More Than You Know How to Ask

This verse is the launch of a doxology — a burst of praise that closes the first half of Ephesians. Paul has just finished praying that believers would grasp "how wide and long and high and deep" the love of Christ is, a love that "surpasses knowledge." Verse 20 is where the prayer boils over into worship.

The word translated "immeasurably more" is one of Paul's most extravagant constructions: hyperekperissou, a compound that piles "beyond" on top of "abundance." Translators have reached for phrases like "exceedingly abundantly above" and "infinitely more" to capture it. Paul is deliberately breaking the scale.

Notice where this limitless power operates: "within us." Paul wrote this from imprisonment, to ordinary believers in a city dominated by the towering temple of Artemis. The claim is quietly subversive — the greatest power at work in Ephesus was not in the famous temple. It was inside the people of God.

Many of us pray small on purpose. Managed expectations feel safer; asking big risks disappointment. This verse gently exposes that strategy. The ceiling on what God can do was never your imagination — his ability runs past your asking and even past your capacity to conceive the request.

At the same time, the verse redefines where to look for the answer. "According to his power that is at work within us" suggests God's biggest work is often internal before it is circumstantial — patience where there was reactivity, courage where there was fear. Sometimes the immeasurably-more arrives as a changed situation. Often it arrives as a changed you.