The fourth matter in Ephesians 3 is the church, which is mentioned in verse 10. The church comes out of the dispensing of the mystery. When we enjoy Christ, and He is dispensed into each of us, the church will be produced. The church is not a building but a group of living Christians experiencing and enjoying the riches of Christ.
The mystery of Christ, the unsearchable riches of Christ, the economy of the mystery, and the church are covered in the first half of Ephesians 3. The apostle Paul goes on in the second part of the chapter to pray for the saints that they would gain more of Christ by allowing Christ to make His home in their hearts. Ephesians 3:17 says, “That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith.”
When we first believed in the Lord, He came into the center of our being. When we first called on the Lord, something that was formerly a mystery entered into our being. This is the dispensing of the mystery. The mystery has been dispensed into the center of our being. We have Christ, but we do not have enough of Christ. There is much room in our being, but the space within us that has Christ is small. He is mainly limited to our spirit. We need to have more Christ. The way to have more Christ is to allow Him to spread from the center of our being to fill our heart.
The key to having Christ make His home in our heart is in verse 16, where Paul prays, “That He [the Father] would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit into the inner man.” Christ is in our spirit, but we often miss Him because we remain in other areas of our being where Christ has not yet spread, such as our mind. When we experience troubles, such as losing our job, having problems with our spouse, or being bothered by others, we spontaneously exercise our mind to think about why we have these troubles. We may think about our troubles so much that we cannot sleep well. The more we think, the more we are bothered, and the more we remain in the mind. Then we may find that we have lost our enjoyment of the Lord. Our power and strength are gone, because we are in our mind, but Christ is not in our mind. We need be strengthened into the inner man, for the inner man is where Christ is.
To turn to our spirit is to be strengthened into the inner man. When we remain in our mind, we are weakened and find that we cannot enjoy the Lord. Then a brother may come to help us to pray. When we pray, we turn from our mind to our spirit—we are strengthened into the inner man. When we are strengthened into the inner man, Christ spreads in us and dispenses more of Himself into our being. By daily dispensing Himself into us, Christ eventually fills our heart. For Christ to make His home in our heart is for Him to settle down in us, filling our entire being and making every part of our being His home.
Christ becomes our content by filling every part of our being with Himself. He spreads to our mind, emotion, and will, filling our thinking, considerations, feelings, and decisions. Christ occupies our entire being, possesses us, and even becomes us, making us His expression. Then we can say, “To me, to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). When we think, it is Christ thinking. When we love, it is Christ loving. When we make a decision, it is Christ deciding. Christ becomes us, and He causes us to become Him. This is Christ making His home in our heart. When Christ makes His home in our heart, we will overcome all our troubles, enjoy Him, and experience Him in countless ways. The Christian life is a daily life of allowing Christ to make His home in our heart, a life of Christ adding Himself into our daily life. Christ continually dispenses Himself into our being to fill us, occupy us, and take us over. When this process is taking place, it is not we who are living but Christ, the mystery of God, living in us.
The sixth great matter in Ephesians 3 is in verse 18, which says that Christ makes His home in our hearts so that we “may be full of strength to apprehend with all the saints what the breadth and length and height and depth are.” When Christ begins to make His home in our heart, we will discover that He is unlimited. Christ’s dimensions are the breadth, the length, the height, and the depth of the universe, which are immeasurable and unlimited. The more we experience and enjoy Christ, the more we know that He is unlimited and inexhaustible. We can never exhaust Christ; He is unlimited in every way.
The last great matter revealed in Ephesians 3 is the fullness of God in verse 19. When we experience Christ to the extent that we discover His unlimitedness, we will be filled unto all the fullness of God. The fullness of God is the expression of His riches. When water is dispensed into a cup until it overflows, the water running over is the fullness. In order to express Christ and dispense Him into others, we must be filled unto the fullness. When we are filled with the unlimited Christ, we become the fullness of God, which means that God is expressed through us and flowing out of us. The church is a group of people who are filled with Christ until they become the fullness of God, God’s expression and His flowing out.