Often on my heart and my lips is prayer for you as Subscribers prayer group members, one which comes from the very prayers of Paul in his letter to Ephesus:

I ask that out of the riches of His glory He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Says Charles Spurgeon:

Alas, to a great many religious people the love of Jesus is not a solid substantial thing at all—it is a beautiful fiction, a sentimental belief, a formal theory, but to Paul it was a real, substantial, measurable fact.

Even those who claim Christ can miss holy love. His is unfathomable, unsearchable, unending; it is unearned, undeserved, and unconditional. Jesus love is so great He came for us, took our place, and He is coming again for us.

The apostle recognizes this, experienced it and prays we would know this love also.

He had considered it this way, and that way, and the other way, and it was evidently real to him, whatever it might be to others. No one knows the love of Christ at all if he does not know it to be real, and no one has felt it in his soul at all unless it becomes so real as to constrain him and move him into actual activity.

Knowing in our head Jesus loves us is one thing. It is an awareness, intellectual, an acknowledgement. But another thing entirely for this love to be real to to us, so real it flows out from us, influencing our actions toward others.

We have a word which we sometimes use in a sense which I believe is not correct according to the dictionary. I mean the word “realize.” That word has been forced into the language of Christian experience, and can never be forced out again. We must realize, or make real to our hearts the love of Christ. That is just what I think the apostle did—he made real to himself the love of his Master and Lord.

The way Paul lived, wrote and spoke was in pursuit of knowing and having this love of God real in his own heart and life. Not only this, he prayed for it and experienced it firsthand.

It was not to him a surface theory, which might have breadth, but could not have depth. Or a mere narrow statement with length, but no breadth. It was a thing as firm and solid as anything in the world.

The experience of a thing makes it more real to us. We can look at photos of a vacation destination, but that’s nothing like actually being there in person. The experience makes it more real, more tangible, more meaningful.

It is true the love of Jesus is not material and earthly so as to be seen and handled, but it is even more substantial than if it were a thing to be seen, for the things which are seen are temporal, and the things which are not seen are eternal.

Love is not love, as the world says, meaning that every love is somehow equal. God’s own love is not material as are things in this world, where we love those who love us. The love we have in Christ is that He laid down his life for us. This love changes us from who we were before Christ in us, to who we are to be after.

To the carnal man the visible is real, and the invisible a mere dream. But to the spiritual man things are reversed, the visible is the shadow and the invisible the substance. May you be such people, dear friends, all of you!

We can love Him because He first loved us, and when this love is made known to us, we comprehend it more and more in our inner being. It is more true and real than any other thing we can sense by touch or taste, by smell or sight or sound.

So then, brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray together for love as Paul did.

Praying For Love

God wants us:

* firmly rooted and grounded in love

* able to comprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth

* to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge

* rooted—planted, firmly fixed

* grounded—to be founded upon, a foundation

* comprehending—understand, seize, possess

* breadth, length, height, depth—immensity, without end

* surpasses—experience that affection beyond what we can know

This love is without measure or end and God wants us to know with certainty—from the depth of Christs sacrifice to the height of His glory, that His love is limitless.

O God, make us to know this matchless love, and to live in the reality of it. Amen

My personal prayer is to fall in love with the Savior who loves us. I will pray this for you. Will you pray this for me? Leave a comment or message me below.

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