A young man was determined to win the affection of a young lady who showed no interest in him. He decided that the way to her heart was through handwritten love letters. After all, in this technological age, handwritten notes are a rarity. He was convinced that, over time, they would captivate her heart. So he wrote to this young lady almost every day. Multiple times a week she got a love letter from this man. Months passed. She still wasn’t responding. So he doubled his efforts and sent her even more letters. Finally, she fell in love. She wound up marrying the mailman!
The Bible is a collection of God’s love letters to humanity. These letters all point to the very one who would be the ultimate messenger, indeed, the exact representation of God himself: Jesus Christ. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Furthermore, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5).
God has taken every measure to convey his love to his children – those who have been adopted into God’s family as a result of their faith in Christ (John 1:12).
In Ephesians 3:14-21, Paul utters a beautiful prayer for God’s family, that we would increasingly experience the vastness of God’s love for us.
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.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
At the heart of this prayer is Paul’s request that God’s people would “be strengthened with power through his Spirit in [our] inner being.” When the Holy Spirit fills our hearts, Christ feels at home, and we enter into a fuller experience of his love. Paul even incorporates the use of dimensions to describe the vastness of Jesus’ love – “the breadth and length and height and depth” of it. Some have explained these dimensions this way:
Breadth refers to the extent of God’s love to all peoples, to all nations, to the ends of the earth.
Length speaks of the continuance of God’s love throughout the ages, from eternity past to eternity future.
Depth emphasizes God’s love in “its stooping to the lowest condition, with a design to relieve and save those who have sunk into the depths of sin and misery” (Matthew Henry).
Height points to the supreme elevation to which God’s love brings us – to heavenly happiness and glory.
Paul tells us that such love surpasses knowledge. But the glory of the gospel is that through the power of the Holy Spirit, we can truly experience that which we cannot fully comprehend. That’s the thrust of Paul’s concluding doxology. So inexhaustible is God’s grace, that it will always exceed what we ask — or can even imagine!
Such is the vastness of God’s love for you. Therefore rejoice, O Christian!