Bowling Green Covenant Church

Several years ago we redecorated Liz’s bedroom of our house in Canada. It was an old house so the project took longer than expected to complete—almost five weeks. We painted the windows and trim, the ceiling and part of the walls. We replaced her old light with a new combination lighting fixture and ceiling fan. The hardest job was hanging wallpaper on the crooked walls of her room. It took longer than expected but the room was transformed and the changes were a truer reflection of Liz’s personality.

There is a sense in which a New Year’s resolution is just another way of saying we want to redecorate our life. Similarly, New Year’s resolutions, like room redecoration, require time and effort to achieve. It took us over a month to finish Liz’s room. For as much as Liz was committed to having her room redecorated she need help and she had to wait. The walls in her room needed touching up before they could be painted and papered. Holes had to be filled, the last, stubborn bits of old wallpaper had to be removed. The drywall compound had to be sanded. It was tedious, time-consuming work, but without that preparation the finished product would not have looked as nice as it did.

The verse above is from a prayer in Paul’s letter to believers in Ephesus. The full text of the prayer is this:

16“I pray that from His glorious, unlimited resources He will give you mighty inner strength through His Holy Spirit. 17And I pray that Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts as you trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love. 18And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love really is. 19May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.” [NLT]

There is a lot to unpack from this marvelous prayer. And there is much that could be said. However, let’s focus on the three “May” statements from the New Living Translation:
? 3.17May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love.
? 3.18And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love really is.
? 3.19May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it.

I am not in the habit of making New Year’s resolutions, however after reading Paul’s words in Ephesians 3.17-19, I think it’s time I broke that habit.

And that is one resolution I am very sure I can keep.

You think about that.

MM