«　WEEK 9　DAY 4　»

　　Eph. 3:16-17 That He would grant you…to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into the inner man, that Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith, that you, being rooted and grounded in love.

　　Ephesians 3:14-19 reveals the apostle praying to the Father; the Father strengthening the believers through the Spirit; Christ making His home in the believers’ hearts; and the believers being rooted and grounded in love, apprehending the dimensions of Christ, and knowing the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ to be filled unto all the fullness of [the Triune] God. (CWWL, 1988, vol. 1, “Living in and with the Divine Trinity,” p. 319)

　　[For] the church [to] be constituted to become the fullness of Christ and the fullness of God,…Paul prayed that we might be strengthened into our inner man with the result that Christ could make His home in our heart and thereby occupy, possess, permeate, and saturate our whole inner being with Himself. In this way we are filled with Christ, and we become strong to apprehend the dimensions of Christ and to know the knowledge-surpassing love of Christ. Eventually, we shall be filled with Christ to such an extent that we become the fullness of God. (Life-study of Ephesians, p. 285)

　　First, Paul prayed to the Father as the source. Then the Father strengthens the believers through the Spirit as the means, the channel. Then Christ moves and works to make His home in the believers’ hearts. Eventually, the issue of the moving of the Father and the Spirit and the issue of the Son making His home in our hearts is the fullness of the Triune God. The Father is the source, the Spirit is the means, the Son is the object, and the fullness of the Triune God is the issue.

　　The source is the Father, the means is the Spirit, and the aim, the goal, is the Son because the Son is the center…. Paul prayed to the Father as the source, asking the Father to strengthen the believers through the channel of the Spirit that a goal might be reached. The goal was that Christ would make His home in the hearts of the believers.

　　The Triune God may be likened to a big machine, of which Paul was the operator. His prayer “turned the wheel.” We have to learn…that there is a high principle in the entire universe. This principle is that God wants to do something, but He will only be the “machine,” and He needs someone to be the operator. Today I hope that the church would be the operator. Whatever the apostle Paul did was done in a representing way. He was a representative of the entire Body of Christ. Now the operator of the universal “machine,” the Triune God, is the church, the Body of Christ. But just because the church operates does not mean that the church in itself carries out. The church operates, but the “machine,” the Triune God, carries out. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are the three “parts” of this universal “machine,” and the Body is the operator. The Father is the source, the Spirit is the means, and the Son is the aim, the goal. According to Ephesians 3, the operator asks the “machine” to strengthen the operator…. The Spirit as the channel does the work within us to strengthen every part of our being into the inner man so that the goal, the aim, the Son, might make His home within all the parts of our heart. (CWWL, 1988, vol. 1, “Living in and with the Divine Trinity,” pp. 319-321)

　　In the phrase into the inner man [v. 16], the word into is very significant. To say that we need to be strengthened into the inner man indicates that we are not in the inner man, that we live mostly in the outer man. When a brother tells his wife that he is tired, he is in the outer man, in the mind, living according to his physical tiredness…. You have an inner man. Why not stay there? Why stay in your tiredness? You need to practice bowing your knees unto the Father, that He would strengthen you into your inner man from your tiredness. (CWWL, 1983, vol. 2, “The Divine Dispensing of the Divine Trinity,” p. 311)

　　Further Reading: The Way to Build Up the Church (booklet)