When we are strengthened into our inner man, Christ can make His home in our heart (vv. 16-17). For Christ to make His home in our heart is a great matter. This is to have Himself fully settled in our inner being. Our heart is composed of four parts: the emotion, the will, the mind, and the conscience. For Christ to make His home in our heart means that He must settle Himself in our emotion, will, mind, and conscience. This means that Christ needs to occupy every part of our being.
We may compare our heart to an apartment with many rooms. One room is the mind and other rooms are the will, the emotion, and the conscience. We have believed in the Lord, and we have Him within us, but he still needs to make His home in our heart. Paul prayed for the Ephesians that Christ would have a way to make His home in their hearts. We have Christ in us in a general way, but we may not have Christ in us in a particular way, saturating our mind, emotion, will, and conscience.
I travel frequently, and many times I am placed in a room as a guest. Often the host will encourage me to feel at home. But as a guest receiving hospitality I never have the feeling that I am at home. I am just staying there temporarily. I cannot be settled in that place because it is not my home.
Christ desires to make His home in our heart, to occupy every part of our heart. He wants to occupy every part of our inner being. Our inner being must be saturated, possessed, occupied, and filled with Christ. If Christ has made His home in our heart, if He has occupied every room of our heart, we shall not be weak. On the contrary, we shall be those with a holy and even spiritual living. Too many times, however, we do not feel that we are strong in our spiritual life. The reason is that we have Christ in us in a very general way. Perhaps you have received Christ only into a corner of your “living room.” You have not given Him the liberty to move into another part. The result is that you are weak. You have Christ, but you are still weak because you are not saturated with Christ. You are short of the life-dispensing into your mind, emotion, will, and conscience to saturate your entire being. But if you have been thoroughly saturated by Christ through the life-dispensing in every part of your inward being—in your mind, emotion, will, and conscience—you will be strong. You will truly be one with the Lord. This was Paul’s goal as a leading steward and distributor of God’s grace. He desired that all the saints under his ministry would be saturated with the divine dispensing of life so they would be fully occupied by Christ in their inward parts. For this reason he bowed his knees to the Father that they would be strengthened with power according to the riches of His glory through the Spirit, that Christ may make His home in their hearts.
When Christ makes His home in our heart, we shall be filled not with all the fullness of God, but unto all the fullness of God (3:19). If we let Christ make His home in our heart, we shall be filled with the Godhead, the Trinity, to such an extent that we shall become His full expression.
The fullness here does not mean the riches; it denotes the expression, the manifestation, of the riches. For example, when you fill a cup with water, it is not until the water fills the cup to the brim and overflows that you can see the fullness of the water. The overflow is the fullness of the water. That overflow as the fullness of the water is the expression of the water. But if only a small amount of water is contained in the cup, no one can see the water. In a similar way, we must be strengthened through the Spirit so that Christ may make His home in our heart to fill us to the brim and even overflow from our inner being. When we are filled up to such an extent that Christ overflows from within our being, we become the fullness of God, the expression of God. Then others will be able to see that God is overflowing from within us. This overflowing is God’s full expression. This thought is higher, deeper, richer, and more profound than what is mentioned in chapter one. Chapter one speaks of the fullness of Christ (v. 23), but chapter three speaks of the fullness of God, which is wider and richer.
For us to be filled unto all the fullness of God is something worked out by Him who is able to do superabundantly above all that we ask or think, according to His power which operates in us (v. 20).
Eventually, our being filled unto all the fullness of God and His working in us according to His power operating in us will be for His glory in the church and in Christ Jesus unto eternity (v. 21).
The crucial point in Ephesians 3 is that we need the Father’s strengthening through the Spirit so that the Son may have a free course to make His home in our heart to occupy our entire being, that we may have an overflow of the riches of Christ to be the full expression of God. This is worked out by the life-dispensing, the dispensing of the Triune God to make us His full expression.