Children understand the love of God so effortlessly. But, I find myself perpetually limited in my grasp of the nature of God. So, I focused much of my prayers on that this past week, asking God to take me deeper into His endless abundance of love.
Abundance of Love
I was awed and overwhelmed by God’s love on the day I came to faith. Every day since, I come closer to understanding just how little I actually grasp of its fullness. God’s love is life-changing, healing, and infinite–just as He is infinite.
It is precisely God’s infinity that characterizes so much of His otherness. I can barely conceive of Him, yet He has created a world in which us finite beings can know Him and love Him. And, in that relationship, we are redefined as He knows and loves us.
“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13 ESV
“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8 ESV
God did not arrange the death of Jesus on the cross to shame us with his goodness and mercy. Instead, Jesus walked to the cross and chose to die in order to meet the requirements of God’s unyielding justice with a demonstration of his limitless grace and mercy. He gave the gift of his life freely and without obligation, all so that we could experience life more abundantly.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” John 10:10-11 ESV
Living Life Abundantly
Consider that God established a plan through time and space across thousands of years to bring everything to the place where YOU can know Him intimately. If you already accept this truth, then I encourage you to meditate on it.
The unrivaled, unequaled author of every created thing says, “I love you. You are mine.”
There is nothing that He cannot do. His word does not return void. The name of Jesus has been elevated and granted the highest authority within the creation. He holds the reins of utmost power firmly within His hands. And, He desires a personal relationship with you.
In the New Testament, Paul and John write extensively of God’s love. Paul’s worshipful theology on the matter is still pretty mind-blowing to me. He was so capable of reaching deeper into God’s nature, and teaching it to others. Consider the following passage:
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may 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, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:14-19
There is More to Life
Paul prays to God who is supreme over all things, begging God to strengthen believers with the Holy Spirit so that Christ can dwell in their hearts. There is more to life in Christ, but it requires the help of the Spirit to experience it.
What does it mean for Christ to dwell in their hearts? That they would be rooted and grounded in a love that surpasses knowledge, yet which God can give us enough strength to comprehend its breadth and length and height and depth. This was the basis of Paul’s request.
And, he summed it up with the final phrase. That this knowledge of love would fill them with all of the fullness of God. This is what living life abundantly means for believers. We are sourced in God’s limitless abundance of love. He sustains us, and we demonstrate it in our love for others.
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 ESV
“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” John 13:35
There is More in Heaven and Earth
As CS Lewis pointed out in the Screwtape Letters, we are amphibious creatures. I am a spiritual being that inhabits a physical body, bound by time and space in ways that their Creator is not. I recently came across this section in a devotional on 1 John:
“We don’t know much about the spirit world, other than it’s dangerous to be overly preoccupied with it and equally dangerous to dismiss it. The balance is found in focusing on what the Bible says.”
What does the Bible say about it?
“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Ephesians 6:12 ESV
Shakespeare touched on the truth of the spiritual realm when he wrote Hamlet’s famous line, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”
As a mature believer, it can become tempting to believe that we know God. And, this is not entirely untrue. We do know Him, but only in part. The difficult truth is that what we know of God will always be dwarfed by what we have not yet grasped of Him.
So, pursue Him. Press in more deeply today through worship and prayer. Read the abundance of love in the letters that He wrote to you. THERE IS SO MUCH MORE OF HIM TO DISCOVER.
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