How to Pray for This Church - Part 5

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You know, I was thinking this week; whenever we come to the place of trying to use human language to describe God, we find it woefully inadequate. To help us, we use words like finite for us, and we start referencing those attributes and qualities of God with words such as infinite. God is infinite in His being; He is infinite in His power; He is infinite in His love. Infinite simply means unlimited. But when we say that God is infinite in His attributes, we do not primarily mean (and I think this is what we are tempted to think), we do not primarily mean that God has an infinite amount of that particular quality, although that's certainly true as well. Instead, we mean that God possesses those attributes in a way that's entirely different than any other being in the universe.

So, for example, when we say that God's knowledge is infinite, we don't mean that God simply has a bigger brain than we do and that He has a bigger hard disk on which He's able to store all the details that we're not able to store. When we say God's knowledge is infinite, we mean that God knows what He knows in a different way than we know it. He knows it immediately without having to recall it. He knows everything at once. He knows it intimately in its every detail, thoroughly. He knows everything that can be known about it. He even knows the hypothetical. So, we mean the quality of His knowledge.

Take another example. God's love. We say that God's love is infinite. When we say that, we don't primarily mean that God possesses an infinite quantity of love, although certainly He does. What we mean is that the quality of God's love is unlimited, without borders, without boundaries. Now, let me just take that word infinite for a moment, because it's not a word we use a lot. The word infinite simply means "not finite". That's all it means, not finite. And the word (the English word) finite comes from a Latin word which means end. In other words, when we say that things are infinite in God, we're saying that nothing in God has an end, a terminus.

Today we continue our discussion about the love of Christ. And the love of Christ, as we will see together, is infinite. It has no end, no boundaries, no borders. You can try like a diver to plumb the depths of the love of Christ, but you will never reach the bottom. You can try, like a mountain-climber, to scale the lofty heights of the love of God for us in Christ, but you will always be ascending. You will never reach the summit. You can try, like the ancient explorers, to try to find how far the width of God's love extends, but you will never reach the borders of it. If we set out under our own steam to understand the love of God, we will never arrive at it. Why? Because we are finite. We have an end. There is a limit to what our understanding is. And God is infinite. Only the infinite God can help us comprehend His own love for us. And that's the heart of what Paul wants us to learn today from Ephesians 3.

We're studying Paul's prayer for this great church that he came to love and in which he ministered for almost three years. In Ephesians 3, beginning in verse 14 and running down through the end of the chapter, he writes to them his prayer. He tells them exactly what it is that he prays for them, and we're discovering in this prayer the foundational principles of praying for the church.

We find ourselves in the middle of the fourth great principle that we've learned together. The overarching fourth principle is "pray for spiritual growth". Pray for spiritual growth. This is really where we get to the core of his prayer, where we meet the requests that he lays out before God for these people.

Let me just remind you that based on the grammar in the original, we can know that Paul was essentially praying here for three things. He's praying, number 1, verse 16, "… that
God would grant them … to be strengthened with power … in the inner man." That's request number one. What follows that, all has to do with that request.

Request number two comes in the middle of verse 17, that you may be able to comprehend the height and depth and breadth and so forth, and to know the love of Christ (end of verse 18 and the beginning of verse 19).

The third request comes in the middle of verse 19, "… that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God." Those are the three requests. The rest of what's there relates to and builds on those three requests. Now, those are clearly three separate requests, but they do not stand alone. They build on each other. This prayer has been likened to a ladder, and each of these requests to a rung. They're progressive.

His first request, we looked at in great detail, begins in verse 16, was that they would be strengthened by the Spirit of God in the inner man. The second request (and this is where we find ourselves today in the middle of the second request) is that we would comprehend Christ's love for us. Let me just read the second request for you. Look at verse 17. It begins in the middle of verse 17. Paul says I pray, or I bow my knees, "… that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge," That's Paul's second prayer request for these people that he loved so much. Paul wants them to grasp the infinite love of Christ.

But before that can happen, Paul identifies something that has to happen first. Two weeks ago, we saw that there's a condition for understanding the love of Christ. We called it the pre-requisite for understanding the love of Christ. Verse 17, You, being rooted in grounded in love. Literally, the Greek text says, "… having been rooted and grounded in love." At the moment of salvation, God rooted us and grounded us in love. These are two word-pictures, two metaphors. Paul pictures love as the soil in which Christians were planted by God at the moment of salvation. He pictures love as the foundation that God laid at the moment of salvation, on which He continues to build that Christian's life. What does, what does this mean, God has rooted and grounded us in love? Well, as we saw, in context, Paul means two things.

He means that we have been rooted and grounded in a basic knowledge of God's love for us. When you became a Christian, the Spirit of God spread the love of God in your heart so that you understood, to some degree, that God loved you. That's why you call out, as Christians do, Abba, Father. We came to a basic understanding that we have a Father and that He loves us. But we also, then, expressed and reflected that love to others. You can't experience the love of God (you can't have it shed in your heart by the Spirit of God) without showing it to others and to God. What Paul is saying here (the prerequisite for comprehending the love of Christ) is you have to experience it to understand it. In other words, you have to be a Christian. You cannot never have experienced it. You cannot understand it. That's what Paul wants us to see, and to comprehend, to grasp.

If you're here this morning, and you're not a Christian, you won't get anything I'm saying. Because, certainly, you can understand the words and the language, I don't mean that. But I'm talking about, you're not going to be gripped by it. You're not going to be in any way changed by it because it doesn't mean anything to you. The love of Christ doesn't mean anything to you because you've never experienced it. But if you've experienced it, then the Spirit of God has already given you a taste of the love He's shown for you, and you just want to comprehend it and understand it and grow in it understanding even more.

So, we've seen the pre-requisite to understanding the love of Christ. As we work our way through this passage (as we continue to) the next element that we need to see, and we begin with this morning, is the importance of understanding the love of Christ. The importance of understanding it. You know, I really don't think that most Christians get it. They don't see why this is so important. I mean, this is a prayer you probably read over many times, and it's probably not something you consistently pray for yourself or for those you love. Why? Because you don't see how important it is. But there are some clues here as to why it is so important; a couple of clues in verses 17 and 18.

First of all, I want you to notice that Paul prays this for every Christian in the church in Ephesus, for every Christian. Now, this is harder to see in English than it is in the original text because in English the pronoun "you" serves as both singular and plural. We use the same word "you", and it can mean one person, or it can mean a thousand people. In Greek, there is a singular "you" and there is a plural "you". Here, the plural "you" occurs. So, Paul prays that "you, all of you" in the church there in Ephesus may be able to comprehend.

Paul wanted every believer in Ephesus to get this point. He intended that this letter (as we've worked our way through it gradually) it would have been read to the congregation in Ephesus. When it arrived, they would have taken it out; they would have read it. Every member of the congregation would have heard it read, and they would have heard the plural pronoun used here. Paul would have said I'm praying that you (all of you) would be able to get this, would be able to grasp this. So, it's obviously important. Paul didn't want a single Christian in Ephesus to miss this. But even more than that, Paul's prayer isn't just for this one church (this church in Ephesus, and the surrounding churches). It actually (this prayer) encompasses every other Christian.

Notice what Paul adds in Ephesians 3:18. He says that you "may be able to comprehend with all the saints." He says I want all of you in Ephesus to get it. But I don't want it to stop there. I want every Christian to get this! It's my prayer that not a single Christian misses out on this. We tend to think of these deep profound things as for Christian leaders, for elite Christians, for the privileged few. But that's not Paul. Paul says I don't want a single Christian in the church in Ephesus to miss it, and I don't want a single Christian anywhere to miss this.

You know, I think some Christians think of the Christian life like they were purchasing a car. I don't know if you've bought a car recently. But you go to the dealer, and you go to the little window there on the car, and the sticker, and you look to see what options are on that car. You can buy the basic model. You know, every dealer has different markings to indicate the base model. But you can buy the base model, and it does good to have wheels on it.

And then there's the next model up which has some options thrown in. You can get better rims and a better sound system, and you get the optional packages. And then, if you really want to spend some money, you get the sort-of ultimate model of that particular car that you're looking at, and it has all the options included. Some Christians look at the Christian life like that. They just assume that there are some Christians who got stuck with the base model. You know, it's just me. I have the base model. This isn't for me.

That's not how Paul thought at all. Paul saw this as so important, as so foundational for the Christian life, that he prayed that there wouldn't be a single Christian who would miss it. He prays that every Christian in the church there at Ephesus would get it. And then he goes way beyond that, and he prays that every Christian everywhere, in all times, would come to this understanding. It's not optional. This isn't something you can just say, well, you know, I've got the base model. What he's talking about today isn't for me. Do you really understand how important this is to your spiritual life?

Now Paul doesn't develop here why it's important. He tells us it's important because he prays for everybody, and he prays for all Christians, but he doesn't tell us why it's important. So, kinda keep your mind here in Ephesians for a moment, and just as a kind of a sidetrack, let me take you a couple of places and show you why it's so important. It's important for you to understand God's love for you in Christ because of what it produces in you if you do understand it. Let me show you just a couple of them.

Turn to 1 John 4, 1 John 4. If you truly understand the love of Christ for you, you will have assurance and confidence in God's love. Would you like that? Most Christians would. If you understand the love of Christ, the love of God for you in Christ, you will have assurance. You will have confidence because you will understand that God's love for you is not about something in you. It's about something in God. Look at 1 John 4:15. He talks about the fact that Jesus is the Son of God. Who is in Christ? Verse 16, he comes to this whole issue of love. "We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us." [There it is. We begin to grasp this love.] "God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." So, there is this foundational element of understanding the love God has for us. Verse 17, "By this, love is perfected with us…." Or love matures in us may be another way to picture it.

When we understand the love God has for us, love matures in us "… so that we … have confidence in the day of judgment…." We end up confident, even on that day, that terrible day when all of us will stand before the judge of the universe, we can have confidence in that day, assurance in that day because we know of God's love for us. It matures us. He goes on to say, verse 17, "… because as … [Christ] is, so … are we [also] in this world." In other words, we come to understand that God's love for us makes us a child of His, and we stand unto Him in the same relation that Christ does.

Verse 18, So, because of that, "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love." John is saying, listen, as you understand God's love for you, it will build into your life assurance and confidence even when the day of judgment comes. Because you will understand that God, for nothing in you, in eternity past chose to set His love on you and that it is eternal love and that it cannot change.

There's a second (right here in this very passage), second thing that understanding the love of Christ (the love of God for us in Christ) produces. Not only assurance and confidence, but love for God and others. If you understand God's love for you, you will then love God and love others. Look at verse 19. "We love ..." in other words we love God, and right beneath it he's going to talk about loving others as well, so we love God, and we love others. If you're a Christian, there is a measure of love that you have for God and a measure of love you have for others. It's not perfect, but you have it. Why? … because (here was the cause) He first loved us. We are driven by, motivated by, God's love for us to love God and to love others. This is a reality that God produces in us.

You know, there was, for probably the better part of the last fifty years (you've heard it taught, some of you have been around that long and heard it taught) that, you know, we first learn to love ourselves, and then if we learn to love ourselves, we can love God and love others. That is nearly the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. That is not biblical. It's not what the Bible teaches, but it does teach this. If we come to understand God's love for us, then it will be the foundation, the platform, for loving God and loving others. So, if we really get it (if we really comprehend Christ's love), this is why it's so important. If we really understand it, it will give us assurance and confidence. It will produce in us love for God and love for others.

Let me give you one more before we go back to Ephesians. Turn over to 2 Corinthians 5, 2 Corinthians 5:14. Paul makes this profound statement. He says,

For the love of Christ (that is Christ's love for me) controls us. The word "controls" is the word "to compel", '"o drive", "to motivate". The love of Christ drives us could be another way to say it.] "having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and [that] He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf."

Listen, if you understand the love of Christ, it will compel you; it will drive you; it will motivate you not to live any longer for yourself but to live for the one who died for you. That's what Paul says. You want to, you want to be motivated? With a drive to live the Christian life and experience? Then understand God's love for you. And it will compel you. It will drive you. Legalism won't do it. Self-discipline won't do it. But understanding the love of God will. So, it's very important. It's absolutely crucial. And that's why Paul prayed it for all of the Christians there in Ephesus and for every Christian everywhere. That we would "get" the love of Christ—that we would understand it. Now go back to Ephesians 3.

We've seen the pre-requisite. We've seen the importance of understanding the love of Christ. That brings us, thirdly, to the request for understanding itself. Let's look at the request. Verse 18, that you,

… [that you] may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge….

There is the second request. Now, the focus of this request is obviously knowledge. He uses two expressions that tell us that. He begins verse 18 with "… may be able to…." He begins verse 19 with "… to know …" So, the focus of this request is what we know. Let's go back and look at the first one. Look at verse 18. It begins "… may be able to comprehend …" That translation is built on two Greek words. The first one is translated "may be able", the other "to comprehend." The first Greek word occurs only here in the New Testament. It means to have the ability or strength for a particular task. God wants, or excuse me, Paul wants us, and he's asking God to give us, the ability or strength for something.

What? To comprehend. The second word literally means to grasp or seize something. It's often used literally that way in the New Testament. For example, if you go back to Mark 9 (you don't need to turn there, but in Mark 9:18) we're told there (you remember the young boy who was possessed of a demon?) We're told that the demon seized him and slammed him to the ground. That's this word. The word is also used literally in John 8 where we're told that the Pharisees seized (grabbed) a woman caught in the act of adultery, and thrust her in front of Christ and said, so what do you think? They grabbed her; they seized her. That's this word.

It eventually came to mean to grasp or seize something, not by your hands, but with your mind. To grasp it, to get it, to seize it, to come to grips with it. It's used this way a number of times. Maybe one way that will help you is in Acts 10:34. You remember Peter has that whole vision of the sheet coming down, and he learns that the Gentiles are supposed to be included in God's work in the church and all of that. And he says, at the end of all that, in verse 34, he says, "I certainly now understand." What it literally says is, I grasp it. I now seize it; I grasp it mentally. So, Paul's prayer then, here, is that God would give us the ability or strength to mentally grasp or seize something. That's the first way he expresses it.

In verse 19 he makes it more explicit. He begins verse 19 by saying, "I want you to know …" [something.] This word can, at times, refer merely to factual knowledge. But it's more commonly used, both in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) and in the New Testament, to refer to personal knowledge, knowledge of relationship. Early on in Genesis it's used in the Septuagint where it says Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare a son. You come to the New Testament. By the way, it's used repeatedly that way throughout the Old Testament. In the New Testament it's used the same way. In Luke 1:34, Mary responds to Gabriel and says, "... How can … I give birth to a child, since (literally it says), I do not know a man." The NAS translates it … [because] I am a virgin. That's what she was essentially saying. I don't know a man. I don't have that personal, intimate relationship with a man.

And, by the way, this is what Jesus says (you remember in Matthew 7) at the end of the Sermon on the Mount when he's talking about those who falsely claim to belong to Him, and they'll show up at the judgment. He says many will say to Me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not done this, … done that? And He'll say to them, verse 23, I will declare to them, "I never knew you." That doesn't mean Jesus doesn't know who they are. It means He doesn't have a relationship with them. That's the essence of this word "know". Paul is not praying, then, in Ephesians 3, that we would have some cold, clinical knowledge of the love of Christ. He's praying that we would have a real, personal knowledge built on relationship of the love that Christ has for us.

By the way, this is a test of the reality of your faith. If you want to know if you're a Christian or not. If you find yourself bored by all of this, if you haven't been moved by a study of the love of Christ, if your heart isn't stirred by recounting to yourself the love that God has shown you in Christ, then one of two things is true. Either, you have allowed your own love to grow cold, as later the very church at Ephesus would (you remember Revelation 2), or you're not a Christian at all.

So, as we examine this prayer (as we examine this second request), the focus of it is knowledge, having the ability or strength to mentally grasp something, having a real personal knowledge based on relationship of the love of Christ. But notice the object of the request. That you may be able to grasp and know what? Verse 19, ... the love of Christ…. Clearly, Paul is not talking here about our love for Christ but rather Christ's love for us. He wants every Christian to grasp, to comprehend, the love that Christ has for us. Now, let me, first of all, say, that Christ has a genuine love for all human beings.

We studied this when we studied the love of God back a year or so ago on Sunday night. If you're interested, you can go and listen online and catch up on that whole issue. But let me just give you the thumbnail version. Christ loves every human being. Probably the clearest passage on that, or at least my favorite, would be in Mark 10. And you don't need to turn there, but in Mark 10:21, you remember the story of the rich young ruler who comes to Christ, and he says, "… what must I do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus says, "… here's what I want you to do." And He gives him, He puts his finger on the issue in this man's life, which was his possessions.

Christ didn't tell everybody to sell everything they had. He told him to because He knew that was the issue. And what does this guy do? He walks away and never returns. As far as we know, he never came to faith in Christ at all. There's no account of it whatsoever. But the text says Jesus loved him.

And Jesus, I think, has a genuine love for all of humanity, even those who will not follow Him, as He wept over the city of Jerusalem. But Scripture is also clear that Christ has a unique love for His own. This is true throughout the New Testament, but one passage that comes to mind is John 13. You remember, in John 13:1 there as Jesus is being ushered into the upper room it says that Jesus loved His own, and He loved them to the end, the text says. Literally, the idea is, He loved them to the end point, to the uttermost, to the maximum. He had a special love for His own.

By the way, it's not just Christ that loves you, if you're a Christian. The New Testament makes it clear that the other members of the Trinity love you. The Father loves you. Here in Ephesians 2:4 it says that because of His great love with which He loved us, He made us alive. The Spirit loves you. Romans 15 talks about the love of the Spirit. And in fact, here, when it says the love of Christ, it's not meaning the love of Christ as distinct from the love of the rest of the members of the Trinity.

In fact, let me show you that Paul uses this synonymously, interchangeably. Turn over to Romans 8 for just a moment. Keep your finger in Ephesians 3. Romans 8:35, This is a familiar and favorite passage for many of you, where he talks about the love that Christ has for us. Verse 35 says, "Who will separate us [and notice what he says] from the love of Christ?" And then he goes through this whole list of things. And then he gets to the end, verse 38. "I am convinced …" and he lists all these things, and he says in verse 39, And none of these things will be able to separate us, and now what we should expect to hear is, "… from the love of Christ." That's what he's been talking about. But what he says is, "… from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." So, he uses them interchangeably.

So, when you read "… the love of Christ …" here, don't think the love of Christ is distinct from the other members of the Trinity. Think "… the love of God, shown us in Christ." That's what Paul is praying. He wants each of us to come to grips with (to mentally come to grips with) the love God has for us in His Son. The focus of this request is personal knowledge. The object of the request is the love of Christ or the love of God for us in Christ.

Look at the dimensions of the request. Verse 18, [Paul says, I want you] … to be able to comprehend … [and to know] what is the breadth and length and height and depth…. Those are often called the four magnitudes. If you look at those four expressions, they mark off the volume of anything. If you know the length and depth and height and width, you know the volume of anything. They mark off the dimensions, the volume of this thing. Paul wants us to grasp the volume, the infinite dimensions of the divine love. Now, we can look for specific nuances here, and many have played with this. For example, John Stott writes,

The love of Christ is broad enough to encompass all mankind. It's long enough to last for eternity. It's deep enough to reach the most degraded sinner. It's high enough to exalt him to heaven.

And all those things are true. All those things are points Scripture makes.

But here, I don't think Paul means for us to pick them apart individually and try to find some individual meaning in each one. Rather, the stress is on the whole idea. He wants us to see the vastness, the vast dimensions of the love of God for us in Christ, the volume, if you will. But our problem is, everything in our world is small, relatively speaking, compared to who God is.

Where do you go for an accurate illustration of the infinite nature of anything that's true about God? There's only really one place we can go as human beings, and that's to the universe as a whole. Only the entire universe in which we live begins to give us some idea of the dimensions of who God is. In fact, I wonder (and I can't prove this to you), but I wonder if all that space that's out there, and all those planets and all those galaxies are merely there to illustrate the magnitude of our God. But even as you begin to look at those things, it's hard for us to begin to grasp the size of even our universe. Let me see if I can help you.

Just start with our solar system, the collection of planets and other bodies that revolve around our sun. The average car (the car that you're driving today) has a typical life expectancy of about 200,000 miles. For most of us, that's a number of years of travel. Imagine if, instead of traveling the distance your car will travel in its lifetime—in its life span—imagine if you could travel that distance not in a number of years, not in a month, not in a day, but in one second. If you could travel the distance your car will likely go in its lifetime in one second, that's the speed of light (186,000 miles a second). If you could travel 186,000 miles a second, it would only take you (from Texas) 1.3 seconds to get to our moon. You could reach the sun in a little over eight minutes. It would take you about seven hours at that speed to reach the edge of our solar system. And of course, our solar system is part of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Scientists estimate that if you could travel at the speed of light (if you could travel at 186,000 miles a second), it would take you one hundred thousand years (traveling at that speed) to cross from one edge of our galaxy to the other. And once you leave the Milky Way Galaxy, there are millions of other galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope has observed three thousand other galaxies visibly, and scientists estimate, based on the findings, that there are more than a hundred billion other galaxies. We live in a huge universe.

But folks, as huge as the universe in which we live is, it pales to give an illustration of the volume, the magnitude of the love that God has for us. It's not an adequate illustration, its width, its length, its height, its depth. The song writer, I think, had the right idea when he wrote this.

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, Were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade, To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry; Nor could the scroll contain the whole, tho' stretched from sky to sky.

Paul further describes the magnitude of God's love for us back in Ephesians 3. Notice verse 19. He says it surpasses knowledge. The love of Christ cannot be known or comprehended without divine intervention, that's why this is a prayer. And beyond that, no matter how much God helps us, no matter how much time we have even into eternity, we will never grasp all there is to grasp all there is to grasp of the love of Christ, because it's infinite. It surpasses knowing. Our minds will never fully be able to grasp it. But obviously, we can grasp it to some degree, because that's Paul's prayer here for every Christian.

I want us to close our time by asking a crucial question, and that is how? How can you grow as a Christian in your knowledge, in your comprehension of the love of Christ for you? If it's so important, how do you get there? Well, obviously, we have to pray. This is a prayer. Paul teaches us here to pray that God will help us understand. Ultimately, this is something that only God can work in our hearts. But God uses means.

You are not going to be sitting somewhere someday with your knees crossed (your legs crossed) reciting some mantra, and suddenly God is going to give you a fresh revelation of what it means that He loves you. That isn't going to be how it happens. Where has God already explained His love for us? In the Bible. It's impossible to come to this understanding that Paul's talking about here outside of an objective understanding of the Bible's words and sentences and paragraphs. In other words, the only path God gives us to help us understand His love is the revelation of His love in the Word of God.

So then, start looking at, start examining those great demonstrations of the love of God in the Bible. What are they? What are the greatest expressions of God's love in the Bible? Well, let me give you four, very briefly, just for you to think about, to meditate on. These are all found in Ephesians, by the way, as well as throughout the Scripture.

Number one. If you want to grasp the love of God in Christ, think about sovereign election. In Malachi 1 the children of Israel: God says I love you, and the children say: How have you shown us your love. You know what God says? He says, because I chose you. Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated. You want to see God's love? Think about this. God, in eternity past, Christian, chose you because of nothing in you, but solely because He decided to set His love on you. Think about that for a while, and you'll begin to come to grips with the love of God. In Ephesians 1 Paul ties love to election as well.

Number two. If you want to grasp the love of God in Christ, think about adoption. In Ephesians 1:4 he says, "In love He predestined us [un]to adoption as sons…." It was God's love that drove Him to take those who were His enemies and to say I'm going to legally adopt them. Do you understand, God has made you His child in the very truest sense of that expression? He thinks of you as His child. Start thinking about adoption. Some of you have adopted kids. You understand what this means. There are some of you who were adopted. Your parents just didn't have to love you because you were born to them. Your parents loved you because they decided to set their love on you and to make you their own. That's how it is with God. Think about that.

Number three. Think about salvation, salvation by grace. In Ephesians 2:4, it says that because of His great love with which He loved us, He made us alive. He gave us salvation. He rescued us from His own wrath. Think about the reality that God, for nothing in you, decided, because of His love, to make you alive to Him, to give you spiritual life, to rescue you from the mess you had made with your life from eternal wrath. But the greatest demonstration of God's love isn't sovereign election; it isn't adoption; it isn't salvation by grace.

The greatest demonstration of God's love was the death of Jesus Christ as your substitute. If you really want to come to grips with the love of God, think about that. Paul, in Romans 5:8 puts it like this. He says, … "God demonstrates…." That word "demonstrates" literally means to prove, to present something in its true and unmistakable character. God presented in its true and unmistakable character His own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. You want to think about and know God's love, look at Christ giving Himself up for you. Look at God being willing to part with His own Son; being willing to subject Him to all that He was subjected to for you, for me. The cross is the ultimate demonstration of the love of God.

Listen, if you want to grow in your grasp of the love of Christ, pray, pray, pray. Ask God, as Paul does for the Ephesians, help me get it. Help me understand it. That starts, I think, by seeing how important it is. And then read, study, meditate on sovereign election, on adoption, on salvation by grace, but especially on the cross and Jesus dying there as your substitute. And God will give you insight into His word. He'll give you the strength to mentally seize or grasp the truth. You'll see the volume, the dimensions that are the love of Christ.

James Montgomery Boice recounts the story of when Napoleon's armies discovered and opened a prison, a prison that had been used in the Spanish Inquisition. The dungeon was underground. And as they began to rifle through the dungeon, and do a thorough search, they came across one small dismal cell; and in that cell, they found the remains of a man who had been imprisoned for his faith. His body, at this point, was fully decayed. Just the bones remained. But the testimony of his imprisonment remained as well, because there was around his ankle bone still the chain affixed to the wall.

On the wall of his cell, this faithful Christian had left a silent witness of his faith, because he had scratched within arm's reach of himself a small cross. And then he had written four Spanish words. Above the cross he had written the word height. Beneath it the word depth, and the left width, and to the right length. Obviously, driven by, thinking on, meditating on the passage that we've studied together this morning. Here was a man suffering (ultimately to the point of death) because of his faith in Jesus Christ. And yet, even as he lay in that dark dismal place, he couldn't get over the love of Christ for him.

This week, Christian, pray. Pray for yourself. Pray for your family. Pray for the people you know in this church. Pray for all Christians everywhere. Pray that God would enable us to have the ability to comprehend and to know, personally, in the context of our relationship with Him, the vast dimensions of His love for us. And get used to praying it because this is a prayer that we will continue to pray, I believe, throughout eternity because we will never, with our finite minds ultimately get it. But may God help us to grasp it some.

Let's pray together.

Our Father, we pray, as we study this text together that You would help us to see how important this really is. Lord, help us to see that this is what we ought to be praying for ourselves and for our children, for our friends, for the people of this church, for the church as a whole.

Because, Father, if we really understood; if we really grasped Your love for us in Christ, we would have so many wonderful blessings as a result. We would have assurance and confidence even to stand before You in the judgment. We would have a deepening love for You. We would be compelled to love others. And Lord, we would be driven to live not for ourselves, but for Him who gave Himself for us.

O God, help us to see the importance of this. And help us to pray it regularly. Help us to meditate on Your love as expressed in the Scriptures. Father, help us to think about sovereign election. Help us to think about the adoption You've given us in Christ. Father, tie our minds to the wonderful truths that we've looked at together this morning. Help us to see salvation by grace. And Father, most of all, help us to see the ultimate expression of Your love in all of its depth and height and length and breadth. God, help us to see Your love at the cross, and change us. Re-ignite our own love for Christ.

Father, there are some of us here who have been Christians a long time. We could be tempted like the church in Ephesus to leave our first love. Lord, don't let that happen. Don't let us, like that prisoner, ever get over it, Your love for us in Christ.

For it's in His name we pray. Amen.