Deep & Wide

The one problem with this story as an illustration of God’s love is that John Griffith’s difficult choice was brought on by a sudden emergency, a split second decision, God on the other hand knowingly sent his son to die. His end came about not because of religious fanatics or hard hearted Roman soldiers, but because a loving father sent His son to die.

How High and wide is God’s love? As high as the son of God lifted up on a rugged cross and as wide as two arms outstretched.

Paul says his prayer is that we would know what is unknowable—the vastness of God’s incredible love for us.

And if we can grasp it, it will transform us…

Growing in His Love

19 —that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

It is only through our being grounded in His love and grasping His love for us that we can become what He is calling us to be—to be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Imagine that, God envisions us filled with Him—radiating that perfect love to the world.

How would your life be different if you fully grasped His love so that his Love flowed through you? How would your priorities be different? How would your daytimer be changed? What would the entries in your checkbook look like? How would you treat people differently?

If you grasped the full measure of his sacrifice not only for you, but for that coworker, that snotty nosed kid down the street, that waitress who got your order wrong, how might your conduct and conversations be transformed? If you were truly desperate to insure that not one single drop of that precious blood be wasted because someone failed to see His love reflected in you, how might your life be changed?

How might our church be renewed and revived if suddenly we were a people electrified by the unimaginable love of God. If we viewed the person on the pew across the sanctuary as a precious soul for whom Christ died? If our hearts ached along with the heart of God for the lost souls of our community?

How might church ministries be invigorated if we truly understood the passion of Christ for his bride the church and began to love the church as Christ did and began to sacrifice ourselves, our time, our energies, our talents and our treasure in the service of our beloved? What would happen if we began to treasure the gifts He has given us—those gifts of the Spirit by which He means to empower us to serve Him and one another?

The apostle’s prayer is “to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us,”

If we are grounded in His love and grasp the full weight of it, then in us and through us He can and will do more than we can even imagine.

“O Love That Will Not Let Me Go” written on the evening of Matheson’s sister’s marriage. His whole family had went to the wedding and had left him alone. And he writes of something which had happened to him that caused immense mental anguish. There is a story of how years before, he had been engaged until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and there was nothing the doctors could do, and she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man. He went blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister had been the one who had taken care of him all these years, but now she is gone. He had been a brilliant student, some say that if he hadn’t went blind he could have been the leader of the church of Scotland in his day. He had written a learned work on German theology and then wrote “The Growth of The Spirit of Christianity.” Louis Benson says this was a brilliant book but with some major mistakes in it. When some critics pointed out the mistakes and charged him with being an inaccurate student he was heartbroken. One of his friends wrote, “When he saw that for the purposes of scholarship his blindness was a fatal hindrance, he withdrew from the field – not without pangs, but finally.” So he turned to the pastoral ministry, and the Lord has richly blessed him, finally bringing him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week. But he was only able to do this because of the care of his sister and now she was married and gone. Who will care for him, a blind man? Not only that, but his sister’s marriage brought fresh reminder of his own heartbreak, over his fiancé’s refusal to “go through life with a blind man.” It is the midst of this circumstance and intense sadness that the Lord gives him this hymn – written he says in 5 minutes!