FRIDAY June 21st
Ephesians 3:18-19
‘. . . may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.’
I guess we are familiar with the children’s song, ‘The love of Jesus is so wonderful . . . so high, you can’t get over it, so wide you can’t get round it. So deep you can’t get under it, oh wonderful love’, (since I prepared this devotion, we sang it last Sunday morning). Well, Paul is not just wanting us to have spiritual strength to understand something of the vastness of God’s love, but also everything else that pertains to it. I casually asked a question a few weeks ago, on a Sunday evening in our service as to when we think of every benefit that is ours as believers, which would we put at the top of the list. His mercy, his grace, his forgiveness, his faithfulness toward us etc. I suggested and still suggest that top of the list would be his love for us for it is because of his love for mankind that we have come to know all these other blessings.
And I readily admit. His love is so immense, so great, that I cannot fully grasp everything about it, but I am grateful for it, the fact that he loved ME and gave his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ to be the propitiation for MY sin! Yes, I have made it personal to myself, but you do the same, God loved you so much, he loved me so much, his love which we cannot fully comprehend is such that it has brought us into a living powerful relationship with him.
His love is so high, so wide, so deep that we cannot get away from it, and if you are reading this devotion today and you do not yet know Jesus as your Saviour, understand this, God loves you, he has shown it by sending his Son into this world, Jesus loves you, and he has proven it by dying for you at Calvary, taking all the wrath and punishment that you deserve for your sin so that if you are willing by faith to come and to believe in him and to accept him you can be completely pardoned, forgiven, saved from the wrath that is to come, and you can know what it is to be on the road that leads to heaven, to spend eternity with him.
In the words of another well-known song,
The love of God is greater far,
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell . . .
Oh, love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall for evermore endure—
The saints, and angels’ song.