OUR VEHICLE: (2)

“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)

TO EXPERIENTIALLY KNOW THE LOVE OF CHRIST
That’s why he prays...to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge...

Paul writes that the way we get closer to our destination of spiritual maturity is by grasping the love of Christ. This is one of the places where the NIV translation probably does the best job of conveying the meaning of what Paul is writing. Other translations speak of “understanding” or “comprehending” the love of Christ. But the word that Paul uses here is much stronger than that. He truly is expressing the idea of grasping, of being able to grab and hold onto, the love of Christ.

But there is an interesting paradox here. Paul writes that Christ’s love is wide and long and high and deep and that it is the kind of love that surpasses knowledge. Then he turns around and prays that his readers would be able to know this unknowable love.

The word Paul uses for “know” is a word that means to “know by experience.” Literally here is what Paul is praying for his readers: [I pray for you to] know experientially this love that surpasses the ability to be known experientially.

On one hand that seems impossible. How can we know something that is beyond knowing? But it must be possible or else Paul wouldn’t have prayed for his readers to do that. It seems to me that Paul is emphasizing for us that this kind of knowledge we can’t figure out on our own. Only God can impart that kind of knowledge.

Paul has certainly described the love of Christ in the first three chapters of his letter. He has written about how we have been redeemed from an empty way of life by the work of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection. But Paul wants us to realize that we can never know that kind of love just by reading about it. Obviously reading about the love of Christ in His Word is the starting point, but that is inadequate on its own. We have to experience its operation in our lives in order to really know it in the sense Paul is writing about here. And that is the only way that we can move toward our destination.

Experientially knowing the love if Christ is the key to being all that we can be. But how do we do that? Tomorrow Paul gives us a roadmap to our destination that will take you to amazing spiritual places. You are loved!