Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. 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. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, - Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-20
"I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened..." There is so much in this world that cannot actually be seen. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control to name just a few. They are real and we feel their effects every day. The problem with these is that we can be conditioned so that we do not recognize them and we are tempted to write them off as mere fantasies.
In these verses, Paul prays that the "eyes of our heart may be enlightened" to see three key intangibles--real but likely to be overlooked because of the default manner of our thinking. He wants that we should see "the hope to which he has called us" and the "riches of his glorious inheritance" and "his incomparably great power". We can't touch, taste, smell, hear or feel these but, for the believer, these suffuse reality. So we need a new sense--a new awareness--to what God is doing with his people.
Without it, we might be left with the depressing, limited reality of the senses we were born with. With it, we find we are surrounded with the amazing, infinite, plentiful reality of the kingdom of God we were born again into. So I pray I can live life with eyes open, not shut.
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