Ephesians 3:14-21
Psalm 103:1-14
“Love me……..just don’t expect me to change…….”
“Just love me…….If you really loved me, you wouldn’t want me to change……….”
“If you really loved me, you would change for me, you would work around my faults, my personality flaws…..you would change and adapt for me, if you truly loved me”
Sadly some of us treat Jesus this way.
We may confess we love Jesus as Lord and saviour, but then refuse to change our lifestyle, to show that we really do love Him. We expect Jesus to change and adapt to us, so that we can keep living in our sin, living for ourselves, squeezing Jesus into one hour on a Sunday, and yet still pretend to have a relationship with him.
Some of us may even treat Jesus like that bit on the side.
Jesus may get a bit of our hearts, but he doesn’t get the whole lot. There are parts of our lives that we refuse to surrender to Him, because we know if we do, he would want to change those dark corners of our hearts, and we just don’t want to do that. We are comfortable in ruling those parts of our lives, our way.
For those of us who have been married for more than 5 minutes, we know that marriage doesn’t work, if we, ourselves never change. One of the beauties of the love of marriage is that when we tie the knot, two become one….and as two become one, both people change. As a couple experience the love of the other, both people change….and that is a good thing.
When a person knows the love of another person, when they experience the love of another person, they want to change to reflect that love.
And when they marry, they are no longer one, but two in one.
Friends, if we truly grasp, just how much God loves us through His son- Jesus, we will want to change to reflect that love he has for us. It won’t be a begrudging change, but it will be a joyful all-embracing change- that is, if we truly know the depth of God’s love for us.
And unlike the marriage metaphor, where both people change, Jesus doesn’t need to change, because He is perfect, He always has been and always will be.
One of the struggles that Lesbian and gay people have who claim that Christ is their Lord and Saviour, is that they perhaps think that because Christ loves them, He doesn’t expect them to turn from their sexual sin, and change.
Whereas the Love of Christ is the opposite.
Christ loves us so much that he wants us to change, change to living a life that will bring eternal life rather than eternal death.
Christ’s love for you is life changing.
Perhaps we as followers of Jesus are afraid to change, because we don’t fully understand the love that Christ has for us.
When we truly grasp the love of God for us, it will give us freedom to walk away from sin, knowing that those things are nothing….. nothing, compared to the love that Christ has for us. That ocean of sin, which we think brings freedom and satisfaction is just a dirty pool compared to the ocean of Christ’s love for us.
This is at the heart of the apostle Paul’s prayer that he prayed for the church at Ephesus and it is a prayer that we should pray for one another- that we may truly grasp the love that God has for us in Christ Jesus.
Look at verses 14-19 with me:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 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.
Friends, the love of God is so big, that Paul prays that through the Holy Spirit, we may be able to comprehend it.
God’s love is so great, that it is unrecognisable to any so- called worldly love, and so it takes something supernatural, something divine- the Holy Spirit for us to actually start to understand this love.
Paul says that God’s love is wide.
When Paul compares God’s love to being wide, he was probably referring to what he said in previous chapters of Ephesians, were Christ came to save those who were near and those who were far away.
The love of God is open to all people, and Jesus proved that, as he died for people from all nations across the whole world, not just one group, but all people. The love of God is open to all.
For God so loved the world, the whole world, that he gave his one and only son- Jesus, as proof as that love.
When Paul refers to God’s love being wide, it is referring to his love that is wider than any sin.
There is no sinner “bad” enough” that God’s love cannot break through and save.
No-one is out of reach of God’s open arms, no matter what sin you have committed, no matter how many times, you have committed that sin.
Paul also says that God’s love is long.
This refers to God’s faithfulness to us. He never stops loving us. His love for us, isn’t based on our performance…….otherwise his love for us would be up and down- and we all would be nervous wrecks just hoping that he keeps loving us.
No, God faithfully loves us, even when we are unfaithful to him.
Her never stops loving us.
Paul says God’s love is high.
God’s love is nothing like the love this world has to offer. His love is lofty. So lofty that his love lifts us from the depths of hell to heaven. God’s love for us is so high, that he has prepared a place in heaven for us, so we can enjoy him forever. His love is not a cheap love that drags us down, but it is a love that lifts us up.
Paul says God’s love is deep.
This probably reflects God’s sacrificial love for us. He loved us so much, that when the going got tough, he didn’t bail on us, but willingly laid down his life for us. His love is so deep, that even knowing how dirty our hearts are, how many despicable things we have done, how many good things we have chosen not to do, Jesus still saw all of that mess and he died for us- He loved us.
Did you notice how Paul said we may begin to understand the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love for us in Christ (from verse 18)?
It wasn’t by us sitting alone under a tree meditating….feeling the power……channelling that cosmic “energy” dude…..No…..
No, His love is grasped in the context of other believers, dare I say, done in the context even of a local church gathering as the saints meet together.
When we meet together, when we serve one another, when we bear with one another’s grievances, when we love one another, it is in that context that we begin to grasp the love that God had for us in Christ Jesus.
In the context of church, we see the sheer awesomeness of God’s love, as we see him working in and through people’s lives, not just ours, but all the saints. As we see God working through all his saints, we see just how diverse and all-encompassing God’s love is, as we see his love, not just in our lives, but others also.
There have been many, many times I have experienced God’s love to me, through the saints…..many, many times, and I am sure you can say the same thing.
And yet, here is the amazing thing about God’s love: even when we see it amongst his saints, in this place, we can never really understand it fully.
Look at verse 19 again with me:
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
The love of God surpasses our knowledge- what does that mean?
I think part of it means this: when we know that God loves us, that God is for us, he may ask us do things we don’t understand at times, like God asked Abraham to kill his own son, but because we know God loves us and is for us, even though we may not understand what he is asking us to do, we do it anyway, because we know God loves us.
Perhaps it also means that when God puts us through things we don’t understand, like a sickness, the death of a loved one or some other hardship, we trust that God still loves us, trust that He wants the best for us.
Richard Coekin, who wrote a commentary on Ephesians compared God’s love to the ocean. We know that the deepest parts of the ocean reach deeper than the height of mount Everest, but we don’t really know the depths of the oceans, because no-one can get that deep without their head exploding. We can still enjoy the ocean, swim , surf, enjoy the dolphins, without ever really knowing everything about the ocean.
In the same way, we can enjoy God’s love for us in Christ Jesus without knowing fully, the breadth, length, height and depth of that love- if we fully plundered into the depths of God’s love for us- our heads may explode.
Now I am going to say something which is not very Presbyterian, and so if you are a true Presbyterian close your ears.
God not only wants us to know of the love He has for us, but he wants us to feel His love.
God wants to stir our emotions.
That is what love does, it stirs the emotions.
As the spirit of God works in us, or as Paul puts it in verse 20, as his power works within us, it will stir us, stir us to repent of sin, - we must feel godly sorrow for sin, otherwise we would never want to change, but also stir us to live a life that pleases him.
Jesus felt it when he saw the effects of sin, when saw the death of his friend Lazarus, Jesus cried, he felt the effects of sin, even though he never sinned himself.
When Jesus went to the cross, he didn’t go as some lifeless, “robot”, but he went to the cross because he could see the joy set before him as it says in Hebrews 12:2- He went to the cross, knowing and feeling the Joy that was to come, as he purchased a people for himself- he went to the cross, with the joy of your salvation, my salvation before Him.
Friends, the writer of Hebrews encourages us to do the same thing in Hebrews 12:1, let us leave that weight of sin that we feel, and let us feel the Joy that Jesus has for us.
Let us pray:
Lord, we humbly bow before you now.
May you strengthen us by your spirit to know and feel the love you have for us in Christ Jesus.
May you take residence of our whole hearts.
Help us to surrender those corners of our lives, we want to rule
Help us to change each day, to be more like you.
Let us not only know your love but may you stir our hearts by your love.
We pray these things in Jesus name- Amen
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