Connecting everything he has said about the revelation of the great mystery of God in the church, Paul breaks out into prayer. And his prayer is instructive. The truth is one thing; living it out is another—he prays for strength.

Like many things in the Christian life, there is an “already” and a “not yet.” In God’s eyes, the church is already a unity; in practice we need to live up to that unity. We are already one in Christ, but we are not yet fully experiencing that oneness. This oneness is humanly impossible for we are self-driven individuals with our own highest good motivating our behavior. Divine truth and empowering are required to overcome this self-ward inertia. So Paul’s prayer comes at a very propitious time in his letter. The rest of the letter will be dealing with application of the truth of one church—this prayer forms the bridge from doctrine to practice. In fact, divine help is always the connector between the mind and the feet, what we know and how we walk, what we think and how we live. We need God’s help.

The first thing we notice in this passage is that we need to focus on the family nature of the church. This is the predominant metaphor used of the assembly of God’s people in the New Testament. We are a family, whose head is God the Father. Churches today get caught up in the organizational structure, the hierarchy, the professionalism of pastoral staff. They identify with a prominent preacher, the size of their building and multiplicity of programs so that they miss the truth—namely, that the church is first and foremost a family. This should affect every aspect of church life. And, following Paul’s example in this prayer, we should take every problem and every situation to the Father.

Our primary identity as a church is not with a specific denomination or movement. Further, we need His strength and power, not just the latest church growth gimmick, high-tech, multi-media Sunday technologies or latest cultural-spiritual lingo. We need genuine Holy Spirit power and inner strength that takes root deep in our lives, that reflects the riches of His glory. God is able to make us wildly powerful to live the Christian life of unity. It takes that kind of strength to experience the fullness of our unity in Christ. This is the gift of God’s blessing in unveiling the great mystery of the Church.