Thirty-seven hours after my father died, my phone rang. “Dan, your mother only has hours to live. You need to come to the hospital now.”

Even now, over three years later, my heart rate speeds up as I recall the ICU doctor’s words. The first words I spoke after hanging up the phone were to my wife, Melissa. “I just can’t take this again. I have no emotional capital left. How am I going to make it?”

What I needed at that moment, and in the hours that followed, was exactly what my mother had needed just two days before when we told her that her husband, our father, was in his last hours: endurance to continue trusting in the God who never fails to love us, even when all we see is a frowning providence. The razor’s-edge difference between doubt and assurance lies in the strength to believe God loves us when circumstances scream otherwise.

Such moments of crisis reveal the profound need for a deep assurance of God’s love.

Grasping Niagara

In his book Children of the Living God, Sinclair Ferguson recognizes that, for many Christians, “the reality of the love of God for us is often the last thing in the world to dawn upon us. As we fix our eyes upon ourselves, our past failures, our present guilt, it seems impossible to us that the Father could love us” (27). This seeming impossibility underscores our need for divine strength to truly grasp God’s love.

In Ephesians 3:14, Paul introduces a prayer for the Ephesians with the words “for this reason” (picking up his train of thought from 3:1) precisely because of our tendency to doubt God’s love and grace. Paul’s two opening chapters lifted us up to the towering heights of what the Father has done for us in Christ by the Spirit. Imagine standing beneath the plummeting waters of Niagara Falls, trying to take a drink. The sheer force and volume might just make it impossible. In the same way, we have no natural capacity to grasp the magnitude of what the Father has graciously done for us in Christ. We cannot comprehend the depth of God’s love without divine strength.

And so, Paul prays that the Father may grant us to “have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18–19). If we are to find doubt-banishing assurance in the Niagara of Christ’s unfathomable love for us, we need a strength we do not naturally possess.

When my wife was three months into her pregnancy with our oldest child, Hannah, I started journaling prayers to the Father about the daughter I had yet to meet. Each morning, I’d write a prayer about my desire for her to come to know the Father and Jesus Christ (John 17:3). These written prayers revealed my heart’s deep desires.

“Your Father wants you to grasp the ungraspable so your heart will be strengthened in hard times.”

The same is true of Paul’s prayers. But we can go a step further. As inspired Scripture, Paul’s prayers are “breathed out by God” himself (2 Timothy 3:16). Paul prayed this prayer because the Father wanted him to pray it. God-inspired prayers like Ephesians 3:14–19 reveal the very depths of the Father’s heart for us. The Father wanted Paul to pray this because he sovereignly intended to grant his requests. Your Father wants you to grasp the ungraspable so your heart will be strengthened in hard times.

None Left Out

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with severe introspection and regular bouts of doubt. I have talked to many Christians who also struggle with assurance. On the other hand, my wife does not struggle with too much introspection. She rarely, if ever, experiences doubt. From time to time, I find myself envying her and other Christians with the same experience. On the surface, I seem to require more strength to grasp Christ’s vast love than they do.

In God’s kindness, Paul reassures us that our particular inclinations will not exclude us from a deeper experience of God’s love. Paul prays that we would have the strength to grasp this love “with all the saints” (Ephesians 3:18), whether Jews or Gentiles (2:11, 17–18), husbands or wives (5:22–33), children or parents (6:1–4), slaves or masters (6:5–9). This unity in experiencing God’s love emphasizes that his grace and strength extend to every believer, regardless of background, personality, or struggles. Paul prays with confidence that all believers can receive the strength to grasp the depth of Christ’s love, even those with a past marked by fear and uncertainty.

I am helped by remembering that Paul’s prayer is a corporate prayer. You, like me, may read Paul’s prayer and think mainly in terms of yourself rather than the whole church. But every “you” in Ephesians 3:14–19 is plural. So, when Paul prays that God would grant strength to comprehend “with all the saints,” I think he means every singular “you” within the plural “you” of the church at Ephesus, but he also implies that God answers this request mainly when the saints are gathered together. The Father loves to answer this corporate request within the gathered church.

Christians often wrestle with doubt in isolation, striving to preach the gospel to their lonely heart. However, the best place where assurance replaces doubt is in the gathering of the whole church. It is in the fellowship of believers, united in our need for grace, that the strength to comprehend Christ’s love is most powerfully imparted. Here, amid our brothers and sisters in Christ, we find that our collective faith and mutual encouragement help to dispel the dark shadows of doubt. The gathered church becomes a sanctuary where our wavering hearts are fortified (Psalm 73:16–17), and together we grasp the boundless love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

Our Father does not want any of his children left out of his warm home of assurance, including you.

Our Naming Father

When it comes to replacing doubt with assurance, it truly matters to whom we pray. In light of the towering doctrinal heights of Ephesians 1–2, Paul kneels “before the Father” — and not just any father, but the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14–15). A better translation of “every family” might be “the whole family in heaven and on earth,” emphasizing the unity of all believers under the fatherhood of God. The whole family is named by the Father.

Earlier, Paul described the Ephesians before their conversion as alienated, outsiders, and strangers without hope (Ephesians 2:12). But now the Father has named them. Isaiah 62:2–4 illustrates what it means for the Father to name us. Although God’s people were returning from exile, they still felt forsaken. Then Isaiah says,

You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give. . . . You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

In a similar way, Paul tells us that God has “predestined us for adoption to himself as sons” (Ephesians 1:5) and that “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). In other words, the Father and the Son have named us sons of God and the bride of Christ. The name we carry in this world, even amidst our relational trials, is this: “My delight is in you.”

This is one crucial reason we gather: to hear and be reminded through faith that the Father actually delights in us. Only the love of this Father can cast out our doubt when we are weak.

When the news that my mother was in her final hours drained the strength out of me, the Father provided the strength I needed to grasp more of the ungraspable love of Christ, especially as I gathered with all the saints in the weeks and months that followed. In the midst of my profound grief and weakness, the assurance of God’s love “strengthened [me] with power through his Spirit” (Ephesians 3:16) in the gathering of the saints, to the praise of the Father’s glorious grace (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14).