TUESDAY June 25th
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.’
We are back to the same verses again, in which we find the reason why Paul wanted to pray all that he had prayed for the believers, and it was that ‘you may be filled with the fulness of God’.
I stopped as I was writing this and thought about the various things that I allow to fill my life. I could write a long list, but what should be the priority is that I should desire to be filled with the fulness of God. As we contemplate just as Paul has done, something of the wonder of the love of God, its vastness, its immensity, its immeasurableness it should cause us in our hearts to want to just fall on our knees and to worship him! The more we wonder about our wonderful, amazing God and his wonderful, amazing love, and on top of that all the spiritual blessings that are ours as we find ourselves in Christ it should cause us to evaluate who we are and what we are doing to become determined to live for the glory of God.
Now, I know I fall short, and so I personally need to have a fresh revelation of who God is and of all he has done, I need to grasp more deeply the splendour of his majesty, I need to desire as the apostle Paul cried out in Philippians ‘that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead’ 3:10-11.
While I have prepared the last few devotions, I have felt like I should break out in songs of joy as I have contemplated how much God has loved me and how much his Son loves me, but then I have had to examine my heart to see how much do I genuinely love both God the Father and Jesus the Son back, do I really love the triune God as deeply as I ought? What about you? I think that if we examined how we spend our time, we would soon discover how deep our love really is.
The fulness of God wants to dwell in me! That is amazing, then it is important that I and the same for each one of us do a regular spring clean of our lives, so that we are temples that are fit for the presence of God.
The words of another hymn spring to mind:
‘If I but knew thee as thou art. O Loveliness unknown, with what desire, O Lord, my heart would claim thee for its own . . . But, ah, my lonely spirit tires of knowing thee in part. O Jesus, how my soul desires to see thee as thou art.’