge of the power which alone can fulfill the hope and bring the inheritance. When we read this scripture, our souls should catch on fire when we think about the power that works in us. It is “exceeding”. Exceeding what? Paul speaks of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge and of God being :”able to do exceedingly above all that we can ask or think.” The power which is really at work in Christians today is in its nature properly transcendent and immeasurable and passes all thought and desire and knowledge.

And yet it has a measure. “according to the working of the strength of the might which is wrought in Christ.” We liken these words to fruit and branch and root. God’s immeasurable power!

“According to the working of the strength of the might which he wrought in Christ.” The Resurrection, the Ascension, the session at the right hand of God, the rule over all creatures, and exaltation above all things on earth or in the heavens. This is the evidence that Paul brings before us as evidence of the power that is operating in all Christians.

The present glories of the ascended Christ are glories possessed by a man; they are available as evidences and measures of the power which works in believing souls. In

This present glory we see the possibilities of humanity, the ideal that God had for man when He created and breathed His blessing upon Him. It is one of us who has the strength enough to bear the burden of God’s glory, one of us who can stand within the blaze of the encircling and indwelling Divinity and not be consumed. The possibilities of human nature are manifest in the presence of the glory of God. If you want to know what the Divine power can make of you, let us turn to look with the eye of faith upon what it has made of Jesus.

Are you still in doubt? You can find the truth in the bond between Jesus and those who truly love and trust Him. When you truly love and trust the Lord, possibilities become realities and can be consolidated into certainty. The Vine and its branches, the members and their Head, the Christ and His church are knit together by such closeness of union, that wheresoever and whatsoever the one is, there must the others also be. So when my doubts and fears and consciousness of my own weakness creep across me and all my hopes are just about gone, as a star in heaven when a cloud gets between me and it, I will turn to Jesus my brother, bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and think about Him in His clam exaltation and regal authority and infinite blessedness, what is not only the pattern of what I may be, but the pledge of what His church must be. “The glory that thou gavest me I have given them.”

And that’s not all. Not only is God’s power and glory a possibility and certainty for the future, but is a measure of the power that worketh in us. Just as this letter teaches us, we have as Christians a present scale by which we may estimate the greatness of his power. In the next chapter, chapter 2, the Apostle goes on to say, “And you hath he quickened.” He goes on to remind us that what had been done on Jesus has been done on us Christians. If that Divine Spirit raised Him from, the dead and set Him at His right hand in heavenly places, it is as true that the same power has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Christ gave us the measure of the power, but also the present limited experience of the present Christian life, the fact of the resurrection from the true death, the death of sin, the fact of union with Christ Jesus so real and close as they who truly experience it do live, as far as the root of their lives are concerned, and the scope and the aim their lives, “in the heavens” and “sit with him in heavenly places”—these are the things that afford us the measure of the power that works in us.