The following is a rewrite of Paul's prayer found in Ephesians 1:15-23.
Because God has chose you, predestined you, accepted you, redeemed you, forgiven your sins, lavished you with his grace, shown you his will, marked you with the Holy Spirit and given you an eternal inheritance that you can partake of in the here and now, I have not stopped giving thanks for you. Day and night I’m praying for you! I keep asking God, over and over, to give you in abundance the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. The Spirit that causes you to come alive with an awareness to God and His present-nearness, even in the most mundane moments of life. In all the arenas of your life, may you know God better. May your relationship with Him continue to move from the theoretical and abstract to the practical expressions of love and faith in action. May this experiential knowledge of God transform you from the inside out and cause you to walk in complete freedom with-Him.
Like the shutter of a camera that opens to let light in so that an image can be captured, I pray that the eyes of your heart will be opened, so that the image of who God created you to be, will be etched and developed deep in the core of your being. May every skewed image of this world that rises up to distort your true identity in Christ be exposed for what it is, a mirage - an illusion.
May you be consumed with the hope to which you have been called. All these truths that declare who you are in Christ, may they begin to cause you to see everything from His perspective (God, yourself, others and the world in which you live). May you be so infiltrated by the reality of God’s promises that you will never again settle for empty, stale or aimless living.
May you come to understand not only who you are in Christ, but how Christ Himself sees you. You are His treasured possession, a precious jewel, the very one who He suffered and died for to reconcile back to Himself.
May you know that you are no longer under the tyranny of sin, nor the power of Satan. No longer are you to be spellbound by the enchantments of this world or imprisoned by the fads and labels of this present age.
For the same dynamic force that God exercised to shatter the dominion of death, raising Christ from the grave is at work within you who believe. May you live in the sphere of His kingdom here and now…
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