Love

Love

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God’s marvelous love. And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love really is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is so great you will never fully understand it. Then you will be filled with the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

Ephesians 3:17-19

Some time ago my husband and a friend had breakfast together. His friend posed the question, “When we get to heaven, what do you think is going to be the biggest surprise of all?” After thinking it over, my husband replied, “I think we’ll be surprised by the overwhelming depth of God’s love for us.”

In today’s passage, Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians explores the scope of God’s love—how wide, how long, how high, and how deep it is. Paul wants us not only to have an intellectual understanding of the love of Christ but also to experience that love. He tells us that Christ’s love is so great that we will never fully understand it! Thankfully, we can experience it even without understanding it.

The shore of a great ocean is one of the best places to think about the extremes of God’s love. As far as our eyes can see to the left, to the right, and straight across, there is no end in sight. What a wonderful picture of the extent of God’s love.

A songwriter puts it this way:

Could we with ink the ocean fill

And were the skies of parchment made,

Were every stalk on earth a quill

And every man a scribe by trade,

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry,

Nor could the scroll contain the whole

Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.^a

Father,

Please fill us with your love that is deep and wide so that we will live a full life for you. In Jesus’ name, amen.