"For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and which _ye shew_ toward all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention _of you_ in my prayers:
"That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to that working of the might of His strength, which He wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly _places_."--EPH. i. 15-20.
_Because of this_: because you have heard the glad tidings, and believing it have been sealed with the Holy Spirit (vv. 13, 14). _I too_: I your apostle, with so great an interest in your salvation, in return give thanks for you. Thus St Paul, having extolled to the uttermost God's counsel of redemption unfolded through the ages, claims to offer especial thanksgiving for the faith of those who belong to his Gentile province and are, directly or indirectly, the fruit of his own ministry (iii. 1-13).
The intermediate clause of verse 15, describing the readers' faith, is obscure. This form of expression occurs nowhere else in St Paul; but the construction is used by St Luke,--_e.g._, in Acts xxi. 21: "All the Jews _which are among_ the Gentiles," where it implies diffusion over a wide area. This being a circular letter, addressed to a number of Churches scattered through the province of Asia, of whose faith in many cases St Paul knew only by report, we can understand how he writes: "having heard of the faith that is [spread] amongst you."--_The love_, completing _faith_ in the ordinary text (as in Col. i. 4), is relegated by the Revisers to the margin, upon evidence that seems conclusive.[61] The commentators, however, feel so strongly the harshness of this ellipsis that, in spite of the ancient witnesses, they read, almost with one consent,[62] "_your love_ toward all the saints." The variation of the former clause prepares us, however, for something peculiar in this. In verse 13 we found St Paul's thought fixed on the decisive fact of his readers' _faith_. On this he still dwells lingeringly. The grammatical link needed between "faith" and "unto all the saints" is supplied in the Revised Version by _ye show_, after the analogy of Philemon 5. Perhaps it might be supplied as grammatically, and in a sense better suiting the situation, by _is come_. Then the co-ordinate prepositional phrases qualifying "faith" have both alike a local reference, and we paraphrase the clause thus: "since I heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is spread amongst you, and whose report has reached all the saints."
We are reminded of the thanksgiving for the Roman Church, "that your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world."[63] The success of the gospel in Asia gave encouragement to believers in Christ everywhere. St Paul loves in this way to link Church to Church, to knit the bonds of faith between land and land: in this letter most of all; for it is his catholic epistle, the epistle of the Church oecumenical.
In verse 16 we pass from praise to prayer. God is invoked by a double title peculiar to this passage, as "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory." The former expression is in no way difficult. The apostle often speaks, as in verse 3, of "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ": intending to qualify the Divine Fatherhood by another epithet, he writes for once simply of "_the God_ of our Lord Jesus Christ." This reminds us of the dependence of the Lord Jesus upon the eternal Father, and accentuates the Divine sovereignty so conspicuous in the foregoing Act of Praise. Christ's constant attitude towards the Father was that of His cry of anguish on the cross, "My God, my God!" Yet He never speaks to men of _our_ God. To us God is "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ," as He was to the men of old time "the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob."