In the frontier days snake oil salesmen would sell potions guaranteed to cure whatever ailed you, from gout to gangrene and warts to weariness. Unfortunately their claims were a tad overblown, but in the passage we looked at today we get a glimpse of a genuine miracle cure.
Paul writing from prison to a church in the center of pagan idolatry, facing persecution bowed his knee to the father to pray for the solution to all their problems—that they might understand how much God loves them.
The love of God is an amazing thing. Healing, strengthening, restoring, building encouraging.
My hope today is to in someway help us to get a glimpse of that all surpassing love by looking at how Paul describes it here in the Holy Scripture.
Grounded in Love
16-17 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love,
God’s love is the foundation of it all, the root that ties us down and nourishes us.
ILLUSTRATION Our two shrubs that weren’t rooted.
The picture here is that God’s love is the very basis of who we are and all we do. Every phone call we make, every e-mail we send, every church service we attend, every television program we watch, every friendship we cultivate is meant to be rooted in the fabulous love of God.
If we fail to root deep in the fertile soil of God’s love the only thing that can result is a shallow and sickly life, ending in death.
But there is no need for that dire consequence, for in God’s love there is an endless supply of all that we need, if we are rooted deep, even when the winds blow they cannot bring us down.
We can be grounded in God’s love. Secondly Paul prays that the Ephesians and all of us should
Grasping His Love
18-19 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19and to know this love that surpasses knowledge
The place was Oklahoma, and the time was the roaring twenties. John Griffith was in his early twenties—newly married and full of optimism. He and his lovely wife had been blessed with a beautiful, blue-eyed baby, Gregory. John was living the American dream. But then came 1929 and the great stock market crash.
The Great Depression settled like a funeral cloak upon the land. Oklahoma, John’s native state, was turned into a swirling dust bowl by the dry winds, and his dreams were swept away with the wind. So he packed up his wife, his tiny, blue-eyed baby boy, and their few meager belongings in the old Model-A Ford and drove east to find greener pastures.
They made their way to Missouri, to the edge of the Mississippi River, and there he found a job tending one of the great railroad bridges that spanned the massive river.
Every day John sat in a control room and directed the enormous gears of an immense bridge over the mighty Mississippi.
By 1937 his son Greg was 8 years old, and John had begun to catch a vision of a new life—a life in which Greg would work shoulder to shoulder with him. On April 5, 1937, for the first time, John brought Greg to work with him. Excitedly they packed their lunches and headed off toward the immense bridge.
Greg looked on in wide-eyed amazement as his dad pressed down the huge lever that raised and lowered the vast bridge. As he watched, he thought surely his father must be the greatest man alive.
Soon noon arrived. After John elevated the bridge and allowed some scheduled ships to pass through, he took his son by the hand, and they headed off for lunch. They inched their way down the narrow catwalk and out onto the observation deck that projected some 50 feet out over the majestic Mississippi. There they sat and watched spellbound as the ships passed by below.
As they ate, John told his son, in vivid detail, stories about the strange, faraway destinations of the ships that glided below them. Losing track of time, he told story after story, his son hanging on every word.
Then, just as John was telling about the time the river had overflowed its banks, he and his son were startled by the shrieking whistle of a distant train. He quickly looked at his watch and saw that it was time for the 1:07, the Memphis Express, with 400 passengers, which would be rushing across that bridge in just a couple of minutes. He had just enough time.
In the calmest tone he could muster, he instructed his son to stay put. Quickly leaping to his feet, he jumped onto the catwalk. As the precious seconds flew by, he ran at full tilt to the steel ladder leading into the control house.
Once in, he searched the river to make sure no ships were in sight. And then as he had been trained to do, he looked straight down beneath the bridge to make certain nothing was below. And then he spied something so horrifying that his heart froze in his chest. For there, below him in the massive gear box that housed the gears that moved the bridge, was his beloved son.
Apparently Greg had tried to follow his dad but had fallen off the catwalk. Even now he was wedged between the teeth of two main cogs in the gear box. Although he appeared to be conscious, John could see that his son’s leg was bleeding. Then an even more horrifying thought flashed through his mind. For in that instant he knew that lowering the bridge meant killing his son.
His eyes filled with tears of panic. His mind whirled. What could he do? In his frantic search he spied a rope in the control room. He would rush down the ladder and out the catwalk, tie off the rope, lower himself down, extricate his son, climb back up the rope, run back into the control room, and lower the bridge. But even as he thought this he knew the horrible truth: there was just not enough time. He’d never make it.
Suddenly he heard the whistle again, this time much closer. The clicking of the locomotive wheels on the track beat out their cadence of doom. He heard the puff puff puff of the train with its 400 passengers, many of them fathers like himself. How could he sacrifice his son? His mother—he could see her tear stained face now. This was their only child, their beloved son. How could he. . . .
But he had no choice. He knew what he had to do, so with terror on his face he buried his head under his left arm and pushed the gear forward.
The cries of his son were quickly drowned out by the relentless sound of the bridge as it ground slowly into position. With only seconds to spare, the Memphis Express roared out of the tress and over the mighty bridge.
John Griffith lifted his tear stained face and looked into the windows of the passing train. A businessman was reading the newspaper. A uniformed conductor was glancing nonchalantly at his large vest pocket watch. Ladies were sipping their afternoon tea in the dining cars. A small boy, looking strangely like his own son, Greg, pushed a long thin spoon into a large dish of ice cream. Many of the passengers seemed to be in either idle conversation or careless laughter.
But no one looked his way. No one even cast a glance at the giant gear box that housed the mangled remains of his hopes and dreams.
In anguish he pounded the glass in the control room and cried out, “What’s the matter with you people? Don’t you care? Don’t you know what I’ve sacrificed for you? Doesn’t anyone care?”
No one heard. And soon the disappearing train had vanished into the horizon. [This story is adapted from Bob Barnes, 15 Minutes Alone With God for Men, as well as accounts by Dennis Hensley and D. James Kennedy.]
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!
