The Height of God's Love

What a tremendous thing it would be if Christians around the world began to pray for Christ's body, the church. And for our world leaders as well, in the same way that Paul prayed for his friends in Ephesus.

Do you sometimes feel completely stymied on how to pray for some people? Well, the good news is that Scripture assures us that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us when we don't know how to pray ourselves. But the other good news is that Paul teaches us how to pray by example.

In Ephesians 3, Paul prays that His friends would be completely full of the knowledge of the love of Christ. How wide and long, and how high the love of God is. It's natural to think about the height of God's love in human terms because, well, we're human, and it's the best we can do. And thinking of height in the spiritual realm comes pretty naturally, because we sort of think of heaven and the throne of God as being "up." We celebrate Jesus' ascension when Jesus was taken "up" into heaven, as Luke tells us. Unlike Paul's original audience, however, most of us have actually had the experience of literally being 35,000 feet above ground. High. We in the modern age can actually vicariously experience real space travel. We know what outer space is, and we can begin to think about how high the love of God is. 

But let me also suggest that when we consider how high God's love is, we should consider it in terms of quality. God's ways are always higher than ours, which means His love is always higher. You see the difference? What are the ways we can describe the love of God? Pure, unselfish, transforming. What would our world be like if we began to truly grasp how high the love of God is? Not in location, but in quality.

What if we prayed that for each other?