Made Alive in Christ
The Authority That Flows From Knowing Him
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I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. Ephesians 1:17–21
There is a kind of Christianity that speaks quickly about power and rarely about knowing God. It reaches for authority before it has lingered in intimacy. It binds and looses in language yet struggles to kneel in quiet surrender. But when the apostle Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he does not begin with commands. He begins on his knees. I keep asking, he says, not once but continually, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, would give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know Him better. The verb is not incidental. Paul does not instruct them to acquire knowledge of God. He asks the Father to grant it, because what he seeks is not information but illumination. The natural mind, however educated, cannot perceive the things of the Spirit. So Paul does not lecture the Ephesians into sight. He intercedes for them.
Before resurrection power is explained, it is prayed for. Before authority is exercised, sight must be given. Paul understands that the deepest crisis of the church is not the absence of strength but the absence of spiritual perception. We have learned to accumulate doctrine about God while remaining strangers to His heart, and no amount of theological precision will remedy what only the Spirit’s unveiling can heal.
So he prays for enlightened eyes. Not physical sight, but the awakening of the inner seat of understanding where faith either takes root. This is the faculty that recognizes hope when circumstances contradict it, that perceives inheritance where the world sees lack, that apprehends the power of God not as distant omnipotence but as a force directed personally toward those who believe. To be made alive in Christ is not first about activity. It is about revelation. Resurrection life begins when the Spirit lifts the veil and we see Him rightly. When Christ is no longer a doctrine we affirm but a Lord we behold. When the Father is not a distant concept but the One whose voice steadies our soul.
All true Christian obedience flows downstream from this seeing. We do not act our way into perception; we are granted perception and then find ourselves compelled to act. Authority flows from that knowing. And if we rush past the prayer, we will misunderstand the power entirely.
Paul names three realities that only awakened eyes can truly grasp, and he names them in deliberate order, a theological architecture that moves from origin to possession to operation. First, the hope to which we are called. This is neither optimism nor fragile projection of human desire onto an uncertain future. It is eschatological certainty anchored in the electing purpose of God who chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. This hope does not waver with circumstance because it was never produced by circumstance. It was spoken over us in the eternal counsel of the Trinity before we drew breath.
This hope was spoken over us in the eternal counsel of the Trinity before we drew breath.
Second, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints which is covenantal possession. The staggering claim that God Himself regards His people as His treasure. The inheritance is not only what we receive; it is what He receives in us, a redeemed humanity in whom His glory dwells, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. We are not merely heirs, we are the inheritance.
Third, the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe. Here Paul reaches for language that strains under its own weight, stacking terms in the original Greek letter as if no single word can contain what he means. This is not abstract omnipotence held in reserve. It is the specific, operative energy that seized a crucified corpse from the grip of death and enthroned it above every competing name in this age and the age to come. And that energy, Paul insists, is not distant from us. It is directed toward us. The same force that raised the Son now sustains the sons.
This is the order of heaven: we are called before we act, we belong before we achieve, and we are raised before we stand. Paul does not isolate power from hope or inheritance. He anchors strength in relationship, because in the economy of the kingdom, power divorced from identity produces presumption, and authority severed from communion becomes tyranny. When the eyes of the heart are enlightened, we no longer strive to manufacture authority. We begin to live from a position already given, seated with Christ in the heavenly places, not as metaphor but as mystical reality. The same power that raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at the right hand of the Father is now directed toward those who believe. Not because we are worthy of it or because we have mastered anything. But because we are joined to Him in a union so complete that what is true of the Head cannot fail to reach the body.
The church does not strain toward victory. She awakens to it. And this awakening begins, as it must, in prayer.
This is where many of us hesitate.
We confess that Christ is risen. We affirm that He is seated above all rule and authority, above every principality and power, that every name in heaven and on earth and under the earth bows beneath His. Yet we live as though we are still beneath what He has already overcome, still negotiating with fears He has already conquered, still begging for a position He has already secured.
Paul does not speak symbolically. The power at work in us, he says, is the very energy God exerted when He raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places. Far above every rule, far above every authority, far above every dominion and every name that is named. Christ is not ascending toward authority; He is enthroned in it. And Scripture dares to say that we, as His body, are joined to Him in that enthronement. The Head and the body are not divided. Where He is seated, we are united. What He has conquered, we are no longer bound to. This isn’t exaggeration or spiritual hype. It’s simply taking who Jesus is and applying it to who the Church is because we are united to Him. If Christ is risen and reigning, and we are joined to Him, then that reality must shape how we understand ourselves. This is simply the logic of our union with Christ
Yet heaven handles this truth with restraint, and so must we.
This authority is not given as fuel for ego or platform for self-promotion. It is entrusted as fruit of union. And fruit, by nature, is not manufactured but borne. We do not reign independently but participate dependently. The branch does not boast of its grapes; it abides in the vine. To be made alive in Christ is to be lifted from death not into autonomy but into proximity. We are not spectators of His victory. We are participants in it. But we only walk in what we see, and we only see what the Spirit reveals.
This is why Paul prays before he proclaims. Without revelation, resurrection remains a historical curiosity. Without intimacy, authority becomes imitation, a loud echo of something we have heard about but never encountered. Without knowing Him, we will try to wield what was only ever meant to flow. And if we linger there long enough, in the prayer, in the posture of asking, something shifts.
The striving begins to quiet. The need to prove begins to loosen. The urgency to announce our authority gives way to the deeper desire to reflect His character. For the same Christ who was raised was also humbled. The One seated in glory first bowed in obedience unto death, even death on a cross. Resurrection did not bypass surrender. Exaltation did not cancel the cross. It vindicated it.
The power Paul celebrates is not raw force but cruciform power, strength that passed through suffering, glory that was forged in humiliation. And this is the pattern we inherit. To be made alive in Christ is not merely to share in His position but to share in His posture. Seated with Him, yes. But shaped by Him too. Our authority is cruciform before it is regal. It does not roar before it has wept. It does not command before it has submitted. It does not claim the crown while despising the cross.
When we understand this, the language of binding and loosing takes on a different weight. It is no longer a declaration of personal force, no longer the triumphant shout of an individual asserting dominion. It becomes alignment with heaven’s will. What we bind is what He has already judged. What we loose is what He has already released. Authority, rightly understood, is agreement. The creature saying Amen to what the Creator has already spoken. And agreement is born in intimacy, in the long listening of the soul that has learned to distinguish the Shepherd’s voice from the noise of its own ambition.
The Spirit was not given to make us impressive. He was given to make us faithful. The power at work within us is not a spectacle to be displayed but a life to be yielded. It strengthens us to resist sin. It steadies us in intercession. It emboldens us to stand where darkness presses. And it conforms us, slowly and relentlessly, to the image of the Son. But it never detaches from communion. The moment power operates apart from abiding, it ceases to be the Spirit’s work and becomes the flesh’s counterfeit.
The church is most powerful when she is most prayerful.
Later in Ephesians, Paul ends his great discourse on spiritual warfare not with strategy but with supplication: Pray in the Spirit on all occasions (Eph. 6:18). As if to say that the battle is not won by volume but by vigilance before God. The armor of God is real, but it is fitted in the prayer closet before it is tested on the field. Intercession is not preparation for the war; it is the war. And the saints who shake the powers of darkness are not those with the loudest declarations but those with the deepest communion. Those who have lingered in the presence long enough to carry the scent of it into the conflict.
So we return again to the beginning. Not to activity. Not to ambition. But to the prayer.
Father, let us know You. Let the eyes of our hearts be enlightened, not with the flickering light of human insight but with the blazing clarity of Your Spirit. Let resurrection truth sink deeper than language, deeper than theology, deeper than the sermons we preach and the songs we sing, until it saturates the marrow of who we are.
Lift us out of small thinking and seat our hearts where Christ is seated. Form in us the humility that can carry authority without distortion, the meekness of the Son who wielded all power yet washed His disciples’ feet.
Make us alive in Him. And teach us to live from that life. Not straining toward what has already been given, but resting in the finished work of the One who was dead and is alive forevermore (Rev. 1:18), who holds the keys of death and Hades, and who even now intercedes for us at the right hand of the Father.
In Jesus’ name
Amen.