So Much Love!

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." (Ephesians 3:17b-19 NIV)

Paul wrote the Ephesian letter late in his life, and it's likely that the Ephesian letter was a circular letter intended for all of the churches in Asia minor, so I have always thought that what he prays in this letter is of very great significance. It's the distillation of his entire life designed for everyone to pay special attention to! How striking then, that a major part of Paul's prayer for his readers is for them to continuously be growing in their knowledge and actual experience of Papa's love for them. And the longer I walk with God the more sense this makes to me. I cannot think of anything more important than God's people grasping, knowing and experiencing more and more of His love for them.

As you know, I believe that "Living Loved" (to use Wayne Jacobsen's phrase) is the key to everything else in life. There's no such thing as too much of God's love.

But people sometimes get nervous when I start talking this way. I have a couple of thoughts as to why that happens. First, I find that those who protest that we need to talk about obedience, too, not just God's love (I agree with this) are usually those that haven't really experienced God's love. They often have "father wounds" or other wounds that have caused them to keep Father at a distance. With folks like this I have found that it's helpful just to gently persist in loving them, not backing away from the centrality of living loved but patiently waiting for God's healing love to seep past the walls erected against His love.

I also find that some people object to this emphasis on God's love because they think we are talking only about feelings or experiences. But when Paul prays for his readers to know God's love it extends far beyond just a feeling of being loved (as important as that is). To know God's love is to have our eyes and hearts opened to everything about Him that our little minds can catch. Because God is love, everything He does expresses that love. And because His love is completely and totally working for our good, even the most painful experiences in life can reveal His love if we "keep watching" and keep our hearts soft towards Him even in our pain. (I speak from experience here, as you know).

So I will keep on inviting people to know and experience God's love, echoing Paul's prayer as my own and also seeking to express this prayer in how I live and serve others.

Now here are a few more thoughts about God's love for you that I just want to get on paper, so to speak.

Because God's love has no end, our experience of it is something that also has no end. This opens up amazing possibilities, if you catch the meaning here. Everything, everything!! becomes a potential purveyor of Papa's love, from the simple sighting of a little hummingbird to the painful and complex loss of those we love. Everything becomes one more invitation, one more opportunity to experience Father's love, and this will continue forever, ramping up considerably, methinks, once we see Him face to face.

Also, God's love is specific and personal to each person on the planet. For some reason, lots of believers seem to think that God loves them in a sort of generic way: "He loves everyone, so I guess He has to love me, too." But this is a terribly inferior understanding of Papa's love. God loves you with a love that is specific to you or them. His love isn't a one-size-fits-all kind of love but a specific treasuring of you in your uniqueness. He loves the little things about you that make you you. In a sense, God is in love with each and every person on the planet! And since He's God, His knowledge of each person's uniqueness is infinite. Think about that: Papa can honestly say to you, "I will never run out of reasons I love you!" The one who knows when a single sparrow falls knows and treasures you in all your wonderful uniqueness--wow!

Finally, as the plural "you" (y'all) indicates here in this passage and in most other passages that have to do with love, God's love is discovered in healthy community. Yes, Holy Spirit also pours love directly into our hearts (Romans 5:5), but as the many one another passages in Scripture indicate, God's intention was that much of our experience of getting to know His love would happen through others who are living loved. That's why the "whole picture" for me is that we lived loved and listening (for His loving affirmation and for His guidance as to how we are to love others). And yes, I know that church has failed rather miserably in this area. The Christian religion is no better than any other religion at producing loving people. Only a vibrant, "religion-free" relationship with the One who is love will enable us to make our contribution to the loving, healing community that Jesus empowers us to become. Will you sign up for this? Sigh...I could write so much more about this, but I will stop for now and ask Father simply to make me more and more an encounter with His love for all I meet.

Learning to live loved, praying for an eternal and continuing experience of His love for all of us.

Tom, one of Papa's children